(Crack Comics 010, 1941)
The Sophisticated Lady is a femme fatale thief of the kind that comics love. She has a decent career going as the comic opens but the Black Condor shows up to put the kibosh on it. Sadly she doesn't actually get to do that much on-panel, but the terrific name makes up for it a little.
(Crack Comics 009, 1941)
(Crack Comics 009, 1941)
She does have a really great costume, though. Top marks for style.
(Crack Comics 008, 1940)
Kind of a weird and somewhat problematic case - Stuporman, like the Largest Man in the World before him, is a superhuman man of limited intelligence who is used as a living weapon by crooks until being killed by the hero of the piece, in this case the Clock. He comes from Mongolia, which is, like, the most remote and mysterious place that 1940s comics writers could think of.
Frankly, the only real reason I include Stuporman is his name, which is clearly a dig at Quality Comics' Distinguished Competition, particularly in an adventure of the Clock, occasionally advertised as the "oldest and best comic book character." And now he has defeated the big dumb strongman! He has won!
(Crack Comics 007, 1940)
There is no textual evidence for this, but since this guy is dressed exactly like the unnamed boss of the Skull Gang (plus some rad horns) and uses the very similar tactic of dosing his minions (the Robbers from Hades - good name) with toxins that make them all shriveled and weird (and in this case more pliable and obedient), I like to think that it's the same guy back for another shot at making his fortune in the crime boss game, albeit without taking the very sensible precaution of, say, switching cities or otherwise trying to avoid the Clock. This time, alas, he meets his end, so we won't be treated to a green-hooded man with a tail leading squads of Demonic Monkey Marauders, or a green-hooded man with a tinfoil halo commanding his Larceny Angels. Sad days.
(Crack Comics 001-022, 1940-1942)
Madam Fatal is the alter ego of one Richard Stanton, famous actor and female impersonator. Shortly after retiring to settle down, Stanton's young daughter was kidnapped by a vengeful enemy and his wife died of grief. Going undercover as the elderly Madam Fatal in order to avoid recognition Stanton spent the next nine years looking for his child. In the first Madam Fatal adventure, he finds the kidnapper but not the kid and since the kidnapper ends up dead, the case of Richard Stanton's missing child just... never gets addressed again.
Madam Fatal comics are pretty fun as a rule. They're short and snappy, and since a big part of the character's appeal is the incongruity of a little old lady (as mentioned in the past, they got no respect in the Golden Age) being in adventure situations, she is extremely kinetic and rough and tumble.
There's absolutely no exploration of gender roles or sexuality because, duh, it's the 1940s, but Stanton and Fatal are generally treated as being two different genders. A modern revival of the character could do interesting things if done right, by the right people. Mostly though, Madam Fatal is a punchline in modern comics.
The exception to this came in The Shade v2 006, 2012. James Robinson (and Darwyn Cooke) introduced Hot Older Lady Madam Fatal, made her just as much of a shitkicker as the original, and even (finally) resolved the case of Richard Stanton's missing child. A worthy if brief revival!
(Crack Comics 007, 1940)
This is a weird guy. I'm not entirely sure what his deal is, to be honest. He's developed some sort of revolutionary hydroelectric generator and some sort of lightning projector and claims that they are "useless commercially" but doesn't really outline why. He extorts men with the last name Garr for some reason. I mean, it seems like it should be that the Garrs all got together and quashed his funding because he threatened their own business and now he's getting revenge. Or maybe he's the black sheep of the Garr family and now he's eliminating everyone else to inherit their monies. The guy needs just a bit more motivation!
Drowned by Madam Fatal.
(Crack Comics 019, 1941)
Black Condor skips out on receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor for rescuing FDR from being kidnapped by Nazis but his secret identity Senator Tom Wright ends up getting one for discovering that FDR had been kidnapped in the first place.
(Crack Comics 007, 1940)
The Master Brain (also styled the Brain Master) kidnaps brilliant men and, with the help of his brain-stealing machine and his pal Gor, sucks the knowledge out of their heads and into his own. A classic scheme, with a classic consequence: the Master Brain's brain gets too much brain in it, and goes insane. A shame.
(Crack Comics 006, 1940)
SKULL SCORE: 1/5 Bald guys with gritted teeth just don't cut the mustard, I'm afraid.
