MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 909: THE SPIDER

(Whiz Comics 022, 1941)

In what turns out to be Dan Dare's final recorded case, he is asked to protect a man named Dr Phoebus Weber from being murdered by a mysterious figure known only as the Spider.

Upon entering Weber's home, Dan and Carol are almost immediately attacked by the Spider, who I have to give partial credit to for the costume. Sure it appears to have a more beetle-like body plan and the head of a mosquito, but what's more important is that it has the full eight limbs, including four useless ones hanging off the torso that surely must constantly be in the way. Accuracy be damned, I love a commitment to the bit.

The Spider also has a third central eye that is supposedly able to emit a hypnotic light, but if it does there is no actual evidence of it in the text. Perhaps Dan Dare is merely a paragon of mental fortitude.

The Spider's attempt to kill Dan fails thanks to an over-reliance on a hypnotic eye/ stabbing proboscis combo that he never really manages to pull off and I can only imagine was further hindered by the extra arms. He is unmasked to reveal the in-retrospect-supiciously-named Dr Weber, but that's not all, because...

Weber is in turn unmasked to reveal that he is in fact Dan's old enemy Hypno Harry! This has all been an attempt to kill Dan in revenge for his foiling Harry's old racket of hypnotizing bank clerks with his gimmicked glass eye, and just imagine the impact that this story might have had if we had ever heard about any of this before the Spider reared his improbable head!

Still, a costumed crook is a pretty good note for Dan and Carol to go out on after 20-odd issues of solving one mystery after another. Let's hope that they were finally able to get that vacation. 

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 033

Just another buncha jerks.

John Elton: 

This fellow brings us right back to the roots of the Generic Costumed Villain Round-Up, being a businessman who puts on a mask to run a gang and kill off the other officers of his company so that he can buy up all their shares and make a fortune. Plus, his name is John Elton, which doesn't mean anything but is still a fun coincidence. Dan Dare gets 'im. (Whiz Comics 016, 1941)

the War Lord:

Like the War Maniac before him, the War Lord is a generic and unseen stand-in for Adolf Hitler with a good enough villain name that I had to highlight it. A whole passel of his agents feature in the story in which Smasher Spy goes back to being Spy Smasher and get beaten up by Spy Smasher, Smasher Spy and Captain Marvel. 

It's not particularly germane to anything but this panel of Spy Smasher flying out a window into the arms of the War Lord's agents after almost being blown up looks very nice and I had nowhere else to use it. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

The War Lord returns to vex Spy Smasher in Whiz Comics 019, in a rare return appearance for a generic Axis dictator. In fact, he is also the power behind the fascist group the Blitzys and Ibis the Invincible foe Half-Man as well - he's one of the most prolific Hitler stand-ins of the Golden Age!

The War Lord finally shows up in person in Whiz Comics 024 and while he is clearly just a straight-up stand-in for Hitler his main character trait seems to be in expressing himself like a disappointed father. He sticks around just long enough to instill a deep sense of despair in the Half-Man, leaving him vulnerable to being turned to the side of good by a bit of kindness from Ibis the Invincible. Once again being a bad boss fails to pay off!

Puni, God of Fire: 

The above text box precedes the Lance O'Casey story in Whiz Comics 018 and let me tell you: none of that stuff happened in the prior issue. We are very much dropped in media res on the tropical Antarctic island populated by cannibals and also lost explorer Hiram T. Wallis - I don't know if this is some remnant of a never-published story or just an attempt to shake things up again (EDIT: it happens, in fact, in Whiz Comics 019. The two-part story was just published in the wrong order).

Lance and his ever-expanding supporting cast (including Hiram T. Wells, old-timey pirate Dan'l Doom and not one but two monkey sidekicks) are venturing into a volcano to get some gold that Wells had found there when they are confronted and menaced by the self-proclaimed Puni, God of Fire, who is in actuality Marino, a sailor shipwrecked at the same time as Wells and presumably driven insane by ten years of living in a volcanic cave. Puni/Marino never manages to get very close to killing the party but he does try in his way, and by gar can he belt out a villainous pronouncement.

Everything ends up okay, as Marino has the kind of insanity that can be cured via a solid smack to the jaw and a dunk in the ocean. 

