The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: scientist

  • 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.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 336: ADAM ADDAMS

    (All-Flash 003, 1941)

    Like the Threat before him, Adam Addams is a revenge guy. Unlike the Threat, Addams is… I won’t say more petty, but perhaps less focused – they include the woman who didn’t marry him, the man she married instead, the man who refused to give him a medical license because he talked about glands too much, and anyone who contributed to one of his prior revenge schemes going wrong. If he has a particular focus, it’s Dr French, the man what married the woman. About half of the issue involves attempts by Addams to ruin French’s life and the other half is all about killing as many of his enemies as possible.

    Contrary to Addams’ big talk about changing your face with glandular treatments, he actually uses bog-standard rubberoid masks. Maybe they’re just easier than mutating your head every time you want to put on a disguise, because he does turn out to have the goods, gland-manipulation-wise…

    To whit, he posts up on a tropical island and mutates a herd of horses into beefcake centaurs! Centaurs who he then flies back to NYC and parachutes into Dr French’s hospital for a good old fashioned rampage, because nothing ruins a medical reputation like a centaur attack.

    Special shout out to Oats, the doofus centaur who ruins the whole operation by being too horny.

    Extra special shoutout to the unnamed and very professional centaur pilot in his little hat.

    Aside from Addams’ revenge schemes his other major interest is in recreating the hard water formula that gave the Flash his powers (because the Flash has very poor infosec and it’s trivially easy to find out where and how he did so). To that end, he kidnaps Jay Garrick’s old chemistry professor and forces him to work on finding the formula. And he finds it! Adam Addams acquires Flash-style super-speed! He gets beat up by the actual Flash because he has no fine control yet, but surely this marks a dark new day in the annals of crime!

    Not a chance. In a move that smacks of “we have to wrap up the issue now”, Addams takes his own life after the Flash foils what is frankly a medium-sized plot. It’s fairly unsatisfying, to say the least. Thankfully, I have a solution: Addams didn’t blow up, he entered the Speed Force. He can come back at any time!And I want that! I want him to be brung back! Because as uninteresting as the Speed Force and its related heroes and villains have become through proliferation it can only be improved through the application of a guy who can whip up a pack of centaurs on a month’s notice.

    ADDENDUM: I was wrong! He does change some of his henchmen’s faces via glandular treatments!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 327: DR SMART

    (Human Torch v1 005a, 1941)

    I think I’ve mentioned the old three-act super-villain story structure of yore a couple of times, but there are a whole host of old comic book story styles that have fallen by the wayside and Dr Smart here stars in one of them: the book-length heist story. 

    Three pages into our tale, Smart and his crew, posing as a funeral procession, rob an armoured car. The remaining 38 or so pages concern the efforts of the Human Torch and Toro to capture the slippery little devil because to his credit Dr Smart is a guy who reads the paper and knows that the Torch is a cop and will be guarding the money he is after.

    Dr Smart’s entire scheme hinges on anti-Torch technology: asbestos suits; grenades that explode into asbestos bindings; super-cold liquid air bombs and smokescreens; thermite ammunition that won’t melt. The capper is a duo of tricked-out hearses equipped with asbestos linings and heatproof glass – a considerable portion of the issue is spent with Toro and the Torch either locked up in the back of one or fruitlessly trying to get Dr Smart and his henchmen out of the front. Smart might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t tried to be clever and bury the heroes with the loot – it was one too many things to juggle and he got pinched.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 002

    Back again with another collection of science-villains who didn’t quite make the grade!

    Fritz Cardif here has a gunpowder-exploding ray and a lot of big plans. He probably would have made the main list except that I personally find his antics very dull, with the exception of the lil’ stinker moment pictured above. (Hit Comics 006, 1940)

    Dr Marko figured on using kidnapped scientists as research slaves in his Grand Canyon hideout, but he too was corralled by Neon the Unknown. (Hit Comics 013, 1941)

    Professor Dorn here is your typical Nazi scientist obsessed with replicating the powers of the Sub-Mariner for the glory of the cause. He ends up lasting about fifteen minutes after meeting the real deal. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941)

     Dr Sunga has a pretty good scheme going wherein he seeming kills people by sending them a cursed wand that is actually harmless – seemingly the perfect crime! But the Golden Age Falcon figures out the trick: it’s actually the box that the wand is sent in that does the killing. Sunga of course ends up dead by his own fiendish device. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 002

    Back again with another collection of science-villains who didn’t quite make the grade!

