MINOR SUPER-VILLAINS

I like taking note of minor and obscure characters from days of yore, and none other is so beloved of my heart as the minor super-villain. Even though lot of them are real duds, as a class of characters they pack such a lot of potential. Just as very little separates an Ultra-Humanite (middlingly significant super-villain) from a Luthor (one of the top super-villains of all time), just as little separates them from Zolar, a bald super-scientist who fought Superman one time in 1940.

But if we're going to talk about minor super-villains then we must determine what exactly defines a villain as super (at least to me). The simplest route to this is to put on a costume, adopt an alias, and commit a crime. Particularly if the costume, crime or both are themed according to the name. Call yourself the Viper and dress in a snakeskin jacket and papier mache snake head while robbing a reptile house and you, my friend, are a super-villain.

Not every super-villain fits those criteria, however - heck, Luthor basically never has and he was my major example earlier - so I had to come up with some criteria. Generally, a villain who fulfils two or more of the following is elevated to the ranks of the minor super-villain:

-costume (even a simple domino mask can make the difference)

-foe (fight a super-hero and the super can rub off on you)

-methods (superpowers or superscience make super-villains)

-name (probably the least important without any of the others - comics are littered with gangsters named the Little Gardenia or the Bone Butcher who amount to exactly nothing)

-scale (rob a convenience store: nothing. Rob every convenience store in the city: that's supercrime!)

-theme (theme your weapons, your crimes, your henchmens' names. Delicious stuff)

-style (absolutely the most important. A character who fails to thrive doesn't make the list: Tex Thomson once fought a guy who lived in an isolated castle and had rebuilt himself as a shapechanging plastic cyborg and he is not represented here because I yawned my way through the issue)

That's it and I'm sure that I'll be very inconsistent as I go along.