MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 841: SIKANDUR, THE ROBOT MASTER

(War Comics 001, 1940) 

Sikandur, the Robot Master, is a villain-in-a-starring-role who sadly only appeared once. Any evil roboticist who, for example, makes his robots red-hot as a way of discouraging those who might grapple them is an evil roboticist I want to read about, and I only got the one opportunity to do so.

Sikandur need gold in order to build more robots, though whether he needs it as a necessary component or as a handy source of cash is unspecified. To that end, he sends his boy Robot X5328B to the United States to rob Fort Knox.

If Sikandur's feature had continued to appear then presumably these three dingbats would have been the ones who would be foiling him going forward. As it is, they're just three... college students? who figure out that Robot X5328B is something more than a simple traveller with jet-black eyes and kind of bumble around trying to figure out what he's up to.

Also please not that Sikandur has apparently "conquered half of Europe" at this point.

Robot X5328B is an advanced robot indeed, because he (?) does some excellent and very menacing threats before being undermined by Sikandur's caution re: the small-town police missing three local oafs. And that's a wrap on Sikandur the Robot Master. Presumably the next few issues would have concerned our unlikely trio's efforts to prevent the robbery of Fort Knox and then ultimately the end of Sikandur and his dreams of world conquest.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 019

We may have gotten away from the "costumed" and "generic" is debatable but you can take the "villain" from my cold dead hands. 

This guy is part of a gang who:

-broke into Fort Knox via a secret tunnel

-smashed up up all of the gold and mixed it into stone in a nearby quarry

-transported that gold-bearing stone from the quarry to a mansion

-melted down the gold and concealed it inside a series of bronze statues

And while I suppose that you want to take a lot of care to conceal your movements when you are looting the US gold reserve I just have to be on record as saying that this is an unnecessarily complex scheme. Just book it for the border, fellows!

Also Dynamo, stung by the razzing of government investigators, gilds the entire gang... thus killing them? before turning them in. Brutal stuff. (Science Comics 002, 1940)

This very cool looking but unnamed spy chief has developed anti-Dynamo technology that renders him immune to the various beams and rays that usually assail the hero's foes, which he uses to make off with some explosive wire that Dynamo and the nerds at his day job have made. He pulls off this theft pretty slickly but then completely fails to recognize the difficulty of attempting to pull off a scheme (in this case blowing up US military installations using explosive wire) while a super-hero is after you. It's a real failure to recognize the opportunity to slay Dynamo while he can't get you, unnamed spy chief! (Science Comics 004, 1940)

John J. Hix, millionaire and asylum escapee, needs to get revenge on his old friend for some reason, so he puts on a cloak that makes him look like the ghost of a cat and hires some crooks to kidnap his friend's daughter Doris Dare (a "society deb singer," which is not a type of entertainer I am familiar with. Was it a thing? It's hard to tell!) so that he can kill her. He is opposed by heroic police inspector the Duke and ends up blowing himself up rather than be captured. (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

The Sky Wolf encounters this goofy-but-also-cool magnetically-shielded fire-breathing duck/dragon/plane as it attacks fishing boats one day and traces it back to a similarly magnetically-shielded base where crooks armed with plastic guns inform him that all of this is essentially prep work in advance of setting up a smuggling operation.

Now, issues of whether the expense involved in setting up this operation might cut substantially into any profits realized from it or indeed whether simply selling this magnetic bullet shield to one of the many armies extant in 1940 might be more profitable aside... my admittedly layman's understanding of how smuggling works is that you really want to keep it as quiet as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but establishing a huge messy monster-infested exclusion zone might just... draw more attention to your operation? Like a masked pilot, for example? 

Anyway, they all get blown up. (Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 472: THE GREAT QUESTION

(Amazing-Man Comics 005, 1939)

The Great Question is a member of the Council of Seven, the mysterious body of scientists and mystics who trained and orphan boy into John Aman aka the Amazing-Man. The inner dynamics of the Council of Seven can be a bit hard to parse but early on it seems like the Great Question is if not in charge at least an unofficial leader. Later, as he has more and more conflict with Amazing-Man that role is filled by Aman's mentor Nika.

