GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 040

Once again I am plagued by the absolute dregs of villainy.

A Vampire:

Vampires are one of the types of character that are statistically likely to make it through my classification system and be certified as super, but this particular one who a) lives in a swamp shack, b) has two meals in a row taken away from him by the Green Knight, c) doesn't even get a name and d) ends up dead with his shack burned down around his ears, is too much of a loser to make it to even minor villain status. He does, however, provide the Green Knight with a sidekick in the form of one of his prospective victims, which is something. (Dynamic Comics 002, 1941)

Hank Rutter:

This fellow might have been called the Mask or the Masked Man if it weren't for the fact that his heroic foe is already called the Mask. As such, he's just a gambling focused villain with a bit more interest in concealing his identity than usual.

It's no surprise that the unnamed masked villain is in actuality Hank Rutter, big-time gambler. What is surprising is that he manages to learn the Mask's secret identity as DA Tony Colby. Especially to him, as Colby responds by knocking him off a roof to his death. (Exciting Comics 007, 1941)

Henry Devoe: 

When this masked drug kingpin shows up with a very visible withered left hand and then civic leader Henry Devoe is on the front page of the newspaper, also with a very prominent withered left hand the next day, my assumption as a longtime consumer of comic books and detective fiction was that Devoe was being framed, but no, he's the guy. While I commend him for making his disability visible and thus normalizing it, I do question his decision not to disguise such a distinguishing characteristic while out and about doing drug-related murders. (Exciting Comics 012, 1941)

Black Terror impostor:

When the Black Terror decides to play nice with the police and inform them about Henry Devoe's perfidy, he is surely disappointed to learn that Police Chief Nelson is a crooked cop who guns him down on sight and then steals his uniform in order to extort Devoe. And we wonder why most vigilantes have an adversarial relationship with the police.

Nelson's plan is hindered by the fact that Henry Devoe's response to having the Black Terror show up in his living room is exactly the same as his own had been: to shoot him on sight. And unlike Bob "the Black Terror" Benton, Nelson hasn't been huffing enough formic ether to survive a close-range gunshot. (Exciting Comics 012, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 639: LU CHENG THE FORBIDDEN

(Fantastic Comics 013, 1940) 

A vampire holed up in a cave in the Gobi Desert with a bunch of lady vampires, Lu Cheng the Forbidden talks a big game but I reckon that he's super screwed. He's somehow found himself in one of the largest deserts in the world, presumably farther from human habitation than is comfortable for a vampire - when Captain Kidd wanders into his cave all Lu Cheng is concerned with is using his plane to get the heck out of the Gobi.

Lucky for Captain Kidd, Lu Cheng is not the kind of vampire that is immune to everything that isn't a specific vampire weakness, or maybe is a kind of vampire that is vulnerable to grenades. Either way, he ends up dead for real. And as a bonus, the lady vampires are the kind of vampire thrall that returns to normal once the head vampire is killed! Hooray!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 561: LAILANI, QUEEN OF THE VALLEY

(Wonderworld Comics 006, 1939)

It's another Yarko the Great adventure! This time we find Yarko and his companion Li Wan journeying to the isolated Valley of the Moon in Tibet, in search of the fabled Hoshai Plant, which bleeds human blood. And they find it, growing in pools of "moulten lava"! They are also immediately captured by bow-wielding women.

Yarko and the weirdly misogynistic Li Wan are marched back to the women's cave/ palace HQ, where they meet Lailani, Queen of the Valley and learn that she and her followers are all vampires, the unstated implication being that they farm the Hoshai Plant for blood, and here I have to admit that I have a lot of sympathy for the vampires in this here story? Obviously they are framed as villains but if you are an isolated matriarchal society and a white dude rocks up looking for your rare goods I think you're perfectly within your rights to dungeon them immediately.

Also they look really cool and I want that on the record.

