MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 254: THE SMOKE THIEF

(Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)

I'll be honest: this is a very charitable entry on this list. The Smoke Thief is Dr Lucius Darrell and his gang of toughs, who use smoke bombs and special goggles to rob people on trains. If this was the main focus of the story, that might just be enough for full Minor Super-Villain status, but it ain't.

The real point of the story is this. Darrell captures Hawkman, then tries to kill him by chucking him out of a plane, which leads to a whole sequence where Hawkman is nursed back to health by the birds, earns their trust and eventually becomes their leader, leading them in righteous vengence against poor unsuspecting Dr Darrell.

So yes, I'm being charitable. Being absolutely destroyed by Hawkman and an army of birds isn't particularly villainous but it must be terrifically unpleasant. Plus the Smoke Thief is an excellent name.

NOTES - MARCH 2023

New Powers:

An injured Hawkman is tended to by birds and learns to speak their language. (Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)

Just some of my favourite alien designs ever: the Kriglo AKA Martian Spider-Men (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)

Super Hero Costume Party:

Hawkman attends a costume party with Shiera Sanders as Hawkgirl. Though not the first time she wore the costume, this does mark the start of the two as a crime-fighting duo ongoing, no matter what stinky ol' Hawkman says. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)

Rick Raleigh might have intended to attend this party as the Red Bee in that classic cheeky move, but ended up getting mixed up in a murder and attending as a different guy dressed as the Red Bee. (Hit Comics 014, 1941)

Really enjoy the selection of creature that inhabit the inner earth in the year 50029 CE: Mud Men, Rock Men, hot ladies, and down at the very bottom: guys with beards. (Hit Comics 003, 1940)

Quality comics with another entry for the list of increasingly unhinged patriotic heroes: Don Glory, the xenophobic jingoist former boxer (Hit Comics 008, 1941)

SUPER-HERO COSTUME PARTY

This bit where Hawkman intends to attend a costumed event as himself but doesn't quite make it (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) made me realize that I've missed a few examples of super-heroes attending costume parties as themselves, one of my most favourite tropes in comics! Time for some catchup rectification!

Here's the Red Gaucho being mistaken for someone who was dressed as him, who is then impersonated by a third person in a story that was not called "Too Many Gauchos" but could have been (Nickel Comics 006, 1940)

Similarly, Rex Tyler attends a costume party as Hourman and gets mistaken as part of a whole gang of Hourmen who are planning on sticking the place up (All-Star 003, 1940)

And finally we have USA, the Spirit of Old Glory attending a party in her own costume with no impostors to horn in on her idea. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 252: EGON

(Flash Comics v1 021, 1941)

This one's got a lot of setup. First, Hawkman sees a spaceship crash, as you do. Venturing inside, he finds a deceased Neptunian couple, their egg son and a Rosetta Stone of a  ship's log. He makes off with the egg and the journal and just leaves the ship and its former crew to rot.

Next night is the Scientist Society Ball, where monocled botanist and creep Noel Ratchford makes a play for Shiera Sanders and is rebuffed. There's an egg-based sequence of events as follows:

-Noel is germinating seeds in eggs

-Carter "Hawkman" Hall thinks this is dumb

-Shiera stumbles across the boy-egg and assumes that Carter is also experimenting with eggs. She steals the egg as a joke and tells Noel about it

-Noel decides to steal the egg and take credit for Carters egg-based research. He ends up hatching out the boy Egon.

Thanks to Neptunian genetics, Egon hatches into a rapidly-growing boy with cool eye-beams and full powers of speech. Noel then hits upon the idea to raise him up to a) hate him and b) believe that his name is Carter Hall, so that he will go out and do evil giant stuff and blame it on Carter, thus presumably sullying his good name enough for Shiera to reject him? it's a flimsy plan at best, but when all you have is a giant you look for rampage-based solutions to your problems.

Everything kind of goes according to plan, except that Carter Hall is of course Hawkman, and that he has the journal and knows all of the Neptunians' weak points and kills Egon and brings Noel to justice. But other than that stuff, A-OK.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 251: BOMB-BABY SATHAN

(Flash Comics v1 020, 1941)

An absolutely ordinary criminal scientist villain completely overshadowed by his criminal rival Big Frenchy in this adventure. Sathan has at-the-time fantastically futuristic guided missile tech, as well as one of my personal favourite bits of super-villain utility tech: the communications cut-in, via which he extorts money from banks lest they get hit by guided missiles.

