MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 645: SNEELY

(Fight Comics 004, 1940)

Kinks Mason is deep sea fishing with some friend when one of them lands a swordfish that is covered in gold and jewels! Just where did these riches come from? The answer is unguessable!

Upon reaching the ocean floor, Kinks discovers that the swordfish was covered in pirate gold, and furthermore, he finds the pirate! Sneely (Pirate Terror of the Seven Seas, the Great, the Magnificent) is an old-time pirate who claims that he drank a magic potion that allowed him to live seemingly indefinitely underwater and who guards his ill-gotten treasure both personally and with a school of trained swordfish. Is attaining near-immortality and then spending it guarding a pile of shiny metal that only has value if you actually spend it on something a huge waste? Indeed it is! It's absolute dragon behaviour is what it is.

Sneely is exactly the kind of weird wild completely un-fleshed-out villain that you get for a character like Kinks Mason who a) isn't one of the real top-tier guys in the book he appears in and b) has a niche role. Every issue, Kinks dives into the ocean for 5 to 8 pages and he has to find a challenge to overcome down there and sometimes it's a, immortal amphibious pirate with the world's most Xtreme Hoarding Problem. 

Probably the best thing about Sneely is the one that never got capitalized on: that he's seemingly still alive at the end of the story, as Kinks Mason just konks him on the head with a thighbone before making off with the treasure. And while an immortal amphibious pirate squatting on a pile of gold at the bottom of the ocean is a bit of an underwhelming idea for a comic book, an immortal amphibious pirate who Wants His Treasure Back is a cool recurring enemy. I say BRING BACK Sneely, in concept if not as an actual character.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 643: THE MASTER

(Fight Comics 003, 1940)

Kinks Mason is back on the case! And just what sub-oceanic mystery is he attempting to solve by just wandering around underwater? Why, it's Just Where is All the Salt Going? And somewhat astonishingly, he figures it out almost immediately: it's going into this building.

The building turns out to belong to a race of ocean-dwelling humanoids referred to only as the Amphibians, though I can't imagine that that's what they call themselves. I kind of appreciate how generic their design is, like a greatest hits of underwater humanoid features with the single eye added on for flair.

The Amphibians are ruled by the Master, who similarly is a fairly generic comic book undersea ruler villain: he and his people have developed some cool offensive technology and are now out to conquer the surface world. The most intriguing thing about this whole setup is just what all the salt is for - I kept hoping that everything would be powered by a big glowing salt crystal but no such luck. 

(Also the Amphibians refer to their tech as a "poison ray" but later it seems to be a generic ray gun, and while I of course appreciate an evocative name I would much prefer to see a ray gun - preferably salt-powered -  poison a guy)

Kinks Mason is of course not going to stand for this sort of nonsense and so for the second time in as many issues he possibly wipes out an intelligent underwater species, this time using stray torpedoes from all of the partially-destroyed submarines littering the seafloor around the Amphibians' base. Do adventure heroes ever have crises of conscience about this kind of thing?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 642: QUEEN OF THE WEED PEOPLE

(Fight Comics 002, 1940)

After spending so long with Sub Saunders in the far-off year 10 000 it's a bit strange to detail an undersea menace that he isn't battling but here we are and our focus is present-day adventurer Kinks Mason, who sets out with nothing but a helmet that extracts oxygen from seawater to solve the mystery of just where all these missing ships have been getting to and ends up discovering an underwater civilization of seaweed people.

(I really like the Weed People, as they are referred to in the text a couple of times - their krinkly kelp frond aesthetic is very pleasing to me. It's quite different from the look of Kozar's Sea-Weed Men but I enjoy them in a similar fashion. Just something about humanoids made of seaweed, I guess)

Weed Person society is dependent on a giant whirlpool-powered chlorophyll manufacturing plant. Just where this infrastructure came from and how the Weed People existed without it is not elaborated upon - did their primitive ancestors subsist on naturally occurring chlorophyll or spend their days basking in the sun photosynthesizing and then completely abandon that lifestyle once some unnamed Weed Person genius created the machine? Plausibly!

Chlorophyll isn't just the Weed Person staff of life, however. It also turns humans into Weed Creatures, which, though they look and are named similar to the Weed People are in fact distinct and who serve as slaves of the Weed People in their bid to take over the world.

The Weed People and their Queen have made the crucial mistake of not being genre savvy enough to know that any lone adventurer, particularly one with an action hero-y name like Kinks Mason, should be killed immediately and they end up dead for their trouble. Specifically, Kinks goes ahead and blows up the chlorophyll machine, dooming all Weed People society to extinction. Hopefully there's some hipster Weed Person subculture on the fringes of society still harvesting chlorophyll in the ancient ways because it tastes better, if only for the sake of Kinks Mason's conscience.

NOTES - SEPTEMBER 2024

Honours: 

Yank Wilson gets the Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts in preventing the the nation of Hondu (a Japan analog) from pulling a sneak attack on the US naval bases in Hawaii. I reckon that this is where Yank Wilson stops plausibly being in the near future and becomes a contemporary series - note the 3/4s perspective FDR. (Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Samson's sidekick David: lariat champion of his Boy Scout troop three years running. There's a reason he gets to run around with a super guy! (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

Undersea adventurer Kinks Mason gets an unspecified medal for bravery for rescuing a bunch of folks from the Weed People. (Fight Comics 002, 1940)

Fate of the Missing Link:

Despite the Missing Link conceptually being an intermediate evolutionary stage between apes and humans and thus being something that is by definition no longer extant, the darn things keep showing up. This bunch, a kind of amphibious ape-lizard-caveman, were found by Kinks Mason living at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. (Fight Comics 005, 1940)