(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Hook is in reality cannery cwner Rand Greer, who has a lucrative sideline in smuggling jewels inside of frozen fish (and a less lucrative hobby of murdering FBI agents). To justify the name, Greer has a hook hand concealed under a fake plastic hand (a pretty good one honestly – I reckon he’s holding a fish with it in the first image). There’s really nothing to this guy and I’d ordinarily banish him to…
(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Murder Maestro comes out swinging with a rapid-fire campaign of musical murder. Over the course of two days he delivers five musical warnings followed by song-inspired deathtraps to members of the Tin Pan Alley Club, e.g., “I’m Walking on Air” delivered via singing telegram followed by an attempt to hang the recipient from a light aircraft. This of course leads to one of my favourite setups: a collection of possible suspects. Not as much…
(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel. The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism,…
(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) Adam Igorovich! Your typical scientist unhinged by his treatment by the scientific community, who deemed his theories impractical and/or dangerous and/or insane, so now he is striking back at the world using those selfsame theories to get his back. If we’ve seen it once we’ve seen it a million times. There’s one important difference between the machinations of Adam Igorovich and those of, say, the Master (the last Russian-ish scientist we saw battle Dr Fate):…
(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) The Cipher is a fairly unremarkable oceangoing spy with a really great name. He attempts to extract some information on winter warfare tactics from a friend of Clip Carson (on behalf of unspecified employers – somewhat interestingly, the Cipher is explicitly a freelance spy) and gets blown up for his efforts.
(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) The Great Caesar is the antagonist of the first published Johnny Quick adventure (though not, of course, the first overall Johnny Quick adventure – as revealed in the last round of Generic Costumed Villains he had a several-year career before this). He’s got the ever-popular array of circus of crime henchmen who he coerces to rob and kill at his pleasure. He also has the much dumber but just as popular “death as consequence of…
The Scar was a spymaster encountered and captured by adventurer Biff Bronson and maybe if he dressed like that all of the time he’d have an entry of his own but no, he had just left the opera. (More Fun Comics 067, 1941) This bunch work for the villainous Count Parla and his pal Eddie in a classic case of “work your way into polite society in order to set up a big score”. If there’s a non-evil Count…
(More Fun Comics 070, 1941) I got some gripes about Bandar and they’re not really Bandar’s fault. But let’s start with who Bandar is: the source of a mysterious spectral figure that keeps bamboozling the Spectre and killing former members of the Crimson Circle Mystic Society. Jim Corrigan goes deep cover and joins the Society in order to get to the bottom of what the heck is going on and discovers that they’re just a bunch of dupes that society…
What were Ian Karkull and Wotan up to in 1941? Ian Karkull is my Platonic Ideal of the Median Super-Villain: he has two Golden Age appearances (detailed here) and a handful of post-Silver Age ones but also was seemingly pulled out of a hat (probably by Roy Thomas) as the villain who did some sort of scheme that blasted the Justice Society with some sort of energies that made them age slower so that otherwise normal WWII veterans like Wildcat…
What was Wotan up to in 1940? A trip back in time! A year or so ago when I was reading the 1940 issues of More Fun was before I started doing Super-Villain Yearbook posts and so I skipped poor Wotan, an injustice compounded by the fact that he is what I would call a Median Villain: one who has either enough appearances or importance to a hero’s history to be more than a minor villain but without the name…