Monday, June 5, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 294: THE WAX MAN

(Captain America Comics 002, 1941)



The Wax Man is a bit of  an oddball. For one thing, he's not explicitly a Nazi, just "in the pay of a hostile foreign power," which is only strange in that this is Marvel Comics, the only big publisher not hedging their bets about calling bad guys Nazis - the story previous to this featured Captain America and Bucky punching out Hitler and Goering and leaving them in trash cans, for heavens sake. But not the Wax Man, he just has a bunch of nonspecific guys working for him who shout "ach du lieber!" when you surprise them.

He's also a combo of two kinds of foreign agent character types. As seen above he's a ruthless and feared killer who gruesomely slays even his own men via suffocation in wax masks (and collects the heads of his enemies, natch), but also...


He's a guy with a squadron of super tanks and a plan to topple the US Government via their mechanized might backed up with barrages of guided missiles. These aren't incompatible character traits per se (and in fact describe quite a few classic villains including Captain America's very own Red Skull) but they are quite a lot to cram into a 15-page story without losing focus.


The Wax Man manages to stick the landing by reverting to the "feared killer" aspect of his persona after his super tanks take a bath. Somewhat predictably/ extremely delightfully, he lairs in a wax museum, where we get some classic bits including The Real Guy Hiding Among the Statues and That's Not Wax, That's a Dead Person Covered in Wax.


And finally, the Wax Man turns out to be a Chekov's Mayor as his real identity is revealed to be Mayor Dobbs, who only showed up for half a page to demand that somebody do something about that terrible Wax Man.

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