(Jackpot Comics 001, 1941)
Zarro, the Zombie Master, is yet another take on an evil Haitian voodoo practitioner: we’ve seen ’em before and we’ll see ’em again. He is recruited by a couple of pseudo-Nazis named Karl Bezdek and Hugo Kempf for help in setting up a factory that uses zombies as workers in the production of war material for the Axis. Like the other Zombie Master we have covered, this one is a vibrant shade of green, just like a cartoon zombie, though I’m not entirely sure when that particular colour association started.
I am going to lay out Karl and Hugo’s plan before telling you why I’m mad about it:
1. Pose as magazine photographers in order to get total access to the defense factories in the as-yet unnamed city that Mr Justice calls home (the risk of targeting a city with a super-hero is leavened by the fact that it has the world’s most gullible mayor).
2. Photograph as many workers as possible.
3. Zarro uses the photographs as sympathetic magic links to the workers (plucking them out of the photographs = very cool) and kills them.
4. The worker’s bodies are stolen and shipped to Haiti for use in the factory.
So why does this plan make me mad? Because I want to critique it but I can’t. See, it’s a bad and inefficient plan with a lot of unnecessary steps, but only if the only goal is to make money. But that isn’t the goal! Karl and Hugo are spies for a fascist nation! Their goal is to hamper US war production while simultaneously boosting that of their own country using the Haitian zombie factory, and they have done both! It’s maddening! The only real flaw I can find is that the graverobbing and body shipping are a bit involved but I can’t really think of a good alternative that doesn’t introduce more points of failure to the plan.
The risk of super-hero vs reward of gullible mayor calculation that we discussed earlier does in fact prove to be the trio’s downfall, as Mr Justice is able to make his way to Haiti (and please note the surprisingly grody-looking zombies that he finds there) thanks to a minor kidnapping subplot and strangle the Zombie Master, which in turn restores the workers to life. One smashed up Axis factory later, everyone is on the way back to [CITY NAME NOT FOUND].
Categorized in: Generica (Masters), Powers (Magic (Create Zombies)), Supranormal Beings (Zombies))
