(More Fun 014, 1936)
Another Dr Occult foe (and thus another early Siegel and Shuster creation), Koth is a fairly generic magic guy, for all that his origin involved being a magic alien who swore to destroy humanity when his companions were slain by cavemen.
Unlike the preceding minor villains, Koth has gone on to appear in more modern comics, though whether any of them were set in the modern day as opposed to being period pieces is something I’m not sure of..
(More Fun 012, 1936)
A member of the surprisingly robust fraternity of guys who get a head injury and then become criminal masterminds. Distinguished mainly by appearing in Radio Squad, a pre-Superman Siegel and Shuster joint featuring police offers with RADIOS in their CARS, which is honestly more revolutionary than it might sound to us in this far future year.
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Honestly just putting this here to note that I won’t be adding this to every generic crime idiot’s mini-writeup. If it’s not there, just assume that my opinion is the same as for the Purple Tiger: There’s no reason to bring the specific character back, but it’s a perfectly fine name for a minor villain and you know I love legacy characters.
(More Fun 010, 1936)
Another Dr Occult foe, Methuselah was basically a serial killer who believed that he could absorb the time he was stealing by killing people and so targeted folks with long-lived ancestors. Dr Occult set a trap and captured Methuselah, which leads to:
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Absolutely! The assumption in the comic is that Methuselah is wrong, but what if he wasn’t? Just a dude locked up in Arkham or wherever for 90 years, all records lost in the oldest filing cabinets, and then one day he notices a grey hair and busts out to get more time. Is Dr Occult even still around?
(New Fun 006, 1935)
The *second* DC super-villain, the Vampire Master was upset that a lady rejected him so responded reasonably by holding the city to ransom via hordes of machine-created Universal movie monsters, possibly the first example in comics of someone creating something of unbelievable power and using it for petty nonsense instead of becoming the richest person in creation.
Theoretically, the Vampire Master was beaten by Dr Occult, but *really* he was shanked by one of his own creations after talking about how he was going to shut off his machine and make her disappear.
SHOULD THEY COME BACK? Maybe not the Vampire Master himself, but a story about someone breaking into an abandoned basement and finding his tech, still set to fill NYC with Frankensteins and Draculas would be a real hoot.
I like taking note of minor and obscure characters from days of yore, and none other is so beloved of my heart as the minor super-villain. Even though lot of them are real duds, as a class of characters they pack such a lot of potential. Just as very little separates an Ultra-Humanite (middlingly significant super-villain) from a Luthor (one of the top super-villains of all time), just as little separates them from Zolar, a bald super-scientist who fought Superman one time in 1940.
But if we’re going to talk about minor super-villains then we must determine what exactly defines a villain as super (at least to me). The simplest route to this is to put on a costume, adopt an alias, and commit a crime. Particularly if the costume, crime or both are themed according to the name. Call yourself the Viper and dress in a snakeskin jacket and papier mache snake head while robbing a reptile house and you, my friend, are a super-villain.
Not every super-villain fits those criteria, however – heck, Luthor basically never has and he was my major example earlier – so I had to come up with some criteria. Generally, a villain who fulfils two or more of the following is elevated to the ranks of the minor super-villain:
-costume (even a simple domino mask can make the difference)
-foe (fight a super-hero and the super can rub off on you)
-name (probably the least important without any of the others – comics are littered with gangsters named the Little Gardenia or the Bone Butcher who amount to exactly nothing)
-scale (rob a convenience store: nothing. Rob every convenience store in the city: that’s supercrime!)
-theme (theme your weapons, your crimes, your henchmens’ names. Delicious stuff)
-style (absolutely the most important. A character who fails to thrive doesn’t make the list: Tex Thomson once fought a guy who lived in an isolated castle and had rebuilt himself as a shapechanging plastic cyborg and he is not represented here because I yawned my way through the issue)
That’s it and I’m sure that I’ll be very inconsistent as I go along.
