The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Samson

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 600: KILGOR

    (Fantastic Comics 004, 1940)

    Kilgor is a roboticist with a simple 5-step plan for success and world domination:

    1. develop a giant super-robot on an isolated Pacific island.

    2. ally with generic fascist dictator Rigo in order to acquire the industrial might required to manufacture your robot en mass.

    3. Once Rigo decides that you are surplus to requirements and tries to eliminate you and claim the robot army for himself, turn the tables on him and take the reins of power from his cold dead hands. Kilgor is now the dictator.

    4. March your robot army across Europe in a bloody wave of conquest until they are destroyed by Samson. Hold on, wait.

    5. Get the tar whaled out of both you and your master robot by Samson, then make a minor miscalculation while attempting to rebuild your creation that results in it crushing you to death.

    I feel like this plan needed a failsafe in case of super-heroes.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 533: THORGA

    (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939) 

    Thorga! Exiled from Western society because of his “mad plans”, he emerges from the mountains of Tibet with a high-tech army, intent on conquering Europe!

    Thorga! He fields a mighty airforce of advanced planes, a mechanized infantry of advanced tanks!

    Thorga! He is the first foe faced by Fox Features’ Samson and so his main role is as a demonstration of Samson’s power as he destroys not only the planes and tanks but the regular infantry to boot (who, might I note, are not only dressed in excellent henchman costumes but apparently referred to as “Thorganians”, a top-notch henchman name).

    Thorga, not only defeated by Samson, not only killed by Samson but buried under the wreckage of his lab in a callback to Original Samson’s final hurrah.

    Thorga. He served his purpose.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 487: THE EEL

    (Big 3 006, 1941) 

    Our story opens with Samson investigating a series of mysterious deaths and ship disappearances in naval yards across the country. Cut to beloved Samson supporting character J. Rembrandt Speedball hilariously painting camouflage on a Navy cruiser. He is briefly distracted by horniness, and when he manages to get ahold of himself *pow*, the ship has vanished.

    Speedball is arrested as a spy and spends the rest of the issue failing to commit suicide in his cell (a hilarious joke in the 40s, I guess), while Samson very convincingly disguises himself as a sailor. This smokes out the real criminal, the Eel, a saboteur of no stated or even implied affiliation who has been substituting the Navy’s ship paint with a variety that becomes acidic when opposed to an electric charge. It turns out that the Navy just wasn’t thinking to check if their ships had sunk! And also that J. Rembrandt Speedball was so horny for that lady that he completely missed any sight or sound of an entire cruiser sinking about three feet away from him. That’s some paint!

    Anyway, Samson goes ahead and drowns everyone at the end. Message to all aquatic-themed villains: be more amphibious.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 484: BARON SIVA

    (Big 3 004, 1941)

    Baron Siva is a regular-style science-type villain who attempts to conquer the US via a campaign of fear and espionage before being captured by Samson and David. Perhaps the most interesting thing about him are the things about him that go completely unaddressed:

    -the fact that his head is enormous

    -the fact that he has no ears

    -his weird transparent blouse

    -the fact that he possesses advanced technology like paralysis rays

    -is his surname just Siva or is this a reference to the Hindu god?

    -are those walnuts in his hand in the second panel above or is he crushing some model testicles?

    The fact that he has weird tech is admittedly not that weird in a super-hero comic but given the first three factors I spent the entire comic expecting him to be revealed as an alien, time traveller or mutant. It seems like he might just be an earless bighead with avant garde fashion tastes.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 006

    It’s time for more mad and criminal scientists! Round ’em up!

    The fantastically-named Doctor Evecloud has a plan: shrink everyone else on the planet so that he, the only big person, will be in charge. As so often happens, one of his first guinea pigs is a super-hero, in this case the Shark. Things end poorly for Doctor Evecloud. (Amazing-Man Comics 016, 1940)

    This fellow is Dr Scowl and so far we’re sitting at 2/2 great scientist names. Dr Scowl is attempting to dissect Minimidget and Ritty to figure out how his late colleague got them so dang small and he’s not afraid to deploy a highly unsettling chimeric man to do so. (Amazing-Man Comics 025, 1941)

    Professor Zarr breaks the good name streak and it’s entirely in character, as he’s a guy who can’t catch a break: Samson and David bust up his radium-stealing gang, bust up his fortress lair and destroy his Z-Ray machine before he has a chance to even fire the thing. And to add insult to injury, he sets himself on fire while he’s trying to get his revenge. (Big 3 003, 1941)

    Later in the same issue, Samson and David head to Central America and spoil the plans of Dr Kalt, who seems to be Professor Zarr’s non-union equivalent, down to not getting to fire his solar disintegrator and blowing himself up with a grenade he was trying to throw at the heroes. (Big 3 003, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 004

    the Lone Warrior (and Dicky): 

    The Lone Warrior and Dicky are Stan and Dicky Carter, son of the now-deceased “world’s greatest scientist” and recipients of his Power Elixir injections, leaving them generically physically enhanced and well-equipped to battle pseudo-Nazi forces seeking to wreck America’s military. Plus he made them a land/ air/ sea plane/tank called the Wonder Ship which is very useful.

    There is of course a knee-jerk impulse to snidely point out that a guy called the Lone Warrior is never seen without his sidekick, but… I think it’s on purpose? They don’t explore it well but I reckon that it’s meant to be a joke: big tough dude calls himself the Lone Warrior and can’t avoid being tailed everywhere by his little brother? It’s not a bad joke! Too bad they only had 4 or so appearances and never really explored it. (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

    Samson:

    Samson from the comics is, unsurprisingly, based off of Samson from the Bible. In fact, he’s a descendant of the Biblical Samson, which seems hard to prove. Like his supposed ancestor, Samson possesses superhuman strength as long as his hair remains uncut, which in his case means that he must maintain a sort of shoulder-length mullet. His hair of course frequently gets cut for dramatic effect but luckily for Samson his other super power is that it will grow back preternaturally fast and always into the same style, like Wolverine’s.

