(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Wax Man is a bit of an oddball. For one thing, he’s not explicitly a Nazi, just “in the pay of a hostile foreign power,” which is only strange in that this is Marvel Comics, the only big publisher not hedging their bets about calling bad guys Nazis – the story previous to this featured Captain America and Bucky punching out Hitler and Goering and leaving them in trash cans, for heavens sake. But…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 026, 1941) Armless Tiger Man! A minor classic in the Characters With Goofy Names category and almost certainly a Wizard Magazine Mort of the Month some time in the late 90s. Also: he wears stirrup pants. Unfortunately there’s not a lot going on in the story: Armless Tiger Man is a Nazi saboteur who murders a man in order to save a few bucks on bribes, which leads the Angel to get involved. He ends up…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) There are two different comic book tropes that come together in the Parrot. The first is simple: the weird-looking guy adopts a criminal persona based on their appearance -. So: the Penguin, the Vulture, the Chicken, the Platypus, the Skull etc. This is basic stuff, but generally fun. The second thing has to do with the nature of super-powers, that by their very nature they require countering Just as every penny-ante gangster who faced…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) Enric Zagnar is your classic Victim of Orthodoxy. His beliefs (mankind will someday be able to control the weather) clash with the view of the establishment (that is wrong) and so he is left adrift. He of course goes off into the mountains to learn how to control the weather and dream of revenge. Harnessing the power of black magic, he attempts to flood and drown the entire town and is opposed by everyone’s…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) The King is your regular old gang boss who decides to pivot from running a numbers racket to selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and if that was it he wouldn’t be listed here. The dang guy just wasn’t content to be regular, though. Some salient features of his crime time: -he made the fake drugs in a sprawling underground lab using kidnapped doctors -recalcitrant doctors ended up in a giant vat of boiling acid -he has…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024) A simple if gruesome one: Dr Hyde steals the eyes of wealthy men and then ransoms them back. One expects there to be some sort of ultra-technical removal process but no, he just yanks them out – the secret must be in the replacement. He is of course undone by the fact that the Angel is a rich guy and has rich guy friends. Once their paths cross in the person of artist Keene, Dr…
(Marvel Mystery Comics 024, 1941) It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper evil equivalent, so here’s Grosso to show us how it’s done! Golden Age Vision, see, is from an extradimensional realm usually called Smokeworld that’s full of smoke and that the Vision travels to and from via (you guessed it) clouds of smoke. Smoke is kind of his whole deal. Grosso, by contrast, is from the World of War-Dust, with war-dust being defined as clouds of metallic…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024-025, 1941) Rudolf Hess, a major figure in the Nazi party, flew to Scotland in May 1941, probably without authorization and probably in an attempt to broker some sort of peace treaty. As you can see from the previous sentence, even today the whole thing is pretty murky, and in 1941 it was a tantalizing enough mystery for Hess to crop up in a fair few comics either as himself or as a thinly-veiled stand-in. This…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) Kai-Mak here (AKA God of Sharks, Lord of Sharks, Lord of the Deep, Master of the Deep, the Man-Shark) is one of my very favourite things in comics: a weird monster pretending to be a god in order to score power or riches or, as in this case, snacks. I’m so fond of this trope, in fact, that I have to make sure to frontload the acknowledgement that it is predicated on the idea that a lot of the varied people…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 022, 1941) Khor, the Black Sorcerer is one of those magical generalists I was talking about back when I wrote about the Mor the Mighty, with a diverse range of magic abilities including stun bolts, paralysis spells, teleportation spells and shrinking spells. He’s a Jack Kirby troll-man special who comes to the attention of the Vision when he kidnaps a whole-ass Antarctic science expedition because he’s a lonely immortal who doesn’t know how to make friends normally….