(Super-Mystery Comics v1 005, 1940)
The Clown! One of the more prolific non-Marvel or DC/Fawcett/Quality super-villains of the Golden Age, and I'm kind of glad that he only made one appearance in 1940 because like his fellow crime clown the Joker, the Clown gets up to a wide variety of different schemes and plots and it's nice to have the breathing room to just introduce his concept without having to detail a bunch of extra antics as well (and speaking of the Joker, I've never been sure if the various early-40s clown villains were all inspired by him or if there was something else in the zeitgeist that was responsible for there being so many of them running around).
The Clown's debut is as spectacular as it is inexplicable: Magno's sidekick Davey is at the library checking out a book on chemistry and it just so happens that the Clown is there to get the same book. Faced with the fact that Davey got it first, how does he respond? By murdering the librarian, attempting to murder Davey and trashing the place. This is how one exemplifies the super-villain lifestyle, friends.
And when Davey runs off and gets Magno, what do they return to find? Why, that the Clown has either burned down what appears to be the New York Public Library or merely set fire to enough of its stock to make a roaring blaze out front, it's hard to tell. Either way, it's a heck of a debut and a real blow to the library sciences.
Now, if you know anything at all about the Clown it's likely the fact that he is a Nazi, as is reported in Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Supervillains, but after scrubbing through a bunch of his appearances I don't know if that's entirely accurate. He certainly works for the Nazis once or twice but I also found a few instances of him in conflict with them - we shall have to see. What he certainly is, however, is vocally and aggressively anti-patriotic, to the point that he almost manages to burn an American flag before Magno and Davey butt in.
This initial appearance also serve to show off the Clown's scientific acumen: he performs super-leaps thanks to his "degravitating solvent," deploys knockout gas to escape the two in their initial encounter, and even manages to whip up an "anti-magnetic compound" to prevent Magno and Davey from disarming him after experience that humiliation in their first encounter.
Some more details from this lore-packed episode: the Clown has a secret lair in a mausoleum in a nearby cemetery, staffed by a suspiciously compliant lab assistant named Lydia. The Clown, having captured Magno and Davey, has plans to vivisect them and learn the secret of their powers.
Though the Clown and Lydia have coated the entire lair in anti-magnetic compound they neglected to consider the pipes in the walls, and the whole place is soon awash (this is how Sub-Zero captured Professor X in their first encounter, too. Villains: look into PVC piping). The compound is washed away in the flood, allowing Magno and Davey to recommence the beating.
The Clown is unsurprisingly not up-to-date on the latest lab safety guidelines and so the fight is only a couple of punches in before some shoddily-stored chemicals end up causing a huge explosion. Magno and Davey are fine, of course, as is Lydia, who - surprise, surprise - turns out to have been mind controlled into being the Clown's lab assistant. And of course the Clown is fine. You simply don't kill off a character like that after one appearance, after all. For our purposes, though, it'll be some months until he returns.
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