MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 745: THE BAT

(Smash Comics 010, 1940)

I had a little intro to this entry all mapped out in my head, something along the lines of how in a super-hero universe, super crimes are just as obvious a choice as mundane ones, like hiring a scientist to mind control your political opponents instead of merely blackmailing them,  and so we shouldn't judge super-villains for over-complicating things, but as a part of actually writing it out I had to go over the details of the Bat aka Graystone's plan in my head and... he over-complicates it.

I don't think that I can lay this out properly in paragraph form, so we must once again turn to our old friend the bulleted list for aid. Here is the Bat's basic plan:

- systematically rob his neighbours

- create a fake monster bat to terrify the countryside and draw suspicion away from himself by linking its appearances to the robberies

- once everyone around him is poor and frightened enough, buy up all the local property for cheap.

Up to this point, everything is fine. It's a bit complicated but appropriately so for a comic book world in which there are people running around putting human brains into gorillas and so forth.

Graystone's downfall presumably begins when he realizes that being the only person in the area not targeted by the Bat is a bit suspicious. The obvious solution to this problem is simply to rob himself and join his neighbours in bemoaning their monster-haunted fate, but instead he:

- fakes the kidnapping of his son (in on the scheme, flies the plane that the bat monster hangs off of, is arguably also the Bat)

- calls in Scotland Yard and makes a bunch of noise

- attempts to kill Captain Cook of Scotland Yard several times as he investigates the mystery

- has the Bat demand that Cook deliver the ransom money so that Graystone can try to kill him again

It's like a list of things you shouldn't do if you want to stay under the radar - heck, killing Cook would only raise the profile of the case! Even the operation of the bat monster involves both a secret airfield and a hidden image projector (that doubles as an engine-killing ray for some reason) so that the bat image can be projected onto a sheet that is being pulled by a plane. Have these fools never considered the humble kite?  

Graystone, his son and various of their servants are of course bundled off to jail to think about wot they done.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 013

Progress! Science! 

It's blood that this nameless inventor wants, blood to make his super fuel! Too bad for him that he chose to steal it from US Marine Strut Warren because he ends up extremely dead for his efforts (and the world remains dependant on fossil fuels. Thanks, Strut). (Fight Comics 003, 1940)

Professor Pierre Villon, refugee from the Paris Medical Academy, has set himself up on a tropical island to further his scientific research into making human/animal hybrids. His method of acquiring test subjects by knocking aircraft out of the sky with an engine killing ray attracts the attention of Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron, and Villon ends up perishing at the hands, claws and teeth of his own creations. (Fight Comics 008, 1940)

Professor Gustoff's one interest is in administering his mutagenic fluid to people to turn them into "weird creatures", aka bald guys with webbed hands and feet.He sets his sights too high when he tries to creaturize South Sea adventurer Shark Brodie and ends up beat up and presumably in some sort of colonial penal system. And the worst part? The poor weird creatures aren't even fully amphibious - they all end up drowning. (Fight Comics 009, 1940)

This is Dr Wratt, who lives on an isolated island populated by hypnotically controlled man-apes. He kidnaps Kaänga's love interest Ann Mason for what I can only assume are weird creep reasons, based mostly on the fact that Wratt's outfit consists of a short lab smock and nothing else. (Jungle Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 651: THE RAIDERS

(Green Giant Comics 001, 1940)

The Raiders are a piratical group with a two-pronged approach to acquiring gold on the briny deep: 

1. learn of  gold shipments via a spy network operated by a member known only as "the Spy Chief"

2. employ the super-scientific creations of submarine captain Dirck to wreak havoc on gold bearing ships and then escape.

The whole thing is going swimmingly and even Rex Norton, the Black Arrow, is making very little headway against them until they make the mistake of trying to eliminate him using some of the Spy Chief's spies. Here's where the Raiders' fatal flaw comes in: no two of them can stand one another. In the course of their operation, spies Borgu and X-13 bicker hard enough to spill every vital secret that their organization has to Norton's hot little ears, and are distracted enough by infighting that he escapes and captures them without difficulty.

