The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: disaster causer

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 022

    Just look at them go.

    This gang has hit upon the very effective technique of faking an appearance by the Arrow in order to steal other crooks’ takings when they intelligently run away from a potential ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante. 

    The important corollary to any plan to impersonate a super-hero, of course, is that that hero will eventually get wind and show up to see just what they are supposedly doing, which leads to, yes, a collective ass-kicking by a seven-foot-tall vigilante. (The Arrow 002, 1940)

    I’d probably make more of this “ring of big shots” and their plan to take over NYC by blowing up the various dams that contain its water reservoirs (for instance: is a flooded New York without a fresh water supply really worth taking over?) but Phantasmo really torpedoes their whole plan by literally torpedoing their leader as he’s trying to torpedo the New Croton Dam, so the whole plot fizzles before it can really get off the ground. (The Funnies 047, 1940)

    He may be an extremely generic Central American revolutionary leader who bungles things spectacularly enough that his entire force is destroyed before they actually get around to doing any revolution, but I do find the name “El Tiger” to be as charming as it is linguistically nonsensical. (The Funnies 050, 1940)

    Is Eldas Thayer, a cranky old terminally ill miser who stages his own murder in order to frame the Spirit, yet another example of me possibly straying a bit too far from the concept of the “generic costumed villain” that this round-up supposedly exists to showcase? Probably, but that doesn’t matter because I am in charge here.

    Though the reason for this plot is ultimately “this is a more interesting comic if the Spirit is wanted by the police” (which is why the Spirit is never actually exonerated for this crime), I do really appreciate Thayer’s forthright statement that he is doing this because he is an evil old man. Not enough villains have the guts to own up to that kind of thing, you know? (The Spirit, “Eldas Thayer”, 21 July, 1940) 

    ADDENDUM: I have made a proverbial fool of myself. The Spirit was cleared of the murder of Eldas Thayer like three months later. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 790: DR HORTON

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 790: DR HORTON

    (Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940)

    The town of Branton, no state specified, has been struck by a mysterious plague, and X, the Phantom Fed, is suspicious. He infiltrates the quarantine zone around the town in the guise of a doctor and starts investigating the various odd facts of the plague, beginning with 1) the fact that is is being spread by a troop of escaped gorillas that were being used in medical testing and are now apparently just wandering the town and attacking people at random.

    Or are these attacks actually random? They are not, and weird thing number 2) is the fact that the gorillas seem to only be attacking the wealthiest inhabitants of Branton, such as young Donald Warden here.

    3) Speaking of amazing coincidences, a mysterious doctor just happens to have an antidote to the disease spread by the gorillas, and is willing to provide it for a hundred grand a pop, which is again an amazing coincidence since all of the victims just happen to have that kind of money.

    X disguises himself as the deceased Donald Warden and arranges to get the antidote so that he can trail the agents of the mysterious doctor back to their headquarters. There, he makes an amazing discovery: the gorillas are actually men in gorilla outfits, administering fake diseased bites using a weird fork. Let me tell you: it has been too long since we have had some gorillas, real or not, in this online space.

    The thing about a gang made up of a bunch of guys in gorilla suits is that it is pretty easy to infiltrate, and X does just that, tagging along as Dr Horton, the supposed researcher who supposedly accidentally lost the gorillas, orchestrates an all-out attack on City Hall to loot the town treasury before presumably wrapping up the entire operation and skipping town. Horton’s luck has run out, however, and he is corralled with relative ease by the Man of a Million Faces.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 769: DR SLADE

    (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    “Dr
    Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a
    super-hero’s origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that
    they don’t even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of
    that hero’s rogues gallery. That’s sad! On the other hand, Slade did
    develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the
    formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of the United States, so
    maybe he got everything he deserved.”

    That right there is what I wrote about Dr Slade in what will be the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, and it’s all true. That’s a wrap on Dr Slade, I thought, and took a big gulp of coffee as I turned to the Mystico story in Startling Comics 002. 

