MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 837: THE SKULL

(Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

 

The Skull is the recurring foe of the Golden Age Black Hood, and as is common for such characters he is a kind of generalist super-villain willing to dabble in everything from theft to kidnapping to espionage to murder as circumstances dictate. He even indulges in a little housebreaking on occasion, and it is while doing so that he is interrupted by police officer Kip Burland, who he frames for the crime and then eventually attempts to have murdered when he refuses to give up on proving himself innocent. 

This of course is the origin of the Black Hood, as Burland recovers and trains under the tutelage of one of the Skulls other victims. Accidentally creating your own nemesis is one of the occupational hazards of being a successful super criminal, after all, and the Skull is so successful as he kind of did it twice, as Kip Burland's mentor is a different lawman who the Skull framed and ruined who swore revenge on him but then took too long preparing and had to be content with weaponizing another to do the deed.

By the time that Kip Burland is prepared to go into action as the Black Hood, the Skull has devised the first of what I now recognize as his signature: an overcomplicated scheme. Specifically, he has targeted the debut/masquerade ball being held for wealthy socialite Barbara Sutton, and has not only informed all of the guests that they must show up in their best jewelry so that he can steal it but has also announced his plans in the papers. I think that the intent is to ensure compliance through fear, but it really seems like he's just introducing ways that his scheme can go wrong.

The Skull's instructions are clear: he will steal the jewels off of the guests during the party and they are to keep quiet about it. None of them manage this, and each victim ends up being killed via a blowgun dart tipped with a poison that turns the human head all green and corpsey. Plus - and this is hard to see but trust me - the dart leaves a little skull-shaped mark at the point of contact.

The Black Hood eventually works out how the Skull is doing all this: he has disguised himself as hostess Mrs Sutton and has been shooting the darts out of a blowgun shaped like a cigarette holder. One dunk in an oversized decorative vase later, the case is solved!

(also please note that the Black Hood is in attendance in costume as himself. It still counts even if this is his first public appearance in costume) 

After the Black Hood turns the Skull in to the police at the end of his first costumed adventure, his ally the Hermit predicts that they will be unable to hold him, and what do you know but he's right. The Skull dramatically breaks jail and immediately puts another overly complicated scheme into action. Major Quentin Duff has invented the unspecified-but-presumably-valuable Iota Ray, and the Skull wants it, but is not prepared to do anything so simple as to steal the plans. Instead, he implements a simple three-part plan:

Step One: ambush Major Duff at his house and murder him just after he hands the Iota Ray plans over to Mrs Duff for safekeeping. 

Step Two: While Mrs Duff and Barbara Sutton are taking the plans from Washington DC via train, kidnap Duff and gaslight Sutton into believing that she was never there. This requires at least a half-dozen confederates as well as an appearance by the Skull as a Dr van Luks, a backward name so annoying that I audibly groaned when I worked it out.

Step Three: Once the plan falls apart, just try to murder everyone and take the plans off of Mrs Duff's body. Please note that this step was an option from the start, and that the theft could have been committed using the Major's gruesome murder as cover.

As 1940 draws to a close, the Skull is left shaking his fist after a speeding train as the Black Hood escapes with the plans. We will see him again in 1941!

SKULL SCORE: A very generous 2/5, considering that this particular Skull isn't actually missing any facial features. The combination of his emaciated face, sunken eyes and perpetual rictus goes a long way nonetheless. Plus he's green.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 814: SARKU

(The Spirit Section, 25 August, 1940)

I've mentioned before that the foes faced by magical Golden Age super-heroes break down into roughly three types: 1) regular crooks who are there to be clowned upon, 2) legitimate threats with equivalent magical power of their own and 3) crooks with a little magical power, who provide a Iof a challenge but are ultimately also clowned upon. Sarku is the third type, and has set out, fresh out of prison, to get revenge on those who put him there. Also, like all magic users in "Mr Mystic," Sarku has an innate resistance to magic that makes even low-level practicioners more of a challenge to Our Hero than they would be to a Zatara or a Yarko.

