The Painter Of A Thousand Perils! * 1ST APPEARANCE of "The PAINTER" (Wilhelm Van Vile)
With the Human Torch cracking down on "Scar" Tobin's crime operations, Tobin has become desperate to find a way of dispose of the Torch once and for all. He ended up hiring the Painter, a former counterfeiter who was caught by the Human Torch when the Torch noticed that his counterfeits had obvious flaws. The Painter has a set of paints that turned whatever he painted into reality.
The Painter explained that when he escaped from prison he had found a secret cavern where he found hieroglyphics from an alien race explaining how the paints left behind work. The Painter then used his paints to create various traps to try and stop the Torch. His final plan involved creating fakes of the other members of the Fantastic Four to lure the Torch into a room where he is seemingly destroyed by a grenade.
However the Torch managed to avoid his fate because he realized that he was dealing with fakes when he noticed several flaws in the Painter's "artwork" including that none of the other FF members had the famous Fantastic Four insignia on their uniforms. Tracking the Painter back to Tobin's lair, the Torch burned all the paints and took all the criminals to jail where the Torch revealed to the Painter how he saw through his traps.
