MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 946: THE GHOUL

(Silver Streak Comics 017, 1941)

Here's the thing about the Ghoul, aka "the Most Dangerous Madman of All Time": he's a stock character, the basic 1940s idea of the homicidal madman. He does have an obsession with collecting dead bodies as part of his attempts to restore the dead to life - hence the name - but he's otherwise very regular.

There are, however, several interesting things to note in the Ghoul's appearance:

First is the fact that the Daredevil's initial encounter with the Ghoul is said to have occurred "a few years ago," which is of course very interesting considering the fact that the Daredevil had at this point been operating for almost exactly one year. The reason for this discrepancy is twofold: 1. the history of a comics character is by no means tied to the dates that their adventures are published and 2. nobody involved in the production of this comic expected a pencil-necked geek like me to be counting up dates on his fingers eighty-odd years later. Fun stuff!

Secondly we get to see Daredevil just haul off and institutionalize the guy. I don't know if this was as easy in real life as in fiction, but it's always weird and horrifying when it happens in a comic.

Once the Ghoul escapes (because of course he escapes, what kind of story would it be otherwise?) Daredevil heads out to find him, but he in turn has come to Daredevil's house to get the jump on him. Just how does he know where Daredevil lives (and by extension who he is)? This is not explored. In the absence of his enemy, the Ghoul instead grabs Daredevil's fiance Tonia Saunders.

Tonia is taken to the Kingdom of the Ghoul (an overgrown island with a cave on it) in the Haunted Lake (a regular lake) and menaced with an oversized axe, but the Daredevil is hot on their trail.

The Ghoul, for all his reputation, is taken out just a quickly as he was the first time he and Daredevil clashed. Honestly, his entire career as a homicidal maniac has involved the killing of one (1) one man, a cemetery watchman who he beans with a shovel. I just don't know if he deserves to be locked up in an asylum for the "Hopelessly Insane" rather than treated in a more conventional manner. Oh well: it's back to the asylum once more.

Revenge killer score: 0/2

Categorized in: Accessories (Islands), Murder (Homicidal Maniac, Revenge Killer), Supranormal Beings (Ghouls) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 892: MR HYDE

(Wow Comics 004, 1941)

Mr Hyde is introduced to the reader as a homicidal maniac who murders future Mr Scarlet sidekick Pinky's mother one night for unclear reasons. He just bursts in and kills her and there is not even attempt to justify it. In fact... I'm not 100% certain that Pinky actually knows that Mr Hyde is the killer.

Pinky is relocated to Oaklawn Orphanage, under the care of director Dr Jelke, who we as savvy readers immediately recognize is going to turn out to be Mr Hyde. I must admit that upon first reading this story I thought that Jelke/Hyde might have been out murdering parents in order to keep his orphanage well-stocked with kids but alas, it seems that Pinky ends up crossing his path purely by chance.

Mr Hyde's next crime is to make the city safer for crime and criminals by murdering the mayor, and since Mr Scarlet has been pretty firmly established as operating out of NYC we must add the Honorable James T. Flynn to the list of alternate, non-Fiorello La Guardia mayors of New York in comic books. Perhaps La Guardia claims the mayoral role after Flynn's death - we'll have to watch the pages of Wow Comics to find out.

Mr Scarlet intercepts Mr Hyde (a rare battle between a super-hero and -villain with the same prefix!) but loses him just inside the orphanage walls. This of course again points straight at Dr Jelke as the fiend's alter ego but more importantly leads us to our main line of inquiry about this villain: Just What Kind of Jekyll/Hyde Situation is This?

We all know the basics of the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which Dr Henry Jekyll attempts to purge all evil from his body using a chemical concoction and instead creates a secondary, wholly evil identity that controls his body with ever-increasing frequency and power. The question is, which elements, and in what form, are being used in this particular story?

1. Does Dr Jelke know what Mr Hyde is up to? It appears that he does! Hyde turns back into Jelke to avoid Mr Scarlet and though Jelke's brush-off of Scarlet could be chalked up to his being a stuffed shirt, the fact that he then tries to locate Hyde's lost monocle indicates that he is wise to the situation.

2. How is the change effected? Though Mr Hyde has a small laboratory and loves to hurl flasks of acid around, the Jekyll/Hyde transformation in this story is not chemical but seemingly purely mental and brought on by Jelke reading the original novel. But there is something else going on! Namely...

