MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 025

I feel like we could avoid some of this unpleasantness if we made the Mad Arts a required part of the curriculum again.

Unnamed Sorcerer:

The Golden Knight and Alice are up to some good old-fashioned adventure, as they travel into the land of Kongola to seek out the cause of mysterious disappearances of people in adjoining Kooran. Just where are Kongola and Kooran? I'm going to say somewhere in what is now the United Kingdom since that that is where the Golden Knight is headquartered, but they could literally be anywhere given that he has started visiting his supernatural brothers in-law on the Moon and the Sun and thus has an interplanetary range.

Kongola turns out to be a good place for adventure, as it is filled with magical and monstrous threats including:

- hypnotic illusions

- carnivorous trees hiding behind those illusions

- club-wielding minotaurs

- giant bats

- ape men, who manage to carry off Alice

Pressing on, the Golden Knight arrives at a huge tower that he says has been built by the enslaved people of Kooran, but I never see them.

So just who is responsible for the kidnappings, the tower and the monsters? Why, this insane magician, who claims to have done it all so that he can be safe from floods and then promptly jumps off the tower into a... lake? and drowns. More importantly, why is he listed here in the space reserved for low-rent mad scientists? Because while comic book magic users fill a very similar ecological niche as super-scientists they don't have as great a population and consequently a far lesser rate of one-note losers, and I had to put him somewhere. (Fantastic Comics 019, 1941)

the Professor:

The Professor is a hypnotist of some stripe who uses his powers to turn lawmen into agents of his gang. He meets his match in detective Spencer Steel, who as a comic book protagonist is of course immune to such feeble things as mind control and quickly turns the tables on his would-be master. (Fight Comics 011, 1941)

Unnamed Scientist:

Though this unnamed scientist talks a bit like a kindly mentor who gives you super-powers in order to save mankind from aliens etc, in practice he just has a kid tied up in his jungle compound who he feeds potions to. Perhaps he had some sort of important plan that would justify this behaviour but if so it is lost to the ages when he wanders out into the jungle to get hilariously killed by an extremely jumpy snake.

The poor kid, meanwhile, grows into a giant and aimlessly wanders the countryside battling various world militaries until Power-Man shows up and tosses a bomb at his gut. It's a bummer ending that wouldn't happen in most comics and I kind of respect it. (Fight Comics 012, 1941)

Dr Moluk:

Dr Moluk and his assistant Scorpo have developed a machine that takes germs and bacteria and assembles them into multicellular organisms that resemble golden dragon-dogs. He intends to use these creatures to sow mass panic and ultimately take over the world. An evil plan, but a cool one. 

Unfortunately for Moluk, his assigned heroic enemy is Guy Gorham, who is billed as the World's Greatest Chemist but acts like the World's Most Thorough Ass-Kicker. He busts in, beats ten kinds of hell out of Moluk and Scorpo, and ends up feeding the former to his own dragons. It honestly feels like bullying by the end. (Great Comics 001, 1941)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 024

Let's spare a thought for all the mad lab assistants who do so much for so little credit. 

Rokula:

Rokula's plan is simple: kidnap inventors and then use his mind control machine to force them to work for him. Hey, it's a classic for a reason, but it's also a plan with a high chance of attracting super-heroic attention such as that of Zongar the Miracle Man.  

Rokula might be a fan of the classics but like so many of his peers he is no as into workplace safety, and he meets his end when Zongar sends him careening into his own equipment with a forceful punch. (Silver Streak Comics 007, 1941)

Quislor:

Quislor is a fellow who has developed technology that turns aircraft into remote-controlled drones, and is using it to send bombers out to destroy airfields across the US, thus reducing its ability to field an air force. Though he never quite gets around to saying just why he's doing this it is presumably in service to some sort of fascist plot.

Like all air-based crooks within Cloud Curtis' flight range, Quislor soon learns that the only reward for messing with the sanctity of the wild blue yonder is a sock to the jaw and a trip to the hoosegow. (Silver Streak Comics 014, 1941)

Professor Giess:

Professor Giess, a crypto-fascist scientist with some very interesting eyebrows, has developed a fuel additive called Thanotane (great name) that causes vehicles using it to give off deadly fumes in their exhaust. His plan to distribute this fuel throughout the US to spread terror is stymied somewhat when the test shipment is hijacked by gangsters, but the plan is still on track until John Thesson, aka the Son of the Gods, gets involved and beats everyone up. This must be especially galling for Giess, who noted that Thesson was going to pose a challenge but put off dealing with him for too long. Live and learn, I guess, until you're shot as an enemy agent. (Exciting Comics 007, 1941)

Doctor Mord:

Dr Mord is, like, the Platonic ideal of the comic book mad scientist. He lives in a castle that he explicitly just kind of found in the South African jungle and is attempting to scientifically extract the human soul and place it into a big jar of acid by electrocuting people's brains. He claims that this will make him a god among men, but fails to lay out how, exactly.

