The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: magic

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 231: UNA CATHAY

    (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

    Big fan of Una Cathay! The criminal scientist-type super-villains that you get in the Golden Age could get a little samey after a while – even if they all had their individual weirnesses, they were all of a common stripe – and it’s amazing how fresh a well put-together lady-villain makes the old tropes seem. 

    Una’s main deal was extracting the secret of eternal life from a young scientist named Dick Blendon who, unfortunately for her, was an old college pal of Carter “Hawkman” Hall.

    Like our old pal the Lord of Life, Una’s preferred technique was to administer to her victims a drug that simulated death and then grave-rob their bodies and pretend that she was bringing them back from the dead instead of reviving them. Unlike the Lord of Life, she kept her faux revenants in big jars that she claimed to be full of life-sustaining fluid. Love love love a guy in a big jar with his head poking out. Amazing visuals.

    Una also brings a kind of ambiguously ethnic element to her villainy, which of course means that she has voodoo powers that she nearly manages to kill Hawkman with except that Shiera somehow knows the warning signs of an incipient voodoo execution and saves his ass.

    Everything comes crashing down for Una Cathay after that: Hawkman lets all of the men out of their jars, her pal Count Torgoff falls off a roof while trying to stab Hawkman to death and she herself dies in a Hawkman-caused car accident. It’s almost like you shouldn’t turn to violent crime in your search for immortality, lest violence be meted back unto ye. Or something!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 207: THE BLACK WITCH

    (Crack Comics 018, 1941)

    The Black Witch is a member of a long comic book tradition: Haitian voodoo practitioners who use their sinister powers to get up to no good – in this case kidnapping the wife of one of Richard “Madam Fatal” Stanton’s friends as raw material in a search for eternal youth.

    The Black Witch is also part of a long-term demographic shift in comics: while the Haitian voodoo character is a staple villain s(and sometimes hero) into at least the 90s, in the early days they were basically all white folks like the Black Witch here, or the Master of Corpses. A question that I’m not qualified to answer: is this more racist than the state of things post 1960 or so when the population of voodoo villains more accurately represents the demographic makeup of Haiti or is it semi-vilifying an entire ethnoreligious group? 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 161: THE BLACK WITCH

    (Batman Comics v1 005, 1941)

    Batman and Robin’s first interdimensional jaunt took them to Fairyland, where they were tasked with rescuing the daughter of one Professor Anderson, who it seems he was using as a test subject for his narrative-dimensional travel device? There they face off against sundry giants and dragons and so forth before confronting the top evildoer of the realm: the Black Witch.

    One could argue that a villain whose existence is defined by peasant morality tales that have been passed through a series of bowdlerizations is not necessarily completely responsible for their evil nature, but Grant Morrison didn’t write this one, so Batman beats her up and she commits suicide.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 157: THE WIZARD

    (All-Star Comics 003, 1940)

    This is the kind of super-villain that you see magical heroes taking on a lot more often than other types: the preemptive striker. The likely cause of this is the status of so many magical heroes as the de facto head of Earth’s magical security, someone that a bad actor can take out and then be free to act with impunity.

    What’s interesting about this super-villain? The thing that appeals to me about this guy, who is primarily a user of illusion magic, is the variety of things he throws at Dr Fate: you got your crazed unicorns, some undead Egyptian warriors, a weird tentacle monster and the “Three Witches of Endor” who themselves cast spells at him. It’s a nice bit of variety!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 153: KULAK

    (All-Star Comics 002, 1940)

    Kulak is the High Priest of Brztal, which is originally implied to be an ancient lost civilization but I believe is later defined as extra-dimensional in some way. His deal is ostensibly that he is upset that his tomb was disturbed so he is going to destroy humanity, but I don’t know that he wasn’t just looking for an excuse to flex his magical muscles. He gets up to a lot of fun stuff with disasters – worldwide flooding and riots, plagues of lucusts etc – and summons armies of ancient Brztalan dead to smite his enemy but ultimately is put down again by the Spectre.

