The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: DC Comics

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 163: PROFESSOR RADIUM

    (Batman Comics 008, 1941)

    Professor Henry “Radium” Ross has things stacked against him from at least three different angles by my count. First, he’s a classic Victim of Orthodoxy as his research is rejected as too fantastic by a stick-in-the-mud institute director and he feels compelled to test his radium-based cure for death on himself. It works, but turns him into a radioactive man in the process, and he starts to go mad from a combination of radiation poisoning and (presumably) grief after he accidentally kills both his partner and his sweetheart (that’s angle no. 2, by the way).

    The third misfortune to strike Professor Radium is Batman, who is much more of a protector of capital than he will be later and consequently is more concerned with preventing Ross from stealing the valuable drug that he need to treat his condition than with helping him get better. They fight and Prof Rad goes into the harbour, presumably to drown. OR DOES HE, the final caption box asks? No, depending on which comic book reality you live in. He makes an appearance as part of a squad of radioactive bad guys in Infinite Crisis, so at least one version of him evidently hangs out for up to 70 years before getting motivation to do some evil.

    They should have brought him back beforehand (or used him since). He’s neat.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 162: THE CLOCK MAKER

    (Batman Comics 006, 1941)

    A few different longstanding comic book bits make early appearances in the tale of the Clock Maker. First, Bruce Wayne has to go to a boring old board meeting at one of the many companies that he has an stake in, but that meeting sows the seeds of crime. Specifically, they all go to a clock store together afterward and Atkins, the evil board member who wants to gain sole ownership of the clock company for some reason, meets Elias Brock, an unhinged old man who loves clocks so much that he gets violently angry at the thought of wasting or killing time.

    Which leads to the second recurring comics motif: the calculating villain convinces an unstable person to do their killing for them. Brock takes out two board members and almost gets Bruce Wayne before Batman works out the plan, then kills Atkins and almost blows up a decent part of Gotham before being pitched out a window by Robin.

    A side note is that the comic itself seems to somewhat agree with the clockmaker with regard to the precious nature of time – the man himself is a bit of an anticapitalist…

    … while Batman expresses more of a rise and grind mentality, completely unsurprisingly.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 161: THE BLACK WITCH

    (Batman Comics v1 005, 1941)

    Batman and Robin’s first interdimensional jaunt took them to Fairyland, where they were tasked with rescuing the daughter of one Professor Anderson, who it seems he was using as a test subject for his narrative-dimensional travel device? There they face off against sundry giants and dragons and so forth before confronting the top evildoer of the realm: the Black Witch.

    One could argue that a villain whose existence is defined by peasant morality tales that have been passed through a series of bowdlerizations is not necessarily completely responsible for their evil nature, but Grant Morrison didn’t write this one, so Batman beats her up and she commits suicide.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 160: THE FOUR CARDS

    (Batman Comics 005, 1941)

    A while ago I decided that groups were going to go into my lists (and charts and graphs) of super-villains. After all, if I was willing to accord one fellow who went around as the Masked Bandit, why should I spurn four guys who do exactly the same, only pluralized? Accordingly, masked gangs get as much credit as masked crooks, if they fulfil enough other criteria. The Four Cards, however, introduce a new wrinkle.

    Simply put: if any other four people with card-based nicknames had formed a card-themed gang I’d count them as minor super-villains, but one of them is the Joker. So the group is minor and three quarters of its members are – is that enough? Evidently!

    Aside from my categorization panic, the Four Cards are a bit basic: they operate a semi-legal gambling ship in international waters off Gotham and a disguised Joker, seductive Black Queen and socially adroit Jack of Diamonds line up wealthy targets for the King of Clubs to beat up and rob.

    Inevitably, Batman and Robin step in. The Black Queen falls in love with Batman and she and the Jack of Diamonds bump one another off over him. Meanwhile, the Joker has pulled his inevitable double cross and left (having set the ship on fire as he went), leaving poor Clubbsy as the only one left to be hauled away to jail.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 159: MISTER X

    (All-Star Comics 005, 1941)

    Mister X is another team comic overboss, like the Leader before him. Outwardly an unassuming little man, he has managed to gather a wide range of organized crime under his control while remaining completely anonymous, even to his own underlings. His only mistake (and the inciting event of the story) is being so threatened by the crimefighting activities of the Justice Society that he mobilizes his forces in an attempt to kill them even though they have no idea that he actually exists.

    Even after they are variously attacked by gangsters, gamblers, car thieves, muscle men, criminal scientists, arsonists and magicians, the Justice Society doesn’t actually end up catching Mister X. As seen above, he chooses to turn himself in rather than, say, relocating to South America or attempting to go into finance.