(Crack Comics 006, 1940)
The Master himself is your typical world conqueror, whose motivation seems to be that he's sick of being laughed at because he's a dwarf. And as if to illustrate, when Black Condor discovers the leader of this plot who has already killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, he too laughs. HE'S PART OF THE PROBLEM.
(Crack Comics 005, 1940)
The Jay Bird is one of my favourite minor super-villains of all time, I reckon. He's just a guy in a bird mask with a gimmick that is simultaneously very simple and far too complex and dangerous: he simulates flight via a very long tether that is dangling him from a plane. Thus equipped, he swoops down and robs various targets on the streets of New York City, quipping all the time. He's great!
The real unsung hero here has to be his pilot, Spike, for managing to not smear the Jay Bird across a skyscraper the first time they tried this. What a guy! Sadly he was killed in the Jay Bird's encounter with the Clock.
(Crack Comics 001-031, 1940-1943)
There are a lot of elements to the Black Condor's origin so I shall be presenting them in a bulleted list:
-His father, archaeologist Richard Grey, brought his wife and newborn baby along on an expedition to Mongolia. This did not pay off, as their caravan was massacred by bandits and the only survivor was the baby, Richard Jr, who was carried off by a mother condor.
-Experiencing cross-species maternal instincts, the condor chose to raise the child instead of eating it. Grey eventually not only learned to communicate with condors but through imitation managed to teach himself to fly (later on this explanation of his power was considered far too ridiculous. Instead, he was exposed to a radioactive meteorite while living with the condors, which makes a lot more sense).
-Teen Richard then has a run-in with some eagles that leaves him seriously injured. He is found by kindly hermit/ missionary Father Pierre, who nurses him back to health and teaches him English. And names him Black Condor - because of his black hair, oddly enough. All is well until bandits kill Father Pierre while Black Condor is out and about. This puts him at 3/4 parental figures lost to crime, giving him the motivation of 1.5 Batmans.
-Black Condor becomes a foe of crime across Eurasia, with enough success that it's reported on globally. The narrative culmination of this effort comics in Hindustan, where he confronts and kills Gali Kan, the bandit chief who had killed Father Pierre (later retellings of the origin make him explicitly the one who killed Condor's parents too, because that's very narratively satisfying)
For the first year of Black Condor adventures he bummed around the world defeating various tyrants using his black-ray gun (never explained) but then! He encounters young US Senator Tom Wright! Who is his double! And who is then killed! And Black Condor, a man who was raised by birds and has known how to speak for maybe five years max, assumes the man's identity, position in the US government and fiancé. With the fiancé's father's blessing.
Anyhow, real good comics. It's a shame that a character with such a lot of wild stuff going on doesn't really show up any more. He has successors but other than being able to fly they're pretty separate character concepts, to be covered in about 50 subjective years, I guess.
(Crack Comics 005, 1940)
What makes them a super-villain? As his name suggests, the Sapphire king is motivated by his desire for and love of sapphires - he seems to love them for themselves and also for the wealth and by extension power they grant him. And he gets sapphires by using giant eagles to kidnap ships' crews and take them to his island in the Indian Ocean, there to labour in his underwater sapphire mines (?) until giant octopus or some other death claims them. So: ruthless pursuit of an obsession using extreme methods over practical ones (kidnapping an endless stream of sailors vs draining the sapphire pool): that's a super-villain.
But even an eagle-rich island sapphire colony is not immune to interference from meddling super-heroes: the Black Condor shows up and slays both the birds and the Sapphire King himself, sending the former mine slaves on their way with some compensatory gemstones.
(Crack Comics 004, 1940)
What makes them a super-villain? Any number of things! The Asp is a jewel thief who taunts his victims/ the police ahead of time and then arranges for seemingly impossible murders using time-delayed poisons. He's a weird creep who hisses all the time and almost manages to kill the Clock. And yet... it's all a little perfunctory. I saw someone on the DC wikia editorialize about how the Asp's MO was similar to the Joker's first appearance, and they aren't wrong, but where the Joker had a little room to breathe and establish himself over the course of 3 or 4 crimes, the poor Asp is dead and gone after just one.
(Crack Comics 001-020, 1940-1942)
The Red Torpedo is Jim Lockhart, a guy who came up with a design for the ultimate one-man submarine and turned that into his whole personality. This is a not-uncommon Golden-Age comics trope that kind of petered out once the world was no longer awash with mechanized combat - Silver Age super-vehicles tended more toward the exploration side of things.
