The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Columbia

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 500: DR VYLE AND THE VULTURE MEN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 500: DR VYLE AND THE VULTURE MEN

    (Big Shot Comics 020, 1941)

    Dr Howard Vyle is a pretty disappointing villain to land on for the big Number 500, if I’m honest. He’s just some guy from some country (Big Shot Comics 1940-1941 is rife with spies but the folks at Columbia Comic Corporation were even more cagey than the rest of the industry about indicating where those spies might actually be from – it’s faintly possible he might be supposed to be a commie, even as late as December ’41) who kidnaps a US Senator with colossal eyebrows in order to hypnotize him and use his influence over the government for the glory of his home country. 

    This is all pretty regular comics stuff and depending on my mood on the day I encountered him Dr Vyle would normally find himself in the Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up or maybe not even there. Lucky for him as well as for my sense that there should be something interesting in these big round number entries, Dr Vyle did not limit himself to using his hypnotic gifts for dull old political plots:

    He also used them to recruit hapless goons to be his costumed Vulture Men! So cool they appear on the cover!

    I can’t say there’s too much to the Vulture Men beyond being a bunch of mind controlled goons in cool wingsuits, but after reading two years’ worth of Big Shot Comics‘ array of spies and gang bosses a flock of guys in proper gaudy villain garb are a breath of fresh air.

    Unfortunately for Dr Vyle while mind controlled goons are certainly cheaper and less concerned with their personal safety than your more conventional salaried minions they also seem to lack some of the verve and personal initiative that you need to give a super-hero a run for their money. Skyman beats them up and then beats up their boss, in other words. The senator is saved!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 500: DR VYLE AND THE VULTURE MEN

    (Big Shot Comics 020, 1941)

    Dr Howard Vyle is a pretty disappointing villain to land on for the big Number 500, if I’m honest. He’s just some guy from some country (Big Shot Comics 1940-1941 is rife with spies but the folks at Columbia Comic Corporation were even more cagey than the rest of the industry about indicating where those spies might actually be from – it’s faintly possible he might be supposed to be a commie, even as late as December ’41) who kidnaps a US Senator with colossal eyebrows in order to hypnotize him and use his influence over the government for the glory of his home country. 

    This is all pretty regular comics stuff and depending on my mood on the day I encountered him Dr Vyle would normally find himself in the Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up or maybe not even there. Lucky for him as well as for my sense that there should be something interesting in these big round number entries, Dr Vyle did not limit himself to using his hypnotic gifts for dull old political plots:

    He also used them to recruit hapless goons to be his costumed Vulture Men! So cool they appear on the cover!

    I can’t say there’s too much to the Vulture Men beyond being a bunch of mind controlled goons in cool wingsuits, but after reading two years’ worth of Big Shot Comics‘ array of spies and gang bosses a flock of guys in proper gaudy villain garb are a breath of fresh air.

    Unfortunately for Dr Vyle while mind controlled goons are certainly cheaper and less concerned with their personal safety than your more conventional salaried minions they also seem to lack some of the verve and personal initiative that you need to give a super-hero a run for their money. Skyman beats them up and then beats up their boss, in other words. The senator is saved!

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 008

    Mad or criminal, it’s the science that matters.

    This fellow is known only as “the hypnotist” and has an unspecified plan to do… something that involves taking control of flights of Army bombers and having them blow up targets of his choosing. If the details seem thin on the ground it’s because this fellow speaks precisely three words (see above) before being captured by Jeff Cardiff, Spy-Chief and so the only knowledge we have about his plans is that which can be extrapolated from his actions.