By the time Mr Mystic has been brought in on the case, Sarku has already murdered the (police?) Commissioner of the unnamed Indian city he was incarcerated in and escaped via some handy teleportation magic. Though Mystic interrupts his attempt on the life of the French Consul, Sarku escapes again, this time into the far future world of 2050 AD.

(just what had prevented him from time travelling or indeed merely teleporting out of his prison cell over the ten years of his incarceration is not elaborated upon. Perhaps he only just got the knack)

Sarku does a bit of premature gloating before learning that Mr Mystic can also travel through time, and the two are quickly engaged in a high-speed rocket chase to the Moon. 

Mystic ends up shooting Sarku down as they approach the Moon's surface, and he makes the grim choice to pop his corpse into a handy corpse container (originally intended for the evocatively-named by alas never-seen "Moon King's mummy") as a sort of general warning to all would-be murderers who might be wandering around on the Moon. That's it for Sarku!

But perhaps I spoke too soon! Sarku is back in the next "Mr Mystic" installment, and though we don't get to see any mummies, we are treated to a Moon King, as a not-so-dead Sarku is brought before Tan Tan, King of the Moon by his subjects. It turns out that he wasn't quite dead when Mr Mystic shoved him in that tube, which is great for him now but horrifying in retrospect.

Tan Tan turns out to have a weird crush on the (to him) historical figure of Elena, former Mr Mystic villain and current Mr Mystic fiance (stay tuned for her entry), and trades Sarku a space fleet for her.

Sarku's attempt to get revenge on the entire population of Earth for a 1930-1940 AD prison sentence that almost nobody in 2050 AD would have been alive at the same time as, let alone had anything to do with, is foiled once again by Mr Mystic, who leaves nothing to chance this time as he socks Sarku out the spaceship's hatch and into the void of space (Tan Tan, by contrast gets a mere sock in the jaw for his creepy Elena-napping. The perks of royalty, eh?).

REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/2+

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 810: MR MIDNIGHT

(The Spirit, "Mr Midnight", 14 July, 1940)

Mr Midnight is your classic police taunter, a crook who not only thinks that they have the wherewithal to pull off the perfect crime but is so confident that they decide to tip off the cops to their plans. In this specific instance, the villain is a dapper blue-skinned fellow who has not only informed the police but the Spirit as well, and further has declared that he will commit his murder in the very office of Police Commissioner Dolan. And he does it! Ellison Wright, Midnight's erstwhile blackmailer, dutifully shows up and drops dead at the stroke of midnight, and since Happy O'Day, the coroner, declares the death as due to heart failure, Mr Midnight walks right on out the door afterward.

This is where your "perfect crime" criminals often make their mistake, because while the fact that it can't actually be proven that Mr Midnight killed Wright might keep the police off of his back, the Spirit is a vigilante, and doesn't exactly have to worry about things like "the letter of the law" or "evidence" or "not showing up in someone's house unexpectedly". He just has the fact that Midnight said that he was going to commit murder to go off of, plus the knowledge that Happy O'Day just loves to call any unexplained death heart failure - not a month and a half earlier he said that Denny "the Spirit" Colt had died of heart failure, after all.

Indeed, Mr Midnight is almost comically eager to confess that he did it. Midnight, aka John Caliban, was once a stage heartthrob whose life was ruined when he fell in love with a married woman. Blackmailed into poverty by Ellison Wright and turned blue seemingly incidentally by a cosmetics mishap, Caliban murders first his lover and then Wright. 

What was Caliban's next move going to be? Impossible to say now, because though he almost gets away when he beans the Spirit with his human skull prop and sets his house on fire, Midnight is captured and dragged back to police headquarters, only to take the ultimate way out via his own poisoned fingernails. A shame - a dapper blue guy would have made a fine addition to any rogue's gallery.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 690: VULCAN

(Pep Comics 006, 1940)

A man working in a London steam plant dies by falling into an industrial furnace. A horrible thing to happen! Why am I showing you this horrible thing?

I am showing it to you because it is not in fact a horrible accident but a horrible murder, and we know that because the murderer left a horrible little bit of doggerel in order to crow about what he did, and he signed it "Vulcan."

