ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 012

You won't believe these guys. 

the Mermen: 

Some undersea jerks who capture explorer Typhon and his crew. Their leader is a real creep named Neptune who has a nigh-fetishistic plan to freeze the crew - and particularly sole female crewmember Cecelia - into blocks of ice and then breathe fire on them. Luckily for all who might venture beneath the waves, he drowns (?) during Typhon's escape. (Weird Comics 002, 1940)

the Beaked Men:

The Beaked Men of Mercury's mountains operate as an extortion racket on the solar trade routes, raiding and capturing ships from their mobile "space island" ships. Such a threat to the interplanetary commerce of the year 25 000 will not stand, and Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer successfully manages to explode the whole operation thanks to a handy prisoner revolt. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

the Big-Eared Tribe of Saturn: 

I'm not sure if the implication is that all of the people of Saturn are big-eared or if it's just a subgroup, but the fact that they seem to be generally feared and that the leader (and father) of this particular bunch of Big-Eared men, Varg Emmos, is a respected scientist who is presumably using his futuristic heardpiece to disguise his own big-eared status points toward the former. 

Varg and his boys have a plot to take over Earth using an ultrasonic ray that affects only humans but are foiled when Rex Dexter in turn discovers a musical note that kills them and that is seemingly featured heavily in symphonic music. Sucks to be a Big-Eared music lover I guess. (Mystery Men Comics 020, 1941)

the Coal People:

The Coal People (also referred to as the Blackmen) reside in an underground kingdom below Colorado and are descended from ancient people who got themselves trapped there and were forced to subsist of coal to survive. Rather than dying of starvation and/or stomach cancer, they instead became humanoid creatures composed of living coal. The problem comes when mining activities bring the Coal People into contact with contemporary surface humans - fairly harmless when they decide to worship the above old man as a kind of captive god, but increasingly menacing after the discovery of a miner's corpse reveals to them that there are more interesting things to eat than coal.

Luckily for the surface world (or for Coloradans, at least) the next person to enter the mines and get captured is the super-strong giant Mighty Man, who discovers the in-retrospect-fairly-obvious secret of the Coal People: that they fear fire. He and the erstwhile god escape and seal the mine behind them. Colorado is saved! (Amazing-Man Comics 011, 1940)

FASCIST GOON CLEARING HOUSE 006

Who will rid me of these fascist goons?

The Nordland Bund is another German-American Bund analog but operates as more of a traditional spy operation on behalf of Nazi Germany stand-in Prussland. Their moderately complicated plan to get explosive coal onto US ships leaving Bermuda is foiled by Secret Agent D-13 and his Canadian counterpart/ love interest Lorraine MacAlinn (Mystery Men Comics 019, 1941)

Like the man's feet say, the Hoops are a bunch of Nazis (proper Nazis - Fox Features seems to have stopped pussyfooting around with oblique references and backwards words in the last few months of 1941) who had a signature move of leaving a hoop around the neck of their victims. And the word the Blue Beetle is searching for is explode the hoops explode. And fittingly enough the Blue Beetle later uses one of those hoops to explode Baron Gell, leader of the big-h Hoops. (Mystery Men Comics 025, 1941)

Technically this group is nameless and the Anti-Foreigners Committee is a supposedly patriotic group run by their leader as a cover, but if there's a name that underlines the simmering fascism that underlies ultra-patriotism better than that one then I can't recall it. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

These guys are called the Thorns for no particular reason. Just a buncha Nazi goons with a more poetic name than usual. They go up against ultrapatriotic teen Paul Revere, Jr and also his dad. (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 002

Still lotsa super-heroes to add.

the Marksman: 

Single appearance hero trained by his father to be completely accurate with thrown or projectile weapons. Uses the alias John Courage. Throws a spear through a guy's head one time. (Amazing-Man Comics 023, 1941)

Miraco the Great:

Circus magician with real powers. His one adventure involved running a sex pest gorilla trainer out of the circus. (Amazing-Man Comics 023, 1941)

Super Ann:

A young woman who was given super strength by a weird old cave-dwelling alien man as a child. She's very charming! I particularly like how straightforward her crimefighting is - most of the time she just walks up and punches a fool, as someone who grew up with super strength might. This does leave her vulnerable to sneaky attacks, but lucky for her her fellow hero Mighty Man has decided to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. (Amazing-Man Comics 024, 1941)

And speaking of Mighty Man...

