The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: scientist

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 016

    Can’t keep ’em down for long, these guys.

    Look, breeding up a giant amoeba in order to use it to spread terror and conquer the world is one thing, but deliberately going out of your way to feed it “pretty girls” is some real twisted incel shit. It’s a wonder that Dr Jorgen here just ends up in jail and not in the belly vacuoles of his creation. (Science Comics 006, 1940)

    Dr Borgia is a weird creep who becomes… infatuated? obsessed? with Marga the Panther Woman during a period in which she is working at a circus in the US. Stung by her rejection of his creepy overtures, Borgia conspires with the owner of a rival circus to kill Marga by using the same technique that von Dorf used to give her the power of a panther to give a tiger the added power of a lion, thus making it too powerful fro her to defeat.

    (and how galling for the ghost of von Dorf to see that Borgia knows his secrets after dying in a fire he caused while trying to burn that very information)

    Marga is of course more than a match for even a tiger with the proportionate strength of a lion and proceeds to murder not only it but Borgia and his associate Randler. She also gets so fired up by this process that she acquires a kind of feral vampire-from-Buffy look that may not ever appear again.  (Science Comics 006, 1940)

    With a thesis like “I reckon that humans won’t do well when deprived of water,” Bulvo here isn’t exactly pushing the boundaries or even basics of science. It’s just as well that the Eagle ends up blowing him up as he tries to destroy NYC’s water supply, as he would have been eviscerated in court, not to mention the mad scientist trade shows. (Science Comics 008, 1940) 

    Like his nemesis Iron Vic, Dr Spagna here suffers from the fact that the sole story in which he appears is incomplete. What we do know about him is that he used to work with Vic’s benefactor Professor Carvel and possibly even on the very serum that Carvel used on the near-corpse that would become Iron Vic, but Spagna was too eager to share his findings and ended up being laughed out of scientific society. This is a common origin story for evil scientist types, but Spagna seems to have taken it harder than most and has been sowing murder and chaos throughout New York City even before the plot outlined in his letter to Vic above.

    Iron Vic manages to foil 2/3 of Spagna’s plot before the adventure is cut off, never to be resumed (as far as I can tell). Presumably, Vic prevented the bombing of Jefferson Square Garden and brought Spagna to justice somehow, but if that involved further hints or revelations about Vic’s past, we will seemingly never know. (Single Series 022, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 726: PROFESSOR MEIER

    (Science Comics 005, 1940)

    Professor Meier, a scientist, seeks to conquer the world by unleashing an ever-growing horde of mutated life forms from his jungle HQ. This is all pretty regular stuff and he probably would have been tossed into the regular science round-up, only there are a couple of fun things that Meier brings to the table that I would like to highlight.

    First off, the mutated beasts themselves are a pretty fun design, a sort of lion/monkey/caveman/eagle chimera, plus green. What really sells them for me, though, are the dramatic shadows that they are covered with, and which usually obscure their face like they’re in a 50s horror comic and have visages too terrible for the human mind to comprehend (*CHOKE!*). Plus, they all have fun little bowl cuts.

    Professor Meier also has a fantastic look. Like, yes, most of the characters tagged “scientist” and/or “mad science” here are wearing some sort of labwear, but the whole 1940s surgical outfit complete with head mirror and black rubber gloves is a real banger of a costume. And he wears it to bed in his Safety Bedroom. Armed, of course.

    New Power Alert: Marga the Panther Woman is already too mutated to be turned into a creature by Meier’s janky serum but she does get even stronger than she already was.

    And finally, once Marga and Homer (the one friendly beast) get Meier out of the way, all of his creatures are given an antidote and turn out mainly to be small animals like rabbits and ducks – shades of Sonic the Hedgehog! – which is pretty fun. Homer turns out to be a German Shepherd, and it looks like Marga will have a fun canine companion going forward but sadly he never returns. Professor Meier’s fate is a bit more ambiguous, but I reckon he’s dead.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 726: PROFESSOR MEIER

    (Science Comics 005, 1940)

    Professor Meier, a scientist, seeks to conquer the world by unleashing an ever-growing horde of mutated life forms from his jungle HQ. This is all pretty regular stuff and he probably would have been tossed into the regular science round-up, only there are a couple of fun things that Meier brings to the table that I would like to highlight.

