The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: London

  • MEDIA IN COMICS 004

    It’s an all-movies episode of Media in Comics!

    Movies:

    London Strikes Back – Hard! is the film follow-up to London Can Take It, with both featuring an actor playing costumed vigilante London and the narration of Marc Holmes, London’s secret identity. As a bonus, please note the wild nasal apparatus that Imperial Studios required to put a toothbrush mustache on the actor playing Hitler. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

    We don’t too much of the action of Wild Mesa as it is filmed on the ranch of cowboy hero Bull’s-Eye Bill, as the issues in question are much more concerned with the interpersonal conflict between Bill and film star Tex O’Conner. Seems to be a regular-ass Western. (Target Comics v1 009, 1940)

    And now for some more Fantastic Feature Films content, as discussed in the last Media in Comics round-up: 

    Musical genius Gorevski, driven mad by a progressive paralysis in his right arm and the perceived infidelity of his wife, turns his strange musical abilities to crime in The Music Monster. (Target Comics v1 004, 1941)

    Big city gangsters steal a rain-making machine and get mixed up in backwoods hijinks in the execrable hillbilly comedy Ezekiel’s Ark. (Target Comics v1 005, 1941) 

    The Blue Zombie, a film about mad science being turned against warmongers, turned up in a minor super-hero round-up a while back. (Target Comics v1 006, 1941)

    The House of Horror is kind of a horror movie and kind of a crime movie, about a young couple who stumble into a gang hideout while visiting a relative and get fake haunted. (Target Comics v1 007, 1941)

    In Wedding Present, a gangster tries to go straight for love, only to be dragged back in and ultimately meet his end thanks to his own twisted mind. (Target Comics v1 008, 1941)

    Boomerang is the tale of a heroic reporter fighting to clear his lover’s father from a political frameup (the boomerang in question being the fact that the source of the smear campaign has his own career ruined). (Target Comics v1 009, 1941)

    Sword of Destiny is a very weird horror movie in which an American couple buy a house that once belonged to Mexican war hero General Santa Guerrero, only to find that instead of dying twenty years earlier as everyone had believed he had instead been trapped in the building’s basement, eating rats and house painters. The titular sword of destiny is Guerrero’s own that had been left hanging over the fireplace and is ultimately used to slay him. (Target Comics v1 010, 1941)

    Oddly featured just two issues after the last one, this Boomerang is a story about a man trying to commit the perfect murder and then himself dying when rigor mortis causes his victim to posthumously shoot him back. (Target Comics v1 011, 1941)

  • REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 024

    You just can’t keep ’em out of comics, those real people.

    Adolf Hitler:

    Dispatches super-spy Miss X to America. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

    Raymond Stokes, the actor playing Hitler in a British propaganda film about London (the super-hero, not the city) inexplicably also turns out to be a Nazi agent who attempts to murder the Prime Minister when he makes a cameo appearance in the movie. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

    Al Capone:  

    No-first-name Perrone here is another classic example of a crook lent a bit of legitimacy via a Capone-alike name. (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    Charles Biro:

    Carnival stunt-eater Ydlab Orib is a transparent Biro name-drop, though the “Baldy” part of his backward name doesn’t really jibe with the pictorial record of the man himself. Whether he was a prodigious eater or not is unrecorded as far as I can find. I would venture that we are witness to a series of in-jokes here. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

    Comics Folk:

    Give a Golden Age comic creator like Edd Ashe a chance to write a list and you’ll get a bunch of references to other Golden Age comics guys. For example, this collection of football stats features a (Harry “A”) Chesler College, a (Gil) Fox University and a (Mort) Meskin Mining & Mech. And a double-barrelled reference to Bob Wood, with Wood Military College and also Woodro College, referencing a Bob Wood/Charles Biro combination pen name. (Daredevil Comics 006, 1941)

    The list of schools also includes one called Lamont and I was ready to discount it, but then remembered that there was a reference to a Lamont in the previous issue, as a circus freak called the “Man of Wood,” which made me think that this might be a third Bob Wood reference and wouldn’t you know it some places list his middle name as Lamont or Lemont. What’s with all the Bob Wood references, Edd Ashe? 