(I can't tell if that vampire in green is a statue of if it's a trick of perspective or she's supposed to be really big. Like, she's a vampire, maybe that's one of her vampire powers)

They try to sacrifice Yarko in the fire pit and then shoot him with and arrow and of course hes a dick about it all. Probably because they're  women.

Conventional methods of execution having failed, Lailani engages Yarko in an hours-long mental battle that of course ends in a victory for Yarko and being blasted into a withered husk for Lailani. Yarko and his pal escape and in an unusually merciful move for the intrepid explorers in this kind of situation do not commit casual genocide but instead merely seal the mouth of the vampires' cave behind them as they flee. Yes, somewhere in the world of Yarko the Great this cool society of nigh-identical vampire women persists, led by an old shrivelled prune.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 559: THE COUNCIL OF VAMPIRES

(Wonderworld Comics 004, 1939)

Firstly: re the first panel, I really struggled with whether to call these guys the Deadly Council of Vampires or just the Council of Vampires. Still doubting myself.

Secondly: I am going to lay out these guys' whole deal up front in order to properly critique them in the manner I am compelled to: they are not, despite the name, vampires. Instead, they are what seems to be a cult devoted to a vampire named Anya and they are looking for an artifact called the Vampire Ruby that will allow her to live in "our world," which contextually seems to mean that she will be able to remain awake and alive during the daytime.

The Vampire Ruby turns out to be in the possession of an agent of the London Museum and here's where my critique comes in: the Singapore branch of the Council captures that agent and tortures him to death in an unsuccessful attempt to get him to give up the Ruby's location (he had it between his toes! Very sloppy searching on the Council's part). BUT!

THE CURATOR OF THE LONDON MUSEUM IS MARRIED TO ANYA! If they had just left the agent alone he would have taken it directly to their Queen! And then once protagonist Dr Fung and his pal Dan Barrister show up at the museum late on a Friday to say that they have Vampire Ruby, the curator invites them to his country estate for the weekend rather than (presumably) waiting until Monday office hours for them to come back with it!

If the curator (Luigi Bishop, btw) was just able to be cool for two and a half days he would have had the thing! Instead, he brings a famous detective to his mirror-filled home to meet his vampire bride.

But maybe I'm being unfair to the mortals in this story. After all, they're all in thrall to a vampire who is dumb enough to tip off Fung and his pal Dan before doing a clumsy room invasion on them when, again, just waiting a couple of days would have delivered them the ruby on a silver platter. Presumably some of that dumb impulsiveness rubbed off on the ordinary cult members.

It all ends in a huge fire, like maybe a third of all vampire stories. Anya and her husband perish and the Singapore branch of the cult has to find something else to do on weekends.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 524: THE KING OF THE VAMPIRES

(Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941) 

We open not on the King of the Vampires but on a different vampire, one with a monocle. This is Carlos Hubbello, a diplomatic envoy from South America who has been sent to discuss a trade deal with the US that would leave the Nazis in the cold. The two gentlemen with him are no gentlemen at all but rather Nazi spies who are controlling Hubbello by the simple expedient of having turned him into a vampire, which is certainly harder to get out of than say kidnapping his loved ones but comes with a whole lot of extra risk for his handlers.

This story is rife with lore. To whit:

LORE: Vampires are easily cowed with a cross, even when wielded by evil men.

Hubbello comes very close to vampiring Mr Justice's love interest Pat Clark while they watch a performance of the very weird and cool "Waltz of the Vampire". A ghost/ vampire brawl ensues.

LORE: A vampire can lose control when exposed to great art.

LORE: vampires can transform into wolves and bats and retain their special vampire haircut in both forms (you can just make out a teeny tiny widow's peak on the bat if you squint).

Hubbello, defeated, spills the beans. The Nazis imported the King of the Vampires from Transylvania as part of their scheme to control the trade negotiations. Is the King of the Vampires a Nazi or merely using them to his own ends? This is not explored. Is the King of the Vampires supposed to be Dracula or is Transylvania just a good place for a vampire to come from? We can never know.

