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 801: GENERAL Z

(Target Comics v1 007, 1940)

Boystate is under attack! At first, it's a relatively innocuous disruption of the power supply, which from what I've been able to glean is broadcast power derived from cosmic rays, but it swiftly escalates until all contact with the rangers operating outside of the Boystate boyborders is lost.

And just in case there's any confusion, this disruption attack is swiftly followed by a barrage of poison gas missiles, and the Boystate child army must be rolled out to deal with them using flamethrowers.

The culprit behind these dastardly attacks turns out to be General Z, who in turn is revealed to be the former Captain of Boystate, who was dismissed from his post for selling the Skipper's inventions on to ne'er-do-wells and is now back for revenge. This is one of those times that something seems like a hoary old trope (the new villain is actually a disgraced former holder of a heroic position) is probably still fairly fresh.

General Z's minions are called the Z-Men and I must say that they're terrific: they have a great name, they are dressed in a kind of junior version of Z's own outfit, they seem like they're a little dumb, they're roughly equivalent to the Boystate Rangers... it's like a checklist of all the things I want to see in a group of henchmen, plus they have death ray guns. All that's really missing to really make the experience complete are one or more lieutenants with code names and/or slightly distinctive uniforms.

I said that the Z-Men are roughly equivalent to the Boystate Rangers, but there is one missed opportunity here: though they do have a kind of slouchy adolescent look the Z-Men appear to be adults, and it would be much more symmetrical and satisfying if they were also troubled youths but instead of the benevolent arms of Boystate they had been taken in by General Z and turned to a life of crime.

Perhaps the reason for this is that the Skipper's first plan is to simply blow up General Z's whole compound, Z-Men and all, and it might not reflect well on him as a saviour of the at-risk youth were he seen to be okay with murdering them en masse. In any case, he is prevented from doing so when General Z kidnaps Jerry, the grandson of the Skipper's old friend Colonel Richey. Instead, while the Z-Men and the Boystate Rangers engage in deadly hand-to-hand combat, the Captain and M-4 (formerly Pretty Boy, and one of the few Rangers to make even a second appearance) infiltrate Z's compound in order to rescue Jerry and shut down the signal-damping device that is keeping the Boystate air force grounded.

Jerry is found in this absolutely awesome looking cryogenic chamber in which General Z freezes his enemies and then sticks them in little oubliettes. Not particularly important to the plot but certainly sick as hell.

The Captain also manages to trash the power plant, and once the Boystate bugplanes start joining the fight, General Z legs it (knocking his subordinate to the ground in the process just to underscore what a wretch he is).

Also please note that young Jerry is completely traumatized by the experience, which is a real change of pace from the usual plucky kids in these kinds of stories. 

General Z returns in Target Comics v1 011, but as the real meat of that story takes place in issue 012, in 1941, I'm going to cover both together once we get to that batch of issues.

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 637: CHANG

(Fantastic Comics 013, 1940)

It finally happened: Flip Falcon told the world that travel between Earth and the Fourth Dimension was possible (I haven't been highlighting it because there aren't super-villains etc but a fair few of his adventures have just been commissions from randos to go back in time and find out where pirates hid some treasure and whatnot. Everyone knows about the Fourth Dimension, Billy.) and someone has finally replicated his findings. Too bad for the world in general and Flip Falcon in particular that that person was Chang.

Chang is a Tibetan Lama for some reason (the reason is that Tibet is far away and Tibetan Buddhism was exotic so virtually any secret knowledge could be ascribed to them. And also Tibetans are Asians, so racism) and is notably more cautious than Flip. Rather than dive headfirst into what could reasonably be called a Hell Dimension, Chang has chosen to communicate with the various spirits and demonoids who reside there. Details are sparse but it seems that he was attempting to recruit them as an invasion force before Flip Falcon cottoned onto him.

The real stars of the adventure are the creeps and ghouloids that slither out of the landscape to take Chang up on his offer. For such a fun and diverse collection of creepos they certainly get little enough page time in favour of a guy in a robe and a widow's peak.

Chang's caution proves to be his ultimate undoing, however, as while he has not been placing himself into the same danger as Flip Falcon, he has also not been charged up with the same extradimensional energies that Flip is when he does and which allow him to, for example, easily escape from a deathtrap and then fly off after blowing up Chang and his entire lamasery. A valuable lesson, learned too late.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 555: SHADDIBA

(Wonder Comics 002, 1939)

Shaddiba appears in the first adventure of magic hero Yarko the Great as an old enemy of Yarko who has come to the town of Hexville in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. His exact reasons for doing so are unstated, so I reckon that it's equally likely that Hexville is an especially ripe spot for crime as that he was attracted by the old haunted mansion on the hill that he moves into. Comic book expectations aside I reckon that sourcing those has to be a real estate nightmare - I've certainly never had the opportunity to rent one.

Shaddiba's dumb name also introduces the possibility that perhaps Yarko is not alone, that all magic users in this continuity have made-up nonsense monikers. It's the only rational explanation!

Shaddiba does a lot of mouthing off to Yarko about what a great magician he is and how much Yarko sucks and to be fair Yarko is unable to break the mental hold that Shaddiba has on several locals in order to compel them to rob and murder (as well as on a local woman because he is a creep), but this is definitely classified as hubris.

The fact that Shaddiba lambastes Yarko for intruding on the "sacred arts" of the "magic of the East" and then immediately invokes Lucifer as the source of his power is weird.

The disagreement between the two magicians comes to a head in an all-out astral smackdown. A lot of the astral battling that we've seen so far (e.g., the one in this Mr Justice episode) has been quite quick-and-dirty decisive, so it's neat to see these fellows really get into it.

Shaddiba surrenders rather than be flung into the Chasm of Oblivion but if there's one trait almost universally shared by super-villains it's being a sore loser and so he blows himself to smithereens rather than live with the consequences of his actions.