(Captain Battle Comics 002, 1941)
The Sisters of Fear, a trio of witches who either are the Three Witches of "Macbeth" fame or who take a lot of inspiration from them, have a new scheme: to create a horrible creature to spread death and destruction across the face of the Earth.
As part of the prep for this task they gather together all of their fiendish allies, the Demons of Land, Sea and Air, and I must commend them on being a diverse and fun-filled collection of grotesques
The Sisters do the "double double toil and trouble" routine - either in homage to the great witches of antiquity or as a callback to one of their own classic numbers, depending - and call Dr Horror into being. There are three things worth pointing out about this guy:
1. his pupils are little human skulls
2. he's a dedicated nudist
3. somehow he is a doctor, despite a) having just been created and b) having an innate antipathy toward human society, the only place where being a doctor has any meaning. But perhaps that's the point - that he cares so little for the mores of humanity that he's going to adopt that title, our puny certification boards be damned
Dr Horror is a pretty straightforward guy: he hates humanity, he has all the terrible power of the elements at his command and thus he spends most of his time post-creation blasting humanity and its trappings to smithereens.
Dr Horror's depredations are unopposed by any hero. Instead, the forces of nature themselves rise up and destroy him by holding him in place with a whirlwind and then exploding a volcano under his feet. There's a strong implication that this is because Dr Horror is a being of darkness and evil and that the essence of nature is bright and good, which is all fine but I really resent the implication that the dinosaurs were also evil and that that is why nature destroyed them.
Dr Horror swears that he will return to avenge himself and the Sisters of Fear (also blown up), but he has not yet managed to do so.
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