PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

Get ready for a collection of MLJ's finest racially-problematic villains.

Yen Fat Sing: 

Yen Fat Sing's deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang's charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He's a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of remarkable things about Yen Fat Sing: 

1. after all the effort to run everyone off the farm, once Fu Chang is closing in he just sneaks onto the grounds and digs up the treasure, suggesting that he could have done that all along and particularly so because nobody knew about the treasure at all until he ran his mouth about it.

2. Yen Fat Sing is killed in the course of the story but, unlike virtually every other comic book villain to have anything to do with carnivorous plants, he is not eaten by a tree but rather dies in a car crash.

I do rally like that the man-eating plants only attack in the dark. That's a fun detail. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

Joodar the Evil:

Joodar the Evil starts out as an evil equivalent to Fu Chang, only instead of accessing his power via supplication to an ancestral god with a tonsure, Joodar worships the Great Genii of the Water Demons, and instead of a very eclectic set of animated chess figures...

... Joodar is granted the services of - you guessed it - water demons. Though his stated plans involve world domination, Joodar has a lot of trouble with step 1: destroy Fu Chang, to the extent that both the Great Genii and his Water Demon crew end up destroyed. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

Joodar returns in the next issue, potentially because "summoning water demons" isn't a crime in San Francisco. This time he is without his demon pals and so he turns to the next best things: bacteria and mosquitoes! Specifically, he has mixed up a big batch of different harmful bacteria and stuck 'em in some mosquitoes in order to create havoc in San Francisco's Chinatown. Why does he do this? It's not entirely clear. Generic revenge? Mass chaos? Joodar doesn't really deliver a coherent thesis statement I'm afraid.

Joodar's greatest creation is this enormous mosquito, which almost takes out Fu Chang and his fiance Tay Ming but ultimately cannot contend with those pesky magic chessmen. Joodar, as far as I know, just absconds into the night - perhaps mosquito-crime is also not illegal in San Francisco. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)

Dr Wang:

Dr Wang is a Yellow Peril villain in the true Fu Manchu mould, a sinister genius who strikes at the security of the US for no stated reason. It's possible that we are meant to read Asian villain = Japanese, but if I'm honest an evil mastermind who plots against the United States for the sheer cussed challenge of it it quite a bit more evocative.

Dr Wang is so threatening to the secuirty of the country, in fact, that we are introduced to him in media res ad the Shield attempts to murder him by dropping a boulder on his car. This is that proactive super-hero action that we al1 wanted in the late aughts!

Dr Wang has two things going for him: the first is his mask, which looks great. Terrific style of mask, particularly with a hat. The second is his plan to disrupt US war production, by rounding up a bunch of guys who are afflicted with cholera and hypnotizing them into getting jobs in arms factories, thus starting a targeted cholera epidemic. And the very fun thing about this is that cholera is mostly spread by contact with infected feces, so these factories must be disgusting.

The Shield cannot of course let this stand, and goes back for another try at solving the Dr Wang Problem, and you know what they say: the second time is the charm - plus it's a bit more narratively satisfying for the Shield not to do a premeditated murder! (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 642: QUEEN OF THE WEED PEOPLE

(Fight Comics 002, 1940)

After spending so long with Sub Saunders in the far-off year 10 000 it's a bit strange to detail an undersea menace that he isn't battling but here we are and our focus is present-day adventurer Kinks Mason, who sets out with nothing but a helmet that extracts oxygen from seawater to solve the mystery of just where all these missing ships have been getting to and ends up discovering an underwater civilization of seaweed people.

(I really like the Weed People, as they are referred to in the text a couple of times - their krinkly kelp frond aesthetic is very pleasing to me. It's quite different from the look of Kozar's Sea-Weed Men but I enjoy them in a similar fashion. Just something about humanoids made of seaweed, I guess)

Weed Person society is dependent on a giant whirlpool-powered chlorophyll manufacturing plant. Just where this infrastructure came from and how the Weed People existed without it is not elaborated upon - did their primitive ancestors subsist on naturally occurring chlorophyll or spend their days basking in the sun photosynthesizing and then completely abandon that lifestyle once some unnamed Weed Person genius created the machine? Plausibly!

