MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 562: THE HARBINGERS OF DEATH

(Wonderworld Comics 008, 1939)

As part of Yarko the Great's second encounter with Death, he and the hapless Madame Punai journeyed to a sort of pastiche underworld (e.g., their journey took them through the Biblical Valley of Death but also involved this unnamed boatman ferrying them across the River Styx). And as with any good underworld pastiche there are some allegorical foes to get past before their goal is reached - the Harbingers of Death!

Like I said, these guys are allegorical demon guardians, so there isn't much more to them than the expression of their allegory. First Pain, aka Burning Pain, appears to crush Yarko to his burning body. Good allegory! Pain can overwhelm you - though in a more in-depth work perhaps Yarko would be left with a burn or other lingering reminder of this battle rather than walking away unscathed after hurling pain into the abyss.

Fear appears next, and I really appreciate that he himself is a fearful creature rather than the more common monstrous fear-beasts that inflict fear by being big and spiky. Like Pain, Fear cannot stand up to Yarko's overwhelming machismo and slinks back into the shadows from whence it came.

Finally, Horror is a master of the jump scare and as someone who is particularly vulnerable to that tool of the filmmaker's art I really appreciate seeing him (them?) be flung off a cliff, probably not to their doom due to being a demon but at the very least to their major inconvenience.

And there you have it: three lil' henchmen, three anthropomorphic personifications, three notches in Yarko the Great's belt.

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 560: VLADIM

(Wonderworld Comics 005, 1939) 

Our hero, Yarko the Great, is driving along a country lane outside London when his travels are interrupted by a bestial figure who runs out of a nearby castle and immediately drops dead. While Yarko is examining the body a monocled creep emerges from some nearby bushes Homer Simpson-style to introduce himself as "Vladim, a genius!" For me, this is exciting, because he shares his somewhat-unusual name with the seldom-mentioned, never-seen airplane designer of the Blackhawk Squadron and you better believe I think about that guy more than most people (just how these two characters created by Will Eisner came to share a name is a mystery for the ages).  

As any self-proclaimed genius would, Vlamir brings Yarko to his underground sanctum to show off his magical experiments and I just want to emphasize something about his setup: beneath his castle is a series of bridges and staircases seemingly to the scale of Moradin in the first Lord of the Rings movie, yet his magical laboratory is housed in a room the size of a large bathroom and furnished with one (1) light, one (1) art and one (1) large skull-themed throne.

Also please note that the initial view of the throne was out of proportion for dramatic effect and that the actual placement of the skull ensures that unless it is made of plush velvet, that sucker is going to be wildly uncomfortable to sit in for any length of time. This as much as the fact that Vladim has trapped a woman in a fire pit using a voodoo doll has me convinced that he's just started out on the road of dark magic and is indulging his every whim - a more experienced villain would know the long-term importance of good lumbar support.

Yarko of course has little trouble dealing with a dilettante like Vladim: in short order he frees the girl, turns a bestial henchman back on his creator and kind of kills Vladim. If hounding a man along a narrow bridge with an image of your own floating head until he slips on his own knife and falls into the murky depths of his basement can be counted as killing a guy. Which I suppose it can.

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 558: DOXOL

(Wonderworld Comics 004, 1939)

We (and the Flame) start in media res, as a young woman unsuccessfully attempts to flee a car full of hooded goons, is captured and brought back to an ominous manor in the woods. The Flame cottons on to this and follows them.

Inside we find Doxol! Doxol is a wizened green fellow who is using mind control drugs (mystic ones!) to create his own little crime cult. This is where the slice-of-life nature of the story gets a bit frustrating from an analytical perspective: is Doxol still setting up or has this cult been a going concern for a while? Were the new recruits all kidnapped or recruited regular cult-style? Even Doxol's appearance - magic mutation or dramatic disguise? It's a mystery!

The Flame has even less information about Doxol than we do because he was dropped into a pit with crushy walls as soon as he stepped through the door. Lucky for him/ unlucky for Doxol his induction ceremony involves a flaming brazier for the Flame to appear in like he does (also lucky for that lady because she doesn't get shot full of grody mind control drugs).

