MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 737: THE SPOOK

(Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940) 

Continuing from the story of the Panther, Ace Powers ventures into the hole he had left the villain and his Panther Men in, seeking to discover the location of the former and presumably the reason for the deaths of the latter. Making his way through a concealed door, Powers finds the Panther about to be executed by a third villain called the Spook, who states that he is doing so because the Panther failed him, presumably by being foiled by Ace Powers in the previous issue. And let me tell you: I almost always love the revelation that a super-villain is in fact merely an agent of an even more evil villain but I especially love the fact that this means that the Panther Men were essentially subcontracting villainy.

The Spook captures Powers with the help of his rad Skeleton Men and of course offers him the chance to join up with an organization where failure will get you gruesomely killed (it's an understandable no from Our Hero). He also lays out his deal, kind of, and this is where we get into the very frustrating thing about the Spook: he's clearly a vampire, but this comic won't just come out and say it. Check it out: sharp canines, lives underground, "my body cannot stand sunlight." Even that mantled robe he's wearing is pretty reasonable comic book vampire fashion for the early 1940s.

Plus, there's the Skeleton Men, who are again rad as hell and are described as being animated by the Spook's will alone (yes, he says "hypnotic" there but really that's about the same as describing your power as "quantum" in a comic from 2010 only for magic). That's some vampire shit right there.

Ace Powers manages to knock the Spook out with a solid right to the jaw, which disables the Skeleton Men as well - this raises some questions about how security works while the Spook is enjoying a nap, or it would do if he weren't clearly a vampire.

To cap off the frustration, Powers decides to rid the world of the Spook with a simple bundle of dynamite rather than for instance dragging him out into the sun to shrivel up, a clear violation of my right to see vampires shrivel up in the sun from time to time. It's a good thing that this is your final appearance, Ace Powers, because I now have a grudge against you and I would hate to have that taint my reading experience going forward.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 539 UPDATE: THE CLAW (1940)

(Silver Streak Comics 002, 006)

As you may or may not recall, when I covered the Claw's sole 1939 appearance I concluded that taken on its own, it read like one of those stories where a villain holds sway over an area by means of a fake monster and that if the Claw had never appeared again that's what I would assume he was: just an illusion composed of papier mache and maybe a balloon or an image projected on a cloud.

Well, surprise, surprise, because that wasn't the only appearance of the Claw and in fact the vary next issue of Silver Streak Comics features him joining up with an unnamed but very recognizable Adolf Hitler in return for control of half of Europe following a Claw/Nazi victory.

The first part of the Claw's plan involves attacking allied shipping using his very cool underwater train/tank. Next, using super-powered artillery cannon to shell civilian population centres... somewhere. I mean, the cities all look pretty Western hemisphere but as the Claw's original HQ on the island of Ricca was in the Pacific and he's still close enough to there that the ships he sinks are being transported back to be used in Riccan munitions factories, so maybe he's attacking the West coast of the United States? Not sure how that helps the Nazis, honestly, but it's either that or his artillery is really really super and he's bombing Europe.

The Claw eventually gets impatient with just blowing things up and proves me wrong yet again by growing enormous and using his weird powers to set up a whirlpool so mighty that it not only draws in and dooms ships from across the ocean but also changes the world's weather patterns, causing the tropics to freeze over. Bad!

Our old pal and original Claw foe Jerry Morris is of course not going to take this, particularly after his previously-unmentioned younger brother Tad is lost at sea in the Claw's oceanic chaos. He combines one of his signature astonishing super-science inventions - in this case a special bulb that emits light rays that instantly freeze water - with some cars stored in the hold of the ship he is on to create vehicles that are able to fabricate a sheet of ice to drive on across even the deepest water. And since the ice goes all the way to the bottom, these vehicles are able to neutralize the Claw's maelstrom by creating a series of concentric ice walls around it.

