MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 865: HANS VON LUNDBERG

(Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

Our story begins in a very economical way, as Yarko the Great hears about a great plague ravaging Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania, if you must know) and determines that it merits his attention enough to teleport directly to the scene. 

Yarko uses his mental powers to trace the source of the disease to a very Transylvanian-looking spooky castle that is not explicitly said to either be or to not be in Tanganyika so I guess we must assume that it is there because that is the more interesting version. Venturing inside, he encounters the spirit of Pestilence, a very sassy character who reveals the following amazing facts:

a. the plague has been caused by the efforts of Hans von Lundberg, aka the Mad Archaeologist, who presumably dug up a sample of it in a tomb or something. This is a real win for the mad social sciences!

b. the plague is called the Curse of Hecate, which is bad ass.

c. Pestilence is there because he is von Lundberg's slave, but whether this is literal and the Mad Archaeologist is doing some mystical disease shit or more of a metaphorical thing because he is responsible for so many plague-deaths is not clarified. 

Yarko finally meets von Lundberg after he is captured by some very culturally-insensitive goons (who add weight to the idea of the castle being in Africa in the most unfortunate manner) and contrary to Pestilence's assertions that he is more powerful than the magician ends up dealing with him pretty handily. Perhaps when you are the personification of infectious disease your value system is weighted more toward how much plague someone has spread than any other measure of worth.

Though Yarko could presumably just vaporize von Lundberg with his majicks, he chooses to employ the services of his old enemy Death (not looking quite as dapper as he used to, if I may say so) to do the deed, possibly because this symbolically frees Pestilence from service and thus abates the plague via sympathetic magic. Or something like that. As this is the Yarko the Great version of Death who just loves to harvest the souls of the living he has to be reverse psycologied into it a bit, but he eventually takes the bait/ the archaeologist. 

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 008

Mad or criminal, it's the science that matters.

This fellow is known only as "the hypnotist" and has an unspecified plan to do... something that involves taking control of flights of Army bombers and having them blow up targets of his choosing. If the details seem thin on the ground it's because this fellow speaks precisely three words (see above) before being captured by Jeff Cardiff, Spy-Chief and so the only knowledge we have about his plans is that which can be extrapolated from his actions.

Bonus details: 1. he hypnotizes people with his large purple eyes 2. his plan requires a video hookup to the planes he is controlling, which I personally did not know was standard or even possible in 1940. (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940)

De Carva here developed an earthquake causing ray and almost managed to conquer the US with it but made the classic mistake of trusting in his deathtraps to finish off Skyman without bothering to confirm if he was, in fact, dead. This is known as hubris, kids. (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

Professor Scorp here is a mad Egyptologist! That's right, folks, we've got a mad social science case on our hands! Scorp suffered some sort of breakdown and his family made the unfortunate and retrograde decision to confine him on their island estate rather than, say, seek treatment for him. Eventually, two unscrupulous servants helped him escape as part of a plan to steal and resurrect the mummy of evil pharaoh Tut-Akum-Aut so as to learn the location of his legendary lost treasure. The reanimated mummy above is sadly merely an illusion conjured by Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians. But on a happy note, Professtor Scorp is taken somewhere for proper treatment at the end of the story! (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

UPDATE: Astonishingly, Professor Scorp returns in The Face 001!

This is Humpy Hudson, who has a moderately foolproof scheme (develop a substance that explodes the air around it but is itself unharmed and make it an innocuous shape, thus giving yourself a hard-to-spot, untraceable bomb, then bomb utilities until you can extort money out of them) hampered by some poor planning (he only has one reusable bomb and he made it in the shape of an onyx statuette). Humpy spends most of the issue trying to get his bomb back after it gets picked up by a youngster and sold at a pawnshop, then gets captured by Skyman. (Big Shot Comics 019, 1941)