(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) The King is your regular old gang boss who decides to pivot from running a numbers racket to selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and if that was it he wouldn’t be listed here. The dang guy just wasn’t content to be regular, though. Some salient features of his crime time: -he made the fake drugs in a sprawling underground lab using kidnapped doctors -recalcitrant doctors ended up in a giant vat of boiling acid -he has…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024) A simple if gruesome one: Dr Hyde steals the eyes of wealthy men and then ransoms them back. One expects there to be some sort of ultra-technical removal process but no, he just yanks them out – the secret must be in the replacement. He is of course undone by the fact that the Angel is a rich guy and has rich guy friends. Once their paths cross in the person of artist Keene, Dr…
(Marvel Mystery Comics 024, 1941) It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper evil equivalent, so here’s Grosso to show us how it’s done! Golden Age Vision, see, is from an extradimensional realm usually called Smokeworld that’s full of smoke and that the Vision travels to and from via (you guessed it) clouds of smoke. Smoke is kind of his whole deal. Grosso, by contrast, is from the World of War-Dust, with war-dust being defined as clouds of metallic…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024-025, 1941) Rudolf Hess, a major figure in the Nazi party, flew to Scotland in May 1941, probably without authorization and probably in an attempt to broker some sort of peace treaty. As you can see from the previous sentence, even today the whole thing is pretty murky, and in 1941 it was a tantalizing enough mystery for Hess to crop up in a fair few comics either as himself or as a thinly-veiled stand-in. This…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) Daka is Namor the Sub-Mariner’s uncle who is the first of many to usurp his throne while he’s off adventuring. He allies with the Nazis and the Seal People in a scheme to invade Argentina and it’s a testament to how little I can bring myself to care about Atlantean political drama that not even the Seal People can inspire me to write more about this guy.
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) Kai-Mak here (AKA God of Sharks, Lord of Sharks, Lord of the Deep, Master of the Deep, the Man-Shark) is one of my very favourite things in comics: a weird monster pretending to be a god in order to score power or riches or, as in this case, snacks. I’m so fond of this trope, in fact, that I have to make sure to frontload the acknowledgement that it is predicated on the idea that a lot of the varied people…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) N-4 is the kind of Nazi spy that really reminds one that the swastika was a costume design go-to for a while there. Gonna be swastikas cropping up basically forever, aren’t there. Like Captain Nazi still shows up from time to time, doesn’t he. More interesting than N-4 being one of our earlier costumed Nazis is that they’re a trend-based crime villain! The trend: highways! Their whole scheme revolves around the recently-completed Pennsylvania Turnpike…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 022, 1941) Khor, the Black Sorcerer is one of those magical generalists I was talking about back when I wrote about the Mor the Mighty, with a diverse range of magic abilities including stun bolts, paralysis spells, teleportation spells and shrinking spells. He’s a Jack Kirby troll-man special who comes to the attention of the Vision when he kidnaps a whole-ass Antarctic science expedition because he’s a lonely immortal who doesn’t know how to make friends normally….
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 022, 1941) During the Human Torch and Toro’s time foiling the Nazi invasion of clear-stand-in-for-Yugoslavia Aslavia they encounter and sink this submersible fortress: But FAR more importantly they encounter what may be the best ridiculous Nazi superweapon I have ever seen: The German Invasion Wall! The superweapon so ridiculous that even in a comic book it has to have bits of wood propping it up so that it doesn’t fall over when firing its cannons! I love…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 021, 1941) I got lazy here and clipped the setup, sorry. In brief, the story takes place at Chellcroft, the swampland mansion of wealthy Georgian C.J. Miller (just one letter off from being quite funny), formerly a centre of art and society but now fallen into disrepair. To make things worse, the Weird Ghost of Amber Swamps has started haunting the property and killing people, including Norton, the poor butler pictured fleeing the house in the…