MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 951: THE DEADLY DOZEN

(Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

We open on a demonstration by one Dr Roe of his invention the Death Detector, which he purports is able to determine if someone is incapable of murder (yellow light displayed), potentially capable of murder (red light) or has in fact murdered someone (blue light). 

While the implications and legalities of this device are legion (e.g., how does it determine this, does it distinguish between killing in self defense and manslaughter and premeditated murder, would widespread adoption of this technology create a semi-criminal class of Red Light People who are discriminated against despite having done nothing wrong, etc, etc), the really important thing about this demonstaration is that Bart "Daredevil" Hill taunts mobster "Nat" Nattony into going up on stage, whereupon he murders Dr Roe. Would the machine give Bart a blue light for being directly if inadvertently responsible for Roe's death, I wonder.

Daredevil makes off with the device in order to keep it safe, but the upside of whole sordid affair was that it provided a means of proving the machine's efficacy, as before taking off he had used it to search the crowd for Nattony and instead turned up a different wanted murderer. Now the FBI wants the Death Detector and the Daredevil aims to get it to them.

Nattony's boss Curly is understandably concerned about this development and calls the nation's gang bosses together in Atlantic City for a Crime Convention to discuss the matter. After a lot of goofy business with gangsters picking each others' pockets and so forth, the assembled ranks of crimedom take a vote and determine that the best way to deal with the Daredevil is to pick out twelve of gangland's most proficient killers and send them after him. Thus: the Deadly Dozen!

The members of the Deadly Dozen are: the Crusher, Egg Head, Snake Eyes, Skully, Benito, the Butcher, the Giant Killer, the Owl, Satan, the Sniffer, the Turk and Lady Killer, and though I love the idea of this group on many levels (gather together a bunch of vicious assassins! With diverse and distinct idiosyncrasies and fun names! Yes please!) there is one notable flaw with the concept of the Deadly Dozen, and that is that every single one of its appearances takes place in an anthology comic in which there is simply not enough room to spotlight every member of a twelve-strong team. 

This might be the only story in which each member of the Dozen gets even a token shoutout, rather than mooching around in the background while a couple of highlighted characters get on with the action. As such, we'll take a quick look at them in the order that they appear in-story:

the Sniffer:

The Sniffer stands out from the moment that he appears in that initial group shot, and it's no surprise that he is the breakout star of the bunch, with his own ongoing feature starting in Daredevil Comics 008. A rough, crude, hairy, flat-headed brute who wears rough clothes and rope belt while everyone else is in a suit or tuxedo, the Sniffer is a real rough-and-tumble rowdy boy. As his name suggests, he also has a superhuman sense of smell, capable of locating, for example, the Daredevil in a warehouse full of criminals.

Lady Killer: 

Lady Killer doesn't even get a line before he is beaten up and hung from the telephone pole he was lurking behind for the Daredevil. Hopefully his name derives from the fact that he is a handsome man and not from the fact that he tends to kill ladies, like his recent fellow Lev Gleason character, but it is possible that we will never know.

the Crusher and Egg Head: 

The Crusher and Egg Head fall prey to the ol' duck-out-of-the-way-when-they're-about-to-shoot-you-from-two-sides-so-that-they-shoot-one-another trick, but don't worry, they survive. I'm no gun expert but I'll bet that they specifically tell you not to shoot at something that's in front of someone you don't want to shoot for exactly this reason.

Both Egg Head and Crusher are mainstays of the Deadly Dozen, with speaking lines in just about every story I scanned through just now. With Egg Head this is likely because of his visually distinct bald dome, while Crusher has the distinction of becoming known as Sniffer's best friend over time. He even appears in the very last Sniffer story in the far-distant future of 1956!

Snake Eyes, the Owl and the Turk:

Snake Eyes, the Owl and the Turk make a decent attempt at ambushing the Daredevil while pretending to be FBI agents, only to be beaten up in pretty short order. I haven't read through every Deadly Dozen appearance, but I reckon that this poor showing is also their career highlight, which is a real shame in the cases of the very visually-interesting Owl and Snake Eyes.