    Bonus details: 1. he hypnotizes people with his large purple eyes 2. his plan requires a video hookup to the planes he is controlling, which I personally did not know was standard or even possible in 1940. (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940)

    De Carva here developed an earthquake causing ray and almost managed to conquer the US with it but made the classic mistake of trusting in his deathtraps to finish off Skyman without bothering to confirm if he was, in fact, dead. This is known as hubris, kids. (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

    Professor Scorp here is a mad Egyptologist! That’s right, folks, we’ve got a mad social science case on our hands! Scorp suffered some sort of breakdown and his family made the unfortunate and retrograde decision to confine him on their island estate rather than, say, seek treatment for him. Eventually, two unscrupulous servants helped him escape as part of a plan to steal and resurrect the mummy of evil pharaoh Tut-Akum-Aut so as to learn the location of his legendary lost treasure. The reanimated mummy above is sadly merely an illusion conjured by Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians. But on a happy note, Professtor Scorp is taken somewhere for proper treatment at the end of the story! (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

    UPDATE: Astonishingly, Professor Scorp returns in The Face 001!

    This is Humpy Hudson, who has a moderately foolproof scheme (develop a substance that explodes the air around it but is itself unharmed and make it an innocuous shape, thus giving yourself a hard-to-spot, untraceable bomb, then bomb utilities until you can extort money out of them) hampered by some poor planning (he only has one reusable bomb and he made it in the shape of an onyx statuette). Humpy spends most of the issue trying to get his bomb back after it gets picked up by a youngster and sold at a pawnshop, then gets captured by Skyman. (Big Shot Comics 019, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 499: NELS LAMBERT

    (Big Shot Comics 017, 1941) 

    Like a lot of Skyman’s enemies Nels Lambert is a disaster causing guy. Specifically, he has a rig called an Electrical Wave Generator, with which he can create waves – presumably of all sizes but as he is a criminal scientist he’s mostly focused on the largest and most destructive ones.

    A note on naming: the Electrical Wave Generator is an okay name at best but he does refer to his base here as Nels Lambert’s Floating Island and I personally choose to believe that that is it’s official name because it’s extremely whimsical..

    Like our old friend the Ice Menace, Nels Lambert’s plan is to weaponize the ocean and demand ransom from nations bordering the Atlantic in return for not being flooded. And he almost gets away with it, thanks to the fact that the Electrical Wave Generator is a multifunctional doomsday device: not only can it be used to create waves using electricity but that same electricity can be discharged into the atmosphere around Nels Lambert’s Floating Island™ in order to for example very nearly electrocute Skyman and his pal Chubby as they fly in to investigate the source of this wave nuisance.

    And speaking of Skyman’s pal! Chubby Weeks is an old college friend of Allan “Skyman” Turner who ends up going along on this adventure through medium-level plot contrivance. The real interesting thing about Chubby is that he’s a radio news reporter and that according the the callsign in the background of this picture he works at Station WBSC, which is the same station that Tony “the Face” Trent owns and/or works at. This is my first time reading any comics from the Columbia Comic Corporation so I have no idea if there’s any further crossover action in the future but this evidence of a very mildly shared universe is very mildly exciting!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 498: THE ROCKINGHAM BANDIT

    (Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

    The Rockingham Bandit is a masked fellow who commits robberies and murders in the town of Rockingham (natch) who turns out to be a balloonist from a nearby circus who is framing another guy from the same circus in an attempt to steal his girl. Two items:

    1) The frame works like this: the Rockingham Bandit does a crime and then leaves behind an item identifiable as belonging to the target. The Rockingham PD are apparently even dumber than your typical comic book cops and don’t question the fact that this guy is doing crimes while seemingly shedding a constant stream of monogrammed items (he does have a weirdly large number of such items, though).

    2) This is a Charlie Chan story and like all Charlies Chan comics (all Charlie Chan everything?) is pretty good! If you completely tune out everything that Charlie Chan says.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 497: RAMUN THE EVIL ONE

    (Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

    Ramun the Evil One aka Ramun the Great is a hypnotist/ stage magician with a simple if short-sighted plan: 1) open a club in New York 2) have it become popular with the wealthy social set 3) hypnotize rich guys 4) profit

    (aside: just look at that charming picture of a man who thinks he’s an ape! The little dance!)

