MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 266: DR BRUNO VAROZ

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010, 1940) 

I like this guy. This guy is the fun kind of mad scientist with a lot of fun details. First of all he lives in a castle roughly the same size as the island it sits on, off the coast of Cuba. Secondly, he follows the rules of Mad Scientist Grooming, which state that they must either be impeccably groomed or, as with Dr Varoz here, look like they woke up in a compost heap.

Varoz' great discovery is a formula for artificial blood, which he uses to bring the dead back to life. Like aerial torpedoes (missiles) and airplane detectors (RADAR), artificial blood as something that both real-world and comic book people were trying to perfect in the 40s, but unlike the former we still haven't quite gotten the handle on artificial blood, probably because it always seems to turn people into draculas or monsters or, as here, a bunch of skull-faced science revenants.

And there's a lot to like about these guys! They look great for one, they're seemingly unstoppable for two, even though there's nothing stopping them from being killed again - I guess they're just too scary to stop.

They're also intelligent, which rules, and which is why they're science revenants and not science zombies. They talk, fly planes, fire guns... Dr Varoz can stay forgotten as far as I'm concerned, but I would love to see his Corpse-Beings BRUNG BACK in some capacity.

(I really like that the animated corpse is afraid of Electro)

Dr Bruno Varoz' other two claims to fame are this excellent two-headed monster and a pretty cold-blooded death via being thrown by Electro into the same acid pit pictured above; The monster, unaccounted for at the end of the story, would also be a welcome sight in a modern comic, if only in one of those crowd shots on Monster Island or in the Mole Man's tunnels.