MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 665: THE WIND GOD

(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 that of Sirocco, who he has... tamed? Brainwashed? The fact that it has a baby's face really obfuscates just how intelligent it is.

Eventually, Tabu has the common decency to recognize that even though he has the magical might to have a long-form duel with a deity, that doesn't mean that he should do so, especially in a populated area. As such, he is forced to be the bigger man being and return Sirocco to the loving arms of his... owner? father? coworker? and hopefully learns a valuable lesson about wizard/god relations in the process.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 664: THE DEVIL

(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 things: an anthropomorphic personification! Specifically, they encounter Temptation, who almost ensnares poor Caredodo with her wiles and mug of delicious-looking potion before Camilla sends her packing.

Also there to greet them is Mephistopheles of Faust fame in a much more charming turn than comic book demons usually get to be, probably as a deliberate contrast to the main attraction, the Devil himself, in a wildly more grotesque form than one usually sees in comics before the late Sixties. Ordinarily, your Devils and Satans are a lot closer to Mephistopheles there than this soggy lump of flesh and even the more monstrous of the bunch are still red humanoids along the lines of MLJ's Devil.

The Devil wants Camilla's help to escape into the world of man and take over the place. Ambitious, sure, but a bit pedestrian for Satan himself. What use is temporal power to the Lord of Hell?

In a slightly odd turn of events, Camilla defeats the Devil by hewing a cross out of stone and holding him at bay with it. Since Camilla originally worshipped Thor and the other Norse gods and later restored her empire with the aid of the pantheon-unspecified god Bal, I had assumed that the Lost Empire was established some time before the conversion of the Norse to Christianity. I'd be tempted to blame that pill Jon Dale for converting her but she has engaged in some paganism since his departure from the strip, so I am forced to conclude that Camila subscribes to some sort of syncretic faith that incorporates elements of many religions. Fun!

(This is also the mission that ends with the Angel of Faith rewarding Camilla by transforming Caredodo from a Nottie to the Hottie Sir Champion, in case you were curious about when that happened)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 663: THE JUNGLE DEMON

(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 young man chows down on what turns out to be some AD&D Alignment-flipping berries and Nice Boy becomes the Jungle Demon.

My memory had filled in some details and I was thinking of this fellow as one of the big Fantomah villains but in fact although he talks a big game about conquering the Jungle, mostly he just steals jewels and defrauds his workers.

Fantomah steps in a couple of times throughout the story to warn the Jungle Demon away from pursuing his darker impulses (pulling down a city to build a palace, enslaving people with dark majicks, etc) but he just can't help but be evil and eventually she is forced to feed him an antidote salad to reverse the effects of the berries (and she exiles him and his snake to an isolated plateau, which seems a bit mean). I hadn't really thought about it before but this tendency of Fantomah's to watch the unfolding action but not really step in until she does so decisively at the moment of crisis is the equivalent to Stardust the Super Wizard's very long commute: a way for there to be a story with an effectively omnipotent protagonist in which anything actually happens.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 662: THE GUY BEHIND WORLD WAR II

(N/A)

This is perhaps the ultimate narrative football, or at least is in contention. Will there be more villains claiming credit for, say, the Fall of Rome or the French Revolution? Only time will tell.

CLAIMANTS:

the Dictator (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941)

the Devil (Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 661: THE GUY WHO SHOT BATMAN'S PARENTS

(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 bit of gravitas. Sometimes they don't even start out as the actions of a person: while the the Explosion of Krypton eventually becomes a very popular item on various villains' C.V.s, it isn't even blamed on Kryptonian society for the first decade or so. 

The Guy Who Shot Batman's Parents is just a guy until 1948, when he is identified as Joe Chill. I think he's mostly Joe Chill still, but sometimes he's the Joker (Batman (1989)) or Joe Chill was working for a big bad guy etc etc. I have no evidence here but I'll bet a dollar that there's a comic somewhere where it turns out that Ra's al Ghul was behind it.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 660: MUNDOOR

(Jungle Comics 005, 1940)

Mundoor is a scientist who hangs out in the Fantomah part of the Jungle Comics Omnijungle and has seemingly been spending his time looking for a vitamin-rich plant that will induce giant growth in those that eat it, and in an astonishing turn of fortune an asteroid bearing that very plant lands on his doorstep one day! And the asteroid is also stuffed full of viable monster eggs! What a day for Mundoor.

Mundoor raises his reptiles on a diet of super-vitamins and hypnotism and sets out to conquer the jungle. He also coats them in phosphorescent paint to make them scarier which is frankly overkill.

Quite a bit of the adventure concerns Fantomah playing keepaway with the treasure vaults from Mundoor's first target, one of those Indian style palaces that Fantomah's mostly African style jungle is dotted with.

Mundoor eventually crosses Fantomah's mental line, from "prevent this guy from doing crimes" to "get rid of this guy for good' when he orders his beasts to destroy and loot an entire (kind of Middle Eastern style) city. He and his pets are unceremoniously dumped back on the asteroid and blasted into space, where they presumably get extremely huge on a diet of nothing but growth inducing plants.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 659: THE MASKED ARROWS

(Jungle Comics 005, 1940)

As far as being minor super-villains goes, the Masked Arrows are all right: a group of cloaked bandits who manage to run circles around the local forces of law until they push their luck too far and are wiped out.

The far more interesting thing about the Masked Arrows is the fact that they appear in a story that highlights just how literal the title Jungle Comics is, that virtually all of the stories that appear within take place in an undifferentiated jungle setting that is probably meant to be in Africa but which freely incorporates elements from Southeast Asia such as tigers and Indian-style palaces. 

The Masked Arrows' foe is Captain Terry Thunder of the Congo Lancers, a unit of a French Foreign Legion style outfit that I wasted a fair amount of time trying to parse before I realized that "Congo" in this instance was nothing so crass as a geographic indicator but simply meant "jungle" again. To this end, though Fort Death, Thunder's command, is located in a Foreign Legion desert setting it is never more than a days ride from the deepest jungle (and indeed is sometimes in the deepest jungle) and is just as likely to be attacked by South American tribes as desert nomads. Similarly, the Masked Arrows are simultaneously desert and jungle bandits.Wild stuff.