MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 939: THE BLACK PHARAOH

(Silver Streak Comics 014, 1941)

After his initial defeat at the hands of Thun-Dohr, the villainous Sin Khaii is on the lookout for an ally in his war on humanity and he finds one in the pages of a tome called the Book of the Dead, and presumably it's the Egyptian Book of the Dead because the candidate he lines up is called the Black Pharaoh, the only Pharaoh evil enough that he was cursed and sealed up in a pyramid to think about what he had done for all time. The only way he would be able to go free is if a) the pyramid moves, which will free the Pharaoh's servant Tut-Mut, who b) must then find new guys to take the place of the Black Pharaoh and his cronies. All of this stands as a real lesson for those inclined to mete out mystic justice: if you're going to seal away evil or otherwise prevent awfulness from getting everywhere and your work can only be undone by a very specific set of circumstances, don't write those circumstances down anywhere.

As usual, I attempted to figure out just who if anyone the Black Pharaoh is supposed to be, with the only real clue being that he was buried in "the oldest pyramid in Egypt," and while there are a few contenders for that title due to the gradual development of pyramid technology, the oldest pyramid-shaped pyramid like the depicted in the story seems to be the Red Pyramid near Cairo. What does this tell us? Only that the Black Pharaoh was interred some time after 2563 BC, alas.

Sin Khaii isn't one to be deterred by any Ancient Egyptian mystics. He uses his dark majicks to transport the pyramid to the former site of the New York World's Fair and then deploys a bug from the criminally-underutilized Pandora's Box to infect passersby with Curiosity so that they will enter the structure and fall prey to Tut-Mut.

The innocent people of Queens need not fear, however, for Thun-Dohr and his mentor the Dalai Lama (not that one) are on the case. Thun-Dohr ambushes the Black Pharaoh's servants as they ransack a museum, only to be captured via some pretty cool shadow magic.

Finally, the Black Pharaoh and Sin Khaii get down to business and formulate a plan: they are going to recreate Ancient Egypt on a grand scale by smothering the entire United States in a layer of sand. This is why the Pharaoh's men are looting museums, to get all of their boss' stuff back before it is buried forever.

(the duo's apocalyptic sandstorm is shown blowing across the Atlantic from Egypt, and there's a part of me that wants to get really pedantic about the relative sizes of the two countries and point out just how thin the available sand would be spread, but we are dealing with magic after all. Presumably the sand would be multiplied somehow? I'm much more concerned about the state that Egypt was left in - just how much of that sand was load-bearing?) 

If there's one thing about shadow magic, it's that you need shadows to use it, and the Dalai Lama deals with that by blowing out the candle that was supplying the particular shadows keeping Thun-Dohr bound. Thun-Dohr disrupts the ritual - is the sand just hovering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic? This has to be the kind of thing that inspires conspiracy theories in a comic book universe, particularly in the kind where super-heroic stuff isn't front page news.

Thun-Dohr and the Black Pharaoh engage in Thrilling Astral Combat (I think. Whenever two people are battling on a cloud I assume that this is shorthand for their astral forms duking it out in the Aetherial Realms, but in this case it's possible that they have merely chosen the clouds as their battlefield for some unexplained reason) with Our Hero emerging victorious and the villainous Pharaoh at the bottom of the ocean, weighed down by his sins. After that it is a simple matter for Thun-Dohr and his mentor to restore the pyramid and sand to Egypt.

As always, it's kind of disappointing when an ancient evil that was sealed away for untold eons is dispatched with relative ease in the present day. After all, why go to all the trouble with the curse of eternal slumber if you could just murder the guy in the first place? I suppose the fact that the Black Pharaoh was royalty might have played into it somehow, though on the other hand "being murdered" has to be the most expected way to die for a historical royal. Give me more formidable primordial evils!

Categorized in: Colour (Black), Origin (Resurrected Mummy), Royalty (Pharaoh)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 938: HERR SKULL

(Silver Streak Comics 014, 1941)

Herr Skull is the leader of the Skull Men, a band of fascist saboteurs who dress up like ghoulish skeletons in order to facilitate their crimes. Why do they have spikes on top of their heads? I do not know the answer to that. Perhaps Herr Skull just thought the look needed a bit more to really pop.

Spike aside, the plan works! The Skull Men are terrifying enough that their victims are caught completely off guard, as these unfortunate armoured truck guards demonstrate, and those who do not manage to flee are ruthlessly killed.

Using the defense money stolen from the armoured truck job, Herr Skull and his men embark on a campaign of death and destruction around NYC, striking at aircraft, naval and ammunition production.

The flaw in the Skull Men's operation is exposed by Captain Battle and sidekick Hale Battle, who almost capture them during the armoured car job but are knocked out by a gas grenade long enough for the gang to make their escape. Simply put, Herr Skull's whole plan hinges on the Skull Men's victims being too frightened to fight back with no apparent backup plan for if they do. When the Battle duo infiltrate their sewer lair it's all over.

