MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 404: THE AVENGER

(More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

Another day, another Avenger. This Avenger is a disgruntled scientist named Mortimer Crandall who is seeking revenge on his old bosses for firing him because of his wacky scientific theories that, you guessed it, turned out to be correct. He uses his working technology to kidnap the men responsible in preparation for their murders.

This Avenger also demonstrates a flair for comic-book style hypnosis sufficient to place the Spectre himself under his power, which is impressive even in the Golden Age, before the whole "the Spectre is literally an angel" thing.

The Avenger ultimately fails in his bid to exact revenge and instead is given that most rare of choices for a Spectre foe: the chance to reform (with a little help from the mystic radiations of the Nebula of Truth, of course). Is it because he had genuinely been wronged? Because he had not yet taken a life? Or is the Spectre just a capricious guy? Regardless, the Avenger will venge no more.

This issue also marks the first appearance of Spectre sidekick Percival Popp, the Super Cop and I find myself in a familiar place: here is a charming oddball character that I like, being treated like an unbearable pain by all the other characters that I like. It's one of the more annoying literary dynamics! Hope it doesn't stick around!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 398: THE DARK VAPOR

(More Fun Comics 072, 1941)

The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel.

The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism, all in a few short days.

All this unwholesome business draws the attention of the Spectre, who quickly discovers that a) he cannot influence "Hiram Spiezel" like he could a normal man, b) "Spiezel" can see him, c) "Hiram Spiezel" is actually a banished evil entity from an ancient civilization picking up a bid for world conquest where it left off and d) the Dark Vapor entity is much more powerful than the Spectre. 

The entity swiftly runs off the Spectre and gets back to the business of enacting a hostile takeover on the world. As an aside: I really appreciate the adaptability of this being - I mean, I assume that whatever civilization it originated in was not organized along the same lines as 1940s US capitalist society and yet it is perfectly comfortable in its new role as business mogul rather than Thunder Warlord or Priest-King or Grand Art Critic. Good job, Dark Vapor!

Too bad for the Vape that the Spectre has an unspecified, vaguely Christian entity on speed dial, a literal deus ex machina for just such occasions. It supplies him with a power-boosting red aura, with which he in short order evicts the Vapor from Hiram Spiezel, hunts it down and imprisons it at the bottom of the sea, presumably to someday bedevil a civilization of intelligent octopuses with its preternatural pebble-stacking prowess.

AND SPEAKING OF OCTOPUSES! I enjoyed the Dark Vapor's machinations but absolutely the greatest thing about their adventure is this illustration of them as a metaphorical octopus ensnaring the US in their horrible flesh-toned tentacles. Always a delight!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 394: BANDAR

(More Fun Comics 070, 1941)

I got some gripes about Bandar and they're not really Bandar's fault. But let's start with who Bandar is: the source of a mysterious spectral figure that keeps bamboozling the Spectre and killing former members of the Crimson Circle Mystic Society.

Jim Corrigan goes deep cover and joins the Society in order to get to the bottom of what the heck is going on and discovers that they're just a bunch of dupes that society leader Bandar hypnotizes and makes steal for him. The former members are being killed - by Bandar's astral form, it turns out - not to preserve some sort of mystic secret, etc., but to keep them from possibly remembering their actions and blabbing to the fuzz.

The Spectre eventually solves the problem in his own inimitable way: by destroying Bandar's human form so that his astral self is doomed to wander forever. Efficient!

Now for the gripes: 

1. While I appreciate the consistency of the "ghosts are chalk-white figures in a purple/grey hooded robe" design, it does get pretty samey after a while and there have been quite a lot of ghosts in 1941's Spectre adventures.

2. When I started reading this story I got pretty excited about the Crimson Circle Mystic Society (or the much cooler Order of the Crimson Circle, according to their signage) being the villain and Bandar is a bit of a step down from that.

I acknowledge that those are unfair and subjective reasons to dislike a character so here are a couple of subjective things I liked about this tale to balance the scales:

1. Bandar is an example of a trope that I don't really know the name for - monster of the week? Basically, an antagonist who is able to enact a complete runaround on the very capable protagonist because they don't know what the Deal is and thus can't effectively counter the Deal. In this case, the Spectre can't stop or catch Bandar until he figures out that he's not actually a ghost but an astral projection. It's just a fun way to make what would on paper be a mismatched foe work.

