The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains: Oddball Criminals from Comic Book History ISBN (10 digit): 1594749337

INTRODUCTION

WHAT GOOD IS A SUPERHERO without a decent supervillain?

It didn’t take long for the first comics creators to ask themselves that very question. While the dynamic new literary genre of the costumed crime-fighter was still cooling on the windowsill, the heroes’ opponents began to crawl out of the woodwork. Almost immediately, their ranks were tremendous and their variety seemingly limitless.

From the start, the narrative burden in superhero comics has always been on the bad guys. They need to outnumber and overpower the heroes, enact an array of schemes to provide conflict, be alluring in their appearance and modus operandi, and—most important—set the heroism of the good guys into stark relief. Some supervillains have risen to the occasion, and their fame has grown as great as the heroes they battle. Lex Luthor, the Joker, the Green Goblin, Thanos, Ultron, Doomsday—these are household names among comic book fans, and even in the wider pop culture universe their renown is on par with that of their noble nemeses.

But those illustrious reprobates represent only the tiniest tip of the illicit iceberg of do-baddery. Within the pages of this book you will find villainy’s vilest runners-up in all their weird, wonderful glory. These are the forgotten fiends whose usually brief, and frequently fatal, careers belie a degree of wild invention—and a peculiar appeal that often makes the crook more compelling than the hero. It’s not their fault that so many of these lurid lowlifes and repulsive rogues enjoyed only short and uncelebrated careers. After all, the hero gets the glory, even though the villain does so much of the heavy lifting.

Inside this volume you will meet wild werewolves, sensuous snake women, and avaricious alien conquerors in abundance. You’ll find such wild wrongdoers as a bioelectric brainpowered baddie, a space wizard with a nose full of lightning, and a voodoo villain dressed like a haunted chicken, just to name a handful of evil’s oddest representatives. Comics fans will recognize a few familiar and beloved—if bizarre—bad guys, including a high-hopping bundle of French clichés, a flying cyborg head, and a hundred-foot-tall hard-boiled Communist egg.

As in the companion volume to this book, The League of Regrettable Superheroes, we use the term regrettable lightly. No matter the shape, size, or strategy of the four-color finks gracing these pages, every one of them had the potential to join the ranks of comicdom’s icons of iniquity. It was only poor sales, inopportune timing, and occasional overshadowing from bigger baddies that consigned so many of these scoundrels to the scrapheap of comic book history. Until now!

Read on and enjoy the colorful variety of the medium’s most forgotten foes and oddball blackguards. You’ll find your own answer to the question posed at the outset. Clearly a superhero without a decent supervillain is simply no good at all.

PART 1

WHEN SUPERMAN DEBUTED IN 1938, he launched the immense, florid industry of comic book superheroes. His colorful foes, however, came a little later. Originally, the Man of Steel’s opponents were limited to corrupt politicians, oligarch industrialists, penny-ante gangsters, and the occasional force of nature. His immediate imitators followed suit, and superhero comics began their existence presenting a notably one-sided battle for justice.

By 1939, the Man of Steel was matching wits with the insidious Ultra-Humanite and a modest coterie of sinister scientists. Meanwhile, his caped and crusading buddy Batman debuted in his own title confronting a homicidal harlequin called the Joker. Within a year, supervillains were as common to comics as the heroes they battled.

A hallmark of the Golden Age of comics is the era’s limitless sense of invention. The genre was shiny, new, and utterly devoid of established rules. This was a rich playground for a wealth of imaginative authors and artists, who were required by their editors to produce continuous grist for the comics-reading mill.

Vile ventriloquists’ dummies, brutish space invaders, diabolical demagogues, disembodied hands, avenging opera stars, femmes fatales, and murder-happy menaces populated every inch of newsprint four-color fantasies in those days. And even wilder opponents waited in the wings, with comics creators seeming eager to outdo one another with weird variations on the villainous theme.

It was an era when anything was possible, and every kind of villain—no matter how strange or unlikely—was given a shot at the good guys.

NOTE: Not all scholars agree on the exact boundaries of these comicbookdom epochs, but the debut of Superman is generally considered the big bang of superhero comics.

BABY FACE AND BROTHER

He asked for it, Brother. We are peaceful, but we can also be firm!

© 1943 by Hillman Periodicals

Enemies of: Twilight

Created by: John Cassone

Debuted in: Clue Comics #5 (Hillman Periodicals, October 1943)

Not be confused with: Baby and Brotherface

CTS OF VILLAINY OFTEN hide behind acts of charity, and sometimes behind a bunch of bandages and a derby. That’s the story behind Baby Face and Brother, a mismatched pair of apparent philanthropists whose freewheeling ways with fat wads of cash hide their sinister agenda.

