MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 850: DR MORTAL

(Weird Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Mortal, in contrast to his fellow Weird Comics character the Sorceress of Zoom, is your typical comic-headlining super-villain, in that he is a mad scientist with an obsession with making monsters. Like most of his ilk, Mortal is opposed by a heterosexual couple of upstanding moral character, and in his specific case they are his niece Marlene Mortal and her lover Gary Brent (as Marlene's surname is never actually given in print, I'm just making an assumption that it is also a Mortal, because I want it to be). Dr Mortal's main distinguishing characteristic is that thanks to his eyebrow/mustache/skin droopiness he kind of looks like he's melting.

Some 1940 Dr Mortal highlights:

In his first appearance, Dr Mortal is up to some basic mad scientist stuff: he is kidnapping and mutating people into big gobliny guys called the Monster Men. He is of course mind controlling these Monster Men to serve him, but it's not very good mind control, as can be seen above as it is broken by Gary Brent. Dr Mortal seemingly dies in a fire but actually just scuttles out the back door.

Weird Comics 002 sees Dr Mortal rebuilding, with the aid of his faithful assistant Salvo, and includes the immortal line "Now, Salvo - get me the lion entrails!!"

Just what are the lion entrails for? Why, to create Lion-Men, of course! And what are the Lion-Men for? Why, to terrorize the countryside to no stated end, of course! They just kind of rampage around, smashing up local farms.

Whatever the reasoning behind this, it ends up backfiring on Dr Mortal, as when Gary Brent shows up to rescue Marlene (and here I must say that any time that Marlene Mortal is not explicitly mentioned one can safely assume that she has been captured by Dr Mortal and is about to have something terrible happen to her) he is able to round up an armed group of farmers with relative ease, and it turns out that the Lion-Men are less effective against pitchforks and shotguns than they are against isolated farmsteads. Dr Mortal supposedly dies in a fire for a second time, and for a second time he's just fine.

 

Weird Comics 003 is one of those off-model appearances that you get in longer Golden Age series and especially in Fox Features comics, that could either be a different artist taking over for one issue or a comic intended for another character with a few minor edits. My money's on the latter, but only because Marlene keeps calling Dr Mortal "father" instead of "uncle" throughout.

Whatever its provenance, this story features Dr Mortal in a pretty straightforward "I'll show 'em all!" revenge scheme in which he is creating a robot with a human brain and the terrific name "Jaque the Super Automaton." After an interruption by Gary and Marlene, Jaque goes rogue and beats up Dr Mortal before setting his sights on the world at large.

Poor Jaque meets his end at the barrel of a ray gun, while for the first time Dr Mortal is carted off to jail instead of seeming to perish.

Dr Mortal shows some flexibility in Weird Comics 004, as he plays on the tremendous 1940s obsession with class to lure Gary and Marlene into a trap. He convinces the two of them that he has turned over a new leaf by surrounding himself with beautiful, high-class people who he has made in his lab. Called "Pseudo-Socialites" at least once, these are in my opinion Dr Mortal's greatest creations.

Mortal invites Gary, Marlene and a few other people who he presumably has beef with to a dinner party liberally stocked with Pseudo-Socialites, then excuses himself and uses a beam to revert his creations to their true, monstrous forms. It's a great little plan, spoiled only by the fact that Gary Brent manages to electrocute all the monsters and capture Dr Mortal.

Weird Comics 005 sees Dr Mortal experimenting with mind transferral and is mostly concerned with a poor ape who has been injected with the memories of a dead man. Oh, that poor ape.

Any mad scientist worth their salt eventually gets into shrinking people and Weird Comics 006 is Dr Mortal's shrinking phase. He of course uses this technology in an attempt to get revenge on Gary and Marlene and is immediately betrayed and shrunk by his own butler Kalak, forcing the three tiny enemies to team up against him.

All of this revenge-based science must have drained Dr Mortal's cash reserves, because Weird Comics 007 features him charging rich middle-aged people big bucks in order to transfer their minds into young, attractive bodies. As per usual, Mortal shoots himself in the foot by attempting to get revenge on Gary and Marlene and the whole scheme falls apart, leading to the deaths of all the old rich body snatchers. 

