MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 320: THE LEGION OF THE DOOMED

(Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

There's not much substance to the Legion of the Doomed, but there's a lot of cool ideas, so lets knock them out.

a) a weird figure imposes a baby on a couple dwelling in haunted hill country. The baby, it is later revealed, cries with the voice of a man.

b) subsequently, a killer begins stalking the streets of a nearby city, probably New York. Panic ensues! The Fiery Mask is on the prowl.

c) somewhat unsurprisingly, the killer and the baby turn out to be one and the same! There's a missed opportunity for more creepy adult-acting baby, one of my favourite comics tropes. The Fiery Mask witnesses this transformation and manages to stop the next murder...

d) ... and pursues the killer back to whatever level of Comic Book Hell they came from. The Legion of the Doomed are slain! The city is safe! No questions have been answered:

Why do these killings? Not sure.

Why the whole ruse with the baby? No idea.

Has the Legion of the Doomed actually been stopped? Not saying.

Which actually opens the possibility of these guys being BRUNG BACK. I mean, supernatural killers are a dime a dozen, but these guys bring a creepy baby to the mix, plus they're very easy to kill. Say they're on some sort of ~80-year sacrifice cycle and you're good to go. And it's a perfect chance to bring the current Fiery Mask out of limbo!

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 002

Back again with another collection of science-villains who didn't quite make the grade!

Fritz Cardif here has a gunpowder-exploding ray and a lot of big plans. He probably would have made the main list except that I personally find his antics very dull, with the exception of the lil' stinker moment pictured above. (Hit Comics 006, 1940)

Dr Marko figured on using kidnapped scientists as research slaves in his Grand Canyon hideout, but he too was corralled by Neon the Unknown. (Hit Comics 013, 1941)

Professor Dorn here is your typical Nazi scientist obsessed with replicating the powers of the Sub-Mariner for the glory of the cause. He ends up lasting about fifteen minutes after meeting the real deal. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941)

 Dr Sunga has a pretty good scheme going wherein he seeming kills people by sending them a cursed wand that is actually harmless - seemingly the perfect crime! But the Golden Age Falcon figures out the trick: it's actually the box that the wand is sent in that does the killing. Sunga of course ends up dead by his own fiendish device. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 319: DR NARR

(Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

Poor Dr Narr. all he wanted was to make good robots, but all he could make were terrible robots (in comics terms. Even today, bipedal, semi-autonomous robots capable of running and throwing nets etc are wildly advanced. Be less hard on yourself, Narr).

Too bad for Narr that he chose the villain's path: rather than reevaluating his metrics for success in a robot he kidnaps Marvex the 5th dimensional super-robot in hopes of discerning his secrets. This leads directly to his death by falling (from a window that he was attempting to push Marvex out of). The moral: don't kidnap robots.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 318: DORK

(Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

There's a great temptation when dealing with an evil scientist named Dork to focus on easy, puerile humour rather than appreciating the other things that make him a good super-villain.

I had a whole bit about how his big plan was to flood the city with white goo (hur hur) and kidnap women to experiment on their bodies but it wasn't sustainable. Ironically, I would have had to jump through more hoops to obliquely reference his monster looking like jizz than if, as here, I just said it.

Good costumes on the henchmen!

This is where the joke fell apart, by the way. There was no good way to link this guy with the jizz jokes that wasn't a huge stretch. Appreciate the cool monster, I guess.

And then he was killed by his own jizz!

Excuse me. He was dissolved by his own blob-monster in a classic example of irony.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 317: MR MURO

(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 004, 1940)

 

The most interesting thing about Mr Muro is that he represents an intermediate stage in the development of the comic book Yellow Peril villain, away from the gaudy Fu Manchu style of the pulps and the comics of the 30s. There are a few of these more workaday Asian Threat villains kicking around in 1940/ 41 but they eventually lose out to the super-agents of the Japanese Empire as the preeminent example of such.

Anyway, Muro is a low-rent would-be world conqueror at heart and has the misfortune to have ended up as the antagonist for Monako, Prince of Magic, a typically-overpowered magic hero. This understandably put a crimp in his plans.

I his second appearance Muro demonstrates some ability at magic himself, but he never makes a third appearance to give Monako a real run for his money. This does mean that he's another technically-at-large Golden Age villain, but that's about it as far as mildly interesting facts about Mr Muro goes.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 316: THE VAMPIRE

(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940) 

The Vampire has the distinction of appearing in the only Golden Age featuring Mister E, possibly the biggest nonentity in the collection of heroes brought back in The Twelve. He's whatever: he has a drug that makes your heart explode and his major plot involves trying to get control of an oil company (and marry a woman against her will after killing her father, in case you though he might be a bit sympathetic). He is one of the few comic book super-villains to dress like the villains from 1940s super-hero movies though, so that's something.

Probably the most interesting thing about the Vampire is the fact that like so many features in Daring Mystery Comics Mister E was a one-off, which means that he is still at large to this day. Fun! BRING BACK this very very old man and his old machinations! Mister E has retired - who can save us from the Vampire?

MINOR SUPER-HERO 037: THE PHANTOM BULLET

(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940)

There's a lot of people on the internet who like to opine on the morality of bat-themed rich-guy vigilantism, but I gotta tell you that it could have been a whole lot worse. Case in point, the Phantom Bullet, a rich guy who gets ahold of an untraceable ice pellet gun and immediately thinks "what this city needs is a whole lot more extra-judicial killings."