Plump and short-statured, his face contorted into a manic rictus of beaming joy, Baby Face is the derby-topped brains behind this felonious duo’s complicated scheme. His so-called Brother, by contrast, is a hulking mute wrapped in bandages from head to toe. This is a pairing that cries menace from every pore, but they mask their unsavory auras by freely donating to the distraught. Ever since my brother was burned and lost his tongue, says Baby Face unconvincingly, we love to give out charity. Taking to the streets, the lugubrious Baby Face hands out thick stacks of dosh to the impoverished and underprivileged. Particularly beefy subjects receive extra attention. Lured by promises of further largesse or, failing that, manhandled by Brother, suitably poor and tough-looking men are shoved into a sleek sedan and whisked off to parts unknown.

Baby Face and Brother’s antics catch the attention of the masked do-gooder Twilight and his partner, a wisecracking parrot who answered to the name Snoopy a good twenty years before Peanuts. A curious crimefighter in his own right, Twilight was secretly Marine sergeant (and former wrestling champ) Terry Gardner. When trouble arose he would leap into battle wearing a T-emblazoned, fur-covered costume that left him looking like a long-haired werewolf.

Twilight investigates Baby Face and Brother by disguising himself as a down-on-his-luck palooka. This requires pulling a lifelike rubber mask over his fur-covered cowl, the combination of which must have smelled like a floor mat at a pet salon. Taken to a secret dungeon where the abducted men are crammed into a tiny cage and abused by Brother, Twilight uncovers the full scope of Baby Face’s evil scheme. It’s a matter of revenge—strange revenge.

As it turns out, Brother is no tongueless burn victim. Beneath his bandages and ill-fitting green suit, the titanic brute is a snarling, vicious gorilla! Twisted by hate after years of captivity, Brother turns the tables by torturing the captive men for amusement. For years he was teased by silly people while locked in a cage, explains Baby Face, adding gleefully, poke ’em with the stick like monkeys in the zoo!

As for Baby Face, his desire for vengeance runs on similar fuel. People poked fun at me because I was small, he informs Twilight. For retribution, Baby Face carries a terrible weapon of his own invention: a reducing spray. Now I’ll laugh! he cries, demonstrating the spray’s shrinking effect on a helpless rabbit. In a subsequent scuffle, however, it’s Brother who’s struck by the shrinking formula. Enraged, the rapidly reducing ape turns on his sibling, brutally slashing Baby Face’s throat before being helplessly transformed into a small, pitiful monkey.

Freeing the prisoners, Twilight sums up the whole adventure adroitly. What a weird sight, he exclaims, standing over the twisted bodies of his former foes. It all seems like a dream!

Other foes of Twilight included pedestrian menaces such as Boss Bogus, the King of Counterfeiters, as well as more extravagant threats like the Porcupine, a hulking needle-covered beast referred to as The Quilled Death!

THE BALLOON MAKER

After I have my lunch, I’m going to add you to my collection—and nobody will ever know!!!

© 1948 by Prize Comics

Enemy of: Frankenstein

Created by: Dick Briefer

Debuted in: Frankenstein vol. 2, #2 (Prize Comics, July/August 1948)

Primary characteristic: Inflated ego

RANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER (let’s call him Frankenstein from now on) is no stranger to comics. The iconic creature has appeared in dozens of incarnations in as many different titles. However, creator Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein—once a creature of menace—enjoyed a second life as a humor character. And the now-pleasant and neighborly Frankenstein found himself facing villains of his own!

But horror elements continued to pop up, with the grotesque tale of the Balloon Maker as a notable example. His backstory begins when opportunistic explorer Hank Gallo stumbles across a peaceful African tribe that practices the gruesome but impressive art of skin stretching. Gallo exclaims in wonder: This skin stretching takes the cake! Look! An ordinary pig—yet the skin is stretched out like a rug!

It’s true, the tribe has mastered a concoction that allows the flensed skin of animals to be stretched like rubber, and Gallo decides he must have it. He absconds with a twelve-year supply of the stuff and escapes back to America, murdering the tribe’s friendly leader in the process.

Twelve years later, a parade, complete with colorful balloons, sparks inspiration. Before long, Gallo has set himself up as the greatest balloon maker of all time—and, yes, those balloons are made of exactly what you think they’re made of. Gallo might’ve gotten away with his horrific practices had he not impulsively hired the intimidating but avuncular Frankenstein as an assistant. On his way to his first day of work, Frankenstein stops at a carnival sideshow. There he learns from a weeping snake charmer that the attraction’s stars have been abducted! They were last seen in Gallo’s studio, posing to have balloons made of them.