Of particular note is the lady above, who just wants to have her mind placed in the body of Marlene Mortal and ends up in the body of a gorilla instead. And then Marlene shoots her dead. 

(important note - Gary and Marlene only know about this scheme beacuse he calls them and tells them to stay away. They didn't even know he was alive!)

Weird Comics 008 features another mad scientist classic: giant insects, which Dr Mortal releases after the police take their first-ever on-panel interest in him and attempt to raid his laboratory. Hearkening back to the old days, this one ends with Mortal seemingly dying as his lab explodes.

This is of course not the end, and Weird Comics 009 sees Dr Mortal in the South Pacific. He abducts men from nearby islands to test his devolution ray on, but is foiled when Gary and Marlene (who just happen to have been vacationing in Waikiki) rally the local police to raid his yacht.

That's it for Dr Mortal in 1940, but don't worry, he wasn't really eaten by sharks. We'll see this rascal again in 1941.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 804: THE MAD SCIENTIST OF HELL'S KITCHEN

(The Flame 003, 1940)

The Mad Scientist of Hell's Kitchen is a, you guessed it, mad scientist who has developed one of the classic serums, giving him the option to turn into a huge and super strong ape-man with a simple injection. Of note is the fact that this is not a Jekyll and Hyde situation, as the Mad Scientist and his alter ego the Beast appear to be merely physically and not mentally distinct. Also of note: though the Beast is described as "shaggy" at least once, he appears to in fact be completely hairless.

After the Beast murders the eminent surgeon Doctor Brown, the Flame takes the time to check in on Brown's only known enemy, the Mad Scientist of Hell's Kitchen, and spots the Beast emerging from his warehouse/laboratory.

Though the Beast hands the Flame's ass to him and then goes out and kidnaps a young woman while Our Hero lies senseless in the gutter, he picks himself up, dusts himself off and continues the investigation. The Mad Scientist of Hell's Kitchen does a really phenomenal job of deflecting the Flame's immediate suspicion with his "I'm the only one here and I'm certainly no beast" routine, but then goes and spoils it all by injecting Beast Serum and transforming into the creature directly in front of a window.

(just a little demonstration of both the Beast's level of super strength and the Reverse C panel structure, popular in the early Golden age and always infuriating)

Ultimately, though the Beast proves tough enough to shrug off the Flame's fists, and walks away from a collapsing building, he isn't quite invulnerable enough to resist the force of an extremely tall bit of public art. Once caged, the Beast quickly reverts to the form of the Mad Scientist of Hell's Kitchen and the city is once again safe for its doctors.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 015

They can't help themselves and/or they're choosing to be horrible.

Dr Zynnon has been asked along to help Dr Curan, his daughter Sandra and protagonist Buzz Crandall in their mission to prevent the Moon from exploding, presumably dooming us all. This turns out to be a Bad Choice, because unbeknownst to all, Dr Zynnon harbours a deep misanthropy and would love nothing more than for the world to be doomed.

Despite the fact that I love not being scoured from the face of the planet by hurtling lunar debris I must give Zynnon credit for one of the most adorable doomsday devices ever conceived of: tiny moon lizard carrying vials of acid powerful enough to bring down the roof of the lunar cavern the bulk of the adventure takes place in. Powerful enough, that is, if they were delivered to the correct location. Which they weren't, presumably because Zynnon didn't bother to train or condition them in any way and just let loose as many lizards as he could smuggle onto the moon bathysphere under his coat. In the end, the only casualty of Zynnon's plot was Zynnon himself. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

Tobor the Evil is a Plutonian scientist who has been using an army of child-sized robots to steal Martian gold, with the end goal of conquering Mars and making it a Plutonian territory. With the help of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, he learns two important lessons about fielding robot armies: 1) don't leave robot shells that can be repurposed into armour by your foes just lying around, and 2) if your robots have an "indiscriminate murder" setting, make sure to build in a failsafe that excludes yourself from the list of viable targets. (Planet Comics 008, 1940)

