MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 809: GANGA LIN

(The Spirit Section, 7 July, 1940)

Our first Mr Mystic foe! Mystic's old pal Mr Cooper brings him in because he's worried about his daughter Erica's involvement with a religious group (cult) called the Temple of Lin. It's always a real toss-up whenever this kind of thing crops up as a comic book plot, between the cult being a total con job and it having some legitimate but sinister basis, and in this case it's the latter. Mr Mystic goes to the Temple of Lin and after some enhanced interrogation (i.e. partially melting local Lin Temple head Mamsa Lin) learns that Erica Cooper has been mystically transported to the Paradise of Lin, a hidden city in the Himalayas.

In the meantime, Erica has discovered that perhaps life in a cult isn't all it's cracked up to be, as she is horrified to learn that the Paradise of Lin has a kind of celestial "one in, one out" policy and that in order for her to enter requires the sacrifice of a slave girl. Also, they have slaves, which I would also call a red flag. Luckily for all the women involved in this little altercation, this is the point at which Mr Mystic appears to challenge the cult's leader, the eight-foot tall mystic Ganga Lin, to a battle to the death.

Mr Mystic and Ganga Lin engage in astral combat, much as Mystic's inspiration Yarko the Great did with his foe Shaddiba, only even more homoerotically, with their fully nude and well-muscled astral forms clad only in their signature headwear. Mr Mystic of course comes out on top with a cool astral hawk-on astral deer kill, and he and Erica head back to the US, leaving only one question unanswered: did either of them think to free that poor slave girl/human sacrifice?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 735: THE SILVER-WORSHIPPERS

(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)

Comics book cults, am I right? They'll worship anything. Case in point: the Silver-Worshippers, who believe that silver is sacred and are pretty dang mad that it is being profaned by its use in finance and currency. They also very frustratingly do not seem to have a name that they use for themselves, so the Silver-Worshippers will have to do.

But just how to remove the sacred silver from the hands of the heathen financiers? Why via a series of bank robberies, of course! The Silver-Worshippers devise a system so foolproof that they use it upwards of thirty-five times: set off a big explosion and/or fire on the edge of town and then rob the town bank of all of its silver while the emergency services are busy.

Of course, the Silver Streak is no slouch and so by the thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth silver robbery he is ready to get in on the action, zipping off to Easton, Ohio in time to help with the fire and in grand comics tradition almost catch the bank robbers so that it will be more satisfying when he gets 'em later.

Now to reveal a little bit about the kind of person I am: I absolutely love when an old comic uses a real place (or even better: a real street address) due to the ease with which I can use modern mapping software to check out just where things supposedly happened, and of course I was overjoyed to discover that Easton, Ohio was a real place, but let me tell you, it does not have a downtown, or a bank, or indeed a fire department.

Our adventure in geography continues, as the Silver Streak determines that the Silver-Worshippers have been writing the word DOOM in cursive across a map of the US (this is where my "thirty-five robberies" calculation comes from, by the way), and that Clayton, Ohio is the next likely stop to complete the M.

(Clayton, Ohio is also a real place, by the way, and while it does have a small downtown that I can believe held a robbable bank in 1940 it is not directly South of Easton. What wild geography games was Jack Cole playing with us? did he just pick two names out of the air and get lucky?)

The Silver Streak tracks the cultists sent to rob the Clayton bank back to their hidden temple and comes very close to being gruesomely killed in a wave of molten silver, but because he is a super speed character this only comes about because he clumsily knocks himself out with a bit of falling masonry.

The Silver Streak recovers in time to not be fatally silvered and proves my usual point about speedster heroes vs regular crooks by taking on a whole temple-full of guys using only hand-thrown bricks of silver, only they turn out to actually be silvered bricks, substituted for the real thing by the cult's leader Gregory Randil. "Just who is Gregory Randil?" I hear you cry. Why he is the owner of Randil Silver Co and he has been playing the Silver-Worshippers for chumps by having them steal for him so that he can cut down on overhead. And to forestall any further questions: no, Randil has never appeared or been mentioned in the comic prior to his unmasking. This is the definition of an unfair mystery!