The only reason Sathan hasn't been relegated to the Criminal and Mad Scientist Roundup queue is this here henchman's inspired nickname game. Bomb-Baby Sathan is a Grant Morrison Making Up a Sixties Villain in the Nineties-style name and it's genuinely joyful to encounter it in a Golden Age comic.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 250: THE HOOD

(Flash Comics v1 019, 1941)

Hey, it's the Hood! I'll be honest: I thought that the Hood was one of those super-villain names like the Masked Man that was super common and that we already had one or more guys with this name but here we are, 250 villains in and welcoming our first.

The Hood is Pratt Palmer, and he's a bog standard scientist-villain of type A: scientist who develops some astonishing new tech and turns it to crime (type B is of course the scientist who turns to crime after being rejected by the hidebound academics they go to for approval, while type C is your classic mad scientist meddling where humanity ought not to).

So yes, Pratt Palmer fakes his own death, forms a gang and is almost immediately captured by Hawkman. There's not much to recommend about him other than his fun bombastic villainspeak, which he really nails off the bat.

The really interesting thing about Hawkman's encounter with the Hood is his tech, which he calls Cold Light, and which functions as a kind of energy blob that wanders around semi-autonomously when not being directed. They don't really explore it much but I reckon that it's pretty cool. More weird tech in comics!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 248: THE GOLDEN MUMMY

(Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

It's the Golden Mummy! As I have previously stated, I love fake mummies and had read this issue before, so I was anticipating this fellow's appearance with some joy, and it is with great sadness that I must announce that he's a complete disappointment.

My threshold for fake mummy appreciation is quite low - usually they just steal a few antiquities before getting tripped up by Archie and Jughead or the Scooby Gang, after all - but the Golden Mummy's only admirable quality is his dedication to theme. He has the costume, a cave hideout, a bunch of gangsters that he paid well enough to paint themselves gold and pretend to be called the Sect of the Golden Mummy (and of course the only thing better than henchmen in themed costumes is when they also have a cool name). 

. He even dies lamely, by stumbling into a trap set for Hawkman.

So why do I dislike this guy so much? The reason is twofold: firstly, the whole Golden Mummy thing is just some incel shit: he's a guy named Dr Selkirk getting revenge on his ex-fiance for dumping him by murdering her. This is one of those motivations that sucks some of the fun out of super-villain analysis.

Secondly: the Golden Mummy is a completely unnecessary affectation. He kills her as she's onstage singing opera, via a poisoned blowdart. The Mummy and his Sect spend the entire adventure coping with Hawkman, and it kind of seems like Selkirk made up the persona expressly because he was afraid of Hawkman - I don't know if he'd have gotten away with it by not calling attention to himself with cryptic warnings and golden men but it couldn't have hurt.

Boo to the Golden Mummy. Booo!

THE FATE OF...

(Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

Have you ever wondered what happened to the ancient Dravidians and their kingdom of Dravidia? No, because they're an extant ethnic group and that would be a bit like wondering about the fate of the Caucasians and their fabled land of Caucasia? Excatly. But nevertheless, here's Hawkman flying into Dravidia, somewhere in Mongolia.

Furthermore, the Dravidian king claims that his people originally came from a now-sunken land called Eden. An intriguing concept - that Eden is truly lost because it sank into the sea. Nothing comes of it though.

The really interesting thing to come out of this adventure is the idea that a prior incarnation of Hawkman might have ruled Dravidia as Keft, known as Icaro, the Redeemer. My experience with Golden Age Hawkman is limited to his JSA appearances, so I don't know if the exploration of his prior incarnations is a running topic or if this is a weird outlier, decades before the idea of Hawkman and Hawkgirl being endlessly reincarnated gained steam.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 247: THE HAND

(Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

It's old hat by now: like former Hawkman foe Czar the Unkillable Man and his ilk, the Hand is a henchbeing who is far more interesting to read and talk about than their creator. This is the risk you run when you set out to create an autonomous crime-servant via... I'm guessing magical means? It's unclear in the text but magic seems more likely than science.

In this case, the creator is a guy named Edward Thayer, the black sheep of a wealthy family who has decided to turn his amazing talking and flying disembodied hand to the sordid task of killing off his brother Elwin and niece Teddy so that he can inherit enough money to convince some lady to sleep with him. Cue my usual complaints about crooks in super-hero universes not aiming high enough.

