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.