The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: scientist

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 449: DR LEECH

    (Mystery Men Comics 028, 1941)

    In addition to being a member in good standing of the Name Sounds Like It’s a Thematic Choice But Isn’t Club, Dr Leech is a charter member of the The Protagonist Just Wandered into My Place of Work Instead of Having to Do Any Detective Work to Find Me Society. When the Green Mask intercepts a clearly mind controlled bank robber he hauls him into the nearest doctor’s office, which turns out to be Dr Leech’s (possibly helped out by the fact that Leech seems to order his thralls to run directly to him with the loot).

    Mind control is insidious enough, but it turns out that Leech is using a drug called Hystodine with an unfortunate side effect – it causes his victims to become suicidal as it wears off. Talk about a jerk, am I right? Don’t worry though: he gets his.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 449: DR LEECH

    (Mystery Men Comics 028, 1941)

    In addition to being a member in good standing of the Name Sounds Like It’s a Thematic Choice But Isn’t Club, Dr Leech is a charter member of the The Protagonist Just Wandered into My Place of Work Instead of Having to Do Any Detective Work to Find Me Society. When the Green Mask intercepts a clearly mind controlled bank robber he hauls him into the nearest doctor’s office, which turns out to be Dr Leech’s (possibly helped out by the fact that Leech seems to order his thralls to run directly to him with the loot).

    Mind control is insidious enough, but it turns out that Leech is using a drug called Hystodine with an unfortunate side effect – it causes his victims to become suicidal as it wears off. Talk about a jerk, am I right? Don’t worry though: he gets his.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 003

    They may not be the top of the class, but they did their time in the evil sciences!

    Dr Eric Karlin has a lot of moxie on paper: a Nazi psychologist with a sideline in Egyptology, he dissolves the enemies of the Reich in acid and keeps their jellied remains in a series of jars in his basement. He also employs mind controlled pseudo-zombies in a scheme to recover frozen Nazi assets from a bank vault. The problem is that while all of this makes for a dynamite summary, the Blue Diamond story that he appears in is… not very good. (Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942)

    DeVaux here had a plan to grow regular guys into huge guys and use them to take over the world but made the elementary mistake of trying to kill a friend of super-magician El Carim as his literal first step toward that end – it didn’t go well. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

    I’m not sure if this guy is even a scientist, but if you’re “the worst foreign spy living” and your name is Dr Evil and your cover as you plan to blow up a NYC analog is to call yourself “Dr Live” well then I can’t help but love you, even if you do get electrocuted by extremely generic Golden Age hero Lightning. (Jumbo Comics 015, 1940)

    And speaking of Lightning, he also battled Dr Tol, who used remote stone-crumbling technology to open up banks for his gang to loot. He also had very cool goggles. (Jumbo Comics 020, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 411: SATAN REX

    (Amazing Mystery Funnies v2 011, 1939)

    We’ve all read a comic in which a scientist is rejected for his wild-but-true theories and goes a bit bonkers and criminal, but Satan Rex really went for it. Originally Eric von Hochwalt, who developed the Theory of Relativity ten years before Einstein and dealt with his subsequent rejection by disappearing into the Himalayas, founding a city full of people who worship him as a god, conquering the aging process and eventually taking a few stabs at destroying the world that wronged him, in the far-off year 2009.

    Everything Satan Rex does is over-the-top and baroque: his minions have cryptic science tattoos on their foreheads, for example.

    And his doomsday device is incorporated into the Temple of the Golden Man, the state religion of his City of the Mists. If there’s a choice to be made, Satan Rex will go with the fanciest option. He makes at least three passes at destroying the Earth and/or humanity before his heroic foil Jon Linton accidentally travels to the far corners of space and time. Did Satan Rex try again, unopposed? It shall remain a mystery!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 408: MR WHO

    (More Fun Comics 073, 1941) 

    It’s Mr Who! You know, from comics! I was very excited for this guy to turn up, as he’s one of those comic book characters I had heard about but never really read about, and… he’s okay.