Edward never gets to see his ill-gotten money, though, because Sandra (the lady in question) decides to bump him off for a quick buck. Which leads to the above panel: not only a rare hero/ villain teamup but an as-far-as-I-know unique hero/ disembodied hand teamup! Sadly, the revenge rampage ends with not only Sandra but the Hand itself seemingly plummeting to their deaths in a crashing car. Boo, says I! The Hand should be BRUNG BACK post-haste! Give it a bartending job somewhere.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 246: KARVAC

(Flash Comics v1 014, 1941)

Karvac himself is strictly ho hum territory: a would-be world conqueror who leads his army of heat ray-toting goons on a path of destruction before being beaten up by Hawkman. Snoresville, man.

BUT: the method by which Karvac managed to acquire his army of heat ray-toting goons, now that's the kind of comic book nonsense that we love around here.

Karvac, you see, unearthed rites and rituals connected to Scorio, Alligator God of the Phoenicians, and established both a temple and cult of worshippers to Scorio in the Eastern US, in order to cast ancient ritual magics and bring Scorio to him.

AND IT WORKS! Korvac summons a god! And that god promptly tells him how to make heat rays for his army of goons to tote! (it's not exactly clear in the text whether the army of goons are also the Scorio cultists that Hawkman sees performing rituals at the temple earlier in the story, but it's narratively satisfying to think so)

Scorio eventually gets banished back to the otherworldly swamp that he usually hangs out in, and as far as I know has never made a return appearance. But he should! Korvac might've been a dud, but an ancient and vengeful alligator god who can hand out secret knowledge to evil men is a really neat foe for a guy like Hawkman, particularly once his reincarnation bullshit really gets going - Katar Hol might not know Scorio from a hole in the ground but Scorio knows a soul no matter how many times it's been reborn. BRING BACK Scorio!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 245: SATANA

(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941)

 I am torn on Satana! Torn verily in twain!

My standard critique of a comic book scientist-villain is that they would have been better off using their tech in a non-crime endeavor, but Satana is a brilliant and pioneering young surgeon living in 1941 and given what I know about the history of women in science I think it's fair to say that if she had decided to make a go of it in academia then there's a decent chance that all her research would have been stolen by some dude and she might have gotten credit years after her death, if ever. Also, her signature breakthrough involves transplanting human brains (and eyes!) into tigers, which while groundbreaking might be a hard sell to the ethics committee.

On the other hand, her crime scheme is very bad. In short: she extorts rich men with threats of harm, then gets work as an entertainer called Satana the Tiger Girl at rich guy parties and has her tigers kill the ones that don't pay up. She only does it once before getting caught by Hawkman, that we know of, but even if she varied the method by which the tiger was introduced to the rich guy, it's not a sustainable business model. Stylish, yes, but not sustainable.

Perhaps the best part of the story is when Hawkman comes across a couple of tigers engaging in humanlike behaviors and it nearly drives him insane, like he's an HP Lovecraft character. Human habits like... sitting near a newspaper and holding a pipe in their mouth. 

They kinda hint at a return appearance for Satana at the end of the story but she doesn't actually come back until 2004, in the same Hawkman story that brought back the Thought Terror. She's a substantially different character by that point, with ties to the Ultra-Humanite and a focus on making humanoid animals via genetic modification. I'll revisit her when and if I manage to keep doing this long enough to get to that era. It's good that they brought her back! She's a fun character!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 241: KING JUPO

(Flash Comics v1 009, 1940)

King Jupo is the leader of the Kogats, a race of water-breathing caveman types who live beneath New York Harbor and have a fun mix of technologies, being armed with either stone axes or laser pistols. They've decided to invade the surface world, for no substantial reason other than that it seems like a good idea, and immediately run afoul of Hawkman. Needless to say, this does not end well, and the entire Kogats race, Jupo included, are destroyed when Hawkman collapses their city into an undersea trench, because genociding nonhuman races is okay in comics.

I really like the Kogats - the contrast between the regular caveman guys and enormous Jupo is fun, plus Jupo himself - 10 feet tall, flaming red hair, ram's horns - is visually striking. So what if their actual plan is ho hum regular comic stuff? I'm surprised that Roy Thomas never brought this guy back to fight the All-Star Squadron, but since he didn't, they're ripe to be BRUNG BACK, if only as part of the weirdly extensive network of subsea communities that Atlantis is part of. I wanna see Aquaman try to do diplomacy with this dude!

