The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Yarko the Great

  • DIVINE ROUND-UP 017

    You’ll never believe it: more gods. 

    the Serpent Gods: 

    While pursuing crook Rango in the African jungle, Yarko the Great comes across a couple being sacrificed to the Serpent Gods by being flung into a pit of sacred serpents. But are the serpents the Serpent Gods themselves? There is no further context given, so we must assume that they are.

    God style: Animist (Wonderworld Comics 015, 1940) 

    Gorm: 

    Gorm is the god of the villainous Hatchet Cult, a gang that the Flash encounters early in his career, but since the Hatchet Cult is made up of white gangsters surgically made to look Chinese in order to throw the authorities off of their trail, one must assume that Gorm is just another part of the ruse (though for who’s benefit these guys are praying is a mystery to me).

    God Style: Idol (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) 

    the Great God Orrab: 

    The Great God Orrab is yet another idol to which Our Heroes are almost sacrificed, ho hum. The interesting thing about this particular god, however, is that the hero in question is Blaze Barton, which placed Orrab in the year 50033 CE or thereabouts, and makes it very possible that his worshippers are in fact post-apocalyptic remnants worshipping the equivalent of a McDonaldland statue.

    God Style: Idol (Hit Comics 009, 1941)

    Hu, the Horse God: 

    Adventurer Lance Larkin and a lady named Marsha are looking for the “Land of the Flying Dragons” in Siberia, and wouldn’t you know it, they find it! And there are flying dragons (well, “pterodactyls”) there! There are also caveman-style Ape-Men riding the dragons, who swiftly capture Lance and Marsha and take them to be sacrificed at the altar of Hu, the Horse God. It is only the arrival of Lance’s loyal steed Satan, taken to be an earthly avatar of Hu, that saves the two.

    So just why do a bunch of cavemen who ride flying reptiles and have never seen a horse in their lives have a horse as their god? Because hundreds of thousands of years ago when they came to this prehistoric enclave they had horses and those horses saved them from disaster somehow. This inspired the reverence, but didn’t stop the horses from eventually dying out, which then inspired the taming of the “pterodactyls”.

    God-Style: Idol (More Fun Comics 067, 1941) 

  • DIVINE ROUND-UP 017

    DIVINE ROUND-UP 017

    You’ll never believe it: more gods. 

    the Serpent Gods: 

    While pursuing crook Rango in the African jungle, Yarko the Great comes across a couple being sacrificed to the Serpent Gods by being flung into a pit of sacred serpents. But are the serpents the Serpent Gods themselves? There is no further context given, so we must assume that they are.

    God style: Animist (Wonderworld Comics 015, 1940) 

    Gorm: 

    Gorm is the god of the villainous Hatchet Cult, a gang that the Flash encounters early in his career, but since the Hatchet Cult is made up of white gangsters surgically made to look Chinese in order to throw the authorities off of their trail, one must assume that Gorm is just another part of the ruse (though for who’s benefit these guys are praying is a mystery to me).

    God Style: Idol (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) 

    the Great God Orrab: 

    The Great God Orrab is yet another idol to which Our Heroes are almost sacrificed, ho hum. The interesting thing about this particular god, however, is that the hero in question is Blaze Barton, which placed Orrab in the year 50033 CE or thereabouts, and makes it very possible that his worshippers are in fact post-apocalyptic remnants worshipping the equivalent of a McDonaldland statue.

    God Style: Idol (Hit Comics 009, 1941)

    Hu, the Horse God: 

    Adventurer Lance Larkin and a lady named Marsha are looking for the “Land of the Flying Dragons” in Siberia, and wouldn’t you know it, they find it! And there are flying dragons (well, “pterodactyls”) there! There are also caveman-style Ape-Men riding the dragons, who swiftly capture Lance and Marsha and take them to be sacrificed at the altar of Hu, the Horse God. It is only the arrival of Lance’s loyal steed Satan, taken to be an earthly avatar of Hu, that saves the two.

    So just why do a bunch of cavemen who ride flying reptiles and have never seen a horse in their lives have a horse as their god? Because hundreds of thousands of years ago when they came to this prehistoric enclave they had horses and those horses saved them from disaster somehow. This inspired the reverence, but didn’t stop the horses from eventually dying out, which then inspired the taming of the “pterodactyls”.

    God-Style: Idol (More Fun Comics 067, 1941) 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 865: HANS VON LUNDBERG

    (Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

    Our story begins in a very economical way, as Yarko the Great hears about a great plague ravaging Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania, if you must know) and determines that it merits his attention enough to teleport directly to the scene. 

