(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)
I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I’m from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn’t need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain.
Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would bother to investigate the nearby vicinity when large numbers of corpses are found in quick succession.
But the similarities to Python don’t end there! Like Python, Donaire lives in an old stone structure (a temple rather than a castle, buts still) retrofitted with a modern lab, has a big bald goon with a K name (Karlo to Python’s Kreeper) and the corpses he’s dumping are sans brain.
Unlike Python, Prof Donaire has no interest in the brains of his victims. No, he’s a body thief. He’s scooped out his own brain and put it in a jar and now can control five seperate bodies on the 40s equivalent of a Local Area Network. And as always with any kind of body part thief, Donaire is just salivating at the thought of adding a toned super-hero bod to his collection.
Luckily for the Angel, merely having the bodies of a bunch of athletes does not grant Donaire the reflexes or fighting abilities of their original owners. Likewise, being able to mobilize four bodies for a melee doesn’t convey the ability to coordinate their attacks. The Angel is perfectly fine.
All good things come to an end, however, and Professor Donaire learns a bit too late the primary rule of having an disembodied brain: don’t just, like, put it on a shelf or other easily accessed location in a glass jar. In this particular case, Donaire ends up setting his own lab (and therefore brain) on fire but the Angel would have been completely justified in nailing it with a jump-kick.
In conclusion: the Brain of Professor Donaire should absolutely be BRUNG BACK.
