The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: disaster causer

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 993: ZOMAX

    (Jungle Comics 014, 1941)

    Zomax, the “demonized marine scientist,” has a very over-the-top, Fletcher Hanks villain goal: to kill every animal in the jungle. And he isn’t afraid to say it.

    I won’t say that Zomax has a good reason for wanting to destroy all jungle life, but he does have some justification, stemming from a big game hunt he went on that involved, in order:

    1. being mauled by a fatally wounded lion. Once the lion died, Zomax wandered away, only to…

    2. be grabbed by a man-hating elephant and tossed into a stagnant pond where…

    3. swarms of poisonous gnats shredded his skin. Zomax crawled out of the muck in torment, only to be…

    4. crushed by a boa constrictor, but not killed, because he was…

    5. pulled away by the Hannibal Lector of gorillas, who then proceeded to take Zomax home to his nest and inflict months of psychological torture on him.

    Though one might see all of this as a kind of ironic punishment for going on a big game hunt in the first place, Zomax does not in fact see it that way, and concludes that the jungle is an evil place fit only for destruction. And since he is a “marine scientist,” what better tool of that destruction than the ocean itself?

    Specifically, Zomax has built a machine that can create and control a bespoke tidal wave to to wash over the entire continent of Africa (or that portion of it that contains jungle animals) and destroy all of his tormentors. Other than the gnats, I reckon: I bet they do just fine in a landscape covered in brackish ponds. 

    As violence against any jungle is violence against the universal Jungle that Fantomah protects, she is out to get Zomax as soon as he actually initiates the tidal wave engine (though please note the silhouettes that indicate that Zomax gets revenge against one representative of each animal species that wronged him, gnats excepted).

    Having been given an unusual number of chances to repent and stop his machines by Fantomah, Zomax instead decides to flee in a plane, leaving her not choice but to destroy him with his own tidal wave, or, as Fantomah (and the second Paul Karasik collection of Hanks comics) puts it “YYou shall die by your own creation!”

    Categorized in: Generica (Ends in -x), Origin (Vengeance Quest), Supercrime (Disaster Causers)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 993: ZOMAX

    (Jungle Comics 014, 1941)

    Zomax, the “demonized marine scientist,” has a very over-the-top, Fletcher Hanks villain goal: to kill every animal in the jungle. And he isn’t afraid to say it.

    I won’t say that Zomax has a good reason for wanting to destroy all jungle life, but he does have some justification, stemming from a big game hunt he went on that involved, in order:

    1. being mauled by a fatally wounded lion. Once the lion died, Zomax wandered away, only to…

    2. be grabbed by a man-hating elephant and tossed into a stagnant pond where…

    3. swarms of poisonous gnats shredded his skin. Zomax crawled out of the muck in torment, only to be…

    4. crushed by a boa constrictor, but not killed, because he was…

    5. pulled away by the Hannibal Lector of gorillas, who then proceeded to take Zomax home to his nest and inflict months of psychological torture on him.

    Though one might see all of this as a kind of ironic punishment for going on a big game hunt in the first place, Zomax does not in fact see it that way, and concludes that the jungle is an evil place fit only for destruction. And since he is a “marine scientist,” what better tool of that destruction than the ocean itself?

    Specifically, Zomax has built a machine that can create and control a bespoke tidal wave to to wash over the entire continent of Africa (or that portion of it that contains jungle animals) and destroy all of his tormentors. Other than the gnats, I reckon: I bet they do just fine in a landscape covered in brackish ponds. 

    As violence against any jungle is violence against the universal Jungle that Fantomah protects, she is out to get Zomax as soon as he actually initiates the tidal wave engine (though please note the silhouettes that indicate that Zomax gets revenge against one representative of each animal species that wronged him, gnats excepted).

    Having been given an unusual number of chances to repent and stop his machines by Fantomah, Zomax instead decides to flee in a plane, leaving her not choice but to destroy him with his own tidal wave, or, as Fantomah (and the second Paul Karasik collection of Hanks comics) puts it “YYou shall die by your own creation!”

    Categorized in: Generica (Ends in -x), Origin (Vengeance Quest), Supercrime (Disaster Causers)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 936: SIN KHAII

    (Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)

    Sin Khaii, a lama at the same monastery that Thun-Dohr was raised at, has been cast out for unspecified reasons. His reaction to being an outcast – to steal Pandora’s Box and use it in a war on all humanity – would seem to retroactively justify the exile, however. Just why a Tibetan monastery would be the hiding place of Pandora’s Box is likewise left unexplored.

