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)

NOTES - MARCH 2026

Cops Shooting Fleeing Suspects: 

The NYPD do their level best to gun down the Challenger for wearing a mask near the scene of a crime. (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941) 

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 081

Lev Gleason characters filling every available ecological niche over here. 

Thun-Dohr:

We've seen it before and we'll see it again: Thun-Dohr (Thun-dohr?) is a white guy brought up in the traditions of a Tibetan monastery and he's just the best dang mystic anyone's ever seen, much better than all those Tibetan monks could ever be. 

Like Iron Fist, the 1970s version of this character archetype, Thun-Dohr was orphaned when his parents succumbed to the elements while attempting to reach the fabled monastery. Baby Thun-Dohr (and I can no longer think of new ways to ask why these people brought their baby along on this super dangerous expedition) was found and brought to safety by the monks, who acclaimed him as some sort of prophesied kid. 

Thanks to his training in "the arts of the Gom-Pa," Thun-Dohr has a wide variety of mystic powers, including invisibility, teleportation, invulnerability to a variety of environmental conditions, the ability to see the last moments of a person's life in their corpse's eyes, astral projection and so on and so forth. He also has a mystical bracelet that allows him to remain in mental contact with the 300+ year-old Dalai Lama (not the one you're thinking of) who raised him as he goes out into the world to battle evil (i.e., the other guy from the same monastery who is attempting to end the world - could've used a prophecy telling them not to let him in, amirite?). (Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)

Categorized in: Day Jobs (Lamas), Elements (Thunder), Origin (Mystic Traditions)

Undercover Man:

Police Detective Phil Barrows is unpopular at the Centre Street Homicide Department due to his habit of working alone (I think? Nobody seems to like him and this is the only stated reason why) so what does he do? Create a secondary identity called the Undercover Man so that he can work even more alone while adopting a variety of disguises. During his one published adventure he takes down corrupt politician Eduardo Donati and while I'm not normally one to critique someone's decision to adopt a costumed identity I think he probably could have done it as a regular cop if he'd tried to. (Captain Battle Comics 001, 1941)

Categorized in: Day Jobs (Police Detective), Powers (Master of Disguise), Professions (Law Enforcement)

Blackout: 

Blackout is the new name adopted by Dr Basil Brusiloff after he is mutated by chemicals randomly mixed together during a Nazi air raid on the hospital in which he is working. Unlike many other super-heroes who undergo physical transformations, Brusiloff's new, jet-black form appears to be a permanent change and not something that he can switch on and off.

Blackout is able to fly at speed comparable to a fighter plane, but his main power is the ability to emit a thick black smoke from his pores, the specificity of which somehow makes it seem more gross than a smoke power usually does.

In addition to being opaque, this smoke is thick enough to suffocate someone in an unventilated environment (this is also gross. Huff my gas, miscreants!). Blackout is able to direct this smoke and even shape it to some degree (such as when he forms a long tunnel out of it to shield fleeing civilians from Nazi eyes), but most remarkably is able to emit it in large enough quantities that at one point he escapes a sealed room by bursting the walls through sheer air pressure.

Aside from his powers, there are two remarkable things about Blackout: firstly, his origin takes place in Belgrade, which makes him the first in what is sure to be a pretty short list of Yugoslavian superhumans. Secondly, Blackout is the subject of some very minor debate vis-a-vis just how hairy/furry he is, with the two sides boiling down to "the text never says he's hairy so it must just be something else" versus "he looks very hairy." I am inclined to side with the latter side. He looks very hairy!

Related to the hairiness question is a third interesting thing about Blackout: it is quite possible that he is completely nude, aside from that stylish green mask. (Captain Battle Comics 001, 1941)

Categorized in: Activities (Blackouts), Colours (Black), Origin (Chemical Mutates)

Nightro: 

Nightro is Hugh Goddard, a scientist who was betrayed and left to die by his associates after they found a rich radium deposit in Alaska and Goddard expressed his desire to donate it to medical research, and though I do have some sympathy for his partners' position that as the expedition's financial backers they should see some profit from the mine they resort to murder a bit too quickly for my tatse. Surely this is a case for the courts!