Of course, Gallo has skinned the Fat Lady, the Tattooed Man, the Siamese Twins, and many more sideshow superstars, converting their stretched-out skin into dazzling, parade-ready balloons. He plans to do the same to Frankenstein, the snake charmer, and the carnival’s African Wildman, Bongo. But Bongo is in fact Bootra, son of the chief whom Gallo murdered. While Frankenstein frees the snake charmer, Bootra has plans of his own for the now-cornered Balloon Maker.

Later, back in his homeland, Bootra stands over his father’s grave. Mission completed, he grunts. [I’ve] avenged your death. He gestures at a titanic balloon hovering above the burial site, a balloon resembling Hank Gallo.

THE BLACK HAND

Die! Die! As do all who foolishly oppose the Black Hand!

© 1941 by MLJ Comics

Enemy of: Captain Flag

Created by: Joe Blair and Lin Streeter

Debuted in: Blue Ribbon Comics #16 (MLJ Comics, September 1941)

Type of compliment he gives: Blackhanded

HEARTY DOSE OF IRONY adds color to a supervillain’s origin. And nothing is more ironic than inadvertently creating your own nemesis.

So it goes when the Black Hand, an ominous and pale figure whose withered right mitt can deliver death at a touch, accidentally triggers the origin of patriotic superhero Captain Flag. Flag begins his existence as flippant playboy Tommy Townsend. While the Black Hand and his minions capture Townsend’s inventor dad in order to extract the details of a new bomb sight he created, young Tommy is wasting time, his dad’s money, and his potential at the exclusive Crane Club.

After getting nowhere with Tommy’s pop, the Black Hand has Tommy abducted and tortured before his father’s eyes. The Black Hand may have overestimated Tommy’s worth, though, since the elder fellow continues to keep shtum. Having played all his cards, the Black Hand employs his terrible grip, first slaying the father and then clutching the young man around the neck.

Before he can strangle the life out of Tommy, a great bird—a brown eagle—bursts through the window. It’s an omen, although it also seems like an accident. The eagle alights on the only man-creature which threatens it no harm. Then it beats a hasty retreat with Tommy in its clutches. The Black Hand is unconcerned, declaring: That mollycoddle will never survive!

Atop his rocky aerie, Tommy’s new eagle pal—now dubbed Yank—provides the young wastrel with a strict regimen of exercise and healthy foods. Who knew that eagles could be such harsh taskmasters? Tommy is gifted with a flag that has somehow fallen into Yank’s possession, and he uses it to fashion a spy-smashing alter ego: Captain Flag!

His first mission: I’m itching to tangle with that Black Hand and his mob!And tangle he does, making short work of the Hand’s men, though the villain escapes. In his final appearance, the Black Hand steals a yacht for piracy and is subjected to the ultimate punishment. He ends up swinging from the yardarm by a length of rope around his neck, apparently—and decisively—dead at last.

Or is he? Who’s to say an evil eagle won’t rescue and revive him? Perhaps we’re all just pawns in the talons of the eagles who secretly control everything. Perhaps…

BLACK TARANTULA

I go to spread evil and wickedness among you…while I am around, deviltry and cunning will remain on Earth!

© 1950 by Fox Publications

Enemy of: Princesses, villagers

Created by: Unknown

Debuted in: Feature Presentation #5 (Fox Publications, April 1950)

Favorite hiding place: Behind a beautiful bunch a’ ripe banana

ILLAINS PLAY THE LONG GAME. Whether their goal is world domination, the death of their greatest enemy, or the destruction of the universe, one thing is true: they only need to win once. Thus, long-lived lowlifes and farsighted fiends have the luxury of letting their plans develop slowly over time. Sometimes, in fact, they set preparations in motion centuries before their endgame.

The Black Tarantula—or, we should say, this Black Tarantula, since the story mentions others—has lived for almost a thousand years when his tale begins. Hanging out above his own grave, he’s delighted to direct our attention to his tombstone. It reads: Zoraster Rorret (that last name is a real treat for anyone who reads their comic books in a mirror) with the dates 1101–[blank]. Gasp! I laugh, explains Count Rorret, a gaping grin splitting his ghastly green face, because there is no date of my death! How can there be, when I have eternal life? I’m dead, yet never will I die!

Such grim but merry contradictions appear to be the count’s stock in trade. Holding forth in a graveyard at midnight, he calls upon evil souls to share with them the tale of ugly life and beautiful death, of evil good and good evil. The story recounts his seduction