MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 991: ZIRA

(Jungle Comics 013, 1941)

While searching for her champion Sir Champion (annoying thing to have to write and the main reason I'm happy that he eventually fades into obscurity), who has failed to return from a hunt, Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire is confronted by the ghostly vision of a blonde lady who rules an ancient lost castle. This is just a kind of person you get in the undefined part of Africa that houses the Lost Empire.

The lady's name, by the way, is Zira, Princess of the Palace of the Black Heart. She also refers to herself as a "wizardess," and while I am generally of the opinion that gendered job titles like that are retrograde and unhelpful I must admit to being charmed. Wizardess!

This vision leads Camilla back to the aforementioned Palace of the Black Heart, where her mortal form is revealed to be a middle-aged lady, or "old hag" as our hero so tactfully puts it. Zira states that Sir Champion is locked up in her dungeon and she will return him in exchange for all of Camilla's magic powers. The sum total of these powers, from my notes, being the ability to talk to gorillas and the power to call upon Thor and Baal to freeze someone. Frankly not a bad trade for someone's life. Do we include her eternal life? She got that from a potion, after all.

Camilla evidently wishes to continue to speak to apes and so she and her men battle with Zira's forces until they are ironically defeated by some apes.

It then turns out that Camilla has more tricks up her sleeve than I had in my notes. She offers to brew up a potion to make Zira good looking in exchange for freedom for her and her men, and since this is the same comic that made a point of calling Zira a wizardess, she is of course very vain by default and takes the deal immediately.

The thing about taking advantage of a woman's default vanity in such a comic is of course the fact that the vain woman will also be extremely fickle, as seen when the newly-hot Zira reneges on her deal in favour of keeping Sir Champion for her own horny purposes. Things quickly turn violent and Sir Champion is forced to slay Zira to save Camilla's life. All in all it's a real eleventh-hour fumble on Zira's part.

Categorized in: Accessories (Castles), Genrica (Ends in -a), Powers (Various Magics)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 990: THE EMPEROR

(Bill Barnes, America's Air Ace Comics 003, 1941)

The first chunk of the story that the Emperor appears in is not available anywhere that I can find, but what remains is enough to evaluate him and determine that yes, he is a super-villain. Specifically, he is a scientist who discovered "the secret of atomic power" and decided that the best way to use it was as part of an attempt to conquer the world. Plus he has all of his henchmen running around in little uniforms, a clear sign of super-villainy.

The part of the Emperor's plans that we get to see involves using cool-looking rocket bombers to blow big holes in various US cities and then sending out agents provocateur to stir up public support for surrender as an alternative to continued explosions.

Unfortunately for the Emperor, Bill Barnes (America's Air Ace) is on the case, and he's such a mechanical genius that he is able to divine the secrets of atomic energy merely by creeping around the engine room of one of those cool rocket bombers for about half an hour. Barnes builds his own fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft, tracks the Emperor to a secret base in the Rockies and then wipes him off the map with atomic bombs. I suppose that the actual Emperor himself might have suvived, since we never actually see him alive or dead, but it's pretty unlikely.

BONUS: Bill Barnes is awarded "the highest honor of the nation" by FDR for stopping the Emperor, which is either the Medal of Honor or... some precursor to the Medal of Freedom that I can't find (logically there had to be a highest civilian honour before 1942 but Wikipedia is being coy). It all depends on whether America's Air Ace is a military or civilian role.

Categorized in: Accessories (Mountain Base), Royalty (Emperors), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest of the US)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 989: THE ARTIST

(Jackpot Comics 004, 1941)

An otherwise-unnamed portraitist, the Artist finds himself down on his luck because he refuses to flatter his clients by painting them in anything but complete realism. After his latest client, a banker, literally kicks him out onto the street, he continues to work on the man's portrait in a hate-fueled haze until he unlocks a power within himself: once he has painted someone's portrait realistically enough, their soul becomes trapped inside and the husk of their body is forced to do the Artist's bidding. It's the ultimate service worker power fantasy!

