MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 349: THE GHOST KILLERS

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Maybe someday I'll wish that I had started out putting all of the various gangs of masked Western outlaws in group posts like the generic villains or mad scientists. But maybe not, because the major difference between those three groups is that the other two are par for the course in a super-hero comic while masked outlaws are frequently the only interesting thing about a Western comic.

Anyway: the Ghost Killers (unofficial name - they are hard to find and they kill witnesses) are fun because they are made up of the remnants of the White Arrow's gang and achieve their ghostly status by operating out of the town jail, coming and going via some loose bars until Marshal Buck Jones gets wise and slaps leather, rendering one of them and actual ghost and sending the other two to big boy jail.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 348: THE SEVEN MASTERS

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

The Seven Masters are just your regular drug smuggling/ opium dealing gang operating out of San Francisco's Chinatown. They don't get up to anything too spectacular - El Carim gets in on the action because the head of the gang is using his criminal might to try to get a woman to marry him instead of her boyfriend - and they trade on some pulp-era Yellow Peril tropes, but despite all of that I must admit to liking their style. The name! The robes! The custom sword-lowering engine! If only they all hadn't been wasted on low-tier chumps!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 347: TRIPLE THREAT

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Triple Threat is in actuality a fellow named Theron who believes that due to his own scientific genius he is above such things as "regular jobs" and "not murdering and robbing at whim" and so develops an armoured multi-environment vehicle - also called Triple Threat, as is often the case with super vehicle types - with which to enact his plans.

The obvious thing to lead with here is that great name: Triple Threat. Some cursory research seems to indicate that in the early 20th Century the term was used to refer to a person etc who could fill three different roles in sports, war etc (I even saw it used to refer to a breed of cow that was useful for meat, dairy and as a work animal). The more narrow entertainment-focused definition that is mostly used today seems to have gained prominence in the mid 20th Century, which is a shame, as it would have been a real fun time if Theron wasn't just flying around in a land/air/sea vehicle but also singing, dancing and acting.

That said, there is a real flair for the dramatic in ol' Triple Threat. He's your classic police taunter style of criminal genius, never missing an opportunity to fire up his radio and sling some mud at Sergeant Kent and the rest of the boys over at police HQ.

It's this kind of bravado that ultimately proves to be Triple Threat's downfall, in fact: after escaping an initial encounter with Bulletman, he makes an attempt to eliminate top cop Sergeant Kent and in the subsequent fracas ends up smashing his own vehicle to pieces on Bulletman's pointy head. A true loss to the community of folks like me who like to read comics about real jerks. On the positive side, Bulletman is knocked out in this collision, which leads to Susan Kent finally learning his secret identity, which then leads to her becoming Bulletgirl, by far the best of the half-dozen or so members of the Bullet-family.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 346: THE DRAGON

(Master Comics 011, 1941)

It's our second villain named the Dragon and our second Dragon who turns out to be a white dude in yellowface. Will it happen again? Only time will tell.

The only really interesting thing about this guy is that a key part of his plan was to divert suspicion from himself by repeatedly sending his gang to kill his own secret identity (see above). Whether he was banking on Zoro the Mystery Man to show up and keep him alive is unspoken but if he wasn't it's a frankly baffling plan.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 006

MORE! MORE!

Another Nazi spy-cell headed by a guy in a cloth mask called the Leader, this time in Switzerland for a bit of variety. (Captain America Comics 009, 1941)

Having just read a year's worth of Jumbo Comics, I can tell you that this guy here, name of Sam Bradford, is the closest thing to a super-villain in them and it's mostly because of the decent outfit. He's an agent who kills a producer or something because of professional reasons - strictly snoozeville. (Jumbo Comics 033, 1941)

This creep is Mark Giddings, who kidnaps Eve Scott, daughter of NYC Mayor Scott because she turned down his advances. Somehow he thought that extorting the mayor to resign via threats of dismembering his daughter would net him both the job and the girl but in reality he just got socked by Bulletman. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

This fella answers to the name of Operator G-6, and he's the very first foe faced by patriotic hero Minute-Man. Also the first person summarily thrown off a train to his death by Minute-Man. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 345: THE WHITE ARROW

(Master Comics 008-011, 1940-1941)

A regular-style Old West outlaw chief with the somewhat lyrical name of Santos Figaro, the White Arrow's main distinction is that he was a multi-issue rather than one-off foe of Marshal Buck Jones.  

Jones himself is far more interesting than poor Santos Figaro, being a real-life cowboy actor cast as an Old West lawman (probably - I think I've mentioned before that the media of the 1930s-40s doesn't draw a lot of distinction between the Old West and the contemporary West and that sometimes the only way you find out that a series is one or the other is 50 instalments in when the protagonist hops a plane to Chicago). Jones replaced former marshal Bill Crane in Master Comics 006 in a sadly lost-to-history adventure that might contain clues as to whether he was the Buck Jones or just a Buck Jones. 

Regardless, the "Buck Jones, Frontier Marshal" feature closed its doors after the real Buck Jones died in 1942. Given that, it is somewhat ironic that Master Comics was one of the books to eventually carry the adventures of Old West cowboy Tom Mix based on the Western actor who had died in 1940.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 344: THE HORNED MASKS

(Master Comics 009, 1940)

Like the Blue Devils before them, the Horned Masks dressed up in robes and cowls and took over a small town. In the Masks. case, it's a very small town up in the Ozarks and they go about things less like a gang and more like an offshoot of the Klan with all sorts of nonsense ceremony to what amounts to extortion on a grand scale. Unlucky for them that Zoro the Mystery Man happens to pass through town, leading to their dissolution.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 343: THE TWISTER

(Master Comics 008, 1940)

Not a particularly distinguished entry today: the Twister is a gang boss who employs child pickpockets and keeps them in line with the threat of some semi-eponymous neck-twisting. No idea why he bothers with the robe and cowl - El Carim doesn't even bother to unmask him.

More fun than the Twister himself, in fact, is that his old gang is loyal enough to try to take revenge on El Carim in the next issue - a rare bit of continuity for the Golden Age.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 041: ZORO THE MYSTERY MAN

(Slam-Bang Comics 006-007, Master Comics 007-022, 1940-1942)

It's easy to quantify Zoro because his name says it all: he is a Mystery Man - nobody knows anything about him: nation of origin, real name, nothing. He has an amazing outfit and a sword cane and a pet cheetah named Cheeta. 

Zoro hangs out a swanky clubs and parties and visits his swanky friends and occasionally gets involved in the mysteries that crop up in such circles. Does he have super powers? Maybe! Or maybe he's just a gifted illusionist - who knows? He's a MYSTERY MAN.

(Zoro should absolutely be BRUNG BACK with absolutely no explanation of what he's been doing for the last 80 years. I HAVE SPOKEN)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 342: THE MASTER

(Master Comics 007, 1940)

Once more we find ourselves with a cult on our hands, and it's my favourite kind of cult: a) completely fictional and b) just a bunch of bored rich people taking what probably started as an excuse for some light swinging or BDSM way too seriously. It' the Cult of Jama the Devil-God, folks! Officially broken up by the US government in 1919, they have in fact been lurking in the shadows of the probably-New York upper crust since then, with a particular focus on molding wealthy orphan Imelda Loree (born on the Feast Day of Jama, parents possibly murdered by the cult) into a living goddess figure. This process seems to require either virginity or some sort of spiritual isolation because the main thing tat they do to prepare her is to murder any man who even seems like he might be interested in her.

And of course this is where my favourite Golden Age adventurer Zoro the Mystery Man comes in, because if there's a society event where people are trying to hook up, it's a fair bet that he'll be there. He witnesses the fourth "keep Imelda Loree from getting any" murder and it's at that point that the cult is finished.

