Nothing is known of the Eel before his sole recorded case in the summer of 1942 when he work as caretaker of the private aquarium on the Aylesworth estate. Extended study of his charges — the electric eel above all — had furnished both the name and the methods of his criminal alter ego. Styling himself the Eel, he became, for a single night, among the most slippery foes the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy ever faced.

His first documented crime began when he slipped through an upstairs window into the Aylesworth mansion during the coming-out party of the debutante Susan Aylesworth — an affair the disguised Sylvester Pemberton was attending — and, descending the grand staircase, demanded the guests’ jewels. When a detective lunged at him he loosed a stinging electric shock, boasting that electric eels sting, and when the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy answered the alarm, the oily film coating his body and his boneless, wriggling ease let him squirm from every grip. Brought down for a moment by a flung strand of steelite, he still dove through a window and escaped — though not before secretly dropping the stolen diamond necklace into water, where the submerged gems lay all but invisible.

Reasoning that the Eel had fled empty-handed and would return for the hidden necklace, the heroes lay in wait at the estate — joined, unbidden, by the Pembertons’ adopted orphan Breezy, who had stowed away. The Eel came back, his rubbery frame squirting free of Stripesy’s grasp, and drew a gun; Breezy hurtled down from a balcony to upset him, but the Eel recovered both the necklace, fishing it from the water, and his pistol, bound the heroes, and set a fire to kill them before fleeing with the boy. The Kid smothered the flames beneath an overturned wastebasket, the pair shattered their chairs to break free, and a clue Breezy had scratched into the carpet — the letters A, Q, U — led them to the estate’s aquarium. There the Eel, unmasked as the caretaker Lyman, tried to drown the boy in the octopus tank; a fish hurled into his face by the Kid sent him toppling into the tank himself, and the heroes pulled him out and handed him to the police (World’s Finest Comics #6).

Whether the Eel undertook any further casework after his capture is unknown.