The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: disaster causer

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 613: DR MARTINIOUS

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    Dr Martinious holds a few distinctions. First, he is an Earth scientist who travelled to Mars on a rocket ship of his own design, an impressive feat and one that seems to have endeared him to the Brain Men of Mars sufficiently to make him their leader.

    Secondly, he is an early cosplayer. Note his pseudo-Roman outfit (better view below). This is the outfit of a person who showed up on Mars after reading a lot of pulp fiction and early comic books that populated planets with societies themed after their mythological namesakes – see early Wonder Woman, e.g. How disappointing for Martinious when he showed up and the place was chockablock with cute little big-headed cyborgs! It’s just lucky for him that they’re up for a good war.

    Thirdly, Dr Martinious has the dubious distinction of being the antagonist of a non-Fletcher Hanks-produced Stardust the Super Wizard story. It’s not a particularly bad effort but something is subtly off in a way that makes one feel uneasy while reading it. It’s actually not unlike the sensation of reading Hanks’ work for the first time, so good job unnamed artist!

    The Martinious/Brain Men plan involves flooding the planet with either huge insects or giant bacteria or some hybrid of the two? Big bugs, we’ll say. It’s never expressly spelled out but an attack like this is usually deployed to weaken a planet prior to invasion. Martinious never actually gets that far, however, because Stardust shows up to render aid to the Earthlings.

    (of course Stardust’s solution – to soak the entire planet in ultra-powerful germicide – would probably be just as disastrous in the long term as presumably huge swaths of essential microbial life would be wiped out, but this is a comic with a shaky understanding of the difference between insects and bacteria so don’t hold your breath for that reveal to happen in-story)

    Where a lot of villains would use this as an opportunity to spit defiance at their foe, Dr Martinious instead sinks into despair. He and the Brain Men lock themselves up in a ray-proof fortress to sulk. He also finally gives us a good look at his cosplay, which is nice.

    Martinious never emerges from his funk, so the final act of the story is in the hands of these cute Brain Men assassins, who at least try to kill Stardust. Do they get hurled off a mountain for their efforts? Yes. But it was worth a try.

    Like I said, Martinious never emerges from his ray-proof fortress, and that’s because it’s specifically a death ray-proof fortress. Concentrated solar heat rays are very effective against it. RIP Dr Martinious, you didn’t do a very good job.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 607: THE MIRACLE MEN

    (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

    Like a fair few Fletcher Hanks villains, the Miracle Men take a regular crime and amp it up to the nth degree. In this case, thanks to the technological marvel that is the Invisible Vacuum Tube, they have industrialized kidnapping. And if the ransom is not paid an appropriately oversized response can be delivered via their tornado making machines! This is modern, industrialized crime!

    Under the direction of leader Wolf-Eye, the Miracle Men perform hundreds of simultaneous kidnappings. Should Wolf-Eye be the one in the title of this entry? Maybe.

    Unfortunately for the hundreds of rich guys and the US at large, the FBI does not want to pay up, so it’s tornado time.

    Stardust is of course all over this, so the chances of a major city being destroyed via super-tornado are only about 50% (this is, remember, a Fletcher Hanks comic – he does not shy away from mass casualties). This time there is no slaughter, but remember folks: Stardust will not necessarily save you. He will avenge you.

    The greatest and most unexpected thing in this comic is when the hitherto-normal seeming gang boss Wolf-Eye unveils his gland-control magic. Is it real magic or more super-science? Impossible to say but I choose to believe that it’s magic, a perhaps one-time spell that Wolf-Eye has kept in his back pocket for years in case his authority is sufficiently challenged. It’s really great.

    Merely being a big guy is not enough to take on an enraged Super Wizard, however, so all Wolf-Eye gets for his trouble is a sock in the mouth and a trip to Prison City by way of Getting Shrunk Avenue. It is perhaps lucky for the Miracle Men that they only kidnapped people, as the most ironic punishment for a kidnapping is of course to be taken away and confined yourself – it’s just lucky for them that Stardust didn’t decide to seal them up in a big boulder or something.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 607: THE MIRACLE MEN

    (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

    Like a fair few Fletcher Hanks villains, the Miracle Men take a regular crime and amp it up to the nth degree. In this case, thanks to the technological marvel that is the Invisible Vacuum Tube, they have industrialized kidnapping. And if the ransom is not paid an appropriately oversized response can be delivered via their tornado making machines! This is modern, industrialized crime!

    Under the direction of leader Wolf-Eye, the Miracle Men perform hundreds of simultaneous kidnappings. Should Wolf-Eye be the one in the title of this entry? Maybe.

    Unfortunately for the hundreds of rich guys and the US at large, the FBI does not want to pay up, so it’s tornado time.

    Stardust is of course all over this, so the chances of a major city being destroyed via super-tornado are only about 50% (this is, remember, a Fletcher Hanks comic – he does not shy away from mass casualties). This time there is no slaughter, but remember folks: Stardust will not necessarily save you. He will avenge you.