2. This story marks at least the third time that Jim Corrigan is murdered while on a case, a fun recurring bit.

So: Bandar!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 393: THE TENTACLE

(More Fun Comics 069, 1941)

We don't get a lot of backstory on the Tentacle. Presumably he's a botanist or at least a gifted amateur horticulturalist, as he has developed a type of plant that strangles folks to death and can be triggered remotely (or on a timer, possibly). He uses this creation to blackmail rich men until he is tracked down by the Spectre and of course meets his end at the fronds of his own creation.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 392: THE GREEN MEN

(More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

The Green Men are little alien bigheads who rock up to our Solar System one day in their mobile planet and start siphoning life from the people of New Jersey in order to create a life-extension fluid. To this end, they depopulate at least three entire cities before being stopped, which is cool and dramatic as a bit of villainy and plays merry hell with the idea of a unified comics continuity: whither the monuments to the people of Lakehurst, Brent City and Memphis Beach? 

(of course it's hard to estimate exactly how many people that is, but as the low end of what can be called a city is generally agreed to be around 1500 we're talking 4500 people at minimum)

There's a lot of running around and malarky by both the Green Men and the Spectre - the green ray guns and bighead mental powers that they use on him are able to disable but not kill him, while he spends a long time trying and failing to shoot their planet into a star - but ultimately the Spectre engages in a good old ironic punishment and traps them in a little ball for all eternity. How's the extended lifespan now?

NOTES - DECEMBER 2023

Weaknesses: 

A very specific weakness for the Spectre: a once-in-a-hundred-million-year alignment of constellations that surely will never happen again. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

Misc:

This is my first encounter with Golden Age Johnny Quick so I'm not sure if the slow-down formula that he uses in the third panel above is a regular thing or a one-off but it sure has been left by the wayside. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

EDIT: He does it again in More Fun Comics 072! 

Memes of Yore - Keep 'em Flying!

Johnny Quick (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Green Arrow and Speedy (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

Drawn without reference:

A wonderful 11-legged spider! (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Origins:

Poor ol' Earth-Two Aquaman. Nobody even remembers that he exists half the time, plus he got eliminated in the Crisis. Anyway, here's his origin: his dad found Atlantis and trained his son to breathe water (also a cheeky Fate of Atlantis - it sank and now Aquaman lives there). (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Great Folk:

I had completely forgotten about this story, but the old man who hoots and hollers and calls for detective Russell Granville until he's on the case is the spectacular character find of 1939. Really, really great way to build up the detective before his appearance and I'm a bit sad that this is the only Russell Granville story because that old man needs more panel time. (Keen Detective Funnies v2 011, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 384: DEEJA KATHOON

(More Fun Comics 067, 1941)

Deeja Kathoon is an occultist and necromancer who has the ability to summon and bind ghosts to his service and uses this power to unleash a ghostly crimewave on Cliffland, NJ. He has what turns out to be an Indian surname but there's no indication in-story that he's supposed to be Indian and so I must assume that it's a coincidence and that my first guess was correct and his name was chosen by picking random syllables out of a hat.

Ordinarily this would be the point at which I say "unfortunately, he chose to do his crimes in the Spectre's home town," but not this time, for you see the Spectre is a ghost. Kathoon binds him just like any other ghost and almost forces him to destroy the Cliffland City Hospital before the Ring of Life manages to deus ex machina him out of that particular jam.

One thing that goes unexplored and unexplained in the story is the zippy little rocket ship that Kathoon tries to escape in once the Spectre is free. In the absence of any hint or eleventh hour reveal that he is an alien or magical time traveller I must assume that it is a magic rocket ship, which is great. More magic rocket ships are what we need, in my humble opinion.

It's just possible that being forced to do Kathoon's bidding rattled the Spectre, or at least convinced him that the guy was a legitimate threat, because not only does he kill him via rocket ship explosion, he then hunts down and kills his ghost. This is, yes, a step more extreme than 1939 Batman gunning down the odd monster, but then again this is the Spectre. He has a reputation for brutality for a reason.

