MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 003

They may not be the top of the class, but they did their time in the evil sciences!

Dr Eric Karlin has a lot of moxie on paper: a Nazi psychologist with a sideline in Egyptology, he dissolves the enemies of the Reich in acid and keeps their jellied remains in a series of jars in his basement. He also employs mind controlled pseudo-zombies in a scheme to recover frozen Nazi assets from a bank vault. The problem is that while all of this makes for a dynamite summary, the Blue Diamond story that he appears in is... not very good. (Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942)

DeVaux here had a plan to grow regular guys into huge guys and use them to take over the world but made the elementary mistake of trying to kill a friend of super-magician El Carim as his literal first step toward that end - it didn't go well. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

I'm not sure if this guy is even a scientist, but if you're "the worst foreign spy living" and your name is Dr Evil and your cover as you plan to blow up a NYC analog is to call yourself "Dr Live" well then I can't help but love you, even if you do get electrocuted by extremely generic Golden Age hero Lightning. (Jumbo Comics 015, 1940)

And speaking of Lightning, he also battled Dr Tol, who used remote stone-crumbling technology to open up banks for his gang to loot. He also had very cool goggles. (Jumbo Comics 020, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 207: THE BLACK WITCH

(Crack Comics 018, 1941)

The Black Witch is a member of a long comic book tradition: Haitian voodoo practitioners who use their sinister powers to get up to no good - in this case kidnapping the wife of one of Richard "Madam Fatal" Stanton's friends as raw material in a search for eternal youth.

The Black Witch is also part of a long-term demographic shift in comics: while the Haitian voodoo character is a staple villain s(and sometimes hero) into at least the 90s, in the early days they were basically all white folks like the Black Witch here, or the Master of Corpses. A question that I'm not qualified to answer: is this more racist than the state of things post 1960 or so when the population of voodoo villains more accurately represents the demographic makeup of Haiti or is it semi-vilifying an entire ethnoreligious group?