MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 067: ZOLAR

(Action Comics 030, 1940)

In thinking about Zolar I realized that he engages in a surprisingly common plot-expedient activity which I, unwilling to root around on TVTropes for whatever twee thing they might dub it, am hereby going to call "the Reel": the villain sends a minion from their exotically-located HQ to wherever the hero is located to accomplish some sort of McGuffin task - collect an item, kill or kidnap someone, etc - thereby alerting the hero to the threat and drawing them to the exotic location. As soon as I thought about this I realized that many of the minor super-villains on our list employ the Reel: the Gorilla King sends a squad of gorilla-assassins to kill his enemy, thereby alerting Zatara, for instance.

In Zolar's case, he sends some of his men (mind controlled desert tribespeople, natch) to Metropolis to eliminate an impediment to his plans, which involves first Lois Lane and then Superman. Cut to the Sahara Desert, where Zolar is trying to conquer the lost city of Ulonda using a combination of mind control, rocket planes and flesh-destroying death orbs.

The whole thing ends in bloodshed: Zolar and his lieutenant attempt to death orb Superman only to have it bounce back on themselves, while his fleet of mind controlled rocket pilots are caused to crash by a slightly-pre-anti-killing-code Superman. The lost city of Ulonda, though battered, survives.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAINS

I like taking note of minor and obscure characters from days of yore, and none other is so beloved of my heart as the minor super-villain. Even though lot of them are real duds, as a class of characters they pack such a lot of potential. Just as very little separates an Ultra-Humanite (middlingly significant super-villain) from a Luthor (one of the top super-villains of all time), just as little separates them from Zolar, a bald super-scientist who fought Superman one time in 1940.

But if we're going to talk about minor super-villains then we must determine what exactly defines a villain as super (at least to me). The simplest route to this is to put on a costume, adopt an alias, and commit a crime. Particularly if the costume, crime or both are themed according to the name. Call yourself the Viper and dress in a snakeskin jacket and papier mache snake head while robbing a reptile house and you, my friend, are a super-villain.

Not every super-villain fits those criteria, however - heck, Luthor basically never has and he was my major example earlier - so I had to come up with some criteria. Generally, a villain who fulfils two or more of the following is elevated to the ranks of the minor super-villain:

-costume (even a simple domino mask can make the difference)

-foe (fight a super-hero and the super can rub off on you)

-methods (superpowers or superscience make super-villains)

-name (probably the least important without any of the others - comics are littered with gangsters named the Little Gardenia or the Bone Butcher who amount to exactly nothing)

-scale (rob a convenience store: nothing. Rob every convenience store in the city: that's supercrime!)

-theme (theme your weapons, your crimes, your henchmens' names. Delicious stuff)

-style (absolutely the most important. A character who fails to thrive doesn't make the list: Tex Thomson once fought a guy who lived in an isolated castle and had rebuilt himself as a shapechanging plastic cyborg and he is not represented here because I yawned my way through the issue)

That's it and I'm sure that I'll be very inconsistent as I go along.