(Bulletman 002, 1941) I cannot tell a lie: I love a fake mummy. I can’t help it – there’s something about a crook going to the trouble of wrapping themself up in old linen that is very endearing to me. And as with our friend here, they often have a modifier to distinguish them from the workaday mummies that you see everywhere. They’re a Golden Mummy or a Missing Mummy, or, as with our boy here, a Limping Mummy. The actual reason…
(Bulletman 002, 1941) There are many Hunchbacks, both actual and fake, in the ranks of the minor super-villain, alas. Victor Hugo has much to answer for. This Hunchback is a former actor whose back (and presumably mind) was injured in a fall and thereafter resolved to kill all leading men at a particular theatre via dart to the neck. The real standout of the story is not the Hunchback but rather red herring murder suspect Matt Benson, seen here being a…
(Bulletman 001, 1941) The Largest Man in the World is exactly what it says on the tin: an unfeasibly enormous dude. By himself, not much of a threat so long as he gets a regular supply of molasses to eat. It’s just too bad for society that he is spotted by crooks and used as a living siege weapon to rob and kill. The really remarkable thing about the Largest Man in the World is that his gangster pal is Machine…
(Bulletman 001, 1940) There is a pretty broad swath of the super-villain community (and an even larger cohort of generic costumed villains) who have the common origin of being respectable members of society who need a second identity to head a gang or catburgle or do murders under the guise of. The gang leaders tend to stick to a few different styles of dress: there’s the domino mask wearers, the executioners-style hood guys and the more cautious head-to-toe robe wearers….
(Bulletman 001, 1941) What makes them a super-villain? The Black Spider is Jules Rey, a French crook who got caught in NYC and shipped back to France, where he was thrown in a dungeon, went blind, befriended the spiders in his cell and escaped. Now he’s back for revenge on those he blames for his circumstances, including Jim “Bulletman” Barr and his coworker and future father-in-law Sergeant Kent. Plus he dresses in a kind of low-rent Batman costume. What is…
(Blue Beetle Comics 010, 1941) Once again I am faced with the painful dichotomy of a villain with all of the trappings I love – he’s a bombastic loudmouth with a bunch of costumed henchmen, who uses simple trickery to appear superhuman – but uses them in service to some frankly uninspired crimes. In this case, the Swamp Master (great name, too!) emerges from the swamp (natch) with his wet-suited Swampmen and a saurian monster that is actually a disguised…
(Blue Beetle v1 006, 1941) What makes them a super-villain? I’ll be honest. The Eel’s initial plot – take over NYC York City ‘s shipping industry in order to starve and thereby ransom the city – was, while ambitious, a bit old hat and I was going to write him off as another jagoff gang boss with a decent moniker. But then! He reveals his Room of Horrors(!) where he pickles his enemies alive(!!), and, well, how could I not?
(Batman Comics 008, 1941) I got pretty excited when reading this story, as it concerns murders among the cast and crew of a play called the Superstition Murders and there’s a lot of kerfuffle about bad luck and jealousy and drunk has-been actors and I was hopeful that it might boil down to my favourite motive for supercrime: mad art. Just as mad as mad science but it really makes you think, you know? Sadly, the real motive for the crimes is…
(Batman Comics 006, 1941) A few different longstanding comic book bits make early appearances in the tale of the Clock Maker. First, Bruce Wayne has to go to a boring old board meeting at one of the many companies that he has an stake in, but that meeting sows the seeds of crime. Specifically, they all go to a clock store together afterward and Atkins, the evil board member who wants to gain sole ownership of the clock company for…
(Batman Comics v1 005, 1941) Batman and Robin’s first interdimensional jaunt took them to Fairyland, where they were tasked with rescuing the daughter of one Professor Anderson, who it seems he was using as a test subject for his narrative-dimensional travel device? There they face off against sundry giants and dragons and so forth before confronting the top evildoer of the realm: the Black Witch. One could argue that a villain whose existence is defined by peasant morality tales that…