In conclusion, this little cloud guy that Kathoon made to intimidate the Spectre is the sensational character find of 1941.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 382: THE MAN

(More Fun Comics 066, 1941) 

Out of nowhere one day, giant monsters attack Cliffland, New Jersey!

After driving them off a couple of times, the Spectre manages to follow them back to their base of operations, a weird painting of unknown provenance hanging in a Cliffland museum. There he finds that the monsters reside in a metal city ruled over by a man referred to only as the Man.

The Man is clearly modeled after the fascist dictators of the day and spends his time whipping his monstrous subjects into a frenzy prior to a wholesale invasion of the real world. While I don't appreciate the attempted-destruction-of-humanity of it all I must admit that he has some wonderful turns of phrase. Maybe being a fictional entity allows you to tap into a poetical mindset more easily.

The Man's schemes all come to nothing as the Spectre invades his world and decimates his forces, then overcomes the Man himself (despite the Man deploying not only a variety of magical powers but a surprise eleventh-hour monster transformation) and destroys both the painting and the world it contains.

I have to say that despite not particularly loving the monster designs here I do love the idea of an outsider artist putting so much of themself into a work that it gains a life of its own. BRING BACK the Man, I say, whether in another work by the same artist or as a fictional parasite who appears in other paintings until he can find one that he can use as a portal to the real world. He would be a great addition to the ranks of the DCU's magical weirdos.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 379: THE BLUE FLAME

(More Fun Comics 065, 1941)

A fairly simple one, this. The Blue Flame is an eerie cloaked figure sheathed in, yes, blue flame, that embarks on a crime spree in Cliffland, New Jersey. His crimes are not quite but almost exclusively aimed at the attendees of shows by stage magician Dr Mephisto and there is even some indication that the Blue Flame is attempting to frame Mephisto.

Unfortunately for the Blue Flame, Cliffland is home to the Spectre, and he is fairly swiftly revealed to actually be... Dr Mephisto! That's right, the whole thing about the frame-up was a moderately clever ruse! That failed to take into account the fairly well-documented super-powered ghost-man constantly capturing costumed crooks, sure, but a plan is a plan and deserves acknowledgement.

By far the best part of the story, at least for my money, is the Spectre's encounter with Blue Flame henchman Jimmy "Knife" Groggins. Contrary to his no-nonsense buzzkill modern characterization, the Golden Age Spectre really seemed to have fun with his job and letting Knife throw his namesake only to turn it into a little necklace charm is a fairly good illustration of that. 

Even better is this "monster of space" that the Spectre lets eat both himself and Knife as an advanced interrogation technique. Just look at that guy! A real top-notch monster! The Blue Flame can go kick rocks but BRING BACK this magnificent beast!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 376: THE SHADOW

(More Fun Comics 064, 1941)

The Shadow is in reality the vengeful ghost of Elmer Watson, a bumped-off witness in a big corruption case. Slightly more reasonable reason for revenge than some murderous ghosts, certainly, but Watson's vengeance eventually becomes so all-consuming that he attempts to derail an entire passenger train to get at one target and he ends up banished to whatever nether realm the Spectre sends bad ghosts to.

This is two Vengeance Ghosts in a row for the Spectre! Is that all he is going to face now? No, I checked, it's not. Close call though!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 372: THE GHOST OF TRIGGER DANIELS

(More Fun Comics 063, 1941)

Trigger Daniels is a hitman in the employ of gang boss Bugs O'Leary who gets sent up for the murder of a local philanthropist and swears revenge on all who had a part in his fate just before being executed. This is a pretty standard setup to a comic book story and usually involves  lot of faked deaths and/or secret twins and/or scientists with cashflow problems and innovative ideas about brain transplants/ reviving the dead. Trigger Daniels stands out because he represents the first time I have encountered such a person just... coming back as a ghost. I'm sure it's happened in other comics but I do not recall any examples.