    Sin Kahii is able to use the Box to unleash fresh evils upon mankind, in the form of mosquito-like insects that are under his control. The first such is a plague called the Black Madness, which seems to act both as a traditional and deadly disease and as a vector for insanity, as seen above after Dr Benson Bell concocts a cure for it and his assistant is immediately driven to homicidal rage to keep it from being distributed.

    No madness or madman is a match for the mystic might of Thun-Dohr, however. Sin Khaii’s first plot is foiled with a sock to the jaw. Of Clavell, the madman. Sin Khaii remains unpunched.

    Since regular humans have proved to be no match for his foe, Sin Khaii’s next plan involves allying with someone more powerful, namely the ancient and evil Black Pharaoh (check in in a day or two for more on him). To that end, he levitates the Pharaoh’s whole damn pyramid and moves it from Giza to the former site of the New York World’s Fair (I was going to gripe about the comic missing an opportunity to feature the pyramid next to the Trylon and Perisphere but it seems like they were demolished with much more alacrity than I might have expected).

    As will be discussed further in the Black Pharaoh’s own entry, his imprisonment in the pyramid can only be ended when he and his servants’ places are taken by other people. Sin Khaii facilitates this via another Pandora’s Box bug, in this case “curiosity.” Could one argue that curiosity is not one of the evils contained in the box since Pandora already had it her curiosity was in fact foundational to the whole myth? I think that one could, but of course if we’re going to insist on mythic accuracy then Sin Khaii is going to have to be finding increasingly unlikely ways to weaponize hope, seeing as it’s the only thing that’s supposed to still be in the dang thing.

    Once the Black Pharaoh is free, he and Sin Khaii plot to destroy the United States but are once again foiled by the flying fists of Thun-Dohr. The pyramid (and all of the sand in Egypt) is restored to its proper resting place and Sin Khaii, still at large, swears further vengeance. Sadly for us plot resolution fans out there, the “Thun-Dohr” feature never returned after this second instalment and Sin Khaii is presumably at large to this day.

    Categorized in: Accessories (Pandora’s Box), Day Jobs (Lamas), Powers (Various Magical)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 873: SATAN

    (Zip Comics 003, 1940)

    Zambini (the Miracle Man) is on his first vacation in years and Satan, presuming that his guard will be down or that he left his magic amulet at home I guess, decides that this is the perfect time to attack and murder him for being such a thorn in the side of Evil. 

    (Please note the near-identical guy kind of capering behind Satan’s throne up there, as he represents my favourite thing about this adventure, that Satan rules over a nation of devils (the Devil Men) who all look pretty much exactly the same as him. Some of them have red hair or different beard styles, but over all they are the most homogeneous demon army I have ever seen,

    Also, I know that trying to formulate a coherent cosmology out of any comic book company’s output will be a fool’s errand for some time yet, but it’s interesting that Satan and the Devil appear to be two seperate entities in the MLJ/Archie afterlife) 

    In case it wasn’t clear up above: I don’t think that this is a very good plan on Satan’s part. Like, why not attack Zambini while he is tackling another problem instead of while he is having a nice rest? Why attempt to kill him with a tidal wave, the well-known slow and ominous disaster, rather than something quick and sudden that he doesn’t have time to react to by, as in this case, freezing the ocean?  

    Satan’s next move is to send some Devil Men to attack Zambini directly (and looking at them here I must say that there are two faces in the devil nation: the classic devil face of the black haired Devil Men and the more cavemanish look of the red haired ones). They fare no better than the tidal wave and are transformed into a flock of presumably infernal penguins that presumably must be bedevilling the seas to this day.

    Zambini decides to take the battle to Satan, and here’s where I’ll give the ol’ Prince of Lies a little credit: he did plan for this eventuality, in the form of a really horrible cage that takes advantage of Zambini’s weakness to human touch by being made entirely out of human hands. It’s honestly one of the worst things that I have seen in a depiction of comic book Hell!

    Satan of course follows this up with the worst plan ever devised: he has his guys push the cage into a big fire in an attempt to kill Zambini, without reckoning with the fact that the unprotected human hands will probably be destroyed more quickly than the asbestos suit-clad magician. Sure enough: Zambini emerges from the flames unharmed and strikes Satan dead.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 865: HANS VON LUNDBERG

    (Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

    Our story begins in a very economical way, as Yarko the Great hears about a great plague ravaging Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania, if you must know) and determines that it merits his attention enough to teleport directly to the scene. 

