MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 539 UPDATE: THE CLAW (1941 PART 1: THE CLAW VS DAREDEVIL)

The Claw simply has too many appearances in 1941 and if we covered them all in one post it would be exceptionally long. Thus, we are breaking things up into three chunks. The first and longest of these chunks concerns the Claw battling his most famous opponent, the Daredevil, across five issues of Silver Streak Comics.

The Claw is now firmly established as being based in Tibet and he has a brand new headquarters: a cool skull-shaped castle. He also has a new goal, to invade and conquer the United States, and to that end he uses a combination of a drilling machine and the labour of his horde of undifferentiated fanatical Asian followers (a hoary old racist trope when this comic was published in 1941 and one that crops up again to this day). I was all set to clown on the Claw for going under the Atlantic rather than the Pacific but then I checked on a map and it seems that it is in fact 5000 km shorter to go that way.

The Claw's initial approach to conquering the US is to use simple shock and awe to cow the nation into surrender. He attacks New York City in his giant form and employs an underground generator to fire lightning bolts from his fingers in a way that I don't quite understand. Is the Claw shooting lightning and the generator merely draws it downward or is the generator solely responsible for the bolts? Either way, New York takes a real beating - so much so that the next issue features a short segment on how it gets put back together again.

It is at this point that the Daredevil, long established as a New Yorker, steps in. He busts up the lightning generator and beats up the ground troops that the Claw had sent in to pillage the town, then engages the Claw himself. This first battle between them ends when a temporarily-ingested Daredevil drops a stick of dynamite down the Claw's throat and the villain retreats in a puff of smoke.

The Claw returns Silver Streak Comics 008 with the maximum degree of subtlety that he appears to be capable of exercising. In an excellent initial plan, he mind control the President (and possibly other government officials) and begins shaping government policy through him. The only major flaw in this plan is the fact that the Claw is constitutionally unable to operate at anything but full throttle, and so he essentially speedruns totalitarianism with a series of reforms designed to impoverish the nation and curtail personal freedom.

It is only at the point that armed guards are preventing people from going to church that the Daredevil once again takes a hand and exposes the fact that FDR is a mind-controlled thrall. The reins of government are passed off to the Vice-President - presumably Henry A. Wallace, given the publication date - and the Claw is so annoyed by this that he has his men begin to systematically loot US cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.

Daredevil manages to play on the Claw's pride and goad him into single combat at a normal human size, which ends in the Claw being beaten up so badly that he is no longer able to access his powers and is easily slung into jail.

Silver Streak Comics 009: With the Claw in jail, powerless and scheduled for execution in one week's time, Bart "the Daredevil" Hill decides that, having saved the entire nation on two separate occasions, it's high time that he take a vacation. So resolved, he hops a yacht for the South Seas and some fishing.

This proves to be a grave mistake, as the charge of the electric chair is just what the Claw needs to be revitalized. In short order, he breaks jail and sets out with his fellow prisoners, now joined up with him as a criminal army, to make yet another attempt to take over the US. 

The Claw and his new followers retreat to an extinct volcano in the Rockies and there found a criminal city, which is a concept that I personally have a great deal of affection for and am very pleased whenever I encounter. There, the Claw develops another comic book classic, the engine-killing ray, and uses it to systematically lure and capture US military aircraft until he holds absolute air superiority over the North American continent.

(about here is when Daredevil II, aka Bart Hill's unnamed and unmourned brother, makes his run at the Claw and is moderately ceremoniously killed)

Using his overwhelming air might, the Claw forces the US - possibly still under Vice-Presidential control, which would go far to help FDR's legacy in light of what happens next - to surrender to his rule. The newly-proclaimed Emperor of America is without effective opposition, having captured the original Daredevil when he deigned to return from his vacation. The modest crime city in the Rockies grows into a bustling new capitol city of the USA over the multiple months that the Claw is in control of the country.

Having achieved his goal, the Claw enacts a nationwide search for an appropriate consort, finally settling on a luckless young woman to be his unwilling Empress of America. This backfires almost immediately, as the new Empress uses the freedom of her position to sabotage the execution of Daredevil and then escape with him on a handy motorcycle.

Daredevil returns, of course, and in swift order tricks the Claw into stomping his foot hard enough to set off the dormant volcano under his city, thus destroying it, his criminal army and seemingly himself (and probably a lot of political prisoners and rejected Empress of America candidates, too). The Nation is safe!

