MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 870: THE CHIEF

(Zip Comics 002, 1940)

While walking down the street one day in what is almost certainly supposed to be New York City, Jim "the Scarlet Avenger" Kendal witnesses the protection racket-related bombing of a tailor shop. What's worse, the police response to the blast makes it pretty clear that they are on the take!

Using his network of operatives, the Scarlet Avenger discovers when and where the next bombing is set to take place and intervenes by way of a heat ray that blows up the bomb as well as the crooks delivering it to kingdom come.

After this and other interference in the gang's activities, the Scarlet Avenger has well and truly drawn the ire of the leader, the aptly-named Chief, who arranges for the Avenger to be captured and delivered to him for disposal. But! Not without the Scarlet Avenger hearing about it first. 

Before the Chef can execute his plan to execute the Scarlet Avenger in his homemade gas chamber, the hero reveals that he has "electrically wired myself, a million volts," and that whatever that means, it allows him to easily escape both his shackles and the glass chamber.

It also gives the Avenger a lethal touch, as both the Chief and his gang learn when they are killed by it. And just who is this mastermind of crime? Why, it's the district attorney! There are a lot of questions to be asked about the large numbers of both super-heroes and super-villains who are district attorneys in their day-to-day lives, but at this point the one I'm asking is: just where do they find the time?

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 030

I seal up the cracks but the dang things keep getting in. 

Klang is your classic rejected-and-shunned-by-society-due-to-his-appearance villain, who has channelled his bitterness into inventions such as heat rays and the explosive Super X-X Nitro Glycerine, which he secretes in the bottle of christening champagne in order to destroy the Navy's newest battleship. Just how this is meant to bring him closer to his goal of becoming the dictator of America is left unexplored, as it draws the heroic Navy goofballs Spark Stevens and Chuck Dawson into his orbit and ultimately leads to Klang himself getting blown up. (Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

Astonishingly, Klang manages to return for a second kick at the can in Wonderworld Comics 016, but spoils his own chances at destroying the US fleet and conquering a weakened US by attempting to get revenge on Spark and Chuck at the same time. They of course manage to bumble their way free of Klang's trap and blow him up again, this time for good.

Though Klang does in fact die in the second explosion, his daughter Madam Klang survives and continues to vex Spark and Chuck. Madam Klang carries on the family tradition of attempting to take over the US, and in her first solo appearance does a little bit of spying for the Axis as a way of raising funds toward that goal. Though her employers end up being captured by Spark and Chuck, she actually manages to get away with the money, in a rare win for the Klang clan. (Wonderworld Comics 017, 1940)

Madam Klang's final appearance involves a joint attempt to get revenge on Spark and Chuck and also steal the plans for a remote controlled bomber from the US Navy during manoeuvres in the Philippines. Her plans fail mostly because she is a truly terrible boss who kills people for failure. Please note the special font chosen for her suicide panel that indicates that she is doing so for Inscrutable Asian reasons, and also her dying speech about how great the USA is and how the current political norm is the best one, boys and girls. (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940) 

This here Snake Cult is extremely generic as far as comic book cults go. They spend all episode running around Madras (aka Chennai if you care about accuracy) killing or attempting to kill people for interfering in their affairs but never actually going into what those affairs are. Probably the most interesting thing about the whole adventure is that the king cobras employed (and presumably worshipped) by the cult are consistently referred to by the archaic name of hamadryads, which is already weird to anyone who knows a little Greek mythology, but is then made weirder by the fact that it is misspelled as hamdryad, which is of course some sort of pork nymph. (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940)

A spy chief so generic that I can't even tell you for certain if he's supposed to be a fascist or not, the Head operates out of a Swiss castle and is primarily concerned with learning the secret of K-51's secret super-power powders. I do appreciate the juxtaposition of the triangular eyeholes with the triangular forehead symbol on his outfit, but other than that this guy is strictly HO-HUM. (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 869: THE BLACK KNIGHT

(Zip Comics 001, 1940)

Shortly after giving himself super powers, Steel Sterling gets word of a brutal bank robbery in the town of Beeville and sets out to bring the culprits to justice. Determining that the crooks must have been guided by a mastermind of some sort, he trails their plane to a mountaintop fortress.

The bow-wielding guards outside the Black Knight's fortress (spoiler: it's the Black Knight's fortress, but what were you expecting) are notable for being the one time that he has anything related to his chosen theme around, and even they are supposedly only there to prevent... mountain cops?... from hearing the sound of gunfire. Inside, it's plain old gangsters.

Gangsters armed with ordinary machine guns are of course no match for a man with all the properties of steel, and Steel Sterling quickly makes his way to the Black Knight's throne room, where he is immediately dropped into a deep pit full of rats.

