MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 232: THE THOUGHT TERROR

(Flash Comics v1 004, 1940)

I have complicated feelings about the Thought Terror! He has both good and bad traits! 

Off the bat, the basics. His costume choice is pretty entry level for the Golden Age, but suitable for a guy who employs eye-based super-powers (which he does) and wants to project a certain aura of fear. 

His name, by contrast, is both unusual and bad, and made all the worse for the fact that it's almost good. Terror is usually a decent word to use in a name but it just doesn't have the gravitas to work with a mealy word like Thought. The Thought Tyrant, the Thought Titan, the Thinking Terror... there had to be a better name.

But maybe a poorly thought-out name is appropriate for this guy, because he's not a very good planner in general. See, he has these amazing hypnotic powers, and he uses them to convince a little cult of people that he has amazing precognitive powers. He tells fortunes at a hundred bucks a pop and then fulfils them by planting hypnotic suggestions in his subjects' minds, causing them to act out his predictions.

Ordinarily, I'd be cheering for this guy - the thing that thinking a lot about super-villains does is give you a lot of opinions about how they should all just stick to easy small-scale scores and that's what this is - but TT must be getting bored, because he's making predictions like "you're going to get drunk and wander into traffic," and if you're running a cult complete with costumed goons in New York City in a SUPER-HERO UNIVERSE the thing you absolutely do not want to do is draw attention to yourself by, for instance, killing someone.

(this does of course happen - Hawkman shows up and ruins the whole operation, including the Thought Terror's mind)

One point in the Thought Terror's favour is his use of costumed goons, in this case dressed just like him and given a dose of hypnotic mind-over-matter treatment such that they are physical powerhouses. Always a great choice, costumed goons. Plus they're called the Mesmerized Men, a great name!

Wildly, Thought Terror (without the "the", not that it improves the name) was brought back in the year of our Lord 2005 along with several other Golden and Silver Age Hawkman foes (Thought Terror specifically in Hawkman v4 039). He's just kind of a super-torturer, though, and he just kind of disappears halfway through the issue. I guess that's about as good as he could hope to get.

HONOURS - JOHNNY THUNDER

(Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

Johnny Thunder accidentally becomes heavyweight boxing champion of the world. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 231: UNA CATHAY

(Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

Big fan of Una Cathay! The criminal scientist-type super-villains that you get in the Golden Age could get a little samey after a while - even if they all had their individual weirnesses, they were all of a common stripe - and it's amazing how fresh a well put-together lady-villain makes the old tropes seem. 

Una's main deal was extracting the secret of eternal life from a young scientist named Dick Blendon who, unfortunately for her, was an old college pal of Carter "Hawkman" Hall.

Like our old pal the Lord of Life, Una's preferred technique was to administer to her victims a drug that simulated death and then grave-rob their bodies and pretend that she was bringing them back from the dead instead of reviving them. Unlike the Lord of Life, she kept her faux revenants in big jars that she claimed to be full of life-sustaining fluid. Love love love a guy in a big jar with his head poking out. Amazing visuals.

Una also brings a kind of ambiguously ethnic element to her villainy, which of course means that she has voodoo powers that she nearly manages to kill Hawkman with except that Shiera somehow knows the warning signs of an incipient voodoo execution and saves his ass.

Everything comes crashing down for Una Cathay after that: Hawkman lets all of the men out of their jars, her pal Count Torgoff falls off a roof while trying to stab Hawkman to death and she herself dies in a Hawkman-caused car accident. It's almost like you shouldn't turn to violent crime in your search for immortality, lest violence be meted back unto ye. Or something!

AESTHETICAL FUTURISM

(Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

 

This strip (Rod Rian of the Sky Police, natch) might just be the greatest stand-alone future in comics, if only for Earth Commandant Elmus' uniform, which includes not only a belt covered in little stars but a helmet with a planet and star on top!

(better look at that great helmet)

Amazing uniforms aside, this strip has some top-notch sci-fi jargon: pilotar, telespaceship, terlurium ore, sensotar, earthons (that one's a currency), alien races called Mephistans, Unicors and Skeleton Men... this strip has it all!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 230: ALEXANDER THE GREAT

(Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

On the one hand, Alexander the Great is your standard criminal scientist with an ego as big as his great big head who tries to extort the city of New York just as soon as he has developed the technology necessary to do so, in this case a density increasing ray.

On the other hand, I like him a whole lot more than most criminal scientists. He's cool! he wears a tux and is kind of suave! He does have that big ol' dome, which I love on a science villain. He invites Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders over for dinner in an attempt to negotiate Hawkamn's uninvolvement with his scheme in a sequence that is so cordial and charming that he might have also been angling for a threesome. Hawkman stabs him in the neck with a trident, which is if nothing else, not a common way to die. 

Top marks to Alexander the Great, in other words. I wish he had showed up again outside of that one All-Star Squadron story that also had Sieur Satan in it.

BONUS:

Hawkman takes the density ray as a trophy!