Skully and the Butcher: 

Skully and the Butcher get tricked into shooting and knifing one another, respectively, with embarrassing ease by the Daredevil. Once again they are retroactively fine due to the demands of future stories, though this does call their competence as killers into question somewhat.

Though the Butcher seems to be just another face-in-the-crowd member of the Dozen, Skully gets a fair number of speaking roles going forward.

(Skull Score: 1 - just an emaciated face on ol' Skully I'm afraid)

the Sniffer (again), Satan, Giant Killer, Benito: 

Here we have a very contrasting group, with Sniffer and Satan (de facto leader, visually interesting, always in a speaking role) alongside Benito (most boring member, couldn't even muster up a nickname, I'd be surprised if he ever gets another line of dialogue) and Giant Killer (solid middle of the roader, not just bald but short, probably gets a line now and then). All four of them get tossed off the train, and that's it for the Deadly Dozen.

Like I said, I love the Deadly Dozen conceptually and I love the Sniffer specifically, and it's nice to have those feeling about characters who will be returning, for once. I don't think that the problem of one dozen being too damn many members to showcase in a single comic, but who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and some hidden Golden Age gem awaits me still.

As for the Death Detector, not only does it get safely delivered to the FBI so that they can start planning out the dystopian society they're going to form around it (Gattaca meets Minority Report, I reckon), but the Daredevil is able to lead them back to Atlantic City to round up the whole Crime Convention for use as test subjects. 

(almost forgot to include this terrific pic of Daredevil vs the Sniffer from the cover)

Categorized in: Alphanumeric (Twelve), Language (Superlatives - Deadly), Team Index

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 900: TRUG

(Whiz Comics 013, 1941) 

Trug is a student of magic and of Ibis the Invincible specifically who creeps out of the shadows after Ibis and Taia's ward Tommy has defeated his school's boxing champion and tempts the despondent youth into stealing the Ibistick for him (the sad boy is then turned into a tree and then never mentioned again - very sad).

Trug's Ibis scholarship extends beyond kind of dressing like him and knowing where his extended family hang out into important topics like how not to kill yourself while using the Ibistick. Unlike every poor chump who has gotten their hands on it before him, Trug is aware that it will visit any harm intended for Ibis back on its wielder and so deals exclusively in barriers, crevasses and other nonlethal means of keeping his rival at bay.

Where Trug fails is in not being a creep and kidnapping Taia as he leaves to enjoy his newfound power. Quite aside from any moral implications, this is a sure way to make Ibis just that much more determined in his quest to defeat his foe.

Fore reasons of his own, Trug heads north, subjugates the local peoples and builds a palace, and here I notice that he has kidnapped Taia not as a creepy "I will make you my queen" kind of thing but as a hostage, which I would still not call a good idea but which at least has a bit of logic to it.

One thing that Trug has clearly not considered is that Ibis still has access to magical items that he used the Ibistick to create and that using two of these - the crystal ball and super-plane, specifically - he is able to locate and travel to Trug's new kingdom in swift order. Trug thus makes the mistake of summoning an air force to deal with whoever might be encroaching on his airspace, only for them to turn on him and cause a piece of his own palace to fall and bonk him unconscious.

Trug ends his days as a decorative statue as part of the compensation offered by Ibis to his former subjects. (Whiz Comics 014, 1941) 

Trug isn't a statue for very long before he is carried off by slavers and worshipped as an idol. When Ibis is then asked for help, he restores Trug to human form as part of a scheme to show that he is a mere mortal.

