MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 728: THE GREAT BRAIN

(Science Comics 007, 1940)

Perisphere Payne, futureman of the year 2000, has his work cut out for him when six Earth battle rockets go missing and then subsequently attack their home planet! And upon defeating their seemingly traitorous crews, Payne discovers that they are being remotely mind controlled via a chunky black box stuck to each of their backs in a place that looks like it would be pretty annoying to live with. Good thing they're mind controlled and presumably not capable of being annoyed, I guess.

Following the mind control carrier wave to an unnamed planet, Perisphere Payne and his associate Doyle (and here I was going to make a joke about Doyle also being named after a defunct bit of architecture but in trying to find one starting with D I discovered that it's surprisingly hard to do that. Therefore, we're gonna call him Trylon Doyle and be done with this whole tangent) are attacked by what are clearly centaurs but are consistently called satyrs, which is about as annoying as being unable to find a list of defunct symbolic architecture.

Payne and Doyle are eventually captured by the centaurs satyrs centaurs and ushered into the presence of the Great Master, aka the Great Brain, a human brain in a glass ball who wants to conquer the human race for unclear reasons.

Luckily for Payne, Doyle, humanity and basically everyone except for centaurs and centaur-lovers, though the Great Brain was savvy enough to make their dome ray gun proof, they forgot about the ballistic properties of the humble Oscar statuette. Once released, the Brain's energies start a chain reaction that destroys the whole planet, centaurs and all.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 269: THE BRAIN OF PROFESSOR DONAIRE

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) 

I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I'm from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn't need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain.

Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would bother to investigate the nearby vicinity when large numbers of corpses are found in quick succession.

But the similarities to Python don't end there! Like Python, Donaire lives in an old stone structure (a temple rather than a castle, buts still) retrofitted with a modern lab, has a big bald goon with a K name (Karlo to Python's Kreeper) and the corpses he's dumping are sans brain.

Unlike Python, Prof Donaire has no interest in the brains of his victims. No, he's a body thief. He's scooped out his own brain and put it in a jar and now can control five seperate bodies on the 40s equivalent of a Local Area Network. And as always with any kind of body part thief, Donaire is just salivating at the thought of adding a toned super-hero bod to his collection.

Luckily for the Angel, merely having the bodies of a bunch of athletes does not grant Donaire the reflexes or fighting abilities of their original owners. Likewise, being able to mobilize four bodies for a melee doesn't convey the ability to coordinate their attacks. The Angel is perfectly fine.

All good things come to an end, however, and Professor Donaire learns a bit too late the primary rule of having an disembodied brain: don't just, like, put it on a shelf or other easily accessed location in a glass jar. In this particular case, Donaire ends up setting his own lab (and therefore brain) on fire but the Angel would have been completely justified in nailing it with a jump-kick.

In conclusion: the Brain of Professor Donaire should absolutely be BRUNG BACK.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 112: THE CRIME LORD/ THE BRAIN

(More Fun Comics 062, 1940) 

An early iteration of the classic tale of a brain that is freed of its cranium and becomes both powerful and EVIL, originally just a man named Dexter with a skeletal system and all the organs, he then became a mysterious shadowy figure named the Crime Lord as he directed his minions toward an eventual takeover of the US.

Upon being freed from his bell jar, the Crime Lord became the rapidly-expanding Brain, who similarly grew his ambitions: no longer interested in conquest on a national level, he was now going to expand to fill the entire universe. And he might have gotten away with it if the Spectre hadn't shown up to shrivel him away to nothingness.

Bonus: the Spectre eating a bullet to save FDR.