Saturday, October 25, 2008

Worst Criminals of the Silver Age

It's an ill wind that blew this crook into the Marvel Universe:



Meet the Whirlwind, aka the Human Top. Clearly a charter member of the "my incredibly stupid-looking helmet gives me no peripheral vision" club, along with Magneto and others.

He's an exceedingly rare type of supervillain; one that had superpowers from childhood, as shown here:



Powers far beyond those of mortal men? Is Stan (or Roy Thomas) swiping a little of the Superman intro? Anyway, the Human Top faced Ant-Man during the latter's run in Tales to Astonish, then returned in Avengers #46. Of course, you may wonder, having been bested by a bug boy, how the newly-renamed Whirlwind thought he could tackle the entire team. Well, you guessed it:



This was a well that Marvel kept going back to: Hero defeats villain, then villain gets more powerful (and hero loses power or is sick/injured), so we have another matchup.