MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 619: GYP CLIPP

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) 

Mr Clipp here is our first villain with "Gyp" or "Gypsy" as a part of their name, and there are going to be a lot of the. On the one hand you have to cut the old-time creators a bit of slack, as the World Romani Congress didn't officially vote to reject the term and all of its derivatives until 1971, but on the other hand they knew. "Gyp" is in the Top 50 in my spreadsheet of all the nicknames I come across (yes of course I have one of those) and unlike Red, Doc, Slim or Happy it is only ever given to crooks.

It therefore both makes sense and is very annoying that a Fletcher Hanks villain would be named such, because this is possibly the Platonic ideal of a Hanks story. Clipp and his pals here have an over-the-top plan to amass wealth: stop the rotation of the Earth, thus flinging all other humans off into space so that they can have all of the good stuff for themselves. And don't worry about the good stuff also flying off into the endless void because they've used rays to stick everything that isn't humans down.

Then we have one of those iconic Fletcher Hanks panels of all humans flying off into the lemon void. This is the kind of thing that Roy Lichtenstein would have been stealing if he wasn't a coward.

After successfully ejecting all other humans from the planet, Clipp makes the amazing decision to kill his two accomplices so as not to have to split the take, and while I was initially going to make a big deal about what a wild decision this is, it is in fact extremely consistent with his other actions in the story. You don't get to the point that Clipp is at without something very wrong with the way you look at the world, but does he not realize that having unlimited wealth on an empty planet is a meaningless thing or does he simply not care and is content to sit on a pile of gold by himself until the canned goods run out, like a horrible little dragon?

We will never know the answer, because, deus ex machina, Stardust the Super Wizard shows up before anyone even has time to asphyxiate and uses one of his highly specific rays to restore everyone to their starting location!

Stardust of course does not waste time: Clipp is crumpled up in a big fist and tossed into space. This is the kind of Direct Action Irony we have come to expect and love from the big man.

The last few Stardust stories have featured crooks being taken to prison instead of messily killed and I kept thinking that that was unusually merciful for a character I had thought of as very harsh in his punishments, but if they're all being shipped off to the Floating Prison of Eternal Space to be frozen yet aware for all eternity... that's in character.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 618: THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) 

The Great White Chief is a chubby scientist who wears stirrup pants with no shoes or socks and lives in a dormant volcano (that he makes look non-dormant using special effects) where he makes animal-headed monstrosities like Cinu the Unicorn Man here. This is all very good classic villain stuff.

The name is pretty annoying. It implies a lot about his relationship with the native peoples of wherever his volcano is located (probably Africa as he has kidnapped the daughter of an ivory trader) and so I am constantly on edge while reading about him, waiting for him or Captain Kidd to say or do something really racist, but nothing concrete ever happens. But the name!

I guess the only thing to do is to focus on how fun a design the unicorn man is. Look! Captain Kidd is stabbing him with his own horn!

After finishing off poor Cinu, Captain Kidd gets the drop on the GWC and socks him into a boiling sulphur pit. I was going to make a joke about Kidd being just as weirded out by the name as I was but then I remembered that Captain Kidd is himself pretty racist. Welp...

Hey look, more animal headed people! Check out that bird head!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 617: MOROSIO

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

Like so many Space Smith adventures do, this one begins with Space and his ladyfriend Dianna being waylaid as they make their way around the Solar System. In this case a mysterious gas disables their spaceship and causes them to land on the moon Ganymede. From whence did this gas come? Why, it was the sinister laboratory of Morosio, not just a mad and/or criminal scientist but a mad and/or criminal scientist who has already been caught once and escaped to do further science crimes and/or madness.

I like his sass ("Say Emperor Morosio") and I love a villain with pre-baked backstory but I gotta say that Morosio's hair leaves a lot to be desired.

The really great thing about Morosio is that his henchmen of choice are these fellows who he made with his own two hands. They're called the Crustaceans and they are peak character design. The base model is the size of a large cat, with a lobster body and a crab claw head, but they can range in size all the way up to maybe five feet tall. They have between zero and two arms and either have wings or little bipedal legs... I think that given a more advanced colour palette and a visual guide to different crab claw shapes you could populate an entire video game enemy ecosystem based off of the Crustacean design.

