A “Circus of Crime” would be an unlikely and unwieldy enterprise, yet Marvel Comics has frequently found them irresistible over the decades.
Why? It’s easy to see the answer in the first such story, The Ringmaster of Death (Captain America 5, Aug. 1941).
A circus provides a superhero any number of built-in colorful challenges — lions, gorillas, elephants, acrobats, clowns, human cannonballs, the lot. And after all, superheroes owe the existence of their very costumes to the circus tradition. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon exploit the setting to full visual effect here.
Cap gets kayoed by a strong man and hurled aloft by an elephant. He performs acrobatic rescues on a trapeze, breaks a tiger’s neck and corrals the Nazi saboteur Ringmaster.
Another Circus of Crime — complete with its own hypnotically powered Ringmaster — fought the Incredible Hulk in September 1962, Spider-Man and Daredevil in September 1964, the Mighty Thor in November 1967, and Howard the Duck in June 1978.
An old West version of the Circus of Crime even turned up in Kid Colt Outlaw in September 1962, which meant that Marvel heroes were tackling two Circuses of Crime the same month!
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