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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 372: THE GHOST OF TRIGGER DANIELS

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 372: THE GHOST OF TRIGGER DANIELS

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(More Fun Comics 063, 1941) Trigger Daniels is a hitman in the employ of gang boss Bugs O’Leary who gets sent up for the murder of a local philanthropist and swears revenge on all who had a part in his fate just before being executed. This is a pretty standard setup to a comic book story and usually involves  lot of faked deaths and/or secret twins and/or scientists with cashflow problems and innovative ideas about brain transplants/ reviving the dead….

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 371: THE BLITZ GANG

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 371: THE BLITZ GANG

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(Minute-Man 002, 1941) AKA the Blitz Force AKA the Panzer Gang. I almost started out by saying that the idea of a criminal gang operating along military lines was an old one but no, it isn’t yet. It’s not a new idea – there might be half a dozen examples in this list so far and I’m sure it cropped up more than once in the pulps – but it’s not quite the mid-tier trope that it eventually will be….

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 370: THE GREEN HOOD

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 370: THE GREEN HOOD

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(Minute-Man 002, 1941) As mentioned in our last entry, the Green Hood was retroactively revealed to be the boss of Illyria, Queen of Spies in her final appearance (probably for the best as it’s hard maintain queenly authority when people know that you have a supervisor). He’s your standard hooded mastermind/ spymaster, albeit with a much more dramatically draped hood than most. He is also A Bad Boss, as shown by his demonstration of managerial style above. Having tasked Illyria…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO 046: THE SNIPER

MINOR SUPER-HERO 046: THE SNIPER

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(Military Comics 005-034, 1941-1944) Not that Golden Age super-heroes didn’t often kill their enemies, but the Sniper here is an example of a style of hero that had a brief niche to themselves in the 40s and then didn’t really reemerge until the 70s – I am talking of course about heroes who deliberately hunt and kill their foes. Those foes are specifically Axis in the case of the Sniper and his colleagues the Marksman, the Americommando, etc. Not that…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 366: THE SCAVENGERS

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 366: THE SCAVENGERS

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(Military Comics 005, 1941)  The Scavengers are an interesting bunch, but all of the most interesting things about them are implied rather than stated. As seen above, they show up to loot and murder in the aftermath of WWII battles. The fact that they all look the same, like little rat-men, is probably meant to be a metaphorical signifier of their moral degradation but I like the implication that this is what happens to battlefield looters, like the the transformation…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 365: THE BLACK TIGRESS

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 365: THE BLACK TIGRESS

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(Military Comics 004, 1941) The Black Tigress is a Gestapo agent operating in Egypt with the goal of capturing or destroying the Suez Canal with her army of little Perter Lorre looking Nazis. Nothing particularly remarkable, but she does have the distinction of being the first of many, many minor super-villains to be faced by the Blackhawks. She is also the first of many femmes fatale to be encountered by Blackhawk himself, and Will Eisner creation (and Howard Chaykin adoptee,…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO 044: THE Q-BOAT

MINOR SUPER-HERO 044: THE Q-BOAT

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(Military Comics 001, 1941) This is stretching the idea of what a “minor super-hero” is quite a bit but I ultimately had to defer to my judgment rule about criminal groups: if one person were doing this would it make sense to categorize them such? And it would! The Q-Boat is just that, a warship disguised as a harmless four-masted schooner in order to prey on Nazi convoy raiders. Swap out the disguised ship for a submarine and you have…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO 042: THE BLUE TRACER

MINOR SUPER-HERO 042: THE BLUE TRACER

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(Military Comics 001-016, 1941-1942) The Blue Tracer is your standard guy-with-a-super-vehicle hero: “Wild Bill” Dunn, an American engineer serving with the British in Ethiopia, finds himself the only survivor of an ambush by a race of would-be world-conquering superhumans called the M’bujies. He and Anzac Boomerang Jones team up to build the multienvironment supercraft the Blue Tracer and foil the M’bujie plans (by killing them all). There seems to be a consensus online that the vehicle is the Blue Tracer…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 364: THE BLACK DRAGON SOCIETY

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 364: THE BLACK DRAGON SOCIETY

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(Master Comics 021, 1941) The Black Dragon Society is nothing new: a bog standard Yellow Peril spy and sabotage ring that has a couple of weeks of success before being trounced by Minute-Man. The one interesting thing about them is that they were based on an actual Japanese secret society that was still extant at the time the comic was published. Despite the fact that the story is just as disseminating as pre-Pearl Harbor comics usually are about the exact…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 363: MR H

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 363: MR H

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(Master Comics 001 (behind the scenes) or Master Comics 007 (first mentioned) or Master Comics 008 (first appearance on-panel)-Master Comics 020, 1940-1941)   Mr H, the mastermind behind all crime in the city of Carterville and its unnamed state, gets up to all kinds of schemes through his proxies. For example: -running an illegal casino in a hard-to-catch gambling blimp -robbing a munitions plant in order to outfit a small army of gangsters and enact a criminal takeover of Carterville…

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