    Fritz Cardif here has a gunpowder-exploding ray and a lot of big plans. He probably would have made the main list except that I personally find his antics very dull, with the exception of the lil’ stinker moment pictured above. (Hit Comics 006, 1940)

    Dr Marko figured on using kidnapped scientists as research slaves in his Grand Canyon hideout, but he too was corralled by Neon the Unknown. (Hit Comics 013, 1941)

    Professor Dorn here is your typical Nazi scientist obsessed with replicating the powers of the Sub-Mariner for the glory of the cause. He ends up lasting about fifteen minutes after meeting the real deal. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941)

     Dr Sunga has a pretty good scheme going wherein he seeming kills people by sending them a cursed wand that is actually harmless – seemingly the perfect crime! But the Golden Age Falcon figures out the trick: it’s actually the box that the wand is sent in that does the killing. Sunga of course ends up dead by his own fiendish device. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 319: DR NARR

    (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

    Poor Dr Narr. all he wanted was to make good robots, but all he could make were terrible robots (in comics terms. Even today, bipedal, semi-autonomous robots capable of running and throwing nets etc are wildly advanced. Be less hard on yourself, Narr).

    Too bad for Narr that he chose the villain’s path: rather than reevaluating his metrics for success in a robot he kidnaps Marvex the 5th dimensional super-robot in hopes of discerning his secrets. This leads directly to his death by falling (from a window that he was attempting to push Marvex out of). The moral: don’t kidnap robots.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 318: DORK

    (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

    There’s a great temptation when dealing with an evil scientist named Dork to focus on easy, puerile humour rather than appreciating the other things that make him a good super-villain.

    I had a whole bit about how his big plan was to flood the city with white goo (hur hur) and kidnap women to experiment on their bodies but it wasn’t sustainable. Ironically, I would have had to jump through more hoops to obliquely reference his monster looking like jizz than if, as here, I just said it.

    Good costumes on the henchmen!

    This is where the joke fell apart, by the way. There was no good way to link this guy with the jizz jokes that wasn’t a huge stretch. Appreciate the cool monster, I guess.

    And then he was killed by his own jizz!

    Excuse me. He was dissolved by his own blob-monster in a classic example of irony.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 313: DR KLUTCH

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    Dr Klutch is your basic criminal scientist. His major distinction is that he got beat up by the Tough Kid Squad in their only recorded outing, but there are a couple of other points worthy of discussion here.

    The first is that we have a clear timeline for this guy. Many, many super-villains are clearly operating at a level that would require years of work to establish or have a lengthy if nebulous criminal record, but with Klutch here we know: in 1926 he murdered his research partner Dr Danger in revenge for not sharing his findings and in the subsequent 16 years he became a successful enough criminal scientist to be identified on sight by even beat cops.

    (not sure how great of a scientist he was, given that it took the entire 16 years to track down the Danger Twins, one of whom was adopted by Danger’s friend Professor Moxon – follow a few leads, buddy!)

    Point two is merely that the idea of murdering someone and then perpetually electrocuting their twitching skeleton is fairly metal.

    But the real kicker is that Klutch eventually gets ahold of Dr Danger’s serum by extracting it from the blood of Danger Twin Wally. Klutch is a super-powered criminal scientist! The serum is a bit ill-defined but the gist of it seems to be that it enhances your trained abilities, and Dr Klutch is trained in fightin’, science and EVIL.

    Sadly, the closest we get to seeing the full chemically-enhanced might of Klutch’s evil mind is a plan to rob several banks at once – mid-tier super-villainy at best, but perhaps he was working up to it. BUT, in an exciting turn of events, Klutch was captured at the end of the story, leaving the door open to my favourite potential BRUNG BACK scenario: the super-powered crook who gets out after 80+ years of cooling his heels in the klink. After all, he’s full of serum! Who knows what that does to the aging process?