MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 546: PROFESSOR DWYER

(Smash Comics 003, 1939)

When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he must contend with that most classic of comic book man-monsters: a gorilla with a human brain, wearing a suit.

Dwyer isn't the biggest villain, per se - he robs a safe, transplants a brain from a presumably-unwilling man into a gorilla and briefly kidnaps an elevator boy - but he certainly does manage to rack up an impressive checklist of mad science achievements before being taken into custody:

- fired and in fact confined to an asylum due to the unorthodox nature of his research

- asylum escapee

- castle HQ

- gorilla henchman

- in fact gorilla henchman with a human brain

- engine killing technology

- death ray technology

It's an impressive resume, capped off by his complete lack of physical ability that leads to him being captured  with exactly no trouble despite being armed. The gorilla-man unfortunately does not survive.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 415: THE GORILLA

(Blue Beetle Comics 009-010, 1941)

The Gorilla is actually Jack Castle, a drunken lout who happens to be the lab assistant to the unhinged Dr Brock. Castle pushes his employer a bit too far and ends up on the wrong end of an ape brain transplant. Dr Brock meanwhile has forgotten one of the major things about brains and so ends up like so many other mad scientists do after transplanting an unwilling one: murdered by his own creation.

Castle was a creep as a human and he's no better as a gorilla, so he ends up vowing revenge on all humanity.

But it's a tricky prospect, taking on the world with a gorilla body and no people skills. The Gorilla's only adventure post-origin involves his trying to take over the underworld based solely on physical prowess and it goes poorly - in fact, both of his adventures end with him crawling off to nurse a gunshot wound.

It's all okay stuff, but the most interesting part of it is that the Gorilla is an antagonist without a protagonist. In storytelling terms I suppose that the Gorilla is the protagonist and the world is the antagonist? The point it that this is an early experiment in having the villain headline the story and I appreciate it.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 037: THE GORILLA KING

(Action v1 019, 1939)

Classic mad scientist stuff here: work out a revolutionary technique to transplant human brains into gorillas and then aim no higher than sending your gorilla-men out on horseback to plunder Mexico. Blows himself up, as per the above image.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 030: DR KICHUNG

(Action v1 008-009, 1939)

Dr Kichung menaced Tex Thomson for a couple of issues in a fairly standard scientist-who-puts-human-brains-into-apes kind of way until the local apes, sick of his malarky, killed him dead. I really liked his apes though. They had gravitas.