So: Jim Lockhart, young US Navy officer resigns his commission after being told that his submarine design was unworkable. He builds it anyway, with the help of his fiancé, Meg, then seemingly leaves her behind as well - a "Peggy" show up as his assistant a few issues later but after that he's a strictly one-man operation.
Lockhart shows up here and there in the extended DCU - most notably in a Roy Thomas engineered cull of the old Quality Comics characters in All-Star Squadron back in the day. Like most of the others killed off in that ish, Red Torpedo got better and shows up whenever someone needs a really good submarine for something.
Good luck finding it but the thing that really cemented my love for this guy is the Crack Comics installment of the Next Issue Project. A really lovely, simple, melancholy story about a submarine man.
(Crack Comics 003, 1940)
What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout.
What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain's name that is frankly wasted on this capitalist pigdog.
The real draw, though, is those submarine pirates! Check out those dreamy mantled masks, that skull-and-crossboned conning tower! It's hard to go wrong with submarine pirates but by Jove I've seldom seen any done more right.
The Clock flatlines himself in order to solve a murder by speaking to the victim in the afterlife. (Crack Comics 010, 1941)
Decoration:
Jaspar Crow's got a monogrammed wastecan! (Crack Comics 016, 1941)
Dr Foster's got a monogrammed lampshade! (Crack Comics 017, 1941)
Names: Tor the Magic Master encounters a counterfeiter with the unlikely name Phrogg Zaarn.
One of the victims of Clock foe the Werewolf is named A.B. Ceedee.
(Funny Picture Stories/ Funny Pages/ Feature Comics/ Crack Comics, 1936-1944)
So: Brian O'Brien is a wealthy playboy who puts on a tuxedo and mask and fights crime at night. He leaves calling cards for his foes, is often thought to be a criminal himself and is friends with police Captain Kane in his civilian identity while enjoying a somewhat fraught relationship with him while masked.
Over the years the Clock has a few different associates - above find Pug Brady, a down-on-his-luck guy who happens to look just like Brian O'Brien. They team up for a couple of years until Pug is unceremoniously chucked for a tough orphan girl named Butch about whom I know almost nothing, so it's a bit of a qualified statement when I say that by far my favourite member of the Clock family is the Orchid:
The Orchid appears a handful of times and her gimmick is that she is also a crimefighter, and one who is slightly more on-the ball than the Clock: she may know his secret identity, she can always get a message to him and most of the time she disappears at the end of a case, with the exception of the time she was distracted by her own kidnap-victim father. The Orchid only makes a handful of appearances but she's a winner in my books: bring her back, I say - fold her into the backstory of the Black Orchid!
So: the Clock is a solid Golden Age strip. Sadly, he will likely never see the light of day again. DC owns roughly seven dozen masked adventurers in suits and included in that number is Midnight, who would be a straight palette-swap of the Spirit if they had bothered to give him a different-coloured suit. Thusfar, he's the one they pull out in the rare cases that a suited crimefighter who isn't early Sandman is required, while the Clock and the Mouthpiece and Destiny and Just n' Right and Devil's Dagger and Diamond Jack and Cosmo, Phantom of Disguise all twiddle their thumbs in purgatory.
(Crack Comics 001, 1940)
A series of facts about Golden Age super-hero comics:
-most of them take place in cities
-they are either set in a specific location (e.g. Wonder Woman being in Washington DC or the Red Bee in Superior City) or an unidentified large city
-in the latter case, over time the city acquires characteristics that either lead to it becoming its own thing (e.g. Batman's unidentified large city becomes Gotham) or being identified as New York City
Now there are plenty of exceptions to this (Superman starts out in Cleveland which quickly becomes Metropolis; plenty of Golden Age heroes didn't stick around for their location to gel, etc etc) but it does happen a fair amount and it leads to situations like the above, wherein the Clock, who lives in an unidentified large city clearly based on NYC, arrests crimelord the Big Shot and learns that he is in fact Mayor Kozer! And then over the years it becomes more and more clear that Clock stories are set in New York and you end up with an alternate history of the office of Mayor of New York City in which Fiorello la Guardia is presumably repeatedly ousted from office only to be reelected following the various Evil Mayor Arrested by Vigilante scandals. This is the sort of thing that really gets my heartrate up!
Anyway: the Big Shot, folks.