    Yarko uses his mental powers to trace the source of the disease to a very Transylvanian-looking spooky castle that is not explicitly said to either be or to not be in Tanganyika so I guess we must assume that it is there because that is the more interesting version. Venturing inside, he encounters the spirit of Pestilence, a very sassy character who reveals the following amazing facts:

    a. the plague has been caused by the efforts of Hans von Lundberg, aka the Mad Archaeologist, who presumably dug up a sample of it in a tomb or something. This is a real win for the mad social sciences!

    b. the plague is called the Curse of Hecate, which is bad ass.

    c. Pestilence is there because he is von Lundberg’s slave, but whether this is literal and the Mad Archaeologist is doing some mystical disease shit or more of a metaphorical thing because he is responsible for so many plague-deaths is not clarified. 

    Yarko finally meets von Lundberg after he is captured by some very culturally-insensitive goons (who add weight to the idea of the castle being in Africa in the most unfortunate manner) and contrary to Pestilence’s assertions that he is more powerful than the magician ends up dealing with him pretty handily. Perhaps when you are the personification of infectious disease your value system is weighted more toward how much plague someone has spread than any other measure of worth.

    Though Yarko could presumably just vaporize von Lundberg with his majicks, he chooses to employ the services of his old enemy Death (not looking quite as dapper as he used to, if I may say so) to do the deed, possibly because this symbolically frees Pestilence from service and thus abates the plague via sympathetic magic. Or something like that. As this is the Yarko the Great version of Death who just loves to harvest the souls of the living he has to be reverse psycologied into it a bit, but he eventually takes the bait/ the archaeologist. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 864: THE BLOODY BARON

    (Wonderworld Comics 010, 1940)

    The Bloody Baron was once Karek, Baron of the Duchy of Morziava, somewhere in the spooky part of Eastern Europe. Nine Hundred plus years ago he went off to war and came back a woman-killing creep and so his people burned him at the stake. Ever since, he’s been rising from the dead and carrying off a woman per year – that’s at least eight hundred women as of the story we’re talking about!

    Yarko the Great is passing through Morziava when he runs into the Albert Deach, the son of an old friend, and his Morziavan fiance Sonya Miran. They collectively seek shelter for the night in a nearby castle and have the bad luck to find the Bloody Baron and his cadre of ghostly knights, who grab Sonya and spirit her off to the Valley of Shadows, which is either a euphemism for the underworld or a location in the underworld, take your pick.

    Yarko of course pursues, using the Baron’s own sword as a link to his spirit and then later as a weapon to stab the ghostly knights with.

    The Baron is made of sterner stuff than his subordinate ghosts, and Yarko’s magic is hampered by being in the underworld. but this doesn’t prove to be a problem, because the Baron has spent eight centuries generating an army of vengeful spirits and is completely unprepared to deal with any sort of ghost-on-ghost violence. Yarko only has to summon three dagger-wielding women before he is completely destroyed and descends to some sort of lower underworld yet. The people of Morziava are finally free!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 864: THE BLOODY BARON

    (Wonderworld Comics 010, 1940)

    The Bloody Baron was once Karek, Baron of the Duchy of Morziava, somewhere in the spooky part of Eastern Europe. Nine Hundred plus years ago he went off to war and came back a woman-killing creep and so his people burned him at the stake. Ever since, he’s been rising from the dead and carrying off a woman per year – that’s at least eight hundred women as of the story we’re talking about!

    Yarko the Great is passing through Morziava when he runs into the Albert Deach, the son of an old friend, and his Morziavan fiance Sonya Miran. They collectively seek shelter for the night in a nearby castle and have the bad luck to find the Bloody Baron and his cadre of ghostly knights, who grab Sonya and spirit her off to the Valley of Shadows, which is either a euphemism for the underworld or a location in the underworld, take your pick.

    Yarko of course pursues, using the Baron’s own sword as a link to his spirit and then later as a weapon to stab the ghostly knights with.

