MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 936: SIN KHAII

(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)

Sin Khaii, a lama at the same monastery that Thun-Dohr was raised at, has been cast out for unspecified reasons. His reaction to being an outcast - to steal Pandora's Box and use it in a war on all humanity - would seem to retroactively justify the exile, however. Just why a Tibetan monastery would be the hiding place of Pandora's Box is likewise left unexplored.

Sin Kahii is able to use the Box to unleash fresh evils upon mankind, in the form of mosquito-like insects that are under his control. The first such is a plague called the Black Madness, which seems to act both as a traditional and deadly disease and as a vector for insanity, as seen above after Dr Benson Bell concocts a cure for it and his assistant is immediately driven to homicidal rage to keep it from being distributed.

No madness or madman is a match for the mystic might of Thun-Dohr, however. Sin Khaii's first plot is foiled with a sock to the jaw. Of Clavell, the madman. Sin Khaii remains unpunched.

Since regular humans have proved to be no match for his foe, Sin Khaii's next plan involves allying with someone more powerful, namely the ancient and evil Black Pharaoh (check in in a day or two for more on him). To that end, he levitates the Pharaoh's whole damn pyramid and moves it from Giza to the former site of the New York World's Fair (I was going to gripe about the comic missing an opportunity to feature the pyramid next to the Trylon and Perisphere but it seems like they were demolished with much more alacrity than I might have expected).

As will be discussed further in the Black Pharaoh's own entry, his imprisonment in the pyramid can only be ended when he and his servants' places are taken by other people. Sin Khaii facilitates this via another Pandora's Box bug, in this case "curiosity." Could one argue that curiosity is not one of the evils contained in the box since Pandora already had it her curiosity was in fact foundational to the whole myth? I think that one could, but of course if we're going to insist on mythic accuracy then Sin Khaii is going to have to be finding increasingly unlikely ways to weaponize hope, seeing as it's the only thing that's supposed to still be in the dang thing.

Once the Black Pharaoh is free, he and Sin Khaii plot to destroy the United States but are once again foiled by the flying fists of Thun-Dohr. The pyramid (and all of the sand in Egypt) is restored to its proper resting place and Sin Khaii, still at large, swears further vengeance. Sadly for us plot resolution fans out there, the "Thun-Dohr" feature never returned after this second instalment and Sin Khaii is presumably at large to this day.

Categorized in: Accessories (Pandora's Box), Day Jobs (Lamas), Powers (Various Magical)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 873: SATAN

(Zip Comics 003, 1940)

Zambini (the Miracle Man) is on his first vacation in years and Satan, presuming that his guard will be down or that he left his magic amulet at home I guess, decides that this is the perfect time to attack and murder him for being such a thorn in the side of Evil. 

(Please note the near-identical guy kind of capering behind Satan's throne up there, as he represents my favourite thing about this adventure, that Satan rules over a nation of devils (the Devil Men) who all look pretty much exactly the same as him. Some of them have red hair or different beard styles, but over all they are the most homogeneous demon army I have ever seen,

Also, I know that trying to formulate a coherent cosmology out of any comic book company's output will be a fool's errand for some time yet, but it's interesting that Satan and the Devil appear to be two seperate entities in the MLJ/Archie afterlife) 

In case it wasn't clear up above: I don't think that this is a very good plan on Satan's part. Like, why not attack Zambini while he is tackling another problem instead of while he is having a nice rest? Why attempt to kill him with a tidal wave, the well-known slow and ominous disaster, rather than something quick and sudden that he doesn't have time to react to by, as in this case, freezing the ocean?  

Satan's next move is to send some Devil Men to attack Zambini directly (and looking at them here I must say that there are two faces in the devil nation: the classic devil face of the black haired Devil Men and the more cavemanish look of the red haired ones). They fare no better than the tidal wave and are transformed into a flock of presumably infernal penguins that presumably must be bedevilling the seas to this day.

Zambini decides to take the battle to Satan, and here's where I'll give the ol' Prince of Lies a little credit: he did plan for this eventuality, in the form of a really horrible cage that takes advantage of Zambini's weakness to human touch by being made entirely out of human hands. It's honestly one of the worst things that I have seen in a depiction of comic book Hell!

Satan of course follows this up with the worst plan ever devised: he has his guys push the cage into a big fire in an attempt to kill Zambini, without reckoning with the fact that the unprotected human hands will probably be destroyed more quickly than the asbestos suit-clad magician. Sure enough: Zambini emerges from the flames unharmed and strikes Satan dead.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 865: HANS VON LUNDBERG

(Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

Our story begins in a very economical way, as Yarko the Great hears about a great plague ravaging Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania, if you must know) and determines that it merits his attention enough to teleport directly to the scene. 

Yarko uses his mental powers to trace the source of the disease to a very Transylvanian-looking spooky castle that is not explicitly said to either be or to not be in Tanganyika so I guess we must assume that it is there because that is the more interesting version. Venturing inside, he encounters the spirit of Pestilence, a very sassy character who reveals the following amazing facts:

a. the plague has been caused by the efforts of Hans von Lundberg, aka the Mad Archaeologist, who presumably dug up a sample of it in a tomb or something. This is a real win for the mad social sciences!

b. the plague is called the Curse of Hecate, which is bad ass.

c. Pestilence is there because he is von Lundberg's slave, but whether this is literal and the Mad Archaeologist is doing some mystical disease shit or more of a metaphorical thing because he is responsible for so many plague-deaths is not clarified. 

