The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Yellow Peril

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 030: DR KICHUNG

    (Action v1 008-009, 1939)

    Dr Kichung menaced Tex Thomson for a couple of issues in a fairly standard scientist-who-puts-human-brains-into-apes kind of way until the local apes, sick of his malarky, killed him dead. I really liked his apes though. They had gravitas.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

     (Action v1 002, 1938)

    Early on in Tex Thomson’s adventuring career, he and his pal Bob Daly found themselves in a hidden city called, appropriately, the Sealed City. There they met the leader, or Gorrah, of that city and eventually discovered that he was an usurper who they quickly helped overthrow. There it would end for your average hidden-city-usurper but not this Gorrah, no sir. He came back half a dozen times, indulging in schemes such as:

    -turning people into weird cyborgs

    -turning people into weird rat-men

    -attempting to take over Turkey

    -fixing boxing matches

    and so on. 

    By his last appearance, he was dealing with Mr America instead of boring old Tex Thomson and it wasn’t a very fair fight. Over the years he had shed his super-science, his one-time hypnotic power and even his flamboyant costume and was merely a one-eyed agent of some unspecified Foreign Power (ie, the Nazis) tasked with bombing libraries, which somewhat ignominiously (if predictably) ended with him being blown up by his own bomb. A sad end to be sure.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 001: FANG GOW

    (New Fun 001, 1935)

    Unfortunately, the first DC super-villain is Fang Gow, a pulp-style Yellow Peril sort who vexes adventurer Barry O’Neill , his pal Inspector LeGrande and the nation of France.

    Fang Gow persists until 1941, and inevitably participates in some entertaining stories, including a half year or so in which he is near death and the story relocates to Tunisia where he kidnaps a famous doctor to treat him, but ultimately he’s just a warmed-over version of all the Fu Manchu knockoffs who bedeviled the pulps.

    His finest moment might just be his death, in fact: captured in French Guiana and on a ship en route to London and trial, he takes a death-simulating drug and requests burial at sea. Instead of being revived by immersion in seawater (and merely having to escape a weighted coffin and swim to shore), he lands on a rogue sea mine and is blown to high heaven.