MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 800: BRAINO

(Target Comics v1 009, 1940) 

Braino, a circus mentalist with sufficient actual psychic power to control the minds of animals, is looking to take over the circus that he works for and is make a play to do so while the circus train has been stranded by a storm and is being helped out by the boys of Boystate. This isn't a bad idea - take advantage of the chaos and confusion to bump off the boss and then swoop in to lead the circus in the aftermath! Classic stuff!

The problem with this plan is that it doesn't quite work on Braino's first attempt and rather than bide his time and wait for another opportunity down the road, he just keeps on trying, to the point that he is just walking up to Cristo the gorilla here and giving him mental orders while the entirety of Boystate watches him. It's a sufficient level of hubris that Braino should be grateful to have only ended up with a sock on the jaw from the Captain, rather than, say, getting mauled to death by an enraged ape.

Braino also marks our 800th minor super-villain! A huge honour for a terrible little man!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 790: DR HORTON

(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940)

The town of Branton, no state specified, has been struck by a mysterious plague, and X, the Phantom Fed, is suspicious. He infiltrates the quarantine zone around the town in the guise of a doctor and starts investigating the various odd facts of the plague, beginning with 1) the fact that is is being spread by a troop of escaped gorillas that were being used in medical testing and are now apparently just wandering the town and attacking people at random.

Or are these attacks actually random? They are not, and weird thing number 2) is the fact that the gorillas seem to only be attacking the wealthiest inhabitants of Branton, such as young Donald Warden here.

3) Speaking of amazing coincidences, a mysterious doctor just happens to have an antidote to the disease spread by the gorillas, and is willing to provide it for a hundred grand a pop, which is again an amazing coincidence since all of the victims just happen to have that kind of money.

X disguises himself as the deceased Donald Warden and arranges to get the antidote so that he can trail the agents of the mysterious doctor back to their headquarters. There, he makes an amazing discovery: the gorillas are actually men in gorilla outfits, administering fake diseased bites using a weird fork. Let me tell you: it has been too long since we have had some gorillas, real or not, in this online space.

The thing about a gang made up of a bunch of guys in gorilla suits is that it is pretty easy to infiltrate, and X does just that, tagging along as Dr Horton, the supposed researcher who supposedly accidentally lost the gorillas, orchestrates an all-out attack on City Hall to loot the town treasury before presumably wrapping up the entire operation and skipping town. Horton's luck has run out, however, and he is corralled with relative ease by the Man of a Million Faces.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 657: THE SCIENTIST

(Jungle Comics 004, 1940)

The Scientist (no other name given) is a man with a very comic book plan: develop a serum capable of giving gorillas superhuman intelligence, do so to a population of the particularly huge Gorgon Gorillas, and use the resulting army to conquer the world, presumably after a period of rapid gorilla breeding.

Though the Scientist is a compelling villain in his own right (he is a world-class asshole, for example, like all the best bad guys), the stars of this adventure are absolutely the Gorgon Gorillas, who for example respond to a gorilla call by marching single-file through the jungle beating their chests until they just kind of topple into a pit trap.

The post-enhancement gorgons are even better, as they exhibit a range of amazing facial expressions from "benignly intelligent" to "absolutely fucking mental" depending on input from the Scientist.

As is her prerogative, Fantomah waits to step in to the situation until the crisis point, in this case the Scientist ordering his gorilla army to scour human life from the face to the jungle. Alas, he learns too late that the old adage is true: you live by the army of demonized gorillas, you die by the army of demonized gorillas.

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It's time for another round with the guys in the masks.

A radio announcer who tries to poison all of Inland City with chlorine gas for unclear reasons. Ends up blowing himself up while tangling with heroic pilot Captain Steve Ransom. (Keen Detective Funnies v2 006, 1939)

This unnamed fellow takes the cake for audaciousness: his racket is drug smuggling and though traditionally one wants to keep a low profile while attempting to move controlled substances from place to place he:

-sets up camp in the basement of an occupied house,

-keeps a gorilla in that same basement,

-sends that gorilla out to attack randos in hopes of driving away the locals,

-poses as an FBI agent in an attempt to throw Power-Man off his scent.

