How fitting and extremely predictable that Dr Sivana, our inaugural full-fledged Super-Villain, is also our first villain to receive a Super-Villain Update!
In Whiz Comics 003a, Sivana attempts to conquer the US, first via simple extortion, followed by full-fledged invasion = please note that he even goes to the trouble to declare war before mobilizing his forces. Captain Marvel of course is more than a match for any conventional army, and Dr Sivana seemingly meets his end when a deathtrap meant for Marvel blows up his entire fortress with him inside.
(this is likely also when Sivana figures out that Billy Batson is Captain Marvel. There’s no on-panel acknowledgement of this fact, but he does know it by the next issue, and frankly given the fast-and-loose way that Billy approaches having a secret identity in the early days it’s a miracle that everyone who he passes on the street doesn’t know. I’m pretty sure that they eventually have to retroactively add a mind-clouding aspect to his transformations to explain why the hundreds of people who have seen a famous boy reporter transform into a famous super-hero don’t retain that fact without making Captain Marvel a secret mass murderer)
In Whiz Comics 003b, a disguised and not-dead Sivana, operating under the name of Professor Xerxes Smith, entices Billy Batson (and by extension Captain Marvel, who he clearly knows into accompanying him on a rocket trip to the planet Venus. There, with the aid of his ally Beautia, Empress of Venus, he captures Marvel and performs the classic super-villain manoeuvre of placing him in a seemingly-inescapable deathtrap that he does not stick around long enough to watch to completion.
Once back on Earth, Sivana attempt to take over the US again, this time by way of a paralyzing gas that will leave the populace more susceptible to domination by a charismatic leader like Beautia. This scheme has a tragic flaw: the machines are all easily smashed up by a Captain Marvel type, which is probably why Sivana stranded him on Venus in the first place. Luckily for humanity, Captain Marvel is able to harness the Wisdom of Solomon to build his own rocket ship to return to Earth and smash them up good. Beautia and Sivana escape…
…only to return in Whiz Comics 004 with a plan to get Beautia elected President of the United States by employing her great charisma and hotness to capture the entire US male vote. This is possibly Dr Sivana’s most viable and least illegal plan, only he has to spoil it all by immediately making plans to murder huge swaths of the government and populace and to loot the nation’s coffers.
Knowing that Captain Marvel wouldn’t take this kind of thing lying down, Dr Sivana arranges to get Billy Batson into a machine called the Memory Mangler that removes his ability to remember any details of his past, let alone that he needs to say SHAZAM. He is only cured when he just kind of aimlessly wanders back into the Wizard Shazam’s cave and rediscovers the word written on the wall there.
The real downfall of Sivana’s plan this time is the fact that he hired such misogynist henchmen who attempt to murder him and Beautia rather than take orders from a woman, which is how Billy Batson escapes in the first place.
So far we’ve seen three separate attempts by Dr Sivana to take over the United States, but in Whiz Comics 006 we get the other kind of Sivana plot, in which he attempts to get ahold of a lot of money that he can then use to finance his takeover of the United States. In this case, Sivana has imported a load of Venusian animals, including some sabre-toothed tigers, a dragon, a mastodon, some “crocosaurs” and the amazing-looking gorilla/lion centaur chimera called the gorillion. Unusually for him, Sivana isn’t even using these animals to rob banks or the like – he’s just exhibiting them at a circus and banking on getting large enough crowds to make a fortune.
Things don’t even go wrong until a jealous circus performer releases the animals in an attempt to kill Captain Marvel, upon which he kills them all by dropping them into the ocean (or just dropping them, in the gorallion’s case). A depressing end for some innocent if hostile animals.
Whiz Comics 010 features a plot to destroy the US Pacific Fleet using information gathered by Beautia under the alias of Dot Darling, Newsreel Reporter. This is the beginning of the end for the Beautia/Sivana partnership, as she suffers a change of heart when the time comes to actually blow up a whole lot of sailors and Sivana responds by attempting to kill her. He is of course prevented from doing this by Captain Marvel and escapes in style on a very phallic aerial torpedo.
Dr Sivana’s final appearance of 1940* is in Special Edition Comics 001 and is another money-making scheme. This time it’s some good old fashioned high-tech insurance fraud, involving Sivana buying cheap disaster insurance against, say, a cyclone destroying some properties in downtown NYC and then causing those disasters himself.
*Okay so it probably goes in between Whiz 006 and 010, but I forgot about it until the last second, so sue me.
As usual, Captain Marvel is all over this scheme. He prevents most of the disasters from landing and ultimately destroys the disaster causing machine with the body of the criminally underused Grandfather Locust, a plague whose descendants was used to attack some well-insured cropland earlier in the issue. Sadly, he only gets a couple of panels to shine before he head is knocked clean off.
BODY COUNT: at least 1402
END OF YEAR STATUS: At large