There ensues what is actually a pretty neat battle between ice-road cars and the submarine tank/train, with the cars attempting to hem in the train with walls while the train fires its artillery cannons upward - I would enjoy playing a video game about this! The Claw is ultimately killed in an explosion when the munitions on his train explode... OR IS HE?

He is not! And despite the assertion at the end of the previous story, Jerry Morris seems to have foregone taking the Claw's body back to the US for dissection, perhaps because it was not technically a legal thing to do. Whatever the circumstances, the body ends up falling into the hands of a group of "devil worshippers" somewhere in Asia, but whether the Claw was the devil in question or not is hard to say (though in leaping back to life just as his body was consigned to the funeral pyre he certainly must have inspired some supernatural awe).

Also, for this story alone, the Claw is referred to as the Green Claw and his claws are indeed coloured green for the occasion.

The (Green) Claw's opponent in this case is Major Carl Tarrant, who is either a soldier of fortune or a member of the local colonial police, but either way he simply must investigate the possibility of the Claw's return. Tarrant manages to avoid the Claw's cultists but is tracked down by the villain himself with some high-tech devices, then shrunk via magic and stuck in a metal box to gruesomely expire when the shrink spell wears off.

The Claw then reveals his latest plan to take over the world: a kick-ass robot army! No notes, 10/10, a classic for a reason, just look at those cool robots.

Tarrant of course has to spoil everything by getting out of the box before he gets squished. He destroys the robots by taking advantage of the Claw's metal-destroying anti-bullet force field and then does one better by bombing the entire fortress/city to smithereens. But though the Claw is thwarted, HE YET LIVES. What horrors are we in store for in 1941?

(just had to feature this cover from Silver Streak Comics 006, which I spent an inordinate amount of time being creeped out by - those hands! - as replicated in Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Super Villains)

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 019

We may have gotten away from the "costumed" and "generic" is debatable but you can take the "villain" from my cold dead hands. 

This guy is part of a gang who:

-broke into Fort Knox via a secret tunnel

-smashed up up all of the gold and mixed it into stone in a nearby quarry

-transported that gold-bearing stone from the quarry to a mansion

-melted down the gold and concealed it inside a series of bronze statues

And while I suppose that you want to take a lot of care to conceal your movements when you are looting the US gold reserve I just have to be on record as saying that this is an unnecessarily complex scheme. Just book it for the border, fellows!

Also Dynamo, stung by the razzing of government investigators, gilds the entire gang... thus killing them? before turning them in. Brutal stuff. (Science Comics 002, 1940)

This very cool looking but unnamed spy chief has developed anti-Dynamo technology that renders him immune to the various beams and rays that usually assail the hero's foes, which he uses to make off with some explosive wire that Dynamo and the nerds at his day job have made. He pulls off this theft pretty slickly but then completely fails to recognize the difficulty of attempting to pull off a scheme (in this case blowing up US military installations using explosive wire) while a super-hero is after you. It's a real failure to recognize the opportunity to slay Dynamo while he can't get you, unnamed spy chief! (Science Comics 004, 1940)

John J. Hix, millionaire and asylum escapee, needs to get revenge on his old friend for some reason, so he puts on a cloak that makes him look like the ghost of a cat and hires some crooks to kidnap his friend's daughter Doris Dare (a "society deb singer," which is not a type of entertainer I am familiar with. Was it a thing? It's hard to tell!) so that he can kill her. He is opposed by heroic police inspector the Duke and ends up blowing himself up rather than be captured. (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

The Sky Wolf encounters this goofy-but-also-cool magnetically-shielded fire-breathing duck/dragon/plane as it attacks fishing boats one day and traces it back to a similarly magnetically-shielded base where crooks armed with plastic guns inform him that all of this is essentially prep work in advance of setting up a smuggling operation.

Now, issues of whether the expense involved in setting up this operation might cut substantially into any profits realized from it or indeed whether simply selling this magnetic bullet shield to one of the many armies extant in 1940 might be more profitable aside... my admittedly layman's understanding of how smuggling works is that you really want to keep it as quiet as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but establishing a huge messy monster-infested exclusion zone might just... draw more attention to your operation? Like a masked pilot, for example? 

