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 818: THE FACELESS PHANTOM

(Thrilling Comics 001, 1940) 

Here's a nice picture of the Faceless Phantom from his second appearance, before we delve into the muddy fiche images of his first.

Scientific hero Doc Strange is just walking down the street one day when he hears a cry for help that leads him to an encounter with his first super-villain (the Faceless Phantom) as well as his long-term love interest (Virginia Thompson). The Faceless Phantom, it turns out, has just kidnapped Virginia's father Professor Thompson in an attempt to get him to reveal the secret of his Delta Ray gun, which is a good old-fashioned sci-fi death ray.

What follows is an astonishingly long (for a Golden Age story - 37 pages!) chase sequence, as Doc Strange, Virginia and New York Police Commissioner Baxter pursue the Faceless Phantom and Professor Thompson to the Central American republic of San Pedro and back. Along the way both Virginia and Baxter are captured and rescued and captured again, Doc fist fights multiple animals (a shark, a boa constrictor, crocodiles, a tiger, a pit full of cobras, an octopus and a gorilla), and Doc acquires several temporary companions, including:

-Togo, hired as a bodyguard for Virginia; ultimately revealed to be an agent of (implicitly) the Chinese government looking to acquire the Delta Ray

-Parker, a seaplane pilot who shuttles Doc around for the middle part of the story until he is almost killed in a plane crash and left behind in Florida

-Jerry Adams, a newsie who Doc helps with his mortgage during a brief spell of train crash-induced amnesia

Things eventually come to a head back in NYC where they started, with the Faceless Phantom armed not only with the Delta Ray but a stolen supply of Alosun, the "distillation of sun-atoms" that gives Doc Strange his super powers. Thus equipped, the Phantom and his men have effectively taken over the city.

In order to combat a gang of death ray-wielding gangsters all hopped up on super serum, Doc really hunkers down and gets inventing. He comes up with two key bits of technology: suits of death ray-proof armour for a special detail of police officers to wear and a gas that neutralizes the effects of Alosun (something which one might reasonably expect to crop up to bite him in the ass in the future but not so, as far as I can tell). The subsequent gang round-up is almost 100% effective, with the exception being that the Faceless Phantom pulls his signature trick and disappears in a cloud of purple mist.

Thanks to his Alosun-enhanced senses, this time when the Faceless Phantom disappears Doc is able to identify that he is doing so using an Ancient Egyptian alchemical preparation called Kalodin, and thanks to his well-stocked library he is then able to find a book that tells him how to counter Kalodin's effects. Thus, the next time the Phantom tries to do a runner he gets a face full of reagent, followed by a sock to the jaw.

The Faceless Phantom is unmasked, and surprising no one with any degree of genre savvy he turns out to be Police Commissioner Baxter, the character who tagged along with Doc throughout the adventure and mostly got kidnapped over and over again while the Phantom somehow learned all of Doc's secrets. But he's been caught and the long nightmare is finally over.

OR IS IT? No, it isn't, because Baxter still had some Alosun hidden away for a rainy day and he gets ahold of it just in time to ruin is own execution, thanks to a crooked prison guard. Side note: Baxter's tattered clothing in the above panels is not as a result of his escape attempt - he was dressed in them already when he was led in. Was this some sort of attempt to save money on prison uniforms by giving condemned men the worst one or something?

Baxter resumes his life as the Faceless Phantom, pledging to make the whole country pay. Thanks to his Kalodin-derived invisibility and his residual Alosun strength he is able to form a gang and start up a crime spree with great alacrity.

As is often the case, a successful crimewave becomes a systematic campaign of terror and looting becomes a plan to take over the US by kidnapping the entire Senate. This is the point at which Doc Strange catches up with the Phantom - that's him in the lower right in gangster cosplay - and strikes back by packing the Senate galleries with gun-toting lawmen who engage the Faceless Phantom gang in what I would call an irresponsibly large gun battle. No senator catches a stray bullet on panel though, so I guess you could call the operation a success.

Things come to a head on the wing of a plane in which the Faceless Phantom is escaping with a re-re-re-kidnapped Virginia. Though both hero and villain are juiced up on Alosun, Doc wins out in the end and punches the Phantom clean off of the plane, at which point he dusts off his hands and declares that the Faceless Phantom is finally dead, despite the fact that his own Alosun-powered body has survived similar falls on many occasions. Will this come back to bite Doc Strange in the ass? Only in that he will be more surprised than he should be when the Phantom returns in 1942. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 813: YAGOR

(The Spirit, "The Death Dolls", 4 August, 1940)

In terms of villainy, Yagor ain't much. Formerly chief engineer at the Battle Arms Co, Yagor murdered the inventor Kalin and stole his inventions and is trying to sell them on when the Spirit tracks him down in a small New England town. Though he gets the drop on the Spirit and captures him when he shows up to take him in, Yagor is undone by his own poor salesmanship and the crucial lack of imagination possessed by munitions buyer Emil Kampf, who dismisses a working robot soldier as a useless toy without, for instance, considering the possibility inherent in a bit of armour plating.