Turning Trug back and forth from statue to man to show that he is in fact powerless swiftly convinces his erstwhile worshippers to abandon him, and somehow also that they should give up their warlike ways and make peace with their former enemies. Trug, meanwhile, is left at liberty and feeling vengeful, though he is under-dressed in the Arctic. (Whiz Comics 015, 1941)

Undaunted by his circumstances, Trug hops on a log and starts paddling his way South, and has the good fortune to encounter a helpful man with a magic bag of wind, who he promptly robs and murders. He makes an opportunistic and unsuccessful attempt to kill Ibis and Taia by summoning a storm demon, then composes himself and... (Whiz Comics 016, 1941)

... kidnaps Ibis and Taia's ward Tommy and uses him as bait in yet another attempt to kill Ibis, and while the first part of that plan works like a charm, his trapping game is pretty haphazard. His ace in the hole is clearly the god-monster the Man of the Mountain (the four-armed guy above) but he also blows up the ship that Ibis is crossing the Pacific on (ineffective) and places fairly obvious traps like a clearly-carnivorous tree and a demon disguised as a pretty lady on the path leading to his cave hideout. (Whiz Comics 017, 1941) 

The Man of the Mountain, though imposing, is not too bright and is lured off of a cliff with relative ease, after which Trug just kind of gives up. There is a small amount of tension as the ambient magical energies of the area render the Ibistick powerless and thus Ibis and Taia are trapped on the side of a mountain, but that barely counts as a deathtrap. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

We now enter that phase of any recurring villain's career in which they go from being a legitimate threat to a bit of a joke, and in Trug's case this begins when he is rejected by a loser named Mudge who himself is looking to get revenge on Ibis for foiling his plans. Trug might have fallen on hard times but he knows how to size up a fool, and Mudge is exactly the kind of guy to fall for the old Fake Satan trick. Where he was unwilling to team up with an unsuccessful magician he is more than happy to sell his soul for a chance at revenge, the dope.

Mudge and Satan/Trug attempt to kill Ibis and Taia with a magic bomb, but fail as Ibis saw them coming a mile away and substituted a couple of magical duplicates for them. He afflicts Mudge with donkey ears for his trouble, which only redoubles his commitment to revenge.

The duo next attempt to harm Ibis by killing Taia and are fooled by the same magical duplicate trick, upon which Ibis reveals that he was not only on to them but that he know that "Satan" was actually Trug the whole time. Mudge and Trug are then sealed up in a wall to die, which is pretty tough justice, but we must remember that Ibis is from another time.

Though Mudge's fate is sealed, Trug will return in 1942. (Whiz Comics 020, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 873: SATAN

(Zip Comics 003, 1940)

Zambini (the Miracle Man) is on his first vacation in years and Satan, presuming that his guard will be down or that he left his magic amulet at home I guess, decides that this is the perfect time to attack and murder him for being such a thorn in the side of Evil. 

(Please note the near-identical guy kind of capering behind Satan's throne up there, as he represents my favourite thing about this adventure, that Satan rules over a nation of devils (the Devil Men) who all look pretty much exactly the same as him. Some of them have red hair or different beard styles, but over all they are the most homogeneous demon army I have ever seen,

Also, I know that trying to formulate a coherent cosmology out of any comic book company's output will be a fool's errand for some time yet, but it's interesting that Satan and the Devil appear to be two seperate entities in the MLJ/Archie afterlife) 

In case it wasn't clear up above: I don't think that this is a very good plan on Satan's part. Like, why not attack Zambini while he is tackling another problem instead of while he is having a nice rest? Why attempt to kill him with a tidal wave, the well-known slow and ominous disaster, rather than something quick and sudden that he doesn't have time to react to by, as in this case, freezing the ocean?  

Satan's next move is to send some Devil Men to attack Zambini directly (and looking at them here I must say that there are two faces in the devil nation: the classic devil face of the black haired Devil Men and the more cavemanish look of the red haired ones). They fare no better than the tidal wave and are transformed into a flock of presumably infernal penguins that presumably must be bedevilling the seas to this day.

Zambini decides to take the battle to Satan, and here's where I'll give the ol' Prince of Lies a little credit: he did plan for this eventuality, in the form of a really horrible cage that takes advantage of Zambini's weakness to human touch by being made entirely out of human hands. It's honestly one of the worst things that I have seen in a depiction of comic book Hell!

Satan of course follows this up with the worst plan ever devised: he has his guys push the cage into a big fire in an attempt to kill Zambini, without reckoning with the fact that the unprotected human hands will probably be destroyed more quickly than the asbestos suit-clad magician. Sure enough: Zambini emerges from the flames unharmed and strikes Satan dead.