Silver Streak Comics 011: Having repeatedly met defeat at the hands of one man, the Claw grows somewhat discouraged and so turns to the dark arts for aid, and specifically turns to the "genii" Lucifer, to whom he claims to have already sold his soul. A few things about all this:

Why call him a genii and not a demon? No idea. If this comic were produced in the mid 50s or the mid 80s I might say that it was an attempt to avoid the scrutiny of moral crusaders, but nobody else in 1941 is shy about calling a demon a demon.

Did this Lucifer stuff ever come up before? It did not and furthermore will not come up again. The Claw has used magic in the past, however, so I guess we must assume that he gained that power through selling his soul.

If Lucifer already has the Claw's soul then what's in this deal for him? Lucifer seems to accept the Claw's proposal out of mere caprice. Perhaps he looks forward to seeing more chaos being inflicted on the world. The only payment he extracts from the Claw is a stipulation that if he does not defeat Daredevil this time then he will be "banished to Asia," which I read as some sort of mystic travel restriction.

Flush with new power, the Claw challenges the Daredevil to a battle to the death and enhances the challenge by attacking the country with various demonic genii entities. How can Daredevil hope to prevail?

With relative ease, as it turns out. The Claw's monstrous minions might be dangerous but, like all of us,  are vulnerable to the awesome might of an avalanche, while the Claw, weakened and abandoned by his demonic genii ally, once again falls prey to a Daredevil right hook. The Daredevil and the USA are free of the Claw forever!

(in actuality the Claw and Daredevil meet up one last time, in Daredevil Comics 001, aka Daredevil Battles Hitler, though the Claw never knows that Daredevil is there. In the story, the Claw has made a pact with Hitler to aid the Japanese in their conquest of China and Daredevil employs subterfuge and sabotage to set the two villains against one another. Also, the Claw absolutely returns to the US - I guess that's what comes of going with a genii instead of a demon for your fell curses)

And one last thing that didn't fit anywhere else: though the Claw is a long-time size changer, this is the year that he demonstrates the ability to selectively grow parts of his body, seen here in Silver Streak Comics 009.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 736: LURIDA

(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)

I was just about to type that this was "a simple, straightforward super-hero comic story" and then immediately had to grapple with how to summarize the following: in the previous issue of Silver Streak Comics, adventurer Lance Hale set out to recover a treasure left by his uncle in an old mine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After helping the immortal Queen of the Underground Empire Aldia and her caveman subjects fight off a lizard man invasion (and incidentally becoming immortal himself, though this is never brought up again), Lance took the treasure with the stated intention of using it to help the needy back in America. Simple!

This issue, we learn that this treasure includes an artifact known as the Gem of Evil and that a femme fatale named Lurida (very on-the-nose name) not only knows about it but somehow knows that Lance Hale has it. She steals the treasure with the help of some more-competent-than-usual henchmen and voila, summons herself the Shadow Monster.

We don't get a real run-down of the Shadow Monster's abilities but on-panel it is at least physically invulnerable and able to grow to giant size, and so I must admit that I find Lurida's use of it to commit bank robberies and insurance fraud to be a bit limited, imagination-wise. Not that I have any sort of Grand Scheme for what I would do with such a beast, mind, I just have a knee jerk sense that if you're using magic or super science or mutant powers or whatever to do something as banal as insurance fraud then you're Doing It Wrong.

As a femme fatale, Lurida is obligated to make a stab at seducing Lance over to her side, just as Lance as a stalwart hero is obliged to insultingly turn her down, and after some monkey business with a fire-based deathtrap Lance manages to destroy both the Gem of Evil and the Shadow Monster, and Lurida completes the set by flinging herself into the same flame she had set for Lance. It's not a great decision considering that no court in the land is equipped to prosecute somebody for shadow demon summoning, but it does tie up the episode in a real neat bow.

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

Get ready for a collection of MLJ's finest racially-problematic villains.

Yen Fat Sing: 

Yen Fat Sing's deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang's charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He's a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of remarkable things about Yen Fat Sing: 

1. after all the effort to run everyone off the farm, once Fu Chang is closing in he just sneaks onto the grounds and digs up the treasure, suggesting that he could have done that all along and particularly so because nobody knew about the treasure at all until he ran his mouth about it.

2. Yen Fat Sing is killed in the course of the story but, unlike virtually every other comic book villain to have anything to do with carnivorous plants, he is not eaten by a tree but rather dies in a car crash.