(X-13 seems to be coded as the Black Arrow's femme fatale/ friendly enemy and probably would have been a recurring antagonist if Rex Norton had ever reappeared)

The bickering extends all the way to the top, as the Spy Chief and Dirck the Inventor basically do Rex Norton's job for him in a mutual betrayal that he barely has to intervene in to take down the entire organization.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 601: THE THINKER

(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) 

After a couple of stories worth of interruptions, Space Smith and Dianna either finished the Brain off between issues or they and/or Fletcher Hanks forgot that he was an immanent threat to life on Earth because this issue finds them following a mysterious radio signal to sight-see a rare gold comet as it passes by the moon.

Instead of watching the comet on its flyby, Space and Dianna are hit with a ray that disables their spaceship before being drawn to the surface. There they find themselves the captives of the Thinker and his army of headless goons. And here let me say that while it is not great that the Thinker's only stated goal is to acquire Dianna as his "Empress-Goddess", there is a clarity of purpose there that is a bit refreshing after seeing so many villains attempt to wed unwilling women as a mere opportunistic afterthought.

Whether the Thinker had greater plans or if getting married to a woman and keeping her in a "flame-girdled Cage of Solitude" was his only goal in life will have to go unanswered because he learns the same hard lesson as so many other big-headed creeps in comics do: all of your big-head smart plans can be undone in an instant by some thoughtless violence. 

RIP the Thinker: you should have controlled for muscleheads.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 009

You know how it is with these guys. Their science is mad and/or criminal!

Felix Zurich, lab assistant to Professor Trent, has hidden the professor away in a castle improbably located in the middle of the jungle in Africa, all so that Zurich can force him to perfect his invention of the ever-popular engine-killing ray. This is a Blackstone the Magician story so of course Zurich is also an accomplished stage magician and there is a pivotal duel of illusions. Ultimately, a high-speed canoe chase ends with Zurich going over Victoria Falls while Blackstone and his companions serenely float down on parachutes. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)  

This here scientist and his brother are for some reason trying to turn young women into statues. They don't get very far before being beat up by Ted Parrish, the Man With 1000 Faces (Speed Comics 001, 1939)

Senor Anza here is one of your scientists with mysterious motivations: he's been blowing up passing ships on their way to or from the Panama Canal using his very cool Radium Ray, but just why he's doing it is not elaborated on. Top possibilities are "as a weapons test prior to some other scheme" and "on behalf of the Axis forces" with a possibility of "straightforward homicidal madness" but as Anza ends up stone dead at the hands of super-spy K-51 and his colleague/ fiance/ fellow super-spy Z-19 all speculation is purely academic. (Wonderworld Comics 004, 1939)

The Professor Maxon mentioned above never appears in person in the story but does carry a scientific rivalry far enough that he completes the extinction of the dodo rather than allow his rival Professor Stone get credit for his discovery of a remnant population. (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 571: THE YELLOW SPIDER

(Champion Comics 004, 1940)

Champion Comics 003 featured the murder of the Champ's mentor Dr Marlin and at the conclusion of that adventure the blame for Marlin's death seemed to rest squarely on the shoulders of his assistant Dr Katsu. Champion Comics 004, however, introduces a further development: Katsu was in fact working for a greater mastermind, the Yellow Spider!

(and here I'm going to contrast my usual delight at a villainous note signed with a little cartoon with my deep sighs as I say that yes, the Yellow in Yellow Spider is 100% a racist thing. Early Champion Comics issues are even more comfortable with using racist tropes for their villains than the rest of the comics industry, and that's saying something)

The Yellow Spider is big on indirect action. Beyond employing goons to do his dirty work he also uses engine-killing rays and cuts in on radio and telephone signals to orchestrate events at a distance, such as his successful kidnapping of the Champ here, followed by his doing a solid for the unnamed police officer who was supposed to be driving him around.

The Champ is brought to the Yellow Spider's dirigible/ base, where he eventually learns that the Spider is in fact this one little guy who has popped up a couple of times previously as an agent of what turns out to be himself. It's not explicit but quite possible he wants formula because he is puny (spoiler: much later it turns out that Dr Katsu pulled a double cross and had the formula all along. This Yellow Spider/ Champ beef is all a huge waste of everyone's time).

