(Big Shot Comics 017, 1941) Like a lot of Skyman’s enemies Nels Lambert is a disaster causing guy. Specifically, he has a rig called an Electrical Wave Generator, with which he can create waves – presumably of all sizes but as he is a criminal scientist he’s mostly focused on the largest and most destructive ones. A note on naming: the Electrical Wave Generator is an okay name at best but he does refer to his base here as Nels…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) The Rockingham Bandit is a masked fellow who commits robberies and murders in the town of Rockingham (natch) who turns out to be a balloonist from a nearby circus who is framing another guy from the same circus in an attempt to steal his girl. Two items: 1) The frame works like this: the Rockingham Bandit does a crime and then leaves behind an item identifiable as belonging to the target. The Rockingham PD are…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) Ramun the Evil One aka Ramun the Great is a hypnotist/ stage magician with a simple if short-sighted plan: 1) open a club in New York 2) have it become popular with the wealthy social set 3) hypnotize rich guys 4) profit (aside: just look at that charming picture of a man who thinks he’s an ape! The little dance!) The short-sighted part goes hand-in-hand with the profit, as once Ramun has induced his victims…
(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941) The Cobra technically works for the Chief if you want to exclusively go by the criminal org chart, but the Cobra is also the only reason for the Chief being mentioned at all and not just thrown into my big bin of nondescript gang bosses. Thus: a dual entry. Like I said, the Chief is your regular degular gang boss, albeit one who swans around in a green smoking jacket the whole time. Feeling the…
(Big Shot Comics 011, 1941) Stentor is named after a character from the Iliad who was known to have an amazingly loud voice and from whom we derive the word “Stentorian”. This is a real slap in the face to me, a mythology-obsessed kid who got a minor in Classics at university essentially by accident because I kept signing up for classes I found interesting. I have opinions on Greek heroes! I know who Philoctetes is! And yet Stentor, a…
(Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t. So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential…
The mad scientists are usually up to something criminal, but the criminal scientists are often completely rational. Like a fair few of the scientists I speak of here, Dr Hayles here talks a big game but gets caught in the planning stages before he has the chance to prove to the world that he was right all along. In Hayles’ case it was kidnapping a bunch of boys that got him in trouble and operating on young boys’ brains in…
(Big Shot Comics 006, 1940) Moora, Queen of the People of the Moon, is technically only called the Moon-Mistress by her enemies, but what can I say, I love alliteration. As introduced, she is merely the leader of a troublesome “hill tribe” that pistol-packing adventurer Rocky Ryan is asked to settle down on behalf of a local Maharajah (where exactly this takes place is ambiguous: Ryan is one of those Golden Age soldier-of-fortune characters who perpetually bums around an “India”…
(Big Shot Comics 006, 1940) Someone is killing old policemen! And furthermore, they’re doing it in such a way that their skin is tinted blue as they die! Unsurprisingly, this ends up being called the Blue Death. But Who is administering it, and why? It’s a short story, so we find out pretty quickly that the culprit is one Doctor Swanson and he’s getting revenge on the eight police officers who arrested him twenty-three years earlier, using special arsenic/ phosphorous/…
(Big Shot Comics 001, 1940) Just a simple head of a gang that specializes in stealing furs (and I would call that over-specialized but we’re just a couple of years off from wartime rationing and with it gangs that specialize in meat, tires and scrap metal theft) but he has a number of super-villainous aspects: -the biggest one has to go first and it’s that he has the chutzpah to track a police informant through the streets of New York…