    The greatest and most unexpected thing in this comic is when the hitherto-normal seeming gang boss Wolf-Eye unveils his gland-control magic. Is it real magic or more super-science? Impossible to say but I choose to believe that it’s magic, a perhaps one-time spell that Wolf-Eye has kept in his back pocket for years in case his authority is sufficiently challenged. It’s really great.

    Merely being a big guy is not enough to take on an enraged Super Wizard, however, so all Wolf-Eye gets for his trouble is a sock in the mouth and a trip to Prison City by way of Getting Shrunk Avenue. It is perhaps lucky for the Miracle Men that they only kidnapped people, as the most ironic punishment for a kidnapping is of course to be taken away and confined yourself – it’s just lucky for them that Stardust didn’t decide to seal them up in a big boulder or something.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 598: THE DEMON

    (Fantastic Comics 003, 1940)

    The Demon is a pretty straightforward Stardust enemy: he thinks that there are too many people on Earth and so is going to destroy cities until he gets that number under control. Exactly why he thinks that there are too many people (fear of overcrowding? an ahead-of-his-time radical environmentalist? simple misanthropy?) is not explored.

    This is of course exactly the sort of thing to draw Stardust the Super Wizard like a magnet. Importantly, this happens before the Demon manages to destroy NYC but after he has wrecked an ocean liner, so that he might be punished in an appropriately Stardustian manner. The apprehension of the Demon is also notable for being the first time that Stardust performs his signature move of picking up a villain in one hand and having them crumple up like they’re made of sponge rubber, though this is presumably a stylistic choice rather than an actual effect that Stardust’s big mitts have on the criminal fraternity.

    Stardust… I was going to say “of course does not allow NYC to be obliterated” but in a different Fletcher Hanks comic it might have happened. But no. He throws the Demon into the wave to be killed by roiling water, then disintegrates both Demon and wave. He also says a famous line, from the title of that one Paul Karasik book about Fletcher Hanks!

    The Demon’s assistant Max, oddly, seems to get away scot-free. Stay out of trouble, Max!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 598: THE DEMON

    (Fantastic Comics 003, 1940)

    The Demon is a pretty straightforward Stardust enemy: he thinks that there are too many people on Earth and so is going to destroy cities until he gets that number under control. Exactly why he thinks that there are too many people (fear of overcrowding? an ahead-of-his-time radical environmentalist? simple misanthropy?) is not explored.

    This is of course exactly the sort of thing to draw Stardust the Super Wizard like a magnet. Importantly, this happens before the Demon manages to destroy NYC but after he has wrecked an ocean liner, so that he might be punished in an appropriately Stardustian manner. The apprehension of the Demon is also notable for being the first time that Stardust performs his signature move of picking up a villain in one hand and having them crumple up like they’re made of sponge rubber, though this is presumably a stylistic choice rather than an actual effect that Stardust’s big mitts have on the criminal fraternity.

    Stardust… I was going to say “of course does not allow NYC to be obliterated” but in a different Fletcher Hanks comic it might have happened. But no. He throws the Demon into the wave to be killed by roiling water, then disintegrates both Demon and wave. He also says a famous line, from the title of that one Paul Karasik book about Fletcher Hanks!

    The Demon’s assistant Max, oddly, seems to get away scot-free. Stay out of trouble, Max!

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 008

    Mad or criminal, it’s the science that matters.

    This fellow is known only as “the hypnotist” and has an unspecified plan to do… something that involves taking control of flights of Army bombers and having them blow up targets of his choosing. If the details seem thin on the ground it’s because this fellow speaks precisely three words (see above) before being captured by Jeff Cardiff, Spy-Chief and so the only knowledge we have about his plans is that which can be extrapolated from his actions.

    Bonus details: 1. he hypnotizes people with his large purple eyes 2. his plan requires a video hookup to the planes he is controlling, which I personally did not know was standard or even possible in 1940. (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940)

    De Carva here developed an earthquake causing ray and almost managed to conquer the US with it but made the classic mistake of trusting in his deathtraps to finish off Skyman without bothering to confirm if he was, in fact, dead. This is known as hubris, kids. (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

    Professor Scorp here is a mad Egyptologist! That’s right, folks, we’ve got a mad social science case on our hands! Scorp suffered some sort of breakdown and his family made the unfortunate and retrograde decision to confine him on their island estate rather than, say, seek treatment for him. Eventually, two unscrupulous servants helped him escape as part of a plan to steal and resurrect the mummy of evil pharaoh Tut-Akum-Aut so as to learn the location of his legendary lost treasure. The reanimated mummy above is sadly merely an illusion conjured by Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians. But on a happy note, Professtor Scorp is taken somewhere for proper treatment at the end of the story! (Big Shot Comics 015, 1941)

    UPDATE: Astonishingly, Professor Scorp returns in The Face 001!