    At some point in a comic I have not yet read Samson finds and adopts a boy named David. David has no super-powers and is in constant peril. He also has a scientist pal named Professor Brun who acts as a sort of Samson dispatcher using advanced surveillance tech to find trouble and a teleporter with the fun nmae of the “demoleculing ray” to send Samson and David to the scene.

    Finally, Samson is a stone cold killer. He wipes out crooks by the dozen with a frankly concerning lack of care for the legal process. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

    Late in 1941, Samson got a bit of sprucing up. I don’t know if this was a deliberate attempt on the part of Fox Features to rectify the formulaic nature of Samson comics or it was a simple case of a new artist/ writer shaking things up but suddenly Samson had a supporting cast beyond David: namely a gal pal with the incredibly on-the-nose name of Lila Dee and a comic relief artist named J. Rembrandt Speedball. 

    The best addition, however, was… not exactly a secret identity for Samson but an Incognito Mode in which he dressed in street clothes, but since he was an enormous, long-haired guy what this entails is his wearing a huge overcoat buttoned to the neck with the collar flipped up over his mullet. Truly great. Sadly, this revamped Samson only appeared in a handful of issues before Fox Features had the troubles that lead to them halting production for a few years. Like most of their characters, he was never seen again.

    UPDATES: He really is the descendant of the Biblical Samson (Samson 001, 1940)

    Update 1941 

    the Flame:

    Found by Tibetan lamas as a baby and taught their mystic secrets, the Flame has a lot of the standard flame powers – immunity to fire and heat (and explosions), control over flame, a high enough body temperature that bullets melt on contact with him – a few more unusual ones – the ability to walk and climb on sheets of flame as if they were solid, the weirdly common Golden Age super power of appearing suddenly in the element that they embody, in this case any size flame down to a match – and surprisingly no actual ability to produce flame. Instead, he carries a pistol-sized flamethrower (over time, the amount of heat and flame produced by his body does increase, but he’s never at Human Torch level). The Flame’s enemies of course frequently attempt to set fire to him.

    While I appreciate the Flame’s classic costume stylings, he is ultimately a pretty generic guy. Plus he’s at least as bloodthirsty as his fellow Fox Features alum Samson. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    (the Flame also has a very cool car, as seen in Big 3 002, 1940)

    Like Samson, the Flame eventually gets a more fleshed out world just in time for Fox Features to go to heck for a few years and then fail to bring him back. In the Flame’s case he does adopt a secret identity: as Gary Preston, private investigator. He is joined by former boxer and general goofball Pug and future Flame Girl (watch for future round-ups, I guess) Linda Dale.

    Flame UPDATE 1

    Flame UPDATE 2 

    Flame UPDATE 3

    Flame UPDATE 4 

    Stardust the Super Wizard:

    Stardust the Super Wizard is an enormous, nigh-omnipotent fellow who lives in a star and deals out bizarre and ironic punishments to a cartoonishly evil rogues gallery with incredible ease – the only real obstacle that he faces in an average adventure is the travel time between him and his villains. The second-greatest creation of outsider comics artist Fletcher Hanks (after Fantomah, of course), Stardust is well-known enough that I don’t really need to go into much detail on him here but it seemed weird to leave him out. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 479: DR BLOOD

    (Big 3 001, 1940)

    There are a couple of interesting things about Dr Blood but I’ll be honest: it’s mostly the name. Great, over the top villain moniker, Dr Blood. Furthermore, Dr Blood runs a costumed gang called the Inner Crime Ring, which is not nearly as good a name as Dr Blood but still better than an unnamed collection of gangsters.

    What Dr Blood is a doctor of is hard to say. The Inner Crime Ring has access to paralysis ray technology so I suppose we must assume that he invented that rather than stealing it from a lesser scientist with an unimpressive name. Or he could be a Doctor of Larceny.

    The other thing about Dr Blood and the Inner Crime Ring is that they make the mistake of tangling with the super-hero Samson and his pal David and Samson absolutely destroys them. Like, straight-up murders them. This is my first Samson story so I’m unsure if this is his usual MO or if it’s because Dr Blood almost killed David earlier in the episode but what I can say for certain is that those cops should not be as okay with this level of vigilante justice/ mass destruction as they are.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 479: DR BLOOD

    (Big 3 001, 1940)

    There are a couple of interesting things about Dr Blood but I’ll be honest: it’s mostly the name. Great, over the top villain moniker, Dr Blood. Furthermore, Dr Blood runs a costumed gang called the Inner Crime Ring, which is not nearly as good a name as Dr Blood but still better than an unnamed collection of gangsters.

    What Dr Blood is a doctor of is hard to say. The Inner Crime Ring has access to paralysis ray technology so I suppose we must assume that he invented that rather than stealing it from a lesser scientist with an unimpressive name. Or he could be a Doctor of Larceny.

    The other thing about Dr Blood and the Inner Crime Ring is that they make the mistake of tangling with the super-hero Samson and his pal David and Samson absolutely destroys them. Like, straight-up murders them. This is my first Samson story so I’m unsure if this is his usual MO or if it’s because Dr Blood almost killed David earlier in the episode but what I can say for certain is that those cops should not be as okay with this level of vigilante justice/ mass destruction as they are.