I'd just like to take a second here to appreciate the fact that the Black Knight's costume is a) 100% brown and yellow with no black at all and b) a pretty conventional super-person getup aside from what appears to be a leather jerkin or similar. Historical, yes, but not particularly knightly. 

A pit full of rats is also not enough to stop Steel Sterling, and he makes his way out, causes the Black Knight himself to fall in, and sets out after the fleeing gangsters just in time to avoid a secondary deathtrap as the fortress explodes behind him. The Black Knight is finished, it seems.

The Black Knight is not, in fact, finished, and is soon (Zip Comics 002) hard at work robbing gold and fur shipments coming out of Alaska. Though he manages to capture Steel Sterling when he infiltrates the villain's fake iceberg base he does a bad job of coming up with a suitable deathtrap for the hero and ends up in the hands of the US Navy.

Steel Sterling's next case brings him to the South American nation of Brazonia, where a man called Dr Yar has taken the famous scientist Walter Cummings in order to force him to develop weapons of war and help conquer the gold-rich country. 

Dr Yar is of course eventually revealed to be an alias (or possibly the real identity?) of the Black Knight. Just why he has abandoned his old moniker is unstated but perhaps it is as simple as a desire not to attract the attention of Steel Sterling again. His new look is at least still visually interesting - particularly the periscopiscopes, which are of course goggles which allow 360 degree vision.

Dr Yar really leans into the scientist aspect of his new identity, and deploys gadgets such as: flying tanks, oil bombs, electric rays and various viewscreens and visualizers.

Plus: he not only has Alligator Men at his disposal but also a swarm of giant mosquitoes straight out of an ad for a pest control company (being big does not help them bate through steel skin, alas). 

Once again the Black Knight/Dr Yar apparently meets his end, and this time it's explicitly at the hands of Steel Sterling, who stuffs him into the barrel of his own super-howitzer before it fires. A truly brutal end, even for a dedicated super-villain. (Zip Comics 003, 1940)

Steel doesn't have to live with any guilt he might feel for long, however, as the Black Knight returns in the next issue, this time climbing the rungs of the aristocracy from mere knighthood to become the Radium King. His new plan is simple: steal the entire US radium supply and then ransom it back for 30 million dollars.

The Radium King has appropriately impressive digs: an underwater base in Lake Superior that would probably be pretty hard to find if one of his minions hadn't blabbed under threat of a beating from Steel Sterling.

The Radium King costume turns out to borrow heavily from the original Black Knight getup, although without a lot of the yellow elements. I'd say that it's better than the Dr Yar outfit but not as composed as the original, and that the half-mask/mustache combo is particularly unpleasant. Speaking of Dr Yar, the Radium King reveals that he survived Steel's attempted cannon execution by simply crawling back out of the cannon.

Not to be robbed of a kill, Steel Sterling uses the Radium King's own submarine to blow him and his base to high heaven. Surely he's dead this time! (Zip Comics 004, 1940)

Not quite! The Black Knight's fifth and final appearance (under the original name, this time) is probably his most ignominious, though it does feature his cool underground city headquarters, seen above. In it, he engages in a campaign of sabotage, kidnapping and extortion against his former kidnap victim/current minor member of Steel Sterling's supporting cast Walter Cummings, who has gone into the munitions manufacturing game and has gotten the contract to produce the mysterious Zeta Ray for the US government. Somehow, if the Black Knight can delay production of the US Zeta Ray for long enough then his own scientists can produce one for him and that will be good, and if that description seems vague to you then I must assure you that it is 100% accurate to the comic. I don't even know what the Zeta Ray does, for heaven's sake.

Though Cummings' first factory is destroyed and his second collapses due to some sabotaged cement, Steel Sterling steps in and has almost completed a third when the Black Knight decides to take a personal hand and ram a tanker truck full of TNT into it. Now here's the embarrassing part: not only does Steel Sterling handily prevent the truck from destroying the factory, but the first time that he is even aware that the Black Knight is involved in the plot against Dr Cummings is when he spots him just one fraction of a second before he is atomized in the explosion. It's not even as dignified an end as being shot out of your own cannon would have been. (Zip Comics 005, 1940) 

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 065

Our themes today are "scarlet," "family tragedy," and "inadvisable human experimentation."

Mr Scarlet: 

Brian Butler, NYC* district attorney,** is frustrated by the limitations inherent in working within the law and so like so many of his peers adopts a costumed identity in order to get the better of crime via acrobatics and punching. A classic origin, but Mr Scarlet's real claim to fame is in being created by Jack Kirby (with Ed Herron) and thus starting off with a real dose of comic book charisma that subsequent artist Jack Binder manages to keep going - both, for example, illustrate his acrobatic explots with such flair that to this day people assume that he's meant to be flying.