I do rally like that the man-eating plants only attack in the dark. That's a fun detail. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

Joodar the Evil:

Joodar the Evil starts out as an evil equivalent to Fu Chang, only instead of accessing his power via supplication to an ancestral god with a tonsure, Joodar worships the Great Genii of the Water Demons, and instead of a very eclectic set of animated chess figures...

... Joodar is granted the services of - you guessed it - water demons. Though his stated plans involve world domination, Joodar has a lot of trouble with step 1: destroy Fu Chang, to the extent that both the Great Genii and his Water Demon crew end up destroyed. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

Joodar returns in the next issue, potentially because "summoning water demons" isn't a crime in San Francisco. This time he is without his demon pals and so he turns to the next best things: bacteria and mosquitoes! Specifically, he has mixed up a big batch of different harmful bacteria and stuck 'em in some mosquitoes in order to create havoc in San Francisco's Chinatown. Why does he do this? It's not entirely clear. Generic revenge? Mass chaos? Joodar doesn't really deliver a coherent thesis statement I'm afraid.

Joodar's greatest creation is this enormous mosquito, which almost takes out Fu Chang and his fiance Tay Ming but ultimately cannot contend with those pesky magic chessmen. Joodar, as far as I know, just absconds into the night - perhaps mosquito-crime is also not illegal in San Francisco. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)

Dr Wang:

Dr Wang is a Yellow Peril villain in the true Fu Manchu mould, a sinister genius who strikes at the security of the US for no stated reason. It's possible that we are meant to read Asian villain = Japanese, but if I'm honest an evil mastermind who plots against the United States for the sheer cussed challenge of it it quite a bit more evocative.

Dr Wang is so threatening to the secuirty of the country, in fact, that we are introduced to him in media res ad the Shield attempts to murder him by dropping a boulder on his car. This is that proactive super-hero action that we al1 wanted in the late aughts!

Dr Wang has two things going for him: the first is his mask, which looks great. Terrific style of mask, particularly with a hat. The second is his plan to disrupt US war production, by rounding up a bunch of guys who are afflicted with cholera and hypnotizing them into getting jobs in arms factories, thus starting a targeted cholera epidemic. And the very fun thing about this is that cholera is mostly spread by contact with infected feces, so these factories must be disgusting.

The Shield cannot of course let this stand, and goes back for another try at solving the Dr Wang Problem, and you know what they say: the second time is the charm - plus it's a bit more narratively satisfying for the Shield not to do a premeditated murder! (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 687: PRINCESS LING FOY

(Pep Comics 004, 1940)

Princess Ling Foy probably belongs in the Problematic Round-Up with all of Fu Chang's other enemies (and Fu Chang himself, of course) - she's just as steeped in racist tropes as any of them, right down to her dumb name. But... I have to say that I like her hat.

I also like her minions, the Warriors of Brass, which strongly resemble robots but which are by all accounts magical creations. Let's spit the difference and call them automata, and honestly it doesn't really matter because Fu Chang destroys them all with what must be some wildly powerful acid.

Fu Chang spares Ling Foy's life but also rejects her proposal that they rule Chinatown together (and "ruling Chinatown" is just as nebulous a concept as when all those Fantomah villains were attempting to conquer "the Jungle" - are you going to be sending a representative to the San Francisco City Council or is this just a glorified protection racket?) which of course returns her to the path of crime precisely one second after Fu Chang gives her a second chance. Ling Foy heads right home to make a fairly low-effort sympathetic magic effigy out of wax, but regardless of quality it works. The only way Fu Chang is able to keep going is with the help of an infusion of healing juice from his magic chessmen, and even then he's walking around with his arm in a sling.

Having failed to gain revenge on Fu Chang by killing him, Ling Foy now summons an imp in an attempt to murder his fiance Tay Ming and once again the chessmen save the day, as tiny man battles tiny demon in a scene much more action-packed than a Fu Chang comic usually gets.

The imp spills the beans on Ling Foy's location and since Fu Chang can't bring himself to harm a lady, Tay Ming takes out the trash.

(If you read the Fu Chang entry and were wondering about what exactly the mermaid figure was used for, then this is your lucky day! As Ling Foy dies, the wax effigy of Fu Chang falls out the window into San Francisco Bay with a couple of knives still in it. The mermaid swims down and removes them, thus saving Fu Chang from a lifetime of feeling like he had two knives stuck in him)