The Randil Silver Co. deception of course does not go down well with the room full of Silver-Worshippers, and the Silver Streak has to bop every one of them into unconsciousness before hauling them off to jail.

NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Okay, here is a bonus thing about me. Sometimes I get so excited and full of pride in myself for figuring something out that I overlook the obvious. Yes, Easton and Clayton are real places in Ohio, as I so smugly pointed out, but it's a Golden Age comic book - if you see a place name one of the things you have to assume is that there is a simple substitution going on. Forget Easton and Clayton, I should have checked for a Weston and assumed that it was Dayton, and when I did in fact do so, the line between them was almost perfect for the finale of a cursive "m". Weston even has a little downtown which, while it doesn't appear to have many buildings over two stories, probably had a perfectly lootable bank in 1940. Just a reminder for me to stay humble.

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

The Great Green Turtle:

The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

The Lama:

The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen - Thuggees, natch - from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

The Fire God:

If there's one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it's finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he's off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God's character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer's cop-out when they don't want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Mad Ming:

Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren't still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he's just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 623: THE CYCLOP

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd - not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut).

Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by a tribe of one-eyed Beastmen, respectively.

Surprisingly little is made of the fact that the Beastmen worship a hypnotically paralyzed woman. Ordinarily a reveal like this would be lead to the woman's rescue being the focus of the rest of the adventure but this panel is her only appearance - is it possible that Captain Kidd thinks that she is merely a statue? A grim fate indeed. 

Also: RIP Wango.

The Beastman leader (referred to as "the Cyclop" throughout) of course turns out to be Perez, who went mad upon his discovery of the valley and somehow became the leader of the whole place. If I'm honest, the theoretical comic about the sequence of events that lead to that happening (and presumably to that poor woman becoming a goddess-statue) is more interesting than what we got.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 602: THE TALKING APE

(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940)

Pilot/ adventurer/ confusing-name-haver Captain Kidd has heard some disturbing rumours about a cult of beast-men planning an attempt to take over the Sahara region and so he sets out to investigate. After bribing a local man to show him the way (and then carelessly letting the local man get captured by the cult), Kidd finds a weird bunch of things all at once:

-the cult is indeed made up of beast-men, hoofed humanoids with pig or wolf features who take their orders from:

-the Talking Ape, a talking ape who derives its authority from:

-the Ibkar Oracles, a quartet of young women who sit around huffing volcanic gasses and making prophecies all day, Oracle of Delphi-style.

It's an impressive setup for a local tyrant who wants to extort some nearby communities but hardly a threat to the larger North African populace - Captain Kidd runs off the entire beast-man force with a single strafing run in his plane!

If the beast-men are a bit of a bust, that doesn't change the fact that there is an ape and it is talking and about to murder the guide that Captain Kidd failed so thoroughly without even learning his name. Clearly it's ape-fighting time.

A short tussle reveals the shocking truth: the Talking Ape is in actuality a young woman! A young woman with extremely elastic limbs, seemingly, or possibly an extremely advanced ape suit with both robotic arm extensions and some sort of tesseract technology to fit those super-long lady legs into about half the space they require.

Unfortunately for us, the unveiled Ape flings herself into a pool of lava rather than be captured, so we will never really have an inkling as to her motivations beyond Captain Kidd's half-baked musings about her "conceiv[ing] the gorilla as a symbol of strength," whatever that means. Stay in your lane, Captain Kidd: punching things.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 595: THE VOICE

(Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

Captain Kidd and his pal Freddy land on the... Southeast Asian? island of Morgia, known to be rich in gold but critically not to ever export that gold. As the heroes of the piece, Kidd and Freddy are of course there to just look around and seeing the sights, not to scoop up a bunch of gold on the cheap. Certainly not.

Instead of free gold tourist hotspots they find dozens of local people dead of that one torture where a bamboo plant grows through you. The one living guy they find takes them to an elaborate temple with a flooded tunnel entrance.