As the Champ was summarily evicted from the Yellow Spider's dirigible at the end of issue 4, Champion Comics 005 is almost entirely concerned with busywork. To whit:

-the Champ learns to fly a plane

-the Champ and his pal Bird Kelly attack the dirigible, too late remember about the engine killing ray and are knocked out of the sky

-the Champ travels back to Midwest University to talk to a ray expert

-the ray expert is stranded on a mountain; the Champ must go rescue him

-in consultation with the expert, the Champ crafts ray shielding for his plane

-the Champ and Bird Kelly go back up in a now-shielded plane

-the Champ STILL has to go on the dirigible and wreck the ray because it also explodes gunpowder and they only brought grenades for some reason

-the Champ hops back over to his plane and explodes the dirigible, killing the Yellow Spider

I will say that the Champ expressing some remorse over having killed an evil man (or at least not being up to watching the carnage) is a real departure for the Golden Age. Lotta righteous killing going on back then.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 552: BARON VON KAMPF

(Speed Comics 001, 1939) 

Baron von Kampf! Major recurring Shock Gibson villain and aspiring world conqueror. He's exactly the sort of evil, sneering gloating villain that I love to see vex the heroes of yesteryear, and due to the fact that his appearances are concentrated in the early days of the super-hero medium that's about all the characterization he gets. He wants to rule the world and he's a dick about it.

But who needs characterization when you've 1. got the appearance of a weird little goblin man and 2. employ the services of what are possibly the greatest henchmen of the Golden Age: the Zombies!

"This Better Not Awaken Anything In Me"

According to Baron von Kampf, the Zombies are radio-controlled creatures made out of animal parts. Just why they're called zombies is a mystery - the idea of the zombie as a resurrected corpse or corpselike drugged (or mystically enthralled) person was very much in the cultural ether in 1939, so who the heck knows?

Naming conventions aside the Zombies look terrific, particularly in a huge group - they're like something that Steve Ditko might draw swarming out of a portal to beat up Dr Strange.

Baron von Kampf's second appearance in Speed Comics 002 sadly does not involve the Zombies but does feature that old favourite gizmo, the engine killing ray, which von Kampf is employing to bring down airplanes in order to conquer the South American nation of El Matador. 

The real interesting thing about the Baron in this issue is that he still has on what I previously assumed to be some sort of surgical cap but might just be the top of his head? Like it's a metal plate or something? Like all aspects of the Baron's appearance it goes unmentioned in the text so we can only speculate on why exactly he is Like That.

Baron von Kampf shows up maybe half a dozen times total but the real attraction is the Zombies, who get a bit weirder as time goes on. We''l be seeing them again, I assure you.

UPDATE: Baron von Kampf 1940

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 551: THE MAD PROFESSOR

(Smash Comics 004, 1939)

It's a classic set-up: squat in some out-of the-way location - an isolated island, a desert, or as in this case the mountains of Alaska - bring down planes or draw in ships using a big magnet or fake monster or as here an engine-killing ray, and bingo bango bongo you have your own fleet. You can supply your own crew or save even more money like the Mad Professor by subjecting the existing crew to a little light mind control.

Exactly why the Mad Professor (unofficial name used in captions) is doing this is never elaborated on. As far as I can tell he's got about 11 or so bombers which is hardly enough for the usual "take over the US" goal. Maybe he's just after Alaska.

One thing's for sure: the Mad Professor has not been doing this for long. His organization is riddled with problems, including very lax prisoner handling guidelines that allow escapee Wings Wendall to roam free for a while before he's even missed. 

Even more problematic is his mind control process. Uh, beyond it being a mind control process to begin with, that is. But logistically he has more than a hundred captured US Army bomber crew, all of whom are drugged into servitude. Judging by the timeline of the comic, the drug lasts a maximum of about two days and the drugees come back to themselves almost instantly upon it wearing off. And yet the Mad Professor and his men are seemingly administering doses on an ad hoc basis to the entire group, just before it wears off. The capacity for catastrophic failure is enormous, even without a G-2 agent roaming the facility!

(also note Wings Wendall displaying the weird anti-beard bias that I mention in the Memes of Yore entry)

Like I said, all of the captured pilots are close to recovering from their drugged state and they easily overpower the salaried staff. The Mad Professor gets away but then Wings Wendall takes him out with his own ray, all without anyone getting a coherent list of goals out of the guy.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 546: PROFESSOR DWYER

(Smash Comics 003, 1939)

When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he must contend with that most classic of comic book man-monsters: a gorilla with a human brain, wearing a suit.

