(Crack Comics 005, 1940) The Jay Bird is one of my favourite minor super-villains of all time, I reckon. He’s just a guy in a bird mask with a gimmick that is simultaneously very simple and far too complex and dangerous: he simulates flight via a very long tether that is dangling him from a plane. Thus equipped, he swoops down and robs various targets on the streets of New York City, quipping all the time. He’s great! The real…
(Crack Comics 001-031, 1940-1943) There are a lot of elements to the Black Condor’s origin so I shall be presenting them in a bulleted list: -His father, archaeologist Richard Grey, brought his wife and newborn baby along on an expedition to Mongolia. This did not pay off, as their caravan was massacred by bandits and the only survivor was the baby, Richard Jr, who was carried off by a mother condor. -Experiencing cross-species maternal instincts, the condor chose to raise…
(Crack Comics 005, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? As his name suggests, the Sapphire king is motivated by his desire for and love of sapphires – he seems to love them for themselves and also for the wealth and by extension power they grant him. And he gets sapphires by using giant eagles to kidnap ships’ crews and take them to his island in the Indian Ocean, there to labour in his underwater sapphire mines (?) until giant octopus or…
(Crack Comics 004, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? Any number of things! The Asp is a jewel thief who taunts his victims/ the police ahead of time and then arranges for seemingly impossible murders using time-delayed poisons. He’s a weird creep who hisses all the time and almost manages to kill the Clock. And yet… it’s all a little perfunctory. I saw someone on the DC wikia editorialize about how the Asp’s MO was similar to the Joker’s first appearance,…
(Crack Comics 001-020, 1940-1942) The Red Torpedo is Jim Lockhart, a guy who came up with a design for the ultimate one-man submarine and turned that into his whole personality. This is a not-uncommon Golden-Age comics trope that kind of petered out once the world was no longer awash with mechanized combat – Silver Age super-vehicles tended more toward the exploration side of things. So: Jim Lockhart, young US Navy officer resigns his commission after being told that his submarine…
(Crack Comics 003, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout. What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain’s…
(Crack Comics 001, 1940) A series of facts about Golden Age super-hero comics: -most of them take place in cities -they are either set in a specific location (e.g. Wonder Woman being in Washington DC or the Red Bee in Superior City) or an unidentified large city -in the latter case, over time the city acquires characteristics that either lead to it becoming its own thing (e.g. Batman’s unidentified large city becomes Gotham) or being identified as New York City…
(Batman Comics 008, 1941) I got pretty excited when reading this story, as it concerns murders among the cast and crew of a play called the Superstition Murders and there’s a lot of kerfuffle about bad luck and jealousy and drunk has-been actors and I was hopeful that it might boil down to my favourite motive for supercrime: mad art. Just as mad as mad science but it really makes you think, you know? Sadly, the real motive for the crimes is…
(All-Star Comics 003, 1940) This is the kind of super-villain that you see magical heroes taking on a lot more often than other types: the preemptive striker. The likely cause of this is the status of so many magical heroes as the de facto head of Earth’s magical security, someone that a bad actor can take out and then be free to act with impunity. What’s interesting about this super-villain? The thing that appeals to me about this guy, who is primarily…
(All-Star Comics 003, 1940) Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon – still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror. The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied…