(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs. Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I’m from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn’t need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain. Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 012) The Shark is a submarine pirate, a thing that is fairly common in comic books and as far as I can tell has never actually happened in real life. He’s a bit more ambitious than most such guys, and at the beginning of this particular story is trying parlay a successful streak of piracy into a general toll on shipping. He’s also a pretty snappy dresser. The US, of course, does not take an extortion…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 009, 1940) This one, while not being particularly spectacular as a whole does contain a lot of fun elements. Let’s count them off! We open on our hero one a one-issue trip to Europe (1) where he pooh-poohs the local superstitions (2) about a castle full of vampires who steal young women (3). The Angel – for it is he who pooh-poohs – quickly gets mixed up in an attempted vampiric abduction and, surprise surprise, the…
(Marvel Mystery Comics 004, 1940) Probably the least of the Superstrong Giant Henchman types we’ve seen so far, Butch is very briefly the scourge of an unnamed city under the command of gang boss Brink, until he gets dropped off a building by the Angel. Nothing specifically bad about this guy – there’s just not much that’s specifically interesting about him. It might be fun to see him get brought back as an example of an early mutant but that’s…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 004, 1940) Dr Manyac here is a perfectly fine criminal scientist with a very good name. It’s just too bad for him that he is in the very common position of being completely overshadowed by his henchmen: THE GREEN FLAME! Very very cool looking guys who are also some of our first simple examples of evil opposites, as their green flame burns cold to contend with our pal the red-hot Human Torch. Using the threat of…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940) The Sacred one is a pretty bog-standard cult leader in a way that was cliched even in 1940: he’s got a bunch of people in a castle in the New York countryside somewhere and they kidnap beautiful white women to sacrifice to their Fire God until the Angel shows up to murderize them. The only really interesting things about him are the questions that the loose plotting leaves you with: he has hypnotic powers…
(Marvel Comics v1 001, 1939) The Six Big Men ain’t much, just a bunch of guys who teamed up to do the maximum amount of Crime possible in an unidentified American city. But I am including them in this list, for two reasons: 1. they’re the first even marginal minor super-villains in Marvel Comics (I of course know about Timely Comics, pedants, but I round up) history, and 2. the Six Big Men are actually Seven Big Men and One Big…
(Hit Comics 007, 1941) If Tibetan Lams aren’t the top religious figures cast as super-villains then they at least have to be in the top three, along with druids and Catholic priests – we won’t see any of those for a while but once they get going they go hard. This bunch of Lamas have decided to turn their formidable mental powers (natch) to the task of world conquest, and have chosen to do so by influencing the mind of one…
Like costumed villains, there are a lot of scientists out there doing crimes involving superscience but just missing the levels of interest, ambition or scale to graduate to true super-villain status. Sometimes this is because of poor planning or lack of vision and others just have the misfortune to run into a protagonist while still in the initial stages of their venture. And don’t they deserve a forum just as much as the generic costumed villains we all love? Julius…