Doxol makes his escape while the hooded riffraff deal with the Flame, or so he thinks. Turns out that the Flame was fortuitously flying his plane when he stumbled into this mess. 

You'd think that engaging a guy like the Flame in a dogfight would level the playing field for a fellow like Doxol but no, he just leans out the window and lights Doxol's plane on fire.

NOTES - JULY 2024

Cops Shooting Fleeing Suspects: 

The cops send a "shower of bullets" after the Fantom of the Fair as he swings over the densely-populated New York World's Fair. (Amazing Adventure Funnies 001, 1940)

Spider Drawn Without Reference:

Tarantula: a perfect black sphere covered in root structures. (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

Memes of Yore: COWARD!:

The "cowardly and superstitious lot" line that Batman is quoted as saying was not a one-off thing but it was in fact a widely-promoted idea of the time, that criminals were inherent cowards (there was also a frequent emphasis on criminals' gun use being a very cowardly attribute but that fell by the wayside at some point). Crime Does Not Pay was a message hammered into the public consciousness via the Hayes Code and later the Comics Code, and making criminals non-aspirational figures in every way possible was a part of that.

The extrapolation of this into "the more criminal you are the more cowardly you are" in this story is extremely funny, as is the fact that a criminal supposedly meeting his death by electrocution with some stoicism made front page news. Don't worry, it was the old "escape prison by using a death-simulating drug prior to your execution and then have people on the outside wake you up later" gag. Dr Miracle recaptures Nickie Norton in short order and his actual death was without dignity. (Champ Comics 011, 1940)

Honours:

The Flying Trio receive the Sylvanian Order of the Cross and Palms (Crash Comics Adventures 003, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 557: DEATH

(Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

Like I said in the Devil's entry yesterday: Death and the Devil have teamed up as a sort of Yarko the Great Revenge Squad because Yarko saves so many live and souls, respectively. I also mentioned that Death did all of the legwork toward getting Yarko just where they wanted him, and here that is: Death kills a seemingly random London man then delivers him to the police, leaving only a calling card behind.

The discovery that the calling card's address was that of a cemetery is enough to convince Inspector Drake of Scotland Yard that this is a case for Yarko the Great, and... obviously Drake is right because even the most well-trained officer is going to have a hard time dealing with Death himself, but have some gumption, man. Try to track down where the card was printed or something before abdicating all responsibility.

Yarko makes his way to Death and the Devil's Limehouse lair, where he is promptly captured, put in a deathtrap, escapes and banishes the Devil back to the netherworld. Death takes more of a background role in this latter part of the adventure, but that's okay because he looks great - mostly quite cool but a bit sleazy too, because this ain't your regular Death, this is Bad Boy Death.

In the end, the Devil having been vanquished, Death just leaves. Yarko can't actually affect him, and there's even some hinting that the man in the car was not killed so much as dies naturally and was just used as bait, which implies that Death has no way of affecting someone who isn't about to die anyway. He does kill a reluctant henchman who refuses to go up against Yarko, but maybe he was about to die too - working for the Devil has to be a dangerous profession, right?

Death returns in Wonderworld Comics 008 after a Madame Punjai finds the creatively-named Golden Amulet, which compels his service. Punjai is obsessed with her lost youth and beauty and because of this commands Death to kill the young and beautiful Carla Dennis, a former passing acquaintance. This is done seemingly on a whim? There's no real exploration of Madame Punjai's plans, whether toward regaining her lost youth or revenging herself on the beautiful women of the world.

Yarko the Great of course becomes involved in these shenanigans and the more-hapless-than-evil Madame Punjai is tricked into trading her life for that of Carla's. Death is again cheesed off about this. BUT WHY IS HE? He's going to get basically everyone eventually, even in a comic book world with immortals and so forth. Why care? Is this a Discworld style Death who gets into human roles like hobbies? Maybe.