The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: scientist

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 251: BOMB-BABY SATHAN

    (Flash Comics v1 020, 1941)

    An absolutely ordinary criminal scientist villain completely overshadowed by his criminal rival Big Frenchy in this adventure. Sathan has at-the-time fantastically futuristic guided missile tech, as well as one of my personal favourite bits of super-villain utility tech: the communications cut-in, via which he extorts money from banks lest they get hit by guided missiles.

    The only reason Sathan hasn’t been relegated to the Criminal and Mad Scientist Roundup queue is this here henchman’s inspired nickname game. Bomb-Baby Sathan is a Grant Morrison Making Up a Sixties Villain in the Nineties-style name and it’s genuinely joyful to encounter it in a Golden Age comic.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 251: BOMB-BABY SATHAN

    (Flash Comics v1 020, 1941)

    An absolutely ordinary criminal scientist villain completely overshadowed by his criminal rival Big Frenchy in this adventure. Sathan has at-the-time fantastically futuristic guided missile tech, as well as one of my personal favourite bits of super-villain utility tech: the communications cut-in, via which he extorts money from banks lest they get hit by guided missiles.

    The only reason Sathan hasn’t been relegated to the Criminal and Mad Scientist Roundup queue is this here henchman’s inspired nickname game. Bomb-Baby Sathan is a Grant Morrison Making Up a Sixties Villain in the Nineties-style name and it’s genuinely joyful to encounter it in a Golden Age comic.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 250: THE HOOD

    (Flash Comics v1 019, 1941)

    Hey, it’s the Hood! I’ll be honest: I thought that the Hood was one of those super-villain names like the Masked Man that was super common and that we already had one or more guys with this name but here we are, 250 villains in and welcoming our first.

    The Hood is Pratt Palmer, and he’s a bog standard scientist-villain of type A: scientist who develops some astonishing new tech and turns it to crime (type B is of course the scientist who turns to crime after being rejected by the hidebound academics they go to for approval, while type C is your classic mad scientist meddling where humanity ought not to).


    So yes, Pratt Palmer fakes his own death, forms a gang and is almost immediately captured by Hawkman. There’s not much to recommend about him other than his fun bombastic villainspeak, which he really nails off the bat.

    The really interesting thing about Hawkman’s encounter with the Hood is his tech, which he calls Cold Light, and which functions as a kind of energy blob that wanders around semi-autonomously when not being directed. They don’t really explore it much but I reckon that it’s pretty cool. More weird tech in comics!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 245: SATANA

    (Flash Comics v1 013, 1941)

     I am torn on Satana! Torn verily in twain!

    My standard critique of a comic book scientist-villain is that they would have been better off using their tech in a non-crime endeavor, but Satana is a brilliant and pioneering young surgeon living in 1941 and given what I know about the history of women in science I think it’s fair to say that if she had decided to make a go of it in academia then there’s a decent chance that all her research would have been stolen by some dude and she might have gotten credit years after her death, if ever. Also, her signature breakthrough involves transplanting human brains (and eyes!) into tigers, which while groundbreaking might be a hard sell to the ethics committee.

    On the other hand, her crime scheme is very bad. In short: she extorts rich men with threats of harm, then gets work as an entertainer called Satana the Tiger Girl at rich guy parties and has her tigers kill the ones that don’t pay up. She only does it once before getting caught by Hawkman, that we know of, but even if she varied the method by which the tiger was introduced to the rich guy, it’s not a sustainable business model. Stylish, yes, but not sustainable.

    Perhaps the best part of the story is when Hawkman comes across a couple of tigers engaging in humanlike behaviors and it nearly drives him insane, like he’s an HP Lovecraft character. Human habits like… sitting near a newspaper and holding a pipe in their mouth. 

    They kinda hint at a return appearance for Satana at the end of the story but she doesn’t actually come back until 2004, in the same Hawkman story that brought back the Thought Terror. She’s a substantially different character by that point, with ties to the Ultra-Humanite and a focus on making humanoid animals via genetic modification. I’ll revisit her when and if I manage to keep doing this long enough to get to that era. It’s good that they brought her back! She’s a fun character!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 239: DR BRINE

    (Flash Comics v1 008, 1940)

    Dr Brine should be in the soon-to-be-unveiled first roundup of minor mad and criminal scientists who don’t quite qualify as super-villains. He’s a guy in a purple pin-stripe suit who has a plan to steal a bunch of submarines and then profit from that somehow. There are two very important reasons for his inclusion here:

    1. He’s either a guy who named himself Dr Brine after getting into the submarine piracy game or (even better) he’s a guy who was named Jared Brine or similar and the souped up nominative determinism of the DCU steered him through grad school and right into a job hijacking submarines.

    2. His evil science specialty is that he figured outa way to make his henchmen semi-amphibious, and that the method in question, seen above, is that they must go raw vegan. 