LORE: Kill the head vampire in time and its under-vampires can be saved. What is "in time"? Not sure but it isn't "before the under-vampire takes a life/ drinks human blood" as in a lot of vampire media, because Hubbello has already done both.

Enter the King of the Vampires, freshly gorged on the blood of the innocent and battle commences. And I sure hope that Mr Justice knew the LORE that vampire cannot fight vampire because it means that he is on his own.

LORE: this is the kind of vampire that seemingly isn't harmed by light so much as by not physically being in his coffin at dawn. And he isn't, so he dies.

Hubbello is saved! The trade deal can go forward! And back in the US we are reacquainted with the Nazi vampire-handlers, who come with one last piece of LORE: that knives fashioned of pure gold taken from the tomb of the Egyptian King Ankhaman II are capable - possibly the only things capable - of killing a ghost. A potent weapon against Mr Justice, if only they were any good at knifing. But they aren't so they get captured immediately and the knives are presumably never seen again.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 177: BRAM THIRLA

(Captain Marvel Adventures 001, 1941)

I waffled a bit on this guy - he's just a regular-style vampire, after all. But a regular-style vampire is like a ninja or a xenomorph (or a knight, a pirate, a robot, etc): a deadly threat super-villain level singly, while also being easily killed when part of a group.

So: Bram Thirla demonstrates a couple of important safety concerns specific to comic book science. Firstly: if you must combine the practices of science and sorcery, at least do so in proper laboratory conditions, as performing experiments e.g., in a cemetery at midnight not only introduces quite a lot of unintentional variables but limits the ability to pre-plan safety precautions such as escape routes.

Secondly: when sourcing human remains or brains, go the extra mile and try to get ahold of a nice person's corpse. Sure it's easier to bribe the prison morgue attendant to release the body of a recently executed mass murderer to you but now you have a murderer's brain in your gorilla and that spells trouble. Or in this case: you've resurrected the body of a "mysterious and evil man" because nobody would object and now you're being eaten by a vampire.

The best part of this story is presented above: Captain Marvel and Bram Thirla are incapable of hurting one another, so are locked in a race against time: can Captain Marvel do enough research on vampires to figure out how to bump off Thirla before Thirla catches him in his Billy Batson form?

The comic isn't called Bram Thirla Adventures, so thanks to HP Lovecraft's seminal work The Vampire Legend, Billy prevails and Thirla is reinterred.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 124: MARIA, QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES

(Slam-Bang Comics 005, 1940) 

I quite like Maria. Firstly, she is a vampire with bat wings, which is a feature that hardly ever shows up any more. Also she sleeps in a coffin filled with the bones of her victims, which is not a bit of vampire lore that I am familiar with but which does rule. She hangs out in a castle somewhere in the US and vampirizes random motorists in anticipation of the day that she has enough minions to take over the world. She even manages to turn Diamond Jack briefly but he manages to resist the full transformation due to being good and pure.

She has these weird minions that may or may not be another kind of vampire? They kind of look like bipedal panthers with bat wings. I love them.

Like I said she manages to vamp Diamond Jack, which she achieves by pretending defeat, offering to kiss his ring and then biting out the magic diamond. A clever move, but ultimately undone when the gem refuses to act against Jack and returns to his ring.

Ultimately, Maria ends up turned into a skeleton and her cool looking castle is transformed into a cemetery for the other vampires, who I guess were less redeemable than Diamond Jack.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 026: THE MONK

(Detective v1 031-032, 1939)

The only reason this guy's minor is that Batman shoots him dead in 1939. I know he's made a few reappearances over the years but mostly they're retellings of that first story. Also I guess they're calling him the Mad Monk now? Weird.

My point is that Batman deserves a vampire nemesis so they should BRING HIM BACK.

ADDENDUM: it's very strange to me that in Batman: Red Rain it's Dracula who vampires Batman and not the Monk, an established vampiric Bat-villain.