Look and marvel at Pete Woods and Paul Cornell's Mister Mind!

They say a hero is only as good as his villains, which is one of the reasons I think Captain Marvel is one of the greatest superheroes ever—he's got the best villains! In addition to his archenemy Doctor Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, he's got Mister Mind, an evil alien worm determined to conquer and rule the world.

He was first introduced in Fawcett's Golden Age Captain Marvel comics, as the unseen mastermind behind the Monster Society of Evil that was bedeviling Cap and the whole world. The revelation that he was just a little worm, who wore glasses to see and a little radio around his neck to talk, was a surprise twist. He was put to death in a tiny little electric chair, mounted atop a regular electric chair, and then stuffed and mounted.

But he returned, repeatedly!

After DC bought Fawcett and absorbed their characters, Mr. Mind was relegated to Earth-2 and Earth-S, but was introduced into the post-Crisis DCU in a short-lived miniseries it's probably best to pretend never happened (in that, he was the worm in the bottom of a tequila bottle Sivana was drinking on) and then better and more thoroughly by Jerry Ordway in his Power of Shazam series. Ordway's Mister Mind was a Venusian evil alien worm determined to conquer and rule the world, the vanguard agent of a race of Venusian worms. Ordway's was less cartoonish and more realistic in appearance, looking much more like a caterpillar.

Mind played a big and surprising role in the weekly series 52, during which he had grown from his larval form into a "Hyperfly," an evil butterfly-like cosmic creature that feeds on entire universes.

Writer Paul Cornell and artist Pete Woods brought Mind back in another surprising appearance during their Action Comics story arc, "The Black Ring" (reviewed here).

Mind appears in a splash panel on the last page of the first issue (#890), emerging from the head of one of a trio of mind-controlled kidnappers who have attempted to capture Lex Luthor:
As you can see, Cornell and Woods' Mind looks an awful lot like Ordway's, although now he's bigger—about the size of a large stuffed animal—and while his body is rounder and fatter, his legs and mandibles are pointer and more menacing looking—sometimes. Depending on the context. Here he's dripping with gore, and meant to be a bit scary.

He still talks via a radio or "talk box," although it's a little more modern and space-age in design. While the original wore spectacles, and Ordway's had big, round eyes that visually echoed the original's glasses, this one was the segmented eyes of an insect, save with one in the middle being black, suggesting a pupil. The result is an eye that looks insect-like and cartoonish at once.

Cornell usage of Mind is as the first of many villains Luthor is juxtaposed with throughout the year-long storyline. Mind is working for someone else, although he himself doesn't know who or what he's working for. He (and we) just know it's something incredibly powerful, so powerful its made a lackey out of a villain who has organized Monster Societies, attempted to conquer the world and once almost ate the whole Multiverse.

He engages Luthor in a sort of mental combat, psychically imprisoning Luthor in a series of absurd fantasy sequences, including ones in which Luthor is a Promethean caveman stealing fire from super-gods, another in which he is a playing the role of Doctor Frankenstein from the James Whale movies, another in which he's a Godzilla-like giant monster and Luthor is a Superman-like superhero and, most adorably, a wild west sequence in which Mind wears an adorable cowboy hat and wields a shooting iron:

 

That gives you a good idea of this Mister Mind's size, and how having him emerge from your head would be the end of you.

Unfortunately, it also means he's not much for hand-to-hand combat. This sequence shows what he did to the poor sap whose skull he was occupying (note the prone, headless body in the first panel), and how easily Luthor defeats him once they've escaped the mental plane for the real world:

As to how he returned after his time as a Hyperfly in 52, he attempts to explain to Luthor that he's actually the offspring of the original Mister Mind, but "our consciousness is passed down on a strand of eight-D R.N.A."

He returns again before the story ends (in a chapter drawn by Jesus Merino), when his unseen master is finally revealed and their relationship can be explained without really spoiling anything.

