They may not be the top of the class, but they did their time in the evil sciences! Dr Eric Karlin has a lot of moxie on paper: a Nazi psychologist with a sideline in Egyptology, he dissolves the enemies of the Reich in acid and keeps their jellied remains in a series of jars in his basement. He also employs mind controlled pseudo-zombies in a scheme to recover frozen Nazi assets from a bank vault. The problem is that…
(More Fun Comics 066, 1941) Out of nowhere one day, giant monsters attack Cliffland, New Jersey! After driving them off a couple of times, the Spectre manages to follow them back to their base of operations, a weird painting of unknown provenance hanging in a Cliffland museum. There he finds that the monsters reside in a metal city ruled over by a man referred to only as the Man. The Man is clearly modeled after the fascist dictators of the…
(More Fun Comics 065, 1941) A fairly simple one, this. The Blue Flame is an eerie cloaked figure sheathed in, yes, blue flame, that embarks on a crime spree in Cliffland, New Jersey. His crimes are not quite but almost exclusively aimed at the attendees of shows by stage magician Dr Mephisto and there is even some indication that the Blue Flame is attempting to frame Mephisto. Unfortunately for the Blue Flame, Cliffland is home to the Spectre, and he…
(Captain America Comics 004, 1941) Doctor Grimm is your regular-style mad scientist, subtype Owns a Private Hospital and Conducts Unethical Experiments on the Inmates and Staff. He comes to Captain America’s attention when Bucky gets bashed on the head real good (teen sidekick head trauma is no laughing matter and I hope we never get an earnest comic about it) and has to be admitted for observation. Things get predictably creepy, with disappearing nurses, strange cries in the night and…
(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 020, 1941) We open on a fear-gripped Star City (not the one you’re thinking of), in which ten people have been killed and drained of their blood. VAMPIRE! KILLER! An eleventh soon joins their ranks, and we get a look at the Vampire Killer in his cool as hell Shadow cosplay. VAMPIRE! KILLER! INTO! FASHION! But it seems all is not as we thought! Extradimensional smoke-man the Vision, exercising the oft-overlooked super-hero skill of Research, discovers…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs. Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010, 1940) I like this guy. This guy is the fun kind of mad scientist with a lot of fun details. First of all he lives in a castle roughly the same size as the island it sits on, off the coast of Cuba. Secondly, he follows the rules of Mad Scientist Grooming, which state that they must either be impeccably groomed or, as with Dr Varoz here, look like they woke up in a compost…
(Blue Beetle Comics 006, 1941) I skip a lot of generic villains from the non-Marvel or DC families of comics, because everyone existing together in a big shared world is the thing about comics that makes me get out my spreadsheets and my extensive tagging system. A guy like Lugo, though, demands at least a little attention. One thing to know about him off the bat is: he’s an underwater guy. This happens a lot in comics starring underwater heroes…