Among Yagor's many shortcomings is dismal salesmanship and specifically his failure to present Kampf with the other invention that he stole from Kalin, a smaller automaton capable of tracking a person across tens if not hundreds of kilometres, navigating such obstacles as sheer walls and subway systems, in order to kill them via explosion. Instead, he sends one, charmingly named Jepetto, to kill Kampf.

(perhaps the oddest thing about this assassination is that as Jepetto is tracking down and killing Kampf Yagor and the Spirit are in New England listening for news of the explosion on the radio, and while this is in the days when the Spirit's adventures were still set in New York City, the whole process must have taken hours if not days to complete, even if the "dark. mysterious fishing village" of Cape Haven were somehow both at the Southern border of Connecticut and "out of the tourist route." Just standing around at gunpoint for three days while a small robot walks down the East Coast)

But perhaps I am giving Yagor too much grief. After all, he was the chief engineer at that munitions company, not the chief salesman. Surely after bungling two whole opportunities to sell his robots (I'm counting the assassination because I think that loading that little robot up with a couple of water balloons or the like would have been a very good proof of concept indeed) he will rally and hike up his pants and really put in a good effort in his next black market arms presentation. What's that? He just loaded all of his remaining Death Dolls (which is what the little assassin-bots are called) into a big robot soldier and sent them to attack New York for no good reason? Yagor, no. You're going to get caught by the Spirit!

Yagor got caught by the Spirit, you guys. 

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 022

Just look at them go.

This gang has hit upon the very effective technique of faking an appearance by the Arrow in order to steal other crooks' takings when they intelligently run away from a potential ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante. 

The important corollary to any plan to impersonate a super-hero, of course, is that that hero will eventually get wind and show up to see just what they are supposedly doing, which leads to, yes, a collective ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante. (The Arrow 002, 1940)

I'd probably make more of this "ring of big shots" and their plan to take over NYC by blowing up the various dams that contain its water reservoirs (for instance: is a flooded New York without a fresh water supply really worth taking over?) but Phantasmo really torpedoes their whole plan by literally torpedoing their leader as he's trying to torpedo the New Croton Dam, so the whole plot fizzles before it can really get off the ground. (The Funnies 047, 1940)

He may be an extremely generic Central American revolutionary leader who bungles things spectacularly enough that his entire force is destroyed before they actually get around to doing any revolution, but I do find the name "El Tiger" to be as charming as it is linguistically nonsensical. (The Funnies 050, 1940)

Is Eldas Thayer, a cranky old terminally ill miser who stages his own murder in order to frame the Spirit, yet another example of me possibly straying a bit too far from the concept of the "generic costumed villain" that this round-up supposedly exists to showcase? Probably, but that doesn't matter because I am in charge here.

Though the reason for this plot is ultimately "this is a more interesting comic if the Spirit is wanted by the police" (which is why the Spirit is never actually exonerated for this crime), I do really appreciate Thayer's forthright statement that he is doing this because he is an evil old man. Not enough villains have the guts to own up to that kind of thing, you know? (The Spirit, "Eldas Thayer", 21 July, 1940) 

ADDENDUM: I have made a proverbial fool of myself. The Spirit was cleared of the murder of Eldas Thayer like three months later. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 790: DR HORTON

(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940)

The town of Branton, no state specified, has been struck by a mysterious plague, and X, the Phantom Fed, is suspicious. He infiltrates the quarantine zone around the town in the guise of a doctor and starts investigating the various odd facts of the plague, beginning with 1) the fact that is is being spread by a troop of escaped gorillas that were being used in medical testing and are now apparently just wandering the town and attacking people at random.

Or are these attacks actually random? They are not, and weird thing number 2) is the fact that the gorillas seem to only be attacking the wealthiest inhabitants of Branton, such as young Donald Warden here.

3) Speaking of amazing coincidences, a mysterious doctor just happens to have an antidote to the disease spread by the gorillas, and is willing to provide it for a hundred grand a pop, which is again an amazing coincidence since all of the victims just happen to have that kind of money.

X disguises himself as the deceased Donald Warden and arranges to get the antidote so that he can trail the agents of the mysterious doctor back to their headquarters. There, he makes an amazing discovery: the gorillas are actually men in gorilla outfits, administering fake diseased bites using a weird fork. Let me tell you: it has been too long since we have had some gorillas, real or not, in this online space.

The thing about a gang made up of a bunch of guys in gorilla suits is that it is pretty easy to infiltrate, and X does just that, tagging along as Dr Horton, the supposed researcher who supposedly accidentally lost the gorillas, orchestrates an all-out attack on City Hall to loot the town treasury before presumably wrapping up the entire operation and skipping town. Horton's luck has run out, however, and he is corralled with relative ease by the Man of a Million Faces.