But what of this Master character, you ask? Why he's Murdock Daw, leader of the cult and huge creep. In classic cult leader fashion, Daw has been duping the Jama cultists for decades in order to enrich himself, and in true creep fashion he seems to have been angling to marry Imelda Loree since she was roughly two years old, and even if I'm reading things wrong he has absolutely been having her suitors murdered in order to make her desperate enough to marry him - real creep behaviour, if you ask me.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 341: THE LEOPARD MEN/ MINOR SUPER-HERO 040: NEDDA, QUEEN OF THE ELEPHANTS

(Master Comics 007, 1940)

The Leopard Men are whatever. Groups of evil African (or South American or Indian or Native American etc etc) warriors who dress up like big cats or other animals are a dime a dozen in jungle adventures and I usually don't find them noteworthy enough for inclusion here (also the racism inherent in the whole Jungle Adventure genre kind of dampens the ol' enthusiasm).

Why include them here? Why because they are the arch-foes of Nedda, Queen of the Elephants, of course! If there is one thing I like enough to take some of the bad Jungle Adventure taste out of my mouth, it's the hint of a larger world inherent in one hero crossing paths with another. Like in Halloween 4, when Doctor Loomis hitches a ride with what is clearly another man on his way to confront a different evil in another, unseen movie. Or in this case, Lee "Jungle King" Granger finding himself in the middle of a Nedda, Queen of the Elephants story.

I think I like Nedda, Queen of the Elephants a disproportionate amount precisely because she only appeared this once. She was raised by elephants, she battled the Leopard Men because they were after her herd's tusks, she teamed up with Jungle King and Eric the Lion. FINIS. No additional baggage. Never bring her back because it can only go downhill from there.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 340: THE SEA-DEVIL

(Master Comics 007, 1940)

Let's start with the good things about the Sea-Devil: he's part of one of my favourite super-villain traditions: the guy who dresses up like a creature in order to play off of local superstitions. Nothing specific in this case - he's just banking on the local oyster divers not wanting to contend with a mysterious horned humanoid while they're trying to earn an already dangerous living. To that end, his costume isn't the most elaborate fake sea monster in comics, though it does have a certain minimalist charm.

The rest of the story is depressingly familiar. The Sea-Devil is a guy named Sam Mindoro, his motivation is to drive off the white guy who owns his ancestral lands and of course this makes him the worst kind of villain despite him not actually killing anyone while disrupting the extraction of wealth from the area. I mean he does try to kill Shipwreck Roberts and Deep Sea Doodle, which is a crime, but "wants his land back" and "inconveniences a white guy" are treated as much worse ones. Depressing stuff.

ADDENDUM: Forgot to mention that this fellow is our first Filipino super-villain, for what it's worth.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 339: THE FIREHAWK

(Master Comics 004, 1940)

The Firehawk is an extortionist of the particular kind that you get in comic book stories that have to clock in at under 5 pages: a dumb one. See, he has a pretty good threat to hold over the heads of his victims in that he can seemingly set them on fire at will. Since he's operating on a movie set, he does so by mixing up batches of thermite-impregnated makeup that presumably self ignites after a set time. Like I said, a good threat. The problem lies with his timing: he dopes all of the makeup at once so that the actors are just igniting one after the other - there isn't even enough time for them to consider paying up. Plus there's the matter of his secret identity, the fourth lead in a film in which numbers 1 through 3 were set to be destroyed, which is at least a bit suspect.

For all that, I love this guy for his costume if nothing else. "Green anthropomorphic cartoon bird" is an underrepresented theme in super-villainy.

