Little is known of Dr. Weerd before his first documented case in the autumn of 1941. It is known that in his waking life he was Professor James Stanton, an eminent psychologist of considerable reputation, and that he had perfected a serum which, when drunk, transformed his mild person into a hulking, grotesque, ogreish brute — monstrous in form yet retaining the full measure of Stanton's scientific genius. Under the name Dr. Weerd he turned that genius wholly to crime, becoming one of the most persistent foes of the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy.

His first documented case opened when his giant robot tore the president of the Whitmore bank from his office, killed him, and looted the vault. The affair turned personal when Professor Stanton, invited with a company of fellow scholars to examine the boy prodigy Sylvester Pemberton, was publicly mocked by the youth; seething, he drank his serum and resolved on vengeance. As Weerd he abducted the Star-Spangled Kid and set his robot upon him, but the Kid marked an invisible vapor trail that let Stripesy track the lair, and a corroding chemical reduced the metal monster to rust. Weerd escaped by feigning to be the captive Professor Stanton, found cowering in a closet (Star-Spangled Comics #1).

To protect the income he drew from his slum tenements, Weerd next deployed saucer-craft that conjured destructive tornadoes against the city's new government housing projects, and kidnapped young Pemberton to silence the boy's suspicions; he was cornered atop his flying vessel and jailed (Star-Spangled Comics #2). He soon tunneled out of prison and built an illusion projector, conjuring phantom hazards — a charging train, a road that dissolved into a cliff's edge — that drove victims to apparent suicide. Headquartered in a clock tower, he loosed a lion upon the heroes, who toppled the tower upon him; presumed dead, he dug himself free and swore his life to revenge (Star-Spangled Comics #3).

His schemes then grew grander. An ionic-field tower of his design transmuted gold and silver into worthless lead, threatening to beggar the nation, and when the heroes destroyed it he escaped by parachute; weeks later he piloted a giant flying sawblade through the city toward a munitions plant, only for the Kid to wrest the machine away (Star-Spangled Comics #4). He next fired disintegrator flares from an aircraft to collapse a bridge built of Pemberton steel — meaning to ruin the mill's name — and then a skyscraper, before being run to ground in the Pemberton steelworks and knocked senseless (Star-Spangled Comics #5).