Get ready for a collection of MLJ’s finest racially-problematic villains. Yen Fat Sing: Yen Fat Sing’s deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang’s charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He’s a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of…
The looming spectre of a grinning, skeletal Death is an important storytelling device in comics, and here at the Curse of Skeleton Munroe we celebrate skeletons and their contributions to society, and so I present a small collection of looming Deaths that will surely grow large with time (issue numbers in hover text):
Some day these won’t inevitably start with Hitler. Some day. Adolf Hitler: Rix, a human living on Venus in the peaceful year 3090 CE, learns about dictators thanks to the time capsule from the 1939 New York World’s Fair and immediately sets out to make himself into the Hitler of the future. Beat down by interplanetary troubleshooter Planet Payson. (Planet Comics 008, 1940) Aviator Ted O’Neil is brought down in the warlike nation of Gestapia (one of the more on-the-nose…
(Science Comics 008, 1940) The Wrecker is a very good example of how a good name can elevate a project out from the ordinary. Comics books are full of corporate extortion schemes – it’s one of the classic scheme types for a reason. You can ramp the threat to life up or down with ease depending on just what is being sabotaged and likewise there are opportunities for big action setpieces as buildings or other corporate infrastructure are targeted. But…
(Science Comics 007, 1940) Perisphere Payne, futureman of the year 2000, has his work cut out for him when six Earth battle rockets go missing and then subsequently attack their home planet! And upon defeating their seemingly traitorous crews, Payne discovers that they are being remotely mind controlled via a chunky black box stuck to each of their backs in a place that looks like it would be pretty annoying to live with. Good thing they’re mind controlled and presumably…
(Science Comics 006, 1940) In the Science Comics 005, Dynamo develops his Brain-Wave Trap helmet which allows him to read the minds of everyone on Earth. Now, only one issue later, we discover that the range of this device is in fact interstellar, and furthermore that Dynamo can travel to other stars, as he receives a call for help from King Berin of Betelguese (sic) and gets himself there almost instantly – that’s somewhere between four and six hundred light…
(Science Comics 005, 1940) Professor Meier, a scientist, seeks to conquer the world by unleashing an ever-growing horde of mutated life forms from his jungle HQ. This is all pretty regular stuff and he probably would have been tossed into the regular science round-up, only there are a couple of fun things that Meier brings to the table that I would like to highlight. First off, the mutated beasts themselves are a pretty fun design, a sort of lion/monkey/caveman/eagle chimera,…
Secret Knowledge: This is mostly me not wanting to sign up for a Fandom account but confidential to the Dickie Dean page on the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki: -Dickie Dean is said to be 14 in the splash blurb of his first appearance in Silver Streak Comics 003 -in the same story he receives a telegram from J Edgar Hoover in which he is addressed as Richard -in Silver Streak Comics 006 he is addressed as “Richard Bruce Dean”…
(Science Comics 005, 1940) En route to the court of King Neptune to deliver a new invention to him, Navy Jones and Princess Coral find themselves the prisoner of a heinous-looking clarinet-playing mermaid who looks a lot like something out of a 19th Century political cartoon. I’ll be honest here: while the Sea-Witch is a notable-enough villain to cover here, the real attraction of this comic is that it all looks like an outsider art fever dream. The Grand Comics…
(Science Comics 004, 1940) Perisphere Payne, a kind of outer space troubleshooter (whose name, by the way, was meant to sound cool and futuristic but because the Perisphere was one of the cool and futuristic building-mascots of the 1939 World’s Fair is in fact equivalent to someone today calling themselves Crystal Palace Collins, Parthenon Pete, or indeed Perisphere Payne) gets a wild alert on his televizo one day: the entire city of Freeton has been levitated off the surface of…