****

While thinking about this guy I suddenly had a revelation: in any given super-hero universe there would be a podcast about the super-villains of Old Hollywood. Without question! The only real question is just how many episodes would each villain generate. Sadly for the Firehawk, even though he is the genesis for the idea of the Super-Villains of Hollywood Podcast (an idea so powerful that it has propagated backward through the blog) he probably wasn't fodder for more than one episode - neither Zarrow/ the Firehawk nor any of his victims seemed especially noteworthy in a "lurid true crime podcast" sense so I' afraid that for the inaugural 

Number of episodes of the "Super-Villains of Hollywood" podcast: segment, the answer must be one.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 338: THE BANDIT FORCE

(Master Comics 004, 1940)

This is a simple one because it's simply a matter of scale, plus the fact that everyone involved is wearing a stylish purple cloak/ robe combo. A mass of bandits loot arsenals across the Eastern US, stealing tanks, artillery and armoured cars. Panic ensues!

Soon enough, the band makes its goals known with a bold attack on that sweetest of targets: Fort Knox. And they almost get away with it! They actually have the gold loaded up and are speeding away before second-rate Fawcett character Master Man shows up and absolutely ruins everyone's day.

And of course the leader of the pack turns out to be the unnamed altruistic banker who somehow manages to sit in on every meeting about how to deal with the situation. What a surprise!

ADDENDUM: I absolutely forgot to mention the most notable if underplayed thing about these guys: they use golden bullets for some unstated reason. A bizarre choice for a buncha gold thieves!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 337: DR DROWN

(Master Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Drown is a paragon of his sub-category of super-villain. Unfortunately for him, that is not a particularly exalted position, as he belongs to the Association of Seagoing Criminal Scientists and the membership of that group is heavily diluted by decades of Aquaman and Sea Devils and even Challengers of the Unknown foes with wilfully bad schemes.

Dr Drown's schemes aren't too bad! He as a submersible yacht that he uses to torpedo and loot ships, which is a lucrative if very evil business model, with the sole flaw being that he keeps doing it in exactly the same part of the ocean which makes him very easy for his foe Shipwreck Roberts to track him down.

Drown's other claim to fame is as a tamer of sea monsters and it's here that things really get going for me. The "brontosauruses" above are pretty light fare but check this out:

I follow a lot of horror artists on various social medias and it's still been a while since I've seen anything quite as unsettling as the Giantocrab. Why does it have human arms, for heaven's sake?

By contrast the Colostopus is merely a fun dome-shaped friend with a good name.

Drown also deployed this Mechanosaurus in a later adventure but as the name suggests it was actually a monster-shaped submarine (a classic move but always sad to miss out on a real monster).

As stated above, Dr Drown is a great example of a generally mediocre lot - I'd be right chuffed if he or one of his descendants were ever brung back.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 039: THE DEVIL'S DAGGER

(Master Comics 001-020, 1940-1941)

Devil's Dagger! I love this guy. He has a lot of familiar things going on: a wealthy young man named Ken Wyman who works as a reporter in order to get the latest crime news and heads out at night in his souped-up car (the excellently named Speed Ghost) to kick butt accompanied by Pat Gleason, ex boxer and member of the surprisingly large Chauffeur/ Sidekick club.

There are two really interesting things about the Devil's Dagger: 1. really good costume. 2. he's a mission-driven vigilante. Once he rids Carterville of the sinister Jeff Marlowe... he finds out about Jeff's boss, Mr H. But once he gets rid of him, that's it! Wyman unmasks, retires, maybe takes the job at his father's bank, who knows? It's so rare for a super-hero to have a finite career, not just in the Golden Age but any time! How refreshing!