And he doesn't just come back as a regular-style ghost either! No, he's a Spectre- style "earth-bound spirit" with ghost powers sufficient to take out the average human. Golden Age Spectre comics never really flesh out the hows and whys of ghosts so it's unclear if they all have powers or if Daniels is special somehow. He does have the ability to cloak himself in the "powers of darkness" in order to escape from the Spectre, which might point to some sort of grander evil backing him up, but if it does exist there are no further indications.

In any case, the "powers of darkness" trick works only once as the second time Daniels tries it the Spectre remembers that he has the Ring of Life, mystical multitool that no ghost should leave home without. Daniels is swiftly banished or destroyed utterly.

JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 3/5 -  Trigger Daniels set himself a fairly reasonable target and even managed to get his old gang boss, the prosecutor and the jury foreman but ultimately ran up against the fact that one of his intended victims was Jim "the Spectre" Corrigan and ghost or no ghost that's a hard task to accomplish.

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 153: KULAK

(All-Star Comics 002, 1940)

Kulak is the High Priest of Brztal, which is originally implied to be an ancient lost civilization but I believe is later defined as extra-dimensional in some way. His deal is ostensibly that he is upset that his tomb was disturbed so he is going to destroy humanity, but I don't know that he wasn't just looking for an excuse to flex his magical muscles. He gets up to a lot of fun stuff with disasters - worldwide flooding and riots, plagues of lucusts etc - and summons armies of ancient Brztalan dead to smite his enemy but ultimately is put down again by the Spectre.

In what is going to be an ongoing theme with these one-off All-Star villains, he eventually gets Roy Thomased into the pages of All-Star Squadron to mix it up with the Spectre one more time.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 112: THE CRIME LORD/ THE BRAIN

(More Fun Comics 062, 1940) 

An early iteration of the classic tale of a brain that is freed of its cranium and becomes both powerful and EVIL, originally just a man named Dexter with a skeletal system and all the organs, he then became a mysterious shadowy figure named the Crime Lord as he directed his minions toward an eventual takeover of the US.

Upon being freed from his bell jar, the Crime Lord became the rapidly-expanding Brain, who similarly grew his ambitions: no longer interested in conquest on a national level, he was now going to expand to fill the entire universe. And he might have gotten away with it if the Spectre hadn't shown up to shrivel him away to nothingness.

Bonus: the Spectre eating a bullet to save FDR.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 111: THE SPECTRE

(More Fun 061,1940)

Impersonating and framing a super-hero is not an uncommon thing to do, but Gustav Gilroy took the added step of adopting his target's identity as his own in his campaign of turning his enemies to gold via chemical-laced free gum samples.

Gilroy also faced the Spectre in the first year of his career and so didn't really comprehend just how bad his choice of scapegoat was - the only surprising thing about his end is that he was ultimately turned to gold by his own hand rather than that of the earth-bound ghost himself.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 109: XNON

(More Fun Comics 060, 1940)

Xnon is a guy I like. He lives an an extradimensional orb/city and seems to spend his time traveling from world to world looting and conquering, if his behavior on Earth is taken as an example. Then again, he seems to have recruited all of his henchmen from the Cliffland, New Jersey underworld so maybe this was his first outing as a transdimensional overlord.

What can be said for certain is that Xnon (no idea if it's pronounced "Znon" or "X-non", though I prefer the latter) uses his advanced technology to perform a series of daring thefts including an entire train, then briefly mind controls the Spectre into doing his bidding. He almost gets away with it, but the Spectre manages to call for help from what would later be semi-explicitly defined as the Christian God. Xnon is swiftly stuck in a meteor and blasted into interdimensional space.

I love Xnon. He looks great, has a great orb, is an arrogant jerk which I love in a villain... he has it all. Plus the manner of his defeat makes him someone who could conceivably be BRUNG BACK without any need for a new origin or anything. Just say that throughout all of the retcons and crises and every other dumb thing that DC has done in the last ~30 years, Xnon has been floating around in his meteor and then BAM it lands back in Cliffland (or wherever the Spectre hangs out nowadays) for some reason, and he's ready to scrap with a Spectre who has absolutely no idea who he is.

Also, this is what happens when you try to make the Spectre do a crime: pride flag explosion.