    What I’m trying to convey here is that I was shocked, nay, ultrashocked to find out that Dr Slade had not in fact died when his lab exploded but was back to properly vex Mystico as a villain and not a hapless facilitator of his resurrection. And he looks great! As a villain, I mean. It’s the only profession where having your face blown off has a lot of positives to it.

    Slade is presumably still working for the unnamed fascist country that was behind the Green Shirts and their attempt to take over the US with an army of the dead, and on their behalf he has created the hydrophage, a device that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen at a rate of a billion gallons per hour (that’s nearly 3.8 billion litres for all my fellow metric heads out there)! An impressive device with a cool name, but Slade’s proposal for how to use it in war – to lower the ocean level to such an extent that Allied ships run aground and become easy targets for Slade-aligned forces – is one of the stupidest plans in comics history.

    I mean, sure: it’s going to be effective. You’re absolutely going to catch some ships off guard with this one. But significantly reducing the amount of liquid water on Earth is going to have some wild knock-on effects for everyone, including fascist dictatorships, and that’s without mentioning that they’re just releasing the oxygen into the atmosphere (they’re saving the hydrogen for presumably nefarious purposes)! And what’s going on with the salt, I just realized! I was already concerned about the effects on the world’s ocean life, but now it’s going to have to contend with a supersaturated salt ocean as well? Yikes.

    Luckily for the fishes and the rest of us, Mystico is on the case. He dives into the hydrophage-created bubble that houses Slade’s sub-sea base (a cool use of water-destroying technology, I must admit) and though he is captured by some costumed henchmen that is not enough to prevent him from blowing the whole place to smithereens using the stored hydrogen. 

    Despite all of my hopes for a progressively more blown-up Dr Slade to keep coming back as Mystico’s major recurring foe, this is the last we’ll see of him.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 769: DR SLADE

    (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    “Dr
    Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a
    super-hero’s origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that
    they don’t even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of
    that hero’s rogues gallery. That’s sad! On the other hand, Slade did
    develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the
    formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of the United States, so
    maybe he got everything he deserved.”

    That right there is what I wrote about Dr Slade in what will be the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, and it’s all true. That’s a wrap on Dr Slade, I thought, and took a big gulp of coffee as I turned to the Mystico story in Startling Comics 002. 

    What I’m trying to convey here is that I was shocked, nay, ultrashocked to find out that Dr Slade had not in fact died when his lab exploded but was back to properly vex Mystico as a villain and not a hapless facilitator of his resurrection. And he looks great! As a villain, I mean. It’s the only profession where having your face blown off has a lot of positives to it.

    Slade is presumably still working for the unnamed fascist country that was behind the Green Shirts and their attempt to take over the US with an army of the dead, and on their behalf he has created the hydrophage, a device that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen at a rate of a billion gallons per hour (that’s nearly 3.8 billion litres for all my fellow metric heads out there)! An impressive device with a cool name, but Slade’s proposal for how to use it in war – to lower the ocean level to such an extent that Allied ships run aground and become easy targets for Slade-aligned forces – is one of the stupidest plans in comics history.

    I mean, sure: it’s going to be effective. You’re absolutely going to catch some ships off guard with this one. But significantly reducing the amount of liquid water on Earth is going to have some wild knock-on effects for everyone, including fascist dictatorships, and that’s without mentioning that they’re just releasing the oxygen into the atmosphere (they’re saving the hydrogen for presumably nefarious purposes)! And what’s going on with the salt, I just realized! I was already concerned about the effects on the world’s ocean life, but now it’s going to have to contend with a supersaturated salt ocean as well? Yikes.

    Luckily for the fishes and the rest of us, Mystico is on the case. He dives into the hydrophage-created bubble that houses Slade’s sub-sea base (a cool use of water-destroying technology, I must admit) and though he is captured by some costumed henchmen that is not enough to prevent him from blowing the whole place to smithereens using the stored hydrogen. 

    Despite all of my hopes for a progressively more blown-up Dr Slade to keep coming back as Mystico’s major recurring foe, this is the last we’ll see of him.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 766: COMRADE RATSKI

    (Speed Comics 009, 1940)

    Comrade Ratski’s first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the “we’re just filming a movie” deception? For the love of the game, of course.

