MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 553 UPDATE: LANDOR, MAKER OF MONSTERS (1940)

When last we saw Landor, Maker of Monsters, he had just been exploded along with his castle and giant mosquito minions. But did you honestly expect a simple thing like a huge explosion to stop a villain of Landor's calibre? No! He merely becomes more burned up and crusty and bitter! Landor has not shifted his goals since 1939 and is consumed with the twin urges to 1) make monsters and 2) get revenge on Tony Torrence and Marcia Merrill.

Landor makes his dramatic return at the perfect time: US officials, including Landor's old foe Anthony "Tony" Torrence, are completely unable to deal with the menace of the Fire-Men. This gives Landor the perfect opportunity to get Torrence under his thumb, using the power of patriotism!

 

As usual, Landor has not rested on his laurels. Rather than trot out a version of one of his prior creations, such as a frankenstein or a giant insect or a surprisingly flammable woman, he has dipped his toe into the twin fields of robotics and cybernetics to produce a giant robot powered by a human brain! A fireproof one!

 
The brain-bot disposes of the Fire-Men without a problem. Well, I say without a problem, but in fact there is one tiny hiccup in Landor's plan: the cyborg is not strictly 100% fireproof after all, and the Fire-Men's last desperate flamethrower attacks end up driving it berserk and it makes a murderous beeline for Landor and Tony Torrence. Torrence manages to destroy it by luring it into an electrical substation, and since he has saved Landor's life he is forced to relinquish his claim over Torrence's. Foiled by his own sense of honour!

In Speed Comics 005, Landor accepts a commission to help a couple of foreign agents rob the US Treasury. Being the Maker of Monsters that he is, Landor proceeds to create a giant mole to aid in the tunnelling process. This escapade ends with Tony Torrence gunning down the agents and collapsing the tunnel on top of Landor, but the "IS LANDOR DEAD?" cliffhanger lacks a bit of oomph as he is in fact standing next to the giant mole when last seen.

If Landor had given up his quest for revenge following the giant cyborg incident then the tunnel collapse brought it back in force, and so in Speed Comics 006 he puts a very strange revenge scheme into motion: he creates the Cat-Girl, a two-foot-tall human woman with the head of a cat, and uses her to kidnap Tony Torrence's niece Gloria as a test subject in an experiment to see if he can turn a human being into solid diamond. I'm a bit winded just typing all that out.

Tony Torrence of course rushes Landor's castle just in time to rescue Gloria and deal with both the Cat-Girl and Landor using his new fighting technique: throw your opponent at the nearest solid object. Landor of course survives though the Cat-Girl is not so lucky.

Speed Comics 007 introduces eminent biologist Dr Sina Zurat, who has long admired Landor's work and wishes to join him in it.

Together, Landor and Zurat create the bestial woman Creeta, and at some point along the way the two fall in love! Could a stable home life and a loving partner who gets all of his jokes about gene-splicing finally cure Landor of his antisocial ways? We will never know, as poor Creeta was seemingly born already in love with him and only gets about an hour to grapple with having feelings at all, let alone powerful ones. Consumed with jealousy, Creeta attacks Dr Zurat.

Tony Torrence of course shows up in time to stop Creeta (by turning a screw on the side of her neck that is attached to her steel wire nervous system - a particularly grisly failsafe!), but too late to save Zurat. And here is the point, I reckon, where the Landor/Torrence relationship could turn around. A little compassion from Tony could show Landor that there is a better way to live than in a constant cycle of revenge and biological constructs. Instead, Tony is a huge jerk about the whole thing, ensuring that the cycle continues.

Landor's final four appearances are exclusively revenge-oriented: in Speed 008, he goes with what he knows best and makes a humanoid monster, but unfortunately for him, he drops the dang thing before it's finished... cooking?... and so ends up as a classic Igor rather than the Adonis that Landor had intended. Still, any creature in a storm, and so Ganda, as this particular creation is known, is sent to capture Tony.

Ganda goofs and brings back Torrence's house guest, criminologist Kung Fu Tse (sadly just a name in the "mash together a lot of vaguely Chinese-sounding syllables" mode and not a 70s style martial arts master), but that turns out to be okay, as it turns out that Landor, Tse and Torrence all went to the same college and that the beefs between them began back then.

As usual, Tony shows up in the nick of time, and while Landor escapes unscathed poor Ganda is not so fortunate.

Landor's revenge plot in Speed 009 involves kidnapping Marcia Merrill and injecting her with a chemical to make her blind. It's not a particularly great plan, and Landor absolutely should have seen the end result coming: Tony beats him up until he gives up the antidote to the blindness serum. There are however two points of interest in the story:

1) Landor's chosen henchman for this one is the fantastically-named Stumbi the Fish-Man. It's like I always say: if you're going to be a biological construct created specifically to kidnap people off of boats then you might as well get a great name out of it. 