Mighty Man Update:

When Mighty Man debuted he was just a 12 foot tall guy, then in Amazing-Man Comics 012 a scientist performed an operation on him that allowed him to change his size at will (and then promptly got himself murdered, natch). At first he could merely grow and shrink but pretty quickly he developed more refined shapechanging abilities, including changing his appearance and, most upsettingly, changing the size of individual parts of his body. By the time he began shadowing Super Ann, Mighty Man was just as likely to be a weird little gremlin with one huge arm, or, as in the panel above, a big ear in order to freak out a goon or Nazi. Unpleasant!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 475: THE WITCH

(Amazing-Man Comics 019, 1941)

Mighty Man was always a lot for crooks to deal with even when he was just a 12 foot tall guy with super strength but after he gained complete control over his physical form he really gave them a run for their money. I assume that's why he was assigned an actual, factual magic-using witch as a recurring enemy. At least, at first.

In her first appearance, the Witch had a magic broom that allowed her to fly, changer her shape, pass through walls and paralyze others (plus more, presumably). She came into conflict with Mighty Man over a munitions company executive who had the formula for a mind control gas and was understandably reluctant to reveal it to a gang of crooks. The Witch made her getaway, swearing revenge.

The Witch returns in Amazing-Man Comics 020 without her broom (no reason is given). She is now equipped with a potion that allows her to changer her appearance, which she uses first in an attempt to kill Mighty Man by claiming to herself be the targeted for assassination. This of course does not work, so in issue 21 she captures Mighty Man and declares that she will keep him prisoner until she discovers the secret of his powers.

This is where things get weird, dynamic-wise. The Witch's sedatives turn out not to work on Mighty Man, but he realizes that as her prisoner he is in a prime position to learn of and foil her various schemes. So for the next couple of issues (plus an issue of Stars and Stripes Comics), Mighty Man is theoretically paralyzed in a cell back at the Witch's hideout while actually sneaking around and shapechanging his way through the massed ranks of her criminal army.

The best thing to come out of all of this is this little kid super-hero identity that Mighty Man adopts and who I, like the Witch, like to call "Little Squirt", even though he technically never has a name. Mighty Man's writers eventually solved the problem of him being too powerful by having him assign himself the task of following Super-Ann around and helping her out without being seen by her, which is pretty fun but I kind of wish he'd leaned into this idea of fighting under different identities.

The Witch, meanwhile, eventually drowned in a flood during one of her many schemes. I'm sure she wished she still had that broom.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 471: THE MASTER MIND

(Amazing-Man Comics 018, 1940)

Mighty Man here encounters the Master Mind by following a group of clearly mind controlled criminal types to his secret lair and from there to what turns out to be an assassination attempt on an ex-cop and his daughter. It turns out that the Master Mind is a victim of my least favourite fictional trope that is also a thing that happens frequently in real life: cops shooting fleeing suspects in the back. This fellow actually shot his fleeing suspect so hard that both of his legs had to be amputated! Wotta guy!

