PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

Sax Rohmer has a lot to answer for.

the Golden Dragon:

We've seen it before and we'll see it again - the Golden Dragon is yet another Fu Manchu-style Yellow Peril crimelord bent on bending the world to his will. He messes up by making his campaign of kidnapping and extortion a bit too obvious, which attracts the attention of the Invisible Hood, who in turn rallies various kidnap victims etc into a fighting force to take the Dragon's organization down from within. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

the Key: 

The Key is a Chinese gang boss operating out of London who specializes in getting his men out of prison almost as soon as they go in, by the simple expedient of faking their deaths with an exotic drug then recovering their "corpses" once they're trucked off for burial. The twist is that the Key is in fact the very non-Chinese warden of Yorkshire Prison, where all of these guys are escaping from. Two things about the Key: 1. while his mask is presumably just as effective and lifelike as any other rubberoid prosthetic in comics it is also just king of hilariously and obviously strapped onto his face as you can see above, and 2. dovetailing from this, I do not think that the Key was originally going to be the warden. I think that someone took a look at a story about a regular gang boss who was just very good at jailbreaks and decided that it needed something more and so went through and added some extra juice via the addition of the mask and a few lines ("Hmm... That voice is familiar...") to the already-drawn panels. For what it's worth, which is not much. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

the Scarlet Seal:

The Scarlet Seal! A character who I absolutely was thinking of when I established the Problematic Round-Up, because he is Very Problematic!

The basic concept of the Scarlet Seal is fairly innocuous, and in fact is one that creator Harry Campbell returned to again and again: the hero who excels at their first career but then casts that aside to take up scientific pursuits, and then is forced into the role of detective by circumstance. There's been Wizard Wells (football star to scientist to reluctant detective), Dean Denton (world's greatest ventriloquist to scientist to detective), John Law, kind of (scientist to lawyer to detective, but really all at once), and now Barry Moore, who leaves a lucrative career as a film star to become a police scientist back in his home town of Center City, and eventually segues into the role of vigilante.

As far as the problematic aspect of the character goes, there are actually two distinct strains of the stuff going on here. The first involves the Center City Police Commissioner, a namby-pamby former social worker and bleeding heart liberal strawman who doesn't even believe in torturing confessions out of people (and also bans the use of informants and undercover police officers for unclear reasons). As it turns out, it was only the threat of the rubber hose that was keeping the Center City underworld in check, and the press is having a field day at the expense of  Barry Moore's dad, Police Chief Moore.

It's at this point that Barry decides that what Center City really needs is some sort of vigilante willing to go out and do the hard work that this soft-hearted Commissioner didn't have the stones for. And you know, if that was it, if he had just put on a costume and set off into the night to beat people up, then it would just be a more extreme version of the authoritarian streak that comic book fans of a more thoughtful nature have always had to reckon with.

But no, because Barry Moore it turns out was not just any actor, he was a villainous character actor, and the last movie he made was one in which he played a sinister Asian. Thus, he makes the decision to weaponize his skill at yellowface by establishing a secondary identity as Wen au Chung, importer of Chinese goods, who in turn is the sinister Scarlet Seal, bane of the underworld and the police alike. It's the old classic Green Hornet setup where the Scarlet Seal acts like he's horning in on various criminal enterprises while actually setting up the crooks to be arrested or (more frequently) killed.

Two further things: 1. He's called the Scarlet Seal because he leaves a red stamp on the foreheads of his victims and 2. In the above panels the Scarlet Seal has just allowed the issue's crooks to kill each other in a gunfight and then arranges things so that one of them, a corrupt cop, is posthumously acclaimed as a hero rather than being held accountable for his crimes. An infuriating character in every respect, that's our Scarlet Seal. (Smash Comics 016, 1940)

Dr Feng: 

Yet another Fu Manchu Yellow Peril villain who is actually a white guy in yellowface. This time we have Dr Feng, head of the Ling Yung Tong aka the Yellow Death Society, but in actuality Blaine Moffat, wealthy real estate mogul. Much of his appearance is taken up with a self-kidnapping scheme to get out of the fact that he has murdered an investigator who got too close, so his actual motivation for becoming a problematic super-villain are left unexplored. (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 746: THE LUMINOUS EYES

(Smash Comics 011, 1940)

London is in the grip of terror! An ominous figure with huge glowing eyes is terrifying/attacking people in the streets and in their homes! The city is in an uproar - where could the Luminous Eyes strike next? And to make the whole situation even more confusing, the only purpose of these attacks appears to be the theft of various common items, all green.

When there's trouble in this particular fictional version of London, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard is the one to call, and indeed he almost corners the Luminous Eyes on his first attempt, only to lose his own green hat (and also attempt to shoot a fleeing criminal in the back, I might add). Still, this represents progress.

Through some wild deduction that we are not really privy to, Cook arrives at the conclusion that all of this theft-of-ggreen has been preparation for an attempt to steal the Royal Crown Emeralds (not actually a part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, I checked) from the Tower of London. Further, he has deduced that the Luminous Eyes is not a man at all! Instead, he has been matching wits with an East Indian Panola (a fictional type of chimpanzee, I checked) with surgically-implanted owl's eyes, and that the prior thefts were all part of an elaborate training regimen by the creature's creator.

And speaking of that creator, this is what I was talking about yesterday in the Bat entry! Is training a surgically-modified chimpanzee to steal green objects as part of an attempt to steal an emerald crown a reasonable thing to do? Of course not, unless you're in a comic book universe. In a comic book universe, such a plan has a reasonable chance of working, and even if it doesn't you're only down a chimp. And an owl, I suppose. Heck, the creator of the Luminous Eyes even gets away with it!

