MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 320: THE LEGION OF THE DOOMED

(Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

There's not much substance to the Legion of the Doomed, but there's a lot of cool ideas, so lets knock them out.

a) a weird figure imposes a baby on a couple dwelling in haunted hill country. The baby, it is later revealed, cries with the voice of a man.

b) subsequently, a killer begins stalking the streets of a nearby city, probably New York. Panic ensues! The Fiery Mask is on the prowl.

c) somewhat unsurprisingly, the killer and the baby turn out to be one and the same! There's a missed opportunity for more creepy adult-acting baby, one of my favourite comics tropes. The Fiery Mask witnesses this transformation and manages to stop the next murder...

d) ... and pursues the killer back to whatever level of Comic Book Hell they came from. The Legion of the Doomed are slain! The city is safe! No questions have been answered:

Why do these killings? Not sure.

Why the whole ruse with the baby? No idea.

Has the Legion of the Doomed actually been stopped? Not saying.

Which actually opens the possibility of these guys being BRUNG BACK. I mean, supernatural killers are a dime a dozen, but these guys bring a creepy baby to the mix, plus they're very easy to kill. Say they're on some sort of ~80-year sacrifice cycle and you're good to go. And it's a perfect chance to bring the current Fiery Mask out of limbo!

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 002

Back again with another collection of science-villains who didn't quite make the grade!

Fritz Cardif here has a gunpowder-exploding ray and a lot of big plans. He probably would have made the main list except that I personally find his antics very dull, with the exception of the lil' stinker moment pictured above. (Hit Comics 006, 1940)

Dr Marko figured on using kidnapped scientists as research slaves in his Grand Canyon hideout, but he too was corralled by Neon the Unknown. (Hit Comics 013, 1941)

Professor Dorn here is your typical Nazi scientist obsessed with replicating the powers of the Sub-Mariner for the glory of the cause. He ends up lasting about fifteen minutes after meeting the real deal. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941)

 Dr Sunga has a pretty good scheme going wherein he seeming kills people by sending them a cursed wand that is actually harmless - seemingly the perfect crime! But the Golden Age Falcon figures out the trick: it's actually the box that the wand is sent in that does the killing. Sunga of course ends up dead by his own fiendish device. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 319: DR NARR

(Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

Poor Dr Narr. all he wanted was to make good robots, but all he could make were terrible robots (in comics terms. Even today, bipedal, semi-autonomous robots capable of running and throwing nets etc are wildly advanced. Be less hard on yourself, Narr).

Too bad for Narr that he chose the villain's path: rather than reevaluating his metrics for success in a robot he kidnaps Marvex the 5th dimensional super-robot in hopes of discerning his secrets. This leads directly to his death by falling (from a window that he was attempting to push Marvex out of). The moral: don't kidnap robots.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 318: DORK

(Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

There's a great temptation when dealing with an evil scientist named Dork to focus on easy, puerile humour rather than appreciating the other things that make him a good super-villain.

I had a whole bit about how his big plan was to flood the city with white goo (hur hur) and kidnap women to experiment on their bodies but it wasn't sustainable. Ironically, I would have had to jump through more hoops to obliquely reference his monster looking like jizz than if, as here, I just said it.

Good costumes on the henchmen!

This is where the joke fell apart, by the way. There was no good way to link this guy with the jizz jokes that wasn't a huge stretch. Appreciate the cool monster, I guess.

And then he was killed by his own jizz!

Excuse me. He was dissolved by his own blob-monster in a classic example of irony.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 317: MR MURO

(Daring Mystery Comics 001, 004, 1940)

 

The most interesting thing about Mr Muro is that he represents an intermediate stage in the development of the comic book Yellow Peril villain, away from the gaudy Fu Manchu style of the pulps and the comics of the 30s. There are a few of these more workaday Asian Threat villains kicking around in 1940/ 41 but they eventually lose out to the super-agents of the Japanese Empire as the preeminent example of such.

Anyway, Muro is a low-rent would-be world conqueror at heart and has the misfortune to have ended up as the antagonist for Monako, Prince of Magic, a typically-overpowered magic hero. This understandably put a crimp in his plans.

I his second appearance Muro demonstrates some ability at magic himself, but he never makes a third appearance to give Monako a real run for his money. This does mean that he's another technically-at-large Golden Age villain, but that's about it as far as mildly interesting facts about Mr Muro goes.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 316: THE VAMPIRE

(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940) 

The Vampire has the distinction of appearing in the only Golden Age featuring Mister E, possibly the biggest nonentity in the collection of heroes brought back in The Twelve. He's whatever: he has a drug that makes your heart explode and his major plot involves trying to get control of an oil company (and marry a woman against her will after killing her father, in case you though he might be a bit sympathetic). He is one of the few comic book super-villains to dress like the villains from 1940s super-hero movies though, so that's something.

Probably the most interesting thing about the Vampire is the fact that like so many features in Daring Mystery Comics Mister E was a one-off, which means that he is still at large to this day. Fun! BRING BACK this very very old man and his old machinations! Mister E has retired - who can save us from the Vampire?

MINOR SUPER-HERO 037: THE PHANTOM BULLET

(Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940)

There's a lot of people on the internet who like to opine on the morality of bat-themed rich-guy vigilantism, but I gotta tell you that it could have been a whole lot worse. Case in point, the Phantom Bullet, a rich guy who gets ahold of an untraceable ice pellet gun and immediately thinks "what this city needs is a whole lot more extra-judicial killings."

But instead of becoming an unstoppable media juggernaut, the Phantom Bullet made just one Golden Age appearance (like so many of his Daring compatriots) and returned only once, seventy years later, to die.