MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 849: KEERO

(Weird Comics 005, 1940) 

Blast Bennett, space adventurer of the year 5940, is just noodling around the galaxy one day and decides to stop off to stretch his legs on a desolate ice planet, at which point he falls in a hole and becomes embroiled in a civil war, because he is a comic book protagonist and his every move draws him closer to the nearest source of adventure. 

The Ice Planet is ruled by the presumably-benevolent Empress Ilera - she doesn't really get a chance to rule on-panel before things go to hell but you gotta assume that the one the hero sides with is good, right? - who is under threat by Keero, who has a robot army and feels that that is enough of a qualification to be in charge.

In Keero's defense, they are very cool robots. I particularly enjoy the wind-powered ski-sailor variant, particularly as I just noticed that they only use one ski. Fun!

Keero takes the palace with very little trouble, which plays into his narrative that he should be in charge because he has the power to take control. Don't worry: strong argument against him being in charge immediately presents itself as he begins yelling about all the people he is going to execute before he even gets in the front door of the palace. Ever heard of being a good winner, Keero?

Luckily for the Ice Planet in general and Empress Ilera in particular, Keero has chosen to go the Phantom Menace route with his robots, meaning of course that they are all controlled from a single point and that once that controller is destroyed they are just so many hunks of tin. Blast Bennett, as a seasoned space adventurer, achieves this with ease and then punches Keero right on the kisser. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 841: SIKANDUR, THE ROBOT MASTER

(War Comics 001, 1940) 

Sikandur, the Robot Master, is a villain-in-a-starring-role who sadly only appeared once. Any evil roboticist who, for example, makes his robots red-hot as a way of discouraging those who might grapple them is an evil roboticist I want to read about, and I only got the one opportunity to do so.

Sikandur need gold in order to build more robots, though whether he needs it as a necessary component or as a handy source of cash is unspecified. To that end, he sends his boy Robot X5328B to the United States to rob Fort Knox.

If Sikandur's feature had continued to appear then presumably these three dingbats would have been the ones who would be foiling him going forward. As it is, they're just three... college students? who figure out that Robot X5328B is something more than a simple traveller with jet-black eyes and kind of bumble around trying to figure out what he's up to.

Also please not that Sikandur has apparently "conquered half of Europe" at this point.

Robot X5328B is an advanced robot indeed, because he (?) does some excellent and very menacing threats before being undermined by Sikandur's caution re: the small-town police missing three local oafs. And that's a wrap on Sikandur the Robot Master. Presumably the next few issues would have concerned our unlikely trio's efforts to prevent the robbery of Fort Knox and then ultimately the end of Sikandur and his dreams of world conquest.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 813: YAGOR

(The Spirit, "The Death Dolls", 4 August, 1940)

In terms of villainy, Yagor ain't much. Formerly chief engineer at the Battle Arms Co, Yagor murdered the inventor Kalin and stole his inventions and is trying to sell them on when the Spirit tracks him down in a small New England town. Though he gets the drop on the Spirit and captures him when he shows up to take him in, Yagor is undone by his own poor salesmanship and the crucial lack of imagination possessed by munitions buyer Emil Kampf, who dismisses a working robot soldier as a useless toy without, for instance, considering the possibility inherent in a bit of armour plating.

Among Yagor's many shortcomings is dismal salesmanship and specifically his failure to present Kampf with the other invention that he stole from Kalin, a smaller automaton capable of tracking a person across tens if not hundreds of kilometres, navigating such obstacles as sheer walls and subway systems, in order to kill them via explosion. Instead, he sends one, charmingly named Jepetto, to kill Kampf.

(perhaps the oddest thing about this assassination is that as Jepetto is tracking down and killing Kampf Yagor and the Spirit are in New England listening for news of the explosion on the radio, and while this is in the days when the Spirit's adventures were still set in New York City, the whole process must have taken hours if not days to complete, even if the "dark. mysterious fishing village" of Cape Haven were somehow both at the Southern border of Connecticut and "out of the tourist route." Just standing around at gunpoint for three days while a small robot walks down the East Coast)

But perhaps I am giving Yagor too much grief. After all, he was the chief engineer at that munitions company, not the chief salesman. Surely after bungling two whole opportunities to sell his robots (I'm counting the assassination because I think that loading that little robot up with a couple of water balloons or the like would have been a very good proof of concept indeed) he will rally and hike up his pants and really put in a good effort in his next black market arms presentation. What's that? He just loaded all of his remaining Death Dolls (which is what the little assassin-bots are called) into a big robot soldier and sent them to attack New York for no good reason? Yagor, no. You're going to get caught by the Spirit!

