(Jungle Comics 011, 1940) Arco, aka “the immortal mummy of Ancient Egypt! Old Arco, the super-scientist of long ago!” comes to the attention of Fantomah when he begins blinding the inhabitants of her home jungle using a ray with the fairly awesome name of the Scarlet Shadow. His ultimate goal – like so many Fantomah foes – is to conquer the jungle and establish an empire for himself. (Arco is also, somewhat surprisingly, our first actual mummy. The current ratio…
(Jungle Comics 011, 1940) We begin with a very comic book (or monster-of-the-week TV show) setup. Camilla notices and comments on the ancient Magician’s Pool and then is almost immediately compelled to enter that same pool and disappear from the realms of man. Camilla’s aide/paramour Sir Champion turns to local wizard Warlock (not that Warlock the Wizard, but it is wild that there are two of them) for help and learns that the Magician of Magician’s Pool fame is Thoth,…
(Jungle Comics 010, 1940) It’s a c-c-c-combo breaker! Ordinarily Fantomah swans around observing the villains of her comic adventures and periodically telling them that they should stop what they’re doing before it’s too lat, ie, before she delivers unto them an ironic punishment. This issue features one of the few foes to catch her completely flat-footed and she is as surprised as anyone when giant flaming hands start tearing through the jungle, indiscriminately murdering both people and animals. Who or…
(Jungle Comics 009, 1940) Minor Super-Villain 666 is somewhat in line with how underwhelming our milestone numbers in the past have been. Just two entries away from being the Devil his own two-headed self. I suppose I could have shuffled things around to make it work out in a more satisfying way but that would really taint the pure joy we’ll experience when entry 1000 or 1600 or 69420 turn out to be amazingly apropos. Who we have instead is…
Bless ’em, they’re trying. The first few adventures of Hydroman, a character I have an inexplicable affection for, are concerned with what at first seems like some real standard Yellow Peril bullplop (“Oriental invaders” and so forth) but then there are gangsters involved and the two factions variously mention a higher-up named “the Great One” and “the Big Boss”, respectively. Still later, the whole operation seems to be run by this collection of pseudo-Nazis on a yacht in New York…
(Jungle Comics 007, 1940) Not quite a normal super-hero/ super-villain interaction, this. Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle intervenes to stop the wind elemental Sirocco from wreaking havoc and in so doing incurs the wrath of the unspecified but very Norse-looking Wind God. At this point we have a simple misunderstanding over a poorly-trained pet. Everyone involved now escalates things simultaneously. The Wind God unleashes lightning, storms and tornadoes on the valley and Tabu counters using both his own power and…
(Jungle Comics 007, 1940) Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire, having made the transition from capricious villain to noble hero and staved off a couple of attempts on her throne and her life, is getting ambitious. She is determined to descend into the Cave of Sighs, a local portal to Hell, and banish the Devil from her lands. Together with the reformed assassin Caredodo, Camilla passes the Copper Gates of Hell after a brief encounter with one of my favourite…
(Jungle Comics 006, 1940) The Jungle Demon starts out as an unnamed boy lost in the jungle and true to the old trope he is found and nurtured by a beast – we’ve seen it many times before. The beast in this case is a mind-bogglingly large constrictor snake, which is fun. Boy grows to man and he and the snake (charmingly named “Powerhouse”) are at peace with the people and animals of the jungle until one day the still-unnamed…
(N/A) This is perhaps the ultimate narrative football. At the very least it is in the running. Will there be more villains claiming credit for, say, the Fall of Rome or the French Revolution? Only time will tell. CLAIMANTS: the Black Dragon (Silver Streak Comics 010, 1941) the Dictator (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941) the Devil (Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941) Mars (Liberty Scouts Comics 002, 1941) Mars (National Comics 001, 1940) Wotan (National Comics 011, 1941)
(Detective Comics 033, 1939) Can’t believe that I didn’t think of this before but The Guy Who Shot Batman’s Parents a) should already be here and b) is representative of a class of plot devices I’ll be calling Narrative Footballs. Narrative Footballs are big pivotal events, usually related to a character’s origin in some way, that get more and more significant over time and eventually become something that can be pinned to a villain in order to lend them a…