This issue also features Hawkman meeting Poseidon who gives him the power to breathe underwater. I can't actually figure out if he ever used this power again - it certainly doesn't come up again in any Golden Age stories I've read, but it seems like the sort of thing your Roy Thomas or Geoff Johns would just love to incorporate into a story. Problem is, the fact that Hawkman has this power seems to be a mid-tier popular bit of trivia and finding out whether everyone is just talking about this story or not is a bit more effort than I care to expend.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 240: PROFESSOR KITZOFF

(Flash Comics v1 008)

Professor Kitzoff makes me sad because he is categorically not the Sunspot Wizard. Oh sure, someone at DC or in the fan community went back and assigned titles to all the untitled Golden Age stories and they called this one "the Sunspot Wizard", but that's nothing. I love an unofficial name as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but they have to a) come from the text of the story itself and b) can't just be replacing the actual name by which the character is actually referred!

So, yes, sad. Professor "Boring Name" Kitzoff has followed the popular criminal scientist path of making an astonishing breakthrough based on junk science - in this case the idea that sunspots affect world events. He has a cool ray that supposedly allows him to affect these sunspots and thus the fate of humanity, but luckily for humanity, Hawkman and his pal Doctor French are on the case and Kitzoff is hounded from New York to the Andes until being accidentally shot by one of his own henchmen. Ho hum.

My depression is only lifted by the fact that this is the adventure in which Hawkman is seemingly killed and his seeming corpse is nailed up in a coffin with lots of gaps between the boards for some reason, leading to one of the best images of the Golden Age:

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 237: CZAR THE UNKILLABLE MAN

(Flash Comics v1 007, 1940)

Like Echo or Hugo Strange's Monster Men before him, Czar the Unkillable Man is arguably less a super-villain than a tool created by a super-villain, but where's the fun in listing a buncha guys named Dr Samuels and Professor Tompkins or in this case Boris Nickaloff?

Nickaloff is a bit of a mystery - he creates Czar by sculpting a complete human body - inside and out - out of "plasm-clay" and then shocking it to life with a shot of adrenaline. Is this meant to be mad science? Magic? A modern day Pygmalion story? No clues are given. Probably science if the adrenaline is any hint, but I prefer to think it's reality-bending mad art.

Nickaloff gets Czar to rob some banks and kill a bunch of people, and it's here that he maybe turn out to be a bit less of a tool than old Echo after all, as he sets about his rampages with  a bit more gusto than is required. He also kidnaps Shiera Sanders in a fit of man-monster horniness, which is both telling and gross.

Hawkman of course can't let such wanton killing and reallocation of funds stand, and he eventually stumbles upon the Unkillable Man's weakness: he still has to breathe. To be clear, he stumbles upon it because Nickaloff repeatedly states that it is Czar's only weakness in a loud, clear voice, which favour Hawkman repays by killing the both of them via a set of bolas to the neck.

(as seen above, Hawkman initially thinks that he is dealing with a vampire rather than a living statue and I must say that I love this kind of thing much much more than when the hero jumps to a wild conclusion that is correct. Keep up the dumbass guesses, Hawkman!)

As an addendum, an honour! Hawkman gets a vote of thanks from the banks!

NOTES - FEBRUARY 2023

The Whip is an okay character aside from the brownface bit but one thing I absolutely love about him is that although he does a credible job at the Ineffectual Secret Identity act he also just travels from town to town with an enormous black horse.

(Flash Comics v1 005, 1940) 

Names:

This old dude shares his name with Kurt Busiek's Astro City character Samaritan! The tally of comics characters named Asa Martin stands at 2! (Flash Comics v1 010, 1940)

Same issue's Hawkman story features a (bad) guy named John Denver!

I'm usually pretty good at catching allusions and so forth in these old comics but I have no idea why Joe Magee = "always bungling something" (Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

Places: It's a bit hard to make out but the flash on this armoured car seems to place Seguro in "New Texirona" rather than New Mexico, which might just be the most egregious example of 40s comics writers avoiding real place names that I've ever encountered. (Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

This is how I order in restaurants, too. (Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

Number of references to "the Third Degree" aka the cops torturing someone as a positive thing this month: 3