The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: world domination

  • 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!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: IAN KARKULL & WOTAN 1941

    What were Ian Karkull and Wotan up to in 1941?

    Ian Karkull is my Platonic Ideal of the Median Super-Villain: he has two
    Golden Age appearances (detailed here) and a handful of post-Silver Age
    ones but also was seemingly pulled out of a hat (probably by Roy Thomas) as the villain who did some sort of scheme that blasted the Justice Society with some sort of energies that made them age slower so that otherwise normal WWII veterans like Wildcat and the Sandman could be running around fighting crime well past retirement age. It’s a Big Deal and it means that Karkull has absolutely been mentioned far more than he’s actually appeared.

    1. More Fun Comics 069, ‘Untitled’:But we’re here to talk about 1941! What was Ian Karkull up to then? Well for one thing he wasn’t calling himself ‘Ian’ yet – that was presumably added at the same time that he was revived to irradiate the JSA. Karkull was seemingly just another scientist with a cool invention – a machine that turns people into shadows! – that he is determined to use for crime.

    Surprise of the year: Karkull has if not a good reason for turning to crime then at least a reason. While exploring the lost Saharan city of Ragnor with his partner Everett Dahlen he is betrayed and left for dead so that Dahlen could run off with a huge ruby. Is it the most rock-solid reason to turn to a life of crime? No, but it’s more of an origin than most Golden Age scientists get.

    Karkull’s first outing ends with him at large, albeit trapped in shadow form by Dr Fate as a sort of ad hoc punishment that is fairly out of line with his crimes of one murder and one bank robbery. That’s the Golden Age for you, I guess.

    2. More Fun Comics 070, ‘Untitled’: Not only is Karkull back in the next issue but he brought Wotan with him!

    In a development that is only a bit surprising, Dr Fate’s slapdash brand of vigilante justice has come back to bite him. Yes, Wotan was sealed in a stony cyst for all time and Karkull was left an intangible shadow but the problem with leaving enough foes just out and about like that is that they might team up, which is exactly what happened when Wotan’s wandering astral form (something you really should control for when imprisoning magic guys for all time) met Karkull’s shadowy one and they worked together to release Wotan’s actual body, albeit without his normal green skin for some reason (the colourist forgot that he was green).

    The Wotan/ Karkull team have a plan to conquer and/or attack the nations of Earth from their Arctic base using devices that control 3/4 of the classical elements, namely Earth, Wind and Fire. They accidentally (?) draw Dr Fate’s attention by attacking nearby teams of Arctic explorers with their wind weapon, leading to an ultimate 2 vs 1 confrontation in an Arctic dome!

    In a bit of an anticlimax, Dr Fate merely sidesteps their fire weapon, causing it to rebound and kill them both. Seemingly, at least – they’ll both be back when the continuity nerds start writing comics.

    IAN KARKULL

    Body Count: 6

    End-of-Year Status: Presumed Dead

    WOTAN

    Body Count:1905

    End-of-Year Status: Presumed Dead

    (Karkull kills his enemy; Wotan and Karkull jointly kill explorers; Wotan sinks battleship)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 388: THE MASTER

    (More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

    The Master is… probably Russian. It’s the same as all of the “pseudo-German crypto-Nazi” characters that populate comics pre-Pearl Harbor. Reading through the vagueness, he is a scientist whose partner emigrated to the US about the time of the Russian Revolution while the Master stayed behind. Now the Master wants revenge for his partner’s success and also is gearing up to take over the world and he’s using his sonic death ray device to achieve both tasks. Or would do, if Dr Fate wasn’t around to poke his helmeted nose into things.

    By far the coolest thing about the Master is the depiction of said sonic death ray – it resembles nothing so much as an amorphous life-form, which is very cool! More of that, please!

    Oh yes, once the Master is foiled he jumps in a swamp and drowns.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 388: THE MASTER

    (More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

    The Master is… probably Russian. It’s the same as all of the “pseudo-German crypto-Nazi” characters that populate comics pre-Pearl Harbor. Reading through the vagueness, he is a scientist whose partner emigrated to the US about the time of the Russian Revolution while the Master stayed behind. Now the Master wants revenge for his partner’s success and also is gearing up to take over the world and he’s using his sonic death ray device to achieve both tasks. Or would do, if Dr Fate wasn’t around to poke his helmeted nose into things.

    By far the coolest thing about the Master is the depiction of said sonic death ray – it resembles nothing so much as an amorphous life-form, which is very cool! More of that, please!

    Oh yes, once the Master is foiled he jumps in a swamp and drowns.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 291: QUEEN JARNA

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025-026)

    Jarna here is Queen of the Lavarites, a group of aliens from Venus who coordinate with the Nazis (shown here as a chunky guy in his pyjamas about to be punched out by the Sub-Mariner). This is all regular comics stuff but there’s some fun highlights:

    a) the main Lavarite force is composed of these little roughnecks who talk in their own untranslated language and are clearly having a ball at all times. If your aliens have to look like humans they should absolutely look like fun humans.

    b) Lavarites have some extremely fun sexual dimorphism going on! Some wags over at the Marvel Wiki are of the opinion that Jarna here is a member of a second Venusian species who has become ruler of these little guys but that removes the much more fun option of them being some sort of eusocial species like bees  and that these are all her worker drone children. Or that Lavarite women are just fifty times larger than Lavarite men!

    (this is the first of two times that we cross over into Sexual Kink That I Don’t Fully Get territory)

    As with any good story involving a bunch of little guys, Namor gets Lilliputianed. (and there’s the other one!)

    Jarna is also surprisingly merciless in her attempt to do away with Namor – it’s just her bad luck that he’s also amphibious.