3. Just how much of a transformation are we talking about? Jelke's switch to Hyde involves more than a robe, a monocle and a mussing of the hair - Hyde has claws and fangs and lacks a stupid little mustache! Clearly Jelke is onto something and is not just a homicidal maniac with a literary fixation.

All of these questions lead up to the big one:

4. Are these two personalities sharing one body or not? I gotta say no to this one. While the Mr Hyde persona appears to be more violent and less inhibited, all indications are that this is something that Jelke did on purpose, though his aims are never elaborated on beyond "personal gain." In a classic Jekyll/Hyde situation such as the Wolf's the good personality is oblivious to the actions of the evil one, and Jelke shows no signs of that.

Jelke does eventually follow in Jekyll's footsteps in one final way: once his experiments in identity are proven to be a bust he kills himself.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 020

We're stretching the definition of the term "generic" this week, folks.

Carr, the self-styled Planetary Potentate, is released from the insane asylum that he is imprisoned in when a resurrected sub-sea dinosaur called the Amphisaur crashes into it. He sets out to claim his rightful place at the head of society, along with his friend/ companion/ army, the wild man Simeo.

While murdering and robbing a gas station attendant, Carr learns of the Amphisaur and its role in their escape and vows to aid his newfound ally against the forces of the enemy as represented by former mummy/current magical super-hero Mystico.

At this point in the story I am fully expecting the pair to have a meaningful interaction with the Amphisaur, something along the lines of them interfering with Mystico's second attempt to kill it and then either riding it around as a war-beast or getting eaten by an uncaring monster. Instead, they are unceremoniously knocked out by the Amphisaur's death-throes. Mystico doesn't even know that they're there! (Startling Comics 004, 1940)

Boris Ivanoff is not a particularly remarkable freelance spy in most respects, but he really does have a flair for the theatrical. I really like the flashlight bit above, but I really really like the fact that he wears that sheet ghost outfit for the entire adventure for no stated reason. The authorities already know his name, where he is and enough about his plans to substitute secret agent Q-13 for his new recruit, for heavens sake. They don't even bother to dramatically unmask Ivanoff at the end, because the sheet is apparently just an affectation! (Super-Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940)

This fellow is really Jay Jackson, publisher of newspaper the Morning Star, who extorts money out of people by threatening to print scandalous articles about them and then murders the ones who refuse to pay. He is very frustrating to me because I find his weird Halloween mask disguise very charming, except that I have read this story and know that it is a racist Chinese caricature, which is the opposite of charming. Annoying!

Jackson is also the subject of what is possibly the most extreme version of the bit where a super-hero scares a confession out of someone I have ever read, in which Magno collapses an entire skyscraper on top of him, seemingly with no guarantee that he will survive the process. Plus, there are like half a dozen other crooks in the building when it comes down and none of them are extracted from the wreckage in time to confess their wrongdoings. (Super-Mystery Comics v1, 1940)

Adopting the role of the high priest of the local Tiger-God might have seemed like a good way to take control of a region that contained a rich gold mine, but all too predictably it ended up with this fellow being thrown into his own tiger pit once he is revealed as a fraud by adventurer Scotty of the Skyways. (Super Spy 001, 1940)

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 019

We may have gotten away from the "costumed" and "generic" is debatable but you can take the "villain" from my cold dead hands. 

This guy is part of a gang who:

-broke into Fort Knox via a secret tunnel

-smashed up up all of the gold and mixed it into stone in a nearby quarry

-transported that gold-bearing stone from the quarry to a mansion

-melted down the gold and concealed it inside a series of bronze statues

And while I suppose that you want to take a lot of care to conceal your movements when you are looting the US gold reserve I just have to be on record as saying that this is an unnecessarily complex scheme. Just book it for the border, fellows!