From issue 5 to 11, the first year of Aman's adventures, the dynamic is such: Amazing-Man travels around helping people and inadvertently foiling the Great Question's various schemes while the Question attempts to bend Aman to his will - above is a picture of the one time he managed to actually do it, turning Amazing-Man into some sort of terrifying crime genie.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 012, Aman answers a summons to return to the Council and is rewarded with a harness that both makes his "green mist" power permanent and renders him immune to the Question's mental control. Suddenly, everything changes - sure, Amazing-Man is still travelling around foiling the Great Question's various schemes, but without the mind control aspect to their dynamic it becomes a much more satisfying hero/villain pairing.

(This seems like a good place for an aside: it's never explicitly stated but implicitly it seems like the Council of Seven must know that their most prominent member is a super-villain. Did they recruit him because he was one or was it incidental to the other things he brought to the role? Impossible to say. The gift of the anti-mind control harness makes it clear that they preferred Aman in a heroic role but that's about all that can be determined)

From this point the Great Question really comes into his own as an international super-villain. No matter where Amazing-Man goes, the Question has a group of generic goons working on a scheme of some sort. This all comes to a head in Amazing-Man Comics 021, in which Amazing-Man and the Great Question face off on an island base crawling with uniformed henchmen armed with forcefield projectors to bottle up Aman's gas form.

There's even an extremely radical giant robot!

Things really come crashing down in the next issue, as the Great Question not only joins up with the Nazis but rebrands himself as Mister Que, a much worse name. Now obviously there are a lot of classic Nazi villains - they're very easy to cast in the role because they suck - and it's clear that the Great Question Mister Que is using them to further his own goals, but it really does diminish the fun of a classic megalomaniac to see him working to further the goals of the Nazis rather than his own.

There are some interesting developments during the Mister Que era: he demonstrates more super-powers, for one, including a sort of whirlwind form used for rapid escape. He also manages to rob Fort Knox (well, Fort Fox), a classic villain cheevo. And even though I don't particularly like the Nazi uniform look he does have the right smirk to be wearing that mask.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 024, Amazing-Man and Tommy the Amazing Kid face off against the Vulture, a Nazi agent with convoluted plan to destroy NYC using US soldiers under the thrall of psychoactive temporary tattoos. In the antepenultimate panel, the Vulture pulls off a rubberoid mask to reveal that he was in fact Mister Que! His reasoning for doing this (to keep Amazing-Man from attempting to kill him) is a bit suspect, but he does manage to get away in the end. Ignominious!

And that's it for the Great Question/ Mister Que/ the Vulture. Odds are that he would have returned to vex Amazing-Man yet again but Centaur stopped publishing comics in early 1942. Both he and Amazing-Man have been brought back a handful of times over the years, of course, but mostly the Great Question languishes, unanswered.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 463: PROFESSOR MONTE

(Mystic Comics v1 004, 1940)

Professor Monte is the type of criminal scientist that I want to see in more comics: he has an idea (develop a gold-attracting magnet and use it to steal gold), he secures funding from crooked businessman Prentiss, he tests his device with a series of jewelry store robberies before scaling up to using the big dirigible-mounted model... he has a plan, in other words, rather than a vague idea of how they're going to take over Newark using their amazing new food additive or gun that fires grass seed.

And the plan pays off! Professor Monte robs Fort Knox and gets away with it! All he has to do is lie low and he and Prentiss and all his goons are set for life!

But of course that is too much to ask. Professor Monte is, after all, a criminal scientist and they are not known for their restraint. He is determined to rob the Bank of England as well, and comes close to doing so before running up against the fact that not only is London unusually well prepared for an aerial invasion at the time but that Dynamic Man is on his tail. Ultimately it comes down to electric blast vs hydrogen gas and the hydrogen gas always loses.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 338: THE BANDIT FORCE

(Master Comics 004, 1940)

This is a simple one because it's simply a matter of scale, plus the fact that everyone involved is wearing a stylish purple cloak/ robe combo. A mass of bandits loot arsenals across the Eastern US, stealing tanks, artillery and armoured cars. Panic ensues!

Soon enough, the band makes its goals known with a bold attack on that sweetest of targets: Fort Knox. And they almost get away with it! They actually have the gold loaded up and are speeding away before second-rate Fawcett character Master Man shows up and absolutely ruins everyone's day.

And of course the leader of the pack turns out to be the unnamed altruistic banker who somehow manages to sit in on every meeting about how to deal with the situation. What a surprise!

ADDENDUM: I absolutely forgot to mention the most notable if underplayed thing about these guys: they use golden bullets for some unstated reason. A bizarre choice for a buncha gold thieves!