If you look Nightro up online, odds are that you will be told that he is blinded by the ambient radiation from the deposit. This is not true! What actually happens is that he wanders around in the snow until he is found by some helpful Inuit fellows and ends up with an extreme case of snow-blindness. Radiation doesn't even come up.

Goddard eventually makes his way back to the US, where a Dr Frank Miller (!) discovers that polarized lenses will allow him to see. Unlike his blind super-hero contemporaries the Mask and Dr Mid-Nite, Nightro does not appear to have any kind of enhanced dark vision. Instead, his stated reason for adopting a costumed alias is that his goggles are too ugly for him to be accepted in polite society.

Goddard continues to live as a blind man as part of maintaining his secret identity as Nightro, meaning that from his second appearance onward he has a seeing eye dog companion named Blackie. He is called the "Streamlined Robinhood," supposedly because he takes money from crooks and redistributed it to the needy - I reckon that it's just a way to attach a buzzword to the character - if he had debuted tenyears later he might've been "the Jet Age Robinhood."  (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

Categorized in: Accessories (Dogs), Locations (Temporal), Origins (Blind Characters)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 935: PROFESSOR BLANKHORNE

(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)

Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor has a new invention: the Photo-Lightning Machine, with which he can cause a bolt of lightning to crash down on anyplace he pleases, like the deserted house across the road from him that nobody was planning on using, hopefully. The only catch is that he hasn't yet figured out how to get the lightning to strike a target that is in water.

Dickie and his pal Zip Todd take the plans for the machine to Dickie's lawyer to have it registered at the patent office, only to find a new face ready to take his business. This is C.B. Wolf, a foreign agent who has infiltrated the firm specifically to steal Dickie's inventions for his home country. Wolf wires the plans home to the laboratory of Professor Blankhorne, the second greatest inventor in the world, barring Dickie (and how that must rankle Professor Skinn), who decides that rather than using them to construct his own machine he will save time by travelling to Castleton to acquire the original.

Dickie is of course unwilling to sign over his shiny new weapon of mass destruction to an Axis agent and capable of defeating the Professor's crude attempt to mug him for it, which forces Blankhorne to establish a Stateside volcano lair to operate out of.

Blankhorne's second attempt at obtaining the Photo-Lightning Machine involves sending a storm of remote-controlled and explosive model planes down on Castleton, Pennsylvania and presumably just kind of hoping that they will kill Dickie but leave his invention intact. This attempt is foiled by a patented Dickie Dean lightning storm that brings all of the planes down safely outside of town.

It is at this point that I must question Professor Blankhorne's motives for confronting Dickie Dean. As mentioned above, he claims that stealing the machine will be quicker than building one, yet between the trans-Atlantic journey and the time spent in preparing his drone fleet, this effort has taken Blankhorne at least three and a half months so far. Is this the sunk cost fallacy at play, or is the Professor trying to prove that he is not merely the second-greatest inventor on Earth?

Blankhorn (along with the surprisingly hands-on CB Wolf) are seemingly handed victory on a platter when Dickie's pal Zip Todd sets out to confront them with a baseball bat and is promptly imprisoned and - both inexplicably and importantly - tied up and suspended in a big tub of water.

Thanks to the aforementioned flaw in the Photo-Lightning Machine's targeting, Dickie is able to blast Blankhorne's entire base without hitting Zip Todd, and when the villains attempt to escape in the Sky Bug he blows them out of the air with a complete lack of remorse. 

Astonishingly (considering the fact that he was blown up on-panel), Professor Blankhorne manages to return in Silver Streak Comics 015. He infiltrates Dickie Dean's new high-tech laboratory in the guise of an old flower seller (and gruesomely murders Dickie's head of security in a vat of lye) as part of a scheme to loot the place of all of its technological wizardry. A solid plan, though I will note that he does so on the first day that the lab is in operation and so his haul is mostly made up of the stuff that Dean had already created.

Though the law is no match for Dickie Dean's lightning cannon (a distinct invention from the Photo-Lightning Machine), Blankhorne is no match for a couple of teenaged boys in a smoke screen, and he is captured with much greater ease than in his first appearance.

Categorized in: Accessories (Drones), Doctors & Professors, Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists)