MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 871: THE MONSTER

(Zip Comics 002, 1940) 

Mr Satan is summoned to the charmingly-named Shadow Pond to solve a series of disappearances among a group of scientists who have secluded themselves there. Upon arriving he immediately finds himself in the middle of an attack by a humanoid monster (the Monster, of course. Annoyingly, it is never once referred to as the Monster of Shadow Pond, which would be a pretty great name). He manages to pull a young woman away from the attack and is shortly thereafter introduced to the cast of characters at Shadow Pond:

Professor Heaslip: Mr Satan's client and the de facto leader of the scientific group.

Mrs Heaslip: the Professor's younger wife, recently rescued from the clutches of the Monster by Mr Satan.

John Heaslip: the Professor's brother, a scientist in his own right. Narrowly avoided being killed by the Monster in its first attack.

Blake: Scientist and acquaintance of Mr Satan. Blake gets mentioned a fair amount throughout the story but only makes one appearance. Probably killed by the Monster.

Richards: Scientist. Killed in the first attack by the Monster.

Slade: Scientist. Killed in the attack that Mr Satan witnessed.

Unnamed Scientist: Killed at some point by the Monster.

Is someone in this motley crew actually the Monster? Not the dead ones, obviously. 

Mr Satan does some investigating and is himself almost killed by the Monster. In the process he discovers that the scientists' missing bodies are caught in a whirlpool beneath the surface of the pond, explaining why they have not surfaced.

A plan to kill the Monster with a bomb goes awry when the device, built by John Heaslip, goes off without warning and almost kills both his brother and Mr Satan

This explosion provides Mr Satan with the final key to the puzzle: he tracks down the conveniently-not-at-the-site-of-the-explosion John and Mrs Heaslip and confronts them with the truth: this whole affair has been about the illicit love that they share. The Monster was born out of an attempt to murder Professor Heaslip so that his widow and brother could be together (and also so that they could steal his radium ray, a device that literally had not been mentioned before it was revealed to be a motivation for murder, and which I think was added late in the game to make the story a bit less sordid). A sad and grubby resolution indeed.

We also get to see the full Monster getup, and while some of the other diving-suit-modified-to-look-like-sea-monster examples we have are a bit more monstery, this might just be the best looking weird diving suit. Lust look at that eye stalk/periscope!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 836: MORGANA LE FAY

(Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940) 

It's another version of Morgan le Fay, less than two weeks after the last one! Will le Fay end up being the mythic/fictional character with the greatest number of comic book interpretations? Possibly!

This version of Morgan le Fay, Morgana le Fey, is after revenge on Galahad for the death of her husband the Knight of the Griffin and so sends out squads of knights to find him and bring him back to be tiger food. Unfortunately for her, her knights are pretty unprofessional and fail to question the fact that the "Galahad" that they capture is unusually scrawny and meek and in fact turns out to be Garlan, Galahad's squire, doing a bit of roleplay while his boss is asleep.

Once the real Galahad shows up, Morgana's men prove to be as inadequate at combat as they are at knight-identification and she is forced to play her trump card: the Monster. An eight-foot tall green guy who looks like he just stepped out of a science fiction comic, the Monster proves to be a match for Galahad and his horse.

Lucky for Galahad, Garlan is on-hand to save the day by delivering the poorly-named magic sword Scabor to him as he and the Monster are battling in the depths of Morgana's moat. It's a heroic act for the lad, and it really underscores how terrible it was when he was captured earlier in the story and Galahad did not go after him because he was late for a meeting.

Presumably Morgana le Fay would have continued to vex Galahad going forward, but the series ends while she is planning her next move. 

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 019

Science for all! Whether they want it or not! 

Doctor Ivan has been pursuing a scheme in which he is systematically taking out insurance policies on everyone he knows and then having them murdered, and he is extremely smug about it. Now, I'm no expert in insurance fraud, but I have to say that I am certain that it requires a bit more subtlety than that, even if you're doing it as a one-off. Forget the fact that the Flame shows up after the third murder; I would expect some raised eyebrows down at the insurance company after the second. (The Flame 003, 1940)

Dr Gung is an old associate of magical arch-criminal Elena, and is the one who saves her from execution after the Karoly Gore affair by means of some death-simulating drugs. 