Also Dynamo, stung by the razzing of government investigators, gilds the entire gang... thus killing them? before turning them in. Brutal stuff. (Science Comics 002, 1940)

This very cool looking but unnamed spy chief has developed anti-Dynamo technology that renders him immune to the various beams and rays that usually assail the hero's foes, which he uses to make off with some explosive wire that Dynamo and the nerds at his day job have made. He pulls off this theft pretty slickly but then completely fails to recognize the difficulty of attempting to pull off a scheme (in this case blowing up US military installations using explosive wire) while a super-hero is after you. It's a real failure to recognize the opportunity to slay Dynamo while he can't get you, unnamed spy chief! (Science Comics 004, 1940)

John J. Hix, millionaire and asylum escapee, needs to get revenge on his old friend for some reason, so he puts on a cloak that makes him look like the ghost of a cat and hires some crooks to kidnap his friend's daughter Doris Dare (a "society deb singer," which is not a type of entertainer I am familiar with. Was it a thing? It's hard to tell!) so that he can kill her. He is opposed by heroic police inspector the Duke and ends up blowing himself up rather than be captured. (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

The Sky Wolf encounters this goofy-but-also-cool magnetically-shielded fire-breathing duck/dragon/plane as it attacks fishing boats one day and traces it back to a similarly magnetically-shielded base where crooks armed with plastic guns inform him that all of this is essentially prep work in advance of setting up a smuggling operation.

Now, issues of whether the expense involved in setting up this operation might cut substantially into any profits realized from it or indeed whether simply selling this magnetic bullet shield to one of the many armies extant in 1940 might be more profitable aside... my admittedly layman's understanding of how smuggling works is that you really want to keep it as quiet as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but establishing a huge messy monster-infested exclusion zone might just... draw more attention to your operation? Like a masked pilot, for example? 

Anyway, they all get blown up. (Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 733: THE PANTHER

(Silver Streak Comics 004, 1940)

The Panther! A murderous thief with a very cool look and a vicious set of claws! Well, okay, he does compliment his cool panther mask, panther paw gloves and shoes and pantherskin shirt with a pair of brown slacks so I'll amend that to a mostly cool look. 

Moderately cool looking or not, the Panther has been doing his crimes in the nonspecific New York-esque city that Ace Powers calls home and so Ace is on the case!

And Ace Powers turns out to be the guy for the job, because he immediately figures out the Panther is in fact an unnamed asylum escapee who went mad after his face was mangled in a car accident. What he fails to intuit, to his detriment, is that the panther mask isn't just for show but is armour plated - in his surprised state after his best haymaker fails to make an impact, Powers is nearly slashed to death by the Panther's also-functional claws. 

The Panther's reign of terror comes to an end when, after a rooftop chase across a flaming building, he proves that armour plating is not a good protection against fall damage by landing square on his armoured face and instantly dying.

What's this? Could it be that all of that "armour can't protect you from a fall" talk was mere propaganda courtesy of Big Parachute? Evidently so, because in the next issue of Silver Streak Comics the Panther turns out to be Just Fine. Better, even, because he demonstrates some pretty advanced super-villain thinking by setting out to avoid the mistakes of the past by recruiting some manpower (fellow inmates at the same asylum he had previously escaped from) for backup the next time he had to face Ace Powers.

The Panther Men (as they are called) are a terrific addition to the Panther's operation. First of all, I love any group of henchmen who are dressed in a junior version of their boss' outfit, though the colourist has obfuscated the fact that that is the case here by rendering what is pretty clearly still their inmates' uniforms as a golden brown. More importantly, the Panther's somewhat-goofy open-mouthed mask looks fantastic when quadrupled - just look at that panel where they're all sneaking up on Ace Powers yet perfectly farmed in a mirror for proof.

The Panther Men prove to be effective backup for the Panther (aka the Panther Man at this point) - they capture Ace Powers and take him back to their weird little shed HQ to dispose of him, and he only manages to escape being buried alive by surprising the lot of them and knocking them into his would-be grave.

But the saga of the Panther is not quite over yet! When the police dig up the crooks (did I mention that the shed had collapsed on top of the hole after the various Panther Men had fallen in it? be cause it had) in Silver Streak Comics 006, they find only the bodies of the three Panther Men, with no sign of the Panther himself.

Examining the hole, Powers discovers a secret door that leads to the underground lair of future subject the Spook, who turns out to be the Panther's boss, which I suppose makes the Panther Men some sort of subcontractors? This is very fun! While having the villain turn out to be working for an even greater villain isn't a guaranteed win as far as plot twists go, it works here, even if it was clearly 100% made up when *checks credits* Harry Anderson sat down to draw this comic. 

This is, alas, the end for the poor Panther, as the Spook is one of those terrible super-villain bosses who murder their employees for failing them, in this case for not managing to kill Ace Powers. The Panther meets his end at the blades of a triple swinging pendulum deathtrap, and although that's not a particularly rare style of comic book murder machine this might just be the first time I've seen one take someone out, so that's a final achievement for out boy.