The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: mind control

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 018

    The hits flops just keep coming.

    This gang doesn’t bother to give themself a proper name even though their scheme is extremely big and loud: they have access to a magnetic ray device and have employed it to pull down multiple large buildings in scenic Midtown City, thus killing between one and four thousand people (a printing error obscures the exact number), all so that their demands for protection money from the owners of other buildings will be paid without question. It’s just as well that the Comet eye-beams them all.

    I really am stuck on the fact that they haven’t bothered to give themselves a name, when they have such attention to detail that the hostages they grabbed in order to stymie the Comet were literally Mr & Mrs John Q. Public Priorities differ, I suppose. (Pep Comics 009, 1940)

    Buck Brady of the FBI is investigating a gang that is smuggling Malaysians across the Canada/ US border (because nobody would expect them to, that’s why) and the ringleader, when he shows up, is dressed fantastically. I cannot believe that more super-villains aren’t wearing big fur coats when they look so great when paired with a cowl mask. Anyway, he turns out to be Lieutenant Thomas of the US Border Patrol. (Prize Comics 003, 1940)

    Move over pre-2000s Wolverine, because this guy right here is possibly the most mysterious figure in comics. Samson and David track him to the hidden City of Erde after he initiates a series of attacks against the US, presumably with an eye on conquering it. But who is he? How did he become king of Erde and its population of cavemen? Where did he get the weaponry his cavemen are using in their attacks? Just how the heck did a whole city full of cavemen go unnoticed smack in the middle of the US, secret valley or no? (Samson 002, 1940)

    This unnamed mustachioed man is remarkable mostly for the number of pivots that he manages to pull off over the course of a 13-page story. He first attracts Samsons’s attention with a scheme to pit the presumably South American country of Ecuazil against its neighbour (sadly unnamed but probably something like Perile or Aregentuay) and then conquer both once they were both sufficiently weakened by the fighting. Once Samson and David put an end to that he hypnotically enslaved Samson for a while, then launched into a full-fledged invasion of the US. Pretty good range, I’d say.

    The US invasion plan also featured this amazing spindly-legged flamethrower tank. Bask in its pleasing aesthetics and questionable strategic value! Please also note David in these panels as this is a good representation of his role in the comic: all enthusiasm, willing to lasso absolutely anything, very low actual impact on events as they unfold but clearly Samson enjoys having him around.

    Finally, I don’t quite know why but I feel that I must highlight this sequence in which Samson hurls a man into a pit and then his lifeless body is just there for the next two panels. I want to frame this and hang it on my wall. (Samson 002, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 698: SINFO

    (Planet Comics 002, 1940)

    Sinfo is a scientist of the unspecified future who has used his mind control technology to dominate a city of Neptunian Crab-Men and is now looking into the possibility of doing the same to the people of Earth. As such, he has captured space adventurer Buzz Crandall along with his associates Dr and Susan Curan.

    I have a lot of affection for Sinfo, 100% of which are because I appreciate his aesthetics. Why, just look at the giant fan that he has installed at the highest point of Crab City in order to keep it shrouded in concealing mists! It’s beautiful!

    And speaking of Crab City, I love the design of Sinfo’s thralls the Crab-Men. Talk about simultaneously goofy and menacing! If these were video game enemies I would absolutely underestimate them constantly, only to lose 3/4 of my health to a spinning claw attack.

    Sinfo himself also looks amazing. I don’t know if he’s an alien or a mutant or what, but the important thing is that he’s dressed like someone who lives in a swamp in a movie from the 70s, his facial skin looks like it’s melting, and he’s not balding gracefully. This is peak Scientist Who Lives Alone styling.

    Sinfo’s attempts at taming the human mind are cut short when he makes one of the super-villain’s cardinal errors and allows his primary piece of technology – in this case his Crab-Man controlling device – fall into the hands of the protagonist. This leads to Sinfo falling to his death as he is flung from the top of a building by his former subjects. A fairly ruthless move on Buzz Crandall’s part but I suppose at this point he’d gone through a lot.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 694: SARKO

    (Planet Comics 001, 1940)

    We’re in the 1940 run of Planet Comics now, so look out for a fair few of space tyrants with one-word nonsense names. Like Sarko here! Sarko is an Earth man who came to Mars in 1933 and set about conquering the dark side of the planet. Now it’s the near future and Sarko has his sights set on taking over the remainder of Mars and the light-side city of Ru in particular. 

    The… Ruvians? No demonym is provided. The Ruvians aren’t really up to the task of defending their domed city from Sarko and his army of One-Eyed Monster Men, but lucky for them intrepid space explorer Flint Baker and his crew of condemned murderers (plus New York Globe reporter and stowaway Mimi Wilson) have arrived just in time to help out.

