MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 066: MR LEOPARD SKIN

(Action Comics 028, 1940)

AKA the Leopard Skin Thief AKA the Strongarm Bandit - this is our first example of a clear super-villainous character who has not bothered to give themself a name and so we must take one from the text boxes or (as in this case) from the names given to them by the other characters.

Mr Leopard Skin is fun because he is obviously dressed as a circus strongman, and that is because his crime career is an attempt to frame a circus strongman. The actual culprit, the circus clown, has to basically be caught before anyone else at the circus thinks to mention that the clown used to be the old strongman before a stronger strongman showed up and he got demoted and maybe might want revenge.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 065: ASMODEUS

(Action Comics 025, 1940)

Former chess master turned crimelord, Asmodeus has three of my favourite features in a villain: 

-he employs the Tigress

-he builds little models of crime scenes to use as teaching aids for instructing his gang

-he lives in a house of traps

Unfortunately for him, he ends up battling Zatara, so all the traps in the world avail him not.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 064: MEDINI

(Action Comics 025, 1940)

The "World's Greatest Hypnotist," Medini embarks on a life of crime using his gifts. He's so good at hypnosis, in fact, that he is able to put Superman himself out of commission with the power of his mind, which might be why his story ends with Superman throwing an entire plane at his head.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 063: CHALO

(Action Comics 024, 1940)

Chalo was a stage magician who murdered his own brother to acquire real magical secrets which in turn he used for crime. He took a page from the Mad Lama's book and hired at least one other magical crook as a henchman, a fire- and snake-summoner named Arko.

By far the best thing about Chalo, however, is that his major use of the powers he murdered his brother to get is summoning a weird toad that freaks everyone out. He does it twice! Solid minor villain, should be BROUGHT BACK in the background of the Oblivion Bar or somewhere like that.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 004: THE THREE ACES

(Action Comics 018-063, 1939-1943)

The Three Aces consist of Gunner Bill (blonde, bland), Fog Fortune (fat, Cockney - the kind of character who starts out 1% comic relief and increases by increments until he is unrecognizable. In this case he gets fatter and more faux-Cockney until his word balloons are up to 1/2 apostrophe) and Whistler Will (dark haired ladies man - more on him in a moment). They're fairly standard aviator type heroes except for a couple of things: they have a greater than average rate of running into stuff like lost civilizations and minor super-villains and they have Whistler Will.

Okay, maybe I'm bigging up Will a bit. For most of their adventures he's just your standard square-jawed lothario, but in Action Comics 022 they did a peek into his backstory and it made a big impression on me:

Whistler Will is some sort of feral desert child or fey spirit of the American Southwest or something, an implacable and free spirit of justice. He has a mystic othersense that tells him in this issue that his adopted sister is in trouble with enough advance notice to fly across the continent to help her. He does stuff like this fairly regularly and his mystic senses express themselves as eerie whistling. All of this is very cool. All of this is never referenced again.

Anyway, the Three Aces all fought in WWI so I guess I'll mark them as dead, with a dead? for Will because maybe he just went back to his home in the halls of Avalon or wherever.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 062: QUETZAL

(Action Comics 023, 1940)

Quetzal's actual motivations are unexplored in his encounter with the Three Aces, but his methods - living in a lost Aztec city and using a fleet of remote controlled planes piloted by zombies to destroy anyone who approaches - are fairly indicative of a villainous turn of mind. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 061: THE DEMON

(Action Comics 022, 1940)

Whether the capital-D Demon is actually a lowercase-d demon is never actually resolved, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. He shows up when a friend of Tex Thomson's named Cary James ignores local superstitions to visit an island in the Indian Ocean, where he is quickly captured and murdered by the Demon, who then assumes his appearance and identity via fell majicks.

The Demon's only goal seems to be to murder everyone who knew the original Cary James, but whether there is a further motive to his actions is left unexplained, as one of James' friends happens to have a mystic amulet that is the only thing capable of defeating him. The amulet must be applied directly to the forehead, like so:

Love that bop on the head action. I also love that though this is ostensibly a Tex Thomson adventure, he basically acts in the role of observer, as the locket-thrower Dr Drummond drives much of the action of tracking, trapping and ultimately destroying the Demon. Huzzah for competent non title characters!