    First off, the mutated beasts themselves are a pretty fun design, a sort of lion/monkey/caveman/eagle chimera, plus green. What really sells them for me, though, are the dramatic shadows that they are covered with, and which usually obscure their face like they’re in a 50s horror comic and have visages too terrible for the human mind to comprehend (*CHOKE!*). Plus, they all have fun little bowl cuts.

    Professor Meier also has a fantastic look. Like, yes, most of the characters tagged “scientist” and/or “mad science” here are wearing some sort of labwear, but the whole 1940s surgical outfit complete with head mirror and black rubber gloves is a real banger of a costume. And he wears it to bed in his Safety Bedroom. Armed, of course.

    New Power Alert: Marga the Panther Woman is already too mutated to be turned into a creature by Meier’s janky serum but she does get even stronger than she already was.

    And finally, once Marga and Homer (the one friendly beast) get Meier out of the way, all of his creatures are given an antidote and turn out mainly to be small animals like rabbits and ducks – shades of Sonic the Hedgehog! – which is pretty fun. Homer turns out to be a German Shepherd, and it looks like Marga will have a fun canine companion going forward but sadly he never returns. Professor Meier’s fate is a bit more ambiguous, but I reckon he’s dead.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 722: DR DOOM

    (Science Comics 003, 1940)

    Flashback to my times in the Fiction House content-recycling mines of Planet Comics! What we have here is a Dr Doom story nestled snugly into an issue of Science Comics just where Dr Doom stories always go, but it’s not the right Dr Doom! Was this a story about a different science villain that was renamed to fit the space, or did “Richard Crater” (Dick Briefer, possibly) just kind of freestyle a fill-in gig and go wildly off-model? Who can say?

    What I can say is that this Dr Doom is a villain both more entertaining and more ambitious than our regularly scheduled one. Instead of tormenting a handful of people for his own entertainment, this Dr Doom is blowing up buildings as part of a campaign of terror designed to put him in charge of the world, and he shows off some fantastic bombast while expositing all of this. “Fools! Fools! Fools!”

    Of course this sort of thing can not allowed to go on, and since this Dr Doom is very much not a future-man, J Edgar Hoover sends the rough and tumble Bob Steele to take care of him.

    Bob doesn’t have much trouble making his way to Dr Doom’s lair – he merely hops out of his plane and into the remotely-piloted one that Doom uses as a relay for his destructive ray, and after that it’s just a matter of waiting to be flown back to a mountain full of costumed goons and then beating all of those goons up. Simple stuff.

    Bob and Dr Doom provide an object lesson on the limits of bombast as a tool in everyday life, as it proves ineffective in convincing Bob not to punch Dooms lights out and smash up his laboratory. So long Dr Doom, it’s neat that there are two of you (and more to come).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 721: THE GENIUS

    (Science Comics 003, 1940)

    Dynamo has been stirring up trouble in the Unspecified City underworld. He’s captured Rats Rako and a significant portion of his gang and now Rats’ lieutenant Gun Ramey must figure out just how to deal with a superhuman do-gooder. It’s lucky for him that Unspecified City has a resident criminal scientist, the Genius (ignore the fact that they’re calling him Electro, this is from his first adventure before he changes it).

    I’ll be honest, my first instinct was to chuck the Genius into the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, but between the name and the fact that he looks like someone did one of those awful clickbait art exercises where they do a “realistic” version of a cartoon character, in this case Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and then ran that picture through a filter to make it look like an illustration. He is very distinct looking is what I am saying. And look at the size of that melon!

    The Genius lives up to his reputation, and one week later he is able to depower Dynamo and drop him in a pit with almost laughable ease. And then Gun Ramey make one of the classic inexplicable blunders and decides to save some money by stiffing the Genius on the bill, and as usually happens when someone in fiction cheats the person who specializes in deathtraps and murder, Gun finds himself in a deathtrap, about to be murdered.