    10/10 top-tier crime scientist, no notes. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 239: DR BRINE

    (Flash Comics v1 008, 1940)

    Dr Brine should be in the soon-to-be-unveiled first roundup of minor mad and criminal scientists who don’t quite qualify as super-villains. He’s a guy in a purple pin-stripe suit who has a plan to steal a bunch of submarines and then profit from that somehow. There are two very important reasons for his inclusion here:

    1. He’s either a guy who named himself Dr Brine after getting into the submarine piracy game or (even better) he’s a guy who was named Jared Brine or similar and the souped up nominative determinism of the DCU steered him through grad school and right into a job hijacking submarines.

    2. His evil science specialty is that he figured outa way to make his henchmen semi-amphibious, and that the method in question, seen above, is that they must go raw vegan. 

    10/10 top-tier crime scientist, no notes. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 231: UNA CATHAY

    (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

    Big fan of Una Cathay! The criminal scientist-type super-villains that you get in the Golden Age could get a little samey after a while – even if they all had their individual weirnesses, they were all of a common stripe – and it’s amazing how fresh a well put-together lady-villain makes the old tropes seem. 

    Una’s main deal was extracting the secret of eternal life from a young scientist named Dick Blendon who, unfortunately for her, was an old college pal of Carter “Hawkman” Hall.

    Like our old pal the Lord of Life, Una’s preferred technique was to administer to her victims a drug that simulated death and then grave-rob their bodies and pretend that she was bringing them back from the dead instead of reviving them. Unlike the Lord of Life, she kept her faux revenants in big jars that she claimed to be full of life-sustaining fluid. Love love love a guy in a big jar with his head poking out. Amazing visuals.

    Una also brings a kind of ambiguously ethnic element to her villainy, which of course means that she has voodoo powers that she nearly manages to kill Hawkman with except that Shiera somehow knows the warning signs of an incipient voodoo execution and saves his ass.

    Everything comes crashing down for Una Cathay after that: Hawkman lets all of the men out of their jars, her pal Count Torgoff falls off a roof while trying to stab Hawkman to death and she herself dies in a Hawkman-caused car accident. It’s almost like you shouldn’t turn to violent crime in your search for immortality, lest violence be meted back unto ye. Or something!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 230: ALEXANDER THE GREAT

    (Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

    On the one hand, Alexander the Great is your standard criminal scientist with an ego as big as his great big head who tries to extort the city of New York just as soon as he has developed the technology necessary to do so, in this case a density increasing ray.

    On the other hand, I like him a whole lot more than most criminal scientists. He’s cool! he wears a tux and is kind of suave! He does have that big ol’ dome, which I love on a science villain. He invites Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders over for dinner in an attempt to negotiate Hawkamn’s uninvolvement with his scheme in a sequence that is so cordial and charming that he might have also been angling for a threesome. Hawkman stabs him in the neck with a trident, which is if nothing else, not a common way to die. 

    Top marks to Alexander the Great, in other words. I wish he had showed up again outside of that one All-Star Squadron story that also had Sieur Satan in it.

    BONUS:

    Hawkman takes the density ray as a trophy!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: HATH-SET 1940

    What was Hath-Set up to in 1940?

    That’s actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s origin story.

    Of course, it didn’t start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some 3000 years later to do it all over again. Nice and simple. But comic books are comic books, so all three of these fools have been reincarnated more times than any reasonable person would care to count, including retroactively as characters like the Silent Knight. Hath-Set himself doesn’t always show up – his piddly number of appearances in any incarnation would probably net him the status of minor super-villain if he wasn’t such an integral part of the Hawks’ origin story.

    As for Doctor Hastor: he electrocutes passengers on the New York subway system in an attempt to extort the city for big bux but before he can get any further Hawkman shows up, there’s some back-and-forth that includes an attempt to sacrifice Shiera Sanders to Anubis, and Hawkman shoots Hastor dead with a crossbow.

    Don’t worry, he’ll be back!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: HATH-SET 1940

    What was Hath-Set up to in 1940?

    That’s actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s origin story.

    Of course, it didn’t start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some 3000 years later to do it all over again. Nice and simple. But comic books are comic books, so all three of these fools have been reincarnated more times than any reasonable person would care to count, including retroactively as characters like the Silent Knight. Hath-Set himself doesn’t always show up – his piddly number of appearances in any incarnation would probably net him the status of minor super-villain if he wasn’t such an integral part of the Hawks’ origin story.

    As for Doctor Hastor: he electrocutes passengers on the New York subway system in an attempt to extort the city for big bux but before he can get any further Hawkman shows up, there’s some back-and-forth that includes an attempt to sacrifice Shiera Sanders to Anubis, and Hawkman shoots Hastor dead with a crossbow.

    Don’t worry, he’ll be back!