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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 736: LURIDA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 736: LURIDA

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(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940) I was just about to type that this was “a simple, straightforward super-hero comic story” and then immediately had to grapple with how to summarize the following: in the previous issue of Silver Streak Comics, adventurer Lance Hale set out to recover a treasure left by his uncle in an old mine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After helping the immortal Queen of the Underground Empire Aldia and her caveman subjects fight off a lizard man…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 734: THE ROBOT MASTER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 734: THE ROBOT MASTER

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(Silver Streak Comics 004, 1940) We open on a flashback, as this unnamed scientist and Captain Ken Keen of the Planet Patrol reminisce about the Comet of Death which has returned to the Solar System 100 years after it initially laid waste to the cities of Earth, Mars and Venus. And since the adventures of the Planet Patrol unlike many if not most Golden Age sci-fi comics is set in a defined time period, we know that that initial attack…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 733: THE PANTHER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 733: THE PANTHER

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(Silver Streak Comics 004, 1940) The Panther! A murderous thief with a very cool look and a vicious set of claws! Well, okay, he does compliment his cool panther mask, panther paw gloves and shoes and pantherskin shirt with a pair of brown slacks so I’ll amend that to a mostly cool look.  Moderately cool looking or not, the Panther has been doing his crimes in the nonspecific New York-esque city that Ace Powers calls home and so Ace is…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 731: THE PROFESSOR

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 731: THE PROFESSOR

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(Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940) The Professor sits right on that dividing line between “super-villain” and “gang boss with a cool nickname” and what pushed him over the line for me was the fact that he makes three absolutely classic comic book super-villain mistakes in this issue. MISTAKE #1: The Professor lures the Wasp and his aide Bill Barnes to an isolated area to eliminate them before they interfere with his plans as they have in the past, but they…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 730: THE LITTLE MEN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 730: THE LITTLE MEN

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(Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940) Normally I try to put things in my own words and really work out the ins and outs of the motivations of the super-weirdos I write about, but I gotta be honest: I have so little idea of what the Little Men’s problem is (problems are?) that I’m just going to point to the intro caption: they’re trying to rid the world of all beautiful women. Simple as that. Why are they trying to rid…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 039

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 039

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We’re reading Shield-Wizard Comics, bay-bee, so here’s some stuff about the Shield and the Wizard. the Shield UPDATE: In our original write-up of the Shield, we noted that the origin of his powers shifted from being solely down to his super-suit to being more of an ingrained thing over time, and the time is now! Yes, Shield-Wizard Comics 001 provides a slightly tweaked version of the Shield’s origin, in which Joe Higgins’ father Tom was not just a US Army…

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PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

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Get ready for a collection of MLJ’s finest racially-problematic villains. Yen Fat Sing:  Yen Fat Sing’s deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang’s charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He’s a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 729: THE WRECKER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 729: THE WRECKER

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(Science Comics 008, 1940)  The Wrecker is a very good example of how a good name can elevate a project out from the ordinary. Comics books are full of corporate extortion schemes – it’s one of the classic scheme types for a reason. You can ramp the threat to life up or down with ease depending on just what is being sabotaged and likewise there are opportunities for big action setpieces as buildings or other corporate infrastructure are targeted. But…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 726: PROFESSOR MEIER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 726: PROFESSOR MEIER

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(Science Comics 005, 1940) Professor Meier, a scientist, seeks to conquer the world by unleashing an ever-growing horde of mutated life forms from his jungle HQ. This is all pretty regular stuff and he probably would have been tossed into the regular science round-up, only there are a couple of fun things that Meier brings to the table that I would like to highlight. First off, the mutated beasts themselves are a pretty fun design, a sort of lion/monkey/caveman/eagle chimera,…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 724: BONTO OF DUOTANIA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 724: BONTO OF DUOTANIA

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(Science Comics 004, 1940)  Perisphere Payne, a kind of outer space troubleshooter (whose name, by the way, was meant to sound cool and futuristic but because the Perisphere was one of the cool and futuristic building-mascots of the 1939 World’s Fair is in fact equivalent to someone today calling themselves Crystal Palace Collins, Parthenon Pete, or indeed Perisphere Payne) gets a wild alert on his televizo one day: the entire city of Freeton has been levitated off the surface of…

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