(Amazing Mystery Funnies v2 012, 1939)
The Ten Knights of Doom! Like the Brain of the Robot, more an excuse to talk about their foe than anything else! But here we have to front-load it because you can't get into these guys without setting things up by talking about Speed Centaur.
Speed Centaur is great because he's one of the very first super-heroes and yet he's still also one of the weirdest super-hero concepts that isn't some sort of psychedelic metafiction. To begin with, he has a Superman origin: he's the last survivor of an Arctic city of super-centaurs that inexplicably exploded one day in the early 1900s. He was found and raised by a kindly old trapper named Norton who brought him up to believe in Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Following Norton's death, Speed relocates to the crime-ridden City of Rackets, befriends crusading reporter "Reel" McCoy and proceeds to clean up the city's eponymous gangs using his enhanced strength, super-jumping and ability to cram his human torso into a horse-head disguise.
After a while having Speed beat up regular gangsters must have gotten monotonous for the writers because they added a feature to the mountain cave in which he lived: a portal to... the past? An alternate dimension full of Arthurian weirdos? Somewhere knightly at any rate, which brings us to the Ten Knights of Doom.
(brief aside: the "centaur with fully armoured human half" is always a top-notch visual. Speed Centaur should have stuck with it)
The Ten Knights of Doom are, in fact, a bunch of regular knights with a very good name. They work for the villainous Sir Morbid in aid of his quest to defraud his nephew Prince Albert of his lands. There's a lot of back and forth over two issues and it all ends when Speed Centaur knocks over Sir Morbid's entire castle and the mountain it sits on, presumably killing the whole lot of them.
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