MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 226: THE BLACK BAT

(Feature Comics 043, 1941) 

Another example of the classic combination of someone posing as a spooky local legend-figure in order to scare folk away from a valuable area. In this case one Jean Dupre and his mother are trying to use the legend of the giant Black Bat (that they might have just made up) to scare their step sister/ daughter Marie away from the family ranch, which is just lousy with radium ore.

It's a good attempt, foiled by only a few factors: 1) Marie won't leave and instead calls in the RCMP; 2) Reynolds of the Mounties and his guide/ skáld the Old Timer show up and basically immediately unravel the plot; 3) they both end up dead, from a rock to the head (Madame Dupre) and glider malfunction (Jean Dupre). As usual, the less profitable option of splitting the proceeds of your find with the rightful owner would have been the way to go.

Unless I've been grossly negligent, this mother/ son duo is our first French Canadian representation on the list, so there's that at least.

MINOR EDIT: This is touted as Reynolds' first case in the previous episode, but also he's already a sergeant at the beginning of the story so I don't know when it happened. Some time in the past!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 217: THE STONE IDOL

(Detective Comics v1 056, 1941)

The Stone Idol is a bit of a weird one: a miner living in the ghost town of Ghost Gulch City discovers silver on town land and recruits an unscrupulous group of circus performers to aid him in driving out the town's remaining inhabitants so as to have all the silver for themselves. The actual Stone Idol is the circus strongman disguised as a local Native American statue in order to play on the local superstitions but really it's a group effort.

Sadly for Mad Mack the prospector and his circus of crime, the Stone Idol's push to take over the town coincides with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson's stay in a local hotel and the entire group of them die in a mine collapse while fighting Batman and Robin. Perils of living in a comic book world, I guess.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 181: THE SWAMP DEVIL

(Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)

The Swamp Devil! Part of a couple of fairly populous subgroupings of supercrook: the "kill or scare off folk in order to do a land-grab" type and the "pose as a figure from local legend in order to capitalize on preexisting fear, etc" cohort (a frequently paired duo). Specifically, the Swamp Devil is actually Woggs, an engineer tasked with draining part of the Great Dismal Swamp to create more farmland who is instead flooding nearby farms and using a combination of mind control gas and his monsterized diving rig/ costume to scare off or murder the locals. Later, he plans to return and buy up the fertile farmland cheap.

I gotta say... this seems like a lot of effort to go to for swamp-adjacent farmland. Most guys who pull this kind of scheme are after a quicker payoff: deposits of oil or precious metals, pearl beds, buried treasure... Sure you can get rich off farming but it's a lot more of a long-term plot than your average small-time supercrook is geared for - presumably he's going to have to change his name, right? Or a similar level of obfuscation to cover for the fact that Mr Woggs is back for the land he failed to secure the last time around in his official capacity? Just as well he gets stomped by Captain Marvel, really.