(Science Comics 003, 1940)
Dynamo has been stirring up trouble in the Unspecified City underworld. He's captured Rats Rako and a significant portion of his gang and now Rats' lieutenant Gun Ramey must figure out just how to deal with a superhuman do-gooder. It's lucky for him that Unspecified City has a resident criminal scientist, the Genius (ignore the fact that they're calling him Electro, this is from his first adventure before he changes it).
I'll be honest, my first instinct was to chuck the Genius into the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, but between the name and the fact that he looks like someone did one of those awful clickbait art exercises where they do a "realistic" version of a cartoon character, in this case Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and then ran that picture through a filter to make it look like an illustration. He is very distinct looking is what I am saying. And look at the size of that melon!
The Genius lives up to his reputation, and one week later he is able to depower Dynamo and drop him in a pit with almost laughable ease. And then Gun Ramey make one of the classic inexplicable blunders and decides to save some money by stiffing the Genius on the bill, and as usually happens when someone in fiction cheats the person who specializes in deathtraps and murder, Gun finds himself in a deathtrap, about to be murdered.
Luckily for Gun, the Dynamo and basically everyone in Unspecified City other than the Genius, the particular deathtrap that the two find themselves in is not a bespoke one that was made specifically in order to dispose of an electricity-powered superhuman but an old workaday deathtrap that the Genius has been using for years, to the extent that Gun knows all about it (and yet still got lippy with the Genius about his fee - probably the reason Gun is still a gang lieutenant rather than a gang boss). And a key thing about this deathtrap is that it not only features a spiked ceiling that lowers and crushes the occupants but also an exposed wire, so that the Genius' victims must grapple with the choice of whether to wait for the spikes or end it all with the wire. Dynamo/Electro obviously chooses the latter and, revitalized, zaps the Genius into submission.
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