Of course after saying that I would be a monster to suggest that the Devil's Dagger be brung back, and I am not! I do however think that the identity would make for quite a fun legacy hero! Picture it: Carterville has once again become a crime-ridden hellhole, perhaps even under the thumb of a superannuated Mr H (or a corrupted Ken Wyman!), and someone stumbles across the unpublished memoirs of Ken Wyman and takes inspiration from them - maybe an underpaid employee at the Daily Blade, now stripped of assets by venture capital and printing a ten-page synopsis of the top clickbait of the week? Heck, maybe this time it's a whole group of dagger-wielding vigilantes. Fun!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 336: ADAM ADDAMS

(All-Flash 003, 1941)

Like the Threat before him, Adam Addams is a revenge guy. Unlike the Threat, Addams is... I won't say more petty, but perhaps less focused - they include the woman who didn't marry him, the man she married instead, the man who refused to give him a medical license because he talked about glands too much, and anyone who contributed to one of his prior revenge schemes going wrong. If he has a particular focus, it's Dr French, the man what married the woman. About half of the issue involves attempts by Addams to ruin French's life and the other half is all about killing as many of his enemies as possible.

Contrary to Addams' big talk about changing your face with glandular treatments, he actually uses bog-standard rubberoid masks. Maybe they're just easier than mutating your head every time you want to put on a disguise, because he does turn out to have the goods, gland-manipulation-wise...

To whit, he posts up on a tropical island and mutates a herd of horses into beefcake centaurs! Centaurs who he then flies back to NYC and parachutes into Dr French's hospital for a good old fashioned rampage, because nothing ruins a medical reputation like a centaur attack.

Special shout out to Oats, the doofus centaur who ruins the whole operation by being too horny.

Extra special shoutout to the unnamed and very professional centaur pilot in his little hat.

Aside from Addams' revenge schemes his other major interest is in recreating the hard water formula that gave the Flash his powers (because the Flash has very poor infosec and it's trivially easy to find out where and how he did so). To that end, he kidnaps Jay Garrick's old chemistry professor and forces him to work on finding the formula. And he finds it! Adam Addams acquires Flash-style super-speed! He gets beat up by the actual Flash because he has no fine control yet, but surely this marks a dark new day in the annals of crime!

Not a chance. In a move that smacks of "we have to wrap up the issue now", Addams takes his own life after the Flash foils what is frankly a medium-sized plot. It's fairly unsatisfying, to say the least. Thankfully, I have a solution: Addams didn't blow up, he entered the Speed Force. He can come back at any time!And I want that! I want him to be brung back! Because as uninteresting as the Speed Force and its related heroes and villains have become through proliferation it can only be improved through the application of a guy who can whip up a pack of centaurs on a month's notice.

ADDENDUM: I was wrong! He does change some of his henchmen's faces via glandular treatments!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 335: THE THREAT

(All-Flash 002, 1941) 

The Threat is an example of a type of morality tale that was very popular in 40s and 50s comic books but never really went out of style: a tale of promise squandered in service to a life of crime. In this case, the subject is a crook named Tough Joe Connor, who swears revenge on Jim Kelley, the prosecutor who sent him to jail for ten years. 

My summarizing powers are not up to this task, ergo, a timeline:

1911 CE:

-Jim Kelley sends Tough Joe Connor to jail. Connor swears revenge.

-believing that Kelley got the better of him because he was more clever, Connor devotes himself to study.

1917 CE:

-Connor has become a model prisoner. He is a qualified lawyer, doctor and research scientist specializing in chemistry and physics. He is paroled 4 years early. On the outside, he is already wealthy due to research he did in prison.

-Connor goes to visit Kelley. Ostensibly a good will visit, it is actually in order to provide an alibi: when thugs he has hired burst in and steal Kelley's newborn baby, Connor takes a carefully choreographed bullet to the arm while "attempting to stop them".

-Connor meets and falls in love with a woman named Annie Crowley. They marry and he briefly goes straight (but keeps the baby).

1923 CE:

-Annie dies (possibly in childbirth, as they have a daughter). Connor resumes his quest for revenge and begins telling the boy, Roy, that Kelley killed his mother in order to turn him into a weapon against his own father.

1937 CE:

-Connor has consolidated underworld power in the region, becoming the Threat. He makes his first attempt on the life of now-Mayor Jim Kelley but both his criminal activities and his murder attempt are disrupted by the Flash. Roy heads to the family farm to lie low with his step-sister Ann.