As befits a power born out of hatred and frustration at being rejected, the Artist sets out to enrich himself at the cost of others. He begins with the banker, who he forces to rob his own bank and then allows to be carted off to jail. And he still has his soul stuck in the painting, so in a way he's in double jail.

If the Artist's first crime was at least a little bit justified (I personally would not say that a rude client should be sent to jail for twenty years but I know a fair few artists who might disagree), his subsequent crime spree is exclusively aimed at making money and damn the consequences. In short succession he: forces a woman to kill her husband and then fork over the insurance money, enslaves the leader of Tomania to enable a Nazi invasion of that country, and sells his services as a trial fixer (by way of a desouled District Attorney) to gangster Knuckles Werner.

You just can't get away with this kind of thing forever, and especially not in Mr Justice's unnamed town. Thanks to a little ghostly trickery, the Artist is forced to paint own portrait and confess to his crimes, and I guess that the jury was in a mood to accept the existence of the supernatural because he is found guilty and executed. Perhaps targeting the District Attorney like he did was not the best long-term strategy for the Artist.

Categorized in: Accessories (Henchmen (Mind-Controlled Thralls), Power (Magic (Soul Theft)), Profession (Artists)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 988: FORD

(Jackpot Comics 003, 1941)

l

We meet Ford for the first time as he is knifing his fellow archaeologist Baker to death in an ancient Egyptian tomb, in order to be the sole possessor of the fabled Black Book of Sorcery which they have just found.

Two points about Ford right off the bat: 1. he is only ever called Ford. No first name, even! This is what I get for grumbling internally about how boring William Scott's name was. 2. He looks like the Devil. This makes sense in the context of a Mr Justice comic, as artist Sam Cooper was never shy about tying one's morality to their appearance, but in-universe, is it a reflection of the corruption of his soul or was he always that one archaeologist who looked like Satan?

Having secured the Black Book of Sorcery, Ford is now subject to critiques of how he uses it. His first effort involves raising the mummies that are housed in the temple from the dead in order to murder the remaining six archaeologists in the expedition and thus cover up his crime. I would call this a rash act, but then again I would probably try stealing the book before committing murder in the first place. I suppose Ford and I are just different people.

Next, he covers up the mummy murders by collapsing the entire temple on top of the bodies. This is a pretty wild stunt for an archaeologist of all people to pull, and on top of that it's not even a great way to conceal some bodies, as rubble is famously clearable. It's also a waste of a number of perfectly good mummies, mummies who might have been some help in cleaning up a crime scene.

Having made his way back to the unnamed city that both he and Mr Justice call home, Ford attempts to profit off of his new mastery of the necromantic arts by raising deceased millionaire's son John Grant from the dead to hit up his parents for a loan. Ethical considerations aside, this kind of thing isn't the worst way to make some dough via dark magic: you could emotionally blackmail the parents with the thought of their child being condemned to a miserable half-dead existence, or maybe use privileged family information to commit some sort of financial fraud or very precise burglary, for example. 

Ford just sends Grant to bust down the front door and demand cash, which is a total bust as Grant's parents are left feeling more existentially horrified than inclined to pay out.  Honestly, if smash-and-grab stuff like this is all that you're going to use necromancy for you might as well stick with the squad of beefcake mummies rather than raising up bespoke dead guys for every job.

This is the point that Mr Justice gets involved in the story, by the way. You can't do dark majick inside the borders of [CITY NAME NOT FOUND] and hope to escape his gaze.

For his final trick, Ford summons the very off-model spirit of Nero, "the most horrible tyrant the world has ever known" as a counter to Mr Justice. Nero in turn proposes a sort of ghost road trip to the Edge of Infinity to access the Immunity Vacuum and become immortal in a way that is distinct from the immortality already enjoyed by the souls of the dead in the Mr Justice cosmology.

Perhaps the Immunity Vacuum confers a version of immortality that prevents one's soul from being beaten up by another ghost and thrown into the "depths of eternal nothingness," never to emerge, and if it is it's too bad for Ford and Nero that the latter's chariot isn't faster because that's exactly what Mr Justice does to them.

