(Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940) There’s a great temptation when dealing with an evil scientist named Dork to focus on easy, puerile humour rather than appreciating the other things that make him a good super-villain. I had a whole bit about how his big plan was to flood the city with white goo (hur hur) and kidnap women to experiment on their bodies but it wasn’t sustainable. Ironically, I would have had to jump through more hoops to obliquely reference…
(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 004, 1940) The most interesting thing about Mr Muro is that he represents an intermediate stage in the development of the comic book Yellow Peril villain, away from the gaudy Fu Manchu style of the pulps and the comics of the 30s. There are a few of these more workaday Asian Threat villains kicking around in 1940/ 41 but they eventually lose out to the super-agents of the Japanese Empire as the preeminent example of…
(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940) The Vampire has the distinction of appearing in the only Golden Age featuring Mister E, possibly the biggest nonentity in the collection of heroes brought back in The Twelve. He’s whatever: he has a drug that makes your heart explode and his major plot involves trying to get control of an oil company (and marry a woman against her will after killing her father, in case you though he might be a bit sympathetic). He…
(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940) There’s a lot of people on the internet who like to opine on the morality of bat-themed rich-guy vigilantism, but I gotta tell you that it could have been a whole lot worse. Case in point, the Phantom Bullet, a rich guy who gets ahold of an untraceable ice pellet gun and immediately thinks “what this city needs is a whole lot more extra-judicial killings.” But instead of becoming an unstoppable media juggernaut, the Phantom…
(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940) The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved…
Conundrum: Golden Age fighter pilot characters are essentially a very minor subset of super-heroes, and they are also very boring to me. I feel a compulsion to write something about them and also to slump sideways in my seat when contemplating their existence. Solution: since the only really interesting thing about them is their cool names, I will list those. the Flying Flame (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940) the Flying Fox (More Fun Comics 037, 1938) the Hell Diver (Hit…
(Red Raven 001, 1940) The Human Top is a guy who gets spinning powers after a science accident. The only really noteworthy things about him are that cool collar on his costume and the fact that he’s one of the very few Golden Age Marvel characters to have never had any sort of modern appearance. Spinning powers aren’t cool, I suppose. It’s kind of a shame that this is the first of only two appearance of the Human Top and…
(Red Raven Comics 001, 1940) The Gold Leeches are not terrifically interesting villains, but there are precisely two interesting things about them and that’s enough for me. Uninteresting preamble: Zeelmo, the Gold Leech (unofficial name) is a gold-obsessed gang boss with a few super-scientific gadgets (the Gazegrapho Machine for remote viewing and the Trembling Death gas which kills via accelerated aging) and a birds-and-skeletons decorating motif that I wish had come up more often. Zeelmo attempts to recruit B-tier Golden…
They’re back! They’re insufficiently interesting! They’re costumed! For the fifth time! This fella is just a regular degular Nazi spy, but I like his confidence, even if Super Spy G-5 does wrangle him almost instantly. (Hit Comics 015, 1941) These fellas are a rare example of subway pirates, who derail and loot in the New York underground. My delight in this is dampened somewhat by their habit of carrying off ladies for unspoken but surely unpleasant reasons – happily the Human…
Folk: Luther Robinson and Lynne Harris! These folks are hard to categorize! They’re not villains, despite being antagonists to Namor the Sub-Mariner, because Namor is very much a villain at least half of the time. They’re not heroes, despite eventually allying with Namor to fight Nazis, because they definitely attempt to commit at least one genocide against the people of Atlantis. They’re adventurers, they’ve both been surgically modified by Atlantean scientists to be amphibious, and Lynne is one of a…