MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 906: THE VENGEFUL FOUR

(Whiz Comics 021, 1941)

The Vengeful Four is an example of a phenomenon that I am not sure is common enough that I need to come up with a special name for it: the big-name villain (in this case Dr Sivana) teaming up with a selection of nobodies as if they were equals. The Four Cards represent one other example of this, and the Penguin is a part of another called the Birds of a Feather that we will cover once we hit the year 1942. Are there more? Will I need to make up a term for this? We shall see.

 

The non-Sivana members of the Vengeful Four include gang boss Biggy Brix, who crawls away from his busted-up getaway car and straight into an opportunity to get revenge on Captain Marvel for busting it up;

Captain Death, a heavily cloak-based villain who I posited might be the same as the Captain Marvel foe and pirate submariner of the same name nearly three and a half years ago and I'm still not sure either way;

And finally Herr Geyer, one of the not-quite Nazis from the end of the Smasher Spy saga, who seems to have taken Captain Marvel's interference much harder than the several beatings he got from Spy Smasher both before and after he recovered his moral compass.

Since Dr Sivana already knows that Captain Marvel is actually Billy Batson, he hits upon a plan that is brilliant in its simplicity: send his three compatriots out into the city to find and kidnap Billy. Honestly, he should be doing this constantly, and frequently is, come to think of it.

(there is a part of me that objects to the concept of Sivana sharing this valuable information with just anyone, but I must acknowledge that this is as a result of decades of poisoning by comic book writing. Of course the best thing to do with a super-hero's secret identity is to spread it far and wide, and jealously guarding it is something that only serves to keep the status quo. Still feels weird to read, though)

Thanks to the fact that there is an unofficial Billy Batson convention going on in town, all three junior members of the Vengeful Four, though successful in grabbing a Billy Batson, do not get the Billy Batson. Though a setback, this does provide them with three ready-made hostages to draw the fourth Billy in and soon all available Billys Batson are loaded into a classic industrial deathtrap: the sawmill.

The Vengeful Four, to their extremely small credit, don't stick around to watch four teenage boys get bisected. This allows the Billys the opportunity to escape by pooling their voices and sending out a combined "SHAZAM" that is louder than the sawmill, thus not only allowing Original Billy to transform but incidentally transforming the other three into the Lieutenant Marvels thanks, presumably, to some lazy spell-writing on the wizard Shazam's part. 

The small aircraft that the Vengeful Four are travelling in is no match for four speeding super-guys and is soon nothing but a pile of smouldering wreckage - this is after all during the early part of Captain Marvel's career when he has no problem with killing a sufficiently dangerous foe. Dr Sivana will of course return, but for Biggy Brix, Captain Death and Herr Geyer this is the end of the line.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 557: DEATH

(Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

Like I said in the Devil's entry yesterday: Death and the Devil have teamed up as a sort of Yarko the Great Revenge Squad because Yarko saves so many live and souls, respectively. I also mentioned that Death did all of the legwork toward getting Yarko just where they wanted him, and here that is: Death kills a seemingly random London man then delivers him to the police, leaving only a calling card behind.

The discovery that the calling card's address was that of a cemetery is enough to convince Inspector Drake of Scotland Yard that this is a case for Yarko the Great, and... obviously Drake is right because even the most well-trained officer is going to have a hard time dealing with Death himself, but have some gumption, man. Try to track down where the card was printed or something before abdicating all responsibility.

Yarko makes his way to Death and the Devil's Limehouse lair, where he is promptly captured, put in a deathtrap, escapes and banishes the Devil back to the netherworld. Death takes more of a background role in this latter part of the adventure, but that's okay because he looks great - mostly quite cool but a bit sleazy too, because this ain't your regular Death, this is Bad Boy Death.

In the end, the Devil having been vanquished, Death just leaves. Yarko can't actually affect him, and there's even some hinting that the man in the car was not killed so much as dies naturally and was just used as bait, which implies that Death has no way of affecting someone who isn't about to die anyway. He does kill a reluctant henchman who refuses to go up against Yarko, but maybe he was about to die too - working for the Devil has to be a dangerous profession, right?

Death returns in Wonderworld Comics 008 after a Madame Punjai finds the creatively-named Golden Amulet, which compels his service. Punjai is obsessed with her lost youth and beauty and because of this commands Death to kill the young and beautiful Carla Dennis, a former passing acquaintance. This is done seemingly on a whim? There's no real exploration of Madame Punjai's plans, whether toward regaining her lost youth or revenging herself on the beautiful women of the world.

Yarko the Great of course becomes involved in these shenanigans and the more-hapless-than-evil Madame Punjai is tricked into trading her life for that of Carla's. Death is again cheesed off about this. BUT WHY IS HE? He's going to get basically everyone eventually, even in a comic book world with immortals and so forth. Why care? Is this a Discworld style Death who gets into human roles like hobbies? Maybe.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 556: THE DEVIL

(Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

Maybe it's because the MLJ version of the Devil is so fresh in my mind but... this is an underwhelming version of the Devil. He teams up with Death - and it's a measure of how lacklustre this Devil is that I'm going to deal with the Death separately rather than treat them as a duo - to eliminate their common enemy Yarko the Great. Death does all the legwork toward this goal so we'll discuss that later (I am however going to count them as our first Revenge Squad, one of the best things in comics).

Aesthetically, this is a classic Devil, though one missing the trident and tail. And like many interpretations of the classic Devil, it suffers from the fact that it looks like a guy in a costume, down to the fact that the horns seem to be incorporated into a cowl rather than being organic. And that can work! I've seen plenty of interpretations of the purposely foppish Devil getting one over on those who underestimate him. This Devil, by contrast, has a guy named Beppo with a knife and a skin-tone shirt.

The Devil does in fairness manage to capture Yarko by the simple expedient of having his other, non-Beppo henchman (Killer Kirby, if you must know) blindfold his magic eyes. The Devil attempts to roast Yarko alive in a special chamber but Yarko escapes by the simple expedient of wiggling his magic eyes out from under the blindfold, and any deathtrap that a guy can blink his way out of has got to be counted as a dud.

With Yarko free, the devil is immediately

BANISHED TO HELL

and it says something that the coolest part of his whole endeavour is the moment that he was soundly defeated. Frankly, he might as well have been a costumed gang boss as the Prince of the Damned, and it just occurred to me how wild it would be if he was just a guy in a costume trying to put one over on Yarko and getting banished to Hades for his efforts. Real of Fake, the Devil bit off more than he could chew.