The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Cosmo Mann

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 912: COMMANDER DARKE

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 912: COMMANDER DARKE

    (Bang-Up Comics 001, 1941)

    Commander Darke, though ostensibly on a mission to invade the United States with his private military, is the arch-foe of scientist-adventurer Cosmo Mann and as such spends his entire career trying to Steal Those Gizmos. Perhaps things would be different if there had been more than three issues of Bang-Up Comics for Darke and Mann to clash, but as it stands all we get are the opening moves of their epic struggle.

    You probably already took note of the extreme ostentation on display in Commander Darke’s (almost certainly self-designed) uniform, but the seriousness with which he takes his wardrobe is really underscored in the above panels in which we can not only see that he took the care to screw in his monocle even when waking up in the middle of the night to take a call but that even his double-breasted pyjamas have epaulettes on them. 

    I was all ready to give Darke a bit of credit for undertaking the mission to secure Cosmo Mann’s Sun Ray Gun himself, but once he left his captured underlings behind to die in a cloud of poison gas I was forced to reevaluate: going himself is a part of his being a Bad Boss, an expression of his disdain for the ability of his minions to do even this simple task. He does have a cool-looking gas mask though.

    Commander Darke has a lot of villainous presence or potential, but never really gets a chance to show it off: he captures the Sun Ray and a man who he thinks is Cosmo Mann but turns out to be his assistant Archy and then spends his next appearance on the back foot as Mann attempts to recapture them from Darke as he escapes in his dirigible. His particular brand of bombastic villainy was lost to the vagaries of the comic book boom, alas.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 070

    MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 070

    No more of those fancy-pants vigilantes that you’ve had a chance to have heard of: here’s some real minor super-heroes for you:

    the Rainbow: 

    The Rainbow, aka Jim Travis, may just be the first super-hero whose origin involves reading a comic book and taking inspiration from it, but unlike the other examples of this that I can think of Jim reads less like someone finding a solution to a problem that they have and more like one of those guys who is convinced that they could score a point off of a professional athlete if they tried. Most of his motivation honestly seems to come from a desire to prove his girlfriend wrong when she says that his idea is not good. 

    To his credit, Jim does put in a pretty good show as the Rainbow. He hops around the rooftops and foils some crooks with a few timely punches. Though the real-world reason that he only made one appearance was the fact that Centaur Comics was a very short-lived phenomenon that tailed off pretty sharply in 1941/1942, it is very tempting to imagine that the Rainbow’s second outing ended in some sort of career-ending and unpublishable disaster.

    Finally, the name: while the natural assumption is that Jim called himself the Rainbow after assembling such a multicoloured outfit (and making some real choices, too! The barely laced-up shirt, the cape depending from the cowl mask, the footie tights… this is one of the more eccentric costumes in comics, if only at a second or third glance), I personally think that the name was chosen solely in order to make the above very poor virtually incomprehensible joke. (The Arrow 003, 1941)

    Cosmo Mann: 

    Cosmo Mann is a scientific adventurer who has developed an extremely bulky ray gun with three different modes: a “Sun Ray” capable of vaporizing a tank, a paralysis ray and an ill-defined “G Ray” that seems to both increase the mass of the bullets being fired at him in the above demonstration and also melt them somehow. He also has a cool personal flight suit called the Sun Ray Suit that he dons in his second appearance to rescue his cigar-chomping aide Archy from the diabolical Commander Darke.

    Like all Progressive Publications characters, any enthusiasm I feel toward Cosmo Mann is tempered by the fact that he only ever appeared in three comics, one of which is currently lost to the ages. Still, I have to admit that he is a pretty cool guy. (Bang-Up Comics 001, 1941)

    Buzz Balmer: 

    Buzz Balmer is a young aircraft enthusiast whose father has just perfected his Minus-Ray shrinking device, and thanks to his youthful enthusiasm he ends up bounding directly into the Minus beam and becoming permanently shrunk to a few inches tall.

    Thanks to his guilty conscience, Professor Balmer makes sure to equip him with the very latest in shrunken aviation technology so that he can fly around the countryside making up excuses to kill the wildlife for fun. Eventually – perhaps thanks to all the favours that his dad has been calling in to procure ever-faster fighter planes – military intelligence gets wind of Buzz and recruits him as an asset. His second and final appearance is spent tooling around Europe for the Army.

    The most vexing thing about Buzz Balmer is that I want to say that his name is a pun on “buzz bomber” but I can only really find evidence of v1 Rockets being called that and they don’t start being used for three more years. While it seems like the term might have been used for something before that, any further web-based research is hampered by the popularity of both the Sonic the Hedgehog enemy and novelty fishing lures that also use the name. (Bang-Up Comics 001, 1941)

    Lady Fairplay: 

    Lady Fairplay, the “Goddess of Chastisement,” is actually Mary Lee, a mild-mannered schoolteacher given super powers by the never-seen Professor Amazo. I find her costume quite charming, particularly the scale-mail skirt.

    Here’s the thing about Lady Fairplay: she is a perfectly generic super-hero. She is super fast, super strong, agile enough to climb up the side of a plane while it is in flight. She drives around in a super car and ducks out of her day job to fight crime at the drop of a hat. 

    Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Lady Fairplay is that she just leaves some kid named William in charge of her class while she runs off to fight crime. Good luck on the bullying, William! (Bang-Up Comics 001, 1941)