EDIT TO ADD:
This isn't even the first Mayor of NYC that the Clock is responsible for the arrest of: one year earlier he helped send Mayor Tull up the river! (Feature Comics 022, 1939)
(Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)
I gotta say... this seems like a lot of effort to go to for swamp-adjacent farmland. Most guys who pull this kind of scheme are after a quicker payoff: deposits of oil or precious metals, pearl beds, buried treasure... Sure you can get rich off farming but it's a lot more of a long-term plot than your average small-time supercrook is geared for - presumably he's going to have to change his name, right? Or a similar level of obfuscation to cover for the fact that Mr Woggs is back for the land he failed to secure the last time around in his official capacity? Just as well he gets stomped by Captain Marvel, really.
(Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)
This rockabilly-looking feller is King of the Crater and I like him quite a bit. His plan, as laid out above, is to weaponize a seam of magma that runs under the Rockies and the Andes in order to lay claim to a strip of territory running the length of the Americas. It's not a bad plan if you subscribe to the attitude that violent conquest is an acceptable means of achieving control over territory. Or that control over territory is a desirable end in itself, I guess.
It is a plan that is vulnerable to the supposition that it might just be easier to establish a lucrative monopoly on geothermal power production, of course. Also Captain Marvel. The plan is and was vulnerable to Captain Marvel.
(Captain Marvel Adventures 003, 1941)
The Beast-Ruler's origin is simple: for reasons of his own, Dr Sivana builds a human out of animal parts - the muscles of a gorilla, the memory of an elephant and yes, the life-force of a thousand beasts - and that creation promptly rebels and runs off with the remaining beasts that have not had their life-forces squeezed out. A real rookie mistake on Sivana's part if you ask me - this isn't his first time toying in God's domain and he should have lab procedures covering such as a rebellious super-powered humanoid.
Speaking of super-powers, the Beast-Ruler has 'em (and speaking of names, that's a bad one). He's got the full suite of enhanced physical abilities, plus he can communicate with animals, a trait that he quickly uses to organize an army of beasts as a prelude to wiping out humanity. A pretty smart move on the part of the animals, honestly, but Captain Marvel ultimately prevails over this force with the help of other animals who choose to side with the human race.
The breakdown of the animal armies is interesting: wild animals are all on the Beast-Ruler's side, while Captain Marvel has dogs, cats and a selection of domesticated farm animals, but not all of them. Sheep are firmly on the side of the Beast-Ruler and the loyalty of pigs and horses seem to be split, with some representation in each army. If we're honest, most of the pro-humanity animals were fooling themselves, but they manage to distract the more sensible beasts long enough for Captain Marvel to send the Beast-Ruler head first off a waterfall.
(Captain Marvel Adventures 002, 1941)
The Arson Fiend! A simple villain conceptually: fire insurance salesman George D. Tweedle just can't sell any fire insurance and so he starts what is nominally a protection racket but really seems to be an excuse for wholesale arson.
The twist in this particular tale is that Tweedle has somehow developed or otherwise gotten his hands on a formula that transforms him into the fire-spewing and fireproof Arson Fiend. Legitimately super-powered crooks being a bit underrepresented at this point, I am delighted by this development! I had honestly expected the Fiend to be an asbestos outfit with a flamethrower concealed in each sleeve. The secondary twist is that Tweedle finds out that Billy is Captain Marvel seemingly without effort, which I love. Finally a comic book character is being held accountable for their poor infosec.
Sadly, such a being cannot be long for a comics world. The Arson Fiend and Captain Marvel battle atop a large oil tank and it eventually turns out that however immune to fire you are, you still have to look out for the concussive force element of, say, an oil tank explosion if you want a long career in arson.
(Captain Marvel Adventures 001, 1941)
So: Bram Thirla demonstrates a couple of important safety concerns specific to comic book science. Firstly: if you must combine the practices of science and sorcery, at least do so in proper laboratory conditions, as performing experiments e.g., in a cemetery at midnight not only introduces quite a lot of unintentional variables but limits the ability to pre-plan safety precautions such as escape routes.
Secondly: when sourcing human remains or brains, go the extra mile and try to get ahold of a nice person's corpse. Sure it's easier to bribe the prison morgue attendant to release the body of a recently executed mass murderer to you but now you have a murderer's brain in your gorilla and that spells trouble. Or in this case: you've resurrected the body of a "mysterious and evil man" because nobody would object and now you're being eaten by a vampire.