    Despite the fact that Namor lets her off with a warning in her first outing, Jarna is immediately back to her old tricks in the subsequent issue She’s working with the Nazis to build an underwater staging area for the invasion of the US, but good news: she’s planning on turning on them just as soon as they do the dirty work for her. Attempted world domination I can forgive but Nazi collaboration is a harder pill to swallow.

    Unfortunately it’s just Jarna in this issue – the Lavarites all seem to have gone back to Venus and I guess she hasn’t had time to hatch out another generation of them. I miss them.

    For some reason probably related to her status as a pretty girl Namor lets Jarna go at he the end of this story as well, and she’s stayed away ever since, possibly because he came very close to killing her on a couple of occasions there. I of course would love to see her BRUNG BACK, particularly if she is actually portrayed as the queen of a eusocial species of little guys that she gives birth to, and particularly if they aren’t defaulted to the insect version of such but reflect something more like naked mole-rat society or some other, weirder, model. Have ’em come back for revenge on the Sub-Mariner some time when he’s vulnerable!

    BONUS: this is perhaps the most perfectly drawn “amused disbelief” face I have ever seen 

    (said in a room with two people who had been surgically altered to be amphibious by the Antarctic-dwelling people of lost Atlantis, by the way)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 268: GNORR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 013, 1940)

     

    The history of spaceflight is of course very different in a super-hero universe. For example, Empress Nara of Ligra, featured in a previous post about Professor Zog being knighted, was actually an Earth-woman who arrived on Ligra as an infant because her father invented an interstellar spacecraft sometime around 1920 or so. This it is practically unremarkable that Professor Zog was invited on a trip to the Moon in 1940 by Dr Simon Crane and his daughter Betty. Also Electro came along.

    And having reached the Moon almost 30 years earlier than we in this dimension did, Zog and the Cranes encountered the other side of the super-hero universe coin (if the first side read EASY SPACE TRAVEL, that is): there’s always going to be one or more evil space-creeps when you get where you’re going.

    In this case, the space-creep is Gnorr, self-styled Emperor of the Moon! Last of his kind, thousands of years old and cute as hell! Just a big roly poly head with four wee little tentacles and a wall-eye: I love him. Too bad for him and me that he set his sights on the conquest of Earth, because that’s always the cue for Professor Zog to take a hand – Gnorr ends up blown to high heaven and the Marvel Universe was poorer for it.

    Gnorr also has some pretty great moon-robots in his employ, for the record.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 268: GNORR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 013, 1940)

     

    The history of spaceflight is of course very different in a super-hero universe. For example, Empress Nara of Ligra, featured in a previous post about Professor Zog being knighted, was actually an Earth-woman who arrived on Ligra as an infant because her father invented an interstellar spacecraft sometime around 1920 or so. This it is practically unremarkable that Professor Zog was invited on a trip to the Moon in 1940 by Dr Simon Crane and his daughter Betty. Also Electro came along.

    And having reached the Moon almost 30 years earlier than we in this dimension did, Zog and the Cranes encountered the other side of the super-hero universe coin (if the first side read EASY SPACE TRAVEL, that is): there’s always going to be one or more evil space-creeps when you get where you’re going.

    In this case, the space-creep is Gnorr, self-styled Emperor of the Moon! Last of his kind, thousands of years old and cute as hell! Just a big roly poly head with four wee little tentacles and a wall-eye: I love him. Too bad for him and me that he set his sights on the conquest of Earth, because that’s always the cue for Professor Zog to take a hand – Gnorr ends up blown to high heaven and the Marvel Universe was poorer for it.

    Gnorr also has some pretty great moon-robots in his employ, for the record.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 258: THE FOUR LAMAS

    (Hit Comics 007, 1941)

    If Tibetan Lams aren’t the top religious figures cast as super-villains then they at least have to be in the top three, along with druids and Catholic priests – we won’t see any of those for a while but once they get going they go hard.

    This bunch of Lamas have decided to turn their formidable mental powers (natch) to the task of world conquest, and have chosen to do so by influencing the mind of one President Karla of an unnamed European state to become a rabid warmonger.

    The “Scheming Oriental Mastermind” bit was old before comics existed, and honestly I’d be tempted to skip these guys if this story didn’t include two truly incredible bits: 1. Neon the Unknown flies Karla across Europe and Asia as a sort of human dowsing rod to determine exactly where the mental influence is being broadcast from.

    2. Neon resolves things via mental combat with all three of the Four Lamas (the artist lost track of one of them midway through the story). He of course wins…

    … and their brains explode! Truly a redeeming end for some cliched characters.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 258: THE FOUR LAMAS

    (Hit Comics 007, 1941)

    If Tibetan Lams aren’t the top religious figures cast as super-villains then they at least have to be in the top three, along with druids and Catholic priests – we won’t see any of those for a while but once they get going they go hard.

    This bunch of Lamas have decided to turn their formidable mental powers (natch) to the task of world conquest, and have chosen to do so by influencing the mind of one President Karla of an unnamed European state to become a rabid warmonger.

    The “Scheming Oriental Mastermind” bit was old before comics existed, and honestly I’d be tempted to skip these guys if this story didn’t include two truly incredible bits: 1. Neon the Unknown flies Karla across Europe and Asia as a sort of human dowsing rod to determine exactly where the mental influence is being broadcast from.

    2. Neon resolves things via mental combat with all three of the Four Lamas (the artist lost track of one of them midway through the story). He of course wins…

    … and their brains explode! Truly a redeeming end for some cliched characters.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 256: MORGAN CROOKES

    (Hit Comics 001, 1940)

    Hey, it’s Morgan Crookes, a retired man of great wealth! He tries to take over the world and gets stomped by Neon the Unknown in his first adventure! It’s probably one of the most racist comics of the Golden Age! Which is saying something!