MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 955: THE YELLOW SPOT

(Dynamic Comics 001, 1941)

Scientists across the US are going missing, kidnapped by  the magical madman known as the Yellow Spot!

This brain-draining crime spree inspires the magical scholar Professor Moore to create the super-hero Dynamic Man, which in turn inspires the Yellow Spot to murder Professor Moore. He is just a wee bit too late, however, and instead of preventing the creation of Dynamic Man he merely provides him with a bit of extra motivation in the form of a dying father figure.

But just why is the Yellow Spot after these men of science? Why, to push back against the death of superstition (very funny in retrospect, as in out world the avowed hyper-rationalism of the 40s and 50s gave way to the mystic syncretism of the 60s and ultimately to the proud anti-science of today). He's got a machine that shrinks a man's head and renders him like unto a child, and presumably he plans to keep on shrinking heads until it has an effect on the global scientific consensus.

Dynamic Man shows up just in time to witness a head shrinking, and while it looks to be a pretty uneven contest at first, he is captured in a net made of woven black magic (very cool) that can only be cut using a knife "forged from the bones of a dying murderer" (even cooler, if hard to imagine).

The thing about a net that can only be cut by a special knife is that it's only as effective as your ability to keep that knife away from your prisoner, and I would argue that leaving it unattended on a table in the same room as the prisoner while a bunch of easily suggestible man-children wander around is tantamount to just handing it over. Which is a long-winded way of saying that Dynamic Man gets free with the help of a headshrunken scientist and starts beating up the Yellow Spot's men.

The Yellow Spot makes a break for it, but in an eleventh hour bit of plot contrivance it turns out that his bat form (i.e., the main way he gets around) is also the only form in which he can be harmed, and as it flies slower than Dynamic Man, he ends up as a flat bat. Personally, I would sacrifice a bit of convenience to avoid being squashed on the wing like this, but then again I am not an insane magic man.

Finally, I would like to highlight the Yellow Spot's minions, a bunch of low-grade monster men who he calls the Hideous Ones at least once. Particularly that last fellow, who I swear has half a mustache. A bold choice!

Categorized in: Abstract Concepts (Shapes), Colours (Yellow), Origins (Henchmen)