REACTION.JPG

(Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

HONOURS - JOHNNY THUNDER

(Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

Johnny Thunder is given a medal and a promotion to head window washer. In true Johnny Thunder fashion he is fired the next day.

SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: HATH-SET 1940

What was Hath-Set up to in 1940?

That's actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl's origin story.

Of course, it didn't start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some 3000 years later to do it all over again. Nice and simple. But comic books are comic books, so all three of these fools have been reincarnated more times than any reasonable person would care to count, including retroactively as characters like the Silent Knight. Hath-Set himself doesn't always show up - his piddly number of appearances in any incarnation would probably net him the status of minor super-villain if he wasn't such an integral part of the Hawks' origin story.

As for Doctor Hastor: he electrocutes passengers on the New York subway system in an attempt to extort the city for big bux but before he can get any further Hawkman shows up, there's some back-and-forth that includes an attempt to sacrifice Shiera Sanders to Anubis, and Hawkman shoots Hastor dead with a crossbow.

Don't worry, he'll be back!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 229: THE FAULTLESS FOUR

(Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

I have a lot of fondness for the Faultless Four, the first super-foes of original Flash Jay Garrick. Firstly and most simply, they are a perfect illustration of the power creep that super-heroes introduced to comic books: where this group of criminal scientists armed with mildly-fantastic skills and tactics would have been sufficient to occupy your traditional adventure hero for months if not years, the Flash walks all over them without a care in the world. Crime must adapt to this new reality!

The second reason for my fondness requires a breakdown of the membership, so here we go, from left to right above:

Sieur Satan: The biggest talker of the group and absolutely the one with the best look. I don't think I'm alone in thinking of him as the leader of the Faultless Four even though the only real indication of this is his big mouth. The only thing he actually accomplishes, in fact, is to kill the other three as part of an attempt to get the Flash.

Serge Orloff: Does absolutely nothing aside from looking cool. He might be suggesting that he is a great enough surgeon that he can bring the dead back to life in the above panel but I wouldn't believe that he could do it unless I saw the frankenstein in question myself.

Duriel: I always remember Duriel as "the handsome one" but he's actually a very weird looking dude! In charge of torturing the Flash's future father in-law Major Williams for information, he also is the group's resident pilot.

Smythe: Absent from the first panel for a very good reason - Smythe is the guy who seems to do all of the footwork for the group. He's the one who does a drive-by assassination attempt on Joan Williams and then later the one who goes to steal the (nonexistent) corpse in order to taunt Major Williams with it. He even has a minion of his very own! A little hearse driver guy!

There's a correlation here: how visually interesting a member of the Faultless Four is is inversely proportional to how useful they are. Thus, the one member of the gang to make a second appearance (in a Roy Thomas-penned All-Srar Squadron annual, natch) is Sieur Satan, the biggest fuckup and coolest-looking of the bunch. And as an indignity for poor Smythe alone, his entire role is taken by Duriel in the Secret Origins retelling of the story, leaving him to just stand around like some sort of Serge Orloff until he gets electrocuted.

In conclusion, Sieur is a semi-archaic French honorific that is a root of the more familiar monsieur.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 228: THE PURPLE MONSTER

(Feature Comics 049, 1941)

The Purple Monster is a pretty lacklustre super-villain. He ticks all the boxes: volcano lair on an island somewhere off BC, army of costumed henchmen, subjugated population of poor island yokels to exploit complete with fake human sacrifices and an unexplained sinister use for the sacrificial victims... it's a complete checklist of features designed to qualify him for this list. He even draws his name from a local superstition, albeit one he started himself by projecting a monstrous face on the purple clouds that billow from the volcano.

It's all so... low-rent. He's set himself up with all of this super-villain infrastructure to what? Extort resources out of a small community? Maybe organ harvesting or something? If he plans on moving on to greater things he doesn't get around to saying it on-panel - just as well he suffers the fate of most volcano-dwelling crooks: death by exploding volcano.

GO OUT WITH DIGNITY

(Feature Comics 047, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 227: FRAULEIN DOKTOR'S DAUGHTER

(Feature Comics 046-055, 1941-1942) 

If you, like me, aren't familiar with WWI-era espionage figures, then this one will require some explanation. Fraulein Doktor was the only name that German spy Elsbeth Schragmüller was known by, even after the war had ended and up until German records were seized in 1945, in fact. And once Captain Bruce Blackburn's adventures had wrung all of the interest they could out of the German-American Bund, a sexy spy nemesis was just the ticket! Thus: Sonya (presumably) Schragmüller, Fraulein Doktor's Daughter!

Sonya's a fine foe for a regular-style espionage character like Bruce Blackburn, full of all of the staples of the genre: poisons, disguises, fake cults, horniness, etc., but she has three real features of interest aside from being the made-up child of a real person:

-she has an enormous body count relative to her number of appearances, managing to knock off at least a couple of US intelligence agents per operation.