    Franklin Roosevelt: 

    Once again, President Roosevelt is placed in the unenviable position of being in charge of a country plagued by the Claw’s particular brand of bullshit. He’s also placed in shadow and a 3/4 reverse view, because comic artists didn’t like to draw his face, presumably out of respect. (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    Fritz Julius Kuhn: 

    I’ll be honest: I had no idea who Fritz Kuhn was and certainly didn’t twig to “Herr Kahn” here being a version of him until I took a look to see if “Nordic infested […] Yorkville” was a real place and spotted his name associated with our favourite band of overhyped losers the German-American Bund on its Wikipedia page. Like the Bund itself, the spectre of Kuhn seems to have haunted comics long after he himself was relevant – he had already been slung in jail for tax evasion by the time this comic was published. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941)

    I was curious, so I looked back at the various Bunds we have thusfar encountered to see if any of them had their own version of Kuhn, and the only real candidates to jump out at me were Fritz Kessel, leader of the Termania Bund (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940) and Fritz Hewn – presumably rhymes with Kuhn – leader of the Young Bundists (Blue Ribbon Comics 014, 1941)

    George Roussos: 

    Given the uncommon nature of the surname “Roussos” I have to assume that the crooked newspaper editor in this 13 story is yet another example of Lev Gleason reference-your-coworkers style yuck-em-ups. (Daredevil Comics 003, 1941)

    Three issues later sees a murder be committed above the Roussos Pool Room. (Daredevil Comics 006, 1941)

    And in the same issue, an index of insane asylum inmates yields a Roussos, a (Jerry) Robinson and a (Bob) Wood. And possibly others, but I can’t place them.

    Heinrich Himmler:

    One of several Nazi officials vexed by the hero London and his “L” campaign (Daredevil Comics 006, 1941)

    Rudolph Hess:

    Rudolph Hess (or Hesst) and his flight to England are framed as a straightforward espionage mission, with Hesst landing along with fifty picked men via black parachutes. He is immediately captured by London. (Daredevil Comics 003, 1941)

    Winston Churchill: 

    Initially, I was all set to point out that this “London” adventure featured a completely made-up niece of Winston Churchill making a daring escape from Nazi-occupied Holland, but imagine my surprise when her uncle showed up and was a store-brand imitation Churchill with a mustache. I was particularly caught off guard by this as while US-based comics had a weird reluctance to portray or name FDR they usually had no such qualms about doing so with the PM. (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    The False-Churchill returns in the “London” feature in Daredevil Comics 004, and this time his inexplicable presence is highlighted by the unaltered name of Lloyd’s of London in the upper left.

    Finally, the Churchill-alike in Daredevil Comics 005 looks different enough from both the real deal and Mustache Churchill that we must assume that there has been some sort of regime change between issues. 

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 082

    Lotta visually striking characters this time, plus Pioneer. 

    Pioneer: 

    Pioneer is a man of limited education and experience (and possibly intellect) who has seemingly lived his entire life at the bottom of the inescapable Death Gorge in Yellowstone Park. He comes into contact with the outside world when a trio of fleeing gangsters crash their car near his home and he nurses them back to health. The three then take Pioneer with them once they manage to attract help from outside of the gorge, with little real justification other than to use him as cover if they attract fire from police.

    Pioneer’s morality is simple enough that his disdain for killing cannot be alleviated with the promise of cash, and he captures his three erstwhile companions when they commit a murder while robbing a bank. Our final view of him is as he wanders into New York City traffic while clutching five thousand dollars in reward money, and since he never appears again I suppose we must assume that he was immediately flattened by a car. This is where my “Pioneer might be a stupid” theory comes from, as the man had just completed a car trip from Yellowstone to NYC, which takes at least 33 hours today. You’re telling me that he didn’t take in the fact that you might want to stay out of the way of these things in all that time?

