(More Fun Comics 055, 1940) The Wolf Man: – has a bunch of trained wolves – wears a wolfskin outfit complete with wolf head cowl – constantly refers to himself as the Wolf Man – exclusively robs prospectors in the Canadian wilderness. The Wolf Man puts in too much effort, in other words.
(More Fun Comics 055, 1940) An economics professor who dresses in a bat-winged robe and injects college students with experimental “artificial blood” while they sleep, the Bat is probably more the story of a man’s mental breakdown than a super-villain.
(More Fun Comics 052-054, 1940) The Wizard is the kind of guy you get in comics who develops a robot army and a few different types of rays, destructive and otherwise, and immediately turns around and takes over (what I assume to be) his home town. I do appreciate that he looks like someone who has been sitting in a basement or a cave soldering robot faces for twenty years, but it’s no excuse for incivility.
(Feature Comics 036, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? Simply put, Python lives in a creepy castle somewhere in New York State and spends his time stealing the brains of great thinkers to wire up to his machine so that he can plunder their knowledge. And he decorates with the shrunken heads of his victims, and he has a surgically mind-controlled goon named Kreeper. What is interesting about them? Aside form the above which is pretty solid villain stuff, the…
(Detective Comics 043, 1940) A skull-faced propagandist operating out of the Belgian Congo, presumably Nazi but it’s pre-Pearl Harbor so he works for a “hostile power” or “the dictatorships” etc. The really intriguing thing about the Skull is his choice of themes – rather than go with an obvious skeleton motif like your average skull-faced goon would do, he instead opted for a Medieval theme, complete with sword-wielding henchmen and a jungle castle. I would praise him for making good…
(Detective Comics 042, 1940) The Painter of Death (never actually called that in-comic, sadly) engaged in a campaign against the subjects of paintings by up-and-coming portraitist Antal. He first attacked the painting of the person and then killed them in the same manner: via dart, arrow, gunshot etc. Eventually, Bruce “Batman” Wayne commissioned a painting from Antal and used it to set a trap which netted Wylie, an art collector who had invested heavily in Antal’s work and saw the…
(Blue Beetle Comics 005, 1940) Scrag attempts to extort (New) York City using remote controlled bombers – not a terrifically unique plan but he’s just so gleeful about his evil that I love him. Blown up while battling the Blue Beetle.
(Blue Beetle Comics 004, 1940) Blitz: by far the best thing about this probably-meant-to-be-German spy is his collection of henchmen, who include a maniacal dwarf and Ax, who is somewhat unsurprisingly obsessed with his signature weapon. Love a henchman who goes all-in on their bit.
(Batman Comics 003, 1940) The Ugliest Man in the World, AKA Larry Larrimore, was originally Carlson, a college student who was accidentally injected with a weird fluid during a frat hazing gone wrong. His face mutated and deformed, he lost his friends, fiancĂ© and frat and vowed revenge. Years later, having developed a version of the uglification drug which also rendered its victims’ minds pliant he embarked on a campaign of revenge against both those who had deformed and rejected…
(Batman Comics 002, 1940) Batman’s first Jekyll/ Hyde style villain is Adam Lamb, a meek museum curator who gets bonked on the head while reading a murder mystery and thereafter heads out at night to cause mayhem as crimelord the Wolf. Batman eventually figures out that his crimes are following the sequence of those in the book and the Wolf’s career ends with a second, fatal head bonking.