MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 862: BEAUTIA

(Whiz Comics 003b, 1940)

Captain Marvel first encounters Beautia after being tricked into taking a trip to Venus with a disguised Dr Sivana. There, she rules over a kingdom of wonderful frog aliens called Glompers

If you've read any supplemental material about Dr Sivana then you probably know that Beautia is actually one of his four children, but this is not established since 1941, and honestly the Beautia/Sivana interactions in her first handful of appearances do not support the relationship as having been planned from the start. Dr Sivana is more of a Bad Boss than a Bad Dad here. 

Dr Sivana is of course back on his quest to take over the US in this issue, with Beautia being brought in to act as his figurehead using her preternatural charm. After Captain Marvel disables the paralysis gas machine that the two are using to subdue the population, they flee into the night - after a bit of a flirtatious note for Captain Marvel. 

The Beautia/Sivana team return in Whiz Comics 004 with an extremely simple and effective plot: use Beautia's effect on the American male in order to get her elected President of the United States. 

The plan might just have worked, too, if Dr Sivana had been able to curtail his villainous instincts for just a few weeks. Instead, he kidnaps Billy Batson in an attempt to rid himself of his great enemy and ends up giving him enough information to publish an expose, ruining Beautia's chances for election and sending her back to Venus in disgrace.

Beautia returns in Whiz Comics 009, as Dot Darling, beloved newsreel reporter, and also spy for Dr Sivana. By means of a concealed locket camera, she acquires information on US Naval manoeuvres so that Dr Sivana can destroy the US fleet and make yet another bid to take over the country.

Though she has been happy to go along with Sivana up until now, the reality of the widespread death and destruction necessary for Sivana's plan causes Beautia to rebel and attempt to warn the fleet away, upon which he attempts to murder her. This marks the beginning of Beautia's reformation, though it would take one or two more appearances before she was fully distanced from her former ally/future father.

UPDATES: 

UPDATE 1941 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 817: ELENA

(The Spirit Section, 9 June, 1940)

Elena is Mr Mystic's recurring female foe, the Tigress to his Zatara. Unlike the Tigress, however, Elena isn't in it for the money but rather as an agent of chaos out to maximize the amount of war and bloodshed in the world, as in her first appearance, in which she is acting as the power behind the throne of fascist dictator Karoly Gore.

The final confrontation between Elena and Mr Mystic is also the introduction of the concept that two magic users are unable to affect one another via magic, which is foundational to the Mr Mystic mythos and also a pretty good way to make your wizard duels more likely to be fist fights if that's what you like to draw. Don't worry about Elena in that last panel - it's a deceptively short cliff, and Mr Mystic collars her soon after this jump.

Though she is set to be executed for her role in Karoly Gore's administration, Elena escapes by means of some death-feigning pills provided by her old friend Dr Gung, and hopefully it's the kind of fake death that put you in a coma of some sort because she has to be shipped from Central Europe to Hong Kong before Gung can wake her up and that would be a heckuva long time to stare at the inside of a coffin lid. Though Mr Mystic shows up soon after Elena to harsh the vibe, he focuses a bit more on Dr Gung's unholy experiments than making sure that she doesn't get away. Dr Gung WILL RETURN in the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up.

Elena returns a few weeks later to interfere in the politics of the... Asian? country of Cadiwa, which is styled as India-ajacent, yes, but whose premier meets up with Elena in Nigeria and so, given the lack of any other geographic hints, I keep wanting to say is in Africa. This appearance marks the beginning of a potential romance between Elena and Mr Mystic, expressed by both when Elena is wounded while trying to escape.

Budding romance or not, the next time that Mr Mystic pops in to check up on her he finds that she has been up to her old chaotic tricks and has been influencing King Bahroud of Cadiwa to declare war on his neighbours, thus ending centuries of peace. Clearly, this cannot stand. 

Mr Mystic and Elena bicker their way into a magical duel, and while I said earlier that magic-users not being able to affect one another with their spells led to a lot of fist fights, that was only a partial truth, because it also leads to this kind of magical battle in which each party summons proxies, such as Mr Mystic's giant kitty cat, to fight on their behalf. 

Elena is defeated and reveals that her magic was granted to her by a "Cardin the Terrible" on the condition that she never lose a magical duel. Which she has just done, so bye-bye magical powers. Further, losing her magic causes Elena to turn into a small child.

Now... there is an important question about this whole situation that is never actually answered: does Elena turn into a child as a part of the "lose a duel; lose your powers" curse as a cheeky little joke by Cardin the Terrible or because she was a child given the form of an adult as part of getting those powers? This is important mainly because Mr Mystic returns her to her adult form at the end of the episode and then they basically immediately become engaged, and it's a very different situation, depending. 

Cardin the Terrible himself shows up in the next installment, looking to torture Elena to death for failure, but we don't learn too much more about him than this classic Bad Boss behaviour. Just why did he send an agent out into the world to spread chaos and war? Not a clue. What is certain however is that Mr Mystic totally murderizes him, which weirdly would indicate that he was less magical than his own protege.

Elena spends the remainder of 1940 keeping her head down as Mr Mystic's companion/fiance, though she does spend some time in the future as a captive of the Moon King and almost getting murdered in place of the Goddess of Fire.

Elena's run in the Spirit Section and as Mr Mystic's fiance comes to an end in the second-to-last episode of the year, on 22 December, 1940. Mr Mystic had butted heads with his occasional ally/personification of death/future Divine Round-Up subject the Shadowman a few times in the weeks leading up to this, and the Shadowman's response was to take away the thing that Mr Mystic loved best, i.e., Elena. There's some pretty heavy allegory work going on that makes it unclear if Elena has fallen in actual love with the Shadowman and gone to live with him in the afterlife, or if the whole thing is just standing in for her dying and the love that Elena is expressing is just an expression of the natural cycle of life and death. Either way, Mr Mystic is sad, but worry not: he's standing next to his new love interest Penny Douglas in that second last panel. The man move fast!

