(Captain America Comics 006, 1941) There are three big reasons that I like the Hangman: 1. It’s hard to beat a Golden or Silver Age story that revolves around a group of suspects who might be the villain. Just a series of fun character sketches followed by (in this case) the character’s grisly murder. 2. The Hangman isn’t actually supposed to be a luchador but he sure does look like one, and that’s one of the top super-hero/ villain looks….
(Captain America Comics 005, 1941) Finally, FINALLY, after 300 of these guys an arbitrary milestone lines up with a reasonably cool character: the Ringmaster of Crime AKA the Ringmaster of Death. Compounding the fun of the circus of crime aesthetic is the fact that some of that good-style retconning has been going on and the Ringmaster in this tale has been made the father (and presumably later grandfather, per Marvel’s sliding timeline) of the mid-level super-villain the Ringmaster! Uh, if…
(Captain America Comics 003, 1941) The Butterfly is great. You just can’t beat a guy in a semi-accurate butterfly outfit (I mean that head is a bit of a mashup) who robs museums. He’s got a glider rig and a weaponized proboscis! The only really problem with his operation is that he is in reality museum curator Doctor Victroli, both because he is a fairly obvious suspect and because he is an old man who ends up biting the dust…
(Captain America Comics 001 & 003, 1941) When I started this here blog I tried to put a little bit of thought into the tagging system, and specifically tried to work out how to deal with the fact that a lot of super-villain types have the same names. The solution I came up with is that everyone named, say, the Skull gets the same tag but legacy characters who are adopting a specific persona that another has used get appended…
(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Himalayas of any comic book universe are simply chockablock with hidden communities of mystics, monsters, creeps, enlightened souls and weirdos. One such group are the so-called Walking Mountains (AKA the somewhat less PC Oriental Giants). The Mountains are enormous, invulnerable to all harm, possibly immortal and dumb as bricks, which leads to them becoming the muscle for Benson, an unscrupulous banker with poor long-term planning abilities. Luckily for Captain America and Bucky, they also…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) There are two different comic book tropes that come together in the Parrot. The first is simple: the weird-looking guy adopts a criminal persona based on their appearance -. So: the Penguin, the Vulture, the Chicken, the Platypus, the Skull etc. This is basic stuff, but generally fun. The second thing has to do with the nature of super-powers, that by their very nature they require countering Just as every penny-ante gangster who faced…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) Enric Zagnar is your classic Victim of Orthodoxy. His beliefs (mankind will someday be able to control the weather) clash with the view of the establishment (that is wrong) and so he is left adrift. He of course goes off into the mountains to learn how to control the weather and dream of revenge. Harnessing the power of black magic, he attempts to flood and drown the entire town and is opposed by everyone’s…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) The King is your regular old gang boss who decides to pivot from running a numbers racket to selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and if that was it he wouldn’t be listed here. The dang guy just wasn’t content to be regular, though. Some salient features of his crime time: -he made the fake drugs in a sprawling underground lab using kidnapped doctors -recalcitrant doctors ended up in a giant vat of boiling acid -he has…
(Marvel Mystery Comics 024, 1941) It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper evil equivalent, so here’s Grosso to show us how it’s done! Golden Age Vision, see, is from an extradimensional realm usually called Smokeworld that’s full of smoke and that the Vision travels to and from via (you guessed it) clouds of smoke. Smoke is kind of his whole deal. Grosso, by contrast, is from the World of War-Dust, with war-dust being defined as clouds of metallic…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) Kai-Mak here (AKA God of Sharks, Lord of Sharks, Lord of the Deep, Master of the Deep, the Man-Shark) is one of my very favourite things in comics: a weird monster pretending to be a god in order to score power or riches or, as in this case, snacks. I’m so fond of this trope, in fact, that I have to make sure to frontload the acknowledgement that it is predicated on the idea that a lot of the varied people…