MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 020

If I've learned one thing from comics it's to never turn your back on a scientist. 

Henry Falcon is one of a trio of scientists, along with John Robin and John Sparrow, who have been made the beneficiaries of the whimsical will of millionaire Mortimer Bird. This is of course one of those special murder mystery wills in which the payout increases for any survivors as fellow inheritors are killed off, and Henry Falcon is all about getting that money through murder. He even goes the extra mile to make all of the deaths bird themed in an attempt to throw suspicion on Mortimer Bird, thanks to some special powder he has discovered that makes birds go crazy and peck people to death.

You can't just have something like that bird-madness powder around without some stringent safety protocols, however, and Falcon manages to get some on himself while pretending to be Mortimer Bird's private nurse. So long Henry. (Top-Notch Comics 010, 1940)

Dr Exton, inventor of the super explosive Tekite, almost sells his creation to a fascist dictator but reforms after he is left on an island for a half hour by the Bird Man. (Weird Comics 004, 1940)

Menar, a big-eared scientist of the unspecified future time occupied by Typhon, has invented a device called the Tidal Wave Annihilator which he unsurprisingly uses to create tidal waves. The tidal waves in turn sink ships which Menar and his men then loot. It's a pretty foolproof plan, and Menar even manages to capture Typhon when he comes to investigate, but like many a mad scientist before and after him, Menar has underestimated just how evil he can be before his own daughter turns against him. Typhon escapes with Ina Menar and brings the whole operation crashing down around her father's pointy ears. (Weird Comics 006, 1940)

Karnak is a scientist of the year 5940 CE who has already had some measure of success, having conquered and mind-controlled an entire planet of beefy scaly guys, and I must assume is now at a loss as to what to do with himself. Why else would he send a heavily armed spaceship to Earth to extort them into giving him a lady to be his bride? I mean, there have to be at least a few women who would be into him if he just put himself out there on Space Tinder - everyone likes a bad boy, after all. 

Karnak seems to take it weirdly personally when his kidnapped bride-to-be cooperates with Blast Bennett to take down his whole operation, and tris to feed the two of them to his pet tiger. They'd be doomed if Blast wasn't so good at cat-wrestling, but as it stands they escape handily.

Karnak also commits the cardinal sin of not checking his captive spaceman for any ray guns he might have on his person, and catches an explosion bullet to the gut for it. Alas for the inhabitants of the unnamed planet he was in charge of, Karnak dealt in the kind of mind control that kills its subjects when the controller dies. Alas for the beefy scaly guys. (Weird Comics 007, 1940) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 848: DR HSIN

(Weird Comics 005, 1940) 

There are exactly two reasons why I gave Dr Hsin his own entry rather than sticking him in the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, and the first one is his creation/henchman Mako, aka the Perfect Man. I just can't resist a man with a tube coming out of his head, especially when that man is some sort of cyborg frankenstein.

The second reason is that Hsin's plan - to steal the blood from hundreds of great men and women (up to and including Thor, God of Thunder!) and use it to create superhumans - is delightfully wackadoo. Is this how he created Mako? Is that what the tube is for? The mind boggles.

As so often happens when one creates a perfect being, Mako eventually decides that Dr Hsin is surplus to requirements and tries to take over the entire operation. The rest of the issue is a series of punches: Mako punches out Dr Hsin, then Thor uses the Gauntlet of Thor to punch out Mako and then he does the same to Dr Hsin, making him the most punched man of the issue. 

Dr Hsin gets turned over to the authorities, but poor Mako ends up getting blown up with the rest of Hsin's experiments when Thor determines that they are too foul to exist. RIP to the Perfect Man. And also RIP Dr Hsin, because nobody thought to see if he had any poison on him.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 846: THE WIZARD

(Weird Comics 003, 1940)

The Wizard is the first of five villains to challenge the Sorceress of Zoom for the role of top villain in her own dang feature. He is unique among that group for being the only villain in the story he appears in, as while the rest of his peers come at the Sorceress while she is engaged in some nefarious activity, the Wizard shows up while she is peacefully hanging out with her friend Allan. 

Once the Wizard's weird humanoids have slaughtered all of the citizens of Zoom, he smashes the Sorceress' never-before-seen magic mirror, which in this story only is the source of her magical power. He then absconds with the entire damn city.

The Sorceress and Allan set out to restore the mirror by re-forging it in the heart of a volcano, only to find the Wizard and his goons waiting on the rim of the caldera to beat them up.

This turns out to be a bad decision on the Wizard's part, as the Sorceress is able to perform an extremely sick move that is let down somewhat by the art, wherein she leaps into the volcano holding the mirror and is thus able to use her magic to fly back out/become immune to flame/heal her horrific wounds once it re-forms. And the volcano does double duty, since she is able to dispose of the Wizard in there!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 844: ZOM

(Weird Comics 002, 1940) 

Space adventurers Blast Bennett and his pal Red are tooling around the Solar System one day when they are hailed by and then hauled aboard an enormous space vessel.

This vessel is Plane-City, the mobile headquarters of the space pirate Zom. Actually, I don't know if "space pirate" is quite the right label for Zom, as his main passion seems to be taking and keeping prisoners rather than the more traditional piratical pursuit of taking prisoners and then ransoming them back to their home government or loved ones. I mean, just look at that dank stone dungeon that he has installed on his spaceship, presumably at great expense!

