The kinds of character that are a part of comics history so it would be wrong to ignore them but are also pretty racist (usually – I’m sure that eventually I’ll find something else distasteful enough to put here) and unpleasant to dedicate a whole lot of time to. We’re going with a round-up! Our first culprit is George Harvard AKA Big Sun, a guy with a way too complicated plan to sell oil to the Axis out of the…
(Blue Bolt v1 006, 1940) Blue Bolt is a fine comic book character in the classic setting of a vast underground world full of sci-fi/fantasy concepts but 100% the best thing about him is that 10 or so of his first dozen appearances were by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon and boy does Marto here show it. Just look at this classic Kirby creation! Marto was originally Martin Hall, a scientist who accidentally bombarded himself with the very cosmic rays…
(Blue Bolt v1 005, 1940) Professor X has two of my favourite qualities in a minor super-villain: a famous name and a prior history. The first is the same kind of fun as when my friend named his cat after me. “What do you mean Professor X keeps getting up on the counter to steal ham?” I really love his Prohibition-Era villainy as well, particularly as I had it in my head that he specifically was a bootlegger and thus…
Minor super-heroes need to be rounded up now and then. Blackstone the Magician: There are a fair number of comic versions of real life people: movie cowboys by the dozen, big game tracker Clyde Beatty a couple of times, etc. Not too many of them quite cross over into the super-hero side of things, but here we have magician Harry Blackstone Sr, who absolutely did (Blackstone is also a great example of someone who was at one point wildly famous…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) Ramun the Evil One aka Ramun the Great is a hypnotist/ stage magician with a simple if short-sighted plan: 1) open a club in New York 2) have it become popular with the wealthy social set 3) hypnotize rich guys 4) profit (aside: just look at that charming picture of a man who thinks he’s an ape! The little dance!) The short-sighted part goes hand-in-hand with the profit, as once Ramun has induced his victims…
(Big Shot Comics 006, 1940) Moora, Queen of the People of the Moon, is technically only called the Moon-Mistress by her enemies, but what can I say, I love alliteration. As introduced, she is merely the leader of a troublesome “hill tribe” that pistol-packing adventurer Rocky Ryan is asked to settle down on behalf of a local Maharajah (where exactly this takes place is ambiguous: Ryan is one of those Golden Age soldier-of-fortune characters who perpetually bums around an “India”…
(Big Shot Comics 006, 1940) Someone is killing old policemen! And furthermore, they’re doing it in such a way that their skin is tinted blue as they die! Unsurprisingly, this ends up being called the Blue Death. But Who is administering it, and why? It’s a short story, so we find out pretty quickly that the culprit is one Doctor Swanson and he’s getting revenge on the eight police officers who arrested him twenty-three years earlier, using special arsenic/ phosphorous/…
(Big Shot Comics 001, 1940) Just a simple head of a gang that specializes in stealing furs (and I would call that over-specialized but we’re just a couple of years off from wartime rationing and with it gangs that specialize in meat, tires and scrap metal theft) but he has a number of super-villainous aspects: -the biggest one has to go first and it’s that he has the chutzpah to track a police informant through the streets of New York…
(Big Shot Comics 003, 1940) Is a hook hand the most basic gimmick that automatically flips a gang boss over to being a super-villain in my mind? We don’t have enough data to call it yet but all signs point to Probably. This Hook is Hook Horner and there’s not too much to say about him: he kidnaps a young woman sometime between the death of someone she is set to inherit millions from but before she herself knows about…
(Big Shot Comics 002, 1940) The Goldmaster is one of my very favourite subtypes of super-villain: the guy who really leans into the bit. Specifically, he is a fellow who has discovered the secret of making gold and subsequently adopted all of the trappings of a Medieval alchemist. Or possibly he was a guy who was really into the alchemy lifestyle who made the luckiest find ever. Either way, he doesn’t have to live like this! It’s a choice! No…