(it turns out that this is the 1000th post that I've made on this blog, and unlike many of the other Milestone Posts, this one falls on a character that I actually have a lot of affection for! Here's to the nxt thousand!)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 745: THE BAT

(Smash Comics 010, 1940)

I had a little intro to this entry all mapped out in my head, something along the lines of how in a super-hero universe, super crimes are just as obvious a choice as mundane ones, like hiring a scientist to mind control your political opponents instead of merely blackmailing them,  and so we shouldn't judge super-villains for over-complicating things, but as a part of actually writing it out I had to go over the details of the Bat aka Graystone's plan in my head and... he over-complicates it.

I don't think that I can lay this out properly in paragraph form, so we must once again turn to our old friend the bulleted list for aid. Here is the Bat's basic plan:

- systematically rob his neighbours

- create a fake monster bat to terrify the countryside and draw suspicion away from himself by linking its appearances to the robberies

- once everyone around him is poor and frightened enough, buy up all the local property for cheap.

Up to this point, everything is fine. It's a bit complicated but appropriately so for a comic book world in which there are people running around putting human brains into gorillas and so forth.

Graystone's downfall presumably begins when he realizes that being the only person in the area not targeted by the Bat is a bit suspicious. The obvious solution to this problem is simply to rob himself and join his neighbours in bemoaning their monster-haunted fate, but instead he:

- fakes the kidnapping of his son (in on the scheme, flies the plane that the bat monster hangs off of, is arguably also the Bat)

- calls in Scotland Yard and makes a bunch of noise

- attempts to kill Captain Cook of Scotland Yard several times as he investigates the mystery

- has the Bat demand that Cook deliver the ransom money so that Graystone can try to kill him again

It's like a list of things you shouldn't do if you want to stay under the radar - heck, killing Cook would only raise the profile of the case! Even the operation of the bat monster involves both a secret airfield and a hidden image projector (that doubles as an engine-killing ray for some reason) so that the bat image can be projected onto a sheet that is being pulled by a plane. Have these fools never considered the humble kite?  

Graystone, his son and various of their servants are of course bundled off to jail to think about wot they done.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 742: THE VOICE

(Smash Comics 007, 1940)

The Voice! A classic and popular alter ego for a reason - all you need is to be heard more than you are seen and you have yourself a gimmick, and if you have some sort of voice-based super power, well that's a real bonus. In this case, the Voice is a mysterious figure who has kidnapped Lola Barnes, daughter of wealthy gem collector Sir Sidney Barnes. The Voice demands 100 000 pounds and the Red Star Diamond in return for Lola's safe return and of course Captain Cook of Scotland Yard is brought in on the case.

The Voice turns out to be Sir Sidney's otherwise-unnamed servant, who seeks to recover the diamond because it was once owned by his ancestors, with the hundred grand as a sweet bonus. But how just is his quest? was the gem sold? stolen? Is this a case of colonialist injustice driving a man to the edge or is it just the scion of a formerly wealthy family taking a shortcut back to his perceived natural station? We will never know, because the Voice is a bad driver and dies while attempting to escape with the swag.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 550: THE NUMBERS

(Smash Comics 004, 1939)

The real heyday of the capital-a Anarchist as societal boogeyman was in the 1920s by my reckoning and so you don't get them in anything like the numbers of pseudo-Nazis and Yellow Perils in the comics of the 1930s, and then of course in the 1940s you get your Axis villains, followed by your dastardly Commies and this is all to say that I enjoy these fellows for their novelty if nothing else.

As for their specifics, well, they're anarchists, aren't they? Anarchists are devoted to the goals of blowing up infrastructure for no stated ideological reason other than unquestioning loyalty the their leader, right? Because that's what these guys do and so they're anarchists and they're anarchists so that's what they do. Simple.

Anyway, they manage to get themselves infiltrated by not one but two undercover operatives from Scotland Yard, because the anonymity of the hooded robe is a fickle mistress, particularly if you're always gathered in a big clump in a previously-established location.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 546: PROFESSOR DWYER

(Smash Comics 003, 1939)

When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he must contend with that most classic of comic book man-monsters: a gorilla with a human brain, wearing a suit.

Dwyer isn't the biggest villain, per se - he robs a safe, transplants a brain from a presumably-unwilling man into a gorilla and briefly kidnaps an elevator boy - but he certainly does manage to rack up an impressive checklist of mad science achievements before being taken into custody:

- fired and in fact confined to an asylum due to the unorthodox nature of his research

- asylum escapee

- castle HQ

- gorilla henchman

- in fact gorilla henchman with a human brain

- engine killing technology

- death ray technology

It's an impressive resume, capped off by his complete lack of physical ability that leads to him being captured  with exactly no trouble despite being armed. The gorilla-man unfortunately does not survive.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 545: "?"

(Smash Comics 002, 1939)

An art thief, but an audacious art thief. "?" is so-named because he sends a message signed thus to the Paris Prefect of Police warning that he would steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and then actually does it from under the noses of the Prefect, the police and Captain Cook of Scotland Yard. Like, while in the same room as them - he just hits the lights and grabs the painting.

Then, a couple of days later, another note from "?" saying that he is going to put the painting back! And he approaches this task with the same level of audacity: reveal the location of the painting and then out the window.

Too bad for "?" that reckless audacity can be a bit predictable - he is immediately corralled on the street below and turns out to be criminal Renee Landrue, who simply stole the painting as a way to sell on 4 forged copies of the Mona Lisa. It's practically not even a crime! If only he hadn't tried to blow up Captain Cook and the Prefect in between the theft and the return, he'd practically be a folk hero! BRING BACK the audacious French thief "?", I say! Give Batman's filing system a workout!