Anyway, they all get blown up. (Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 736: LURIDA

(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)

I was just about to type that this was "a simple, straightforward super-hero comic story" and then immediately had to grapple with how to summarize the following: in the previous issue of Silver Streak Comics, adventurer Lance Hale set out to recover a treasure left by his uncle in an old mine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After helping the immortal Queen of the Underground Empire Aldia and her caveman subjects fight off a lizard man invasion (and incidentally becoming immortal himself, though this is never brought up again), Lance took the treasure with the stated intention of using it to help the needy back in America. Simple!

This issue, we learn that this treasure includes an artifact known as the Gem of Evil and that a femme fatale named Lurida (very on-the-nose name) not only knows about it but somehow knows that Lance Hale has it. She steals the treasure with the help of some more-competent-than-usual henchmen and voila, summons herself the Shadow Monster.

We don't get a real run-down of the Shadow Monster's abilities but on-panel it is at least physically invulnerable and able to grow to giant size, and so I must admit that I find Lurida's use of it to commit bank robberies and insurance fraud to be a bit limited, imagination-wise. Not that I have any sort of Grand Scheme for what I would do with such a beast, mind, I just have a knee jerk sense that if you're using magic or super science or mutant powers or whatever to do something as banal as insurance fraud then you're Doing It Wrong.

As a femme fatale, Lurida is obligated to make a stab at seducing Lance over to her side, just as Lance as a stalwart hero is obliged to insultingly turn her down, and after some monkey business with a fire-based deathtrap Lance manages to destroy both the Gem of Evil and the Shadow Monster, and Lurida completes the set by flinging herself into the same flame she had set for Lance. It's not a great decision considering that no court in the land is equipped to prosecute somebody for shadow demon summoning, but it does tie up the episode in a real neat bow.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 735: THE SILVER-WORSHIPPERS

(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)

Comics book cults, am I right? They'll worship anything. Case in point: the Silver-Worshippers, who believe that silver is sacred and are pretty dang mad that it is being profaned by its use in finance and currency. They also very frustratingly do not seem to have a name that they use for themselves, so the Silver-Worshippers will have to do.

But just how to remove the sacred silver from the hands of the heathen financiers? Why via a series of bank robberies, of course! The Silver-Worshippers devise a system so foolproof that they use it upwards of thirty-five times: set off a big explosion and/or fire on the edge of town and then rob the town bank of all of its silver while the emergency services are busy.

Of course, the Silver Streak is no slouch and so by the thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth silver robbery he is ready to get in on the action, zipping off to Easton, Ohio in time to help with the fire and in grand comics tradition almost catch the bank robbers so that it will be more satisfying when he gets 'em later.

Now to reveal a little bit about the kind of person I am: I absolutely love when an old comic uses a real place (or even better: a real street address) due to the ease with which I can use modern mapping software to check out just where things supposedly happened, and of course I was overjoyed to discover that Easton, Ohio was a real place, but let me tell you, it does not have a downtown, or a bank, or indeed a fire department.

Our adventure in geography continues, as the Silver Streak determines that the Silver-Worshippers have been writing the word DOOM in cursive across a map of the US (this is where my "thirty-five robberies" calculation comes from, by the way), and that Clayton, Ohio is the next likely stop to complete the M.

(Clayton, Ohio is also a real place, by the way, and while it does have a small downtown that I can believe held a robbable bank in 1940 it is not directly South of Easton. What wild geography games was Jack Cole playing with us? did he just pick two names out of the air and get lucky?)

The Silver Streak tracks the cultists sent to rob the Clayton bank back to their hidden temple and comes very close to being gruesomely killed in a wave of molten silver, but because he is a super speed character this only comes about because he clumsily knocks himself out with a bit of falling masonry.

