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Month: June 2025

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 808: THE BLACK QUEEN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 808: THE BLACK QUEEN

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(The Spirit, “The Black Queen”, June 16, 1940) We first meet the Black Queen as the otherwise-unnamed defense lawyer in the murder trial of gangster Slot Gorgan. She already has a reputation for being brilliant, and that reputation proves to be accurate, as Gorgan is acquitted despite the evidence against him. Upon returning to the Black Queen’s penthouse, we learn that she is in fact the very first in the Spirit’s long line of female villains, as it turns out…

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GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 022

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 022

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Just look at them go. This gang has hit upon the very effective technique of faking an appearance by the Arrow in order to steal other crooks’ takings when they intelligently run away from a potential ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante.  The important corollary to any plan to impersonate a super-hero, of course, is that that hero will eventually get wind and show up to see just what they are supposedly doing, which leads to, yes, a collective ass-kicking by…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 054

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 054

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Whoops there are two more super-heroes in the Spirit Section. Should have included them with the Spirit himself, tsk tsk.  Lady Luck:  The Spirit’s home, the “Spirit Section” of newspaper comics also included two other Will Eisner-created but not -written or -drawn characters, the first of whom is Lady Luck. In actuality wealthy socialite Brenda Banks, Lady Luck is a costumed vigilante out of boredom with the day-to-day of high society. She is wanted by the law and specifically by…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 807: DR COBRA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 807: DR COBRA

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(The Spirit, “The Origin of the Spirit”, June 2, 1940) Poor Dr Cobra. He goes to all the trouble to put together a sewer lair and develop some weird green slop that puts people into a state of suspended animation and he doesn’t even get to lay out what his plans for the stuff were. No, PI Denny Colt has to show up and get doused in slop and become the Spirit and now that’s all that anyone ever remembers…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO SPECIAL: THE SPIRIT

MINOR SUPER-HERO SPECIAL: THE SPIRIT

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For almost two years, this blog had a huge post buffer thanks to its origins as a Twitter thread. At it’s height, the buffer was almost two months long, but for most of its life there were somewhere between two weeks and a month of pre-written posts sitting at my fingertips, and that meant that I could establish certain habits, like trying to make sure that a Minor Super-Hero Round-Up containing the relevant protagonist was published before talking about the villains that…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 806: THE SCOURGE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 806: THE SCOURGE

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(The Funnies 050, 1940) The Scourge is a bandit chief operating in the nonspecific Medieval-pastiche England of the Black Knight, and let me tell you, he is a terrific villain. His amazing look is one thing – just how many Golden Age villains have the confidence to use eye makeup to accentuate their air of menace? – but on top of that I have seldom seen a villain so eager and joyful to torture a peasant woman. Just an amazingly…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 053

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 053

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They really do just keep coming.  **Update** The Arrow: While the Arrow has always been portrayed as a mysterious seven-foot-tall physical prodigy, this particular adventure really goes all in on his being super-humanly strong. This seems significant somehow, even if it is is second-to-last appearance by my reckoning. (The Arrow 002, 1940) **UPDATE** the Flame:  This is the first actual version of the Flame’s origin that I’ve encountered in a comic book, so here it is. It is also the…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 004

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 004

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Now’s the time that we start pulling aliens from the vaults! So look out for a lot of A-names for the next while! Not the first one though, because something has to come up organically. Crillionites: Hailing from the planet Crillon (which boasts the majestic Crillion City, natch), the Crillionites are a caste-based society in which the Lords of Crillon (like from the title of the comic!) rule over a slave population via some sort of divine right. This societal order is…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 805: THE GREAT ONE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 805: THE GREAT ONE

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(The Funnies 042, 1940) I had great hopes for the Great One, a pirate captain so mysterious that he wears a full-face hood (with nostril holes! The rarest hood hole!) even while hanging out on his own South Pacific island inhabited solely by his own fanatical crew. The black skull insignia alone inspired me to hope that there might be some fun mystery behind that hood for Bruce McKay, formerly Sky Master but now Sky Ranger, to solve when he…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 003

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 003

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It’s time for round three of all the various aliens encountered by Spacehawk in his crusade for justice in the year 1940! Neptunian Dog-Men, Plutonians, Jovians, Lunarians:  This gang of space pirates that Spacehawk and his pal Galar beat up are described as “screaming, bloodthirsty Neptunians, Plutonians and Jovians” and this is somewhat vexing because they are an extremely heterogeneous bunch who absolutely come in more than three distinct styles, but I reckon that we can do it. The Neptunians…

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