Zom's downfall comes thanks to the terrible state of his security - firstly, they allow Blast to get their boss in a headlock and chain him up in his own dungeon, and then it turns out that they didn't even bother to check their new prisoners - one of whom, may I remind you, is named Blast - for ray guns. Just professionally shameful.

Zom's prisoners are all freed via space parachute, while Zom and his men meet their end at the barrel of that same ray gun. Plane-City, alas, does not survive the altercation.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 840: THE CRAWLER

(Top-Notch Comics 010, 1940) 

The antagonist of the Bob Phantom story in Top-Notch Comics 010 is Joe Chizzler, who uses his low-rent marriage agency to set scumbags up with wives then murder the wives for insurance payouts. It's a mean, low-rent, misogynistic little scheme, and the only saving grace of/reason I'm talking about it is the fact that the actual murdering is done by this character, the Crawler.

Is the Crawler a superhuman? Just a very talented human fly? We cannot know! He crawls up walls and he pulls people out of windows and that's it.

Walt "Bob Phantom" Whitney figures it all out, of course, and since the police in his version of NYC are some of the most incompetent in comics it is up to him to solve the problem with his patented combination of gossip column rabble-rousing and teleportation-heavy vigilantism. The former earns him a visit from the Crawler...

 ... and the latter helps him deliver a taste of the Crawler's own methods to him. 

Our subject is dead on page four of a six page story, but for the completionists: Joe Chizzler takes the Crawler's death as a sign that someone is on to him and he should blow town. He bumps off his gang in order to avoid paying them their shares of the loot and then Bob Phantom shows up and throws Chizzler out of a window in the second bit of bit of poetic justice of the story. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 834: THE KNIGHT OF THE GRIFFIN

(Top-Notch Comics 007, 1940) 

Tasked with finding the two-days-overdue Sir Gawain, Galahad discovers him being set upon by ruffians in the employ of the Knight of the Griffin, a dastardly character who hates King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Galahad proceeds to confront the Knight himself, where we find that he is based on Sir Turquine, a villainous knight who had both the knight-summoning bell and tree full of defeated knights' shields as seen above, but who critically hated Lancelot, Galahads father, and battled knights as part of a long-term plan to kill him, whereas the Knight of the Griffin is more of an anti-Knights of the Round Table guy.

Thanks to an exposure to a Choose Your Own Adventure version of this story in my youth, I think I have an inflated sense of how iconic the tree of shields is, but I love it. It's very ominous! 

The Knight of the Griffin is also aided and abetted by his wife, Morgana le Fay, who hoodwinks knights into getting her a drink of water and then swaps their good swords for ones that will shatter during the cut and thrust of knightly combat. This is not a part of Sir Turquine's story - though Morgan le Fay has plenty of evil knights in her roster of exes, she and Turquine don't seem to have been an item.

Between the broken sword and the home field advantage, the Knight of the Griffin has Galahad on the ropes, and might have emerged victorious if Merlin the Magician hadn't been lurking nearby to bring the tree of shields crashing down to unhorse him. Given a more even contest, Galahad is able to employ some Arthurian judo and heave tKotG off of a cliff to his doom.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 832: SIR GILBERT, THE SUN KNIGHT

(Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Sir Gilbert is the evil knight who Galahad sets out to vanquish on his first official Knights of the Round Table mission. He's got all the requisite qualities of an evil Arthurian knight: a cool name, a rakish attitude toward kidnapping and menacing women, and designs on the lands near his castle. And like most if not all non-Mordred evil knights in comic book Arthuriana, he's a completely original character, which is always a bit confusing because there are ever so many villains and scumbags to choose from in the source material.

Canonicity aside, Sir Gilbert is a good first foe for any character. He's got a good name and a bit if a reputation, and he provides just enough challenge to be a credible threat before being defeated so thoroughly that he can be repurposed into an improvised missile.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 829: LOBELO

(Thrilling Comics 008, 1940) 

Lobelo is a modern day pirate, as you might guess from the splash panel above, and while my strong pro-pirate bias means that he was an easy inclusion in the ranks of the minor super-villain he is also a source of great frustration to me.

 

First, though, I will note one thing that I really like about Lobelo and that is his array of costumes. Not only does he wear two distinct pirate outfits during the course of the adventure but he wears a separate classic early-1940s suit-cape-and-mask number while he is robbing the Metroploitan Museum in New York. This is clearly a man who loves an outfit - it's like he's padding out an action figure line over here.

My problem with Lobelo is that he goes into piracy because he is the descendant of the famous 16th Century pirate Redhand. He sets up his headquarters on Redhand's Crossbones Island and he is hunting for Redhand's treasure with the help of Redhand's map, which he stole from the museum. So why the heck doesn't he call himself Redhand, or Redhand II, or something other than his own last name? The gall of it!

(I'm also somewhat put out that the comic features a costume party and Doc Strange attends in a tuxedo rather than his super-suit. I suppose that Lobelo is attending in (one of) his super-villain outfit(s) at the very least)

Lobelo has a pretty good run thanks to some poison he feeds Doc Strange at the party having a long-term weakening effect but ultimately comes up against the simple fact that he is a man armed with a sword versus a man who is completely invulnerable to harm and able to powerbomb a battleship. Lobelo is so outmatched here that maybe Doc Strange doesn't need to kill him like a bear swatting a salmon, and yet he does. So long, Redhand Lobelo.