    Luckily for Gun, the Dynamo and basically everyone in Unspecified City other than the Genius, the particular deathtrap that the two find themselves in is not a bespoke one that was made specifically in order to dispose of an electricity-powered superhuman but an old workaday deathtrap that the Genius has been using for years, to the extent that Gun knows all about it (and yet still got lippy with the Genius about his fee – probably the reason Gun is still a gang lieutenant rather than a gang boss). And a key thing about this deathtrap is that it not only features a spiked ceiling that lowers and crushes the occupants but also an exposed wire, so that the Genius’ victims must grapple with the choice of whether to wait for the spikes or end it all with the wire. Dynamo/Electro obviously chooses the latter and, revitalized, zaps the Genius into submission.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 713: MURDO

    (Prize Comics 005, 1940) 

    Having defeated the mad Racko over the course of three adventures, Jupiter and his pal Jim Johnson are ready for some variety in their lives. Well, too bad, because Racko’s brother Murdo is out for revenge! His first move, kidnap Racko’s former victim and Jim’s current girlfriend Joan and put her in a test tube in her underwear.

    ASIDE: I had been operating under the assumption that Racko was a last name but now I have to revise my worldview to include a set of parents who would name their children “Racko” and “Murdo”.

    Over all, Murdo is a lot less interesting than his brother, possibly because of his focus on revenge instead of wacky ways of harming NYC. If he does share one thing with Racko, it’s a penchant for interesting hideouts – in his debut issue he is making his home under a lake in India that is stocked with octopuses, sharks and mermen. 

    Murdo manages to capture Jim as well (and notably leaves him fully clothed when he puts him in a test tube) but turns out to be even less able to cope with an alien wizard than Racko was.

    Jupiter doesn’t even bother blowing Murdo up. He just piles some stuff on top of him.

    Having not even been plausibly killed in his first appearance (and what an insult that is for the brother of the guy that Jupiter felt the need to blow up three separate times), Murdo is back next issue to try again, this time by using magnets to flip Jim Johnson’s cab into a ditch. This is actually very advanced for a Golden Age villain – Murdo has learned that his chances of taking on Jupiter are low and so is starting out by getting the much easier revenge kill on Johnson. Sadly for both Murdo and Johnson’s cab driver, the passenger compartment is the only part of the cab that survives.

    Jupiter shows up and easily captures Murdo, but Murdo has had the good sense to have a henchman dress up as a cop and lurk nearby to “take the villain into custody.” He then abandons his revenge plot entirely in favour of an attempt to take over the US by murdering the president. It’s an astonishing display in light of the single-minded obsession that governs most super-villainous behaviour, folks. Unless world domination was Murdo’s main thing to begin with and revenge was the distraction, of course.

    Jupiter does not stand idly by and allow Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be murdered, of course, though he makes the unusual choice to destroy Murdo’s henchmen and just… leave Murdo himself wandering around on the ground somewhere. It’s a calculated insult!

    The end-of-story blurb promises that next issue would see Murdo teaming up with his brother Racko and I for one think that that would be a fun time, as despite having chosen to go into the same field the two are actually quite different in their approaches to super-villainy, plus a little sibling rivalry never hurt the readability of any story. Sadly, though, Prize Comics 006 was Jupiter’s final appearance, so while Murdo remains at large poor Racko is in a limbo-state, reportedly not dead but not confirmed alive. Very sad stuff.

    REVENGE KILLING SCORE: 0/5 in two attempts each on Jupiter and Jim’s lives and one on Joan’s, Murdo got none of them. Abysmal.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 712: DR DEKKAR, MASTER OF MONSTERS

    (Prize Comics 005, 1940) 

    Comic book features with the villain as the lead were one of the rarer subgenres of the Golden Age, and so I must note that this is our third instance of one with a monster-maker as the lead. Fun!

