MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 340: THE SEA-DEVIL

(Master Comics 007, 1940)

Let's start with the good things about the Sea-Devil: he's part of one of my favourite super-villain traditions: the guy who dresses up like a creature in order to play off of local superstitions. Nothing specific in this case - he's just banking on the local oyster divers not wanting to contend with a mysterious horned humanoid while they're trying to earn an already dangerous living. To that end, his costume isn't the most elaborate fake sea monster in comics, though it does have a certain minimalist charm.

The rest of the story is depressingly familiar. The Sea-Devil is a guy named Sam Mindoro, his motivation is to drive off the white guy who owns his ancestral lands and of course this makes him the worst kind of villain despite him not actually killing anyone while disrupting the extraction of wealth from the area. I mean he does try to kill Shipwreck Roberts and Deep Sea Doodle, which is a crime, but "wants his land back" and "inconveniences a white guy" are treated as much worse ones. Depressing stuff.

ADDENDUM: Forgot to mention that this fellow is our first Filipino super-villain, for what it's worth.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 337: DR DROWN

(Master Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Drown is a paragon of his sub-category of super-villain. Unfortunately for him, that is not a particularly exalted position, as he belongs to the Association of Seagoing Criminal Scientists and the membership of that group is heavily diluted by decades of Aquaman and Sea Devils and even Challengers of the Unknown foes with wilfully bad schemes.

Dr Drown's schemes aren't too bad! He as a submersible yacht that he uses to torpedo and loot ships, which is a lucrative if very evil business model, with the sole flaw being that he keeps doing it in exactly the same part of the ocean which makes him very easy for his foe Shipwreck Roberts to track him down.

Drown's other claim to fame is as a tamer of sea monsters and it's here that things really get going for me. The "brontosauruses" above are pretty light fare but check this out:

I follow a lot of horror artists on various social medias and it's still been a while since I've seen anything quite as unsettling as the Giantocrab. Why does it have human arms, for heaven's sake?

By contrast the Colostopus is merely a fun dome-shaped friend with a good name.

Drown also deployed this Mechanosaurus in a later adventure but as the name suggests it was actually a monster-shaped submarine (a classic move but always sad to miss out on a real monster).

As stated above, Dr Drown is a great example of a generally mediocre lot - I'd be right chuffed if he or one of his descendants were ever brung back.