Thursday, February 16, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 244: THE GREAT ARTURO

(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941) 


Like Crime & Corruption Inc before him, I almost skipped over the Great Arturo or banished him to the ranks of the generic villains, because a) the Great Arturo is a terrible villain name and b) he appears in a Les Watts comic. But the more I looked at this guy, the more it became clear that he was like a savoury stew made up of all the things I love about comic book creepos.


We've already passed judgement on his name (bad), but let's run down some of the other pertinent details of the Great Arturo's career:

Appearance: he's seven feet tall and both dresses like a vampire and also looks like one - whether his widow's peak, fangs and shadowed eyes are natural or stage makeup matters not.

Motivation: According to his henchman Spider, Arturo just "went insane" one day and decided that he was going to acquire the US' new warship tech or destroy it, which is meh so far as villainous origins go, but according to Arturo himself he sometimes believes that he is the Devil, and if you're going to be an insane villain I think it's important to go big. 

Powers: According to his henchman Spider, Arturo was a great enough hypnotist that he held Spider completely in thrall to his will. Emphasis added because it's entirely possible that ol' Spider is just a fast talker looking to save his own hide.

Hideout: He lives in a secret tomb that you enter through a hollow tree in a graveyard - one of the top secret lair types of all time.

In conclusion, he's a seven foot-tall goth hypnotist with a henchman named Spider who lives in a cemetery. Wotta catch!

BONUS: About Les Watts, Radio Amateur

I don't think I'm going to do a full entry on ol' Les, but in brief, he's an earlier example of a character archetype that persists through to today, probably, the Teen Hobbyist (I initially went with Boy Hobbyist, because they are almost all boys). The Teen Hobbyist has a healthy obsession with the hot new tech of the day: ham radios, light aircraft, hot rods, CB radios, computers, the Internet... They don't usually invent things, but they are completely up to date on the latest developments in their field, leaving the adults around them admiringly befuddled.

Teen Hobbyists had their heyday in the 40s and 50s, but were still going strong in the 60s - Snapper Carr and Rick Jones were absolutely from the hot rodder school of Teen Hobbyist - and on into the 80s and 90s as Computer Whiz Kids and so forth. I'm sure there's some version of them running round today.

Les Watts (later renamed Les Sparks for some reason) is a kid who likes fooling around with ham radios, as do all his friends. He specializes in picking up hints of a crime in progress on the radio waves and then zooming to the location with a bunch of teens. That's about it.

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