(Crack Comics 005, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? As his name suggests, the Sapphire king is motivated by his desire for and love of sapphires – he seems to love them for themselves and also for the wealth and by extension power they grant him. And he gets sapphires by using giant eagles to kidnap ships’ crews and take them to his island in the Indian Ocean, there to labour in his underwater sapphire mines (?) until giant octopus or…
(Crack Comics 004, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? Any number of things! The Asp is a jewel thief who taunts his victims/ the police ahead of time and then arranges for seemingly impossible murders using time-delayed poisons. He’s a weird creep who hisses all the time and almost manages to kill the Clock. And yet… it’s all a little perfunctory. I saw someone on the DC wikia editorialize about how the Asp’s MO was similar to the Joker’s first appearance,…
(Crack Comics 001-020, 1940-1942) The Red Torpedo is Jim Lockhart, a guy who came up with a design for the ultimate one-man submarine and turned that into his whole personality. This is a not-uncommon Golden-Age comics trope that kind of petered out once the world was no longer awash with mechanized combat – Silver Age super-vehicles tended more toward the exploration side of things. So: Jim Lockhart, young US Navy officer resigns his commission after being told that his submarine…
(Crack Comics 003, 1940) What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout. What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain’s…
The Clock flatlines himself in order to solve a murder by speaking to the victim in the afterlife. (Crack Comics 010, 1941) Decoration: Jaspar Crow’s got a monogrammed wastecan! (Crack Comics 016, 1941) Dr Foster’s got a monogrammed lampshade! (Crack Comics 017, 1941) Names: Tor the Magic Master encounters a counterfeiter with the unlikely name Phrogg Zaarn. One of the victims of Clock foe the Werewolf is named A.B. Ceedee.
(Funny Picture Stories/ Funny Pages/ Feature Comics/ Crack Comics, 1936-1944) The Clock has the distinction of probably being the earliest masked crimefighter and definitely that of being the earliest one to stick around, which would make him the earliest super-hero if Dr Occult hadn’t made his debut in 1935. A lot of the details about him are fairly cliché, both because they were cribbed from existing pulp clichés and because the Clock helped define the clichés of the genre. So:…
(Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941) The Swamp Devil! Part of a couple of fairly populous subgroupings of supercrook: the “kill or scare off folk in order to do a land-grab” type and the “pose as a figure from local legend in order to capitalize on preexisting fear, etc” cohort (a frequently paired duo). Specifically, the Swamp Devil is actually Woggs, an engineer tasked with draining part of the Great Dismal Swamp to create more farmland who is instead flooding nearby farms…
(Captain Marvel Adventures 003, 1941) The Beast-Ruler’s origin is simple: for reasons of his own, Dr Sivana builds a human out of animal parts – the muscles of a gorilla, the memory of an elephant and yes, the life-force of a thousand beasts – and that creation promptly rebels and runs off with the remaining beasts that have not had their life-forces squeezed out. A real rookie mistake on Sivana’s part if you ask me – this isn’t his first…
(Captain Marvel Adventures 002, 1941) The Arson Fiend! A simple villain conceptually: fire insurance salesman George D. Tweedle just can’t sell any fire insurance and so he starts what is nominally a protection racket but really seems to be an excuse for wholesale arson. The twist in this particular tale is that Tweedle has somehow developed or otherwise gotten his hands on a formula that transforms him into the fire-spewing and fireproof Arson Fiend. Legitimately super-powered crooks being a bit…
(Bulletman 002, 1941) Gangster Scar Malone was convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair. He swore revenge against the judge and jury, as you do. And once you’ve done that kind of thing, you only have a few options: fake your own death so you can come back as a fake ghost to kill your enemies; arrange for your body to be taken to a scientist or magic man for post execution revival so you can slay your…