The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Clock

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 191: THE DEVIL

    (Crack Comics 007, 1940) 

    There is no textual evidence for this, but since this guy is dressed exactly like the unnamed boss of the Skull Gang (plus some rad horns) and uses the very similar tactic of dosing his minions (the Robbers from Hades – good name) with toxins that make them all shriveled and weird (and in this case more pliable and obedient), I like to think that it’s the same guy back for another shot at making his fortune in the crime boss game, albeit without taking the very sensible precaution of, say, switching cities or otherwise trying to avoid the Clock. This time, alas, he meets his end, so we won’t be treated to a green-hooded man with a tail leading squads of Demonic Monkey Marauders, or a green-hooded man with a tinfoil halo commanding his Larceny Angels. Sad days.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 188: THE SKULL GANG

    (Crack Comics 006, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain (group)? They’re a gang of thieves who are so devoted to this generic hooded guy that they all take small doses of arsenic to give themselves an emaciated skeletal appearance! The penalty for not thieving enough is death! What a dumb thing to dedicate your life to! Absolutely they qualify as a team of very stupid super-villains.

    SKULL SCORE: 1/5 Bald guys with gritted teeth just don’t cut the mustard, I’m afraid.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 186: THE JAY BIRD

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 186: THE JAY BIRD

    (Crack Comics 005, 1940) 

    The Jay Bird is one of my favourite minor super-villains of all time, I reckon. He’s just a guy in a bird mask with a gimmick that is simultaneously very simple and far too complex and dangerous: he simulates flight via a very long tether that is dangling him from a plane. Thus equipped, he swoops down and robs various targets on the streets of New York City, quipping all the time. He’s great!

    The real unsung hero here has to be his pilot, Spike, for managing to not smear the Jay Bird across a skyscraper the first time they tried this. What a guy! Sadly he was killed in the Jay Bird’s encounter with the Clock.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 184: THE ASP

    (Crack Comics 004, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? Any number of things! The Asp is a jewel thief who taunts his victims/ the police ahead of time and then arranges for seemingly impossible murders using time-delayed poisons. He’s a weird creep who hisses all the time and almost manages to kill the Clock. And yet… it’s all a little perfunctory. I saw someone on the DC wikia editorialize about how the Asp’s MO was similar to the Joker’s first appearance, and they aren’t wrong, but where the Joker had a little room to breathe and establish himself over the course of 3 or 4 crimes, the poor Asp is dead and gone after just one.

  • NOTES: OCTOBER 2022

    The Clock flatlines himself in order to solve a murder by speaking to the victim in the afterlife. (Crack Comics 010, 1941) 

    Decoration:

    Jaspar Crow’s got a monogrammed wastecan! (Crack Comics 016, 1941)

    Dr Foster’s got a monogrammed lampshade! (Crack Comics 017, 1941)

    Names: Tor the Magic Master encounters a counterfeiter with the unlikely name Phrogg Zaarn.

    One of the victims of Clock foe the Werewolf is named A.B. Ceedee.

  • NOTES: OCTOBER 2022

    The Clock flatlines himself in order to solve a murder by speaking to the victim in the afterlife. (Crack Comics 010, 1941) 

    Decoration:

    Jaspar Crow’s got a monogrammed wastecan! (Crack Comics 016, 1941)

    Dr Foster’s got a monogrammed lampshade! (Crack Comics 017, 1941)

    Names: Tor the Magic Master encounters a counterfeiter with the unlikely name Phrogg Zaarn.

    One of the victims of Clock foe the Werewolf is named A.B. Ceedee.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 019: THE CLOCK

    (Funny Picture Stories/ Funny Pages/ Feature Comics/ Crack Comics, 1936-1944)

    The Clock has the distinction of probably being the earliest masked crimefighter and definitely that of being the earliest one to stick around, which would make him the earliest super-hero if Dr Occult hadn’t made his debut in 1935. A lot of the details about him are fairly cliché, both because they were cribbed from existing pulp clichés and because the Clock helped define the clichés of the genre.

    So: Brian O’Brien is a wealthy playboy who puts on a tuxedo and mask and fights crime at night. He leaves calling cards for his foes, is often thought to be a criminal himself and is friends with police Captain Kane in his civilian identity while enjoying a somewhat fraught relationship with him while masked.

    Over the years the Clock has a few different associates – above find Pug Brady, a down-on-his-luck guy who happens to look just like Brian O’Brien. They team up for a couple of years until Pug is unceremoniously chucked for a tough orphan girl named Butch about whom I know almost nothing, so it’s a bit of a qualified statement when I say that by far my favourite member of the Clock family is the Orchid:

    The Orchid appears a handful of times and her gimmick is that she is also a crimefighter, and one who is slightly more on-the ball than the Clock: she may know his secret identity, she can always get a message to him and most of the time she disappears at the end of a case, with the exception of the time she was distracted by her own kidnap-victim father. The Orchid only makes a handful of appearances but she’s a winner in my books: bring her back, I say – fold her into the backstory of the Black Orchid!

    So: the Clock is a solid Golden Age strip. Sadly, he will likely never see the light of day again. DC owns roughly seven dozen masked adventurers in suits and included in that number is Midnight, who would be a straight palette-swap of the Spirit if they had bothered to give him a different-coloured suit. Thusfar, he’s the one they pull out in the rare cases that a suited crimefighter who isn’t early Sandman is required, while the Clock and the Mouthpiece and Destiny and Just n’ Right and Devil’s Dagger and Diamond Jack and Cosmo, Phantom of Disguise all twiddle their thumbs in purgatory.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 182: THE BIG SHOT

    (Crack Comics 001, 1940)

    A series of facts about Golden Age super-hero comics:

    -most of them take place in cities

    -they are either set in a specific location (e.g. Wonder Woman being in Washington DC or the Red Bee in Superior City) or an unidentified large city

    -in the latter case, over time the city acquires characteristics that either lead to it becoming its own thing (e.g. Batman’s unidentified large city becomes Gotham) or being identified as New York City

    Now there are plenty of exceptions to this (Superman starts out in Cleveland which quickly becomes Metropolis; plenty of Golden Age heroes didn’t stick around for their location to gel, etc etc) but it does happen a fair amount and it leads to situations like the above, wherein the Clock, who lives in an unidentified large city clearly based on NYC, arrests crimelord the Big Shot and learns that he is in fact Mayor Kozer! And then over the years it becomes more and more clear that Clock stories are set in New York and you end up with an alternate history of the office of Mayor of New York City in which Fiorello la Guardia is presumably repeatedly ousted from office only to be reelected following the various Evil Mayor Arrested by Vigilante scandals. This is the sort of thing that really gets my heartrate up!

    Anyway: the Big Shot, folks.

    EDIT TO ADD:

    This isn’t even the first Mayor of NYC that the Clock is responsible for the arrest of: one year earlier he helped send Mayor Tull up the river! (Feature Comics 022, 1939)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 099: THE REAPER

    (Feature Comics 029, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? The Reaper is another just-scraping-into-the-ranks gang boss. Between his cool name and a setup where he gives his gang orders through a closed-circuit TV and microphone, he makes that final leap, presumably into a slightly higher security prison cell.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 018: THE OWL

    (Feature Funnies 007, 1938)

    Our first Quality Comics super-villain!

    Otherwise, not very interesting – he doesn’t even wear the mask in the story, just tries to frame the Clock and finds out how far that kind of thing gets you in the comic book game.