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.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 349: THE GHOST KILLERS

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Maybe someday I'll wish that I had started out putting all of the various gangs of masked Western outlaws in group posts like the generic villains or mad scientists. But maybe not, because the major difference between those three groups is that the other two are par for the course in a super-hero comic while masked outlaws are frequently the only interesting thing about a Western comic.

Anyway: the Ghost Killers (unofficial name - they are hard to find and they kill witnesses) are fun because they are made up of the remnants of the White Arrow's gang and achieve their ghostly status by operating out of the town jail, coming and going via some loose bars until Marshal Buck Jones gets wise and slaps leather, rendering one of them and actual ghost and sending the other two to big boy jail.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 348: THE SEVEN MASTERS

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

The Seven Masters are just your regular drug smuggling/ opium dealing gang operating out of San Francisco's Chinatown. They don't get up to anything too spectacular - El Carim gets in on the action because the head of the gang is using his criminal might to try to get a woman to marry him instead of her boyfriend - and they trade on some pulp-era Yellow Peril tropes, but despite all of that I must admit to liking their style. The name! The robes! The custom sword-lowering engine! If only they all hadn't been wasted on low-tier chumps!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 347: TRIPLE THREAT

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Triple Threat is in actuality a fellow named Theron who believes that due to his own scientific genius he is above such things as "regular jobs" and "not murdering and robbing at whim" and so develops an armoured multi-environment vehicle - also called Triple Threat, as is often the case with super vehicle types - with which to enact his plans.

The obvious thing to lead with here is that great name: Triple Threat. Some cursory research seems to indicate that in the early 20th Century the term was used to refer to a person etc who could fill three different roles in sports, war etc (I even saw it used to refer to a breed of cow that was useful for meat, dairy and as a work animal). The more narrow entertainment-focused definition that is mostly used today seems to have gained prominence in the mid 20th Century, which is a shame, as it would have been a real fun time if Theron wasn't just flying around in a land/air/sea vehicle but also singing, dancing and acting.

That said, there is a real flair for the dramatic in ol' Triple Threat. He's your classic police taunter style of criminal genius, never missing an opportunity to fire up his radio and sling some mud at Sergeant Kent and the rest of the boys over at police HQ.

It's this kind of bravado that ultimately proves to be Triple Threat's downfall, in fact: after escaping an initial encounter with Bulletman, he makes an attempt to eliminate top cop Sergeant Kent and in the subsequent fracas ends up smashing his own vehicle to pieces on Bulletman's pointy head. A true loss to the community of folks like me who like to read comics about real jerks. On the positive side, Bulletman is knocked out in this collision, which leads to Susan Kent finally learning his secret identity, which then leads to her becoming Bulletgirl, by far the best of the half-dozen or so members of the Bullet-family.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 346: THE DRAGON

(Master Comics 011, 1941)

It's our second villain named the Dragon and our second Dragon who turns out to be a white dude in yellowface. Will it happen again? Only time will tell.

The only really interesting thing about this guy is that a key part of his plan was to divert suspicion from himself by repeatedly sending his gang to kill his own secret identity (see above). Whether he was banking on Zoro the Mystery Man to show up and keep him alive is unspoken but if he wasn't it's a frankly baffling plan.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 006

MORE! MORE!

Another Nazi spy-cell headed by a guy in a cloth mask called the Leader, this time in Switzerland for a bit of variety. (Captain America Comics 009, 1941)

Having just read a year's worth of Jumbo Comics, I can tell you that this guy here, name of Sam Bradford, is the closest thing to a super-villain in them and it's mostly because of the decent outfit. He's an agent who kills a producer or something because of professional reasons - strictly snoozeville. (Jumbo Comics 033, 1941)

This creep is Mark Giddings, who kidnaps Eve Scott, daughter of NYC Mayor Scott because she turned down his advances. Somehow he thought that extorting the mayor to resign via threats of dismembering his daughter would net him both the job and the girl but in reality he just got socked by Bulletman. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

This fella answers to the name of Operator G-6, and he's the very first foe faced by patriotic hero Minute-Man. Also the first person summarily thrown off a train to his death by Minute-Man. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 345: THE WHITE ARROW

(Master Comics 008-011, 1940-1941)

A regular-style Old West outlaw chief with the somewhat lyrical name of Santos Figaro, the White Arrow's main distinction is that he was a multi-issue rather than one-off foe of Marshal Buck Jones.  

Jones himself is far more interesting than poor Santos Figaro, being a real-life cowboy actor cast as an Old West lawman (probably - I think I've mentioned before that the media of the 1930s-40s doesn't draw a lot of distinction between the Old West and the contemporary West and that sometimes the only way you find out that a series is one or the other is 50 instalments in when the protagonist hops a plane to Chicago). Jones replaced former marshal Bill Crane in Master Comics 006 in a sadly lost-to-history adventure that might contain clues as to whether he was the Buck Jones or just a Buck Jones. 

Regardless, the "Buck Jones, Frontier Marshal" feature closed its doors after the real Buck Jones died in 1942. Given that, it is somewhat ironic that Master Comics was one of the books to eventually carry the adventures of Old West cowboy Tom Mix based on the Western actor who had died in 1940.

UPDATE: I finally got to read Master Comics 006, in which Buck Jones takes over for Bill Crane, and it's almost but not quite as unclear about the time period as the issues I already had access to. Buck Jones is a famous actor moving to what is effectively the past for a bit of a break from modern life and when Crane is wounded he is sworn in as the new marshal. Jones is simultaneously a recognizable celebrity and living in a place with no technology more modern than the steam engine. Baffling!