    This is Humpy Hudson, who has a moderately foolproof scheme (develop a substance that explodes the air around it but is itself unharmed and make it an innocuous shape, thus giving yourself a hard-to-spot, untraceable bomb, then bomb utilities until you can extort money out of them) hampered by some poor planning (he only has one reusable bomb and he made it in the shape of an onyx statuette). Humpy spends most of the issue trying to get his bomb back after it gets picked up by a youngster and sold at a pawnshop, then gets captured by Skyman. (Big Shot Comics 019, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 499: NELS LAMBERT

    (Big Shot Comics 017, 1941) 

    Like a lot of Skyman’s enemies Nels Lambert is a disaster causing guy. Specifically, he has a rig called an Electrical Wave Generator, with which he can create waves – presumably of all sizes but as he is a criminal scientist he’s mostly focused on the largest and most destructive ones.

    A note on naming: the Electrical Wave Generator is an okay name at best but he does refer to his base here as Nels Lambert’s Floating Island and I personally choose to believe that that is it’s official name because it’s extremely whimsical..

    Like our old friend the Ice Menace, Nels Lambert’s plan is to weaponize the ocean and demand ransom from nations bordering the Atlantic in return for not being flooded. And he almost gets away with it, thanks to the fact that the Electrical Wave Generator is a multifunctional doomsday device: not only can it be used to create waves using electricity but that same electricity can be discharged into the atmosphere around Nels Lambert’s Floating Island™ in order to for example very nearly electrocute Skyman and his pal Chubby as they fly in to investigate the source of this wave nuisance.

    And speaking of Skyman’s pal! Chubby Weeks is an old college friend of Allan “Skyman” Turner who ends up going along on this adventure through medium-level plot contrivance. The real interesting thing about Chubby is that he’s a radio news reporter and that according the the callsign in the background of this picture he works at Station WBSC, which is the same station that Tony “the Face” Trent owns and/or works at. This is my first time reading any comics from the Columbia Comic Corporation so I have no idea if there’s any further crossover action in the future but this evidence of a very mildly shared universe is very mildly exciting!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 456: KING BASCOM

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

    King Bascom, the first foe faced by Dynamic Man, is nothing more than a grubby little capitalist pig. I almost forgot to write him and his land-grab scheme up due to disinterest.

    Trouble is, while King Bascom is utterly uninteresting he is cocooned in a dense shell of interesting things: his land grab is aided by a drought that he himself is causing using a rain-prevention machine, he has anti-Dymanic Man weaponry and a deathtrap that involves both a descending ceiling and a flood of liquid nitrogen, he’s a traitor and a scumbag and a sneering pompous ass and yet I can’t bring myself to care about him enough to finish writing this.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 312: PLUTO

    (Red Raven Comics 001; Captain America Comics 001-003, 1940-1941)

    As originally presented, this is the literal Roman god of the underworld come down (up?) to Earth to stir up trouble as Rudolph Hendler, dictator of Prussland (mild aside – recently saw a fascist complaining about Nazis being vilified like it was a new thing, but we’ve always known that you suck, bro).

     Jupiter and the other Roman gods aren’t so hot on this plan and send Mercury down to Earth to combat cousin Pluto. A simple tale. The very mild complication comes from Marvel’s fondness for retcons and rcontextualizations. After the Enernals were introduced in the 70s, a number of characters from the 40s and 50s were retroactively said to actually be the Eternal Makkari, including Mercury here.

    He was also said to be Hurricane, the near-identical hero who faced Pluto in his next couple of appearances. But if Mercury/ Hurricane was not actually a member of some godly pantheon, who was Pluto?

    In an unsurprising twist, Pluto was revealed to be Kro, a villainous member of the Deviant race who features in the same 70s series as Makkari. I don’t know a lot about Kro but I guess that it’s in-character for him to (in order) start a version of WWII, run a murder-for-hire gang, unleash a plague in the Amazon and attempt to take over a place called Groton City via the medium of repeated subway accidents.

    The really important thing is that his first couple of appearances were drawn by Jack Kirby so he looks like a perfect evil creep. Of course there might be an argument that he no longer qualifies as a minor super-villain because the Pluto identity has been rolled into the larger Kro identity but where’s the fun in that?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 289: PROFESSOR ENRIC ZAGNAR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941)

    Enric Zagnar is your classic Victim of Orthodoxy. His beliefs (mankind will someday be able to control the weather) clash with the view of the establishment (that is wrong) and so he is left adrift.

    He of course goes off into the mountains to learn how to control the weather and dream of revenge.

    Harnessing the power of black magic, he attempts to flood and drown the entire town and is opposed by everyone’s fave smoke-dweller the Vision.

    Finally, in his moment of triumph, nature itself seems to take a hand and he is incinerated by lightning.

    Honestly the most interesting part of this guy’s story aside from his wild-haired Jack Kirby Draws a Madman design is the specifics of the conflict between Zagnar and his unnamed university. “Mankind will learn to control the weather someday” is not a particularly outré belief, particularly in comics – we’re probably less than a decade away from the heyday of cloud seeding as a go-to solution, for instance – so I reckon it’s the hubris of it all, the Victor Frankenstein “we will be as gods” of it all that narratively seals Zagnar’s fate.