MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 906: THE VENGEFUL FOUR

(Whiz Comics 021, 1941)

The Vengeful Four is an example of a phenomenon that I am not sure is common enough that I need to come up with a special name for it: the big-name villain (in this case Dr Sivana) teaming up with a selection of nobodies as if they were equals. The Four Cards represent one other example of this, and the Penguin is a part of another called the Birds of a Feather that we will cover once we hit the year 1942. Are there more? Will I need to make up a term for this? We shall see.

 

The non-Sivana members of the Vengeful Four include gang boss Biggy Brix, who crawls away from his busted-up getaway car and straight into an opportunity to get revenge on Captain Marvel for busting it up;

Captain Death, a heavily cloak-based villain who I posited might be the same as the Captain Marvel foe and pirate submariner of the same name nearly three and a half years ago and I'm still not sure either way;

And finally Herr Geyer, one of the not-quite Nazis from the end of the Smasher Spy saga, who seems to have taken Captain Marvel's interference much harder than the several beatings he got from Spy Smasher both before and after he recovered his moral compass.

Since Dr Sivana already knows that Captain Marvel is actually Billy Batson, he hits upon a plan that is brilliant in its simplicity: send his three compatriots out into the city to find and kidnap Billy. Honestly, he should be doing this constantly, and frequently is, come to think of it.

(there is a part of me that objects to the concept of Sivana sharing this valuable information with just anyone, but I must acknowledge that this is as a result of decades of poisoning by comic book writing. Of course the best thing to do with a super-hero's secret identity is to spread it far and wide, and jealously guarding it is something that only serves to keep the status quo. Still feels weird to read, though)

Thanks to the fact that there is an unofficial Billy Batson convention going on in town, all three junior members of the Vengeful Four, though successful in grabbing a Billy Batson, do not get the Billy Batson. Though a setback, this does provide them with three ready-made hostages to draw the fourth Billy in and soon all available Billys Batson are loaded into a classic industrial deathtrap: the sawmill.

The Vengeful Four, to their extremely small credit, don't stick around to watch four teenage boys get bisected. This allows the Billys the opportunity to escape by pooling their voices and sending out a combined "SHAZAM" that is louder than the sawmill, thus not only allowing Original Billy to transform but incidentally transforming the other three into the Lieutenant Marvels thanks, presumably, to some lazy spell-writing on the wizard Shazam's part. 

The small aircraft that the Vengeful Four are travelling in is no match for four speeding super-guys and is soon nothing but a pile of smouldering wreckage - this is after all during the early part of Captain Marvel's career when he has no problem with killing a sufficiently dangerous foe. Dr Sivana will of course return, but for Biggy Brix, Captain Death and Herr Geyer this is the end of the line.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 069

Mostly, but not all, updates. 

Ibis the Invincible **UPDATE**:

1941 sees Ibis the Invincible's omnipotence tempered a bit via a slight limitation that is added to the Ibistick: it is not directly able to affect things created by or otherwise powered by evil magic, and it might not work at all in overtly magical areas such as a giant's floating castle.

This is balanced out somewhat by the fact that it gives Ibis the chance to demonstrate his lateral thinking skills by indirectly affecting these things, whether it be with a right hook or a summoned Egyptian god. (Whiz Comics 016, 1941)

the Lieutenant Marvels:

The Lieutenant Marvels are also the members of the Billy Batson Club, being three other kids with the name Billy Batson who all gather in New York Fawcett City to... share the pain of having the same name as a media figure with the figure in question? I guess that's what they were doing? Turns out they all get along well enough to form a club, and to distinguish themselves they all choose a nickname: the lanky Westerner becomes Tall Billy, the squat Brooklynite is Fat Billy, the Southerner chooses to be Hill Billy and the famous one is acclaimed as Real Billy. This is the sort of nicknaming system that seems fine when you're thirteen but can really fester over the years.

The meetup is not all about comparing names and making friend, however, because these guys all have access to the comic books from our universe somehow and as such they all know about the link between yelling "SHAZAM!" while being named Billy Batson and becoming Captain Marvel, BUT ALSO are surprised when Real Billy does so and transforms. It's a real pickle how they might have most of the info but not that last piece - perhaps the comics in this world that will eventually be designated Earth-S posit that Billy summons Captain Marvel by yelling for him. 

Thanks to some name-based misunderstandings, the four all end up being captured by Dr Sivana and his group the Vengeful Four and tied to a deathtrap loud enough that all four Billys need to shout together to get the SHAZAM through to the lightning dispatcher. Surprisingly, the "any Billy Batson yelling SHAZAM = Captain Marvel" idea that they all had in their heads was accurate, and they all transform into equivalently powerful super-beings, with a ready-made names that are not actually used until their second appearance: Tall Marvel, Fat Marvel and Hill Marvel.

(I have to admit here that I had for many years thought that the "Lieutenant" in Lieutenant Marvels was like when a villain's top guy is called their lieutenant, like these guys are Captain Marvel's helpers. I just now realized that it is in fact a straight military hierarchy joke) 

The Lieutenant Marvels show up now and then to this day when Captain Marvel needs three other guys to help him do something, but given that they debut just a few months before Captain Marvel Jr and a year and a bit before Mary Marvel, their services aren't as in-demand as one might expect.  (Whiz Comics 021, 1941) 

Golden Arrow **Update**: 

Though as previously noted the Golden Arrow strip essentially switched from a Modern West to Old West setting after about two or three issues, there has always been a bit of ambiguity as to the specific century the action was taking place in. Though some might point to the presence of a working stagecoach system or other anachronisms in earlier issues as evidence that Golden Arrow was firmly Old West, I have been burned before and it took something like this declaration of the train as a new-fangled arrival to convince me that the comic wasn't suddenly going to feature Nazi fifth columnists. (Whiz Comics 021, 1941)

the Arrow **Update**: 

The Arrow finally gets an alter ego in his final comic book appearance, and it's US Intelligence agent Ralph Payne. Is this an improvement over being an unnamed giant of a man? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. He also gets a more conventional super-hero cowl mask (with just a hint of the visible hairline that made his fellow Centaur character the Fantom of the Fair look so distinctive) and some cool boots at the same time. (The Arrow 003, 1941)