    I quite like Mister X. It’s hardly a novel idea for a meek little guy to be a secret criminal mastermind – like old ladies, guys like Mister X were accorded so little respect in the popular culture of the 40s that the idea of them being in some way formidable was a cliché long before this comic came to be. It’s well executed here, with X being so unassuming that criminals and crimefighters alike are merely nonplussed when he shows up at the scene of crime after crime.

    Absolutely the best thing about Mister X, though, is this bit about the moment of silence every time his name comes up around a bunch of crooks. They do it throughout the issue!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 159: MISTER X

    (All-Star Comics 005, 1941)

    Mister X is another team comic overboss, like the Leader before him. Outwardly an unassuming little man, he has managed to gather a wide range of organized crime under his control while remaining completely anonymous, even to his own underlings. His only mistake (and the inciting event of the story) is being so threatened by the crimefighting activities of the Justice Society that he mobilizes his forces in an attempt to kill them even though they have no idea that he actually exists.

    Even after they are variously attacked by gangsters, gamblers, car thieves, muscle men, criminal scientists, arsonists and magicians, the Justice Society doesn’t actually end up catching Mister X. As seen above, he chooses to turn himself in rather than, say, relocating to South America or attempting to go into finance.

    I quite like Mister X. It’s hardly a novel idea for a meek little guy to be a secret criminal mastermind – like old ladies, guys like Mister X were accorded so little respect in the popular culture of the 40s that the idea of them being in some way formidable was a cliché long before this comic came to be. It’s well executed here, with X being so unassuming that criminals and crimefighters alike are merely nonplussed when he shows up at the scene of crime after crime.

    Absolutely the best thing about Mister X, though, is this bit about the moment of silence every time his name comes up around a bunch of crooks. They do it throughout the issue!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 158: THE LEADER

    (All-Star Comics 004, 1941)

    What makes them a super-villain? Sheer scale! The Leader AKA Fritz Klaver is the top spy for the “dictator nations” in America, commanding units of his subversive Grey-Shirts as well as other less blatant agents in numbers estimated at 30 000. They come real close to saying he’s a Nazi, too, but it’s about a year out from comics folks being willing to actually do that.

    What makes them interesting? The real deal interesting thing about the Leader is that he’s the first foe that the Justice Society tackle as a group, establishing the split-up-to-take-on-all-of-the-minions-before-coming-together-to-fight-the-overboss paradigm that would rule team super-hero books for decades to come. Other than that he’s your typical fascist spy chief.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 158: THE LEADER

    (All-Star Comics 004, 1941)

    What makes them a super-villain? Sheer scale! The Leader AKA Fritz Klaver is the top spy for the “dictator nations” in America, commanding units of his subversive Grey-Shirts as well as other less blatant agents in numbers estimated at 30 000. They come real close to saying he’s a Nazi, too, but it’s about a year out from comics folks being willing to actually do that.

    What makes them interesting? The real deal interesting thing about the Leader is that he’s the first foe that the Justice Society tackle as a group, establishing the split-up-to-take-on-all-of-the-minions-before-coming-together-to-fight-the-overboss paradigm that would rule team super-hero books for decades to come. Other than that he’s your typical fascist spy chief.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 157: THE WIZARD

    (All-Star Comics 003, 1940)

    This is the kind of super-villain that you see magical heroes taking on a lot more often than other types: the preemptive striker. The likely cause of this is the status of so many magical heroes as the de facto head of Earth’s magical security, someone that a bad actor can take out and then be free to act with impunity.

    What’s interesting about this super-villain? The thing that appeals to me about this guy, who is primarily a user of illusion magic, is the variety of things he throws at Dr Fate: you got your crazed unicorns, some undead Egyptian warriors, a weird tentacle monster and the “Three Witches of Endor” who themselves cast spells at him. It’s a nice bit of variety!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 156: OOM THE MIGHTY

    (All-Star Comics 003, 1940)

    Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon – still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror.

    The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied that he was a spirit that was possessing a bronze grotesque, but later appearances – Oom, like Nyola before him, was Roy Thomased into the Monster Society of Evil in the pages of All-Star Squadron – treat the body as his own, thus introducing the question of why the city of Cliffland New Jersey was festooning their buildings with prehistoric statuary. Whichever is the case, possibly the most interesting thing about Oom is the fact that sometime in the last 30ish years he seems to have made the leap from Justice Society/ Spectre villain to Marvel Family foe, presumably via the Monster Society link.