The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Yarko the Great

  • 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.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 556: THE DEVIL

    (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    Maybe it’s because the MLJ version of the Devil is so fresh in my mind but… this is an underwhelming version of the Devil. He teams up with Death – and it’s a measure of how lacklustre this Devil is that I’m going to deal with the Death separately rather than treat them as a duo – to eliminate their common enemy Yarko the Great. Death does all the legwork toward this goal so we’ll discuss that later (I am however going to count them as our first Revenge Squad, one of the best things in comics).

    Aesthetically, this is a classic Devil, though one missing the trident and tail. And like many interpretations of the classic Devil, it suffers from the fact that it looks like a guy in a costume, down to the fact that the horns seem to be incorporated into a cowl rather than being organic. And that can work! I’ve seen plenty of interpretations of the purposely foppish Devil getting one over on those who underestimate him. This Devil, by contrast, has a guy named Beppo with a knife and a skin-tone shirt.

    The Devil does in fairness manage to capture Yarko by the simple expedient of having his other, non-Beppo henchman (Killer Kirby, if you must know) blindfold his magic eyes. The Devil attempts to roast Yarko alive in a special chamber but Yarko escapes by the simple expedient of wiggling his magic eyes out from under the blindfold, and any deathtrap that a guy can blink his way out of has got to be counted as a dud.

    With Yarko free, the devil is immediately

    BANISHED TO HELL

    and it says something that the coolest part of his whole endeavour is the moment that he was soundly defeated. Frankly, he might as well have been a costumed gang boss as the Prince of the Damned, and it just occurred to me how wild it would be if he was just a guy in a costume trying to put one over on Yarko and getting banished to Hades for his efforts. Real of Fake, the Devil bit off more than he could chew.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 555: SHADDIBA

    (Wonder Comics 002, 1939)

    Shaddiba appears in the first adventure of magic hero Yarko the Great as an old enemy of Yarko who has come to the town of Hexville in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. His exact reasons for doing so are unstated, so I reckon that it’s equally likely that Hexville is an especially ripe spot for crime as that he was attracted by the old haunted mansion on the hill that he moves into. Comic book expectations aside I reckon that sourcing those has to be a real estate nightmare – I’ve certainly never had the opportunity to rent one.

    Shaddiba’s dumb name also introduces the possibility that perhaps Yarko is not alone, that all magic users in this continuity have made-up nonsense monikers. It’s the only rational explanation!

    Shaddiba does a lot of mouthing off to Yarko about what a great magician he is and how much Yarko sucks and to be fair Yarko is unable to break the mental hold that Shaddiba has on several locals in order to compel them to rob and murder (as well as on a local woman because he is a creep), but this is definitely classified as hubris.

    The fact that Shaddiba lambastes Yarko for intruding on the “sacred arts” of the “magic of the East” and then immediately invokes Lucifer as the source of his power is weird.

    The disagreement between the two magicians comes to a head in an all-out astral smackdown. A lot of the astral battling that we’ve seen so far (e.g., the one in this Mr Justice episode) has been quite quick-and-dirty decisive, so it’s neat to see these fellows really get into it.

    Shaddiba surrenders rather than be flung into the Chasm of Oblivion but if there’s one trait almost universally shared by super-villains it’s being a sore loser and so he blows himself to smithereens rather than live with the consequences of his actions.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 015

    Once again we take you to the world of the minor super-hero. See them dance for your amusement. 

    the Mystic: 

    Later known as Kardak the Mystic, the Mystic is a stage magician who uses stage magic to battle crime, specializing in fraudulent mediums etc. His stage magic eventually gets rounded up to real magic, of course. (Top-Notch Comics 001, 1939)

    the Phantom o’ the Hills:

    The Phantom o’ the Hills is an otherwise unnamed masked cowboy who rights wrongs in the Old West. In his first adventure he avenges the death of his younger brother but whether that’s what got him into the vigilante game is not elaborated on. The only real thing that sets him apart from the ranks of other similar characters is his better-than-average name. (Western Picture Stories 001, 1937)

    Wonder Man:

    For all that (by some accounts) Will Eisner was explicitly told to make a Superman clone when he made him for Fox Features (and that DC successfully sued Fox into canning him), Wonder Man is only kind of like Superman. Maybe it’s my modern image of what Superman is like but he’s just a strong guy who jumps around catching artillery shells and beating up warmongers. Plus he gets his powers from a magic Tibetan ring! Plus he’s blonde! (Wonder Comics 001, 1939)

    Yarko the Great:

    There are three major things to know about Yarko the Great: 

    1. He’s a magic-slinging hero in the classic mold, i.e., an American who has learned the secrets of the Far East and turned them to a career in stage magic/ crimefighting.

    2. Like a lot of early Fox Features characters he was created by Will Eisner so his adventures tend to look pretty great.

    3. “Yarko the Great” is – and this is an informed opinion – categorically the worst name that any magic-using Golden Age hero was saddled with. 

    (Wonder Comics 002, 1939)

    Yarko UPDATE 1940

    *UPDATE* the Flame *UPDATE*:

    Just wish to draw everyone’s attentions to the really boss custom-painted boat that the Flame was tooling around in during his first adventure. Plus he had a butler named Jarvis! (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    **DOUBLE UPDATE**

    And he has a plane! (Wonderworld Comics 004, 1939)