    In an even greater coincidence, crewman Cliff Grant recognizes Sarko! It turns out that he was in jail for a series of murders committed while under the mental control of a man named Sappo and that Sappo is in fact the same guy! It’s a heckuva thing folks, but that’s comics for you.

    Grant almost gets his revenge, too, but doesn’t quite stick the landing. Sarko manages to kill Grant but is then taken down by another member of Baker’s crew. Mars and Ru are saved!

    BONUS: finding a crashed spaceship from decades earlier is an objectively very funny thing to happen to someone who was just crowing about being the first human on Mars.

    Heck! I almost forgot to show the One-Eyed Monster Men of Mars! Well, here one is.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 685: SATAN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 685: SATAN

    (Pep Comics 002, 1940)

    Dateline: Florida! A huge and monstrous face has begun appearing in the clouds across the state to demand fealty! Coincidentally, armoured cars have been disappearing up and down the peninsula at about the same time as the facial appearances.

    The Comet is of course intrigued by this coincidence and decides to investigate. Plotting out the robberies on a map, he proceeds to the swamp located at the central point, and I’ve just realized that it’s a good thing that he’s right because the first thing he does is kick a man into the water and steal his boat and that would be a very embarrassing thing for a super-hero to have done to ,e.g., an innocent game warden. It’s no problem, though, because the guy was in fact an agent of Satan.

    Satan turns out to be a pretty cagey character: not only does he have a way of dealing with snoopers (dragging their boats through a whirlpool into his sub-swamp lair, as happens to the Comet) but he’s got an impressive level of knowledge of current super-hero news. He knows just who the Comet is and more importantly how to neutralize his major offensive ability, by welding his protective eye mask shut. And this is only the Comet’s second case!

    The mystery of both the monster in the clouds and the disappearing armoured cars, by the way, come down to the same thing: that old favourite, the mighty dirigible. One dirigible equipped with a high-powered projector and loudspeaker and a second with a powerful electromagnet, to be precise – as one is distracting everyone with a big face, the other is making off with the car and the cash (and the unfortunate driver and guards).

    Back to the Comet: Satan’s anti-super-hero savvy extends only so far. Despite his acumen in capturing the Comet and neutralizing his power, Satan has fallen prey to the super-villain’s hubris by leaving him to die in a deathtrap rather than merely shooting him in the head. You see, the really important thing about the Comet’s visor is that it’s just a sheet of glass and thus easily breakable, which the Comet does by the simple expedient of headbutting a rock. After that, it’s just a matter of utterly obliterating not only both dirigibles but the entire swamp base. Satan is toast.

    OR IS HE? In a shock twist, Satan returns in Pep Comics 003 and manages to capture the Comet again, this time taking the trouble to pop him into a glass tube and thus completely neutralizing his powers! (and also delighting me personally, because the name Satan is very ambiguously used in his first appearance and I really appreciated this confirmation that it really is his nom du crime. For my records).

    Satan’s got big plans for the Comet – no cheesy deathtrap this time, no sir. Instead, he brings in put-upon hypnotist Doc Zadar in order to put the Comet to work for him.

    And this isn’t your namby-pamby “can’t be forced to violate your deeply-held morals” hypnotism, this is the real hard-core shit. The Comet goes on a destructive and violent crime spree under Satan and Zagnar’s direction. Notably, this is when he kills a whole bunch of cops, which informs the rest of his Golden Age career by making him one of the few super-heroes who the police have some real justification for constantly trying to gun down (I mean, they still shouldn’t just be trying to execute him in the street, but it’s nice to see them doing it for a reason other than “he’s running away from me even though I’m threatening to kill him!”)

    Once again Satan is undone by his own hubris: this time his failure to see that cheating and abusing the man who controls the actions of a living death ray generator might be a bad idea, and he gets gruesomely dissolved for his mistake. Unfortunately for Zagnar, he forgets the first rule of owning a living death ray generator: always put the safety cap back on. He too is dissolved and the Comet is free to have cops try to gun him down in the street forevermore.

    BONUS: All this Comet talk had me feeling nostalgic and I looked up 1983’s The Comet 001, which I had as a kid. It’s a pretty maudlin book primarily concerned with the Comet castigating himself over what a violent and murderous vigilante he was, and the splash page reflects this via the floating ghosts of the dead who haunt him – note all the cops from Pep Comics 003 at the top there. But just who is that at the lower left?

    I am 75+% certain that this is the monster face that Satan was projecting onto the clouds in Pep 002, which is a pretty hilarious thing to be haunting a depressed 80s super-hero. “I contributed to the death of the airship as a viable mode of transport when I murdered those dirigibles!”