All of these are what I would describe as "activities likely to invite scrutiny". And they do! (Fight Comics 005, 1940)

Muipo here is a Japanese agent in all but name working to foment trouble in China by flooding the country with opioids. His major interesting features are a decent looking half-face draped cloth mask (rare and annoying-looking to wear) and a fake fat guy body he sits in while dealing with his underlings. He gets beat up by US Marine Strut Warren precisely one page after making his debut. (Fight Comics 007, 1940)

The Squadron of Death is a group who blow up US defense infrastructure for... some reason. And there's the problem: very little is given away about who the Squadron are or what their motivations might be (beyond general anti-US sentiment) in this issue, and though there is some indication that they might return to vex the Arrow in future instalments the next three issues of Funny Pages are not available to anyone without about 10 to 15 grand to spend on physical copies. 

Pending further information the Squadron of Death are just two guys who steal a plane and then variously get thrown out of it or blown up in it by the Arrow. (Funny Pages v4 004, 1940)

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Once again the also-rans.

A bunch of small-time crooks get paid to fake the death of Titano (the largest gorilla in captivity!) for an insurance scam and of course use him to rob a series small-town banks. If only they had thought a bit more ambitiously they might have made the big time. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

This Yank Wilson adventure features a fairly by-the-book super-spy ring headed by Count Lustig von Blackgard. They plot, they scheme, they are ultimately foiled. This mysterious radio message is the only mention of a higher-up, but their moniker - the extremely evocative Neuromania - was too good to pass over without comment. (there is of course the possibility that Neuromania is the spies' home country. Either way, it's great). (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

This happy fellow has no name but makes up for it with a laundry list of distinctive features: missing left eye, hunch, catlike upper lip, pointy ears, bizarrely long hair on his forearms, etc. He lives under a fake man-eating tree in... probably the African jungle and spends his days torturing and poisoning people for no stated reason until he is killed by Captain Kid using his own poisoned melon. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

This is Nipon, ruler of an unnamed Asian country (wink, wink) from that period in late 1940 through 1941 when the Axis powers were very clearly the villains on everyone's minds but the US was remaining neutral so you couldn't in good conscience make the leader of a foreign nation the villain of your story. These guys are usually either extremely obvious stand-ins named, like Arnolf Hilter or Menito Bussolini (in which case they get added to a Real Folk entry) or so generic that I forget them entirely. Nipon is kind of neither - like, he's obviously a stand-in for the Emperor of Japan but extremely generically, but also he has a very fun look! (Fantastic Comics 013, 1940)

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 515: DR ZORKA

(Blue Bolt v2 002, 1941)

Dr Zorka is a probably-mad scientist who gets up to experiments in reanimating the dead on a small island off the coast of Cuba, like Dr Bruno Varoz before him. Unlike Dr Varoz, Dr Zorka has no overt intention of unleashing his creations on an unsuspecting populace.

It's too bad for him, then, that this is a Sergeant Spook comic and in a Sergeant Spook comic the dead are likely to, for example, make a long journey North to Ghost Town in order to recruit the Ghost Law for your Crimes Against Ghosts. Which is exactly what happens when Dr Zorka attempts and fails to reanimate the corpse of a man named Kola.

It's at first unclear why Kola has such a problem with Zorka if his mortal shell is not in fact shambling around on its own but once they (and Dr Sherlock) arrive on the island everything becomes clear. While the the bodies of Zorka's subjects are animated their spirits are doomed to wander the Earth as something much closer to a traditional ghost than Sergeant Spook and his contemporaries.

Further, Dr Zorka has developed technology that allows him to see ghosts and a chemical that theoretically is able to destroy them but is not tested because Zorka is a Classic Nerd and unable to throw worth a damn. This is big stuff! And as with all of the other game changing revelations about the nature of life and death that occur in Sergeant Spook comics it is forgotten once the immediate threat is over and done.

