MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 454: THE GREEN TERROR

(Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

The Green Terror gets off on the right foot with me, let me tell you. Sure he's a mysterious figure who sends goons out to kidnap healthy young New Yorkers for unknown but surely sinister purposes, but those goons are dressed in green costumes and drive around in a green car with a green smokescreen and if there's one thing I love, my friend, it's a villain who sticks to a theme.

The Green Terror is opposed by super-sleuth trio the Three Xs and well... I groused a while back about Marvel Comics fans constantly overwriting their own history and the Three Xs might just be the best recent example of that. Up until 2019 this was their only appearance and their entry on any given fan website probably read like that final panel: 1X is the leader, 2X the brains and 3X the muscle. Then Marvel Comics #1000 came out and did a really great, fun job of bringing together disparate and unconnected bits of Marvel Universe lore - the Three Xs were also the Scientists' Guild from the Human Torch's origin were also the Enclave who created Adam Warlock etc, and they were engaged in a generations-long scheme involving the Eternity Mask which was, it turns out, worn by everyone from the Operative to the Thunderer to the Masked Raider.

And like I said: this is all great! It's a fun way for a forgotten bit of comics lore to come back into focus! I just wish that there wasn't such a tendency for more recent information to overwrite what came before.

Grumbling aside, the Three Xs get jumped by a bunch of the Green Terror's goons, then track them to an ocean liner and get jumped again, leading to them being captured. On purpose, or so they claim.

(the Green Terror's lieutenant really going for it here "Ah! More guests for the blood feast!" indeed)

The blood feast in question involves draining the blood out of the kidnap victims in order to... inject? feed? it to this tall green hunk of jerky. Honestly, most information about the Green Terror is going to be speculative due to the fact that he's a classic blowhard of a villain who yammers on and on about how great he is. If you take him at his word he's an immortal superman who absorbs strength from the blood of his victims. On the face of the evidence, he's a green guy with a blood fetish. The truth lies somewhere in between.

Obviously any villain who can convincingly deliver the line "the Green Terror will always be the strongest man in the Universe!" about half a page before being punched out and apprehended is my kind of bad guy and should be BRUNG BACK post haste. Is he exactly the same or is he a withered green husk after 80-odd years in prison? Just how much blood will he steal and how much trash will he talk while doing so? I want to see it!

OR! Since the Three Xs eventually became the Enclave etc of Adam Warlock fame perhaps they acquired the Green Terror from the authorities as part of their research into superhumanity. He's floating in a tube in an abandoned lab right now after having his weird hair harvested to make cocoons or something and all he needs is for the right dummy to break in to steal the copper wiring to set him free!

MINOR SUPER-HERO 049: FLEXO THE RUBBER MAN

(Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

It's Flexo the Rubber Man! A rubber robot filled with some sort of gas created and remote controlled by scientist brothers Joel and Joshua Williams! Flexo can make huge gas-filled jumps and bound across the cityscape!

Flexo can stretch!

Flexo can squeeze through tight spaces and absorb small arms fire without harm! He can also expel his gas to subdue his foes! Truly Flexo is a marvel of the age!

Flexo is also the recipient of a major retcon: recent stories have revised his origin such that the Williams brothers found a Venom-style symbiote and built a robotlike organism out of it. This is cool! Marvel's frequent revisions to their own history are an interesting contrast to the DC Comics reboot style of doing things in which current comics have no retroactive effect. The only real downside to the Marvel approach is in online spaces, as fan-run wikis absorb retcons like Ancient Egyptian dynasties - actual information on the contents of old comics is metaphorically torn down and replaced by the sun-god of the retcon it can frequently be hard to find information on old comics that does not incorporate the retcons in a misleading way.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 043: MISS AMERICA

(Military Comics 001-007, 1941-1942) 

I am not the first to note this by a country mile but it must be said every time she comes up: she wishes to have all of the powers of the Statue of Liberty and then the Statue of Liberty visits her in a dream and gifts them to her. If USA didn't exist then this would be a shoe-in for "most outlandish patriotic hero concept" but as it stands I reckon that they're tied.

Those powers, by the way, aren't "being enormous and made of bronze" like you might expect but rather a host of generic Golden Age magical abilities such as teleportation, telekinesis and transmutation - particularly of goons into birds and trees and such.

Miss America gets brought back every once in a while but the most noteworthy thing about her, her wild origin, was retconned in the Eighties. Now instead of wishing for the powers of the Statue of Liberty and then getting them (absurd, laughable) she wished for the powers of the Statue of Liberty near the entrance to a secret government project underneath the statue and was given powers by them (high concept, realistic).