    (the real if boring answer is that it probably is the face from the clouds but, as Satan himself is never actually pictured in the severely abridged version of the story in this comic, the face is being retconned into being his)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 668: THOTH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 668: THOTH

    (Jungle Comics 011, 1940)

    We begin with a very comic book (or monster-of-the-week TV show) setup. Camilla notices and comments on the ancient Magician’s Pool and then is almost immediately compelled to enter that same pool and disappear from the realms of man.

    Camilla’s aide/paramour Sir Champion turns to local wizard Warlock (not that Warlock the Wizard, but it is wild that there are two of them) for help and learns that the Magician of Magician’s Pool fame is Thoth, an evil jerk who the people of the Lost Empire tossed through the pool to another dimension hundreds of years earlier. Also, it turns out that the pool links to another dimension on nights of the full moon.

    Meanwhile, Camilla has also learned these things from Thoth himself, who has been spending his time in the unnamed dimension taming weird monsters and is now ready to use them to conquer the Earth. Camilla is of course having none of this but her attempts to prevent it using violence are thwarted as Thoth and all others in his presence are immune to mundane weaponry. On an unrelated note, did I mention that Warlock the wizard gave Sir Champion a magic sword and shield?

    This is a pretty Sir Champion heavy episode overall – he encounters a cute girl who turns out to be a less attractive green assassin and so is okay to slay and then is taken to the home of a cool nude giant dude who I wish we knew more about! As it stands, Sir Champion gets directions and a guide from him and we never see him again.

    Sometimes I get a bit lazy and just do a bullet point summary as my first draft of these entries and what I had here was simply “MAGIC SWORD, ASSHOLE” an I think that stands. Thoth (asshole) gets a magic sword to the heart and ceases to become a threat to the world as a whole and the Lost Empire in particular.

    Camilla and Sir Champion make their way home, accompanied by the giant naked laughing guy’s little beaƒt friend, which would be significant to later plots and stories in a different time, but this is the Golden Age and an extradimensional creature of unknown nature and provenance coming to Earth has no further impact.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 013

    Progress! Science! 

    It’s blood that this nameless inventor wants, blood to make his super fuel! Too bad for him that he chose to steal it from US Marine Strut Warren because he ends up extremely dead for his efforts (and the world remains dependant on fossil fuels. Thanks, Strut). (Fight Comics 003, 1940)

    Professor Pierre Villon, refugee from the Paris Medical Academy, has set himself up on a tropical island to further his scientific research into making human/animal hybrids. His method of acquiring test subjects by knocking aircraft out of the sky with an engine killing ray attracts the attention of Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron, and Villon ends up perishing at the hands, claws and teeth of his own creations. (Fight Comics 008, 1940)

    Professor Gustoff’s one interest is in administering his mutagenic fluid to people to turn them into “weird creatures”, aka bald guys with webbed hands and feet.He sets his sights too high when he tries to creaturize South Sea adventurer Shark Brodie and ends up beat up and presumably in some sort of colonial penal system. And the worst part? The poor weird creatures aren’t even fully amphibious – they all end up drowning. (Fight Comics 009, 1940)

    This is Dr Wratt, who lives on an isolated island populated by hypnotically controlled man-apes. He kidnaps Kaänga’s love interest Ann Mason for what I can only assume are weird creep reasons, based mostly on the fact that Wratt’s outfit consists of a short lab smock and nothing else. (Jungle Comics 002, 1940)

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 013

    Progress! Science! 

    It’s blood that this nameless inventor wants, blood to make his super fuel! Too bad for him that he chose to steal it from US Marine Strut Warren because he ends up extremely dead for his efforts (and the world remains dependant on fossil fuels. Thanks, Strut). (Fight Comics 003, 1940)

    Professor Pierre Villon, refugee from the Paris Medical Academy, has set himself up on a tropical island to further his scientific research into making human/animal hybrids. His method of acquiring test subjects by knocking aircraft out of the sky with an engine killing ray attracts the attention of Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron, and Villon ends up perishing at the hands, claws and teeth of his own creations. (Fight Comics 008, 1940)

    Professor Gustoff’s one interest is in administering his mutagenic fluid to people to turn them into “weird creatures”, aka bald guys with webbed hands and feet.He sets his sights too high when he tries to creaturize South Sea adventurer Shark Brodie and ends up beat up and presumably in some sort of colonial penal system. And the worst part? The poor weird creatures aren’t even fully amphibious – they all end up drowning. (Fight Comics 009, 1940)

    This is Dr Wratt, who lives on an isolated island populated by hypnotically controlled man-apes. He kidnaps Kaänga’s love interest Ann Mason for what I can only assume are weird creep reasons, based mostly on the fact that Wratt’s outfit consists of a short lab smock and nothing else. (Jungle Comics 002, 1940)

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 012

    Science class was never like this.