The old storytelling rule of Chekhov's Unsealed Vat of Acid comes into play here and Doctor Mord ends up doused in the stuff before being chucked out a window by Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 014, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 961: DR ZINN

(Exciting Comics 009, 1941)

Dr Zinn feels like a character who is somehow aware of my classification system and who is desperate not to be relegated to the ranks of the Generic Costumed Villain (yes, the "costumed" part has lost all meaning, I know) and so has shoehorned as many extra details into his appearance as possible to force me to give him Minor Super-Villain status. "what if I wasn't just a super tall hypnotist, but also obsessed with snakes? And what if I ran a cult, the Cult of the Serpent, full of mind controlled thralls and they were also obsessed with snakes?" And I guess it worked.

Dr Zinn's main goal in his one appearance is to get ahold of the contents of a safe deposit box owned by a Mr Britt and his daughter, and while they never lay out what exactly is in there I certainly hope it's securities or deeds to property or something, because if that little bundle of paper is meant to be cash then it's like ten thousand dollars tops (I guess the Britts could have gotten their hands on some vanishingly-rare ten thousand dollar bills but we're still not talking about multiple millions) and even in 1941 that's not enough money to go to so much effort for.

Zinn is captured after Edith Britt hires PI par excellence Dan Williams, who really undercuts the threat of hypnotic mind control by giving him a couple of eyes full of black pepper. 

Addendum: I almost forgot to mention that Dr Zinn (whose first name is Mephiste, by the way) comes to the attention of the law when he orders some poisonous snakes through the mail and some get out and kill two postal workers, and he just grabs the rest and skedaddles out of there.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 539 UPDATE: THE CLAW (post-Daredevil, 1941)

In keeping with my decision to split the Claw updates for 1941 by heroic foe, here are the details of his three-issue dalliance with engineer Bill Hopkins.

When last we saw the Claw... he was in the Pacific, roughing up Adolf Hitler. But before that, at the end of his long back-and-forth with the Daredevil, there was the small matter of his asking Lucifer for aid and getting it, with the caveat that if he still lost in his next encounter with Daredevil he would be "banished into Asia forever!" And since he did lose, that means that he can't return to America, right?

Evidently not, because in  Daredevil Comics 002, the Claw kidnaps a train filled with 2000 soldiers as it passes through Pennsylvania, then sends a note to the president (note the custom signature) to ask for the complete US gold supply in ransom.

Meanwhile, the Claw is showing his prisoners home movies designed to bend them to his will. Note the Hitler impression: in 1941 this is shorthand for being a megalomaniac rather than a genocidal megalomaniac (though in all cases it marks you as being a bit of an uninspired hack). Whether he gets the gold or not, the Claw intends to use these men in yet another attempt to conquer the US.

One of these soldiers, Dick Hopkins, has a brother named Bill Hopkins, who has the radical idea to retrace the path of the original train in a second one and see if anything happens, which it does. This really erodes my confidence in the authorities of this fictional reality, frankly. You'd think "take a couple of lads and check the tracks between here and where the train disappeared" would be the logical first step to take but Bill seems to be the first one to think of it. 

Perhaps the Claw was able to return to America by sacrificing some of his power to Lucifer, because Bill Hopkins' thrown rocks and pistol shots are much more effective than such things as artillery and machine guns have been in the past.

The second part of Bill's plan, after "find out where the Claw has stashed 2000 men" is "come find me if I disappear" and accordingly, in Daredevil Comics 003, the US Army locates the Claw's base by following the extra set of train tracks that split off the main trunk and head directly into a cliff face. Once again, the Claw seems weaker than usual and the Army is pushing his forces back successfully enough that he orders his men to flood the base with poison gas. It is at this point that Bill has his best idea yet, as he steals the Claw's enormous gas mask and chucks it down a convenient bottomless pit.

The Claw is more affected by poison gas than the regular-sized humans in the room thanks to the fact that his big body needs more oxygen and thus are breathing in more gas, and while I love a well-rationalized weakness in a character it does call into question all future Claw foes for not immediately tear gassing him on sight.