1941 CE:

-The Threats's power continues to grow. A second attempt on Mayor Kelley's life ends with Joe Connor back in prison as one of his own henchmen.

-Connor escapes in an old lye barrel. Severely burned, missing an eye, he adopts a series of new identities: an unnamed garage owner, plastic surgeon Doctor Cravath, mechanic Jake Boles. He finds Roy hiding out in the country and together they make an attempt on gubernatorial candidate Kelley's life but once more the Flash steps in.

-Connor makes one last push to kill now-Governor Kelley: he breaks Roy out of prison and arranges a big confrontation. All is for naught, as the Flash, Joan Williams and Ann Connor have pieced together the clues and revealed to Roy his real parentage. Faced with this and the futility of his life of revenge, Connor smokes a poisoned cigarette and dies.

-Roy and Ann are now in love, which happens in these kinds of Secret Step-Sibling situations an unsettling amount.

There are several interesting things about this sequence of events. The first, as seen above, is that young Roy, at age 5, chooses the name Roy Revenge for himself as part of his vendetta and keeps using it into his mid-twenties. It is, frankly, great - it's exactly the kind of henchman name that a villain called the Threat would assign in a campy 60s comic, but earnestly, in the 40s.

The second involves the fact that at this point Keystone City is not a thing and the Flash explicitly lives in New York City, which means that Jim Kelley was presumably Mayor of NYC (eroding La Guardia's term by about four years) and Governor of New York (impacting Herbert H. Lehman).

Meanwhile, the chronology of the story is fairly tentative - the actual timeframes are correct, but the dates are speculative. The crucial point is that four-year gap between Roy Revenge''s first attempt on Kelley's life and the remainder of the story: as presented the bulk of the story is set in 1941, the year of publication, but the Flash is running around three years earlier than previously established. BUT! if we start the story in 1941 the bulk of the action takes place in 1945, which is even more temporally messy. Fun stuff for the old timeline!

The Threat, ultimately, is a bit of a nothing villain but I like him nonetheless. Too bad about the wasted life, better luck next time, Joe.

JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 0/1 

(I know, he's focused on the lawyer, but "judge and jury and prosecutor revenge killer" is just too long and even then someone is going to go after the witnesses and bailiffs. Better to be succinct)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 334: THE MONOCLE

(All-Flash Quarterly 001, 1941) 

I love a foppish gang boss, and the Monocle might just be the most foppish I've seen in some time. He's got all the accessories: the monocle, natch, but also the eccentric mustache, cigarette holder, neat suit with nosegay and tiepin and pocket square and to top it off one of the more eccentric comic book hobbies I have ever encountered: a twee little garden where he displays his stolen gems in artificial flowers. Pretty great stuff.

The Monocle is also a technically-minded villain, whose main line is planning knockout gas-centric crimes but with a sideline in deathtraps - his booby-trapped HQ does a better job than most at almost bumping off the Flash.

Of particular note is that the Monocle hits upon the same discovery as an unnamed criminal scientist the year before: that though the Flash moves fast enough that he uproots shrubs and blows the clothing off of people in his wake, he also moves slow enough that a stroboscopic lighting setup will make it possible to effectively aim a firearm at him. He might even have actually killed the Flash if, succumbing to the deathtrap-maker's hubris, he hadn't left mid-battle to check on his gem garden.

NOTES - SEPTEMBER 2023

Memes of Yore:

 Women be loving hats. (All-Flash 001, 1941)

Decoration:

On the island nation of Felicia, the chairs are monogrammed with a big F (Master Comics 001, 1940) 

UPDATE: And the shields.

Drawn without reference:

The majestic pterodactyl. (Master Comics 007, 1940)

SUPERSTITIOUS AND COWARDLY LOT

 (All-Flash 001, 1941)