(Captain America Comics 004, 1941) This is one of those moments where the first examples of a thing that shows up here is not a great example of the thing. Blame the tyranny of alphabetical order, I suppose, because I know for a fact that Star-Spangled Comics will feature the Ring of Rags when I work my way down my list to it, and that is a good example. The thing in question is of course Poor People as a Horrifying and…
(Captain America Comics 003, 1941) The Hunchback of Hollywood is a villain in the same classic vein as Clayface: dressing up like a horror character and using murder and fear tactics to shut down a movie production. Also like Clayface, the production is within the hero’s range due to the studio taking advantage of the castle-rich landscape of the Eastern US (the castle in question is said to be near Camp Lehigh, home base of Steve “Captain America” Rogers and…
(Captain America Comics 001 & 003, 1941) When I started this here blog I tried to put a little bit of thought into the tagging system, and specifically tried to work out how to deal with the fact that a lot of super-villain types have the same names. The solution I came up with is that everyone named, say, the Skull gets the same tag but legacy characters who are adopting a specific persona that another has used get appended…
(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Wax Man is a bit of an oddball. For one thing, he’s not explicitly a Nazi, just “in the pay of a hostile foreign power,” which is only strange in that this is Marvel Comics, the only big publisher not hedging their bets about calling bad guys Nazis – the story previous to this featured Captain America and Bucky punching out Hitler and Goering and leaving them in trash cans, for heavens sake. But…
(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Himalayas of any comic book universe are simply chockablock with hidden communities of mystics, monsters, creeps, enlightened souls and weirdos. One such group are the so-called Walking Mountains (AKA the somewhat less PC Oriental Giants). The Mountains are enormous, invulnerable to all harm, possibly immortal and dumb as bricks, which leads to them becoming the muscle for Benson, an unscrupulous banker with poor long-term planning abilities. Luckily for Captain America and Bucky, they also…
(Captain America Comics 001, 1941) I’ll be honest: Rathcone doesn’t have too much going on. He’s your regular style Nazi spy with enough extra sauce to make him stand out. To whit: -a maxed-out “Jack Kirby draws a weird creep” stat, complete with fangs and talonlike fingernails -an oblique gimmick whereby he plays out his strategy on a chessboard while his men listen in over an intercom. The custom chess set is of course one of the great super-villain accessories…