    We first encounter Dr Dekkar here after he has advertised for an assistant and thus brought one Diane Clark to his laboratory-castle on the English moors. There’s a part of me that wants to get very critical of the concept of accepting a job whee you will be living with your boss sight-unseen but I know that that was a thing that many people did in fact have to do in the past – particularly women, who were making up most of the live-in childcare and nursing workforce. And there’s a lot ove very harrowing fiction built around the premise of accepting one of those jobs and turning up only to find yourself in a Weird Situation, so this one checks out!

    Case in point: Diane soon learns that the job in the isolated castle, that she was given sight unseen after answering a newspaper advertisement and which has her sharing a residence with two overtly creepy men and a third (unseen, screaming) presence, might just be a little sketchy. Specifically, she learns that the screamer is Dr Dekkar’s last assistant, who has been turned into a kind of ape-man by Dekkar’s experiments with hormone injection.

    And to add insult to injury, it turns out that Diane hasn’t been brought in as an assistant after all, but is simply the next experimental subject!

    Luckily for Diane, her fiance Bob Trent has a poor sense of the boundaries between personal and private lives and shows up on her first day at her new job to see how she’s doing. Chaos ensues: Dekkar’s real assistant Wilkins releases and is killed by the ape-man; the ape-man makes off with Diane and is subsequently killed by Tom; the castle burns down and Dekkar is presumed dead.

    You know what they say about presuming that a super-villain is dead, though: they always crawl back out of the woodwork to press U and ME in some sort of diabolical deathtrap. And indeed, Dr Dekkar is back again one month later with a collection of animal men and a thirst for vengeance.

    In an impressive move for a comic book scientist, Dekkar has continued in his prior avenue of research instead of tossing it all and starting over in the field of robotics or making frankensteins. His hormone treatments have gotten precise enough that he is able to make humanoid creatures out of animal life, including an almost fully human Tiger Woman, with the dual caveats that a) the creatures must be given an injection every six hours or lose their human forms and b) human brain matter is an important part of the recipe and oh, look! Diane and Bob have human brains! What a wonderful coincidence!

    As an aside, Dekkar sure has made some interesting choices here: make a woman out of a tiger, dress her in a fur bikini and teach her to smoke using a cigarette holder… I’m just saying that if this were a modern comic then Dekkar’s search history would have some very specific booleans going on in it.

    The Tiger Woman is of course horny for Bob and lets him free only to turn on him once he expresses some desire to leave with the date he came with. This leads to Bob being carried off by the amazing Condor-Man, who gets far too little on-panel time.

    (shout out to Dr Dekkar for wearing something approaching proper attire for a surgical theatre: just look at that face mask!)

    Bob manages to escape the Condor-Man and return just in time to see his plan take effect: he had somehow managed to replace the beast-men’s hormone injections from the night before with water and now they were all reverting to their former states with remarkable speed. Bob and Diane haul ass out of there while Dr Dekkar is messily devoured by his own test subjects (there is a “will Dr Dekkar return next month?” caption at the end, but since he did not I guess the tigers really did do him in).

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 014

    Don’t bother asking to see their degrees.

    This unnamed scientist has been kidnapping preteens and changing them into hulking brutes via some pretty fantastical brain surgery. He of course gets his ass fatally handed to him by the Red Panther but not before he goes on about producing a new super race and as always I have to question your devotion to science if you think that your physical alterations to these kids are going to be passed on. Who are you, Lamarck? You’re going to be performing brain operations on babies all day every day. (Jungle Comics 009, 1940)

    Von Blumb is a scientist who is saved from death and treated well by Camilla in her Lost Empire, then heads off into the wilderness to further his research. When he doesn’t return after a few weeks, Camilla and Sir Champion head out to check on him and he repays their consideration by capturing them and subjecting them to his reducing serum and adding them to his collection of unwilling subjects. Long story short, they get loose, defeat his pet spider in gladiatorial combat and he gets squashed by a rock. (Jungle Comics 012, 1940)

    Von Lohfer is a scientist with a grudge against John D Rockefeller stand-in J B Rockland, who called him a fake and ruined his life. But if Rockland was claiming that von Lohfer was unable to mind control a bunch of cops into doing his bidding he was dead wrong, because that’s just what he does until he is ultimately stopped by Quicksilver. (National Comics 005, 1940)

