MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 068: THE MASTER

(Action Comics 030, 1940)

I've decided to introduce a system for dealing with some of the more minor super-villains who do not incite as much excitement in me to vomit out more than a cursory sentence about them (slightly unfair to the Master, who is kind of interesting, but I am uninspired today) In such cases, we will be answering one or both of the following questions:

What makes them a super-villain? In addition to his super-villain name, the Master has three qualifying super-villain attributes

1) Methods: he kills those who resist his extortion attempts by releasing huge poisonous beetles in their homes.

2) Powers: the Master, unlike many of Zatara's opponents, is a magic user. Specifically, he has the ability to resist and shrug off Zatara's own magic

3} Association: he employs the services of the Tigress

What's interesting about them? Honestly, it's the idea of a crook being able to resist a magical hero's powers. Underused and underappreciated!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 067: ZOLAR

(Action Comics 030, 1940)

In thinking about Zolar I realized that he engages in a surprisingly common plot-expedient activity which I, unwilling to root around on TVTropes for whatever twee thing they might dub it, am hereby going to call "the Reel": the villain sends a minion from their exotically-located HQ to wherever the hero is located to accomplish some sort of McGuffin task - collect an item, kill or kidnap someone, etc - thereby alerting the hero to the threat and drawing them to the exotic location. As soon as I thought about this I realized that many of the minor super-villains on our list employ the Reel: the Gorilla King sends a squad of gorilla-assassins to kill his enemy, thereby alerting Zatara, for instance.

In Zolar's case, he sends some of his men (mind controlled desert tribespeople, natch) to Metropolis to eliminate an impediment to his plans, which involves first Lois Lane and then Superman. Cut to the Sahara Desert, where Zolar is trying to conquer the lost city of Ulonda using a combination of mind control, rocket planes and flesh-destroying death orbs.

The whole thing ends in bloodshed: Zolar and his lieutenant attempt to death orb Superman only to have it bounce back on themselves, while his fleet of mind controlled rocket pilots are caused to crash by a slightly-pre-anti-killing-code Superman. The lost city of Ulonda, though battered, survives.

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.