    Ratski’s major distinguishing feature in this appearance is the fact that he is a pseudo-Soviet rather than the usual pseudo-Nazis who are the mainstay of the spy plot at this time. 

    Shock Gibson of course does not like all of this factory bombing, and Comrade Ratski, like Baron von Kampf before him, ends up stranded in the middle of the ocean. And he’s even more pessimistic about his chances at rescue!

    Ratski returns in Speed Comics 010 and immediately starts to collect top scientists from top universities: Dr Bronson from Yarvard, Prof Capchek from Rinceton, and… somebody from Hale. His goal? Force them to invent at gunpoint so that he can use their creations to destroy America

    Dr Bronson creates an earthquake machine which Ratski uses to attack democratic hub Western City. Ratski then makes the bizarre decision to send his men out to loot and plunder in the chaos, which is how Shock Gibson learns the location of Ratski’s base after using the tried-and-true method of capturing a henchman and threatening to kill them unless they talk.

    But even if Gibson hadn’t done so, Ratski just can’t stop signposting his location: after Prof Capchek develops an arthropod-enlarging serum Ratski just starts releasing giant beetles and flies from his front door in a way that I would call “highly visible.”

    Though Gibson does fight his way through various flies and spiders to make his way to Ratski’s mountain fastness, the Comrade’s ultimate undoing comes at the jaws of a freshly enlarged (and adorable!) cockroach with no sense of loyalty. He survives the encounter, but only with the help of a very ambitious mountain lion.

    Shock Gibson rescues Capchek and some guy we’ve never seen before, possibly the Hale man. Bronson is unaccounted for.

    Like Baron von Kampf before him, Comrade Ratski’s final appearance is in Speed Comics 011 when the two team up in a version of the Soviet/Nazi manouvres in Poland and Eastern Europe, though I don’t know quite enough about contemporary opinions on WWII to say if the fact that Ratski is clearly just exploiting von Kampf for cheap labour courtesy of his Zombie minions is further extrapolation of this relationship or just the writer favouring one villain over the other as the real heel.

    For an epic team-up between two men sworn to conquer and/or destroy the United States of America, the stakes on the Ratski/von Kampf plan are pretty minimal – essentially it’s just some run-of-the-mill piracy, only done by one-eyed green guys made of animal parts and flying a dirigible.

    More than anything this issue is an exercise in making the zombies look cool while also making Shock Gibson look cool: the Zombies are parachuting! The Zombies are firing a machine gun! Shock Gibson is posing on top of a whale! Shock Gibson is protecting the whale!

    Zombies in keen gas masks wielding cool gas guns! Zombies setting up a guillotine! Shock Gibson looking smug as hell while the guillotine blade smashes on his neck!

    After the guillotine fails to do its job, things go very wrong for Comrade Ratski and Baron von Kampf, culminating in the destruction of their base, the foiling of their plans and they themselves becoming a meal for at least nine alligators. Who presumably represent the Allied Forces.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 759: THE IRON HAND

    (Master Comics 006, 1940)

    While monitoring the world for trouble one day (using his Troublescope, natch), Master Man spots, in quick succession: an auto-gyro creating green rainclouds, a collection of mysteriously paralyzed wildlife, a full-fledged paralysis epidemic dubbed “the Living Death” in a nearby city, and the news that the preeminent scientist working to cure the plague has been murdered. He takes what I would say is a surprising amount of time to put two and two together and determine that these events might just be linked.

    The culprit behind all of these occurrences is the arch-criminal known as the Iron Hand, due to his iron hand. He has been dispensing the Living Death disease into the city’s reservoir using the green rain, and plans on expanding his operation world wide if he is successful in bringing the unnamed city under his heel. It’s a real shame that much of the rest of the story involves the Iron Hand’s minions vs Master Man in a series of retreat actions because the Iron Hand himself is barely present and he’s just the kind of bombastic jagoff villain I love.