    Yarko uses his mental powers to trace the source of the disease to a very Transylvanian-looking spooky castle that is not explicitly said to either be or to not be in Tanganyika so I guess we must assume that it is there because that is the more interesting version. Venturing inside, he encounters the spirit of Pestilence, a very sassy character who reveals the following amazing facts:

    a. the plague has been caused by the efforts of Hans von Lundberg, aka the Mad Archaeologist, who presumably dug up a sample of it in a tomb or something. This is a real win for the mad social sciences!

    b. the plague is called the Curse of Hecate, which is bad ass.

    c. Pestilence is there because he is von Lundberg’s slave, but whether this is literal and the Mad Archaeologist is doing some mystical disease shit or more of a metaphorical thing because he is responsible for so many plague-deaths is not clarified. 

    Yarko finally meets von Lundberg after he is captured by some very culturally-insensitive goons (who add weight to the idea of the castle being in Africa in the most unfortunate manner) and contrary to Pestilence’s assertions that he is more powerful than the magician ends up dealing with him pretty handily. Perhaps when you are the personification of infectious disease your value system is weighted more toward how much plague someone has spread than any other measure of worth.

    Though Yarko could presumably just vaporize von Lundberg with his majicks, he chooses to employ the services of his old enemy Death (not looking quite as dapper as he used to, if I may say so) to do the deed, possibly because this symbolically frees Pestilence from service and thus abates the plague via sympathetic magic. Or something like that. As this is the Yarko the Great version of Death who just loves to harvest the souls of the living he has to be reverse psycologied into it a bit, but he eventually takes the bait/ the archaeologist. 

  • SUPER-VILLAIN 001 UPDATE: DR SIVANA (1940)

    How fitting and extremely predictable that Dr Sivana, our inaugural full-fledged Super-Villain, is also our first villain to receive a Super-Villain Update! 

    In Whiz Comics 003a, Sivana attempts to conquer the US, first via simple extortion, followed by full-fledged invasion = please note that he even goes to the trouble to declare war before mobilizing his forces. Captain Marvel of course is more than a match for any conventional army, and Dr Sivana seemingly meets his end when a deathtrap meant for Marvel blows up his entire fortress with him inside.

    (this is likely also when Sivana figures out that Billy Batson is Captain Marvel. There’s no on-panel acknowledgement of this fact, but he does know it by the next issue, and frankly given the fast-and-loose way that Billy approaches having a secret identity in the early days it’s a miracle that everyone who he passes on the street doesn’t know. I’m pretty sure that they eventually have to retroactively add a mind-clouding aspect to his transformations to explain why the hundreds of people who have seen a famous boy reporter transform into a famous super-hero don’t retain that fact without making Captain Marvel a secret mass murderer)

    In Whiz Comics 003b, a disguised and not-dead Sivana, operating under the name of Professor Xerxes Smith, entices Billy Batson (and by extension Captain Marvel, who he clearly knows into accompanying him on a rocket trip to the planet Venus. There, with the aid of his ally Beautia, Empress of Venus, he captures Marvel and performs the classic super-villain manoeuvre of placing him in a seemingly-inescapable deathtrap that he does not stick around long enough to watch to completion.

    Once back on Earth, Sivana attempt to take over the US again, this time by way of a paralyzing gas that will leave the populace more susceptible to domination by a charismatic leader like Beautia. This scheme has a tragic flaw: the machines are all easily smashed up by a Captain Marvel type, which is probably why Sivana stranded him on Venus in the first place. Luckily for humanity, Captain Marvel is able to harness the Wisdom of Solomon to build his own rocket ship to return to Earth and smash them up good. Beautia and Sivana escape… 

    …only to return in Whiz Comics 004 with a plan to get Beautia elected President of the United States by employing her great charisma and hotness to capture the entire US male vote. This is possibly Dr Sivana’s most viable and least illegal plan, only he has to spoil it all by immediately making plans to murder huge swaths of the government and populace and to loot the nation’s coffers.

    Knowing that Captain Marvel wouldn’t take this kind of thing lying down, Dr Sivana arranges to get Billy Batson into a machine called the Memory Mangler that removes his ability to remember any details of his past, let alone that he needs to say SHAZAM. He is only cured when he just kind of aimlessly wanders back into the Wizard Shazam’s cave and rediscovers the word written on the wall there. 