Chlorophyll isn't just the Weed Person staff of life, however. It also turns humans into Weed Creatures, which, though they look and are named similar to the Weed People are in fact distinct and who serve as slaves of the Weed People in their bid to take over the world.

The Weed People and their Queen have made the crucial mistake of not being genre savvy enough to know that any lone adventurer, particularly one with an action hero-y name like Kinks Mason, should be killed immediately and they end up dead for their trouble. Specifically, Kinks goes ahead and blows up the chlorophyll machine, dooming all Weed People society to extinction. Hopefully there's some hipster Weed Person subculture on the fringes of society still harvesting chlorophyll in the ancient ways because it tastes better, if only for the sake of Kinks Mason's conscience.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 530: THE MAD BOTANIST

(Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941)

The Mad Botanist is an assassin "in the employment of a foreign power" which in 1941 as good as means that he was working for the Axis. His nom de guerre comes from the fact that his preferred method of murder is via deadly plant life, including the African Tentacle Vine, the Mediterranean Poison Cornflower and of course the insidious Man-Eating Clam-Plant. The Botanist's somewhat bizarre physical appearance is never commented upon in the comic so it's a real toss up whether they'd have gone with "he works with deadly plants after being rejected for his appearance" or "working with deadly plants has really messed up his body".

Helping the Mad Botanist in his work are the rock stupid cops of whatever city he works out of, who not only adopt an "arrest the first person we see upon arriving at the crime scene" attitude but also seemingly facilitate this man's death by arresting Captain Flag while he is actively trying to save him from strangling vines.

This is a shorter story so the Mad Botanist doesn't actually get to do that much: he kills one guy with vines, almost kills another by dressing up as an old lady and selling him a poison flower and then ends up in his own Man-Eating Clam-Plant after a final confrontation with Captain Flag. Is the percentage of villains who employ carnivorous plants and then die to them higher than that of similar villains who employ robots or trained animals? I suspect that it is, if only because artists don't want to draw a giant flytrap without the satisfaction of drawing it chomping someone.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 393: THE TENTACLE

(More Fun Comics 069, 1941)

We don't get a lot of backstory on the Tentacle. Presumably he's a botanist or at least a gifted amateur horticulturalist, as he has developed a type of plant that strangles folks to death and can be triggered remotely (or on a timer, possibly). He uses this creation to blackmail rich men until he is tracked down by the Spectre and of course meets his end at the fronds of his own creation.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 389: MISTER K

(More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

Mister K is an unspecified enemy agent encountered by macho adventurer Clip Carson in Panama. His plots and schemes are pretty rote - any comic set in Panama is almost certainly about trying to sabotage the Panama Canal, after all - but his tool of choice is a carnivorous plant called the Devil-Flower, so that's fun.

Interestingly, we last saw Clip Carson battling unspecified enemy agent Mister Z in Colombia. Assuming a linear distribution, we can assume that a theoretical Mister A is stationed... somewhere near the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 373: THE JUNGLE SCIENTIST

(More Fun Comics 063, 1941)

I won't lie to you: this initial panel really did all the work in guaranteeing the Jungle Scientist some time in the spotlight rather than a place in a mad science roundup with three other randos. There are exactly two reasons for that: 1) that he was supplied with a name in the very title of the piece and 2) that wretched little outfit that he has assembled for himself. This man was divorced just before he moved to the jungle.

So after his divorce, the unnamed Jungle Scientist moved out into the middle of nowhere, assembled a terrific look and proceeded to create animate, carnivorous trees "by almost impossible grafting." The next phase of his plan, that Congo Bill and his pal Professor Kent have shown up just in time to foil, is to implant the brain of his step-daughter into one of the trees. And yes, the step-daughter fits into the divorce narrative I am constructing - she could be the child of a recent (and not very picky) second wife, for example.

It all ends as you might expect, with the scientist's special protective perfume getting washed off just before he flees into a grove of man-eating trees. In a way though, isn't death the ultimate divorce?