(Sure-Fire Comics 003b, 1940) The Crimson Circle are a masked gang with a more grandiose than normal name (and led by the Crimson Mask, as can just barely be made out under that rip in the third panel above, a rare instance of the named villain being less prominent than his named henchmen in a story), who have the fortune to rob the same loan company as the Raven, leading to them capturing, unmasking and forcing him to work for…
(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940) Flash Lightning’s first stop after getting juiced up with brand-new electric powers is New York City, super-hero capital of the world, and it’s a good career move for him because he immediately gets mixed up in some super shenanigans. An explorer named Parker has gone missing in Central America and the agents of someone named the Phoenix are doing their damnedest to prevent his daughter Mary from looking for him. Lightning and Mary dodge fiery deathtraps,…
(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940) The Green Mask is after one thing: world domination, and he’s looking to achieve it by capturing the Shock Ray, a weapon capable of paralyzing hundreds of people at a time, and which has been deemed too terrible to use by the US government (just why this is it unclear – my only idea is that it is either a fatal paralysis or a permanent one). The thing about the Green Mask that is very compelling…
(Funny Picture Stories v3 002, 1939) Like every other of my long-term projects, writing this blog has been an exercise in taking a simple premise (writing fairly succinctly about minor DC Comics super-villains) and expanding the scope until the seams start to creak (writing somewhat extensively about all super-villains and super-heroes and a bunch of other comics things and also maintaining a set of variably-useful indices about them all). This is all to lead into the fact that a comic…
(Super-Mystery Comics v1 001, 1940) The Octopus! Leader of a nation-wide crime wave! Keenly interested in branding! His men slap little octopus stickers on cops and burgled vaults alike! And when the Octopus talks to his men, he is represented by what appears to be an animated octopus! As far as criminal operations go, this one is pretty slick. Unfortunately for the Octopus, nothing gold can stay and that includes excellent crime setups. While he might be able to outmanoeuvre…
(Startling Comics 004, 1940) We open on a world in turmoil! The tides are going crazy! New York City is trashed! The world’s leaders turn to the mysterious Dr X for help, and he immediately recognizes that the problem must be Moon-based, and further that the solution will require his niece’s fiance Bob to go beat someone up. This is the second and final Dr X story of the Golden Age, and I really wish that there were more. Wizened…
(Startling Comics 001, 1940) “Dr Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a super-hero’s origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that they don’t even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of that hero’s rogues gallery. That’s sad! On the other hand, Slade did develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of…
(Speed Comics 009, 1940) The Count is a fairly by-the-book pseudo-Nazi spy with a very audacious plan for acquiring US military secrets: kidnap the US Secretary of State (a moderately off-model Cordell Hull) and extract them from him via gear-based torture. Unfortunately for the Count his plans were anticipated by the US Secret Service, who proactively substituted Ted Parrish, aka the Man With 1000 Faces, for Hull. Led to the spies’ farmhouse hideout by a special radium tracking device, the…
(Speed Comics 009, 1940) Comrade Ratski’s first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the “we’re just…
Making his triumphant return to comics, the dome-headed goblin of crime: Baron von Kampf! Baron von Kampf’s initial return in Speed Comics 004 involves him heading a sabotage ring for an unnamed European nation that is probably meant to be Nazi Germany, and it’s possible that this is a relationship that were were meant to understand was behind his actions all along, but frankly it seems to me to be beneath him. The Baron’s schemes on behalf of his fascist…