The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: world domination

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 465: THE HOOD

    (Amazing-Man Comics 010-011, 1940)

    The Magician from Mars’ final foe is a two-issue affair, but the first one is a bit of a nothing story: a mysterious terror attack at an airport turns out to be the work of a villain named the Hood who has found a way to… play a loud sound into a glass ball and then use it as a grenade. It’s a weird contrivance even by sci-fi super-hero comic standards. In any case, the Magician from Mars blows up all of the Hood’s factories and they flee into space.

    I do appreciate a villain who takes the time to dress their henchmen in proper minion outfits though. Plus this is some great we-don’t-quite-have-the-visual-language-of-comics-worked-out-yet-but-we’re-trying jumping around from the Magician from Mars.

    Next issue sees the Magician from Mars returning to her home planet where the Hood is leading an attempted rebellion – fairly successfully in fact, until a nigh-omnipotent superwoman joins the fight on the side of Martian King Marsu and his dishy son Prince Taal.

    Though the Hood is on the ropes and on the run, she takes the time to end the budding romance between the Magician from Mars and Price Taal by shooting the latter as he tries to defend our hero. And what’s that? I said “she”? Yes, because the Hood is in fact a woman! And what’s more an older woman! And even more shocking, she’s Jane “Magician from Mars” 6em35’s aunt!

    All of these revelations are only a bit out of left field. Jane’s aunt was a character in her first appearance and was even a minor antagonist in that story, but rather than attempting to install herself as an iron-fisted dictator she was instead a cruel and controlling guardian who kept her ward in check due to her very unusual super-weakness of… a genetic predisposition to like her relatives. Notably, this version of Aunt Kinza (yes she could have more than one aunt but why complicate matters?) does not appear to have magical powers. Sadly, there were no further Magician from Mars stories, so the path that Kinza took to become the Hood, like Jane’s eventual revenge for her lost love, will remain an untold story.

    ADDENDUM: This is a very good vengeance-swearing panel. Look out, oh vile aunt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 465: THE HOOD

    (Amazing-Man Comics 010-011, 1940)

    The Magician from Mars’ final foe is a two-issue affair, but the first one is a bit of a nothing story: a mysterious terror attack at an airport turns out to be the work of a villain named the Hood who has found a way to… play a loud sound into a glass ball and then use it as a grenade. It’s a weird contrivance even by sci-fi super-hero comic standards. In any case, the Magician from Mars blows up all of the Hood’s factories and they flee into space.

    I do appreciate a villain who takes the time to dress their henchmen in proper minion outfits though. Plus this is some great we-don’t-quite-have-the-visual-language-of-comics-worked-out-yet-but-we’re-trying jumping around from the Magician from Mars.

    Next issue sees the Magician from Mars returning to her home planet where the Hood is leading an attempted rebellion – fairly successfully in fact, until a nigh-omnipotent superwoman joins the fight on the side of Martian King Marsu and his dishy son Prince Taal.

    Though the Hood is on the ropes and on the run, she takes the time to end the budding romance between the Magician from Mars and Price Taal by shooting the latter as he tries to defend our hero. And what’s that? I said “she”? Yes, because the Hood is in fact a woman! And what’s more an older woman! And even more shocking, she’s Jane “Magician from Mars” 6em35’s aunt!

    All of these revelations are only a bit out of left field. Jane’s aunt was a character in her first appearance and was even a minor antagonist in that story, but rather than attempting to install herself as an iron-fisted dictator she was instead a cruel and controlling guardian who kept her ward in check due to her very unusual super-weakness of… a genetic predisposition to like her relatives. Notably, this version of Aunt Kinza (yes she could have more than one aunt but why complicate matters?) does not appear to have magical powers. Sadly, there were no further Magician from Mars stories, so the path that Kinza took to become the Hood, like Jane’s eventual revenge for her lost love, will remain an untold story.