Unsurprisingly, this kills Ford's body, which makes it simplicity itself for Mr Justice to collect the Black Book of Sorcery and use the convenient self-destruct spell that it holds to render it blank.

Categorized in: Accessories (Book of Magic), Day Jobs (Archaeologists), Supercrime (Necromancy)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 987: WILLIAM SCOTT

(Jackpot Comics 002, 1941)

William Scott is your textbook mad scientist delving into the mysteries of life and death that man was not meant to comprehend, and in fact is so clearly going to be a problem that Mr Justice shows up to tell him off in advance, just based on a feeling. Despite this, Scott signs up condemned gangster "Rod" Dugan (and whether the Rod part is short for Rodney or the now-somewhat obscure slang for a gun is impossible to know. Probably the gun, though) as a candidate for post-execution reanimation. Prison officials! You have to stop releasing bodies to men with crazed looks in their eyes who stink of ozone!

Scott's plan is successful, and he soon has his very own science revenant that he sends out to loot and plunder for him. Please not the multiple dentition-based signifiers in the above: while Dugan's tusk-like canines are one of the signifiers of the monstrous in Mr Justice comics, Scott's missing teeth are a mark of his derangement, like his long messy hair and the deep circles around his eyes.

Mr Justice has no trouble tracking down Scott as the source of the trouble, having already pegged him as a troublemaker. He proves to be more than a match for the the resurrected Dugan, but is unable to fully defeat him fully. The reason for this is simple: though Scott brought Dugan's body back to life, his soul is condemned to wander in torment until it is laid to rest. This is all set-up for a Mortal Shell vs. Immortal Soul fight to the death, and the Immortal Soul is not playing around.

Meanwhile, Scott takes the classic mad scientist's way out and blows himself, along with his lab, to high heaven. Hopefully he gets to reconnect with his old friend Rod Dugan when he gets there.

Categorized in: Supercrime (Monster Making)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 986: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

(Jackpot Comics 001, 1941)

Zarro, the Zombie Master, is yet another take on an evil Haitian voodoo practitioner: we've seen 'em before and we'll see 'em again. He is recruited by a couple of pseudo-Nazis named Karl Bezdek and Hugo Kempf for help in setting up a factory that uses zombies as workers in the production of war material for the Axis. Like the other Zombie Master we have covered, this one is a vibrant shade of green, just like a cartoon zombie, though I'm not entirely sure when that particular colour association started.

I am going to lay out Karl and Hugo's plan before telling you why I'm mad about it:

1. Pose as magazine photographers in order to get total access to the defense factories in the as-yet unnamed city that Mr Justice calls home (the risk of targeting a city with a super-hero is leavened by the fact that it has the world's most gullible mayor).

2. Photograph as many workers as possible.

3. Zarro uses the photographs as sympathetic magic links to the workers (plucking them out of the photographs = very cool) and kills them.

4. The worker's bodies are stolen and shipped to Haiti for use in the factory.

So why does this plan make me mad? Because I want to critique it but I can't. See, it's a bad and inefficient plan with a lot of unnecessary steps, but only if the only goal is to make money. But that isn't the goal! Karl and Hugo are spies for a fascist nation! Their goal is to hamper US war production while simultaneously boosting that of their own country using the Haitian zombie factory, and they have done both! It's maddening! The only real flaw I can find is that the graverobbing and body shipping are a bit involved but I can't really think of a good alternative that doesn't introduce more points of failure to the plan.

The risk of super-hero vs reward of gullible mayor calculation that we discussed earlier does in fact prove to be the trio's downfall, as Mr Justice is able to make his way to Haiti (and please note the surprisingly grody-looking zombies that he finds there) thanks to a minor kidnapping subplot and strangle the Zombie Master, which in turn restores the workers to life. One smashed up Axis factory later, everyone is on the way back to [CITY NAME NOT FOUND].

Categorized in: Generica (Masters), Powers (Magic (Create Zombies)), Supranormal Beings (Zombies))