This adventure also features a giant treasure-guarding parrot, just one of the many cool creatures that do their best to convince me to add the truly life-ending task of chronicling all comic book monsters to my already overloaded to-do pile. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

Herculo Svenson: 

This is Herculo Svenson, pirate, Doctor Voodoo antagonist for several issues and man in the running for best name in comics certainly for 1941 and possibly for all time. He kills a whole valley full of giants, kidnaps their regular-sized queen and makes off with magical McGuffin the Golden Flask before eventually getting killed by bigger villain Black Marco. (Whiz Comics 022, 1941)

DIVINE ROUND-UP 024

Not a lot of depth to this batch of gods.

the Tiger God: 

When the Tiger's Eye Emerald, formerly installed as the eye in an idol of the Tiger God in India, is stolen, detective Dan Dare is brought in on the case and almost immediately captured by the tiger-worshippers who were responsible for the theft. As usual it is only the current and not historical owner of the stolen artifact who is considered legitimate and so after slaying the avatar of the Tiger-God pictured above, Dan returns the emerald.

God Style: Idol (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

the Sun God:

Samar of the Jungle gets into it with a local tribe and ends up captured and slated for sacrifice to their Sun God. Disappointingly, though this involves being burned, it is at a boring old stake rather than by the sun itself. Just as well that he manages to escape.

God style: Animist (Feature Comics 049, 1941)

Takal:

The final adventure of the Bob Kane-created kid gang Rusty and His Pals concerns a hunt for lost treasure, specifically the Idol of Takal, stolen by a group of villainous ex-circus performers called the Unholy Four twenty years earlier. Takal doesn't actually feature too prominently into Rusty and the Pals' attempt to re-steal the idol for themselves, aside from being made to talk via ventriloquism to awe his worshippers. 

God Style: Idol (Adventure Comics 049, 1940)

Tanis: 

In one of the two separate adventures in which the Three Aces find a remnant of lost Atlantis, they travel deep blow the Azores to settle a conflict over Atlantean succession caused by power-grasping courtiers. The ultimate solution: use surface world chemistry to simulate an intervention by the god Tanis by setting the throne room on fire. It's unorthodox, but it works! 

God Style: Invoked (Action Comics v1 038, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 905: THE MISSING MUMMY

(Whiz Comics 020, 1941)

Racing to the Hayten Museum in New York City in response to a plea for assistance, super-detective Dan Dare discovers a body upon arrival and is immediately accused of being the murderer by what turns out to be his employers, once everything is cleared up.

It turns out that these men are either archaeologists or the kind of genteel looters who supplied museums back in the day, and that they recently opened a cursed Egyptian tomb along with four others who have since been murdered. The murderer: someone claiming to be the former occupant of that tomb and calling themself the Missing Mummy, who is demanding the return of an emerald that was stolen by one of the expedition members.

The Missing Mummy's depredations are clearly designed to flush the emerald thief out of hiding, and it works, as that night one of the remaining four (named Stackley, fyi) retrieves the gem from its hiding place in the museum (did I mention that these guys all live in the museum? Because they do) and makes a break for it, only to be killed and relieved of his prize before he can get away. Meanwhile, assistant Carol Clews is kidnapped out from under Dan Dare's nose while he is examining the mysterious return of the lower-case missing mummy, because the upper-case Missing Mummy is of course one of the remaining three expedition members.

Dan manages to literally stumble into the Mummy's secret lair and is forced to shoot him dead rather than allow him to kill Carol (and just why did he kidnap her in the first place? Love of the game I guess). Upon unmasking the Missing Mummy, he is revealed to be Hector Brown, the man who hired Dan in the first place, and as someone who has read all of the Dan Dare stories let me tell you: I was not shocked. I'd estimate that up to a quarter of all of Dare's clients are actually the guilty party attempting to give themselves a veneer of innocence. It never works of course, but just like the fact that dressing up like a mummy and killing off the members of a group that you also belong to only serves to reduce the pool od suspects to a manageable level until you are caught, it's the kind of lesson that you only learn after it's too late.

Terrific as always to see a fake mummy running around in a comic. No note, keep them coming.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 901: XYZ

(Whiz Comics 014, 1941) 

Dan Dare exists in a world rife with crime in which he is seemingly the only person capable of solving an moderate-to-difficult mystery. Thus, he and his assistant/lover Carol Clews constantly fly from city to city capturing crooks, while Carol fruitlessly attempts to steal Dan away for a much-needed vacation.

In this particular installment, Dan and Carol have been summoned to Chicago by TL Thornton, Publisher of the Daily Clarion and subject of a terror campaign by the city's mysterious crimelord, known only as XYZ. 

