MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 766: COMRADE RATSKI

(Speed Comics 009, 1940)

Comrade Ratski's first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the "we're just filming a movie" deception? For the love of the game, of course.

Ratski's major distinguishing feature in this appearance is the fact that he is a pseudo-Soviet rather than the usual pseudo-Nazis who are the mainstay of the spy plot at this time. 

Shock Gibson of course does not like all of this factory bombing, and Comrade Ratski, like Baron von Kampf before him, ends up stranded in the middle of the ocean. And he's even more pessimistic about his chances at rescue!

Ratski returns in Speed Comics 010 and immediately starts to collect top scientists from top universities: Dr Bronson from Yarvard, Prof Capchek from Rinceton, and... somebody from Hale. His goal? Force them to invent at gunpoint so that he can use their creations to destroy America

Dr Bronson creates an earthquake machine which Ratski uses to attack democratic hub Western City. Ratski then makes the bizarre decision to send his men out to loot and plunder in the chaos, which is how Shock Gibson learns the location of Ratski's base after using the tried-and-true method of capturing a henchman and threatening to kill them unless they talk.

But even if Gibson hadn't done so, Ratski just can't stop signposting his location: after Prof Capchek develops an arthropod-enlarging serum Ratski just starts releasing giant beetles and flies from his front door in a way that I would call "highly visible."

Though Gibson does fight his way through various flies and spiders to make his way to Ratski's mountain fastness, the Comrade's ultimate undoing comes at the jaws of a freshly enlarged (and adorable!) cockroach with no sense of loyalty. He survives the encounter, but only with the help of a very ambitious mountain lion.

Shock Gibson rescues Capchek and some guy we've never seen before, possibly the Hale man. Bronson is unaccounted for.

Like Baron von Kampf before him, Comrade Ratski's final appearance is in Speed Comics 011 when the two team up in a version of the Soviet/Nazi manouvres in Poland and Eastern Europe, though I don't know quite enough about contemporary opinions on WWII to say if the fact that Ratski is clearly just exploiting von Kampf for cheap labour courtesy of his Zombie minions is further extrapolation of this relationship or just the writer favouring one villain over the other as the real heel.

For an epic team-up between two men sworn to conquer and/or destroy the United States of America, the stakes on the Ratski/von Kampf plan are pretty minimal - essentially it's just some run-of-the-mill piracy, only done by one-eyed green guys made of animal parts and flying a dirigible.

More than anything this issue is an exercise in making the zombies look cool while also making Shock Gibson look cool: the Zombies are parachuting! The Zombies are firing a machine gun! Shock Gibson is posing on top of a whale! Shock Gibson is protecting the whale!

Zombies in keen gas masks wielding cool gas guns! Zombies setting up a guillotine! Shock Gibson looking smug as hell while the guillotine blade smashes on his neck!

After the guillotine fails to do its job, things go very wrong for Comrade Ratski and Baron von Kampf, culminating in the destruction of their base, the foiling of their plans and they themselves becoming a meal for at least nine alligators. Who presumably represent the Allied Forces.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 732: THE DOC

(Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)

Like his super-heroic enemy the Silver Streak, the Doc's story is complicated somewhat by the fact that it begins as an effort by Jack Binder and ends as one by Jack Cole. In the former, the Doc is a mysterious figure who is orchestrating the deaths of the drivers of Silver Streak race cars via giant fly attacks. The reason for this? Never made clear. 

Once the Swami and his race crew are seemingly out of business for good, the giant fly turns to more conventional crime in an effort to extort what will eventually turn out to be New York City for 20 million dollars. This is both where we learn that the fly was created by Dr Katan, a mad zoologist and  also presumably the one writing notes signed "the Fly".

Though the New York authorities feel that they have no choice but to capitulate to the Fly's demands, the Silver Streak has other ideas, and uses his hypnotically-enhanced physique to send the beast to a messy end.

The Fly may be defeated and the monies returned, but Dr Katan is still out there, still capable of creating giant insects...

Dropping the "Katan" (and also the "tor") and now known also as "the Doc", the villain's second appearance is comparatively low stakes, with only one little extortion-based kidnapping before he is forced to marshal all of his insects and arachnids against a Silver Streak out for revenge. the real highlight is these cool-ass stinger bugs - if only there were little gremlinoid insects running around on two legs shooting spikes out of there mouths at one another.

Unfortunately for the Doc, by his second appearance he is up against the super speed Silver Streak rather than the car driving one, so his various arthropods are disposed of and he is captured in fairly short order.

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 553: LANDOR, MAKER OF MONSTERS

(Speed Comics 001, 1939)

Landor, Maker of Monsters is a fellow who hangs out in a castle and - no big surprise - makes monsters. He's also the title character of his feature, which is not unprecidented in Golden Age comics but worth noting whenever it's the case.

Landor is just about finished with his very first monster when socialites Tony Torrence and his fiance  Marcia NoLastName show up at his door seeking shelter from the stormy night. Just why they are on a mountain (in a storm, in the middle of the night) in what appear to be riding clothes is not elaborated on.

Landor's first creature, the Brute, is basically a frankenstein and is horny for Marcia. Not only does this mess up Tony and Marcia's nights but it leads to Landor himself being dashed against a wall when he acts threatening to Marcia and the Brute doesn't like it.

The Brute meets his end as a biological crash mat when he and Tony fall off a high balcony. Tony and Marcia flee and between the wall trauma and the obligatory laboratory fire Lando, Maker of Monsters is assumed to be dead.

But no! Landor lives! An ass has been made of you and of me! He is merely burnt to a crisp! And it is now he who is the horny one, or at least the one who creates a seven foot tall babe in a one-piece swimsuit to do his bidding - is this the one time where attempting to murder a young couple is the more wholesome of two options?

Carda (for that is the flying woman's name) meets with some initial success but is hampered by the fact that she is very flammable. Marcia sets her wings on fire entirely by accident, by merely holding a torch. This time Landor is thought to be dead because he leaps out of a high window.

In his third appearance, Landor has abandoned anthropomorphism entirely in favour of mobilizing a fleet of giant mosquitoes to enact his revenge on Tony and Marcia. As is becoming evident by this point, revenge is not a kind mistress to Landor - giant mosquitoes, while formidable, are vulnerable to both "getting shot" and "being exploded along with your boss and his castle" and so it's back to the drawing board for a fourth time. Once he gets over being exploded, of course.

UPDATE: Landor, Maker of Monsters (1940)