    The short-sighted part goes hand-in-hand with the profit, as once Ramun has induced his victims to hand over all of their fungible wealth he orders them to drive into the Hudson River and drown themselves, and he’s done this more than a dozen times over the course of two weeks. This is… not smart. “Hey, every victim went to the Egyptian Gardens and got hypnotized just before withdrawing all their monies from the bank and disappearing” is a thought that even the most dull-witted police officer will eventually have, to say nothing of Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians.

    Ramun does find an unorthodox counter to the common super-villain problem of invisible magic-men creeping around in their lairs: train an ape to deal with it. And he comes as close as anyone to killing Marvelo, so good job Ramun!

    Ramun blows himself up at the end of the story but manages to recover enough for he and Edpo the ape to return in Big Shot Comics 019, wherein they have switched their focus from larceny to espionage. This time, Ramun seems to have some actual, non-hypnosis-based magic to call on, but it’s not quite enough.

    Ramun, Edpo and their unnamed employer end up simultaneously perforated and drowned at the climax of the story, and while this is exactly the kind of off-panel “nobody could survive that” death that Ramun came back from the first time he was doomed by a far more insidious foe than mere bullets: popularity. Big Shot Comics 020 was Marvelo’s final outing and so Ramun would never get his chance to return.

    UPDATE: Ramun makes a completely unexpected return in The Face 001!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 496: THE CHIEF AND THE COBRA

    (Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

    The Cobra technically works for the Chief if you want to exclusively go by the criminal org chart, but the Cobra is also the only reason for the Chief being mentioned at all and not just thrown into my big bin of nondescript gang bosses. Thus: a dual entry.

    Like I said, the Chief is your regular degular gang boss, albeit one who swans around in a green smoking jacket the whole time. Feeling the pinch as the Face cracks down on crime, he hires the Cobra, a rare super-powered Columbia Comics Corporation character. It’s not much – she can do comic book hypnotism that causes her target to see what she wants and also scry her hypnotized target using a crystal ball – but it’s more than most of her criminal peers have.

    The Chief and the Cobra essentially prank the Face’s secret identity Tony Trent by making him think that a man and then an entire house have disappeared, with the idea being that Trent, who at this point “knows” the Face in the same way Clark Kent knows Superman, will bring him in to investigate. And it works, only instead of being easily killed the Face does his regular schtick and beats everyone up. It’s your classic villain’s 2/3 of a plan – no consideration for how to deal with their foe, only how to draw them out.

    The Chief and the Cobra are pretty swiftly rounded up. Is hypnotizing a guy not to see a house and then looking at him in a crystal ball a crime? If not I assume that the Cobra was released pretty swiftly. I mean, she did try to shoot the Face at the end of the story but good luck ever convicting someone of attempted murder of a masked vigilante, amiright?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 495: STENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 011, 1941)

    Stentor is named after a character from the Iliad who was known to have an amazingly loud voice and from whom we derive the word “Stentorian”. This is a real slap in the face to me, a mythology-obsessed kid who got a minor in Classics at university essentially by accident because I kept signing up for classes I found interesting. I have opinions on Greek heroes! I know who Philoctetes is! And yet Stentor, a guy who died in a shouting contest with Hermes, was unknown to me until today.

    This Stentor has figured out some way of broadcasting his voice without use of obvious receiving equipment and is using it to harass FDR in hopes that he can get ahold of the entire USA.

    By amazing coincidence, Skyman has been messing around with Rochelle salts in his lab, leading to the discovery that they are the secret to Stentor’s technology (tl;dr on the Wikipedia article: they’re crystals used in WWII-era A/V gear).

    Skyman fully figures out Stentor’s tech and starts razzing him, leading to our first view of the man. I must say I appreciate a super-villain who arranges to spend his entire scheme sitting down.