* although it's referred to as "Gotham City" in the one caption that names his location, I simply must assume that it's meant to be the NYC nickname rather than some Earth-S version of Batman's hometown, earlier than both concepts even exist.

** he's pretty consistently called a "special prosecutor", but there's just enough evidence to clarify that he's a DA rather than an impartial lawyer brought in to prosecute cases involving possible conflicts of interest, which I just learned is what a special prosecutor is.

Brian Butler's secretary/love interest Cherry Wade learns his secret in Mr Scarlet's first published adventure, and I must say as always that I appreciate a Golden Age comics with a straightforward hero romance to contrast with the widespread aping of the Clark Kent/Lois Lane situation. Even if it is an HR nightmare. (Wow Comics 001, 1940)

Atom Blake, Boy Wizard: 

Atom Blake, a youngster attending Lincoln High in Collegetown, USA, is curious about why he has a different last name than the people who are raising him, and perhaps more pointedly, why his is physically and mentally superhuman. His foster father, Professor Joseph Page, has the answer in the form of a note left for Atom by his biological father, Stuart Blake. Written in a mathematical code that Atom is instinctively able to read, the note tells of the elder Blake's experiments in creating a super-element composed of all 93 known regular elements* and how the infant Atom was given treatments to make him super-human enough to utilize the power of the super-element (called sun-metal in later Atom Blake stories but not here) without evaporating like Blake Sr's poor experimental orangutan.

*always a good bit when it crops up. I just looked up the history of the discovery of elements to see how long the count of 93 was good for and it looks like about 4 years, though plutonium was discovered in 1941 but kept secret until 1948. More impressive is the fact that at least four of the elements known in 1940 weren't yet discovered in 1923 when Blake did his work!

An encounter between Atom and some bank robbers soon reveals that the super-element was stored in the ring that Stuart Blake left with Atom as a baby, and he gains access to a suite of deus ex machina powers. Will this sixteen or seventeen year old boy be able to deal with unlimited power in a healthy way? Stay tuned! (Wow Comics 001, 1940)

Steel Sterling: 

John Sterling is your classic crime orphan: after losing his father to gangsters at a young age, he devotes his life to battling crime. But rather than become a living weapon through intense training, Sterling takes a note from his father's death by gunfire and spends his formative years developing a chemical treatment that will give his body the properties of steel, dramatically catalyzed by a dip into a vat of molten metal in a sequence with more on-panel male nudity than you usually see. Please also note the final panel above, which showcases Sterling's weird riveted metal briefs.

And Sterling isn't just blowing smoke about having all the properties of steel: in addition to being bulletproof and super strong thanks to his new density, he also has the magnetic properties of the alloy, which he, like many of his magnetic brethren, employs to fly around by "magnetizing himself to" various things. Later this is rounded up to simply being able to fly and thank goodness for that.

Finally, Steel Sterling has one of the better secret identities, as he establishes private detective John Sterling as his own twin brother (and also as a sort of cowardly jerk so that he can establish the usual Lois Lane/Clark Kent dynamic with love interest Dora Cummings). (Zip Comics 001, 1940)

the Scarlet Avenger: 

I know I bagged on the Defender for just being the Avenger with the serial numbers filed off, but dang it if the Scarlet Avenger doesn't feel even more like someone just took Richard Benson out back and slapped a little red paint on him. Real name Jim Kendall, the Scarlet Avenger loses his wife and child as a result of a gold robbery on the airplane they are riding in. Kendall alone survives the subsequent crash but loses the ability to form facial expressions, leading to his nickname as The Man Who Never Smiles. 

The Scarlet Avenger's calling card, seen above making the text box hard to read, is a flaming arrow for no discernible or stated reason. Later on it is often depicted with a decorative skull.

The Scarlet Avenger lacks the ability to reshape his facial features that his inspiration possessed, and instead of being a master of disguise is more of a gadgeteer, variously employing a paralysis ray, bulletproof cloak, electrically wired suit that allows him to deliver lethal shocks, mind reading device, compact miniature parachute, shoe knife, personal smokescreen, rocket car and rocket ship in his pursuit of justice. 

The other point of similarity between the Scarlet and regular Avengers is the extensive network of agents that both employ, though the Scarlet Avenger's narrows somewhat over time as he begins a romantic relationship with Inez Courtney, aka Operative 1. More trouble for HR.  (Zip Comics 001 1940)