The major flaw in the Crustaceans as henchmen is that they are vulnerable to radioactive beryllium, in that it makes them explode. Coincidentally, Ganymede is littered with radioactive beryllium, to the extent that not only is Space Smith able to defeat the entire Crustacean swam using a slingshot but also blow up Morosio's whole operation to hell and gone with some spare radiation. A true design oversight!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 616: THE HAG OF BLACKAMOOR

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

We rejoin the European version of the Golden Knight as he and his ladyfriend Alice are having a bad time in Blackamoor Forest: both Alice and Sir Richard's horse Whitey have broken their legs in a fall and so Richard and Alice are forced to hole up in a cave for the night (Whitey, sadly, did not make it). But who is this ominous form?

It's the Hag of Blackamoor and she isn't messing around! In common with many villainous older women in comics, she wants to regain her lost youth and beauty and she's willing to sacrifice others to do it. And because this is a Golden Knight comic, she has a proper quest for our hero to do: he must retrieve the Golden Stallion from Ice Mountain, for he alone can take the Hag to the Tree of Eternal Youth. That's right: all the nouns are capitalized when you start talking about quest stuff.

The bulk of the story is all quest stuff with no Hag, so we'll just run through it quickly. Sir Richard must climb the Ice Mountain (his magic ring turns out to have a heat ray setting)...

... slay a fire-breathing dragon (his magic cloak is proof against its flames)...

... and get past a guardian giant (his magic strength is up to the task of cleaving the giant's head in twain).

Golden Stallion successfully retrieved, the Golden Knight mounts up and returns to the Hag and his lady love, where it turns out that a) the Stallion doesn't like the Hag very much and b) the Hag didn't plan on that coming up and so does not protect herself from being trampled. Once she is dead, we learn c) that the Golden Stallion was in fact the enchanted Queen of Blackamoor. 

This raises some questions! Like: what the hell was the point of that quest? If the Hag turned the Queen into a horse then why wasn't she prepared for that horse to hate her? How did the Stallion get so well defended? If it was the Hag who put the Stallion there then why did she need a champion to go fetch it and if it wasn't then who did? Does the Queen know where the Tree of Eternal Youth is or was that just a horse thing? None of these questions will ever be answered.

As a reward, the Queen of Blackamoor gives Sir Richard a (presumably) magical horn that will summon her subjects to his aid if blown, because he certainly didn't have enough magic items already.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 615: SANGLOR

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

Sanglor starts out strong. He immediately charms me with his aesthetic sense: his 'Automatic Subplane' spy drones are delightful, his 'Flying Castle' is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and great-looking mobile bases I have ever seen and his costume manages to evoke the dress sense of a 1940s comic book movie villain in a way I have not seen since the Vampire, almost exactly 300 entries ago.

He manages to mess things up almost immediately, of course. His plan is to take over the world by hypnotizing key politicians and diplomats etc., and then presumably induce them to shift the reins of political power his way. This is the kind of scheme that requires some degree of care to set up - you have to get all of your assets in place without causing undue suspicion, so having them for example act all weird and then disappear is problematic. People are noticing your plan, Sanglor.

This is the first evidence of what I will call Sanglor Self-Sabotages. This one seems to stem from the fact that Sanglor works completely solo, without even a weird little lab assistant to test his hypnotic ray on to see if it makes people freak out in noticeable ways before using it in a sensitive espionage operation.

The big upshot of this Sanglor Self-Sabotage is that Samson is on the case basically the instant that the scheme is put in motion

The second Sanglor Self-Sabotage is an extension of the first: he has no real defenses. Once Samson makes his way to the Flying Castle his only real opposition is a crowd of tuxedo-clad diplomats flailing away with their soft fists.

Sanglor does think to call out his drone army to deal with the intruder but they don't seem to even be armed, despite their little gun barrels - they just fly at Samson until he smashes them all.

The really big final Sanglor Self-Sabotage is revealed once Samson bursts into his inner sanctum: Sanglor is too busy being a weird creep to actively manage the defense of his headquarters. It's not exactly clear what he's doing with this young woman or who she is (it's unlikely to be Miss Royce, a politician's daughter in England and the only named female character in the story) but it's real creep shit and it's an unnecessary distraction from the approaching vigilante.

Sanglor is probably still distracted as he flees through an industrial section of his base, because he can't even run correctly - he manages to heave himself off what looks to be a pretty solid catwalk into the first available cauldron of boiling chemicals.