    ADDENDUM: This is a very good vengeance-swearing panel. Look out, oh vile aunt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 453: PROFESSOR MALUSKI

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1941)

    Professor Maluski is the first foe faced by the Blue Blaze after his hibernative period and while he has a lot of cool stuff (huge underground base full of crazy machines, gangster henchmen, a weird gem that flies under its own power and drags its target along in a tractor beam, etc) the real reason that he is getting his own entry rather than being tossed in the next Mad Science Round-Up is the same reason that the Blue Blaze was woken up by a couple of grave robbers: Professor Maluski is making science zombies.

    And not just any science zombies! This is the only full-length view we get of any of them but it appears that they are in fact the upper thirds of human corpses, floating around on columns of light. Probably. It’s a wild and eerie visual and a real shame that it’s not highlighted more.

    Professor Maluski of course learns too late that you gotta build in a few more safeguards when constructing an army of the undead, as his control unit is smashed in a fight with the Blue Blaze and he is killed in the subsequent zombie rampage. I could take or leave the professor himself, but his science zombie tech is so neat that I demand that it be BRUNG BACK by some enterprising young villain – we’re overdue for a take on urban exploration that involves old super-villain lairs.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 432: THE CONQUEROR

    (Keen Detective Funnies 011, 1939)

    The Conqueror is the major recurring foe of Dean Denton, Scientific Adventurer, about whom we will briefly aside: Dean Denton was created by Harry Campbell, who was also responsible for such characters as Ace of Space, Bruce Blackburn and the wretched Scarlet Seal, but also Wizard Wells and John Law, Scientiective, who form a kind of thematic triad of scientific detectives with Dean Denton.

    Dean Denton is definitely the most entertaining of the three to read (with the unfortunate caveat that his are the adventures that are most riddled with racial stereotypes. The Golden Age, folks!) due partially to his former occupation as a well-known ventriloquist but mostly to his archfoe the Conqueror, who beats John Law’s Avenger and Wizard Wells’ collection of no-name goons hands down.

    The Conqueror is actually rich guy Bolton Gates and over the course of a couple of dozen appearances he has my favourite villainous character arc: the villain of means with vast resources is foiled several times by Our Hero and ends up scrabbling around doing comparatively petty crimes for chump change. 

    In his first few appearances the Conqueror has a lavish estate under which is a technologically advanced lair filled with brainwashed minions. After Dean Denton blows all that up it seems like the Conqueror is forever seeking to recreate it with schemes that place him in positions of high status: not only does he pose as divine figures to dupe tribal groups in both Central America and Africa but he founds somewhere between two to three cults:

    Somewhat surprisingly, the White Crusaders, over which the Conqueror presided as the Master Crusader/ the White Master, was not a racially problematic group.

    Meanwhile the Cult of Astra was mostly a way to flimflam flaky Hollywood types and blackmail their studios with the threat of religion-related work stoppages (a scheme that nets him a two-episode arc on the Villains of Old Hollywood podcast).

    The third example is somewhere between a cult and his old habit of minion recruitment through mind control: he takes advantage of the conflict between the countries of Namreg and Feltia (and in case “Namreg” was too subtle for you they clash near the “Tonigam Line”) to capture and brainwash both Namreg and Feltian forces. 

    Even though the Conqueror gets away as per usual at the end of this scheme, it’s his last appearance in comics (that I know of, natch). One can imagine his conflict with Dean Denton continuing indefinitely and why not. It’s more fun than most things that might logically happen to a lone civilian trapped in the midst of two armies that he recently made enemies of. after all.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 431: EMRO, LORD OF DIAMONDS

    (Mystery Men Comics 016, 1940)

    As our story opens, huge diamonds are raining down on Earth. Upon contact with a human, they expand to engulf and imprison them.

    Earth authorities sensibly contact space hero Rex Dexter of Mars who has once again been sidetracked in his seemingly straightforward quest to travel from Earth to his home planet. In a nice change of pace from most Rex Dexter adventures, Rex and his pal Cynde have not stopped due to some mortal peril but for a romantic interlude on the hot and steamy planet Eros.