Dwyer isn't the biggest villain, per se - he robs a safe, transplants a brain from a presumably-unwilling man into a gorilla and briefly kidnaps an elevator boy - but he certainly does manage to rack up an impressive checklist of mad science achievements before being taken into custody:

- fired and in fact confined to an asylum due to the unorthodox nature of his research

- asylum escapee

- castle HQ

- gorilla henchman

- in fact gorilla henchman with a human brain

- engine killing technology

- death ray technology

It's an impressive resume, capped off by his complete lack of physical ability that leads to him being captured  with exactly no trouble despite being armed. The gorilla-man unfortunately does not survive.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 535: VON HAUPT

(Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

Von Haupt is  more like a journey through the traits and attributes of a style of  super-crook than a character: Aviator Captain Kidd is flying over an unspecified jungle when his plane is forced down by an engine-killing ray. Captured by costumed goons, Kidd is brought to a jungle fortress before a vaguely European man  with a German-sounding last name and a monocle. Though threatening, this exchange turns out to be a job interview, as von Haupt needs a few good men to help him take over  the world.

Von Haupt claims to be (and indeed is) physically immortal due to his experiments but makes sure to clearly signpost his weak point, a withered hand encased in a keen metal gauntlet.

He demonstrates his power, as well as the razor sharp claws on his gauntlet.

And finally falls from grace (into vat of sulphur). The weak point comes into play as the gauntlet comes off. The fortress explodes, but Captain Kidd gets out in the nick of time.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 477: THE DICTATOR'S SHADOW

(Banner Comics 003, 1941)

The Dictator's Shadow is the "head of the fifth column in America" and the major villain of patriotic hero the Lone Warrior and his kid brother Dicky, in the vein of the Red Skull. A notable thing about him is that he is not explicitly a Nazi, which is both unusual for someone whose name is so evocative of Hitler as the capital-D Dictator of the day but also for a character appearing in Banner Comics, where the writers were a little more willing to have Nazi villains than in your DC or your Quality mags.

The Dictator's Shadow's (what an odd thing to type) major trick is his so-called "shadow projecting ring," the function of which is a bit opaque but which allows him to appear to be in one place while actually being in another and with which he was able to escape the Lone Warrior and Dicky in 2/3 of their encounters.

In their final encounter, the Dictator's Shadow employed one of the greatest deathtraps in comics: he essentially had a door with an active volcano behind it and when things got too real he opened that door. This inevitably backfired on him and he ended up dead. He probably would have kept on returning if the Lone Warrior and Dicky weren't second-tier characters at an also-ran company, but them's the breaks in the high-stakes game on intercontinental fascism.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 001

Like costumed villains, there are a lot of scientists out there doing crimes involving superscience but just missing the levels of interest, ambition or scale to graduate to true super-villain status. Sometimes this is because of poor planning or lack of vision and others just have the misfortune to run into a protagonist while still in the initial stages of their venture. And don't they deserve a forum just as much as the generic costumed villains we all love?

Our first science fiend is Julius Korn, who takes over a lighthouse with his crew of misfits in order to use his ray machine to sink passing ships. It's unclear just why he does this - is it a weapons test, a piracy scheme, fifth column activity or plain sadism? - but he is thwarted by sea rover Dusty Dane and his pal Big Mike Cardigan and ends his days like so many other comic book scientists: exploding along with his invention. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

The Professor here operated a scheme whereby he used a magnetic engine killing ray to bring down mail planes in Arizona's Painted Desert. As befits a scientist operating in cowboy territory, he was willing to get his hands a bit dirtier than your typical effete science-man, but even that wasn't enough to save him from the Fargo Kid. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)

This unnamed fellow went to the trouble of developing anti-Flash technology - specifically, glasses with rotating lenses that allow him to see fast-moving objects - to protect his kidnap gang rather than, say, moving to another city (or marketing his glasses somewhere, natch) (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

(Trophy Room bonus: the Flash keeps the glasses)

This here's Dr Jennings, who works in a research lab with Jay "the Flash" Garrick and kidnaps a lot of people to live out his dream of establishing a colony on Mars but then is betrayed by his venture capitalist partner Enzil who just wants to establish himself as a Martian tyrant in a story that feels oddly prescient somehow? Anyhow the Flash is more focused on rehabilitation than your average Golden Age hero and so Jennings is allowed to go back to his old life after Enzil is vaporized by spider-aliens. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)