    Master Man eventually works his way through all of the Iron Hand’s low-level doofuses in time to crash his auto gyro in a lake and drown him. There’s a teaser that suggests that maybe the drowning wasn’t quite enough to defeat such a cool villain, but as this is the final Master Man comic, it has to stand.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 759: THE IRON HAND

    (Master Comics 006, 1940)

    While monitoring the world for trouble one day (using his Troublescope, natch), Master Man spots, in quick succession: an auto-gyro creating green rainclouds, a collection of mysteriously paralyzed wildlife, a full-fledged paralysis epidemic dubbed “the Living Death” in a nearby city, and the news that the preeminent scientist working to cure the plague has been murdered. He takes what I would say is a surprising amount of time to put two and two together and determine that these events might just be linked.

    The culprit behind all of these occurrences is the arch-criminal known as the Iron Hand, due to his iron hand. He has been dispensing the Living Death disease into the city’s reservoir using the green rain, and plans on expanding his operation world wide if he is successful in bringing the unnamed city under his heel. It’s a real shame that much of the rest of the story involves the Iron Hand’s minions vs Master Man in a series of retreat actions because the Iron Hand himself is barely present and he’s just the kind of bombastic jagoff villain I love.

    Master Man eventually works his way through all of the Iron Hand’s low-level doofuses in time to crash his auto gyro in a lake and drown him. There’s a teaser that suggests that maybe the drowning wasn’t quite enough to defeat such a cool villain, but as this is the final Master Man comic, it has to stand.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 539 UPDATE: THE CLAW (1940)

    (Silver Streak Comics 002, 006)

    As you may or may not recall, when I covered the Claw’s sole 1939 appearance I concluded that taken on its own, it read like one of those stories where a villain holds sway over an area by means of a fake monster and that if the Claw had never appeared again that’s what I would assume he was: just an illusion composed of papier mache and maybe a balloon or an image projected on a cloud.

    Well, surprise, surprise, because that wasn’t the only appearance of the Claw and in fact the vary next issue of Silver Streak Comics features him joining up with an unnamed but very recognizable Adolf Hitler in return for control of half of Europe following a Claw/Nazi victory.

    The first part of the Claw’s plan involves attacking allied shipping using his very cool underwater train/tank. Next, using super-powered artillery cannon to shell civilian population centres… somewhere. I mean, the cities all look pretty Western hemisphere but as the Claw’s original HQ on the island of Ricca was in the Pacific and he’s still close enough to there that the ships he sinks are being transported back to be used in Riccan munitions factories, so maybe he’s attacking the West coast of the United States? Not sure how that helps the Nazis, honestly, but it’s either that or his artillery is really really super and he’s bombing Europe.

    The Claw eventually gets impatient with just blowing things up and proves me wrong yet again by growing enormous and using his weird powers to set up a whirlpool so mighty that it not only draws in and dooms ships from across the ocean but also changes the world’s weather patterns, causing the tropics to freeze over. Bad!

    Our old pal and original Claw foe Jerry Morris is of course not going to take this, particularly after his previously-unmentioned younger brother Tad is lost at sea in the Claw’s oceanic chaos. He combines one of his signature astonishing super-science inventions – in this case a special bulb that emits light rays that instantly freeze water – with some cars stored in the hold of the ship he is on to create vehicles that are able to fabricate a sheet of ice to drive on across even the deepest water. And since the ice goes all the way to the bottom, these vehicles are able to neutralize the Claw’s maelstrom by creating a series of concentric ice walls around it.

    There ensues what is actually a pretty neat battle between ice-road cars and the submarine tank/train, with the cars attempting to hem in the train with walls while the train fires its artillery cannons upward – I would enjoy playing a video game about this! The Claw is ultimately killed in an explosion when the munitions on his train explode… OR IS HE?

    He is not! And despite the assertion at the end of the previous story, Jerry Morris seems to have foregone taking the Claw’s body back to the US for dissection, perhaps because it was not technically a legal thing to do. Whatever the circumstances, the body ends up falling into the hands of a group of “devil worshippers” somewhere in Asia, but whether the Claw was the devil in question or not is hard to say (though in leaping back to life just as his body was consigned to the funeral pyre he certainly must have inspired some supernatural awe).