    The Baron is made of sterner stuff than his subordinate ghosts, and Yarko’s magic is hampered by being in the underworld. but this doesn’t prove to be a problem, because the Baron has spent eight centuries generating an army of vengeful spirits and is completely unprepared to deal with any sort of ghost-on-ghost violence. Yarko only has to summon three dagger-wielding women before he is completely destroyed and descends to some sort of lower underworld yet. The people of Morziava are finally free!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 562: THE HARBINGERS OF DEATH

    (Wonderworld Comics 008, 1939)

    As part of Yarko the Great’s second encounter with Death, he and the hapless Madame Punai journeyed to a sort of pastiche underworld (e.g., their journey took them through the Biblical Valley of Death but also involved this unnamed boatman ferrying them across the River Styx). And as with any good underworld pastiche there are some allegorical foes to get past before their goal is reached – the Harbingers of Death!

    Like I said, these guys are allegorical demon guardians, so there isn’t much more to them than the expression of their allegory. First Pain, aka Burning Pain, appears to crush Yarko to his burning body. Good allegory! Pain can overwhelm you – though in a more in-depth work perhaps Yarko would be left with a burn or other lingering reminder of this battle rather than walking away unscathed after hurling pain into the abyss.

    Fear appears next, and I really appreciate that he himself is a fearful creature rather than the more common monstrous fear-beasts that inflict fear by being big and spiky. Like Pain, Fear cannot stand up to Yarko’s overwhelming machismo and slinks back into the shadows from whence it came.

    Finally, Horror is a master of the jump scare and as someone who is particularly vulnerable to that tool of the filmmaker’s art I really appreciate seeing him (them?) be flung off a cliff, probably not to their doom due to being a demon but at the very least to their major inconvenience.

    And there you have it: three lil’ henchmen, three anthropomorphic personifications, three notches in Yarko the Great’s belt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 561: LAILANI, QUEEN OF THE VALLEY

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 561: LAILANI, QUEEN OF THE VALLEY

    (Wonderworld Comics 006, 1939)

    It’s another Yarko the Great adventure! This time we find Yarko and his companion Li Wan journeying to the isolated Valley of the Moon in Tibet, in search of the fabled Hoshai Plant, which bleeds human blood. And they find it, growing in pools of “moulten lava”! They are also immediately captured by bow-wielding women.

    Yarko and the weirdly misogynistic Li Wan are marched back to the women’s cave/ palace HQ, where they meet Lailani, Queen of the Valley and learn that she and her followers are all vampires, the unstated implication being that they farm the Hoshai Plant for blood, and here I have to admit that I have a lot of sympathy for the vampires in this here story? Obviously they are framed as villains but if you are an isolated matriarchal society and a white dude rocks up looking for your rare goods I think you’re perfectly within your rights to dungeon them immediately.

    Also they look really cool and I want that on the record.

    (I can’t tell if that vampire in green is a statue of if it’s a trick of perspective or she’s supposed to be really big. Like, she’s a vampire, maybe that’s one of her vampire powers)

    They try to sacrifice Yarko in the fire pit and then shoot him with and arrow and of course hes a dick about it all. Probably because they’re  women.

    Conventional methods of execution having failed, Lailani engages Yarko in an hours-long mental battle that of course ends in a victory for Yarko and being blasted into a withered husk for Lailani. Yarko and his pal escape and in an unusually merciful move for the intrepid explorers in this kind of situation do not commit casual genocide but instead merely seal the mouth of the vampires’ cave behind them as they flee. Yes, somewhere in the world of Yarko the Great this cool society of nigh-identical vampire women persists, led by an old shrivelled prune.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 561: LAILANI, QUEEN OF THE VALLEY

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 561: LAILANI, QUEEN OF THE VALLEY

    (Wonderworld Comics 006, 1939)

    It’s another Yarko the Great adventure! This time we find Yarko and his companion Li Wan journeying to the isolated Valley of the Moon in Tibet, in search of the fabled Hoshai Plant, which bleeds human blood. And they find it, growing in pools of “moulten lava”! They are also immediately captured by bow-wielding women.

    Yarko and the weirdly misogynistic Li Wan are marched back to the women’s cave/ palace HQ, where they meet Lailani, Queen of the Valley and learn that she and her followers are all vampires, the unstated implication being that they farm the Hoshai Plant for blood, and here I have to admit that I have a lot of sympathy for the vampires in this here story? Obviously they are framed as villains but if you are an isolated matriarchal society and a white dude rocks up looking for your rare goods I think you’re perfectly within your rights to dungeon them immediately.

    Also they look really cool and I want that on the record.

    (I can’t tell if that vampire in green is a statue of if it’s a trick of perspective or she’s supposed to be really big. Like, she’s a vampire, maybe that’s one of her vampire powers)

    They try to sacrifice Yarko in the fire pit and then shoot him with and arrow and of course hes a dick about it all. Probably because they’re  women.