He appears in outer space alongside Lex, the "Lois-bot", the cosmic entity and Superman in the climax of "The Black Ring", although he's not really there-there, but sends a "four-dimensional holographic projection" of himself...meaning either Mister Mind survived being punted off a building or, just as likely, reproduced a "grandson" of the original Mister Mind in the same manner that the new Mister Mind at the beginning of the arc was created and shared the consciousness of the original.

Three pretty clever gags from Super Friends #24

1.) Mr. Mind's conveyance


2.) Taking Superman's frequent self-referential in-joke about once boasting that being inflicted with potent forces like lightning only tickled him, and weaponizing it to take out Superman.


3.) A Gardner Fox name-drop. I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure the only reason writer Sholly Fisch included Batman villains The Terrible Trio (Fox, Shark and Vulture) was so he could make this joke. And honestly, that's as good a reason as any.

The Trial of the Century: The United States v. Mr. Mind

Jeff Smith's long-awaited Captain Marvel story finally dropped this week, beginning the cartoonist's re-telling of classic multi-part storyline, "Captain Marvel and the Monster Society of Evil." It was an epic storyline by todays standards, and almost unheard of back in 1945, when it was originally published. Spanning 232 pages of Captain Marvel Adventures, it was a 25-part story which ran for two years.

I haven't read the whole thing (although DC should probably make it available stat, huh?), but I recently re-read the first and last chapters of it, which were reprinted in sweet library find Shazam!: From the Forites to the Seventies (Harmony Books, 1977). Now, there's no telling where Smith's story might go or where it will end three issues from now, but here's how the original story ended—with a courtroom drama.

Cap whittled Mind's forces down in each installment, and by the beginning of chapter 25, he's down to just two henchmen, who promplty quit. Undeterred, he goes after Billy Batson himself, using a tiny little bottle of ether to KO the boy broadcaster. He then remembers he can't strangle Billy himself, lacking hands, so he rushes to improvise, coming at his unconscious foe with a live wire. But Billy revives just in time, and Captain America finaly catches his archenemy...



...leading to the cutest trial of the century! Check out the adorable little witness stand!





Holy moley, who knew Captain Marvel could practice law?






Wait, 186,744 people?! In your face, Joker!








Now unlike Captain Marvel, I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure this is grounds for a mistrial.







In the electric chair? But he’s just a little worm. Oh man, I bet this is going to be one cute state-sanctioned execution!





Aww, dig that cute little electric chair in the seat of the big persons’ electric chair. It's so darling!

It’s kinda weird to see Captain Marvel just chilling in his house reading the paper, but it’s even more weird that he’s got a stopclock counting the seconds until Mr. Mind gets executed.




Thousands?! Just to kill a worm?!







Well, apparently Mr. Mind’s race of alien space worms are built of solid stuff, because even after they pumped thousands of volts of electricity into him, there was enough left to stuff and place in a museum (which is a tad ghoulish, isn’t it? It's not like a taxidermied Saddam Hussein will be on display at the Smithsonian any time soon).

Anyway, that's how the "Monster Society of Evil" storyline ended, with the execution of the cute little monster behind it all.

Bu don't worry! Apparently Billy spoke too soon with that “final and complete end” business, as Mr. Mind would return in the 1970s to menace Marvel once more, this time in a robot body calling himself Mr. Wonderful and leading the all-girl Rainbow Squad. How did he survive?

“I’m an alien! My race is immune to electric shock!” he explained to Marvel, “It doesn’t kill us—only puts us into suspended animation!” As for the body on display in the museum, it was a fake Mr. Mind hypnotized the taxidermist into making for him.

So it turns out Mr. Mind was lucky they put him in a cute little electric chair instead of hanging him using a tiny little noose from an adorable little gallows.

Captain Marvel's Columbus Adventure

I love DC’s Showcase Presents line, which has been releasing phone book-sized collections of black and white reprints of their Silver Age material. Kind of like Marvel’s Essential line, except DC’s tends to reach back further. I’ve devoured nien of the collections they've released so far and enjoyed them all immensely, but the best by far has been Showcase Presents: Shazam!.