So here's to Elena, a fun villain and adequate supporting cast member who I hope is somewhere in a loving relationship with Death. Eat your heart out, Thanos.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 548 UPDATE: MADAME DOOM (1940)

When we last saw Madame Doom, she had been bested at the game of espionage by the Black X and was fleeing the US for friendlier shores at the end of Smash Comics 004.

Madame Doom returns with a fresh new attitude for 1940 in Smash Comics 008, as now she is not just working for an analog of the Axis powers but explicitly for the Nazis. It's a lateral move at best but an important one nonetheless. She only actually appears for a page or so and acts as an obstacle to Black X's escape from Germany rather than a full-fledged villain, and is then left in his dust as he takes off into France.

In Smash Comics 012, Black X accompanies US Ambassador Blank to Paris as part of an attempt to initiate peace talks in Europe. Madame Doom is there too, attempting to disrupt the process by manipulating the Hunchback of Notre Dame into assassinating Blank. It's not explicit that she is still working for the Nazis on this, but c'mon. 

This issue also marks the zenith of Madame Doom's investment in the will they/won't they relationship with Black X, but her plea to him to run away with her is an interrupted first by the Hunchback and then by the French authorities and so it is not to be.

Madame Doom returns in Smash Comics 014 with some snappy new henchmen, the Legion of Living Bombs, who have: a. very cool costumes (that they don't actually wear while they're outside of the house), b. a very cool name (as long as you don't think too hard about it in any context other than aesthetic).

More importantly, this story features the zenith of Black X's investment in the relationship between himself and Madame Doom, to the extent that he resigns from the Espionage for her.

This proves to be what's known as a Bad Decision, as Black X soon learns that while Madame Doom is not working for the Nazis this time around (that's good), that is because she has teamed up with a fellow named Count Mirov in a bid to conquer South America (that's bad), and that to that end she is dosing her fanatical minions with a fluid that eventually causes them to explode and sending them out to disrupt the Pan-American diplomatic talks (that's even worse). If there's a positive to this dastardly plot, it's that it seems to kill the romantic tension between the two once and for all.

(Madame Doom's height, hair colour and general appearance are fairly mutable during these appearances, as is not unusual for reoccurring female villains. I mention that here because in order to say that her height had fluctuated I felt compelled to comb through this issue like a foot pervert to see if she was wearing anachronistic 90s stiletto heels, but as you can see above she is not)

After some hijinks involving Black X's aide Batu stealing back his letter of resignation so that his boss can get back on the case, Black X returns to Madame Doom's underground HQ and proceeds to beat ass, and the ease with which he does so to an entire roomful of guys might just be another indictment of selecting your minions for their willingness to die over any other useful quality.

Defeated, Madame Doom decides to take what I would call "the cool way out" and guzzles some of her own explosive brew rather than be captured. It's a heck of a way to leave a final impression.

SPOILER: Madame Doom will return!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 740: THE DEATH BATTALION

(Smash Comics 007, 1940)

You're going to have to trust me because I have gathered no evidence, but I can state with some confidence that the American people of late 1939/early 1940 had a great deal of (perhaps wishful) hope in the effectiveness of the French Maginot Line, right up to the point at which the Nazis did an end run around it and into France. A fair number of war comics of the time (like the adventures of Corporal Collins, for example) feature defenses of the Line (or fictional versions of the Line) from the advancing Axis. Perhaps the most interesting version of this Maginot Line fandom is the concept of the US defending itself via "the Caldwell Line," a series of floating fortresses running from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, if the caption box is to be believed (the floating fortress is another frequently referenced Golden Age idea that I have no other examples of beyond "dude, trust me").

The Axis powers (still creeping up to the line of just saying Nazis) respond to this defensive superiority by deploying their finest spies, under the leadership of Madame la Coquin here. And since the greatest enemy of the spy in America is Black X (in a Black X comic, at least), la Coquin and her cadre start their campaign by hatching a plot to kill him.

As is usually the case in plots to preemptively murder the protagonist of a comic, this proves to be a very bad idea. The Black X manages to fake his own death with the help of a handy psychic illusion (courtesy of his aide Batu) and uncovers the whole operation, namely a secret underground base from which Madame la Coquin and her Death Battalion comrades plan to attack the Caldwell Line using manned torpedoes. An insane plan!

Black X manages to foil the suicide runs of the first two Death Battalion members by radioing their positions to the US Coast Guard, but finds himself unable to do so when la Coquin takes out the final torpedo herself, because they are very horny for one another. And he almost saves her! Oh Black X, are you ever going to find love in the arms of someone who isn't an enemy agent?

(in one of my patented unproveable theories about comics published before my father was born, I reckon that la Coquin was originally going to be our old friend Madame Doom but they didn't want to blow her up)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 548: MADAME DOOM

(Smash Comics 004, 1939)

We will be seeing more of Madame Doom, as she is Black X's only real recurring foe (I think), but as far as 1939 goes she made one appearance and this is it. 

Madame Doom, a freelance spy, is working for "the dictators" in an attempt to steal US defense plans and prevent the signing of a pretty vague treaty that acts as a deus ex machina reason for war not to have broken out yet (war with the US, that is).

In this first appearance Madam Doom is a very by-the-book Will Eisner femme fatale: a ruthless lady with the hots for the hero (reciprocated).

Black X doesn't quite let her go on purpose but he certainly doesn't try very hard to catch her. This is a mistake! The bloom definitely wears off the rose in this relationship later on.

UPDATE: Madame Doom 1940