But no, the fundamental nature of the relationship between humanity and its dead is not altered, ushering in a new era of peaceful coexistence between all sentient beings. Instead Dr Zorka releases a gorilla in a futile last ditch attempt to kill what turn out to be three gorilla-proof ghost and is left to undo his zombifications under the watchful eye of Kola.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 440: GALGO

(Mystery Men Comics 020, 1941)

Hey kids, it's Galgo! A seemingly regular gang boss! Just how did he hack the system and end up on this illustrious list of no-name losers?

He dressed his men like gorillas for no apparent reason. That, my friends, is the simple life hack that will take your regular villainy (such as stealing a device which reportedly forces criminals to confess) to a super level.

SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: WOTAN 1940

What was Wotan up to in 1940?

A trip back in time! A year or so ago when I was reading the 1940 issues of More Fun was before I started doing Super-Villain Yearbook posts and so I skipped poor Wotan, an injustice compounded by the fact that he is what I would call a Median Villain: one who has either enough appearances or importance to a hero's history to be more than a minor villain but without the name recognition of a Capital S Super-Villain. Wotan has a bit of both: as Dr Fate's first enemy he gets dredged up every once in a while when a magic guy (or gal, occasionally) is required.

1. More Fun Comics 055, 'Untitled':  Wotan's Golden Age appearances are pretty standard fare: he is introduced as an evil equivalent to Dr Fate, operating as some sort of magic crime boss - the ins and outs of his operation are less than clear as his main focus is eliminating Fate and his pal Inza Cramer. 

As time goes on Dr Fate gets more ethereal and mystical and I just want to highlight how rock 'em sock'em, throw 'em out the window he was at the beginning. Just a brutal way to deal with a foe (and perhaps a few passing New Yorkers on the sidewalk below).

2. More Fun Comics 056, 'Untitled': But of course throwing Wotan out of a window wasn't going to stop him. Would it stop Dr Fate? Of Course it wouldn't. He returns with a vengeance, quite literally: as revenge for Fate trying to kill him Wotan is going to blow up the whole damn world! Just try to stop that with a sock on the jaw, Fate!

One sock to the jaw later, Dr Fate seals Wotan in a little rocky cyst for all time.

Body Count: 0

End-of-Year Status: Entombed

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 359: THE UNHOLY THREE

(Master Comics 017-019, 1941)

The Unholy Three! A little guy (Nosey), a huge guy (Brutus) and a gorilla (Herbert)!

Oh and of course we must not forget the fourth member of the Unholy Three, their boss "Doctor" J. Twiddley Fairchild (quotation marks his). Details in the actual story are sketchy but it seems as if Fairchild was jailed for larceny, escaped, assembled the other three as his minions and set out to get revenge on those who were responsible for his imprisonment - in other words an old fashioned Judge and Jury Revenge Killing scheme.

This is where things get a bit annoying for me personally. JaJRK schemes are quantifiable based on the number of attempted slayings divided by the number of successful ones. The problem is that while we know that the Unholy Three end up killing all but one of their targets we do not in fact have any idea of how many targets there were - it's more than three but up to something like twenty+ if the defense team and witnesses are included.

Sadly then, JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLING SCORE: n-1/n

The Unholy Three (all four of them) end up getting caught by Bulletman and Bulletgirl before managing to finish off the last of their targets, but someone at Master Comics must have liked them because they returned for a two-issue story. Too bad for J. Twiddley Fairchild: he didn't make it out of the initial jailbreak alive. Leadership of the group passed to Nosey and Bulletman became the new target for revenge.

The actual action is whatever - the Unholy Three kidnap Bulletgirl and try to kill them both with a deathtrap and the second part opens with Bulletman thinking that Bulletgirl has died while the Unholy Three think that Bulletman has. This doesn't really go anywhere interesting.

Ultimately the Three attempt to flee the country and Bulletman kicks them off a cliff to their demise.

OR DOES HE? Because the Unholy Three are collectively our second villain to be resurrected off-panel in time to sign the Crime Exchange petition. Like Mr Murder they never appear again but just knowing that two guys and a gorilla are out there somewhere is enough for me.