JUST IMAGINE! December 1958: The Four Faces of the Jackal

For years, I assumed that the Batman villain King Tut, played with scenery-chewing relish by Victor Buono, was original to the TV series.
But I was wrong.
Consider Detective Comics 262 (Dec. 1958), which introduced the criminal mastermind Jackal-Head. He’s described by comics historian Jeff Rovin as “…a cunning criminal, his identity concealed by a jackal-headed mask of Anubis, ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, who commits a series of spectacular ‘underground crimes’ — crimes which, in keeping with Anubis’s fabled role as ‘emperor of the underworld,’ take place either underground or underwater.”
The mysterious Jackal-Head seems to be Dr. Coombs, the mentally troubled Gotham City Museum Egyptologist who discovered the mask in an ancient temple. But when Batman and Robin finally trace Jackal-Head to his underwater lair, he proves to be Coombs’ assistant Gibson.
“When I realized how obsessed Dr. Coombs was with his book on Anubis, I planned to hide my identity and blame the thefts on him,” Gibson explains. “Eventually, I intended to retire with my loot.”
After capturing Gibson, Batman adds a replica of the jackal mask to his Batcave trophy room.

King Tut — introduced on April 13, 1966, in the episode The Curse of Tut — is a mild-mannered Yale Egyptology professor, William McElroy, who comes to think he is the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamen after being hit in the head with a brick at a peace rally. Naturally, he intends to rule Gotham City. Wikipedia notes that the role “…was one of Buono’s favorites because he was delighted at being able to overact without restraint.”
Buono also played the villainous Mr. Memory in the unsold Dick Tracy pilot made by the Batman TV producers, as well as Mr. Schubert, the arch-foe of The Man from Atlantis.
So King Tut is essentially Jackal-Head minus the impersonation angle and the mask (a fact for which Buono was undoubtedly grateful. For obvious reasons, actors tend to hate masks).
Batman fought a different masked foe called the Jackal in Batman 157 (Aug. 1963) — a caped, green-costumed scavenger who steals the ill-gotten gains of other criminals in the story The Villain of the Year. Like King Tut but unlike Jackal-Head, this one is in fact mentally unbalanced and suffers from a split personality. He’s really crime reporter Hal Lake.
And if all that’s not complicated enough, back in Batman 33 (March 1946) Batman battled a criminal mastermind called the Jackal who looted the scene of natural disasters, having stolen an advanced seismograph that could pinpoint the time and location of impending earthquakes. That villain and his gang plunged to their deaths in a quake fissure.
A fitting end for their kind.

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