    Conventional methods of execution having failed, Lailani engages Yarko in an hours-long mental battle that of course ends in a victory for Yarko and being blasted into a withered husk for Lailani. Yarko and his pal escape and in an unusually merciful move for the intrepid explorers in this kind of situation do not commit casual genocide but instead merely seal the mouth of the vampires’ cave behind them as they flee. Yes, somewhere in the world of Yarko the Great this cool society of nigh-identical vampire women persists, led by an old shrivelled prune.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 560: VLADIM

    (Wonderworld Comics 005, 1939) 

    Our hero, Yarko the Great, is driving along a country lane outside London when his travels are interrupted by a bestial figure who runs out of a nearby castle and immediately drops dead. While Yarko is examining the body a monocled creep emerges from some nearby bushes Homer Simpson-style to introduce himself as “Vladim, a genius!” For me, this is exciting, because he shares his somewhat-unusual name with the seldom-mentioned, never-seen airplane designer of the Blackhawk Squadron and you better believe I think about that guy more than most people (just how these two characters created by Will Eisner came to share a name is a mystery for the ages).  

    As any self-proclaimed genius would, Vlamir brings Yarko to his underground sanctum to show off his magical experiments and I just want to emphasize something about his setup: beneath his castle is a series of bridges and staircases seemingly to the scale of Moradin in the first Lord of the Rings movie, yet his magical laboratory is housed in a room the size of a large bathroom and furnished with one (1) light, one (1) art and one (1) large skull-themed throne.

    Also please note that the initial view of the throne was out of proportion for dramatic effect and that the actual placement of the skull ensures that unless it is made of plush velvet, that sucker is going to be wildly uncomfortable to sit in for any length of time. This as much as the fact that Vladim has trapped a woman in a fire pit using a voodoo doll has me convinced that he’s just started out on the road of dark magic and is indulging his every whim – a more experienced villain would know the long-term importance of good lumbar support.

    Yarko of course has little trouble dealing with a dilettante like Vladim: in short order he frees the girl, turns a bestial henchman back on his creator and kind of kills Vladim. If hounding a man along a narrow bridge with an image of your own floating head until he slips on his own knife and falls into the murky depths of his basement can be counted as killing a guy. Which I suppose it can.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 557: DEATH

    (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    Like I said in the Devil’s entry yesterday: Death and the Devil have teamed up as a sort of Yarko the Great Revenge Squad because Yarko saves so many live and souls, respectively. I also mentioned that Death did all of the legwork toward getting Yarko just where they wanted him, and here that is: Death kills a seemingly random London man then delivers him to the police, leaving only a calling card behind.

    The discovery that the calling card’s address was that of a cemetery is enough to convince Inspector Drake of Scotland Yard that this is a case for Yarko the Great, and… obviously Drake is right because even the most well-trained officer is going to have a hard time dealing with Death himself, but have some gumption, man. Try to track down where the card was printed or something before abdicating all responsibility.

    Yarko makes his way to Death and the Devil’s Limehouse lair, where he is promptly captured, put in a deathtrap, escapes and banishes the Devil back to the netherworld. Death takes more of a background role in this latter part of the adventure, but that’s okay because he looks great – mostly quite cool but a bit sleazy too, because this ain’t your regular Death, this is Bad Boy Death.

    In the end, the Devil having been vanquished, Death just leaves. Yarko can’t actually affect him, and there’s even some hinting that the man in the car was not killed so much as dies naturally and was just used as bait, which implies that Death has no way of affecting someone who isn’t about to die anyway. He does kill a reluctant henchman who refuses to go up against Yarko, but maybe he was about to die too – working for the Devil has to be a dangerous profession, right?

    Death returns in Wonderworld Comics 008 after a Madame Punjai finds the creatively-named Golden Amulet, which compels his service. Punjai is obsessed with her lost youth and beauty and because of this commands Death to kill the young and beautiful Carla Dennis, a former passing acquaintance. This is done seemingly on a whim? There’s no real exploration of Madame Punjai’s plans, whether toward regaining her lost youth or revenging herself on the beautiful women of the world.

    Yarko the Great of course becomes involved in these shenanigans and the more-hapless-than-evil Madame Punjai is tricked into trading her life for that of Carla’s. Death is again cheesed off about this. BUT WHY IS HE? He’s going to get basically everyone eventually, even in a comic book world with immortals and so forth. Why care? Is this a Discworld style Death who gets into human roles like hobbies? Maybe.