The Silver Streak recovers in time to not be fatally silvered and proves my usual point about speedster heroes vs regular crooks by taking on a whole temple-full of guys using only hand-thrown bricks of silver, only they turn out to actually be silvered bricks, substituted for the real thing by the cult's leader Gregory Randil. "Just who is Gregory Randil?" I hear you cry. Why he is the owner of Randil Silver Co and he has been playing the Silver-Worshippers for chumps by having them steal for him so that he can cut down on overhead. And to forestall any further questions: no, Randil has never appeared or been mentioned in the comic prior to his unmasking. This is the definition of an unfair mystery!

The Randil Silver Co. deception of course does not go down well with the room full of Silver-Worshippers, and the Silver Streak has to bop every one of them into unconsciousness before hauling them off to jail.

NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Okay, here is a bonus thing about me. Sometimes I get so excited and full of pride in myself for figuring something out that I overlook the obvious. Yes, Easton and Clayton are real places in Ohio, as I so smugly pointed out, but it's a Golden Age comic book - if you see a place name one of the things you have to assume is that there is a simple substitution going on. Forget Easton and Clayton, I should have checked for a Weston and assumed that it was Dayton, and when I did in fact do so, the line between them was almost perfect for the finale of a cursive "m". Weston even has a little downtown which, while it doesn't appear to have many buildings over two stories, probably had a perfectly lootable bank in 1940. Just a reminder for me to stay humble.

NOTES: MARCH 2025

Supercut Updates:

Fresh new Skeletons With Jobs and Looming Spectres of Death await ye.

Abandoned Ideas: 

I came very close to assembling a supercut of Women Kissing the Protagonist in the Last Panel While Their Father Looks Coyly On, but it would be way too labour-intensive to assemble. Plus probably a bit creepy to see all in one place.

Anti-Drug Propaganda:

Chic Carter investigates a dangerous drug ring after a college kid goes nuts and kills his friend... ON WEED. (Smash Comics 009, 1940)

Cops Shooting at Fleeing Suspects:

Coupla crooks running from the police get fired upon. (Smash Comics 010, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 734: THE ROBOT MASTER

(Silver Streak Comics 004, 1940)

We open on a flashback, as this unnamed scientist and Captain Ken Keen of the Planet Patrol reminisce about the Comet of Death which has returned to the Solar System 100 years after it initially laid waste to the cities of Earth, Mars and Venus. And since the adventures of the Planet Patrol unlike many if not most Golden Age sci-fi comics is set in a defined time period, we know that that initial attack took place in the futuristic world of 1965 CE!

Back in the even more futuristic world of 2065 CE, Keen and his Martian companion Nirma set out to investigate the comet, only to discover that it is in fact an enormous hostile spacecraft. Making their way inside, they find it to be crewed by extremely cool-looking octopoid "robot animals" that attack on sight.

Keen and Nirma get away from the robots in the objectively funny way of climbing inside a disabled one and sticking their feets out the bottom to scuttle way, tentacles dragging.

This robot disguise is unfortunately not enough to fool the comet-ship's owner, who turns out to be a huge, very cool-looking, robot with a human brain. This Robot Master (referred to as such in exactly one caption, but I have to call them something, don't I?) is a Fletcher Hanks-style villain who hates humanity for unclear reasons and expresses that hate via attempted genocide. The 1965 attempt having failed, the Robot Master is back again for a second pass.

 
Since the previous attempt to destroy humanity via drive-by death ray, the Robot Master seems to be gearing up for a more nuanced second approach, and is starting by converting Nirma and Keen to remote controlled cyborgs and sending them back as espionage assets. The rest of the plan is never elaborated upon, as Ken Keen's cage is conveniently located within reach of a switch labelled "FOR MAGNETIC POWER" but which might as well say "PULL TO DEFEAT THE ROBOT MASTER" as it turns out to magnetize the entire ship in a way that completely immobilizes the ship's robotic occupants. Keen and Nirma then escape and blow the entire place to high(er) heaven.