MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 354: THE MASKED MAN

(Master Comics 015, 1941)

This really illustrates how the life of a mysterious adventurer is different from that of the rest of us: while driving through Florida, Zoro the Mystery Man stops at a random mansion, is rebuffed when he seeks admittance, and decides to snoop around. While you or I might discover, say, a private birthday party or merely a normal family who don't particularly want to entertain every stranger who knocks on their door, Zoro instead finds a masked figure who is busily mutating the mansions inhabitants into ape-men. I guess once it happens to you a couple of times you just get an instinct for it?

Hi-jinks of course ensue, culminating in the revelation that the culprit is Garvey, the black sheep of the family who presumably chose the ape-man route of seeking revenge because it was cooler than merely shooting up the joint. The point is, his name is Garvey Rantrill.

HONOURS

(Master Comics 015, 1941) 

Minute-Man receives the "highest award for valor" from the South American nation of Rinaldo for stopping a load of Nazi stand-ins from blowing up their Washington embassy.

(Master Comics 016, 1941)

The Companions Three receive the Decoration for Valor of the European nation of Cabarro for facilitating and then stopping the theft of their crown jewels.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 353: THE PURPLE HOODS

(Master Comics 013-014, 1941) 

I'm not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story - the one with the Ghost Killer gang - was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought there would be some very exciting gang continuity if any of the former Ghost Killers, already relict of the White Arrow gang, had joined up with the Purple Hoods. That's an unprecedented three gangs! Alas, Snake and Cope were sent to jail and the counter reset.

Ephemeral hopes and dreams aside, the Purple Hoods are crass capitalist crooks: their big scheme involves kidnapping Mexican farm labourers and pressing them into slavery in a secret oil refinery. Ah, the romance of the Old West!

And speaking of the Old West, this story is a perfect illustration of the weird liminal space that the West occupied in the 40s imagination: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal or a contemporary one? Does this issue offer any clues? The ascent of oil as a valuable resource does overlap with the Old West, and steel oil barrels of the kind pictured above are a 20th Century invention, but one of the major conflicts of the story is a business rivalry between two competing stagecoach lines and while I can find evidence of stagecoaches being used into the early 20th Century I doubt that they were such a going concern as that.

What I'm getting at here is that I don't know which way the anachronisms are going: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal with forward-thinking villains or a modern marshal in an overly romanticized setting? Who knows!

(I must note that I do appreciate the Purple Hood leader getting his own special version of the gang costume)

ADDENDUM:

Two issues later (Master Comics 016, 1941), the story is clearly set in the Old West! Answers have been forthcoming at last!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 352: THE CRYSTAL

(Whiz Comics 015/ Master Comics 014, 1941)

Basics first: the Crystal is nothing particularly special. He's a businessman or something named Mr James who has a wealthy ward named Ronnie Keller and covets the money that he is charged with administering. It's a pretty common turn of events in comics and Mr James is part of the significant minority of greedy guardians who decide to skip the simple embezzlement and advance straight to costumed thuggery. He's got goons and everything!

There are two other things about the Crystal, an annoying one and a tragic one. The annoying one is that due to the way that early anthology comics were shuffled around fairly frequently, the first of the two-part Companions Three story he appears in is in Whiz Comics 015 and the second is in Master Comics 014. Thus, 80-odd years later and reading books in a collated way rather than as they arrive on the shelves of your local newsagent you never ever end up reading them concurrently. It's maddening! For me! About once every ten years!

The tragic one is simply that the Crystal has a pretty great costume! Just look at that dome! But ten years later the Red Hood would really just blow this costume out of the water. It's not even close! The Crystal's good costume was doomed to obscurity in that moment.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 351: THE CHOKER

(Master Comics 013, 1941) 

The long and the short of it is that the Choker is an old-fashioned escaped homicidal maniac of the sort who indiscriminately kills everyone who crosses his path - more akin to a rampaging monster than a villain, plot-wise. He gets into a couple of scrapes with Zoro the Mystery Man (who, by the way, proves susceptible to the worst little old lady disguise in comics history) before meeting a rare Death by Cheetah.

Also: a seldom-seen shoeless villain!

NOTES - OCTOBER 2023

Ripped from the headlines:

The acclimation of a new Dalai Lama must have been big headlines in 1941 because not only did Zoro the Mystery Man save him from being kidnapped for ransom... (Master Comics 014, 1941)

... but over on Earth-Two, the Three Aces did the same! (Action Comics 032, 1941)

Great Folk:

Wizzar, Father of All Magic, teacher and mentor of El Carim, dead and returned as a spirit who appears "when some great crime against the dead remains unpunished" is that all-too-frequent thing in comics: a cosmic plot-hook-delivering entity used only once and never seen again (Master Comics 015, 1941) 

Also, Wizzar sends El Carim to the planet Zaam to battle the tyrant Rashtala and basically everyone on Zaam has an amazing look:

Just great.

Grandfather Oyster, the big oyster that eats people when they try to get the little oysters, is a really terrific sea monster concept. Is this the only hostile oyster in comics history? Probably! (Master Comics 017, 1941)

Memes of Yore: COWARD!

Very unsympathetic crowd of Goat-People watching space hero Captain Venture fight a space dragon. (Master Comics 021, 1941)

Nobody ever delivers a long monologue on why kicking people is an unmanly way to fight but there are a lot of expressions of distaste, like Spike of the Companions Three is uttering here. (Master Comics 021, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 350: THE TERROR

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

At first I was fairly unimpressed with the Terror - I regarded him as yet another low-ambition super-crook, a guy with the wherewithal to invent a hypnotic ray belt and mount the output in the villain-standard rubberoid mask but with no greater ambition than to murder his uncle and half sister to get his mitts on the family fortune. But... is there another, non-crime way to get rich off of a hypnotic ray projector? I imagine that it would be quite useful in a psychologist's practice but that's a get-somewhat-rich-slowly scheme if I ever heard one. I suppose crime might have been the way to go for a young man in need of money, though speaking as an uncle, avunculicide is never the answer.

Once I looked at the Terror with fresh eyes I realized something else: as the Terror, young Stephen Barish was completely committed to the bit. He decided to kill his family, adopted an over-the-top cackling movie villain persona and kept that shit up until he was unmasked (and even then he tried to knife Zoro the Mystery Man and got sword caned for his trouble). Just look at this behaviour:

Just grinning and laughing and gloating and hopping around like a goblin until he is physically skewered. This is the kind of villain I like, even if he has an anti-uncle bias.