(More Fun 039, 1939) A man who trained a pair of great danes to steal, leading to a city-wide panic after glimpses of the dogs caused people to assume that some sort of creature was involved, which then lead to newspaper front pages. The Radio Squad eventually got their man, though sadly the dogs did not survive.
(Action v1 019, 1939) Classic mad scientist stuff here: work out a revolutionary technique to transplant human brains into gorillas and then aim no higher than sending your gorilla-men out on horseback to plunder Mexico. Blows himself up, as per the above image.
Lost cities get a lot of play in comic books, especially Atlantis. Sometimes it seems like enough little fragments and offshoots managed to survive the place that it would be surprising to hear of anyone dying. Here are a selection of fates of Earth-Two Atlantis: -Earth’s second moon collides with the planet, causing the sinking of Atlantis. the colony city of Ophir in Africa and an underwater remnant survive (Action v1 017-018, 1939) (this is the Atlantis that Zatara encounters…
(Action v1 017-018, 1939) There’s a lot of ancient murder-cults in comics, and a lot of them are orientalist nonsense about primitive superstitions and such. I present this one (duped into doing the bidding of a couple of no-good brothers) solely because of the magnificent crotch-throne.
(Action v1 015, 1939) Just a regular sort of science villain with a regular sort of plan: create a heat ray cannon and use it to ransom the world by melting the ice caps. Derailed and frozen solid by Zatara after a mere few flooded cities. Actually, that would be a neat way for him to come back: thawed out by global warming. Occasionally a clear super-villain is unnamed in the course of a story and I have to go…
(Action v1 013, 1939) An early example of the principle that if you are friends with a comic book hero you have a high chance of either being the victim of a super-crook or being one yourself, the Ace of Spades is just some guy Tex Thomson made friends with on a ship and mooched houseguest status off of. He’s also a very local super-villain, being a guy with an English country estate who seems to spend his time shaking…
(Action v1 009, 1939) In a fairly typical display of respect for the Tibetan peoples and their religion, the Mad Lama is a ruthless villain bent on world domination. Presumably he achieved his powers through rigid dedication to the popular “evil” style of Tibetan Buddhism. The Lama himself doesn’t get to do much other than bloviate for a while before being incinerated in a magic duel with Zatara, so the most interesting thing about him is the fact that he…
(Feature Funnies 016, 1939) Not much to distinguish this spy organization foiled by Quality character Black X, other than the fact that their leader spends the entire adventure dressed for bed, complete with a little tasseled nightcap. I choose to ignore the in-text indications that he was in fact just about to go to sleep and instead believe that he dressed like that all the time. BRING BACK tasseled nightcaps!
(Detective v1 031-032, 1939) The only reason this guy’s minor is that Batman shoots him dead in 1939. I know he’s made a few reappearances over the years but mostly they’re retellings of that first story. Also I guess they’re calling him the Mad Monk now? Weird. My point is that Batman deserves a vampire nemesis so they should BRING HIM BACK. ADDENDUM: it’s very strange to me that in Batman: Red Rain it’s Dracula who vampires Batman and not…
(All American Comics 025-028, 1941) On the list of Obscure Comic Book Characters, Hop Harrigan doesn’t rate very high. Any discussion of Golden Age comic books will eventually mention the teen aviator whose feature was popular enough to support a fan club, radio serial and movie and also ephemeral enough to have completely disappeared from public consciousness around 1948 CE. Most writeups of Hop will mention that he adopted a couple of costumed identities over the years, and while I…