In conclusion: I quite like Golden Age Miss America but find it hard to get excited about her later incarnations.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 038: THE THUNDERER

(Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941)

Lot to like about the Thunderer: great name, trend-based origin (ham radio enthusiast who finds crime on the airwaves/ rigs up a microphone to enhance his presence with a booming voice), nice-looking costume that was ultimately his downfall (because Marvel Comics 1000 established that virtually every Marvel character who wore a full-face black mask were wearing the same mask, and some of them retroactively had to have died for the chain of mask-wearers to continue). Lot to like.

Perhaps my favourite thing about him, however, is the fact that he turns down his amplifier in the 4th panel above, which heavily implies that he has been talking to himself at top volume while bounding over the rooftops. Just great stuff.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls - fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height - something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources - and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he's been working for about 50 years, so he's a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there's no really good option in the text and I'd've ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski's The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master's lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask - the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

(which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK - what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 312: PLUTO

(Red Raven Comics 001; Captain America Comics 001-003, 1940-1941)

As originally presented, this is the literal Roman god of the underworld come down (up?) to Earth to stir up trouble as Rudolph Hendler, dictator of Prussland (mild aside - recently saw a fascist complaining about Nazis being vilified like it was a new thing, but we've always known that you suck, bro).

 Jupiter and the other Roman gods aren't so hot on this plan and send Mercury down to Earth to combat cousin Pluto. A simple tale. The very mild complication comes from Marvel's fondness for retcons and rcontextualizations. After the Enernals were introduced in the 70s, a number of characters from the 40s and 50s were retroactively said to actually be the Eternal Makkari, including Mercury here.

He was also said to be Hurricane, the near-identical hero who faced Pluto in his next couple of appearances. But if Mercury/ Hurricane was not actually a member of some godly pantheon, who was Pluto?

In an unsurprising twist, Pluto was revealed to be Kro, a villainous member of the Deviant race who features in the same 70s series as Makkari. I don't know a lot about Kro but I guess that it's in-character for him to (in order) start a version of WWII, run a murder-for-hire gang, unleash a plague in the Amazon and attempt to take over a place called Groton City via the medium of repeated subway accidents.

The really important thing is that his first couple of appearances were drawn by Jack Kirby so he looks like a perfect evil creep. Of course there might be an argument that he no longer qualifies as a minor super-villain because the Pluto identity has been rolled into the larger Kro identity but where's the fun in that?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 300: THE RINGMASTER OF CRIME

(Captain America Comics 005, 1941)

Finally, FINALLY, after 300  of these guys an arbitrary milestone lines up with a reasonably cool character: the Ringmaster of Crime AKA the Ringmaster of Death. Compounding the fun of the circus of crime aesthetic is the fact that some of that good-style retconning has been going on and the Ringmaster in this tale has been made the father (and presumably later grandfather, per Marvel's sliding timeline) of the mid-level super-villain the Ringmaster! Uh, if saying that someone is someone else's grampaw is a retcon, that is.

The practical upshot of this is that this Minor Super-Villain writeup also functions as Super-Villain Yearbook, 1941 for the Circus of Crime, which, as a family-owned business entity, is contiguous with the version that reappeared in the 60s even though no individual members reoccur.

All that said, the Ringmaster himself is a fairly regular Nazi creep super-villain. Sure he's got the Jack Kirby villain snake-man look that we all love to hate but compared to his descendant (or, indeed, a regular circus ringmaster) he's a positively dour dresser - his actual theming is pretty weak, when you get right down to it.

Although we must not neglect the Wheel of Death, a perfectly cromulent random victim generator that the Ringmaster presumably stole from one of the sideshow games and spends hours/day applying all the little faces to.

The real star here is the burgeoning Circus of Crime. Not all of the classic archetypes are present (no tall man, no fat guy) but it's a pretty good criminal circus lineup already. To whit:

Omir the Snake Charmer

the Missing Link putting in an appearance for the sideshow folk

Tommy Thumb the circus dwarf who might be held against his will? He definitely does not want to be there

the Trapeze Trio

Zandow the Strong Man

various unnamed clowns, roustabouts and elephant handlers

It's not quite Princess Python levels but it's a good showing.

The Ringmaster of course gets trounced by Captain America, and then according to lore he gets murdered after the war by Nazi loyalists for his failure. His circus endures to this day, however, so that's something. Speaking of which:

CIRCUS OF CRIME 1941 

Body Count: 2

End-of-year Status: Captured/ Defunct