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Category: Fox Features

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 443: THE UGLY QUEEN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 443: THE UGLY QUEEN

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(Mystery Men Comics 022-023, 1941) The Ugly Queen is our first real foray into the heady world of societal beauty standards as motivation for evil (though there’s an element of that sort of thing in Setap’s first appearance and we’ve certainly encountered a fair few characters rejected by society for ugliness and deformity). Her status as a royal is called into question by the end of her appearances but she does cut a powerful figure, with an undersea castle full…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 442: GAT ARAT

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 442: GAT ARAT

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(Mystery Men Comics 023, 1941) I think that Gat Arat’s name doesn’t mean anything, that it’s just a guy with the unusual surname “Arat” and the nickname “Gat”, but it bothers me. I feel like I should be able to extract meaning from it. Is it a reference to 40s popular culture? Is he supposed to look like a rat? No idea. Confusing name or not, it turns out that Gat Arat has taken a lesson from the dearly departed…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO 048: MISS X

MINOR SUPER-HERO 048: MISS X

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(Mystery Men Comics 019, 1941) Miss X is a pretty good example of the Female Guest Star Hero, an infrequent heroic archetype with a clearly identifiable arc: start out mysterious and hypercompetent and become less competent as the hero learns more about them. Our only other example so far is Clock ally the Orchid, but Miss X here is helpfully providing us with a three-issue speedrun of the archetype as illustration: Issue 1, Mystery Men Comics 019: When her sister…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 441: MAGOG

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 441: MAGOG

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(Mystery Men Comics 022, 1941) Magog clearly has some big plans – he repeatedly sends taunting notes to the police and announces his criminal debut by blowing up a playground full of children – but he is almost immediately baited into the open by a fake newspaper and dies in a struggle with the Blue Beetle so we will never know what they were.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 440: GALGO

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 440: GALGO

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(Mystery Men Comics 020, 1941) Hey kids, it’s Galgo! A seemingly regular gang boss! Just how did he hack the system and end up on this illustrious list of no-name losers? He dressed his men like gorillas for no apparent reason. That, my friends, is the simple life hack that will take your regular villainy (such as stealing a device which reportedly forces criminals to confess) to a super level.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 439: THE SKY-RULER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 439: THE SKY-RULER

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(Mystery Men Comics 019, 1941) I’m not sure what the Sky-Ruler’s deal is.  Scratch that – I know what his deal is. He rules the sky. He flies around in a big bomber plane and uses it to drop cars containing his enemies on the streets of New York City (he also tries to throw off the scent of the police by calling these the “Skyscraper Murders” in his notes but I have to imagine that this would only work…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 431: EMRO, LORD OF DIAMONDS

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 431: EMRO, LORD OF DIAMONDS

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(Mystery Men Comics 016, 1940) As our story opens, huge diamonds are raining down on Earth. Upon contact with a human, they expand to engulf and imprison them. Earth authorities sensibly contact space hero Rex Dexter of Mars who has once again been sidetracked in his seemingly straightforward quest to travel from Earth to his home planet. In a nice change of pace from most Rex Dexter adventures, Rex and his pal Cynde have not stopped due to some mortal…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 430: THE DEVIL

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 430: THE DEVIL

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(Mystery Men Comics 007, 1940)  I can’t help but love this guy: yes he’s a cheap extortionist who gives himself a scary name to enhance his death threats but he goes to the trouble of dressing up in a devil outfit even while sneaking around so that nobody can see him. And since he’s the antagonist of a Wing Turner story and Wing Turner is a pilot-detective, the Devil is flying around in a fighter plane dressed in little horns…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 429: LORD MARVEL

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 429: LORD MARVEL

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(Mystery Men Comics 004, 1939) Here we see Lord Marvel, a weird little creep who lives on the planet Ursis (as with many planets in the Rex Dexter comics, Ursis is ambiguously placed: Dexter and his companion/ lover Cynde are constantly sidetracked on the comparatively short voyage from Earth to Mars and always seem to end up on extra-solar planets. The writers of Golden Age sci-fi comics often seem to have a fairly fuzzy grasp of the positions and distances…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 428: THE WHITE FACE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 428: THE WHITE FACE

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(Mystery Men Comics 001, 1939)  I have made an error! Two errors! The first was in skipping the Blue Beetle’s very first foe, and it was because of the second, that I had the antagonist in this story marked down as the White Face Gang rather than the White Face, plus his gang. If it was the former, the best their unnamed leader would get was a place in the Generic Costumed Villain Round-Up, but no, he has a special…

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