I think that ultimately Sanglor serves as an object example of the need for villains to do a couple of trial runs before attempting world domination. If he'd attempted to take over a county or a small business first, maybe some of these kinks would've been worked out.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 614: KOZAR

(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

Once again the nations of he world of the year 10 000 CE are faced with an oceanic menace. Twenty ships have been sunk - seems like a case for Sub Saunders! Could we be faced with yet another jerk ruler from the population of undersea humans? It seems likely! (aside: gotta give a shoutout to Thog here: having a name like that in a comic from 1940 is absolutely an early indicator that you are a villain yet he has rejected nominative determinism to instead serve the public goo. Good on ya, Thog)

But no! After five issues and four separate evil underwater rulers we have a c-c-c-combo breaker in the form of Kozar, a scientist with a weirdly concave face. I mean, sure, he is an antisocial guy who does rule an area under the ocean, but he's originally from the surface! It's totally different!

Kozar has some terrific henchmen at his disposal - forget your Frogmen and Mermen: the Sea-Weed Men are the new greatest underwater goons of the year 10 000. I especially like that their flowing fronds accidentally evoke the 1970s stock character of the Fringed Clothing Hippy.

Kozar's motivation for sinking airships and killing hundreds of people is an unspecified rejection by society. The two most common reasons for this type of rejection are for having really wild out-there scientific theories or for being a creep/looking like a creep and if it's not stated outright then you can usually tell which it is. It's not crystal clear with Kozar but... I reckon he was a real creep and a half.

Kozar actually manages to defeat Sub Saunders pretty decisively by catching him in a mechanical clamp! He actually might have won, except for the fact that his undersea base has one small design flaw: if someone's not constantly monitoring the air pressure etc it will flood and implode. To me personally that seems like an important thing to have multiple automatic failsafes and backups on but what do I know, I'm not a mad genius. Maybe the real thing that Kozar was rejected by society for was his rejection of OSHA guidelines.

Though the story ends on a bit of a melancholy note we must take heart that the Sea-Weed Men are okay. Maybe without the stress of being under the thumb of a homicidal madman they can build a free and just society on the ocean floor.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 613: DR MARTINIOUS

(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

Dr Martinious holds a few distinctions. First, he is an Earth scientist who travelled to Mars on a rocket ship of his own design, an impressive feat and one that seems to have endeared him to the Brain Men of Mars sufficiently to make him their leader.

Secondly, he is an early cosplayer. Note his pseudo-Roman outfit (better view below). This is the outfit of a person who showed up on Mars after reading a lot of pulp fiction and early comic books that populated planets with societies themed after their mythological namesakes - see early Wonder Woman, e.g. How disappointing for Martinious when he showed up and the place was chockablock with cute little big-headed cyborgs! It's just lucky for him that they're up for a good war.

Thirdly, Dr Martinious has the dubious distinction of being the antagonist of a non-Fletcher Hanks-produced Stardust the Super Wizard story. It's not a particularly bad effort but something is subtly off in a way that makes one feel uneasy while reading it. It's actually not unlike the sensation of reading Hanks' work for the first time, so good job unnamed artist!

The Martinious/Brain Men plan involves flooding the planet with either huge insects or giant bacteria or some hybrid of the two? Big bugs, we'll say. It's never expressly spelled out but an attack like this is usually deployed to weaken a planet prior to invasion. Martinious never actually gets that far, however, because Stardust shows up to render aid to the Earthlings.

(of course Stardust's solution - to soak the entire planet in ultra-powerful germicide - would probably be just as disastrous in the long term as presumably huge swaths of essential microbial life would be wiped out, but this is a comic with a shaky understanding of the difference between insects and bacteria so don't hold your breath for that reveal to happen in-story)

Where a lot of villains would use this as an opportunity to spit defiance at their foe, Dr Martinious instead sinks into despair. He and the Brain Men lock themselves up in a ray-proof fortress to sulk. He also finally gives us a good look at his cosplay, which is nice.

Martinious never emerges from his funk, so the final act of the story is in the hands of these cute Brain Men assassins, who at least try to kill Stardust. Do they get hurled off a mountain for their efforts? Yes. But it was worth a try.

Like I said, Martinious never emerges from his ray-proof fortress, and that's because it's specifically a death ray-proof fortress. Concentrated solar heat rays are very effective against it. RIP Dr Martinious, you didn't do a very good job.