(Startling Comics 001, 1940)
Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew "Captain Future" Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against!
Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague's henchmen (called variously the Purple Plague Mob, the Followers of the Purple Plague and the very cool Knights of the Purple Plague), and also with the not-very-genre-savvy police, who keep thinking that the brightly-dressed superhuman is doing the crimes instead of the horde of concussed gangsters littering the landscape around him.
Future does eventually locate the actual Purple Plague himself and at that point it's just a case of one übermensch versus a room full of regular guys plus one older guy in a robe. Even a gang of moderately cool-looking killbots barely slows down the inevitable mass pummelling.
As a side note, one of the Knights of the Purple Plague is Andrew Bryant's boss, Mr Devlin, who fires Bryant as a cost-cutting measure and thus inspires him to pursue the reckless line of research that ends with the accident that turns him into Captain Future. Was Devlin cutting costs in order to funnel profits from the Pacific Electrical Corporation to the Purple Plague, or was the Plague's brand of villainy just an attractive prospect to a small-minded capitalist like Devlin? Either way this is a classic case of the villain inadvertently creating the hero who would destroy them.
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