Our old pal Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard is brought in on this case, and it's a lucky day for him because there are only four possible suspects: the four men who were in the immediate area when John Baker was killed, including his father, his brothers Rex and Bob and his romantic rival Barney Reyman. Like I said: lucky for Inspector Bentley because I'm beginning to suspect that he isn't a particularly astute detective when he doesn't have a guy in a rubber mask to hit with his cane.

Am I saying this because Bentley's only idea is to have everyone go back to where they were when the murder took place with the foreman standing in for his son and Pa Baker is basically instantly murdered too? Kind of, but it's more of an observation that his investigations are a bit brute force. For instance, once this second member of the Baker clan is bumped off, Bentley arranges for another one to stand in front of the open furnace.

Did Bentley know what he was doing? Was he calling Bob Baker's bluff in order to force him to confess by dodging the deathtrap he had set up for his family members (a button-activated swinging pipe, fyi)? It's possible, but I personally think that the "Vulcan = hatred for father and brothers" clue is some bullshit. Does Vulcan have more than his share of family drama? Absolutely, but no more than any other Greco-Roman god and frankly I would peg a guy named Vulcan as a potential matricide, if anything.

So was he right or just trying to winnow down the suspect list a bit? Inspector Bentley will never tell.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 441: MAGOG

(Mystery Men Comics 022, 1941)

Magog clearly has some big plans - he repeatedly sends taunting notes to the police and announces his criminal debut by blowing up a playground full of children - but he is almost immediately baited into the open by a fake newspaper and dies in a struggle with the Blue Beetle so we will never know what they were.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 347: TRIPLE THREAT

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Triple Threat is in actuality a fellow named Theron who believes that due to his own scientific genius he is above such things as "regular jobs" and "not murdering and robbing at whim" and so develops an armoured multi-environment vehicle - also called Triple Threat, as is often the case with super vehicle types - with which to enact his plans.

The obvious thing to lead with here is that great name: Triple Threat. Some cursory research seems to indicate that in the early 20th Century the term was used to refer to a person etc who could fill three different roles in sports, war etc (I even saw it used to refer to a breed of cow that was useful for meat, dairy and as a work animal). The more narrow entertainment-focused definition that is mostly used today seems to have gained prominence in the mid 20th Century, which is a shame, as it would have been a real fun time if Theron wasn't just flying around in a land/air/sea vehicle but also singing, dancing and acting.

That said, there is a real flair for the dramatic in ol' Triple Threat. He's your classic police taunter style of criminal genius, never missing an opportunity to fire up his radio and sling some mud at Sergeant Kent and the rest of the boys over at police HQ.

It's this kind of bravado that ultimately proves to be Triple Threat's downfall, in fact: after escaping an initial encounter with Bulletman, he makes an attempt to eliminate top cop Sergeant Kent and in the subsequent fracas ends up smashing his own vehicle to pieces on Bulletman's pointy head. A true loss to the community of folks like me who like to read comics about real jerks. On the positive side, Bulletman is knocked out in this collision, which leads to Susan Kent finally learning his secret identity, which then leads to her becoming Bulletgirl, by far the best of the half-dozen or so members of the Bullet-family.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 236: THE SNOW-KING

(Flash Comics v1 005, 1940)

A simple concept, but an endearing one: the Snow-King is a famous spy who only works during the winter, hence the name. He's possibly French (at least, he says "au revoir" a lot) and definitely cocky - he is so sure of success pulls the classic move of calling up the authorities to warn them of his next escapade.

Eventually, crack government agent Cliff Cornwall is brought in on the case and works out just why the Snow-King is a cold-weather spy: he relies on the central heating units of the buildings he burgles to disperse sleeping gas throughout them. That solved, he is quickly caught.

Love an arrogantly confident villain; love a suit accessorized with a cape; love the Snow-King. Should be BRUNG BACK as a legacy spy some day.

SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: THE JOKER 1940

What did the Joker get up to in 1940?

1. Batman Comics v1 001, 'Untitled' **first appearance**

The Joker really hits the ground running in his first crime-outing. He establishes his character - prideful, mercurial and on-theme - and methods that are still in his repertoire to this day

He indulges in the old standard of warning the police ahead of time, then killing his target and stealing their named gems (uh, this is a personal term for any gem famous enough to have a name, like the Hope Diamond. they make more frequent appearances in comics than real life, unsurprisingly). Not the most creative of crime sprees by his own eventual standard, but everyone has to start somewhere. He also murders a number of people who challenge him, including a gang boss and a judge who once sent him to jail (a perfect 1/1 judge and jury revenge slaying! Aim low, kids!).