These issues come from the 1970’s DC revival, which paired new material with reprints of classic, Golden Age stories (only the ‘70s stuff is collected). The stories, oirignally drawn by C. C. Beck himself, explain where Marvel Family and Foes have been since the ‘40s, and then rather quickly acclimate them all to the “present.”

Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, superpower-less Uncle Marvel, and Tawky Tawny appear throughout, with the Lieutenant Marvels appearing in just one story. Classic villains Dr. Sivana (and his kids) and Mr. Mind appear the most, although Ibac gets a few spotlight stories, and Mister Atom and Black Marvel each get an issue apiece.

These stories are all Pre-Crisis, so they’re still set on “Earth-S,” although that only comes up once, and some other DC characters make some notable appearances. Lex Luthor appears by way of a dream and/or a malfunction of his recently invented “magic accumulator”, and he quckily teams up with Mr. Mind (“You’re my kind of man—er—worm, Mr. Mind!” Luthor sneers on the cover). Superman's likeness appears on a molten steel robot, which Cap clobbers (Can and Superman punching each other—it's like a staple of DC comics, isn't it?) A short-haired, young Kid Eternity guest-star in one tale and, man, has he ever changed in the last 30 years.

Late in the collection, the focus shifts from Golden Age-esque one-offs set in Billy’s nameless home city to more closely conform to the format of the Shazam! TV show, which had just hit the airwaves. Uncle Dudley grew a moustache, and he and Billy started traveling the country in a van, calling up the immortals who lend Captain Marvel his powers on the “Eterni-Phone” whenever necessary.

This road trip story spans the last eight issues collected in the book, and centers on Billy and Dudley’s trip to record patriotic pieces for their employers at Whiz TV. Coincidentally, first Dr. Sivana and then Mr. Mind are planning on destroying America one city at a time (for the Bicentennial celebration, naturally), and their targets neatly line up with Billy’s travel agenda. They’re all written by E. Nelson Bridwell, and feature pencil art by either Kurt Schaffenberger or Tenny Henson.

Each issue takes us to a different city, where we watch Cap have some sort of regional adventure (in Washington D.C., Sivana kidnaps Congress; in Pittsburgh, Sivana builds an army of steel robots to destroy all the steel mills, et cetera).

I was pretty surprised when I got to issue #31, in which Captain Marvel visits Columbus, Ohio. Ours isn’t a city that sees a whole lot of superhero action, and perhaps for good reason. While Captain Marvel’s visit to Detroit has Tawny trying out for the Detroit Tigers, a and his visit to Indianapolis involves him racing Mr. Atom in the Indy 500, Bridwell seems to have trouble finding something Columbus-specific for Cap to do while in town.

The adventure that follows, “The Rainbow Squad,” could happen just about anywhere. Unless Bridwell was using the title to make a coy reference to Columbus’ large, active gay population…? I don’t know; I was only seven months old at the time it was originally published, and I didn’t live in Columbus then, so I have no idea how gay the town was back then.

But if Columbus doesn't come across as well as Philladelphia or Buffalo do, at least our story is the one which reveals Captain Marvel’s Achilles heel—women.

“No man has been able to beat Captain Marvel, the World’s Mightest Mortal,” Bridwell’s breathless narration begins, “But women are another matter—that’s where Cap’s weakness lies—and he needs help from another hero—one from the Golden Age of comics—when he’s confronted by six super-females called…The Rainbow Squad.”



In the first panel, the Shazam van pulls into Columbus’ German Village, a building of which seems to be scanned into the background. I’d love to see an original of this, to see what it looks like in color, but here the background really seems to stand out as not drawn. No idea what building that is.

At any rate, Billy decides to stop at Jack Weston’s restaurant, humbly named “Weston’s,” for lunch. Jack welcomes our heroes at the door, and they remark how odd it is that he’s become a restraunteer, to which he mentions all the time he spent on K.P. in the war.

“Only because the sergeant didn’t know you were really Minute Man, The One-Man Army!” Billy says, and an asterisk lets us know that “Minute Man appeared in Master Comics, America’s Greatest Xomics and his own magazine from 1941 to 1944.

