MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 948: DR HORROR

(Captain Battle Comics 002, 1941)

The Sisters of Fear, a trio of witches who either are the Three Witches of "Macbeth" fame or who take a lot of inspiration from them, have a new scheme: to create a horrible creature to spread death and destruction across the face of the Earth.

As part of the prep for this task they gather together all of their fiendish allies, the Demons of Land, Sea and Air, and I must commend them on being a diverse and fun-filled collection of grotesques

The Sisters do the "double double toil and trouble" routine - either in homage to the great witches of antiquity or as a callback to one of their own classic numbers, depending - and call Dr Horror into being. There are three things worth pointing out about this guy:

1. his pupils are little human skulls 

2. he's a dedicated nudist

3. somehow he is a doctor, despite a) having just been created and b) having an innate antipathy toward human society, the only place where being a doctor has any meaning. But perhaps that's the point - that he cares so little for the mores of humanity that he's going to adopt that title, our puny certification boards be damned

Dr Horror is a pretty straightforward guy: he hates humanity, he has all the terrible power of the elements at his command and thus he spends most of his time post-creation blasting humanity and its trappings to smithereens.

Dr Horror's depredations are unopposed by any hero. Instead, the forces of nature themselves rise up and destroy him by holding him in place with a whirlwind and then exploding a volcano under his feet. There's a strong implication that this is because Dr Horror is a being of darkness and evil and that the essence of nature is bright and good, which is all fine but I really resent the implication that the dinosaurs were also evil and that that is why nature destroyed them.

Dr Horror swears that he will return to avenge himself and the Sisters of Fear (also blown up), but he has not yet managed to do so.

Categorized in: Generica (Doctors), Murder (Attempted Destruction of Humanity), Origins (Magical Constructs) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 730: THE LITTLE MEN

(Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

Normally I try to put things in my own words and really work out the ins and outs of the motivations of the super-weirdos I write about, but I gotta be honest: I have so little idea of what the Little Men's problem is (problems are?) that I'm just going to point to the intro caption: they're trying to rid the world of all beautiful women. Simple as that.

Why are they trying to rid the world of all beautiful women (and/or all beauty, as their leader puts it)? Not a clue. Are they just weird incel creeps or is it something more? No idea.

One point in favour of the Little Men not being a weird misogynistic serial killer cult (not just a weird misogynistic serial killer cult, at least) is the fact that they have an artificial man with the amazing name Noman, though as with his creators we have so little information to work from that we can't say for sure if Noman is an android, a homunculus, a frankenstein or something else. It's all very genre dependent!

(Mister Midnite is also there)

The only real clue that we get to the nature of the Little Men is unfortunately also very genre-dependent: during Mister Midnite's battle with Noman a "strange gas" is released from a cool heart-shaped container. The gas is harmless to humans, but disintegrates the Little Men on contact, indicating that yes, they were not human, but what were they then? Were they: magical beings, aliens, homunculi, magical constructs, earthbound spirits, underground beings, extradimensional creatures, reified fictional beings, elementals, thought projections, time travellers, mutants, chronal echoes, genii loci, regular guys who all had an extreme allergy... there just isn't enough information, and so we must simplify: they were a bunch of weird little creeps, and the gas was creep remover, which they shouldn't have just left lying around.