    Count la Roach is a scientist-spy looking to synthesize enough “noxio gas” to flood the NYC of the I-think-it’s-still-the-near-future world of Yank Wilson, but all he gets is a sock in the jaw for his trouble. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

    This unnamed fellow is our first proper mad scientist in a while! I really like his style, particularly the fact that he’s introduced while sitting in a tennis judge’s chair for no stated reason. He lives in an inactive volcano, probably in Africa, and is developing a horrible poison dust that he has used to destroy the neighbouring village – it’s probably a good thing that Captain Kidd melts him. (Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)

    Dr Loy here has created an army of chemical androids that he controls and aims to take over the world with. Two problems: the Fantom of the Fair is on the case and Dr Loy’s androids dissolve in water. Loy is quickly arrested. (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 002, 1940)

    Chung Hang has a simple dream: wait until the world is exhausted by WWII and then take over using his mind control ray. And he might just get there some day, because Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron just punches him out and leaves once he and his pals have escaped Chung Hang’s science dungeons. (Fight Comics 002, 1940)

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 012

    Science class was never like this.

    Count la Roach is a scientist-spy looking to synthesize enough “noxio gas” to flood the NYC of the I-think-it’s-still-the-near-future world of Yank Wilson, but all he gets is a sock in the jaw for his trouble. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

    This unnamed fellow is our first proper mad scientist in a while! I really like his style, particularly the fact that he’s introduced while sitting in a tennis judge’s chair for no stated reason. He lives in an inactive volcano, probably in Africa, and is developing a horrible poison dust that he has used to destroy the neighbouring village – it’s probably a good thing that Captain Kidd melts him. (Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)

    Dr Loy here has created an army of chemical androids that he controls and aims to take over the world with. Two problems: the Fantom of the Fair is on the case and Dr Loy’s androids dissolve in water. Loy is quickly arrested. (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 002, 1940)

    Chung Hang has a simple dream: wait until the world is exhausted by WWII and then take over using his mind control ray. And he might just get there some day, because Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron just punches him out and leaves once he and his pals have escaped Chung Hang’s science dungeons. (Fight Comics 002, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 615: SANGLOR

    (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

    Sanglor starts out strong. He immediately charms me with his aesthetic sense: his ‘Automatic Subplane’ spy drones are delightful, his ‘Flying Castle’ is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and great-looking mobile bases I have ever seen and his costume manages to evoke the dress sense of a 1940s comic book movie villain in a way I have not seen since the Vampire, almost exactly 300 entries ago.

    He manages to mess things up almost immediately, of course. His plan is to take over the world by hypnotizing key politicians and diplomats etc., and then presumably induce them to shift the reins of political power his way. This is the kind of scheme that requires some degree of care to set up – you have to get all of your assets in place without causing undue suspicion, so having them for example act all weird and then disappear is problematic. People are noticing your plan, Sanglor.

    This is the first evidence of what I will call Sanglor Self-Sabotages. This one seems to stem from the fact that Sanglor works completely solo, without even a weird little lab assistant to test his hypnotic ray on to see if it makes people freak out in noticeable ways before using it in a sensitive espionage operation.

    The big upshot of this Sanglor Self-Sabotage is that Samson is on the case basically the instant that the scheme is put in motion

    The second Sanglor Self-Sabotage is an extension of the first: he has no real defenses. Once Samson makes his way to the Flying Castle his only real opposition is a crowd of tuxedo-clad diplomats flailing away with their soft fists.

    Sanglor does think to call out his drone army to deal with the intruder but they don’t seem to even be armed, despite their little gun barrels – they just fly at Samson until he smashes them all.

    The really big final Sanglor Self-Sabotage is revealed once Samson bursts into his inner sanctum: Sanglor is too busy being a weird creep to actively manage the defense of his headquarters. It’s not exactly clear what he’s doing with this young woman or who she is (it’s unlikely to be Miss Royce, a politician’s daughter in England and the only named female character in the story) but it’s real creep shit and it’s an unnecessary distraction from the approaching vigilante.

    Sanglor is probably still distracted as he flees through an industrial section of his base, because he can’t even run correctly – he manages to heave himself off what looks to be a pretty solid catwalk into the first available cauldron of boiling chemicals.

    I think that ultimately Sanglor serves as an object example of the need for villains to do a couple of trial runs before attempting world domination. If he’d attempted to take over a county or a small business first, maybe some of these kinks would’ve been worked out.