    The real downfall of Sivana’s plan this time is the fact that he hired such misogynist henchmen who attempt to murder him and Beautia rather than take orders from a woman, which is how Billy Batson escapes in the first place.

    So far we’ve seen three separate attempts by Dr Sivana to take over the United States, but in Whiz Comics 006 we get the other kind of Sivana plot, in which he attempts to get ahold of a lot of money that he can then use to finance his takeover of the United States. In this case, Sivana has imported a load of Venusian animals, including some sabre-toothed tigers, a dragon, a mastodon, some “crocosaurs” and the amazing-looking gorilla/lion centaur chimera called the gorillion. Unusually for him, Sivana isn’t even using these animals to rob banks or the like – he’s just exhibiting them at a circus and banking on getting large enough crowds to make a fortune.

    Things don’t even go wrong until a jealous circus performer releases the animals in an attempt to kill Captain Marvel, upon which he kills them all by dropping them into the ocean (or just dropping them, in the gorallion’s case). A depressing end for some innocent if hostile animals.

    Whiz Comics 010 features a plot to destroy the US Pacific Fleet using information gathered by Beautia under the alias of Dot Darling, Newsreel Reporter. This is the beginning of the end for the Beautia/Sivana partnership, as she suffers a change of heart when the time comes to actually blow up a whole lot of sailors and Sivana responds by attempting to kill her. He is of course prevented from doing this by Captain Marvel and escapes in style on a very phallic aerial torpedo.

    Dr Sivana’s final appearance of 1940* is in Special Edition Comics 001 and is another money-making scheme. This time it’s some good old fashioned high-tech insurance fraud, involving Sivana buying cheap disaster insurance against, say, a cyclone destroying some properties in downtown NYC and then causing those disasters himself.

    *Okay so it probably goes in between Whiz 006 and 010, but I forgot about it until the last second, so sue me.

    As usual, Captain Marvel is all over this scheme. He prevents most of the disasters from landing and ultimately destroys the disaster causing machine with the body of the criminally underused Grandfather Locust, a plague whose descendants was used to attack some well-insured cropland earlier in the issue. Sadly, he only gets a couple of panels to shine before he head is knocked clean off.

    BODY COUNT: at least 1402

    END OF YEAR STATUS: At large 

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 020

    If I’ve learned one thing from comics it’s to never turn your back on a scientist. 

    Henry Falcon is one of a trio of scientists, along with John Robin and John Sparrow, who have been made the beneficiaries of the whimsical will of millionaire Mortimer Bird. This is of course one of those special murder mystery wills in which the payout increases for any survivors as fellow inheritors are killed off, and Henry Falcon is all about getting that money through murder. He even goes the extra mile to make all of the deaths bird themed in an attempt to throw suspicion on Mortimer Bird, thanks to some special powder he has discovered that makes birds go crazy and peck people to death.

    You can’t just have something like that bird-madness powder around without some stringent safety protocols, however, and Falcon manages to get some on himself while pretending to be Mortimer Bird’s private nurse. So long Henry. (Top-Notch Comics 010, 1940)

    Dr Exton, inventor of the super explosive Tekite, almost sells his creation to a fascist dictator but reforms after he is left on an island for a half hour by the Bird Man. (Weird Comics 004, 1940)

    Menar, a big-eared scientist of the unspecified future time occupied by Typhon, has invented a device called the Tidal Wave Annihilator which he unsurprisingly uses to create tidal waves. The tidal waves in turn sink ships which Menar and his men then loot. It’s a pretty foolproof plan, and Menar even manages to capture Typhon when he comes to investigate, but like many a mad scientist before and after him, Menar has underestimated just how evil he can be before his own daughter turns against him. Typhon escapes with Ina Menar and brings the whole operation crashing down around her father’s pointy ears. (Weird Comics 006, 1940)

    Karnak is a scientist of the year 5940 CE who has already had some measure of success, having conquered and mind-controlled an entire planet of beefy scaly guys, and I must assume is now at a loss as to what to do with himself. Why else would he send a heavily armed spaceship to Earth to extort them into giving him a lady to be his bride? I mean, there have to be at least a few women who would be into him if he just put himself out there on Space Tinder – everyone likes a bad boy, after all. 

    Karnak seems to take it weirdly personally when his kidnapped bride-to-be cooperates with Blast Bennett to take down his whole operation, and tris to feed the two of them to his pet tiger. They’d be doomed if Blast wasn’t so good at cat-wrestling, but as it stands they escape handily.

