MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 806: THE SCOURGE

(The Funnies 050, 1940)

The Scourge is a bandit chief operating in the nonspecific Medieval-pastiche England of the Black Knight, and let me tell you, he is a terrific villain. His amazing look is one thing - just how many Golden Age villains have the confidence to use eye makeup to accentuate their air of menace? - but on top of that I have seldom seen a villain so eager and joyful to torture a peasant woman. Just an amazingly hateable guy, with a really top-notch crew of evil oafs to boot.

Though the poor woman's husband and sons set out to avenge her, they prove no match for the Scourge and his band of ruffians, and it falls to the Black Knight and a local hunk to get the job done. 

It does of course turn out that a good look and a bad attitude will only take you so far, particularly when your follow-up to a a successful heist is to get drunk in the woods for a week straight. The Black Knight and his unnamed and shirtless assistant make quick work of the lot of them once they are able to approach them on equal footing, and the Scourge meets his end by the Black Knight's Blade.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 012

Management not responsible if some of the villains are not technically costumed.

This fellow, known as the Boss, was the masked publisher of a newspaper known as the Weekly Tattler which functioned as a vehicle for his blackmail business: pay up or get your secrets printed in the next edition. He turned out to be the husband of one of the paper's victims, which makes little enough sense that I reckon that they got to the end of the story without adding any good suspects so went with the only possibility. Also he gets shot by his very gullible underling after the Fox barely implies that there's a double cross on. (Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941)

Inferno tangles with crook Jake the Fake and his henchmen as they make a break for the Mexican border disguised as a shipment of mummies, a top tier thing to pretend to be. (Blue Ribbon Comics 017, 1941)

If you have to be a very generic pirate so hard up you have to kidnap guys from the US Navy to run your radio equipment in a mid-level (by Golden Age standards) racist adventure well then you'd better have a great name like the Scourge because that's really all you have going for you. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

Like the Scourge, the Obermaster here is a real waste of a good villain name on a real damp squib of a character. He is Samson Gorth, a criminal mastermind with no real plan. No, that's not accurate. He has a plan to incite war between the US and Japan by attacking their respective shipping using planes with false insignia but beyond that his goals are a mystery. Is he hoping for plunder? A chance for war profiteering? No clue and thanks to special agent Bruce McKay, Sky Master, we'll never find out. Because the Obermaster is dead. In case that wasn't clear. (The Funnies 035, 1939)