(Action v1 008-009, 1939)
Dr Kichung menaced Tex Thomson for a couple of issues in a fairly standard scientist-who-puts-human-brains-into-apes kind of way until the local apes, sick of his malarky, killed him dead. I really liked his apes though. They had gravitas.
(Feature Funnies 016, 1939)
Not much to distinguish this spy organization foiled by Quality character Black X, other than the fact that their leader spends the entire adventure dressed for bed, complete with a little tasseled nightcap. I choose to ignore the in-text indications that he was in fact just about to go to sleep and instead believe that he dressed like that all the time. BRING BACK tasseled nightcaps!
(Detective v1 033, 1939)
Carl here is a scientist who is obsessed with Napoleon, something that people used to be when there weren't so many fictional characters to be consumed with - heck, he appears only a few months before the Joker begins his slow crawl to being the one a weird loner would be pictured dressing up as while he makes his Important Plans.
Since Carl was a scientist he recruited a cabal of other scientists to help him make war machines and since he was a Napoleon Head he recruited an army of dudes and together these formed the backbone of his world domination scheme until he was unexpectedly Batmanned.
The real notable thing about Carl is that he was basically the last villain that Batman fought before he stopped killing people. In fact, Batman (by my count) kills the most people in this incident: at least 14, including Carl himself!
ADDENDUM: I was wrong about the "stopped killing people" part because I had a Fan Theory about how Batman stopped killing about the same time he adopted Robin. The major flaw in this Fan Theory was that Batman and Robin kept on killing people.
(Detective v1 032, 1939)
Skull-Face is a villain I love. He looks, predictably, like a guy with a skull-face, yet he runs a "beauty cult" which might just be a very intense spa? Whatever it is, he steals all of his clients'/ congregants' money and then kills them with a special drug that makes them drown themselves/ have heart attacks. And he's very proud of his villainy, which I love. Other salient Skull-Face features:
-caveman butler named Sam
-underground, partially-flooded castle in Maine
-leaves tiny ivory skull as a calling card at the scene of his victims' deaths, thus undermining his own careful planning of natural-seeming causes
-hunted by the swimsuit-clad sister of one of his victims
-despite living in a partially-flooded castle, cannot swim and thus drowns at the end of the story
Just a really good weirdo villain who they should BRING BACK.
EDIT TO ADD: Hadn't really thought about what role Skull-Face would fill in the modern DCU but upon 5 minutes reflection you could absolutely make him the head of a beauty product Multi-Level Marketing scheme and keep everything else the same.
SECOND EDIT:
SKULL SCORE: 3/5 Pretty skully but also unsettlingly fleshy.
(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.
(All American Comics 025-028, 1941)
On the list of Obscure Comic Book Characters, Hop Harrigan doesn't rate very high. Any discussion of Golden Age comic books will eventually mention the teen aviator whose feature was popular enough to support a fan club, radio serial and movie and also ephemeral enough to have completely disappeared from public consciousness around 1948 CE.
Most writeups of Hop will mention that he adopted a couple of costumed identities over the years, and while I have yet to read any comics featuring him as the Black Lamp, here's the lowdown on his brief time as the Guardian Angel: his pals Prop Wash and Ikky Tinker are recruited by the US Government to act as deniable assets/ air pirates in situations where direct action would cause diplomatic complications, such as a Nazi-coded ambassador fleeing the country with an attaché of documents that the CIA would like to look at, please. Hop is deliberately left out of this scheme because he is a minor.
Inevitably, they get in over their heads on these missions and are recued by the Guardian Angel, who is in reality Hop in disguise, flying an experimental VTOL seaplane that the other two... just forgot that they owned? In any case, the ruse only lasts for a few issues.
(Detective v1 030, 1939)
I like the Master because he is simultaneously brilliant enough to invent a mind control device capable of enslaving a significant portion of the US Government and dumb enough to brag about his machine to a federal agent not ten feet away from it. Machine smashing ensues.
(Jackpot Comics 004, 1941) An otherwise-unnamed portraitist, the Artist finds himself down on his luck because he refuses to flatter his cli...