    Also, for this story alone, the Claw is referred to as the Green Claw and his claws are indeed coloured green for the occasion.

    The (Green) Claw’s opponent in this case is Major Carl Tarrant, who is either a soldier of fortune or a member of the local colonial police, but either way he simply must investigate the possibility of the Claw’s return. Tarrant manages to avoid the Claw’s cultists but is tracked down by the villain himself with some high-tech devices, then shrunk via magic and stuck in a metal box to gruesomely expire when the shrink spell wears off.

    The Claw then reveals his latest plan to take over the world: a kick-ass robot army! No notes, 10/10, a classic for a reason, just look at those cool robots.

    Tarrant of course has to spoil everything by getting out of the box before he gets squished. He destroys the robots by taking advantage of the Claw’s metal-destroying anti-bullet force field and then does one better by bombing the entire fortress/city to smithereens. But though the Claw is thwarted, HE YET LIVES. What horrors are we in store for in 1941?

    (just had to feature this cover from Silver Streak Comics 006, which I spent an inordinate amount of time being creeped out by – those hands! – as replicated in Jeff Rovin’s Encyclopedia of Super Villains)

  • PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

    Get ready for a collection of MLJ’s finest racially-problematic villains.

    Yen Fat Sing: 

    Yen Fat Sing’s deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang’s charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He’s a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of remarkable things about Yen Fat Sing: 

    1. after all the effort to run everyone off the farm, once Fu Chang is closing in he just sneaks onto the grounds and digs up the treasure, suggesting that he could have done that all along and particularly so because nobody knew about the treasure at all until he ran his mouth about it.

    2. Yen Fat Sing is killed in the course of the story but, unlike virtually every other comic book villain to have anything to do with carnivorous plants, he is not eaten by a tree but rather dies in a car crash.

    I do rally like that the man-eating plants only attack in the dark. That’s a fun detail. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

    Joodar the Evil:

    Joodar the Evil starts out as an evil equivalent to Fu Chang, only instead of accessing his power via supplication to an ancestral god with a tonsure, Joodar worships the Great Genii of the Water Demons, and instead of a very eclectic set of animated chess figures…

    … Joodar is granted the services of – you guessed it – water demons. Though his stated plans involve world domination, Joodar has a lot of trouble with step 1: destroy Fu Chang, to the extent that both the Great Genii and his Water Demon crew end up destroyed. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

    Joodar returns in the next issue, potentially because “summoning water demons” isn’t a crime in San Francisco. This time he is without his demon pals and so he turns to the next best things: bacteria and mosquitoes! Specifically, he has mixed up a big batch of different harmful bacteria and stuck ’em in some mosquitoes in order to create havoc in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Why does he do this? It’s not entirely clear. Generic revenge? Mass chaos? Joodar doesn’t really deliver a coherent thesis statement I’m afraid.

    Joodar’s greatest creation is this enormous mosquito, which almost takes out Fu Chang and his fiance Tay Ming but ultimately cannot contend with those pesky magic chessmen. Joodar, as far as I know, just absconds into the night – perhaps mosquito-crime is also not illegal in San Francisco. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)

    Dr Wang:

    Dr Wang is a Yellow Peril villain in the true Fu Manchu mould, a sinister genius who strikes at the security of the US for no stated reason. It’s possible that we are meant to read Asian villain = Japanese, but if I’m honest an evil mastermind who plots against the United States for the sheer cussed challenge of it it quite a bit more evocative.

    Dr Wang is so threatening to the secuirty of the country, in fact, that we are introduced to him in media res ad the Shield attempts to murder him by dropping a boulder on his car. This is that proactive super-hero action that we al1 wanted in the late aughts!