    Karnak also commits the cardinal sin of not checking his captive spaceman for any ray guns he might have on his person, and catches an explosion bullet to the gut for it. Alas for the inhabitants of the unnamed planet he was in charge of, Karnak dealt in the kind of mind control that kills its subjects when the controller dies. Alas for the beefy scaly guys. (Weird Comics 007, 1940) 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 818: THE FACELESS PHANTOM

    (Thrilling Comics 001, 1940) 

    Here’s a nice picture of the Faceless Phantom from his second appearance, before we delve into the muddy fiche images of his first.

    Scientific hero Doc Strange is just walking down the street one day when he hears a cry for help that leads him to an encounter with his first super-villain (the Faceless Phantom) as well as his long-term love interest (Virginia Thompson). The Faceless Phantom, it turns out, has just kidnapped Virginia’s father Professor Thompson in an attempt to get him to reveal the secret of his Delta Ray gun, which is a good old-fashioned sci-fi death ray.

    What follows is an astonishingly long (for a Golden Age story – 37 pages!) chase sequence, as Doc Strange, Virginia and New York Police Commissioner Baxter pursue the Faceless Phantom and Professor Thompson to the Central American republic of San Pedro and back. Along the way both Virginia and Baxter are captured and rescued and captured again, Doc fist fights multiple animals (a shark, a boa constrictor, crocodiles, a tiger, a pit full of cobras, an octopus and a gorilla), and Doc acquires several temporary companions, including:

    -Togo, hired as a bodyguard for Virginia; ultimately revealed to be an agent of (implicitly) the Chinese government looking to acquire the Delta Ray

    -Parker, a seaplane pilot who shuttles Doc around for the middle part of the story until he is almost killed in a plane crash and left behind in Florida

    -Jerry Adams, a newsie who Doc helps with his mortgage during a brief spell of train crash-induced amnesia

    Things eventually come to a head back in NYC where they started, with the Faceless Phantom armed not only with the Delta Ray but a stolen supply of Alosun, the “distillation of sun-atoms” that gives Doc Strange his super powers. Thus equipped, the Phantom and his men have effectively taken over the city.

    In order to combat a gang of death ray-wielding gangsters all hopped up on super serum, Doc really hunkers down and gets inventing. He comes up with two key bits of technology: suits of death ray-proof armour for a special detail of police officers to wear and a gas that neutralizes the effects of Alosun (something which one might reasonably expect to crop up to bite him in the ass in the future but not so, as far as I can tell). The subsequent gang round-up is almost 100% effective, with the exception being that the Faceless Phantom pulls his signature trick and disappears in a cloud of purple mist.

    Thanks to his Alosun-enhanced senses, this time when the Faceless Phantom disappears Doc is able to identify that he is doing so using an Ancient Egyptian alchemical preparation called Kalodin, and thanks to his well-stocked library he is then able to find a book that tells him how to counter Kalodin’s effects. Thus, the next time the Phantom tries to do a runner he gets a face full of reagent, followed by a sock to the jaw.

    The Faceless Phantom is unmasked, and surprising no one with any degree of genre savvy he turns out to be Police Commissioner Baxter, the character who tagged along with Doc throughout the adventure and mostly got kidnapped over and over again while the Phantom somehow learned all of Doc’s secrets. But he’s been caught and the long nightmare is finally over.

    OR IS IT? No, it isn’t, because Baxter still had some Alosun hidden away for a rainy day and he gets ahold of it just in time to ruin is own execution, thanks to a crooked prison guard. Side note: Baxter’s tattered clothing in the above panels is not as a result of his escape attempt – he was dressed in them already when he was led in. Was this some sort of attempt to save money on prison uniforms by giving condemned men the worst one or something?

    Baxter resumes his life as the Faceless Phantom, pledging to make the whole country pay. Thanks to his Kalodin-derived invisibility and his residual Alosun strength he is able to form a gang and start up a crime spree with great alacrity.

    As is often the case, a successful crimewave becomes a systematic campaign of terror and looting becomes a plan to take over the US by kidnapping the entire Senate. This is the point at which Doc Strange catches up with the Phantom – that’s him in the lower right in gangster cosplay – and strikes back by packing the Senate galleries with gun-toting lawmen who engage the Faceless Phantom gang in what I would call an irresponsibly large gun battle. No senator catches a stray bullet on panel though, so I guess you could call the operation a success.