Inside, the duo find a cloaked man referred to only as the Voice, who appears to be running a combination cult and scam where he gets gold in exchange for whiskey. He's also responsible for the bamboo torture outside if his hilarious non-apology is anything to go on, though why he's having people killed is never elaborated on. 

The Voice's entire scheme relies on the flooded entrance to keep firearms from entering the temple, a measure that Captain Kidd has defeated by putting his pistol in Freddy's hat. Suddenly, all bets are off!

The Voice makes his escape while Captain Kidd is dealing with his huge goon Twist but unfortunately for him this is a case of Chekhov's Flooded Tunnel and he drowns during his escape attempt.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 583: THE SPACE EMPEROR

(Exciting Comics 001, 1940) 

The Space Emperor first makes himself known to the solar authorities of 3964 AC (and no, I do not know what the C stands for) by either sending or allowing to escape an intelligence agent named Sperling who was investigating trouble on Jupiter for the President of Earth. Sperling has been transformed into a beast-man so horrible to behold that the President's assistant kills him on sight but not before he can get the word out. Clearly, this is a job for Major Mars.

Major Mars beards the Space Emperor in his lair via the classic "pretend to be captured" gag but immediately loses him. It seems that this villain has a few tricks up his sleeve! Specifically, he has acquired "the Magic Belt of the Ancients," an artifact of some long-vanished Jovian race which allows him to become invisible and/or intangible and is presumably also what allows him to turn humans into ape men.

Per his name, the Space Emperor has big big plans for these powers. His first step toward universal domination is to take over Jupiter by both turning the Earth colonists into apes and forging a cult/revolutionary force out of the native Jovians (who absolutely should revolt, let's be clear - the Earth colonists use them as mine labour and limit their rights in some very historically familiar ways). 

While he seems on track to take over Jupiter, the Space Emperor absolutely suffers from a classic excess of ambition. With a movement based on personal appearances and frequent demonstrations of power (not to mention the Jovians' preexisting devotion to the Ancients), he is going to have a heck of a time scaling up even to a conquest of the Solar System without some significant changes.

The Space Emperor is ultimately defeated when Major Mars gets him with a surprise attack and manages to wrest the Belt of the Ancients from him (and this is why you don't advertise the source of your power, folks). He of course turns out to be Vice-Governor Kells, the only extraneous named character in the story, and the day is saved!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 563: SCORPIO

(Wonderworld Comics 008, 1939) 

We open on Dr Fung and his pal Dan making the acquaintance of write Corey Crews on a transcontinental flight. Crews claims that he is about to expose "the biggest phony cult in Frisco" and then is promptly murdered. The telegram that he received just before said murder reads: "you have failed Scorpio... fate is in your hands".

Whether there actually is a cult or not is never resolved but seems dubious, as Scorpio turns out to be operating a wholesale blackmail scheme under cover of some generic mysticism. When confronted with... not evidence but the mere hint that he might be under suspicion, Scorpio demonstrates his most prominent character trait, that he has absolutely no chill. He pulls a gun and takes off, not only dumping his costume on the ground and thus demonstrating that he was wearing a costume (versus just being a hollow-eyed seven-foot tall weirdo) but leaving all of his  blackmail material to be destroyed by Dr Fung.

Dr Fung arranges a challenge of mysticism between Scorpio and sinister stage magician Arno (there's a plot point involving Mira, a woman who has psychic abilities while under hypnosis but honestly this is an unnecessary level of investigative rigour given Scorpio's aforementioned lack of chill), during which Scorpio is immediately murdered with a mysterious arrow and just as immediately revealed to in fact be Scorpio's manservant. 

So who killed Scorpio/ who is Scorpio? Dr Fung's assistant Dan? Reporter Ted Collins? Stagehand and brother of former victim Crews? Sinister and satanic magician Arno?

Of course it's Arno. Who else could it be? And because Arno is Scorpio, Arno has no chill and tries to kill Dr Fung in front of an audience of hundreds rather than be exposed.

Questions left unanswered: was there ever an actual cult or was it just a cover for blackmail? Why did Arno/ Scorpio think that killing his servant would solve anything? Where did Arno get that cool arrow-shooting wand?