(Captain Marvel Adventures 001, 1941)
Z is (spoilers) an android built by Dr Sivana to destroy Captain Marvel. He's a cool guy and a fun villain: slick, full of attitude, almost powerful enough to do the job. Plus he doesn't seem to know he's a robot, which I find to be a fun feature in an android character - it allows for shocking reveals! Z should definitely be BROUGHT BACK, if only as disposable muscle for Sivana. We wuz robbed of a smug android thug slouched over a chair cleaning his nails in the background of every Dr Sivana scene from 1941 on, I say!
The really interesting thing about Z is the fact that he and Captain Marvel fight three times and each time, Captain Marvel is explicitly trying to kill him. I came into my ongoing "read all comics" project a lot less familiar with the Fawcett end of things so I was pretty bought in to the modern conception of Captain Marvel as some sort of Pure Being of Childlike Innocence and thus it was a lot more jarring to come into the realization that in his early days he was just as likely to resort to deadly force as Batman or Superman, probably a bit less often than the former and more than the latter. Honestly interested to see just when each adopts a code against killing relative to one another.
(Bulletman 002, 1941)
Gangster Scar Malone was convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair. He swore revenge against the judge and jury, as you do. And once you've done that kind of thing, you only have a few options: fake your own death so you can come back as a fake ghost to kill your enemies; arrange for your body to be taken to a scientist or magic man for post execution revival so you can slay your enemies; have your secret twin pose as your vengeful spirit to kill your enemies, or do what Malone opts for: simply escape while on the way from trial to prison, (optionally searing your face off with hot steam while doing so) and come back months later to kill your enemies.
If I'm to judge (haha) a judge and jury revenge killer's relative quality, it's going to be a numbers game - just how many of their self-assigned targets did they manage to take out. Even though he was a master of escape and disguise, the Man Without a Face managed a mere 2/13 or 15% before being thrown off a roof by Bulletman. A poor showing indeed.
(Bulletman 002, 1941)
The actual reason for mummying up is usually the same: disguise yourself so that you can rob a museum or steal some Egyptian artifacts or steal some Egyptian artifacts from a museum. The reason our guy is a limping mummy is that he decided to add another layer to his disguise and throw suspicion on Benhurst the museum director, who walks with a cane.
And then, he attempts a third layer of obfuscation by using his civilian identity, newspaper editor Jason Hilder, to slam the police for not being able to deal with all these mummy crimes! This is actually a terrible idea, since Hilder wasn't at all involved before and he actually ends up getting caught because he takes it too far and attacks Sergeant Kent of the police for... some reason? The Limping Mummy's plot doesn't really hold together is I guess what I've been trying to lay out here.
(Bulletman 002, 1941)
There are many Hunchbacks, both actual and fake, in the ranks of the minor super-villain, alas. Victor Hugo has much to answer for. This Hunchback is a former actor whose back (and presumably mind) was injured in a fall and thereafter resolved to kill all leading men at a particular theatre via dart to the neck.
The real standout of the story is not the Hunchback but rather red herring murder suspect Matt Benson, seen here being a completely unsuspicious witness:
And here being careful not to make himself seem like he might have done it:
I sincerely think that in all my years of reading this kind of story I have not seen a suspect with less chill. The man could not order a cup of coffee without implying that he had strangled someone for the cash he was using to pay for it.
(Bulletman 001, 1941)
The Largest Man in the World is exactly what it says on the tin: an unfeasibly enormous dude. By himself, not much of a threat so long as he gets a regular supply of molasses to eat. It's just too bad for society that he is spotted by crooks and used as a living siege weapon to rob and kill.
The really remarkable thing about the Largest Man in the World is that his gangster pal is Machine Gun Kelly. Like, the real guy - the actual real-world crook. This is completely wild to me for two reasons. Firstly, Machine Gun Kelly was jailed in 1933 and died in prison, so when this comic came out he had not been a real-world crime concern in over 8 years.
Secondly, I think I've mentioned how Golden Age comics frequently went out of their way not to use actual country names, and with people, even criminal people, it's even more pronounced. Al Capone isn't going to show up in a comic, but Al Tyrone, Al Maloney or Andy Carpon will. Hell, Adolf Hitler largely appears under light pseudonyms before the US enters WWII. It's weird and wild to see Machine Gun Kelly just running around talking about his machine gun, and that's before they kill him - a man who will go on to live for another 13 years in prison, remember - off!
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