Gung's main line of inquiry is the use of his signature ray to destroy men's minds and turn them into mindless robot soldiers, something that works perfectly well on regular guys sourced from the nearby populace but when tried on Mr Mystic goes badly enough that Dr Gung ends up shrunk to a few inches tall and then blown to smithereens along with his entire mansion. (The Spirit Section, 23 June 1940)

Ghantse is one of those mad scientists who talk a lot about their grand plans but don't actually get a chance to put them in motion, so it's a real mystery whether he actually would have been able to fuse several human brains together into a single entity who would "know all" like he claimed or not, but he sure was willing to try. Along the way, he made two major mistakes: 1) targeting Mr Mystic for brain extraction and 2) somehow ending up with the Shadowman, the literal embodiment of death, on his payroll, the latter being compounded by the fact that the Shadowman hates Ghantse's guts, and so not only releases Mr Mystic from his chemically-induced paralysis before Ghantse can extract his brain but also blows Ghantse's entire base to kingdom come. (The Spirit Section, 22 September, 1940)

Doctor Zorn, an eccentric roboticist living on Puerto Rico, is possibly the world record holder for escalation, as he manages to go from an argument about a late loan payment to unleashing his voice-controlled super robot (aka the Monster) to activating his lab's self-destruct mechanism in the space of about half an hour. 

Given that this is what he started shouting immediately after showing off his robot to a young woman, I do suspect that Doctor Zorn was primed for this kind of thing and was just looking for an excuse, like a man who has just bought a katana standing in his kitchen. (Thrilling Comics 005, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 649: THE MONSTER

(Funny Pages v4 008, 1940)

Betty Thomas is the recipient of the sort of inheritance that seems to be aimed at causing trouble: her uncle Henry has left her a fortune, provided that she is of sound mind thirty days after the will reading. If she isn't, the money goes to a secondary inheritor. This is of course the cue for someone to employ a huge hook-handed goon and start a nightly campaign of terror designed to drive her out of her gourd, and the entire rest of the Thomas clan are suspects! Is it sarcastic bad boy Bob Thomas? Crime novelist George Thomas? The sinister unnamed housekeeper? Surely it couldn't be the saintly Dr Freman Thomas?

It is of course the saintly Dr Freman Thomas, who like his employee the Monster learns the hard way that the Arrow doesn't cotton to gaslighting in his New York.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 486: THE MONSTER

(Big 3 006, 1941)

The Monster, while an imposing figure engaged in some extremely villainous and questionable activities - kidnapping wealthy young women from some sort of summer camp - ultimately fails to satisfy.

And here is exactly why: this is the kind of story that benefits from a bit of mystery: a red herring or two; a few suspects - but this George Benson guy not only is the singular suspect but has spent twenty-plus years saying things like "you will live to regret the day" and trying to ruin the lives of the woman who turned him down, the man she chose over him and their child. Worst of all, the inciting incident that lead to him dressing up in orange jodhpurs and a stupid mask is him pursuing the affections of the child and very reasonably being turned down for being an old creep (to be clear, she is an adult at the time. He is just a double or even triple adult). 

He doesn't even have the dignity to get killed at the end. Just a sad old spiteful creep in a mask.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 156: OOM THE MIGHTY

(All-Star Comics 003, 1940)

Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon - still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror.

The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied that he was a spirit that was possessing a bronze grotesque, but later appearances - Oom, like Nyola before him, was Roy Thomased into the Monster Society of Evil in the pages of All-Star Squadron - treat the body as his own, thus introducing the question of why the city of Cliffland New Jersey was festooning their buildings with prehistoric statuary. Whichever is the case, possibly the most interesting thing about Oom is the fact that sometime in the last 30ish years he seems to have made the leap from Justice Society/ Spectre villain to Marvel Family foe, presumably via the Monster Society link.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 038: THE MONSTER

(More Fun 039, 1939)

A man who trained a pair of great danes to steal, leading to a city-wide panic after glimpses of the dogs caused people to assume that some sort of creature was involved, which then lead to newspaper front pages. The Radio Squad eventually got their man, though sadly the dogs did not survive.