MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 667: ANGEL EYES

(Jungle Comics 010, 1940)

It's a c-c-c-combo breaker! Ordinarily Fantomah swans around observing the villains of her comic adventures and periodically telling them that they should stop what they're doing before it's too lat, ie, before she delivers unto them an ironic punishment. This issue features one of the few foes to catch her completely flat-footed and she is as surprised as anyone when giant flaming hands start tearing through the jungle, indiscriminately murdering both people and animals. Who or what could be behind this?

The culprit turns out to be a scientific prodigy called Angel Eyes, who has the Batman origin except his parents were killed by a jungle and so he has vowed to destroy all jungles. He has created artificial life forms out of chemicals and known as the Flaming Claws for the simple reason that they are completely invisible except for their huge flaming clawed hands.

I really appreciate Angel Eyes' design! He really captures the look of a person who would be extremely attractive if they didn't constantly wear their foul mood in their facial expression.

Not that Fantomah ever has much of a hard time dealing with guys like this, but Angel Eyes is an especially easy one: she just hangs him from a tree and has his own creations attack him until he has a heart attack and dies. As for the Flaming Claws, why, they get melted back into the constituent chemicals that they were made of.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 237: CZAR THE UNKILLABLE MAN

(Flash Comics v1 007, 1940)

Like Echo or Hugo Strange's Monster Men before him, Czar the Unkillable Man is arguably less a super-villain than a tool created by a super-villain, but where's the fun in listing a buncha guys named Dr Samuels and Professor Tompkins or in this case Boris Nickaloff?

Nickaloff is a bit of a mystery - he creates Czar by sculpting a complete human body - inside and out - out of "plasm-clay" and then shocking it to life with a shot of adrenaline. Is this meant to be mad science? Magic? A modern day Pygmalion story? No clues are given. Probably science if the adrenaline is any hint, but I prefer to think it's reality-bending mad art.

Nickaloff gets Czar to rob some banks and kill a bunch of people, and it's here that he maybe turn out to be a bit less of a tool than old Echo after all, as he sets about his rampages with  a bit more gusto than is required. He also kidnaps Shiera Sanders in a fit of man-monster horniness, which is both telling and gross.

Hawkman of course can't let such wanton killing and reallocation of funds stand, and he eventually stumbles upon the Unkillable Man's weakness: he still has to breathe. To be clear, he stumbles upon it because Nickaloff repeatedly states that it is Czar's only weakness in a loud, clear voice, which favour Hawkman repays by killing the both of them via a set of bolas to the neck.

(as seen above, Hawkman initially thinks that he is dealing with a vampire rather than a living statue and I must say that I love this kind of thing much much more than when the hero jumps to a wild conclusion that is correct. Keep up the dumbass guesses, Hawkman!)

As an addendum, an honour! Hawkman gets a vote of thanks from the banks!