The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: chemical mutate

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 004

    the Lone Warrior (and Dicky): 

    The Lone Warrior and Dicky are Stan and Dicky Carter, son of the now-deceased “world’s greatest scientist” and recipients of his Power Elixir injections, leaving them generically physically enhanced and well-equipped to battle pseudo-Nazi forces seeking to wreck America’s military. Plus he made them a land/ air/ sea plane/tank called the Wonder Ship which is very useful.

    There is of course a knee-jerk impulse to snidely point out that a guy called the Lone Warrior is never seen without his sidekick, but… I think it’s on purpose? They don’t explore it well but I reckon that it’s meant to be a joke: big tough dude calls himself the Lone Warrior and can’t avoid being tailed everywhere by his little brother? It’s not a bad joke! Too bad they only had 4 or so appearances and never really explored it. (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

    Samson:

    Samson from the comics is, unsurprisingly, based off of Samson from the Bible. In fact, he’s a descendant of the Biblical Samson, which seems hard to prove. Like his supposed ancestor, Samson possesses superhuman strength as long as his hair remains uncut, which in his case means that he must maintain a sort of shoulder-length mullet. His hair of course frequently gets cut for dramatic effect but luckily for Samson his other super power is that it will grow back preternaturally fast and always into the same style, like Wolverine’s.

    At some point in a comic I have not yet read Samson finds and adopts a boy named David. David has no super-powers and is in constant peril. He also has a scientist pal named Professor Brun who acts as a sort of Samson dispatcher using advanced surveillance tech to find trouble and a teleporter with the fun nmae of the “demoleculing ray” to send Samson and David to the scene.

    Finally, Samson is a stone cold killer. He wipes out crooks by the dozen with a frankly concerning lack of care for the legal process. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

    Late in 1941, Samson got a bit of sprucing up. I don’t know if this was a deliberate attempt on the part of Fox Features to rectify the formulaic nature of Samson comics or it was a simple case of a new artist/ writer shaking things up but suddenly Samson had a supporting cast beyond David: namely a gal pal with the incredibly on-the-nose name of Lila Dee and a comic relief artist named J. Rembrandt Speedball. 

    The best addition, however, was… not exactly a secret identity for Samson but an Incognito Mode in which he dressed in street clothes, but since he was an enormous, long-haired guy what this entails is his wearing a huge overcoat buttoned to the neck with the collar flipped up over his mullet. Truly great. Sadly, this revamped Samson only appeared in a handful of issues before Fox Features had the troubles that lead to them halting production for a few years. Like most of their characters, he was never seen again.

    UPDATES: He really is the descendant of the Biblical Samson (Samson 001, 1940)

    Update 1941 

    the Flame:

    Found by Tibetan lamas as a baby and taught their mystic secrets, the Flame has a lot of the standard flame powers – immunity to fire and heat (and explosions), control over flame, a high enough body temperature that bullets melt on contact with him – a few more unusual ones – the ability to walk and climb on sheets of flame as if they were solid, the weirdly common Golden Age super power of appearing suddenly in the element that they embody, in this case any size flame down to a match – and surprisingly no actual ability to produce flame. Instead, he carries a pistol-sized flamethrower (over time, the amount of heat and flame produced by his body does increase, but he’s never at Human Torch level). The Flame’s enemies of course frequently attempt to set fire to him.

    While I appreciate the Flame’s classic costume stylings, he is ultimately a pretty generic guy. Plus he’s at least as bloodthirsty as his fellow Fox Features alum Samson. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    (the Flame also has a very cool car, as seen in Big 3 002, 1940)

    Like Samson, the Flame eventually gets a more fleshed out world just in time for Fox Features to go to heck for a few years and then fail to bring him back. In the Flame’s case he does adopt a secret identity: as Gary Preston, private investigator. He is joined by former boxer and general goofball Pug and future Flame Girl (watch for future round-ups, I guess) Linda Dale.

