(Weird Comics 003, 1940) The Wizard is the first of five villains to challenge the Sorceress of Zoom for the role of top villain in her own dang feature. He is unique among that group for being the only villain in the story he appears in, as while the rest of his peers come at the Sorceress while she is engaged in some nefarious activity, the Wizard shows up while she is peacefully hanging out with her friend Allan. Once…
(Weird Comics 002, 1940) Space adventurers Blast Bennett and his pal Red are tooling around the Solar System one day when they are hailed by and then hauled aboard an enormous space vessel. This vessel is Plane-City, the mobile headquarters of the space pirate Zom. Actually, I don’t know if “space pirate” is quite the right label for Zom, as his main passion seems to be taking and keeping prisoners rather than the more traditional piratical pursuit of taking prisoners…
(Top-Notch Comics 010, 1940) The antagonist of the Bob Phantom story in Top-Notch Comics 010 is Joe Chizzler, who uses his low-rent marriage agency to set scumbags up with wives then murder the wives for insurance payouts. It’s a mean, low-rent, misogynistic little scheme, and the only saving grace of/reason I’m talking about it is the fact that the actual murdering is done by this character, the Crawler. Is the Crawler a superhuman? Just a very talented human fly? We cannot know!…
(Top-Notch Comics 007, 1940) Tasked with finding the two-days-overdue Sir Gawain, Galahad discovers him being set upon by ruffians in the employ of the Knight of the Griffin, a dastardly character who hates King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Galahad proceeds to confront the Knight himself, where we find that he is based on Sir Turquine, a villainous knight who had both the knight-summoning bell and tree full of defeated knights’ shields as seen above, but who…
(Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940) Sir Gilbert is the evil knight who Galahad sets out to vanquish on his first official Knights of the Round Table mission. He’s got all the requisite qualities of an evil Arthurian knight: a cool name, a rakish attitude toward kidnapping and menacing women, and designs on the lands near his castle. And like most if not all non-Mordred evil knights in comic book Arthuriana, he’s a completely original character, which is always a bit confusing…
(Thrilling Comics 008, 1940) Lobelo is a modern day pirate, as you might guess from the splash panel above, and while my strong pro-pirate bias means that he was an easy inclusion in the ranks of the minor super-villain he is also a source of great frustration to me. First, though, I will note one thing that I really like about Lobelo and that is his array of costumes. Not only does he wear two distinct pirate outfits during…
Science for all! Whether they want it or not! Doctor Ivan has been pursuing a scheme in which he is systematically taking out insurance policies on everyone he knows and then having them murdered, and he is extremely smug about it. Now, I’m no expert in insurance fraud, but I have to say that I am certain that it requires a bit more subtlety than that, even if you’re doing it as a one-off. Forget the fact that the Flame…
(Thrilling Comics 004, 1940) Electru, aka the Giant Electru, is a giant guy with electrical powers. He also has a large gang armed with various electric ray guns and so forth. There’s not a lot to explore about him if I’m honest, but he does inspire a few questions: 1. Just where did Electru come from? We never get an idea of how Electru acquired his great size, his incredible strength or his control over electricity. Are they as a result of his…
(Thrilling Comics 003, 1940) I can’t really devote a lot of energy to Kong because he just kind of makes me tired, conceptually. He’s a Yellow Peril dictator who has devoted a fair amount of time and resources to stealing both military secrets and entire scientists from the US as a part of his bid for world domination, opposed only by Doc Strange and his companion Virginia Thompson. All very exciting stuff in theory, but it all resolves into a…
(Thrilling Comics 002, 1940) Metropolitan Hospital* is in trouble! A mysterious masked figure dubbed the Mystery Man** has been conducting a campaign of terror against the august institution that includes both seemingly random and seemingly targeted murders, the installation of a gang boss and his henchmen in one of the wards, and the theft of $100 000 worth of radium! It’s the perfect case for the Woman in Red to make her debut, as undercover police officer Peggy Allen is…