    Things come to a head on the wing of a plane in which the Faceless Phantom is escaping with a re-re-re-kidnapped Virginia. Though both hero and villain are juiced up on Alosun, Doc wins out in the end and punches the Phantom clean off of the plane, at which point he dusts off his hands and declares that the Faceless Phantom is finally dead, despite the fact that his own Alosun-powered body has survived similar falls on many occasions. Will this come back to bite Doc Strange in the ass? Only in that he will be more surprised than he should be when the Phantom returns in 1942. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 813: YAGOR

    (The Spirit, “The Death Dolls”, 4 August, 1940)

    In terms of villainy, Yagor ain’t much. Formerly chief engineer at the Battle Arms Co, Yagor murdered the inventor Kalin and stole his inventions and is trying to sell them on when the Spirit tracks him down in a small New England town. Though he gets the drop on the Spirit and captures him when he shows up to take him in, Yagor is undone by his own poor salesmanship and the crucial lack of imagination possessed by munitions buyer Emil Kampf, who dismisses a working robot soldier as a useless toy without, for instance, considering the possibility inherent in a bit of armour plating.

    Among Yagor’s many shortcomings is dismal salesmanship and specifically his failure to present Kampf with the other invention that he stole from Kalin, a smaller automaton capable of tracking a person across tens if not hundreds of kilometres, navigating such obstacles as sheer walls and subway systems, in order to kill them via explosion. Instead, he sends one, charmingly named Jepetto, to kill Kampf.

    (perhaps the oddest thing about this assassination is that as Jepetto is tracking down and killing Kampf Yagor and the Spirit are in New England listening for news of the explosion on the radio, and while this is in the days when the Spirit’s adventures were still set in New York City, the whole process must have taken hours if not days to complete, even if the “dark. mysterious fishing village” of Cape Haven were somehow both at the Southern border of Connecticut and “out of the tourist route.” Just standing around at gunpoint for three days while a small robot walks down the East Coast)

    But perhaps I am giving Yagor too much grief. After all, he was the chief engineer at that munitions company, not the chief salesman. Surely after bungling two whole opportunities to sell his robots (I’m counting the assassination because I think that loading that little robot up with a couple of water balloons or the like would have been a very good proof of concept indeed) he will rally and hike up his pants and really put in a good effort in his next black market arms presentation. What’s that? He just loaded all of his remaining Death Dolls (which is what the little assassin-bots are called) into a big robot soldier and sent them to attack New York for no good reason? Yagor, no. You’re going to get caught by the Spirit!

    Yagor got caught by the Spirit, you guys. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 813: YAGOR

    (The Spirit, “The Death Dolls”, 4 August, 1940)

    In terms of villainy, Yagor ain’t much. Formerly chief engineer at the Battle Arms Co, Yagor murdered the inventor Kalin and stole his inventions and is trying to sell them on when the Spirit tracks him down in a small New England town. Though he gets the drop on the Spirit and captures him when he shows up to take him in, Yagor is undone by his own poor salesmanship and the crucial lack of imagination possessed by munitions buyer Emil Kampf, who dismisses a working robot soldier as a useless toy without, for instance, considering the possibility inherent in a bit of armour plating.

    Among Yagor’s many shortcomings is dismal salesmanship and specifically his failure to present Kampf with the other invention that he stole from Kalin, a smaller automaton capable of tracking a person across tens if not hundreds of kilometres, navigating such obstacles as sheer walls and subway systems, in order to kill them via explosion. Instead, he sends one, charmingly named Jepetto, to kill Kampf.

    (perhaps the oddest thing about this assassination is that as Jepetto is tracking down and killing Kampf Yagor and the Spirit are in New England listening for news of the explosion on the radio, and while this is in the days when the Spirit’s adventures were still set in New York City, the whole process must have taken hours if not days to complete, even if the “dark. mysterious fishing village” of Cape Haven were somehow both at the Southern border of Connecticut and “out of the tourist route.” Just standing around at gunpoint for three days while a small robot walks down the East Coast)

    But perhaps I am giving Yagor too much grief. After all, he was the chief engineer at that munitions company, not the chief salesman. Surely after bungling two whole opportunities to sell his robots (I’m counting the assassination because I think that loading that little robot up with a couple of water balloons or the like would have been a very good proof of concept indeed) he will rally and hike up his pants and really put in a good effort in his next black market arms presentation. What’s that? He just loaded all of his remaining Death Dolls (which is what the little assassin-bots are called) into a big robot soldier and sent them to attack New York for no good reason? Yagor, no. You’re going to get caught by the Spirit!

    Yagor got caught by the Spirit, you guys.