The Snake

A cunning murderer, clad in a scaly, yellow, orange-spotted costume resembling the skin of a giant snake, who kills his victims with double-pronged lances tipped with the venom of a deadly serpent. He is in reality Bill Chantey, the foreman of the Allerton Construction Company’s Holloway Tunnel project, and a longtime collector of snakes, whose bitterness at being repeatedly passed over for promotion (“For years I slaved to make the Allerton Construction Company a success, and yet it was always others who got the big promotions. I vowed to ruin the company at any cost!”) leads him to brutally murder several of his company’s sandhogs before he is finally hospitalized after being accidentally bitten by one of his own poisonous snakes during a climactic confrontation with Superman (S No. 18/4, Sep/Oct 1942: “The Snake”). (TGSB)