Yarko finally meets von Lundberg after he is captured by some very culturally-insensitive goons (who add weight to the idea of the castle being in Africa in the most unfortunate manner) and contrary to Pestilence's assertions that he is more powerful than the magician ends up dealing with him pretty handily. Perhaps when you are the personification of infectious disease your value system is weighted more toward how much plague someone has spread than any other measure of worth.

Though Yarko could presumably just vaporize von Lundberg with his majicks, he chooses to employ the services of his old enemy Death (not looking quite as dapper as he used to, if I may say so) to do the deed, possibly because this symbolically frees Pestilence from service and thus abates the plague via sympathetic magic. Or something like that. As this is the Yarko the Great version of Death who just loves to harvest the souls of the living he has to be reverse psycologied into it a bit, but he eventually takes the bait/ the archaeologist. 

SUPER-VILLAIN 001 UPDATE: DR SIVANA (1940)

How fitting and extremely predictable that Dr Sivana, our inaugural full-fledged Super-Villain, is also our first villain to receive a Super-Villain Update! 

In Whiz Comics 003a, Sivana attempts to conquer the US, first via simple extortion, followed by full-fledged invasion = please note that he even goes to the trouble to declare war before mobilizing his forces. Captain Marvel of course is more than a match for any conventional army, and Dr Sivana seemingly meets his end when a deathtrap meant for Marvel blows up his entire fortress with him inside.

(this is likely also when Sivana figures out that Billy Batson is Captain Marvel. There's no on-panel acknowledgement of this fact, but he does know it by the next issue, and frankly given the fast-and-loose way that Billy approaches having a secret identity in the early days it's a miracle that everyone who he passes on the street doesn't know. I'm pretty sure that they eventually have to retroactively add a mind-clouding aspect to his transformations to explain why the hundreds of people who have seen a famous boy reporter transform into a famous super-hero don't retain that fact without making Captain Marvel a secret mass murderer)

In Whiz Comics 003b, a disguised and not-dead Sivana, operating under the name of Professor Xerxes Smith, entices Billy Batson (and by extension Captain Marvel, who he clearly knows into accompanying him on a rocket trip to the planet Venus. There, with the aid of his ally Beautia, Empress of Venus, he captures Marvel and performs the classic super-villain manoeuvre of placing him in a seemingly-inescapable deathtrap that he does not stick around long enough to watch to completion.

Once back on Earth, Sivana attempt to take over the US again, this time by way of a paralyzing gas that will leave the populace more susceptible to domination by a charismatic leader like Beautia. This scheme has a tragic flaw: the machines are all easily smashed up by a Captain Marvel type, which is probably why Sivana stranded him on Venus in the first place. Luckily for humanity, Captain Marvel is able to harness the Wisdom of Solomon to build his own rocket ship to return to Earth and smash them up good. Beautia and Sivana escape... 

...only to return in Whiz Comics 004 with a plan to get Beautia elected President of the United States by employing her great charisma and hotness to capture the entire US male vote. This is possibly Dr Sivana's most viable and least illegal plan, only he has to spoil it all by immediately making plans to murder huge swaths of the government and populace and to loot the nation's coffers.

Knowing that Captain Marvel wouldn't take this kind of thing lying down, Dr Sivana arranges to get Billy Batson into a machine called the Memory Mangler that removes his ability to remember any details of his past, let alone that he needs to say SHAZAM. He is only cured when he just kind of aimlessly wanders back into the Wizard Shazam's cave and rediscovers the word written on the wall there. 

The real downfall of Sivana's plan this time is the fact that he hired such misogynist henchmen who attempt to murder him and Beautia rather than take orders from a woman, which is how Billy Batson escapes in the first place.

So far we've seen three separate attempts by Dr Sivana to take over the United States, but in Whiz Comics 006 we get the other kind of Sivana plot, in which he attempts to get ahold of a lot of money that he can then use to finance his takeover of the United States. In this case, Sivana has imported a load of Venusian animals, including some sabre-toothed tigers, a dragon, a mastodon, some "crocosaurs" and the amazing-looking gorilla/lion centaur chimera called the gorillion. Unusually for him, Sivana isn't even using these animals to rob banks or the like - he's just exhibiting them at a circus and banking on getting large enough crowds to make a fortune.

Things don't even go wrong until a jealous circus performer releases the animals in an attempt to kill Captain Marvel, upon which he kills them all by dropping them into the ocean (or just dropping them, in the gorallion's case). A depressing end for some innocent if hostile animals.

Whiz Comics 010 features a plot to destroy the US Pacific Fleet using information gathered by Beautia under the alias of Dot Darling, Newsreel Reporter. This is the beginning of the end for the Beautia/Sivana partnership, as she suffers a change of heart when the time comes to actually blow up a whole lot of sailors and Sivana responds by attempting to kill her. He is of course prevented from doing this by Captain Marvel and escapes in style on a very phallic aerial torpedo.

Dr Sivana's final appearance of 1940* is in Special Edition Comics 001 and is another money-making scheme. This time it's some good old fashioned high-tech insurance fraud, involving Sivana buying cheap disaster insurance against, say, a cyclone destroying some properties in downtown NYC and then causing those disasters himself.

*Okay so it probably goes in between Whiz 006 and 010, but I forgot about it until the last second, so sue me.

As usual, Captain Marvel is all over this scheme. He prevents most of the disasters from landing and ultimately destroys the disaster causing machine with the body of the criminally underused Grandfather Locust, a plague whose descendants was used to attack some well-insured cropland earlier in the issue. Sadly, he only gets a couple of panels to shine before he head is knocked clean off.

BODY COUNT: at least 1402

END OF YEAR STATUS: At large