(The Spirit, “Mr Midnight”, 14 July, 1940) Mr Midnight is your classic police taunter, a crook who not only thinks that they have the wherewithal to pull off the perfect crime but is so confident that they decide to tip off the cops to their plans. In this specific instance, the villain is a dapper blue-skinned fellow who has not only informed the police but the Spirit as well, and further has declared that he will commit his murder in the very…
(The Spirit, “The Black Queen”, June 16, 1940) We first meet the Black Queen as the otherwise-unnamed defense lawyer in the murder trial of gangster Slot Gorgan. She already has a reputation for being brilliant, and that reputation proves to be accurate, as Gorgan is acquitted despite the evidence against him. Upon returning to the Black Queen’s penthouse, we learn that she is in fact the very first in the Spirit’s long line of female villains, as it turns out…
Just look at them go. This gang has hit upon the very effective technique of faking an appearance by the Arrow in order to steal other crooks’ takings when they intelligently run away from a potential ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante. The important corollary to any plan to impersonate a super-hero, of course, is that that hero will eventually get wind and show up to see just what they are supposedly doing, which leads to, yes, a collective ass-kicking by…
(The Spirit, “The Origin of the Spirit”, June 2, 1940) Poor Dr Cobra. He goes to all the trouble to put together a sewer lair and develop some weird green slop that puts people into a state of suspended animation and he doesn’t even get to lay out what his plans for the stuff were. No, PI Denny Colt has to show up and get doused in slop and become the Spirit and now that’s all that anyone ever remembers…
For almost two years, this blog had a huge post buffer thanks to its origins as a Twitter thread. At it’s height, the buffer was almost two months long, but for most of its life there were somewhere between two weeks and a month of pre-written posts sitting at my fingertips, and that meant that I could establish certain habits, like trying to make sure that a Minor Super-Hero Round-Up containing the relevant protagonist was published before talking about the villains that…
(The Funnies 050, 1940) The Scourge is a bandit chief operating in the nonspecific Medieval-pastiche England of the Black Knight, and let me tell you, he is a terrific villain. His amazing look is one thing – just how many Golden Age villains have the confidence to use eye makeup to accentuate their air of menace? – but on top of that I have seldom seen a villain so eager and joyful to torture a peasant woman. Just an amazingly…
They really do just keep coming. **Update** The Arrow: While the Arrow has always been portrayed as a mysterious seven-foot-tall physical prodigy, this particular adventure really goes all in on his being super-humanly strong. This seems significant somehow, even if it is is second-to-last appearance by my reckoning. (The Arrow 002, 1940) **UPDATE** the Flame: This is the first actual version of the Flame’s origin that I’ve encountered in a comic book, so here it is. It is also the…
(The Funnies 042, 1940) I had great hopes for the Great One, a pirate captain so mysterious that he wears a full-face hood (with nostril holes! The rarest hood hole!) even while hanging out on his own South Pacific island inhabited solely by his own fanatical crew. The black skull insignia alone inspired me to hope that there might be some fun mystery behind that hood for Bruce McKay, formerly Sky Master but now Sky Ranger, to solve when he…
As long as we’re dipping into the aliens of comics, we might as well go all the way and dig out all the various gods etc that people have made up too. Comic book divinities fall into a few broad styles: -real objects or creatures worshipped animistically but which do not display any real divine power -idols, verbal invocations or other trappings of religious worship without any indication that the being being represented is really real -actual supernatural beings, including:…
(The Flame 003, 1940) The Mad Scientist of Hell’s Kitchen is a, you guessed it, mad scientist who has developed one of the classic serums, giving him the option to turn into a huge and super strong ape-man with a simple injection. Of note is the fact that this is not a Jekyll and Hyde situation, as the Mad Scientist and his alter ego the Beast appear to be merely physically and not mentally distinct. Also of note: though the…