    In what is going to be an ongoing theme with these one-off All-Star villains, he eventually gets Roy Thomased into the pages of All-Star Squadron to mix it up with the Spectre one more time.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 153: KULAK

    (All-Star Comics 002, 1940)

    Kulak is the High Priest of Brztal, which is originally implied to be an ancient lost civilization but I believe is later defined as extra-dimensional in some way. His deal is ostensibly that he is upset that his tomb was disturbed so he is going to destroy humanity, but I don’t know that he wasn’t just looking for an excuse to flex his magical muscles. He gets up to a lot of fun stuff with disasters – worldwide flooding and riots, plagues of lucusts etc – and summons armies of ancient Brztalan dead to smite his enemy but ultimately is put down again by the Spectre.

    In what is going to be an ongoing theme with these one-off All-Star villains, he eventually gets Roy Thomased into the pages of All-Star Squadron to mix it up with the Spectre one more time.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 150: BELDAME GAFFY & TRYGG

    (All-Star Comics 001, 1940)

    A couple of magic users, Beldame Gaffy (curse-caster) and Trygg (necromancer) team up to steal the lands that rightfully belong to Trygg’s niece and nephew so that he could get rich via a zombie-staffed mining operation. Things go well until Hawkman shows up to explode them to death. Also, these are the first (only?) Welsh super-villains we have (will ever?) encountered!

    Ordinarily in a two-person set-up like this I would designate one as the boss and the other as a lieutenant or minion but Gaffy and Trygg really do seem like an equal partnership. Sadly however, only Trygg has made any subsequent appearances, specifically in the 2000s-era Hawkman series. I guess it makes sense that the necromancer would be the one to return from the dead but one must nonetheless mourn the dearth of Beldames in this modern world.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 143: THE CAMERA EYE

    (Adventure 066, 1941)

    Mr Cuthbert Cain, the Camera Eye (and I call him that because it’s what he himself signs on an ominous note – at various points in the story he is called the Camera Fiend and the Camera Criminal) is part of a long tradition of super-villains who take a recent technological or cultural trend and extrapolate it into a criminal gimmick – in this case, candid photography.

    Using black magic and photographic equipment, Cain captures souls and enslaves folks to his will, embarking on a minor crime wave. He falls afoul of Starman when he enthralls his friend FBI agent Woodley Allen and subsequently dissolves into the netherworld after a struggle that ends with him accidentally taking his own picture with his black magic camera.

    SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Absolutely! Not only is Cuthbert Cain exactly the kind of smug little shit that makes a perfect villain but the idea of a black magician who faces the price for their power and then comes back is a really great seed for a story. Particularly as the last time he was seen he had become a photo negative version of himself.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 127: THE SKY DEMON

    (Slam-Bang Comics 006, 1940) 

    The Sky Demon is a heretofore-unseen old enemy of Diamond Jack who starts strong with an overall Satanic look and a little skull on the front of his trunks – just the right amount of accessorizing to make a pretty basic super-outfit pop.

    I also love his plot to conquer Earth and/or wipe out humanity: get some gorillas, give them wings and revolvers and let them loose. I can’t say whether or not his plan would have succeeded because he was fatally prevented from carrying it out by Diamond Jack.

    Gorilla-based schemes aside, I really like the parallel of Diamond Jack the magic ring-powered hero vs the Sky Demon and his little magic cape. A sub-ecosystem of heroes and villains weilding magic items of various kinds sounds like it could be interesting comics fodder!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 127: THE SKY DEMON

    (Slam-Bang Comics 006, 1940) 

    The Sky Demon is a heretofore-unseen old enemy of Diamond Jack who starts strong with an overall Satanic look and a little skull on the front of his trunks – just the right amount of accessorizing to make a pretty basic super-outfit pop.

    I also love his plot to conquer Earth and/or wipe out humanity: get some gorillas, give them wings and revolvers and let them loose. I can’t say whether or not his plan would have succeeded because he was fatally prevented from carrying it out by Diamond Jack.

    Gorilla-based schemes aside, I really like the parallel of Diamond Jack the magic ring-powered hero vs the Sky Demon and his little magic cape. A sub-ecosystem of heroes and villains weilding magic items of various kinds sounds like it could be interesting comics fodder!