    Dr Morbidd has a great name and a really remarkable facial deformity, and he’s been using science to raise people from the dead to do his bidding. This is all solid stuff but it doesn’t amount to much actual super-villainy. There’s some allusion to Morbidd’s science zombies being sent out to do murders but the major thing he seems to be interested in is being a real creep to this one young woman he has captured. It would be quite narratively satisfying if he met his end at the hands of his own creations, but sadly he gets his head blown clean off when Merlin the Magician reflects his own death ray beam back at him. (National Comics 005, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 700: RADGIO

    (Planet Comics 003, 1940)

    We open on Spurt Hammond, the Planet-Flyer himself, intercepting an alarming series of images from the planet Mercury. Giants? Explosions? Girls!? What could it all mean?

    It turns out that the girl in question is Princess Zilla, erstwhile ruler of Mercury but recently deposed by her Prime Minister Radgio, who schemes to conquer the world using mutated Mercurians such as the previously-seen giant. Which I suppose strongly implies that Zilla was the ruler of only a part of Mercury – I’m so used to assuming that every sci-fi government is global in nature.

    Zilla and Hammond make their way to Radgio’s fortress and dispose of the unfortunate giant by means of an old reliable method, the portcullis. Move over, Rancor! Make way, two-headed dragon from Willow! there’s a new member of the “Killed by a Falling Portcullis” Club!

    It’s okay though: Radgio is done with boring old giants and has moved on to his ultimate creation, a huge six-armed robot. And unlike many so-called humans-turned-robots in 1940s comics, this isn’t merely a case of extreme mind control but, per the little x-ray cutaway, this poor Mercurian is being mutated into some sort of cybernetic organism with what are possibly horrible organic gears and everything.

    Spurt Hammond bursts in just before Radgio is able to release his creation from where it is shackled to the wall (either as part of the roboticization process or for display purposes, I cannot tell) and, as he believes in ironic punishments, pops the Mercurian into his own machine.

    Radgio is reduced to… somewhere between four inches and a foot in height. But even shrunken so, and nude, he almost manages to turn things back around by assuming voice control of the robot. Unfortunately for him, 1) he failed to make the robot ray gun-proof and it goes down with little effort on Hammond’s part and 2) a nearby rat also has a sense of ironic justice and chows down on his tender Prime Ministerial flesh. Mercury is saved!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 695: ZAN

    (Planet Comics 001, 1940) 

    Zan lives on the far-off planet Volcus and uses the energies of its magnetic core to power his spaceship fleet and capture yet more spaceships. And why does he do this? Why, so that he can turn their crew into science zombies and eventually amass an army large enough to conquer the universe!

    (he also has this one lady with him at all times and I’m not sure what her role is exactly because she does not utter a single word throughout the comic. Is she his lieutenant? His girlfriend? A different story might have revealed that she was the real mastermind all along but no dice. She just hangs out behind him in her slinky dress and touches his shoulders)

    Zan’s piracy is very concerning to the Solar Congress, and so they deploy the Solar Force, under the command of Captain Nelson Cole and his little pal Lieutenant Bud. Too bad for them that their ships are made out of the same stuff as all of the missing ones were: they are immediately swept away to Volcus to be zombified.

    Zan’s whole plan seems to hinge on the unstoppable nature of his science zombie armies, but if I’m honest they aren’t as big a threat as he lets on. For one thing, they seem to operate like units in a strategy game in that if they’re not being explicitly directed then they just keep on doing what they were last ordered, including marching forward into a pit and just standing around. Does Zan believe that he and his ladyfriend have the wherewithal to control entire armies of these guys on the fly or is he going to start recruiting elite Starcraft players to his side soon?

    Zan is ultimately rounded up after Cole and Bud manage to capture the paralysis ray that Zan himself had in reserve specifically to counter his armies if they went haywire. Heckuva way to find out that your contingency plan was viable, fella.

    It’s nice that they let Zan and his gal pal share a cell, but I’m not sure if she’s as into him as she once was.