The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: magic

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 031: THE MAD LAMA

    (Action v1 009, 1939)

    In a fairly typical display of respect for the Tibetan peoples and their religion, the Mad Lama is a ruthless villain bent on world domination. Presumably he achieved his powers through rigid dedication to the popular “evil” style of Tibetan Buddhism.

    The Lama himself doesn’t get to do much other than bloviate for a while before being incinerated in a magic duel with Zatara, so the most interesting thing about him is the fact that he gathered up a cadre of other villains to help him out, a move that I dearly love as it supplies me with more weird little guys to know about.

    Pictured from left to right (after the Mad Lama, of course) above are:

    -Monsieur Henri, a Frenchman able to conjure illusory mists

    -Lalla Gor, probably meant to be Indian but they just kind of spammed syllables to make foreign names back in the day, able to summon an army of phantom warriors

    –the Tigress, our very own MSV 019 in her first turn as another villain’s henchman (she abandons the Lama to team up with Zatara pretty quickly)

    -Zatara, posing as Major Lee, an Englishman of unknown abilities

    -some bald guy

    The Mad Lama gets mentioned every time someone talks about Zatara’s early career in a comic – he came up a couple of times when Zatanna was on her Dad-quest in the 60s, for example – but I don’t reckon he ever recovered from his incineration to actually come back again.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 005: KOTH

     (More Fun 014, 1936)


    Another Dr Occult foe (and thus another early Siegel and Shuster creation), Koth is a fairly generic magic guy, for all that his origin involved being a magic alien who swore to destroy humanity when his companions were slain by cavemen.

    Unlike the preceding minor villains, Koth has gone on to appear in more modern comics, though whether any of them were set in the modern day as opposed to being period pieces is something I’m not sure of..


  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 003: METHUSELAH

     (More Fun 010, 1936)


    Another Dr Occult foe, Methuselah was basically a serial killer who believed that he could absorb the time he was stealing by killing people and so targeted folks with long-lived ancestors. Dr Occult set a trap and captured Methuselah, which leads to:

    SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Absolutely! The assumption in the comic is that Methuselah is wrong, but what if he wasn’t? Just a dude locked up in Arkham or wherever for 90 years, all records lost in the oldest filing cabinets, and then one day he notices a grey hair and busts out to get more time. Is Dr Occult even still around?