    See, Mr Who was born all scrawny and seems to have been a weird kid (and to have had a shitty dad, jeez), so he channelled all of his efforts into science, and more specifically into developing a way to be big and strong and handsome. He ended up with Solution Z, a super-power drug that allowed him to alter his size and shape seemingly without limit, to recover from any injury, camouflage himself like a chameleon, etc. It’s a cool suite of powers that are somewhat undercut by his all-brown wardrobe (including cape!) accessorized with a single dark green neckerchief.

    In his first outing, Mr Who is on a campaign to steal beautiful things such as paintings and gems to surround himself with so as to leave behind his own perceived ugliness. Dr Fate gets involved and seemingly drowns him in the Hudson River for his troubles.

    But of course you can’t keep a good man with complete control over his own biology down, and Mr Who is soon making his way to shore as a highly unsettling fishman. (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

    This time out, Mr Who sets his sights on power rather than material beauty – he uses his shapeshifting abilities to kidnap and replace… a mayor. I’ll be honest: the prior issue was, like a lot of Dr Fate stories, very much set in NYC and this guy is almost certainly supposed to be a generic off-brand version of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, but they changed him just a little too much and he’s falling into the uncanny valley for me. I think this would only affect someone who spends a fair amount of time squinting at old pictures of politicians to see if they’re being alluded to in comics art but unfortunately I’m someone who does that.

    Dr Fate of course foils this plan as well but we’ll be seeing Mr Who again as the Golden Age progresses, and then he’s one of the villains that Roy Thomas brings back in All-Star Squadron. I like Mr Who – he’s a good foil for half-helmet era Dr Fate, who is more of a wisecracking roughneck than the full-face version, which means that a moderately crafty fella can outfox him for a while.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 405: THE VOICE

    (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

    “The Voice” is such a cool and evocative name that I have a real bias in favour of it but I have to say that this guy leaves me cold. Basically, he’s some sort of science man who has invented a “sound destroyer” capable of dampening all noise in an area the size of Manhattan. His crime-gambit involves employing this device and deploying sign language fluent gangsters to cause mayhem during the resultant confusion, then threatening to continue doing so until the city pays him ten million dollars. Not a bad plan but it does nothing for me.

    (He does pull the requisite guy-called-the-Voice trick of only being present vocally by faking out Green Arrow using a radio and a sheet, so there’s that)

    Ultimately though, the Voice pushes his luck one too many times and is foiled by a simple application of visual signals – flare arrows, in this case. Good riddance to bland voices, I say.

    BONUS TROPHY ROOM CONTENT: This is the second recorded adventure of Green Arrow and Speedy and the second time that they add to their trophy case, and this time it’s the sound destroyer itself! Always a more satisfying move than destroying (ha ha) the villain’s tech.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 404: THE AVENGER

    (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

    Another day, another Avenger. This Avenger is a disgruntled scientist named Mortimer Crandall who is seeking revenge on his old bosses for firing him because of his wacky scientific theories that, you guessed it, turned out to be correct. He uses his working technology to kidnap the men responsible in preparation for their murders.

    This Avenger also demonstrates a flair for comic-book style hypnosis sufficient to place the Spectre himself under his power, which is impressive even in the Golden Age, before the whole “the Spectre is literally an angel” thing.

    The Avenger ultimately fails in his bid to exact revenge and instead is given that most rare of choices for a Spectre foe: the chance to reform (with a little help from the mystic radiations of the Nebula of Truth, of course). Is it because he had genuinely been wronged? Because he had not yet taken a life? Or is the Spectre just a capricious guy? Regardless, the Avenger will venge no more.

    This issue also marks the first appearance of Spectre sidekick Percival Popp, the Super Cop and I find myself in a familiar place: here is a charming oddball character that I like, being treated like an unbearable pain by all the other characters that I like. It’s one of the more annoying literary dynamics! Hope it doesn’t stick around!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: IAN KARKULL & WOTAN 1941

    What were Ian Karkull and Wotan up to in 1941?