Also established this adventure: the smiling-death style of Joker Venom, as well as:

...the classic hideous Joker calling card design.

But despite racking up an impressive success rate and almost killing both Batman and Robin on several occasions, the Joker ends his first outing in the slammer.

2. Batman Comics v1 001, 'The Joker Returns'

That's right, the Joker makes his second appearance in the same issue as his first! They knew he was a hot property from the very start!

After a very dramatic escape from prison and a relocation to his secret cemetery hideout, the Joker settles into his familiar pattern: a taunting message, then theft or the murder of his enemies. In achieving the latter, he employs two of my very favourite deathtraps in comics:

To bump off the Chief of Police: a sound-activated poison dart launcher concealed in his telephone - and he activates it by shouting his own name real loud! Tremendous style points there.

The second is just sharpened playing cars with poison on the edges, but again there's some tremendous style on display in the commitment to the bit of having an entire pack of jokers. Completely worth going around to every gaming supply store in Gotham to buy packs of the same brand of cards.

A minor point in this adventure is that it highlights that the Joker is primarily a jewel thief, something that I associate with the Golden Age version of the character but that might just be me extrapolating from this issue.

And finally we have the death of the Joker, truly one of the great on-brand death scenes of all time as he gets stabbed while struggling over a knife with Batman. It was a good run but the Joker is dead.

OR IS HE???

3. Batman Comics v1 002, 'Untitled'

Since the Joker actually survived the last issue, both Batman and the members of Crime Syndicate Inc  have the same idea: kidnap him while he's being treated for his injuries, the former for some sort of gruesome lobotomy and the latter as a replacement for their recently deceased leader. More than half of the story is taken up with the dueling Joker kidnappings, after which he predictably betrays the crooks, strikes out on his own and ends up left for dead in a burning castle.

More interesting to me is that this is the end of a sequence of events that, well, here's a timeline:

-Initial Joker crime spree. No time period is specified in the story but it seems a fairly rapid-fire series of crimes. Somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks, we'll say. Joker is captured.

-Two days later, Joker escapes. His crime spree resumes at the same pace, with at least two robberies occurring sequentially. Say another 1 to 2 weeks. Joker is seriously injured and rushed to hospital.

-Crooks spirit Joker away following his treatment. His recovery lasts one week, after which he seemingly dies in a fire.

What this all adds up to is a situation like Friday the Thirteenth 2 through 4, but whereas that was an astonishingly bloody weekend told over the course of three movies, this is the Joker committing at least 6 high-profile robberies and 13 murders over the course of one to two months! A huge debut for the big guy!

4. Detective Comics v1 045, 'The Case of the Laughing Death'

Predictably, the Joker is not, in fact, dead! He remains alive to this day if you can believe it!

He has, though, adopted a brand new modus operandi. Perhaps drawing on his brief time with Crime Syndicate Inc, he slips for the first time into an alter ego with the infuriating surname of Rekoj and forms a little gang of his own. Then, after his gang pulls a heist, he robs them as the Joker so that he doesn't have to split the profits with them. IT'S A DUMB PLAN BUT IT WORKS.

I'm willing to forgive, but only because of the great deathtraps, and this is a fun one: a record that releases Joker Toxin as it plays, thus killing even as its message is delivered. Insidious!

At story's end, the Joker is in the drink, presumed dead. For good? No.

5. Batman Comics v1 004, 'The Case of the Joker's Crime Circus!'

For his final outing of 1940, the Joker assembles another gang. This time, it's one of my favourite styles of gang, the circus of crime! They specialize in casing wealthy patrons' estates and manors and then using their circus skills to rob the various joints.

Batman being Batman, he pieces together the clues and tracks down the Joker, who ends the adventure in the traditional manner by seemingly plummeting to his death.

Body Count: at least 14

End-of-year Status: Presumed Dead