(Action v1 043, 1941)
Vigilante's first super-foe has the misfortune to share his name with a certain Flash villain beloved of James Robinson, so it's just as well that he's nothing more than a gang boss who uses stage illusions to conceal his real identity because he is never seeing the light of day again.
He did manage to make a second appearance in the Golden Age, so at least there's that.
(Action Comics v1 040, 1941)
Yet another foreign agent looking to weaken America, the Purple does so by forming what is supposedly a patriotic society but in reality is a collection of fervent dupes that can be aimed at whatever target he wishes. Mr America steps in and lays out the truth for the Purple Gang but I fear for the future of a community filled with that many dim bulbs.
As always, massive appreciation for a villain who dresses their henchmen in basically the same costume as them.
(Action Comics v1 039, 1941)
The Ghost is one of Superman's earliest superpowered foes, being Brett Bryson, a chemist who was accidentally irradiated while conducting an experiment and, having found himself with both a burning radium touch and a short time left to live, set out to steal enough in the time he had left to provide for his family once he was finally gone.
But there is a twist to the Ghost's story! The lab accident? Planned by Bryson's greedy partners! The stolen money? Was never going to be delivered to Bryson's family! I like this because this is the earliest example of the On Purpose Lab Accident Origin that I'm aware of in comics and that's a reasonably common origin! (Brett Bryson does not like it and murders his partner before dying himself)
(Action Comics v1 037)
Just a society playboy who puts on a mask to run his crooked casino empire. He might just be my new example of the bare minimum that I need to consider someone a super-villain - nobody is even surprised when his identity is revealed, but he has the barest film of anonymity along with a secret boat dock and a moderately cool name.
Also he gets hit by a boat.
(Action Comics v1 036, 1941)
Another day, another spy from no specific nation striking at the US military for uncertain reasons. This one is even less successful than usual, as he almost blows up an Army convoy and almost blows up an artillery range. But what can I do: I'm a sucker for a monocle, a guy who throws poisoned darts and a neato name.
(Action Comics v1 035, 1941)
Yet another spy encountered by Clip Carson, the Adder was interested in blowing up the Panama Canal for unclear reasons. Much more interestingly, he took his name from a snake-shaped ring which both fatally poisoned those he punched with it and left a cool snake mark on the spot he hit, and evidently he used it enough that his men spoke of him in hushed terms as "the Child of Death," which is an amazing name.
As with so many villains who use a cool signature weapon, the Adder ends up falling on his own ring. A sad end.
(Action Comics v1 035, 1941)
The Spider is a foreign agent with a lot of guys named Herman and Otto working for him who attempts to disrupt US military preparedness. To that end he blows up a military parade and almost manages to poison an entire army camp being captured by Mr America.
(Action Comics v1 032-033, 1941)
Mister Z is actually plantation owner Grasso, who is actually X-11, notorious agent of a "hostile government" whose schemes are placed in jeopardy when a mineral deposit is discovered near his hideout in Colombia. His efforts to shut down the incipient mining operations bring in adventurer Clip Carson but he meets his actual end when he's gunned down by a young boy whose father he had killed.
(Action Comics 027, 1940)
What makes them a super-villain? It's 100% the name plus the fact that "air pirate" along with "submarine pirate" and for that matter "regular pirate" are styles of crime that just reek of super-villainy for me.
What about them is interesting? Aside from the inherent romantic nature of the air pirate, the only real thing of note about the Blue Raider is that his plane is named Hank.
(Action Comics 030, 1940)
I've decided to introduce a system for dealing with some of the more minor super-villains who do not incite as much excitement in me to vomit out more than a cursory sentence about them (slightly unfair to the Master, who is kind of interesting, but I am uninspired today) In such cases, we will be answering one or both of the following questions:
What makes them a super-villain? In addition to his super-villain name, the Master has three qualifying super-villain attributes
1) Methods: he kills those who resist his extortion attempts by releasing huge poisonous beetles in their homes.
2) Powers: the Master, unlike many of Zatara's opponents, is a magic user. Specifically, he has the ability to resist and shrug off Zatara's own magic
3} Association: he employs the services of the Tigress
What's interesting about them? Honestly, it's the idea of a crook being able to resist a magical hero's powers. Underused and underappreciated!
(Action Comics 030, 1940)
In thinking about Zolar I realized that he engages in a surprisingly common plot-expedient activity which I, unwilling to root around on TVTropes for whatever twee thing they might dub it, am hereby going to call "the Reel": the villain sends a minion from their exotically-located HQ to wherever the hero is located to accomplish some sort of McGuffin task - collect an item, kill or kidnap someone, etc - thereby alerting the hero to the threat and drawing them to the exotic location. As soon as I thought about this I realized that many of the minor super-villains on our list employ the Reel: the Gorilla King sends a squad of gorilla-assassins to kill his enemy, thereby alerting Zatara, for instance.
In Zolar's case, he sends some of his men (mind controlled desert tribespeople, natch) to Metropolis to eliminate an impediment to his plans, which involves first Lois Lane and then Superman. Cut to the Sahara Desert, where Zolar is trying to conquer the lost city of Ulonda using a combination of mind control, rocket planes and flesh-destroying death orbs.
The whole thing ends in bloodshed: Zolar and his lieutenant attempt to death orb Superman only to have it bounce back on themselves, while his fleet of mind controlled rocket pilots are caused to crash by a slightly-pre-anti-killing-code Superman. The lost city of Ulonda, though battered, survives.
(Action Comics 028, 1940)
AKA the Leopard Skin Thief AKA the Strongarm Bandit - this is our first example of a clear super-villainous character who has not bothered to give themself a name and so we must take one from the text boxes or (as in this case) from the names given to them by the other characters.
