(Captain America Comics 007, 1941) Here’s the problem with the Black Toad: he looks great. A really top-notch costume, like something Batman would have worn in a stage production in the 30s. No notes. And that’s the only interesting thing about him. He’s a baseball manager who wants to buy into the team and is killing players in order to drive the price down. HO HUM. (I guess he does use a bomb hidden inside a baseball at one point….
(Captain America Comics 007, 1941) What was the Red Skull up to in 1941? As mentioned in the Red Skull II entry, this here is the real deal bad guy we all know and love to hate, still running around being a total stinker to this day. In-comic there is of course no indication of this, as the decision to differentiate the two was made years later when someone figured that the top Nazi villain worked better as a German…
(Captain America Comics 006, 1941) The Menace is a dude who uses secret tunnels and the power of fear to advance his fairly low-stakes plot to steal $50 000 worth of bonds from his elderly sister. Some might argue that that is far too little money to put murder on the table for but those people aren’t super-villain material. Unfortunately for the Menace, he happens to catch the attention of Hurricane (later retconned as Makkari, one of the Eternals), so…
(Captain America Comics 006, 1941) There are three big reasons that I like the Hangman: 1. It’s hard to beat a Golden or Silver Age story that revolves around a group of suspects who might be the villain. Just a series of fun character sketches followed by (in this case) the character’s grisly murder. 2. The Hangman isn’t actually supposed to be a luchador but he sure does look like one, and that’s one of the top super-hero/ villain looks….
Where is Camp Lehigh? As noted previously, Camp Lehigh has been assigned a retroactive location of Virginia, but when that happened is hard to pin down– the earliest citation on the Marvel Comics Wiki is Captain America: White in 2008, which is recent enough that I’m surprised that the MCU location of New Jersey didn’t take precedence when the 2011 movie came out. Was it in fact established earlier? More notes follow: -nothing in the various Handbooks of the Marvel Universe -nor any…
(Captain America Comics 006, 1941) Comics history seems to have taken the Fang as a Japanese agent but I’m pretty sure that as written he’s a Chinese American gang boss who’s working for the Japanese against the Chinese government. Either way, he’s your basic pulp holdover Asian gang boss with swarms of fanatical hatchet-man and a pronounced lack of humanity down to his namesake fangs. Part of me always wants to skip guys like this but they’re just as much a part…
(Captain America Comics 006, 1941) The Camera Fiend is your regular gimmicked-up gang boss who parlays the classic comic book camera gun into a modestly successful career in theft that sees him almost getting away with the British Crown Jewels before being beaten down by Cap and Bucky. He is of course playing off the idea of the rabid photography fanatic from the advent of cheap personal cameras. I was going to criticize him for having such a grotesque costume…
(Captain America Comics 005, 1941) Finally, FINALLY, after 300 of these guys an arbitrary milestone lines up with a reasonably cool character: the Ringmaster of Crime AKA the Ringmaster of Death. Compounding the fun of the circus of crime aesthetic is the fact that some of that good-style retconning has been going on and the Ringmaster in this tale has been made the father (and presumably later grandfather, per Marvel’s sliding timeline) of the mid-level super-villain the Ringmaster! Uh, if…
(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…
(Captain America Comics 003, 1941) The Butterfly is great. You just can’t beat a guy in a semi-accurate butterfly outfit (I mean that head is a bit of a mashup) who robs museums. He’s got a glider rig and a weaponized proboscis! The only really problem with his operation is that he is in reality museum curator Doctor Victroli, both because he is a fairly obvious suspect and because he is an old man who ends up biting the dust…