    Ian Karkull is my Platonic Ideal of the Median Super-Villain: he has two
    Golden Age appearances (detailed here) and a handful of post-Silver Age
    ones but also was seemingly pulled out of a hat (probably by Roy Thomas) as the villain who did some sort of scheme that blasted the Justice Society with some sort of energies that made them age slower so that otherwise normal WWII veterans like Wildcat and the Sandman could be running around fighting crime well past retirement age. It’s a Big Deal and it means that Karkull has absolutely been mentioned far more than he’s actually appeared.

    1. More Fun Comics 069, ‘Untitled’:But we’re here to talk about 1941! What was Ian Karkull up to then? Well for one thing he wasn’t calling himself ‘Ian’ yet – that was presumably added at the same time that he was revived to irradiate the JSA. Karkull was seemingly just another scientist with a cool invention – a machine that turns people into shadows! – that he is determined to use for crime.

    Surprise of the year: Karkull has if not a good reason for turning to crime then at least a reason. While exploring the lost Saharan city of Ragnor with his partner Everett Dahlen he is betrayed and left for dead so that Dahlen could run off with a huge ruby. Is it the most rock-solid reason to turn to a life of crime? No, but it’s more of an origin than most Golden Age scientists get.

    Karkull’s first outing ends with him at large, albeit trapped in shadow form by Dr Fate as a sort of ad hoc punishment that is fairly out of line with his crimes of one murder and one bank robbery. That’s the Golden Age for you, I guess.

    2. More Fun Comics 070, ‘Untitled’: Not only is Karkull back in the next issue but he brought Wotan with him!

    In a development that is only a bit surprising, Dr Fate’s slapdash brand of vigilante justice has come back to bite him. Yes, Wotan was sealed in a stony cyst for all time and Karkull was left an intangible shadow but the problem with leaving enough foes just out and about like that is that they might team up, which is exactly what happened when Wotan’s wandering astral form (something you really should control for when imprisoning magic guys for all time) met Karkull’s shadowy one and they worked together to release Wotan’s actual body, albeit without his normal green skin for some reason (the colourist forgot that he was green).

    The Wotan/ Karkull team have a plan to conquer and/or attack the nations of Earth from their Arctic base using devices that control 3/4 of the classical elements, namely Earth, Wind and Fire. They accidentally (?) draw Dr Fate’s attention by attacking nearby teams of Arctic explorers with their wind weapon, leading to an ultimate 2 vs 1 confrontation in an Arctic dome!

    In a bit of an anticlimax, Dr Fate merely sidesteps their fire weapon, causing it to rebound and kill them both. Seemingly, at least – they’ll both be back when the continuity nerds start writing comics.

    IAN KARKULL

    Body Count: 6

    End-of-Year Status: Presumed Dead

    WOTAN

    Body Count:1905

    End-of-Year Status: Presumed Dead

    (Karkull kills his enemy; Wotan and Karkull jointly kill explorers; Wotan sinks battleship)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 390: DR MAUSE

    (More Fun Comics 067-068, 1941)

    On paper I should love Dr Mause, a weird little creep who preys on Allied shipping for his legally-distinct-from-German masters using not only an “electroblast ray” but a cool floating island base, but in practise he leaves me cold. I’m glad he gets captured by Captain Desmo, see if I’m not.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 388: THE MASTER

    (More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

    The Master is… probably Russian. It’s the same as all of the “pseudo-German crypto-Nazi” characters that populate comics pre-Pearl Harbor. Reading through the vagueness, he is a scientist whose partner emigrated to the US about the time of the Russian Revolution while the Master stayed behind. Now the Master wants revenge for his partner’s success and also is gearing up to take over the world and he’s using his sonic death ray device to achieve both tasks. Or would do, if Dr Fate wasn’t around to poke his helmeted nose into things.

    By far the coolest thing about the Master is the depiction of said sonic death ray – it resembles nothing so much as an amorphous life-form, which is very cool! More of that, please!

    Oh yes, once the Master is foiled he jumps in a swamp and drowns.