    Setting aside my usual question of just where Eros is that it can be stopped off at between Earth and Mars, I want to get to the real point of this entry: digging into some speculative xenobiology! The native Erosite (nice demonym!) here only gets one panel to shine, but what an impression they make! How does a creature evolve to resemble a twee little Cupid-style bow and arrow? Could they be analogous to Earth insect life, with the “bow” as two whirring wings? Or are they a snakelike species equipped with tiny flying machines? Is the unnatural positioning of the bow relative to the plane of the ground indicative of a partially unseen structure like an air jellyfish, or that the bow is an extrusion into three dimensional space by a higher-dimensional creature? I love it! More outlandish aliens in fiction, please!

    Moving on. Here we meet Emro, Lord of Diamonds. Emro is pretty standard as far as mineral-based alien designs go: a faceted crystalline humanoid, though with a really terrific skull face. I do however appreciate the mention of his home planet of Gemro having left the Solar System. As Emro’s plan is to annex the Earth so that the Gemrovians (another nice demonym!) can have sun access again it seems as though the planet’s departure was fairly recent and not some prehistoric event, this adds weight to the theory that all of the extra planets that Rex and Cynde are visiting are in fact asteroids and not additional planetary bodies that have joined the solar system in the 60-400 years between 1940 and Rex Dexter’s time.

    But enough forensic future astronomy – this post is about speculative xenobiology! And here we have a real development: though Emro is a crystalline humanoid with a cool skull face, his fellow Gemrovians are revealed to be shaped vaguely like bacteriophages, all big heads tottering around on a couple of spindly legs. This suggests a couple of possibilities: Gemrovians could operate in a eusocial caste system, with the humanoid form being reserved for breeding castes. Or they could have a more mutable form than organic life – Emro might have chosen to be humanoid as part of his scheme of conquest or for some personal reason.

    The key to defeating the Gemrovians lies in the fact that Earth paralysis weapons are deadly to them. When tested, this effect applies to the diamonds used in the initial attack on Earth as well, indicating that those were, in fact, Gemrovians. This suggests another possibility: that the Gemrovians have a complex life cycle like that of an insect or amphibian, with several morphologically different stages. Perhaps the person-absorbing diamonds are analagous to eggs or pupae and the absorption behaviour is a passive predation tactic!

    Anyway. Emro, Lord of Diamonds, I salute you.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 424: THE FIEND

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 011, 1939)

    The Fiend is a mad scientist/ musician who has developed a supercharged organ capable of destroying structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge. And he does so, ostensibly as a showcase of his power in aid of his conquest of the world but possibly just as a whim – he’s your classic erratic comic book madman. G-Man Dan Dennis tracks him down with relative ease and the threat of the Fiend is ended forever.

    OR IS IT? No, it isn’t, because the next issue features something that is missing from a lot of Golden and Silver Age comic books: geopolitical ramifications. Specifically, all the nations of the world prick up their ears at the potential acquisition of a powerful new weapon of mass destruction and start mobilizing spies and secret agents to get after the Fiend’s technology. Including the US, whose attempt to negotiate with the Fiend for his schematics is foiled when some crooks make off with him.

    What everyone forgot, of course, is that the Fiend is a raving megalomaniac who turns on all of them at the first possible moment. Dan Dennis has to catch him all over again! Sadly for me, this is the end of the tale – I know that I would love to discover a long serial comic about the FBI managing negotiations with an erratic organist over his WMD but it seems like the good people at Centar Publications weren’t writing comics with me in mind.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 422: THE MASTER

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 002, 1939)

    Another day, another guy named the Master. This Master is escaped lunatic Pierre Lacroix, leader of the Hooded Cult and would-be world conqueror. Lacroix maintains the loyalty of his cult via drug addiction and has a castle HQ. This is all penny-ante stuff.

    The most important thing about the Master is his shirt. It’s like, a sweatshirt with attached cowl? Obviously other villains have been doing similar things with robes for years at this point but I feel like this was something special even if my knowledge of the future of super-villain costume design tells me that it is an evolutionary dead end. 

    Anyway, he dies in an explosion but his contributions to villainous fashion will live on.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 419: PSYK

    (Funny Picture Stories v2 001-003, 1937)

    I think I recently mentioned the dreamlike quality of some Golden Age comics. This is one of them, and only partially because the villain operates out of some sort of pocket dimension in the collective human subconscious. 