Yagor got caught by the Spirit, you guys. 

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 018

I'm not sure that these guys all have degrees. 

This fellow is known only as the Professor, and he conducts experiments in long- and short-range mind control on Lost Hope Island until Secret Naval Agent Spike Marlin shows up in search of a missing ship's crew. (Speed Comics 009, 1940) 

This unnamed scientist has developed a drug that puts people into indefinite comas and has used it to kidnap and store ten millionaires, presumably with the intent of ransoming them back to their families. Before he actually gets to the point of sending the ransom notes, however, he makes the mistake of allowing his gangster hirelings go out and use the drug to mug people on the street, thus leaving a trail of mysterious coma victims that the indomitable Detective Crane follows all the way to the scientist's secret penthouse. (Superworld Comics 002, 1940)

Detective Crane is back to investigate the destruction of several West Virginian steel mills. It turns out that remote controlled drone bombers are responsible for the attacks, and he trails them back to a base near Pittsburgh filled with awesome robots, plus one Baranian spy who is merely dressed like a robot, presumably in case someone like Crane were to show up. The whole place gets absolutely annihilated.(Superworld Comics 003, 1940)

Overworked and underappreciated Department Public Sanitation scientist Dr Sheldon might be justified in his workplace dissatisfaction but he expresses his negative emotions in an unproductive manner, by poisoning the city reservoir and killing thousands of people. It must be cathartic though, because the Arrow has to shoot him with one of his trademark arrows in order to prevent him from poisoning the reservoir even more than it was before. (The Arrow 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 768: THE PURPLE PLAGUE

(Startling Comics 001, 1940)

Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew "Captain Future" Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against!

Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague's henchmen (called variously the Purple Plague Mob, the Followers of the Purple Plague and the very cool Knights of the Purple Plague), and also with the not-very-genre-savvy police, who keep thinking that the brightly-dressed superhuman is doing the crimes instead of the horde of concussed gangsters littering the landscape around him.

Future does eventually locate the actual Purple Plague himself and at that point it's just a case of one übermensch versus a room full of regular guys plus one older guy in a robe. Even a gang of moderately cool-looking killbots barely slows down the inevitable mass pummelling.

As a side note, one of the Knights of the Purple Plague is Andrew Bryant's boss, Mr Devlin, who fires Bryant as a cost-cutting measure and thus inspires him to pursue the reckless line of research that ends with the accident that turns him into Captain Future. Was Devlin cutting costs in order to funnel profits from the Pacific Electrical Corporation to the Purple Plague, or was the Plague's brand of villainy just an attractive prospect to a small-minded capitalist like Devlin? Either way this is a classic case of the villain inadvertently creating the hero who would destroy them.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 539 UPDATE: THE CLAW (1940)

(Silver Streak Comics 002, 006)

As you may or may not recall, when I covered the Claw's sole 1939 appearance I concluded that taken on its own, it read like one of those stories where a villain holds sway over an area by means of a fake monster and that if the Claw had never appeared again that's what I would assume he was: just an illusion composed of papier mache and maybe a balloon or an image projected on a cloud.

Well, surprise, surprise, because that wasn't the only appearance of the Claw and in fact the vary next issue of Silver Streak Comics features him joining up with an unnamed but very recognizable Adolf Hitler in return for control of half of Europe following a Claw/Nazi victory.

The first part of the Claw's plan involves attacking allied shipping using his very cool underwater train/tank. Next, using super-powered artillery cannon to shell civilian population centres... somewhere. I mean, the cities all look pretty Western hemisphere but as the Claw's original HQ on the island of Ricca was in the Pacific and he's still close enough to there that the ships he sinks are being transported back to be used in Riccan munitions factories, so maybe he's attacking the West coast of the United States? Not sure how that helps the Nazis, honestly, but it's either that or his artillery is really really super and he's bombing Europe.

The Claw eventually gets impatient with just blowing things up and proves me wrong yet again by growing enormous and using his weird powers to set up a whirlpool so mighty that it not only draws in and dooms ships from across the ocean but also changes the world's weather patterns, causing the tropics to freeze over. Bad!

