(Adventure Comics 046, 1940) The Coin is a few different super-villain clichés rolled into one. Firstly he’s an old college chum of Wesley “Sandman” Dodds, and “old schoolmate of hero turns out to be villain” is as much a recurring thing in comics as an old friend showing up and immediately dying. Which the Coin also does. Finally, the Coin is a man who dresses up as an old lady to do crime, which is a super-villain bit and also…
(Action Comics 030, 1940) I’ve decided to introduce a system for dealing with some of the more minor super-villains who do not incite as much excitement in me to vomit out more than a cursory sentence about them (slightly unfair to the Master, who is kind of interesting, but I am uninspired today) In such cases, we will be answering one or both of the following questions: What makes them a super-villain? In addition to his super-villain name, the Master…
(Action Comics 030, 1940) In thinking about Zolar I realized that he engages in a surprisingly common plot-expedient activity which I, unwilling to root around on TVTropes for whatever twee thing they might dub it, am hereby going to call “the Reel”: the villain sends a minion from their exotically-located HQ to wherever the hero is located to accomplish some sort of McGuffin task – collect an item, kill or kidnap someone, etc – thereby alerting the hero to the…
(Action Comics 028, 1940) AKA the Leopard Skin Thief AKA the Strongarm Bandit – this is our first example of a clear super-villainous character who has not bothered to give themself a name and so we must take one from the text boxes or (as in this case) from the names given to them by the other characters. Mr Leopard Skin is fun because he is obviously dressed as a circus strongman, and that is because his crime career is…
(Action Comics 025, 1940) Former chess master turned crimelord, Asmodeus has three of my favourite features in a villain: -he employs the Tigress -he builds little models of crime scenes to use as teaching aids for instructing his gang -he lives in a house of traps Unfortunately for him, he ends up battling Zatara, so all the traps in the world avail him not.
(Action Comics 025, 1940) The “World’s Greatest Hypnotist,” Medini embarks on a life of crime using his gifts. He’s so good at hypnosis, in fact, that he is able to put Superman himself out of commission with the power of his mind, which might be why his story ends with Superman throwing an entire plane at his head.
(Action Comics 024, 1940) Chalo was a stage magician who murdered his own brother to acquire real magical secrets which in turn he used for crime. He took a page from the Mad Lama’s book and hired at least one other magical crook as a henchman, a fire- and snake-summoner named Arko. By far the best thing about Chalo, however, is that his major use of the powers he murdered his brother to get is summoning a weird toad that freaks…
(Action Comics 018-063, 1939-1943) The Three Aces consist of Gunner Bill (blonde, bland), Fog Fortune (fat, Cockney – the kind of character who starts out 1% comic relief and increases by increments until he is unrecognizable. In this case he gets fatter and more faux-Cockney until his word balloons are up to 1/2 apostrophe) and Whistler Will (dark haired ladies man – more on him in a moment). They’re fairly standard aviator type heroes except for a couple of things:…
(Action Comics 023, 1940) Quetzal’s actual motivations are unexplored in his encounter with the Three Aces, but his methods – living in a lost Aztec city and using a fleet of remote controlled planes piloted by zombies to destroy anyone who approaches – are fairly indicative of a villainous turn of mind.
(Action Comics 022, 1940) Whether the capital-D Demon is actually a lowercase-d demon is never actually resolved, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. He shows up when a friend of Tex Thomson’s named Cary James ignores local superstitions to visit an island in the Indian Ocean, where he is quickly captured and murdered by the Demon, who then assumes his appearance and identity via fell majicks. The Demon’s only goal seems to be to murder everyone who knew…