My favourite Pulp Villains!

These are my favourite pulp villains from the JJ Nevins site.

Antinea. Antinea was created by Pierre Benoit and appeared in L'Atlantide (1919). Antinea was not a serial character, but Benoit wrote nearly fifty novels, all with dangerous heroines whose names began with "A" and who usually caused the death of the hero(es) devoted to them. Antinea is typical of Benoit's female characters, and so I'm using her as a stand-in for the rest of Benoit's output. She is the "Mistress of Atlantis," a Lost Empire in the middle of the Sahara Desert which survived up to the present. She is a cold, hard, cruel woman, surrounded by leopards and a harem of helpless, devoted men. Antinea is found by two French Army officers lost in the Sahara. Things end badly, with the officers being seduced by Antinea nd then turned into metal statues. It's all very H. Rider Haggardian, though much better written (and critically respected) than most Haggard-influenced literature.

Mâh le Sinistre. Mâh le Sinistre was created by Charles Robert-Dumas and appeared in The Lead Idol (1935). Mâh le Sinistre is a Mongolian secret agent for Germany, one of the German Bolsheviks' best agents in the war with the decadent West. Mâh is a brute and a fanatic, someone who not only disembowels his enemies, typically in seedy hotels in the poorer parts of Paris, but who also takes great pleasure in doing so. Mâh works by day as an exporter in Paris, but by night he steals French military secrets and sells them to the Germans. Mâh is not only a spy but is also a master chemist, who brews up not just "Ecstasy 136," a sure-fire aphrodisiac that he uses on any white woman he desires, but also a gas capable of wiping out Paris' population in a matter of hours. His only weakness is for Muguette, a beautiful French spy who puts a bullet through Mâh's head. Mâh is, in short, a weird spin on the Yellow Peril stereotype, combining sexual threat, anti-White hatred, Red Menace, and low cunning (as opposed to the brilliance of a Fu Manchu or a Kiang-Ho.)

Waldo the Wonder Man. Rupert Waldo, the "Wonder Man," was created by Edwy Searles Brooks, creator of Falcon Swift; his first appearance was in "Waldo the Wonder Man," Union Jack #794 (28 December 1918). Waldo ended his career as something of a well-heeled gentleman crook, not much different from many other of that type, but his beginning was quite different. In his debut he is not a lovable rogue, attractive despite his willing disobediance of those pesky laws. He is a murderer, having knocked off a blackmailer who was trying to get rich by threatening to reveal an awful deed in Waldo's past. Waldo is also cunning enough to frame an innocent man for the murder by planting evidence in the man's caravan. Waldo also began as a superman, with the strength of six men--he was quite capable of turning over trolley buses with his bare hands--impervious to pain due to his sufering from Morvan's disease (Syringomelia), capable of amazing recuperative feats, and able to shrug off and ignore being shot, burned, trampled, and other normally-crippling injuries. Over the decades he became better natured and his deeds less criminal and more in the line of other pulp heroes, but when he began he was a real rotter. He clashed with Nelson Lee and Sexton Blake, the latter two being responsible for his first capture, and possibly others I've been unable to discover; his relationship with them began as a standard hero-and-villain situation, but fairly quickly evolved into a much more friendly one, and as Waldo became a better and more "chivalrous" person and more heroic he became much more welcome at Blake's flat on Baker Street and Lee's lodgings on Dover Street. He even became an Deputy Commissioner of Scotland Yard, being helped by Chief Inspector Lennard (they had an amiable dislike for each other when Waldo was a crook and a genuine friendship when Waldo was on the right side of the law), and not only upstaged Sexton Blake himself on some few occasions but even took Blake's place in the pages of Detective Weekly between August 1935 and December 1937! During these times he was a Peril Expert, someone who hired out for outrageously dangerous jobs, just for the adrenaline rush of it; his advertisement ran, "If it's dangerous get it done by Waldo." He wasn't always a Peril Expert, however, and didn't stay that way. He began as "Waldo the Wonder-Man and Crook" (Union Jack #794-942), turned into the more do-gooding and less despicable "Waldo the Robin Hood of Crime" (Union Jack #948-1222), became the Peril Expert (Union Jack #1266-1490), and then reverted back to crime, though not to his murderous beginnings (Union Jack #1499-1530).

Waldo, perhaps surprisingly, had a son, who had all of his talents but never turned bad. Introduced in "Waldo the Wonder Boy," Nelson Lee Library (Second Series) #175 (7 September 1929), Stanley Waldo explained that until recently he hadn't known that he had a father, but Rupert, at this point the law-abiding "Peril Expert," had appeared in his life and brought him back to England, to attend school at Nelson Lee's St. Frank's College. No mention was made of Stanley Waldo later, during Rupert's final criminal phase.

Baron Bunny. Baron Bunny, created by The. Offenstetten, appeared in Baron Bunny's Erlebnisse (Baron Bunny's Experiences) #1-5, in 1922. He was one of a number of German Arsene Lupin lifts. 

Khyzil Kaya. Khyzil Kaya was created by Guy d'Armen and appeared in Les Géants du Lac Noir (The Giants of the Dark Lake, 1931). Kaya was a Yellow Peril type who ruled a secret city; the city was protected by giant spiders, giant microbes, and giant mutants.

Amarbal was created by the Australian writer Joyce Vincent and appeared in The Celestial Hand: A Sensational Story (1903). Amarbal is another of those very interesting prototypes of Fu Manchu. In this case Amarbal is a German-Chinese "half-caste" who leads a Chinese invasion of Australia. Amarbal is an educated man whose driving ambition is to "lead the Chinese to universal dominion."

Mendax. Mendax was created by Guy d'Armen and appeared in Les Troglodytes du Mont Everest (The Troglodytes of Mount Everest, 1929). Mendax, a Yellow Peril type, threatened the world and ransomed ocean lineers with his technologically advanced plane/submarine.