Our old pal and original Claw foe Jerry Morris is of course not going to take this, particularly after his previously-unmentioned younger brother Tad is lost at sea in the Claw's oceanic chaos. He combines one of his signature astonishing super-science inventions - in this case a special bulb that emits light rays that instantly freeze water - with some cars stored in the hold of the ship he is on to create vehicles that are able to fabricate a sheet of ice to drive on across even the deepest water. And since the ice goes all the way to the bottom, these vehicles are able to neutralize the Claw's maelstrom by creating a series of concentric ice walls around it.

There ensues what is actually a pretty neat battle between ice-road cars and the submarine tank/train, with the cars attempting to hem in the train with walls while the train fires its artillery cannons upward - I would enjoy playing a video game about this! The Claw is ultimately killed in an explosion when the munitions on his train explode... OR IS HE?

He is not! And despite the assertion at the end of the previous story, Jerry Morris seems to have foregone taking the Claw's body back to the US for dissection, perhaps because it was not technically a legal thing to do. Whatever the circumstances, the body ends up falling into the hands of a group of "devil worshippers" somewhere in Asia, but whether the Claw was the devil in question or not is hard to say (though in leaping back to life just as his body was consigned to the funeral pyre he certainly must have inspired some supernatural awe).

Also, for this story alone, the Claw is referred to as the Green Claw and his claws are indeed coloured green for the occasion.

The (Green) Claw's opponent in this case is Major Carl Tarrant, who is either a soldier of fortune or a member of the local colonial police, but either way he simply must investigate the possibility of the Claw's return. Tarrant manages to avoid the Claw's cultists but is tracked down by the villain himself with some high-tech devices, then shrunk via magic and stuck in a metal box to gruesomely expire when the shrink spell wears off.

The Claw then reveals his latest plan to take over the world: a kick-ass robot army! No notes, 10/10, a classic for a reason, just look at those cool robots.

Tarrant of course has to spoil everything by getting out of the box before he gets squished. He destroys the robots by taking advantage of the Claw's metal-destroying anti-bullet force field and then does one better by bombing the entire fortress/city to smithereens. But though the Claw is thwarted, HE YET LIVES. What horrors are we in store for in 1941?

(just had to feature this cover from Silver Streak Comics 006, which I spent an inordinate amount of time being creeped out by - those hands! - as replicated in Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Super Villains)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 015

They can't help themselves and/or they're choosing to be horrible.

Dr Zynnon has been asked along to help Dr Curan, his daughter Sandra and protagonist Buzz Crandall in their mission to prevent the Moon from exploding, presumably dooming us all. This turns out to be a Bad Choice, because unbeknownst to all, Dr Zynnon harbours a deep misanthropy and would love nothing more than for the world to be doomed.

Despite the fact that I love not being scoured from the face of the planet by hurtling lunar debris I must give Zynnon credit for one of the most adorable doomsday devices ever conceived of: tiny moon lizard carrying vials of acid powerful enough to bring down the roof of the lunar cavern the bulk of the adventure takes place in. Powerful enough, that is, if they were delivered to the correct location. Which they weren't, presumably because Zynnon didn't bother to train or condition them in any way and just let loose as many lizards as he could smuggle onto the moon bathysphere under his coat. In the end, the only casualty of Zynnon's plot was Zynnon himself. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

Tobor the Evil is a Plutonian scientist who has been using an army of child-sized robots to steal Martian gold, with the end goal of conquering Mars and making it a Plutonian territory. With the help of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, he learns two important lessons about fielding robot armies: 1) don't leave robot shells that can be repurposed into armour by your foes just lying around, and 2) if your robots have an "indiscriminate murder" setting, make sure to build in a failsafe that excludes yourself from the list of viable targets. (Planet Comics 008, 1940)

Von Dorf, a mad physiologist and asylum escapee, was so singularly obsessed with the hybridization of humans and panthers that he kidnapped a nurse and turned her into Marga the Panther Woman. It's likely that he would have his own numbered entry on the Minor Super-Villain list if literally the only other things he ever did weren't a) get his ass kicked and b) blow himself up. Truly being part of an origin story is the most hazardous job in comics. (Science Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Passendorf here managed to perfect the quite respectable criminal science inventions of a mind control device and a paralysis ray and then had to lower himself to using both in the employ of a shifty Wall Street jerk named Augustus Elba who needed to cover up some light embezzlement. Just as well that he ends up riddled with shrapnel after the Eagle blows up his machine - the roasting at the next Criminal Science Convention would have been severe. (Science Comics 005, 1940)