2) From this issue onward Tony Torrence is instead called Jack Torrence, for no clear reason. Is it simple loose Golden Age continuity standards? Burgeoning anti-Italian sentiment relating to WWII? Something else? No idea, but what it certainly is is annoying, though mitigated slightly by the fact that it's almost the name of the guy from The Shining.

Landor's lowest moment comes in Speed Comics 010, as this is the issue in which he doesn't make a monster at all. At least unless you stretch the definition of "monster" to include a prominent criminologist who has been kidnapped and mind-controlled into a willing participant in a plot to frame Tony "Jack" Torrence as a jewel thief. And I do not do so.

Tony ends up spending most of this issue in jail, so Kung Fu Tse is the one who hurls Landor into the nearest hard surface before freeing criminologist John Powers from the mind control.

Speed Comics 011 marks Landor's final appearance and fortunately for his reputation he does in fact make a monster in this one. Specifically, he tricks fugitive Spike Hart into accepting a job and some free plastic surgery and then proceeds to turn him into the Tiger-Man, i.e., Spike Hart with claws, oversized fangs and little stripes on his face.

Sent to bring back Torrence alive or dead, the Tiger-Man comes closer to actually doing so than any creature since the Brute, way back in Speed Comics 001. It is not to be, however, as he ultimately meets his end at the hands of Torrence's butler, a truly ignominious fate.

As often happens in stories with recurring villains, Landor's final appearance was not written as a final appearance. Tony/Jack socks him out the window and he scurries away into the night to get ready for their next encounter, which will never happen. 

ADDENDUM: As I was about to publish this it occurred to me that Landor is of course a revenge killer, albeit one with a terrible score. Counting up all of the various attempts on Tony, Marcia and Kung Fu's lives over the course of his career, he ends up with an abysmal final score of 0/9.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 760: THE FIRE-MEN

(Speed Comics 004, 1940) 

The Fire-Men make an impressive debut: dressed in bulletproof suits and wielding powerful flamethrowers, they carve a path of destruction through both New York City and the tank division that is sent to bring them to heel. Nothing seems able to stop these mysterious marauders!

Nothing, that is, until Landor, Maker of Monsters emerges from the shadows to offer his creature-based services to the US government. He'll fight on the side of law and order for once, but only in exchange for his hated enemy, Tony Torrence. It's a triumph of negotiation, in that there is absolutely no way that a patriotic fellow like Torrence could fail his country in its hour of need, even at the cost of his own life, the rube.

To his credit, Landor follows through, and while up to this point I thought that the Fire-Men might have secretly been more of his creatures under those suits the whole time, they are in fact what will eventually be a comics staple: the minor villain that exists only to be utterly trounced as a demonstration of the prowess of another character. Whatever the Fire-Men's goals might have been will never be revealed due to their grisly deaths at the claws of a giant fireproof cyborg.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 553: LANDOR, MAKER OF MONSTERS

(Speed Comics 001, 1939)

Landor, Maker of Monsters is a fellow who hangs out in a castle and - no big surprise - makes monsters. He's also the title character of his feature, which is not unprecidented in Golden Age comics but worth noting whenever it's the case.

Landor is just about finished with his very first monster when socialites Tony Torrence and his fiance  Marcia NoLastName show up at his door seeking shelter from the stormy night. Just why they are on a mountain (in a storm, in the middle of the night) in what appear to be riding clothes is not elaborated on.

Landor's first creature, the Brute, is basically a frankenstein and is horny for Marcia. Not only does this mess up Tony and Marcia's nights but it leads to Landor himself being dashed against a wall when he acts threatening to Marcia and the Brute doesn't like it.

The Brute meets his end as a biological crash mat when he and Tony fall off a high balcony. Tony and Marcia flee and between the wall trauma and the obligatory laboratory fire Lando, Maker of Monsters is assumed to be dead.

But no! Landor lives! An ass has been made of you and of me! He is merely burnt to a crisp! And it is now he who is the horny one, or at least the one who creates a seven foot tall babe in a one-piece swimsuit to do his bidding - is this the one time where attempting to murder a young couple is the more wholesome of two options?

Carda (for that is the flying woman's name) meets with some initial success but is hampered by the fact that she is very flammable. Marcia sets her wings on fire entirely by accident, by merely holding a torch. This time Landor is thought to be dead because he leaps out of a high window.

In his third appearance, Landor has abandoned anthropomorphism entirely in favour of mobilizing a fleet of giant mosquitoes to enact his revenge on Tony and Marcia. As is becoming evident by this point, revenge is not a kind mistress to Landor - giant mosquitoes, while formidable, are vulnerable to both "getting shot" and "being exploded along with your boss and his castle" and so it's back to the drawing board for a fourth time. Once he gets over being exploded, of course.

UPDATE: Landor, Maker of Monsters (1940)