    Psyk is a would-be world conqueror with three really good tricks in his arsenal: travel between Earth and the aforementioned Realm of the Subconscious, the ability to raise the dead and mental domination of both the raised dead and the living. His plan seems to be to raise an army of dead and living thralls and then transport them to strategic invasion points. It’s not a bad plan, even if the thralls are all armed with swords and nothing else.

    Psyk is opposed by Jack Strand, who ultimately prevails by exploiting Psyk’s two weaknesses: a power-sapping “ray” (and here I think they’re using ray in the not-much-used sense of a radiation rather than a beam of energy) and the fact that each person affected by Psyk’s power has a weak point where that power entered their body – this point is the only vulnerable place on a thrall’s body and so they cover it with a very obvious and easily removed green piece of metal. Strike a living thrall in the spot and they are freed from Psyk’s power; do the same to a dead thrall and they die for good.

    What’s odd is that Psyk himself has such a spot: his cheekbones (as you might be able to tell from his stylish green cheek armour). What does this imply? Is Psyk himself just a thrall to a more powerful being? Maybe! Doesn’t matter though because Jack Strand punches him right in the cheek and blows up his dream castle.

    He’s an interesting guy, Psyk – definitely has the feel of a character bridging the pulp/comic transition. I’d love to see him BRUNG BACK in a limited series told in a more modern style.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 414: THE POWER

    (Amazing Man Comics 008, 1939)

    The worst thing about Minimidget is obviously his name. The best thing about him and his partner Ritty is the fact that unlike your Doll Mans or Atoms or Ants Men they are a) permanently six inches tall and b) proportionally as strong as a six-inch human being – they’re just lil’ guys wearing jodhpurs. A lot of their adventures are not so much about going out and finding excitement as dealing with the problems of being real real small.

    Such is the case when the two of them are spotted by agents of would-be world dictator the Power and spirited away to be part of his collection of oddities. It’s a real pickle, as the Power is about as over the top villainous as you get: he has a harem; he has slaves; he has a torture chamber full of nude men. His outfit, while fun in an ostentatious way, is that of a man who has never been told that he has had a bad idea. You can tell he has long fingernails because he read that it was symbolic of how little actual labour you had to do. Just the worst.

    Minimidget and Ritty eventually escape when one of the slave-scientists straps them to a bird. They make their way to the US and get word to the authorities and I guess that’s another power a couple of six-inch people have: when you say “something wild is happening thataway” the fact that you are something wild adds a bit of oomph to your claims.

    True to his jagoff nature, the Power attempts to flee in a plane as soon as the authorities start to close in. He is immediately shot down. Minimidget and Rittty are feted, technically, for stabbing a bird.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 398: THE DARK VAPOR

    (More Fun Comics 072, 1941)

    The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel.

    The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism, all in a few short days.

    All this unwholesome business draws the attention of the Spectre, who quickly discovers that a) he cannot influence “Hiram Spiezel” like he could a normal man, b) “Spiezel” can see him, c) “Hiram Spiezel” is actually a banished evil entity from an ancient civilization picking up a bid for world conquest where it left off and d) the Dark Vapor entity is much more powerful than the Spectre. 

    The entity swiftly runs off the Spectre and gets back to the business of enacting a hostile takeover on the world. As an aside: I really appreciate the adaptability of this being – I mean, I assume that whatever civilization it originated in was not organized along the same lines as 1940s US capitalist society and yet it is perfectly comfortable in its new role as business mogul rather than Thunder Warlord or Priest-King or Grand Art Critic. Good job, Dark Vapor!

    Too bad for the Vape that the Spectre has an unspecified, vaguely Christian entity on speed dial, a literal deus ex machina for just such occasions. It supplies him with a power-boosting red aura, with which he in short order evicts the Vapor from Hiram Spiezel, hunts it down and imprisons it at the bottom of the sea, presumably to someday bedevil a civilization of intelligent octopuses with its preternatural pebble-stacking prowess.

    AND SPEAKING OF OCTOPUSES! I enjoyed the Dark Vapor’s machinations but absolutely the greatest thing about their adventure is this illustration of them as a metaphorical octopus ensnaring the US in their horrible flesh-toned tentacles. Always a delight!