SKULL SCORE: visible eyes make it a 4, dropping to 3 because it's just a mask.

Categorized in: Body (Skulls), Generica (Herrs), Ideology (Crypto-Fascists)

Silver Streak Comics 014 is the issue in which Hale Battle starts his ongoing souvenir collection. He adds one of the Skull Men masks to it at the end of the issue...

... but the real start of his obsession is in the cliffhanger from their previous adventure which involved sinking a u-boat and from which he retained a torpedo propeller.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 937: THE SCARLET SKULL

(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941) 

The Scarlet Skull was a real surprise to me! Going by cover dates, he debuted about the same time as the second/"real" Red Skull over at Marvel, which means that he was probably created in the window between the death of the original, George Maxon, and the debut of the Red Skull we will eventually know as Johann Shmidt. Obviously the fact that these are now considered to be two separate characters is all retcon nonsense but the idea of Don Rico noticing that the Red Skull was dead and snaffling him for Lev Gleason is a fun one.

That said, here are the similarities between the Scarlet Skull and the Red Skull: they are both a) Nazis who b) wear red skull masks and c) like to dress in green. And that's about all. 

Rather than being a fascist mastermind, the Scarlet Skull is instead the muscle. He works for a spy named Sinhart and does what I would call a poor job of keeping super-heroes out of his house.

So bad a job, in fact, that he facilitates the Daredevil's infiltration mission by providing him with a handy all-concealing costume to wear while he does it.

This allows Daredevil to learn Sinhart's plan: to kidnap the President and replace him with a double in order to destabilize the US to generic fascist ends. The Scarlet Skull is supposed to be the one doing the kidnapping, so I guess he must have skills beyond getting beaten up in the wooded section of Sinhart's back yard.

The Scarlet Skull does manage to recover from a super-heroic beating in time to ambush Daredevil's fiance Tonia Saunders and then parley that into a second ambush of Daredevil himself. Is this redemption? Will my opinion of him raise?

It will not, I'm afraid. The Daredevil is more than a match for the Scarlet Skull, even when the former is shackled to a wall. The Skull, Sinhart and the false FDR (who has the unnecessarily cool name of Condor, by the way) are soon captured.

SKULL SCORE: The one place that the Scarlet Skull comes out ahead of his counterpart! Unlike the Red Skull, the Scarlet Skull's mask has no visible eyes, giving him a total score of 4/5, i.e., the best possible without having an actual skull face!

Categorized in: Body (Skull), Colours (Scarlet), Ideologies (Nazis)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 936: SIN KHAII

(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)

Sin Khaii, a lama at the same monastery that Thun-Dohr was raised at, has been cast out for unspecified reasons. His reaction to being an outcast - to steal Pandora's Box and use it in a war on all humanity - would seem to retroactively justify the exile, however. Just why a Tibetan monastery would be the hiding place of Pandora's Box is likewise left unexplored.

Sin Kahii is able to use the Box to unleash fresh evils upon mankind, in the form of mosquito-like insects that are under his control. The first such is a plague called the Black Madness, which seems to act both as a traditional and deadly disease and as a vector for insanity, as seen above after Dr Benson Bell concocts a cure for it and his assistant is immediately driven to homicidal rage to keep it from being distributed.

No madness or madman is a match for the mystic might of Thun-Dohr, however. Sin Khaii's first plot is foiled with a sock to the jaw. Of Clavell, the madman. Sin Khaii remains unpunched.

Since regular humans have proved to be no match for his foe, Sin Khaii's next plan involves allying with someone more powerful, namely the ancient and evil Black Pharaoh (check in in a day or two for more on him). To that end, he levitates the Pharaoh's whole damn pyramid and moves it from Giza to the former site of the New York World's Fair (I was going to gripe about the comic missing an opportunity to feature the pyramid next to the Trylon and Perisphere but it seems like they were demolished with much more alacrity than I might have expected).

As will be discussed further in the Black Pharaoh's own entry, his imprisonment in the pyramid can only be ended when he and his servants' places are taken by other people. Sin Khaii facilitates this via another Pandora's Box bug, in this case "curiosity." Could one argue that curiosity is not one of the evils contained in the box since Pandora already had it her curiosity was in fact foundational to the whole myth? I think that one could, but of course if we're going to insist on mythic accuracy then Sin Khaii is going to have to be finding increasingly unlikely ways to weaponize hope, seeing as it's the only thing that's supposed to still be in the dang thing.

Once the Black Pharaoh is free, he and Sin Khaii plot to destroy the United States but are once again foiled by the flying fists of Thun-Dohr. The pyramid (and all of the sand in Egypt) is restored to its proper resting place and Sin Khaii, still at large, swears further vengeance. Sadly for us plot resolution fans out there, the "Thun-Dohr" feature never returned after this second instalment and Sin Khaii is presumably at large to this day.

Categorized in: Accessories (Pandora's Box), Day Jobs (Lamas), Powers (Various Magical)