    Dr Wang has two things going for him: the first is his mask, which looks great. Terrific style of mask, particularly with a hat. The second is his plan to disrupt US war production, by rounding up a bunch of guys who are afflicted with cholera and hypnotizing them into getting jobs in arms factories, thus starting a targeted cholera epidemic. And the very fun thing about this is that cholera is mostly spread by contact with infected feces, so these factories must be disgusting.

    The Shield cannot of course let this stand, and goes back for another try at solving the Dr Wang Problem, and you know what they say: the second time is the charm – plus it’s a bit more narratively satisfying for the Shield not to do a premeditated murder! (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

    (Science Comics 001, 1940)

    Dr Doom, another super-villain with his own series (I swear that they’re rare over all but 1940 sure is a fertile year for them), lives in an unspecified future and is your classic mad science polymath, as demonstrated by his various schemes:

    In his very first outing, Dr Doom decides to do some extreme testing of his latest formula and uses it to shrink Jan and Wanda, two otherwise-nondescript youths who just happen to also be his recurring nemeses going forward. They escape of course and, after defeating a crab and regaining their former size, haul him back home to Jupiter with them to face justice.

    Of course Dr Doom also escapes and makes his way back to his laboratory. His next two schemes are also shrinking-based: in Science Comics 002 he kidnaps people (including Jan and Wanda) and forces them to battle insects to the death, while Science Comics 004 sees him shrinking Jan and Wanda’s home city of Daru on Jupiter to use as his personal playground. This adventure ends with Doom himself shrunk and on display in a museum of oddities, an event which seems to put him off the field of shrinking entirely going forward.

    In Science Comics 005, Dr Doom unleashes cosmic ray mutations from the depths of the Grand Canyon in a bid to conquer the US. Also the Grand Canyon is expanding for some reason? This is perhaps the most incoherent Dr Doom story and ends with his equipment just exploding out of nowhere.

    The shock of his last scheme failing so thoroughly seems to have had a profound effect on Dr Doom, because at this stage he enters his “revenge on humanity” period. To that end, in Science Comics 006, he develops and unleashes the Grey Mold Disease and sets it loose on the world until he is forced to reveal the antidote by Jan and Wanda when they threaten to inject him with the even more deadly Green Mold Disease.

    Next, in Science Comics 007, Doom uses a magnetic ray in an attempt to throw the entire Earth off its orbit and into the Sun, but misjudges the gravity on his planetoid base and goes flying off into space himself while fleeing from Jan. As always there is no word on how he gets out of this seemingly inescapable doom, but this is the one I’m most curious about.

    Science Comics 008 is a bit of a break for Dr Doom, as he settles down in Long Island with his amazing screaming robot Lodi. Attempting to wipe out humanity is pretty hard work, so Doom and Lodi are taking it easy by merely blasting various humans into a hostile alternate dimension filled with cannibalistic ogres. 

    (this and the previous story also appear to be set in or around 1940, which likely means that they were either a) repurposed from some already-finished art or b) produced by someone who didn’t particularly care about continuity. See also: Jan and Wanda going from space adventurers to reporters for the New York Daily Star)

    Dr Doom’s appearance in Big 3 001 is another stab at destroying humanity, as he facilitates a Venusian invasion by producing deadly mists. Two notes about this one: 1) the Venusians are amazing looking little weirdos and 2) his attempted revenge on Jan and Wanda by making them but not their potential offspring immune to the mists so they must wander alone through a dead world is harsh as hell.

    Dr Doom’s final appearance (and only appearance in 1941) in Green Mask 004 involves him attacking passing space shipping from a base on Uranus. It’s a bit of a ho-hum scheme to go out on, but at least it features some weird little homunculus creatures that Doom makes out of cats. More villains need more little critters around just kind of being moderately useful.

    In a lot of previous adventures Jan and Wanda haul Dr Doom off to prison or just kind of leave him to rot in whatever bombed-out laboratory they just escaped from but this is the one where they genuinely attempt to kill him by bombing his lab from orbit. It’s pretty understandable after all of the trouble he’s caused them, but they don’t bother to confirm the kill and so we leave Dr Doom alive and stranded on Uranus. Did he ever get out of there to vex them again? We can never know.