-even though she refers to her country of origin as "the Homeland" as is standard in the Counterspy strip, she is presented as the daughter of a German intelligence agent - this is about as close to outright saying she's a Nazi as you get in mid-1941! (I sometimes feel weird getting so excited for actual Nazis to show up in the books I'm reading, but if it's so I can see them get beat up a bunch I guess it's fine)

-since she's the major ongoing villain of the Bruce Blackburn strip, and since the industry standard way to keep an espionage villain around is to have them escape at the end of every story, she never really gets caught, and since the strip ends in mid-1942, she ends her time in comics at large, a rare fate.

ADDENDUM: CARL

In the first Fraulein Doktor's Daughter story she has no henchmen. In the second, she has three, Carl, Fritz and Otto, all apprehended. In the third, a second Carl, probably also arrested. In the fourth, Karl, who ends up dead. What does this mean beyond the writers having a limited pool of German names to draw from? I have no idea!

MINOR SUPER-HERO 030: THE RED TRIANGLE

(Feature Comics 046, 1941)

An exciting development! Up until now our minor super-heroes have been of two flavours: the stars of minor super-hero strips or a new identity adopted by the stars of crime or adventure strips - the key word in either case is star - they are the focus and driving force of the strip.

The Red Triangle is our first example of another type of super-hero: the single issue guest star. These are far more common in the Silver Age, when they pop up every so often to complicate the main hero's life for an adventure before retiring in shame or glory. I don't have a full classification scheme for them yet, but I suspect that there will be a distinction between at least two types: the one who is making an attempt at being a big-time super-hero and the one who temporarily adopts an alternate persona to achieve a goal, with the Red Triangle being the latter.

So: the Red Triangle is a masked vigilante who gets involved with a Reynolds of the Mounted case, which actually and weirdly makes him one of the earliest Canadian super-heroes.

The Red Triangle, real name Baxter, is a man who got mixed up in a counterfeiting gang and when they wouldn't let him back out, disappeared and adopted a new vigilante identity. It's unclear whether he spent the year that he was the Triangle getting into any other crimefighting adventures - the crooks all know his name, but that might just be because he's been hassling them specifically. 

Once the gang's been rounded up, Baxter takes the usual path that this style of minor super-hero does and hangs up the Red Triangle identity to return to the simple life of a hotelier.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 029: THE BOYVILLE BRIGADIERS

(Feature Comics 045, 1941)

It's a tale as old as time, by which I mean about a year: noncostumed adventurers adopting costumed identities to keep up with the oncoming juggernaut that is the Golden Age super-hero boom. In this case, it's Rusty Ryan and the other unusually muscular teens of the Boyville orphanage, who up until now were more of a high school sports type of bunch, dealing with the plague of unscrupulous gamblers betting on local hockey games and catching the occasional band of counterfeiters.

As the Boyville Brigadiers, Ryan and his cohorts are even more dull than what I just described. Rather than the Kirby-style boy gang dynamic of making every member their own distinct style of weirdo, the Brigadiers barely have names, let alone personalities. The only really interesting thing about them, in fact, is how weirdly similar their costumes are to Captain America's. 

Still, they go on the list of patriotic heroes. Hooray!

RANCE KEANE MEETS SHARK EGAN: THE CROSSOVER EVENT OF 1941

(Feature Comics 045-046, 1941)

Golden Age crossovers were a pretty rare thing, other than in places like All-Star Comics where that was the whole idea, but one place you occasionally encounter them is in the kind of adventure strips that filled out the bulk of anthology comics before the super-heroes really got into full market domination mode, and especially if the same person was working on both characters and wanted to have them meet up and say what a good series of adventures each other was having. 

The weird thing about this meetup is that Rance Keane, a Quality character and star of the strip, is meeting Shark Egan, a Dell character whose own adventures had been cancelled more than a year earlier, in Popular Comics 053! The characters are roughly equivalent - Shark is a sea dog-style adventurer while Rance is a cowboy who transitioned into the same - but this dockside mutual admiration moment is very unlikely!

If I were to advance a theory it would be to speculate that Rance Keane scribe William A Smith might have had a hand in Shark Egan too - some of the earlier strips in Popular look a bit like his work - and decided to reappropriate his creations once they were defunct at Dell. We will never know what his plans were though, as both Shark and Rance made but one more appearance in Feature 046 before setting off for parts unknown.

(Shoutout to Comic Book Plus user Ed Love, who is the only person I could find mentioning this in a cursory search)

NOTES: JANUARY 2023

Names:

Bulldog Teeters. (Feature Comics 044, 1941)

Zero the Ghost Detective getting straight-up punched by a ghost. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)

Dates: Johnny Thunder born 7th July, 1917 (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

Calling Cards:

He only ever used 'em a couple of times but the Flash had metal lightning bolt dart calling cards.

Costumes:

Absolutely the best Hawkman costume variant is the brief period in which he wore a big hat in the shape of a sassy hawk's head (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)