The pre-Master Mind took himself to India and developed mind control powers, which are of course what he subsequently used to send waves of men after his old attempted murderer. And here's the thing: the Master Mind is very bad at planning and project management:

1. he has all of the hypnotized crooks march straight to and from his lair

2. he sends the crooks to kill his old enemy with regular firearms while using a powerful ray-gun with a one mile range for personal defense in a medium sized room

3. he stores his explosives inside his own throne

What the Master Mind really needs is one of those long-suffering majordomo types to manage all of these details because he is very bad at the logistics of super-villainy. Plus he is dead.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 005

Just a little crypto-fascist saboteur named Dr Vee who battled Dynamic Man but I like his name and I like his style. His sartorial style. Not the fascism. (Mystic v1 002, 1940)

Lemo here has a mechanical mole-style tank and reckons he can take over the world with it after almost destroying one (1) circus tent. It's a good thing he was blown up by one of Marvel's many Herculeses before he could get too far and get disappointed. (Mystic Comics v1 004, 1940)

This fellow, known only as the Mystery Man, has been working on the problem of how to counter snipers in warfare, and the scheme that he has come up with involves breeding up vicious wolf-dogs, training them to hate a particular smell and then applying that smell to the shoes of enemy combatants so that the dogs hunt and kill them. There's a slight problem with this plan that the two crypto-fascist gentlemen that he's trying to sell this system to don't seem to come on to, even when he offers to sell them the scent and the dogs and doesn't mention offering a dedicated group of scent-applying agents (or maybe he had some smaller dogs trained to do the job and he was going to upsell them later).

The Mystery Man only gets caught because he has been picking up hitchhiking college students and using them to train the dogs and the person responsible for their safety is friends with giant super-hero Mighty Man and long story short the Mystery Man gets eaten by dogs. (Amazing-Man Comics 009, 1940)

This here unnamed fella has a four-step plan: 

1. Capture the Iron Skull 

2. Inject the Iron Skull with a serum that turns him completely to iron

3. Inject his iron blood into robots to make them alive somehow

4. Profit

Steps 1 and 2 go fine but as seen above a major flaw in the plan is that the Iron Skull is now more powerful and mops the floor with his erstwhile captor. The robots don't even show up! (Amazing-Man Comics 015, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HEROES 007-014: AMAZING-MAN COMICS ROUNDUP 1939

(Amazing-Man Comics 005-026, 1939-1942)

All the ephemeral Golden Age heroes who stalked the pages of Amazing-Man Comics:

The Iron Skull! I love him. His origin and so forth is doled out after a few issues so initially you don't know that he is a cyborg war casualty in the far future world of 1970. The most important things are there from the start, though: his huge anime eyes and the fact that every bullet or attack made against him unerringly hit him in his invulnerable head.

SKULL SCORE: 2/5 Not very skully but he gets a point for the lack of nose.

Minimidget: Just a super-small guy with a problematic name. He and his galpal Ritty were shrunk and employed as henchmen by a pervert scientist before redeeming themselves via acts of public service. 

Chuck Hardy: Chuck and Jerry, a couple of deep sea divers, end up in the subterranean land of Aquatania, beneath the Marquesas Islands. They turn out to be super-strong there for murkily-explained reasons and have adventures with the monstrous flora and fauna and the various near-human races. The best part is absolutely the little lobster antennae that all of the various types of Aquatanians have.

Mighty Man is a huge dude who is the last descendant of folk who settled in a valley where everything is huge. After murdering a bunch of evil cowboys, he emerges from his valley to fight crime. Eventually he gets the power to change size.

UPDATE 1940

The Shark! A water-based hero who can talk to sea life and must hit the water regularly, which is about standard for water guys!

ADDENDUM: Later on he meets his father Neptune and his adventures turn into father/son outings, which rules.

UPDATE 1940

Magician from Mars: Not only is Jane 6em35 an Earthian/Martian hybrid from an unspecified future, and not only was she accidentally irradiated as a baby in a way that activated a lot of vague superpowers (including flight, super-strength and a seemingly complete control over matter) but she is a practical and morally flexible hero who takes advantage of the chaos surrounding a rocket crash to make off with $3 million in gold before saving the day. Very fun. Plus: jodhpurs!

The Cat Man: a very marginal entry on this list. In his first appearance, he develops his signature technique of dressing like an old lady and having his trained cat scratch people with poisoned claws to murder three former criminal confederates, which isn't particularly heroic? His second appearance is in more of a vigilante role as he murders a gang of wanted men. How could I not include this loveable murderous scamp, really?