What I don't love is that the Claw, already a distillation of Yellow Peril tropes, is one-upping himself by adopting what I just learned is called a wonton font in his speech bubbles. I think that it's supposed to be adding emphasis when he is yelling but at this point he is almost always yelling.

 Daredevil Comics 004: The Claw brought into NYC in chains/in triumph. He almost instantly escapes.

Seeking vengeance on Bill Hopkins, the Claw fords the Hudson River and in so doing becomes the first-ever super-villain to enter Hoboken.

Bill doesn't take this aggression lying down, and meets the Claw on a handy rooftop with a can of kerosene and a match, and this is a pretty good illustration of a though I have had while writing this: the Claw battling super-heroes is all well and good, but what I really enjoy is seeing him get it from regular folks. Bill Hopkins and his Home Alone energy might just be the best that the "Claw" feature ever gets, and it's a real shame that this is the last we will be seeing of him.

The Claw very reasonably exits via the river. So long forever, Bill. Next time: the Ghost!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 949: PRINCESS SHEBA

(Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

1900! Archaeologist Professor Pierce leads an expedition to find the tomb of Princess Sheba in Arabia! Buried alive in a solid gold tomb with a gold cobra perched on her chest, Princess Sheba appears to be meant to be the daughter of the biblical Queen of Sheba. The mummy, her grave goods and praticularly the golden cobra found sitting on her chest are all promptly packed up and shipped back to New York.

Professor Pierce puzzles over the inscription on the golden cobra for the next forty years, until, in 1941, he decodes it and learns that the cobra is in fact a bottle filled with special mummy-resurrection juice.

What can a dedicated Egyptologist do in a situation like this, other than immediately run to the museum and unwrap the top half of Princess Sheba's mummy so that he can give her the juice. After all, if it works it will be a tremendous boon to science, and if it doesn't, well, they probably have plenty of other mummies.

The fluid works, and Princess Sheba is restored to life as a goth. I was initially going to classify this as a lucky event for Pierce, but it does complicate his life considerably as he not only has to cover up the fact that one of the museum's mummies is missing but also has an unexpected nude woman who he has implicitly taken responsibility for.

And a responsibility it is, because Princess Sheba is not only a woman out of time but a complete amnesiac. She learns English and so forth with supernatural rapidity, but Pierce forces her to remain isolated and withholds the information that she was entombed alive because she was born with the ability to control men's minds with a kiss and used that power for evil in her first life. This turns out to have been a good idea, because as soon as he does tell her she stabs him to death to gain control of the cobra fluid and use her power for evil. 

Please note that her mind-control kiss is called "the Kiss of Death" and that that is very annoying to me.

Sheba declares herself the Queen of America and sets about building an army of men to enact her will, though her methodology is a bit weird. She targets powerful and influential men, but the only use she puts them to (that we see, at least) is to cut out their tongues and employ them as gangsters in a pretty conventional crime wave. Is this evidence of a fundamental lack of imagination on her part or is it that despite her rapid learning she is still effectively a child and cannot yet make subtle plans? Or was her brain all shrivelled and dehydrated for a few thousand years too many?

This is when the Daredevil gets involved after capturing one of her Tongueless Ones and making him write out the directions to her lair - tonguelessness as a tool of secrecy has really lost a lot of its cache as literacy rates have gone up. Sheba goes into the old familiar femme fatale's "this is the most handsome man I have ever met" routine, and... c'mon. It makes sense when people do that to Superman or the Spirit, or even Batman, as you can see enough of the face to make some sort of judgment, but this guy? Frankly, her interest read as disingenuous and Daredevil is correct in his decision not to kiss her.

The confrontation between the two ends in a bit of an anticlimax, as Daredevil doesn't really do anything beyond avoiding that kiss. Instead, Sheba throws the jar of life-juice at him in a fit of pique, then shrivels back into a mummy almost immediately. Like every comic book character who is dependant on a serum for survival she seems to have timed her doses to the minute instead of leaving a little wiggle room in case of unexpected delays. Or maybe the cobra was magic somehow, whatever. The day is saved and hopefully the surviving Tongueless Ones can go back to their old lives in some fashion.

AND THEY GO BACK TO DISPLAYING HER MUMMY IN THE MUSEUM

Categorized in: Origin (Resurrected Mummy), Power (Mind Control Kiss), Royalty (Princesses)