(Blue Bolt v1 002, 1940) Just a simple costumed extortion gang, but I really dig their skull masks if not their habit of killing the extortees regardless of whether they pay up or not. Too bad for them that Sergeant Spook was on the case.
Minor super-heroes need to be rounded up now and then. Blackstone the Magician: There are a fair number of comic versions of real life people: movie cowboys by the dozen, big game tracker Clyde Beatty a couple of times, etc. Not too many of them quite cross over into the super-hero side of things, but here we have magician Harry Blackstone Sr, who absolutely did (Blackstone is also a great example of someone who was at one point wildly famous…
(Big Shot Comics 020, 1941) Dr Howard Vyle is a pretty disappointing villain to land on for the big Number 500, if I’m honest. He’s just some guy from some country (Big Shot Comics 1940-1941 is rife with spies but the folks at Columbia Comic Corporation were even more cagey than the rest of the industry about indicating where those spies might actually be from – it’s faintly possible he might be supposed to be a commie, even as late…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) The Rockingham Bandit is a masked fellow who commits robberies and murders in the town of Rockingham (natch) who turns out to be a balloonist from a nearby circus who is framing another guy from the same circus in an attempt to steal his girl. Two items: 1) The frame works like this: the Rockingham Bandit does a crime and then leaves behind an item identifiable as belonging to the target. The Rockingham PD are…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) The Cobra technically works for the Chief if you want to exclusively go by the criminal org chart, but the Cobra is also the only reason for the Chief being mentioned at all and not just thrown into my big bin of nondescript gang bosses. Thus: a dual entry. Like I said, the Chief is your regular degular gang boss, albeit one who swans around in a green smoking jacket the whole time. Feeling the…
(Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t. So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential…
(Big Shot Comics 006, 1940) Someone is killing old policemen! And furthermore, they’re doing it in such a way that their skin is tinted blue as they die! Unsurprisingly, this ends up being called the Blue Death. But Who is administering it, and why? It’s a short story, so we find out pretty quickly that the culprit is one Doctor Swanson and he’s getting revenge on the eight police officers who arrested him twenty-three years earlier, using special arsenic/ phosphorous/…
(Big Shot Comics 001, 1940) Just a simple head of a gang that specializes in stealing furs (and I would call that over-specialized but we’re just a couple of years off from wartime rationing and with it gangs that specialize in meat, tires and scrap metal theft) but he has a number of super-villainous aspects: -the biggest one has to go first and it’s that he has the chutzpah to track a police informant through the streets of New York…
(Big Shot Comics 003, 1940) Is a hook hand the most basic gimmick that automatically flips a gang boss over to being a super-villain in my mind? We don’t have enough data to call it yet but all signs point to Probably. This Hook is Hook Horner and there’s not too much to say about him: he kidnaps a young woman sometime between the death of someone she is set to inherit millions from but before she herself knows about…
(Big Shot Comics 002, 1940) The Goldmaster is one of my very favourite subtypes of super-villain: the guy who really leans into the bit. Specifically, he is a fellow who has discovered the secret of making gold and subsequently adopted all of the trappings of a Medieval alchemist. Or possibly he was a guy who was really into the alchemy lifestyle who made the luckiest find ever. Either way, he doesn’t have to live like this! It’s a choice! No…