Wait, so Columbus has it’s own superhero—or, at least, it did in 1976—and his name is Minute Man? Well, I suppose it had different connotations back in the day, referring to the Revolutionaries and not Weston’s performance in bed. Now, what was an all-American hero with a patriotic name like Minute Man and a star-spangled costume doing in a comic with a name like Master Comics? Was Fascist Adventures all filled up?



Once Billy and Dudley tuck in to their meals, a man with terrible hair enters, and Dudley announces, “I see an old friend entering—Ron Scheer—Vice President of the Scott Krauss News Agency!” I suspect that this is a real person, based on Schaffenberger’s careful rendering of his face, Dudley's use of his title as if he were reading it off a business cardm and the fact that each city has a similar media executive type appearing to foreshadow the conflict.

While they make small talk with Scheer, in rush the Rainbow Squad, six women in silly costumes who want everyone's valuables.

“Those dames must be loony! They don’t even have guns!” a male patron says, and the men all wade into the women, expressing their reluctance to punch women in the face. But wait, what’s this? They each have a superpower, and make asses out of all the men.

Enter Captain Marvel, but they have a secret plan to deal with him.



“Can’t think straight—have to get out,” Cap thinks to himself while fleeing. Outside, he walks sadly away, completely ignorant of Dynamoll’s blasting him with atomic radiation from behind, as he talks to himself about his predicament: “I don’t understand why beautiful women making a fuss over me does that to me—but I can never get my head straight when it happens!What can I do? I can’t beat up on those girls!”

Meanwhile, the ladies return to the hideout of handsome, vain and slightly off Mr. Wonderful, the man who gave them all their miraculous superpowers through his rainbow machine. He explains, “I chose women because I knew they constitute a weakness on Captain Marvel’s part!”

Meanwhile, Weston and Dudley consult Achillies via Eterni-Phone, and the elder who gives Cap his courage advises them that “Women can be troublesome… It was a woman who caused the Trojan War--and a quarrel over another led to my decision to stop that conflict!” He goes on to cryptically tell Weston to avenge Cap’s defeat.


Meanwhile, Cap is still wandering the city, contemplating his problem of not being able to clobber girls, and we see him in front of City Hall (It’s hard to tell in the black and white reproduction, and my crappy scan of it, but that black blob seems to be the statue of Christopher Columbus downtown).


Dynamoll sneaks up on Cap again, and this time she uses lighting on him, as Mr. Wonderful advised. Changed back to Billy, they put place im under a five ton weight which is somehow suspended near the ceiling by a thin rope, which he intends to cut, Billy “like a worm!"

But in rushes Minute Man at the last, er, minute to pull the gag from Billy’s mouth. Two syllables later, the weight crumbles harmlessly on top of Captain Marvel’s invulnerable head.

It’s Captain Marvel versus the dames, round two!

This time, the Squad eschews seducing Cap for plain old super-violence. He’s still afraid to hit them, but once Minute Man starts getting his ass kicked (figures our hero would have a lame name and be no match for the Rainbow Squad), Cap rallies and enters the fray, letting the women take themselves down by running into one another and bruising their knuckles against his invulnerable chin.

Having brought an end to the Rainbow Squad, Cap attends to thier leader. One Marvelous punch knocks Mr. Wonderful into a thousand pieces with a “KRAA-AMM!” What's this? Mr. Wonderful is just a robot? And inside the head—why, it’s an old foe.

“You mean we’ve been working for a worm ?” an incredulous Squad member asks.



Mind slithers away to safety, and the CPD arrive to load the Rainbow Squad into the back of the paddy wagon. Minute Man vows to stay in the hero game, “I realize now what my life’s been lacking these last few years--excitement! You may be seeing Minute Man in harness a lot from now on!”

Or we may not. That’s the last Minute Man appearance I’ve ever seen, but who knows, maybe he went on to totally defeat all super-crime in central Ohio over the next 30 years, before deciding to go back into retirement. That would certainly explain why there are no supervillains in Columbus at the moment.