(Detective v1 033, 1939) Carl here is a scientist who is obsessed with Napoleon, something that people used to be when there weren’t so many fictional characters to be consumed with – heck, he appears only a few months before the Joker begins his slow crawl to being the one a weird loner would be pictured dressing up as while he makes his Important Plans. Since Carl was a scientist he recruited a cabal of other scientists to help him…
(Detective v1 032, 1939) Skull-Face is a villain I love. He looks, predictably, like a guy with a skull-face, yet he runs a “beauty cult” which might just be a very intense spa? Whatever it is, he steals all of his clients’/ congregants’ money and then kills them with a special drug that makes them drown themselves/ have heart attacks. And he’s very proud of his villainy, which I love. Other salient Skull-Face features: -caveman butler named Sam -underground, partially-flooded…
(Detective v1 031-032, 1939) The only reason this guy’s minor is that Batman shoots him dead in 1939. I know he’s made a few reappearances over the years but mostly they’re retellings of that first story. Also I guess they’re calling him the Mad Monk now? Weird. My point is that Batman deserves a vampire nemesis so they should BRING HIM BACK. ADDENDUM: it’s very strange to me that in Batman: Red Rain it’s Dracula who vampires Batman and not…
(Adventure 044, 1939) Another early Sandman villain. A fairly standard master of disguise who was later reworked into an axe-wielding maniac in Sandman Mystery Theatre.
(Action v1 002, 1938) Early on in Tex Thomson’s adventuring career, he and his pal Bob Daly found themselves in a hidden city called, appropriately, the Sealed City. There they met the leader, or Gorrah, of that city and eventually discovered that he was an usurper who they quickly helped overthrow. There it would end for your average hidden-city-usurper but not this Gorrah, no sir. He came back half a dozen times, indulging in schemes such as: -turning people into…
(Adventure 032, 1938) British Army officer who lined his own pockets supplying rebels in India. Fought Captain Desmo, a masked aviator whose comics were on the whole drawn as if they took place in North Africa even though quite a lot of them were set in India – not so uncommon a type of thing to happen in all the various times before reference materials became as easy to access as they are now. Anyway: the Masked Man. Fairly unremarkable,…
(More Fun 020, 1937) Another common sub-type of masked criminal, the guy who runs his own pirate fleet. Other than being the first example of this on the list, a real snoozer. Taken out by Sandra of the Secret Service.
(More Fun 018, 1937) Used a drug to simulate death in others, then revived them post-funeral and made them do his bidding by claiming that without continual treatments they would die again. Unfortunately for him, he tried the same trick on Dr Occult and was unmasked as a fraud, leading to his swift murder at the hands of his former minions. SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? My initial thought was that he would only be useful as a legacy name, but…
(New Fun 006, 1935) The *second* DC super-villain, the Vampire Master was upset that a lady rejected him so responded reasonably by holding the city to ransom via hordes of machine-created Universal movie monsters, possibly the first example in comics of someone creating something of unbelievable power and using it for petty nonsense instead of becoming the richest person in creation. Theoretically, the Vampire Master was beaten by Dr Occult, but *really* he was shanked by one of his own…
(New Fun 001, 1935) Unfortunately, the first DC super-villain is Fang Gow, a pulp-style Yellow Peril sort who vexes adventurer Barry O’Neill , his pal Inspector LeGrande and the nation of France. Fang Gow persists until 1941, and inevitably participates in some entertaining stories, including a half year or so in which he is near death and the story relocates to Tunisia where he kidnaps a famous doctor to treat him, but ultimately he’s just a warmed-over version of all…