(Feature Comics 029, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? The Reaper is another just-scraping-into-the-ranks gang boss. Between his cool name and a setup where he gives his gang orders through a closed-circuit TV and microphone, he makes that final leap, presumably into a slightly higher security prison cell.
(Detective Comics 041, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? He’s an espionage guy with an invisibility formula. What is interesting about them? Invisible guys are often pretty dull comic book villains, but I will give the Invisible Man/ Dr Ellis this: his cover identity is as a scientist in the team that is trying to catch him, and he’s evidently arrogant enough that he actually developed a formula for a gas that would render him visible again but assumed that investigator Cliff…
(More Fun Comics 052-054, 1940) The Wizard is the kind of guy you get in comics who develops a robot army and a few different types of rays, destructive and otherwise, and immediately turns around and takes over (what I assume to be) his home town. I do appreciate that he looks like someone who has been sitting in a basement or a cave soldering robot faces for twenty years, but it’s no excuse for incivility.
(Feature Comics 036, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? Simply put, Python lives in a creepy castle somewhere in New York State and spends his time stealing the brains of great thinkers to wire up to his machine so that he can plunder their knowledge. And he decorates with the shrunken heads of his victims, and he has a surgically mind-controlled goon named Kreeper. What is interesting about them? Aside form the above which is pretty solid villain stuff, the…
(Feature Comics 028, 1940) As far as a guy who attaches bombs to rats in order to sink and subsequently loot ships goes, Dr Rodent has it all: a great name, a rodentlike cast to his features, and, best of all, his heroic foil is Doll Man so we get to see a little guy ride around on a rat: This is the kind of thing that comics are for!
(Detective Comics 046, 1940) Love this guy. The head of a gang of smugglers who looks like a goldfish and is sensitive about it and tortures his foes by imprisoning them in a huge goldfish bowl where they have to stand for days or drown and the only thing to eat is what raw goldfish they can catch and they eventually go mad? Terrific. All that but it’s actually a mask and the Goldfish is actually a frustrated former actor?…
(Detective Comics 043, 1940) A skull-faced propagandist operating out of the Belgian Congo, presumably Nazi but it’s pre-Pearl Harbor so he works for a “hostile power” or “the dictatorships” etc. The really intriguing thing about the Skull is his choice of themes – rather than go with an obvious skeleton motif like your average skull-faced goon would do, he instead opted for a Medieval theme, complete with sword-wielding henchmen and a jungle castle. I would praise him for making good…
(Detective Comics 042, 1940) The Painter of Death (never actually called that in-comic, sadly) engaged in a campaign against the subjects of paintings by up-and-coming portraitist Antal. He first attacked the painting of the person and then killed them in the same manner: via dart, arrow, gunshot etc. Eventually, Bruce “Batman” Wayne commissioned a painting from Antal and used it to set a trap which netted Wylie, an art collector who had invested heavily in Antal’s work and saw the…
(Detective Comics 041, 1940) A common or garden-variety masked counterfeiter, the Masked Man operated out of an all-boys’ school, leading to him being the first solo foe of an undercover Dick “Robin” Grayson. Mostly. Batman shows up at the end for a punch or two.
(Detective Comics 036, 1940) The Spider, a notorious jewel thief, is in reality nightclub owner Durand. But Durand is in reality (shocked gasp) suburbanite Roberta Roberts! While the original thought process behind the character was likely no more complex than “I bet it would be fun to draw a lady in a bra and false mustache,” a few different narrative jump to the modern mind, the first being that Durand/ the Spider is the true identity of a trans man,…