But instead of becoming an unstoppable media juggernaut, the Phantom Bullet made just one Golden Age appearance (like so many of his Daring compatriots) and returned only once, seventy years later, to die.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls - fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height - something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources - and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he's been working for about 50 years, so he's a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there's no really good option in the text and I'd've ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski's The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master's lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask - the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

(which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK - what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

NOTES: JULY 2023

Another "renegade white":

(Jumbo Comics 034, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 314: THE RED TERROR

(Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

A fairly undistinguished costumed gang boss, the Red Terror has three things going for him:

1. he gets around in a very cool rocket-powered dirigible

2. he is the only super-villain to face Golden Age underachiever the Human Top

3. he really goes above and beyond in his attempt to rid himself of the Top, hitting him with, in quick succession: mountain lions, flame throwers, an avalanche and a bursting dam. That's the kind of thoroughness that more villains should aspire to, although of course if it's not enough to do the job you risk getting thrown from your own rocket-zep in retaliation.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 313: DR KLUTCH

(Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

Dr Klutch is your basic criminal scientist. His major distinction is that he got beat up by the Tough Kid Squad in their only recorded outing, but there are a couple of other points worthy of discussion here.

The first is that we have a clear timeline for this guy. Many, many super-villains are clearly operating at a level that would require years of work to establish or have a lengthy if nebulous criminal record, but with Klutch here we know: in 1926 he murdered his research partner Dr Danger in revenge for not sharing his findings and in the subsequent 16 years he became a successful enough criminal scientist to be identified on sight by even beat cops.

(not sure how great of a scientist he was, given that it took the entire 16 years to track down the Danger Twins, one of whom was adopted by Danger's friend Professor Moxon - follow a few leads, buddy!)

Point two is merely that the idea of murdering someone and then perpetually electrocuting their twitching skeleton is fairly metal.

But the real kicker is that Klutch eventually gets ahold of Dr Danger's serum by extracting it from the blood of Danger Twin Wally. Klutch is a super-powered criminal scientist! The serum is a bit ill-defined but the gist of it seems to be that it enhances your trained abilities, and Dr Klutch is trained in fightin', science and EVIL.

Sadly, the closest we get to seeing the full chemically-enhanced might of Klutch's evil mind is a plan to rob several banks at once - mid-tier super-villainy at best, but perhaps he was working up to it. BUT, in an exciting turn of events, Klutch was captured at the end of the story, leaving the door open to my favourite potential BRUNG BACK scenario: the super-powered crook who gets out after 80+ years of cooling his heels in the klink. After all, he's full of serum! Who knows what that does to the aging process?

MINOR SUPER-HERO 036: THE TOUGH KID SQUAD

(Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

I occasionally opine about the relative obscurity of one super-hero or another and it's tricky to judge such a thing objectively, especially when it's about a suite of characters who are all 100% unknown to the world at large. Despite this I am confident in my assertion that the Tough Kid Squad are the most obscure Marvel characters ever to receive their own title, even if it did only last one issue.

The Tough Kid Squad is an obvious attempt by Marvel to replicate the formula of the Young Allies, but the technology to boil down a concept and recast it misfired somehow. The real key to a 40s kid gang is the mix of personalities - as seen in the Young Allies' Smart Kid, Fat Kid, Tough Kid, Racial Stereotype and two Super-Hero Kids. The Tough Kid Squad on the other hand, is as follows:

Wally Danger: Together with his brother Wally forms the Danger Twins, the Super-Hero kid Element of the team. Orphaned at a young age, the twins were raised separately after Tom was stolen by a crook to be his protege. They both benefit from a serum that their father gave them as infants which enhances their trained abilities. Wally mostly acts as the Smart Kid.

Tom Danger: Raised to be a crook but his better nature shone through when he met his long-lost twin, Tom is a Tough Kid to his core.

Derrick Dawes: A former school bully who was befriended after a beating from Tom. Tough Kid.

Butch: A guy on the school football team who is befriended off-panel. Supposedly a Fat Kid based on the action but is drawn as and acts like a Tough Kid.

Eagle: The football team also had a Racial Stereotype to befriend, albeit one who mostly acts like a Tough Kid. Eagle also presents the conundrum common to comic book racial stereotype characters: that because part of the joke of them is that they are acting against stereotype by being the hero of the piece they are often driving the action in the most interesting ways. 

The main point of this breakdown is that true to its name the Tough Kid Squad is a real one-note kid gang. It is in fact weirdly tough to figure out if there is a true knockoff kirby in the bunch, in fact - they're kind of all part of one gestalt knockoff kirby, with Eagle looking most the part and Tom acting it.

Obviously I think the name should be brung back, and I'm kind of disappointed in Marvel for not dredging it up during the 50-State Initiative time - it might have been the only thing to make the fact that Hellcat was the entire Alaska Initiative team all by herself more fun. As for the members themselves... they are a bit generic, but the fact that the Danger Twins are all hopped up on serum offers the easy possibility for a couple of unaging characters to have been secretly operating for the last 80+ years, which is always fun.

SEMI-MINOR SUPER-HEROS: FIGHTER PILOT EDITION

Conundrum: Golden Age fighter pilot characters are essentially a very minor subset of super-heroes, and they are also very boring to me. I  feel a compulsion to write something about them and also to slump sideways in my seat when contemplating their existence.

Solution: since the only really interesting thing about them is their cool names, I will list those.

the Flying Flame (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

the Flying Fox (More Fun Comics 037, 1938)

the Hell Diver (Hit Comics 014, 1941)

the Scarlet Ace (Amazing-Man Comics 013, 1940)

the Sky Devils (Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940)

the Spitfire (Crack Comics 015, 1941)

the War Bird (Slam-Bang Comics 003, 1940)