(Human Torch v1 002, 1940)
As our story opens, what is presumably New York City is under siege by a mysterious killer who drains their victims of their blood. Dr Jack "the Fiery Mask" Castle decides to get involved. He sets a trap by announcing to the paper that he has a lot of blood on hand and then waits for the fiend to show up - too bad for him it's not just one guy, as twenty blood-hungry maniacs show up and beat the tar out of him.
But! The Fiery Mask had cleverly doped the blood with florescent chemicals visible to his weird glowing eyes and he manages to track it to the castle district of New York State, where he finds them reporting back to famous missing stomach specialist Dr Sendach. None of this is tremendously exciting and Sendach probably would have ended up in the Mad Scientist Roundup but...
He's super cuckoo! Sendach, it turns out, has developed an artificial stomach and installed it in a series of unfortunates without considering what the side effects of such a procedure might be. Turns out: it's bad! They all lost the ability to produce blood and became science vampires! Now a reasonable man would take this as a sign that it might be time to revisit the drawing board, but not old "I shall prove my theories if I have to drain the world of its blood" Sendach, who determines that the Fiery Mask shall be his next subject. Somewhat predictably, the subsequent struggle ends with Sendach being devoured by his own minions.
I don't think that I would advocate for Dr Sendach to be BRUNG BACK, but the Sendach Artificial Stomach would be a fun thing for an aspiring villain to dig up at the US Patent Office as a way to control their minions via regular necessary transfusions.
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