    As presented, Pioneer is not really a super-hero. He’s presented as one, but his one adventure is taken up almost entirely with origin stuff, which in itself is interesting because we don’t actually learn just how he came to be in that gorge in the first place. I suppose he would have worked like a more benevolent version of the Incredible Hulk, travelling from town to town dispensing rough justice and broken English. If he hadn’t been hit by all those cars, that is. (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    Categorized in: Origin (Unknown) 

    the Bronze Terror: 

    After his father is railroaded into a murder sentence in the corrupt Western town of Redfield, athletic wunderkind and hotshot lawyer Jeff Dixon returns home to help prove his innocence.

    Despite his legal background, Jeff turns to vigilante justice almost immediately, presumably due to the fact that all of the town’s officials are in the pocket of Scar Thornton, the real killer. Dixon’s chosen identity, the Bronze Terror, probably deserves a spot in the next Problematic Round-Up, but I’m giving him a reprieve because this comic is the definition of a well-meaning attempt to have a non-white character star in a comic that is still bogged down in all the tropes of in this case the Western genre (the name of the strip is “Real American No. 1,” for gosh sakes) and if I banished characters for that I recon that this space would feature a non-white super-hero some time in the 70s. If then.

    So, while on the plus side the Bronze Terror is a an entertaining and highly competent character who looks terrific (and is detail-oriented enough to get a mask for his horse so that it can also look cool), the negatives include:

    – all of the other Native American characters other than Jeff’s love interest Lilly being broad ethnic caricatures

    – Jeff’s status as a super-hero hanging on the fact that he went off and got a white man’s education, which is a pretty frequent trope in comics with Native American protagonists and stands as a counterpart to that of the white adventurer bringing his expertise to the jungle

    – yes, the costume looks great but I think that the broad objection that Native peoples have to the cultural appropriation of things like the war bonnet probably also applies to their use by comic book super-heroes. This one is going to keep coming up – American Eagle debuts at Marvel in 1981, and he’s wearing one

    (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    Categorized in: Body (Emotions – Terror), Elements (Alloys – Bronze), Problematic Characters

    London: 

    London is a masked vigilante dedicated to stymieing the forces of Nazi Germany as they attempt to conquer Great Britain. Conceptually, he seems to have been built around the catch phrase “London can take it!” and while the name is certainly unique it does introduce some confusion as the character London is based out of the city of London.

    I appreciate London’s costume: while the combination of a mask and a suit or tuxedo is nothing new in comics, this might just be the first time I’ve seen a suit paired with a cape and cowl. Plus the cursive “L” symbol is cute.

    London is in actuality radio broadcaster Marc Holmes, who reports on his own costumed exploits as an employee of the BBC. He works closely with the British military and London law enforcement in both his civilian and costumed identities. (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    Categorized in: Locations (Specific), Origin (Patriotic Characters)

    Pat Patriot: 

    Another in the seemingly endless parade of patriotic WWII super-heroes, Pat Patriot has the requisite flag based costume and dedication to Truth, Justice and the American Way, plus the clunky and also ominous-if-you-know-history sobriquet “America’s Joan of Arc.”

    An aircraft factory worker who kicks up a bit too much fuss about plant conditions and gets fired, Pat proceeds to unearth a conspiracy by her foreman to send aircraft engines to the Axis, all while wearing a patriotic costume from a play that she was in earlier in the evening. She has a mean right hook and a variety of skills (airplane piloting, marksmanship, etc) that see her through.

    In a truly American moment, Pat gets her super-hero name because her coworkers cannot conceive of someone being called the outlandishly foreign Patricia Patrios, and so rename her on the spot. (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

    Although Pat starts out as a worker in an airplane factory in an unidentified part of the US her career as a patriotic vigilante renders her unfit for a typical 9-5 job. By Daredevil Comics 006 she appears to be working as a newspaper reporter but whether that will continue to be her occupation as 1942 rolls around is anyone’s guess.

    Categorized in: Abstract Concepts (Patriotism), Origin (Patriotic Characters)