    Flame UPDATE 1

    Flame UPDATE 2 

    Flame UPDATE 3

    Flame UPDATE 4 

    Stardust the Super Wizard:

    Stardust the Super Wizard is an enormous, nigh-omnipotent fellow who lives in a star and deals out bizarre and ironic punishments to a cartoonishly evil rogues gallery with incredible ease – the only real obstacle that he faces in an average adventure is the travel time between him and his villains. The second-greatest creation of outsider comics artist Fletcher Hanks (after Fantomah, of course), Stardust is well-known enough that I don’t really need to go into much detail on him here but it seemed weird to leave him out. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 313: DR KLUTCH

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    Dr Klutch is your basic criminal scientist. His major distinction is that he got beat up by the Tough Kid Squad in their only recorded outing, but there are a couple of other points worthy of discussion here.

    The first is that we have a clear timeline for this guy. Many, many super-villains are clearly operating at a level that would require years of work to establish or have a lengthy if nebulous criminal record, but with Klutch here we know: in 1926 he murdered his research partner Dr Danger in revenge for not sharing his findings and in the subsequent 16 years he became a successful enough criminal scientist to be identified on sight by even beat cops.

    (not sure how great of a scientist he was, given that it took the entire 16 years to track down the Danger Twins, one of whom was adopted by Danger’s friend Professor Moxon – follow a few leads, buddy!)

    Point two is merely that the idea of murdering someone and then perpetually electrocuting their twitching skeleton is fairly metal.

    But the real kicker is that Klutch eventually gets ahold of Dr Danger’s serum by extracting it from the blood of Danger Twin Wally. Klutch is a super-powered criminal scientist! The serum is a bit ill-defined but the gist of it seems to be that it enhances your trained abilities, and Dr Klutch is trained in fightin’, science and EVIL.

    Sadly, the closest we get to seeing the full chemically-enhanced might of Klutch’s evil mind is a plan to rob several banks at once – mid-tier super-villainy at best, but perhaps he was working up to it. BUT, in an exciting turn of events, Klutch was captured at the end of the story, leaving the door open to my favourite potential BRUNG BACK scenario: the super-powered crook who gets out after 80+ years of cooling his heels in the klink. After all, he’s full of serum! Who knows what that does to the aging process?

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 036: THE TOUGH KID SQUAD

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    I occasionally opine about the relative obscurity of one super-hero or another and it’s tricky to judge such a thing objectively, especially when it’s about a suite of characters who are all 100% unknown to the world at large. Despite this I am confident in my assertion that the Tough Kid Squad are the most obscure Marvel characters ever to receive their own title, even if it did only last one issue.

    The Tough Kid Squad is an obvious attempt by Marvel to replicate the formula of the Young Allies, but the technology to boil down a concept and recast it misfired somehow. The real key to a 40s kid gang is the mix of personalities – as seen in the Young Allies’ Smart Kid, Fat Kid, Tough Kid, Racial Stereotype and two Super-Hero Kids. The Tough Kid Squad on the other hand, is as follows:

    Wally Danger: Together with his brother Wally forms the Danger Twins, the Super-Hero kid Element of the team. Orphaned at a young age, the twins were raised separately after Tom was stolen by a crook to be his protege. They both benefit from a serum that their father gave them as infants which enhances their trained abilities. Wally mostly acts as the Smart Kid.

    Tom Danger: Raised to be a crook but his better nature shone through when he met his long-lost twin, Tom is a Tough Kid to his core.

    Derrick Dawes: A former school bully who was befriended after a beating from Tom. Tough Kid.

    Butch: A guy on the school football team who is befriended off-panel. Supposedly a Fat Kid based on the action but is drawn as and acts like a Tough Kid.

    Eagle: The football team also had a Racial Stereotype to befriend, albeit one who mostly acts like a Tough Kid. Eagle also presents the conundrum common to comic book racial stereotype characters: that because part of the joke of them is that they are acting against stereotype by being the hero of the piece they are often driving the action in the most interesting ways. 

    The main point of this breakdown is that true to its name the Tough Kid Squad is a real one-note kid gang. It is in fact weirdly tough to figure out if there is a true knockoff kirby in the bunch, in fact – they’re kind of all part of one gestalt knockoff kirby, with Eagle looking most the part and Tom acting it.

    Obviously I think the name should be brung back, and I’m kind of disappointed in Marvel for not dredging it up during the 50-State Initiative time – it might have been the only thing to make the fact that Hellcat was the entire Alaska Initiative team all by herself more fun. As for the members themselves… they are a bit generic, but the fact that the Danger Twins are all hopped up on serum offers the easy possibility for a couple of unaging characters to have been secretly operating for the last 80+ years, which is always fun.