(Bang-Up Comics 001, 1941)
Commander Darke, though ostensibly on a mission to invade the United States with his private military, is the arch-foe of scientist-adventurer Cosmo Mann and as such spends his entire career trying to Steal Those Gizmos. Perhaps things would be different if there had been more than three issues of Bang-Up Comics for Darke and Mann to clash, but as it stands all we get are the opening moves of their epic struggle.
You probably already took note of the extreme ostentation on display in Commander Darke's (almost certainly self-designed) uniform, but the seriousness with which he takes his wardrobe is really underscored in the above panels in which we can not only see that he took the care to screw in his monocle even when waking up in the middle of the night to take a call but that even his double-breasted pyjamas have epaulettes on them.
I was all ready to give Darke a bit of credit for undertaking the mission to secure Cosmo Mann's Sun Ray Gun himself, but once he left his captured underlings behind to die in a cloud of poison gas I was forced to reevaluate: going himself is a part of his being a Bad Boss, an expression of his disdain for the ability of his minions to do even this simple task. He does have a cool-looking gas mask though.
Commander Darke has a lot of villainous presence or potential, but never really gets a chance to show it off: he captures the Sun Ray and a man who he thinks is Cosmo Mann but turns out to be his assistant Archy and then spends his next appearance on the back foot as Mann attempts to recapture them from Darke as he escapes in his dirigible. His particular brand of bombastic villainy was lost to the vagaries of the comic book boom, alas.
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