Mr Leopard Skin is fun because he is obviously dressed as a circus strongman, and that is because his crime career is an attempt to frame a circus strongman. The actual culprit, the circus clown, has to basically be caught before anyone else at the circus thinks to mention that the clown used to be the old strongman before a stronger strongman showed up and he got demoted and maybe might want revenge.
(Action Comics 025, 1940)
Former chess master turned crimelord, Asmodeus has three of my favourite features in a villain:
-he employs the Tigress
-he builds little models of crime scenes to use as teaching aids for instructing his gang
-he lives in a house of traps
Unfortunately for him, he ends up battling Zatara, so all the traps in the world avail him not.
(Action Comics 025, 1940)
The "World's Greatest Hypnotist," Medini embarks on a life of crime using his gifts. He's so good at hypnosis, in fact, that he is able to put Superman himself out of commission with the power of his mind, which might be why his story ends with Superman throwing an entire plane at his head.
(Action Comics 024, 1940)
Chalo was a stage magician who murdered his own brother to acquire real magical secrets which in turn he used for crime. He took a page from the Mad Lama's book and hired at least one other magical crook as a henchman, a fire- and snake-summoner named Arko.
By far the best thing about Chalo, however, is that his major use of the powers he murdered his brother to get is summoning a weird toad that freaks everyone out. He does it twice! Solid minor villain, should be BROUGHT BACK in the background of the Oblivion Bar or somewhere like that.
(Action Comics 018-063, 1939-1943)
The Three Aces consist of Gunner Bill (blonde, bland), Fog Fortune (fat, Cockney - the kind of character who starts out 1% comic relief and increases by increments until he is unrecognizable. In this case he gets fatter and more faux-Cockney until his word balloons are up to 1/2 apostrophe) and Whistler Will (dark haired ladies man - more on him in a moment). They're fairly standard aviator type heroes except for a couple of things: they have a greater than average rate of running into stuff like lost civilizations and minor super-villains and they have Whistler Will.
Okay, maybe I'm bigging up Will a bit. For most of their adventures he's just your standard square-jawed lothario, but in Action Comics 022 they did a peek into his backstory and it made a big impression on me:
Whistler Will is some sort of feral desert child or fey spirit of the American Southwest or something, an implacable and free spirit of justice. He has a mystic othersense that tells him in this issue that his adopted sister is in trouble with enough advance notice to fly across the continent to help her. He does stuff like this fairly regularly and his mystic senses express themselves as eerie whistling. All of this is very cool. All of this is never referenced again.
Anyway, the Three Aces all fought in WWI so I guess I'll mark them as dead, with a dead? for Will because maybe he just went back to his home in the halls of Avalon or wherever.
(Action Comics 023, 1940)
Quetzal's actual motivations are unexplored in his encounter with the Three Aces, but his methods - living in a lost Aztec city and using a fleet of remote controlled planes piloted by zombies to destroy anyone who approaches - are fairly indicative of a villainous turn of mind.
(Action Comics 022, 1940)
Whether the capital-D Demon is actually a lowercase-d demon is never actually resolved, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. He shows up when a friend of Tex Thomson's named Cary James ignores local superstitions to visit an island in the Indian Ocean, where he is quickly captured and murdered by the Demon, who then assumes his appearance and identity via fell majicks.
The Demon's only goal seems to be to murder everyone who knew the original Cary James, but whether there is a further motive to his actions is left unexplained, as one of James' friends happens to have a mystic amulet that is the only thing capable of defeating him. The amulet must be applied directly to the forehead, like so:
Love that bop on the head action. I also love that though this is ostensibly a Tex Thomson adventure, he basically acts in the role of observer, as the locket-thrower Dr Drummond drives much of the action of tracking, trapping and ultimately destroying the Demon. Huzzah for competent non title characters!
(Action Comics 022, 1940)
The Mask is your garden-variety master of disguise, con artist subtype: he assumes the identities of others in order to acquire monies from their banks and businesses. He is distinguished from the rest of his ilk in two ways: firstly in that he is our second villain to employ the aid of the Tigress and secondly in that he actually has his face surgically altered to make his impersonations.
His downfall comes when he assumes the identity of Zatara in order to claim some reward money that the magician had turned down, leading to this:
It's sometimes unclear whether Zatara ever reverses this kind of transformation, so I just go by what's said and done on-panel. If he turns a crook to stone and says he's going to come back for them later then he does. Otherwise, there's a petrified wrongdoer in a field somewhere to this day. All this is to say: Zatara never gives any indication that he's going to change the Mask back, so I imagine that he served his sentence for fraud and had to reintegrate to society looking like that.
(Action Comics 021, 1940)
The Master of the Moor is part of the kind of comic story that starts out overly complex - the corrupt sheriff and coroner of a small town in Sussex, England plot to replace local aristocrat Lord Ralway with a double in order to steal his lands - and with the addition of a few comic book elements becomes just completely untenable. To whit:
-the man who they have recruited to be the double, the Master of the Moor himself, seems to be Way Too Into his role, as witnessed in the above panel. If any crime required a cool and measured hand it would be the impersonation of a public figure. Costumes and code names and oh, let's say trained giant condors used to assassinate witnesses are a bit too flashy for such a sneaky task.
-they decide to proceed with the replacement despite the fact that the famed magician and super-hero Zatara is visiting. Now, it's sometimes hard to judge just how famous Zatara is supposed to be in these comics, despite his fairly well-publicized world-saving exploits, but any visitor is surely an undue risk in such an operation, right?
Anyway, they get well and truly magicked up.
(Marvel Comics 001, 1939*) No character in comics history swings more wildly and frequently between super-villain and super-hero than Namor ...