     

    Don’t worry about Stentor being a one-trick pony: he is in fact a two-trick pony, as he also has the capacity to cause Rochelle salts to explode, a capacity he employs in an attempt on the life of the President using a cunningly-placed Rochelle salt fish castle, surely one of the most ignoble ways for a world leader to be assassinated.

    Stentor is at heart the kind of little weenie nerd who would pull an obscure mythological character to name himself after rather than calling himself the Voice like all of his peers, so once Skyman tracks him down he’s swiftly wedgied into custody. Note also that Skyman has the same “ick no, girl cooties” reaction to being smooched as Golden Age Superman.

    In conclusion: I like him! His technology is weird and niche and he manages to use it anyway. Plus I got to learn about a mythological guy I didn’t know about! (EDIT: Looks like he was in an Assassin’s Creed game a couple-three years ago. I am late to the Knowing About Stentor party)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 495: STENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 011, 1941)

    Stentor is named after a character from the Iliad who was known to have an amazingly loud voice and from whom we derive the word “Stentorian”. This is a real slap in the face to me, a mythology-obsessed kid who got a minor in Classics at university essentially by accident because I kept signing up for classes I found interesting. I have opinions on Greek heroes! I know who Philoctetes is! And yet Stentor, a guy who died in a shouting contest with Hermes, was unknown to me until today.

    This Stentor has figured out some way of broadcasting his voice without use of obvious receiving equipment and is using it to harass FDR in hopes that he can get ahold of the entire USA.

    By amazing coincidence, Skyman has been messing around with Rochelle salts in his lab, leading to the discovery that they are the secret to Stentor’s technology (tl;dr on the Wikipedia article: they’re crystals used in WWII-era A/V gear).

    Skyman fully figures out Stentor’s tech and starts razzing him, leading to our first view of the man. I must say I appreciate a super-villain who arranges to spend his entire scheme sitting down.

     

    Don’t worry about Stentor being a one-trick pony: he is in fact a two-trick pony, as he also has the capacity to cause Rochelle salts to explode, a capacity he employs in an attempt on the life of the President using a cunningly-placed Rochelle salt fish castle, surely one of the most ignoble ways for a world leader to be assassinated.

    Stentor is at heart the kind of little weenie nerd who would pull an obscure mythological character to name himself after rather than calling himself the Voice like all of his peers, so once Skyman tracks him down he’s swiftly wedgied into custody. Note also that Skyman has the same “ick no, girl cooties” reaction to being smooched as Golden Age Superman.

    In conclusion: I like him! His technology is weird and niche and he manages to use it anyway. Plus I got to learn about a mythological guy I didn’t know about! (EDIT: Looks like he was in an Assassin’s Creed game a couple-three years ago. I am late to the Knowing About Stentor party)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 494: THE INVENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) 

    It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t.

    So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential value that could be reaped by selling this design for industrial purposes rather than using it for mere bank robbery because the Inventor is in fact a mad scientist and thus cannot be held to the same fiscal standards as his more rational colleagues.

    Let’s take a second to appreciate the classic stylings of this robot: cylinder head, pincer claws, speaker ears… all the great robot features in one cool guy.

    This might be a Tom Kerry story but the real hero of the piece is this night watchman who chooses not to pointlessly die in an attempt to protect the bank he works at and instead lives to clue the two-fisted District Attorney in on the culprit’s identity as a robot. I appreciate you, fella.

    Tom Kerry tracks the robot back to its lair by the simple expedient of clinging to the underside of the remote-controlled auto-gyro used to ferry both it and the money back to the Inventor. There he takes advantage of the fact that like a surprising percentage of Golden and Silver Age robots, this one’s exterior shell is easily removed and repurposed as a costume.

    The Inventor is essentially epically pranked into signing a confession, Tom Kerry battles a knife-wielding maniac in his boxer shorts and the whole thing wraps up with a sock to the jaw. No word on what became of that poor nude robot, though.