XYZ's reach is such that a minion captured during an attempt to blow up Dare, Clews and Thornton is assassinated under the very nose of Thornton's secretary Miss Holmes. Is there no crime too audacious for this mastermind?

Upon walking Miss Holmes home, Dare learns the truth: though he and Thornton had been looking for a male crime boss, XYZ is in fact a woman. Yes, Miss Holmes was conducting her criminal enterprise out of the front office of one of the men trying to expose her and that audacity, plus preconceived notions of the masculine nature of criminality, helped her do it.

Just kidding: Dare cottoned on to the possibility that Miss Holmes was XYZ when she killed that captured henchman. He arranged for Carol to follow them and call the police to their location after a suitable interval - Dan Dare is a feminist after all!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 899: THE BIG SHOT

(Whiz Comics 012, 1941)

The city of Watertown is under the thumb of a mysterious crime lord known only as the Big Shot, and Edward Lucas, the Special Prosecutor in charge of tracking the Big Shot down, has been shot and killed just before a meeting with Watertown District Attorney Harper. Enter super sleuth Dan Dare and his associate Carol Clews to pick up the trail and finish Lucas' last case.

The most obvious suspect is of course DA Harper, and since Dan Dare stories are a little too short for red herrings that is exactly who it turns out to be. I wouldn't call the Big Shot the criminal mastermind of the century or even the week, but he does have the good (fashion) sense to have his minions dress in little domino masks so I must give him a small amount of credit.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 021

None of this science is mad or criminal peer reviewed. 

This fellow attempts to blackmail Dynamo's unnamed home city by various methods, including Causing and then threatening further widespread destruction with his "liquid air" freeze cannon and kidnapping city council members and then subjecting some of them to a frankly horrific bone liquefying ray. 

The main problem with him is honestly the fact that he has no established name. He does go by "Miss Monda" while he is posing as the mayor's secretary in order to get the inside scoop on how his extortion attempts are going, which turns out to be his downfall when he is dewigged by Dynamo. Also, I just realized that in that last panel you can see that he is in fact wearing a full suit under the Miss Monda dress, making this the most improbable disguise in comics by my reckoning. (Weird Comics 009, 1940)

Dr Z here has long been working on a mind-reading device, to no avail. He arranges for psychologist Larry Hunter to arrive at his isolated mansion in the hopes that forcing him to collaborate on the invention will lead to some sort of breakthrough, and it does! Alas for Dr Z, as s is so often the case in such stories the new technology is then turned on its villainous facilitator, as Hunter uses Dr Z'z own thoughts to show him how to eliminate the murderous scientist using his own deathtrap. 

Hunter was probably supposed to go on to use the Thought Receiver to fight more crime in future adventures but as with so many of the denizens of Wham Comics he was never seen again. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)

The mad Dr Chow operates a wax museum at the New York World's Fair that he stocks with living humans who he has frozen with a weird drug. Why is he doing this? It's unclear, but the top three answers that I can think of are : 1. for kicks, 2. for cash and 3. as a way of testing out the formula. He is captured by private detective Dan Dare, and unsettlingly there is no nod to the idea of thawing out the doctor's victims, even though they are implied to still be alive in some way. (Whiz Comics 006, 1940)

I had a lot of rising expectations as the character of Dr Lleh was introduced. Firstly, he was pretty clearly telegraphed to be a former member of a Tibetan archaeological expedition who was consumed by revenge after being dismissed for theft and was now haunting the countryside with his horde of experimental subjects. Secondly, his name is "Hell" backwards.

The good times continue, as Dr Lleh derails the Orient Express (a train that historically did not travel through Tibet) in order to acquire more experimental subjects, only to find that Professor Davis - the very man who wad fired him! - was aboard, along with his daughter, plus indomitable detective Dr Fung and his assistant Dan Barrister. All four are away not just to the Temple of Hades but under it, to "Dr Lleh's Kingdom of Hades" (no I do not know what a temple to Hades is doing in Tibet).

All my hopes are dashed once Dr Lleh's actual style of experimentation is revealed. Bribing two big dudes with llama steak (no I do not know how this guy is getting llama steak in Tibet) to pull a woman's arms off is not research that would be publishied in even mad science journals, Dr Lleh. I hate to say it but I'm glad that Dr Fung blows you up.  (Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)