GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 012

Management not responsible if some of the villains are not technically costumed.

This fellow, known as the Boss, was the masked publisher of a newspaper known as the Weekly Tattler which functioned as a vehicle for his blackmail business: pay up or get your secrets printed in the next edition. He turned out to be the husband of one of the paper's victims, which makes little enough sense that I reckon that they got to the end of the story without adding any good suspects so went with the only possibility. Also he gets shot by his very gullible underling after the Fox barely implies that there's a double cross on. (Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941)

Inferno tangles with crook Jake the Fake and his henchmen as they make a break for the Mexican border disguised as a shipment of mummies, a top tier thing to pretend to be. (Blue Ribbon Comics 017, 1941)

If you have to be a very generic pirate so hard up you have to kidnap guys from the US Navy to run your radio equipment in a mid-level (by Golden Age standards) racist adventure well then you'd better have a great name like the Scourge because that's really all you have going for you. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

Like the Scourge, the Obermaster here is a real waste of a good villain name on a real damp squib of a character. He is Samson Gorth, a criminal mastermind with no real plan. No, that's not accurate. He has a plan to incite war between the US and Japan by attacking their respective shipping using planes with false insignia but beyond that his goals are a mystery. Is he hoping for plunder? A chance for war profiteering? No clue and thanks to special agent Bruce McKay, Sky Master, we'll never find out. Because the Obermaster is dead. In case that wasn't clear. (The Funnies 035, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 010

MORE MLJ ACTION

Doc Strong:

Doc Strong is a famous scientist living in the year 2041, in a world where WWII dragged on for an entire century and a new Mongol Horde has swept in and conquered the battered remnants of civilization. The strangely Doc Savage-like Doc Strong gathers a group of like-minded scientists and starts a new civilization called the Isle of Right from which to strike back at the invaders with such inventions as a ray gun that solidifies shadows. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

the Fox:

Paul Patton, photographer for the Daily Globe, gets the tar beaten out of him by some fellows called the Night Riders and comes up with a plan:

That's right, he's about halfway between Spider-Man and Batman. Okay, he's mostly Batman but his wearable camera scheme anticipates Perter Parker's epic work hack by about twenty years. The Fox's first attempt at a costume is a bit rough, but eventually...

... he adopts one of the top costumes of the Golden Age! His adventures may be a bit regular but he looks great doing it.

BONUS FOX FACT: his "bat flies through the window" moment comes when he hears a song on the radio. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

the Green Falcon: 

The Green Falcon feature is essentially a Robin Hood Elseworlds story in which Robin is a knight instead of a forest outlaw and his pals Tiny Tuck and Jolly Roundfellow kind of encapsulate a few Merry Men each. Prince John is still there, and Maid Marion, but there are more swordfights than arrow tricks. Hey, I never said it was a particularly compelling Elseworlds story. It is more high concept than you usually get in a Golden Age comic, though. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004-015, 1940-1941)

Ty-Gor:

Ty-Gor is MLJ's answer to Mowgli: a British child orphaned in the jungles of Malaysia and raised by tigers. Ty-Gor is a shortened form of his birth name, Tyrone Gorman, which he learns thanks to an absurd series of events pictured above.

I don't usually have a lot of time for jungle adventures but Ty-Gor does have a pretty fun twist in that after a half dozen issues he is brought to New York by explorer Dr Davis and his daughter Joan and Does Not Adapt. He's just a wild kid who knows about five word maximum thrust into the public school system and causing havoc. It's fun! (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

BONUS TY-GOR AS A BABY EATING GRAPES

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 522: THE NIGHT RIDERS

(Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940) 

There are plenty of Ku Klux Klan- inspired groups in comics and thusfar we've encountered a few: the Blue Devils, the Horned Masks, even the Purple's gang of idiots. All of those examples share one thing: they're just gangs that operate in the country using the intimidation tactics of the KKK but without the goals of reinforcing white supremacy - they're just regular comic book gangs, only in the country.

There's a part of me that wants to say that the Night Riders are closer to being the KKK than the rest of these groups but if I'm honest that's because they have no clear goals - they just go around the countryside abducting, beating and killing people for getting into their business without any clear indication of what that business is. It could just as easily be organized insurance fraud as domestic racial terrorism, because the real reason the Night Riders are doing all this is so that they can beat up newspaper photographer Paul Patton and inspire him to become the Fox.