Von Dorf, a mad physiologist and asylum escapee, was so singularly obsessed with the hybridization of humans and panthers that he kidnapped a nurse and turned her into Marga the Panther Woman. It's likely that he would have his own numbered entry on the Minor Super-Villain list if literally the only other things he ever did weren't a) get his ass kicked and b) blow himself up. Truly being part of an origin story is the most hazardous job in comics. (Science Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Passendorf here managed to perfect the quite respectable criminal science inventions of a mind control device and a paralysis ray and then had to lower himself to using both in the employ of a shifty Wall Street jerk named Augustus Elba who needed to cover up some light embezzlement. Just as well that he ends up riddled with shrapnel after the Eagle blows up his machine - the roasting at the next Criminal Science Convention would have been severe. (Science Comics 005, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

(Science Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Doom, another super-villain with his own series (I swear that they're rare over all but 1940 sure is a fertile year for them), lives in an unspecified future and is your classic mad science polymath, as demonstrated by his various schemes:

In his very first outing, Dr Doom decides to do some extreme testing of his latest formula and uses it to shrink Jan and Wanda, two otherwise-nondescript youths who just happen to also be his recurring nemeses going forward. They escape of course and, after defeating a crab and regaining their former size, haul him back home to Jupiter with them to face justice.

Of course Dr Doom also escapes and makes his way back to his laboratory. His next two schemes are also shrinking-based: in Science Comics 002 he kidnaps people (including Jan and Wanda) and forces them to battle insects to the death, while Science Comics 004 sees him shrinking Jan and Wanda's home city of Daru on Jupiter to use as his personal playground. This adventure ends with Doom himself shrink and on display in a museum of oddities, an event which seems to put him off the field of shrinking entirely going forward.

In Science Comics 005, Dr Doom unleashes cosmic ray mutations from the depths of the Grand Canyon in a bid to conquer the US. Also the Grand Canyon is expanding for some reason? This is perhaps the most incoherent Dr Doom story and ends with his equipment just exploding for no particular reason.

The shock of his last scheme failing so thoroughly seems to have had a profound effect on Dr Doom, because at this stage he enters his "revenge on humanity" period. To that end, in Science Comics 006, he develops and unleashes the Grey Mold Disease and sets it loose on the world until he is forced to reveal the antidote by Jan and Wanda when they threaten to inject him with the even more deadly Green Mold Disease.

Next, in Science Comics 007, Doom uses a magnetic ray in an attempt to throw the entire Earth off its orbit and into the Sun, but misjudges the gravity on his planetoid base and goes flying off into space himself while fleeing from Jan. As always there is no word on how he gets out of this seemingly inescapable doom, but this is the one I'm most curious about.

Science Comics 008 is a bit of a break for Dr Doom, as he settles down in Long Island with his amazing screaming robot Lodi. Attempting to wipe out humanity is pretty hard work, so Doom and Lodi are taking it easy by merely blasting various humans into a hostile alternate dimension filled with cannibalistic ogres. 

(this and the previous story also appear to be set in or around 1940, which likely means that they were either a) repurposed from some already-finished art or b) produced by someone who didn't particularly care about continuity. See also Jan and Wanda going from space adventurers to reporters for the New York Daily Star)

Dr Doom's appearance in Big 3 001 is another stab at destroying humanity, as he facilitates a Venusian invasion by producing deadly mists. Two notes about this one: 1) the Venusians are amazing looking little weirdos and 2) his attempted revenge on Jan and Wanda by making them but not their potential offspring immune to the mists so they must wander alone through a dead world is harsh as hell.

Dr Doom's final appearance (and only appearance in 1941) in Green Mask 004 involves him attacking passing space shipping from a base on Uranus. It's a bit of a ho-hum scheme to go out on, but at least it features some weird little homunculus creatures that Doom makes out of cats. More villains need more little critters around just kind of being moderately useful.

In a lot of previous adventures Jan and Wanda haul Dr Doom off to prison or just kind of leave him to rot in whatever bombed-out laboratory they just escaped from but this is the one where they genuinely attempt to kill him by bombing his lab from orbit. It's pretty understandable after all of the trouble he's caused them, but they don't bother to confirm the kill and so we leave Dr Doom alive and stranded on Uranus. Did he ever got out of there to vex them again? We can never know.