The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: tyrant

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 508: THE GHOST OF KING TUT

    (Blue Bolt v1 009-010, 1940)

    This is a simple one but there are a lot of Lore Implications so I had to use a lot of pictures. To start, Sergeant Spook and his pal Dr Sherlock notice that there are no North African ghosts in Ghost Town (aside from Cleopatra, who was mentioned a few issues earlier) and resolve to go solve that mystery. They get the permissions and passports necessary to enter the mortal realm and head out.

    Arriving in North Africa, Spook and Sherlock are captured by ghost soldiers and brought to a ghost city via ghost chariot where they meet the person in charge of the whole ghost shebang: the ghost of Tutankhamen! And tangentially learn that ghosts turn green when they get sunburned – LORE!

    Tutankhamen (and just why he rather than any other North African ruler ended up in charge is not explored) further reveals that the reason that no ghosts leave North Africa is that he has enslaved them all and is making them build him an enormous ghost pyramid, presumably so that he can be entombed in style if he every dies a second time (and forget my usual questions about how blocks of stone might have become ghosts – just why has this pyramid taken so long to make? Literally thousands of years longer than any other! And with an immortal workforce!).

    Sergeant Spook escapes, of course, and makes his way home to appeal to Ghost Town president George Washington for some good old American-style overseas interventionism.

    There is a big battle, with ghost camels and ghost horses and ghost siege engines throwing ghost boulders. Sergeant Spook lays about him with a flail which is always upsetting to me because it looks so cool and I am against arming living police officers with flails.

    Ultimately, the fact that everyone involved is a ghost and thus none of the fighting can have lasting consequence means that Sergeant Spook must solve things by bopping King Tut on the schnozz, thus showing his subjects that he is fallible and not worthy of the thousands of years of torment that they endured/ inflicted in his name. Everyone except for King Tut goes home happy.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 228: THE PURPLE MONSTER

    (Feature Comics 049, 1941)

    The Purple Monster is a pretty lacklustre super-villain. He ticks all the boxes: volcano lair on an island somewhere off BC, army of costumed henchmen, subjugated population of poor island yokels to exploit complete with fake human sacrifices and an unexplained sinister use for the sacrificial victims… it’s a complete checklist of features designed to qualify him for this list. He even draws his name from a local superstition, albeit one he started himself by projecting a monstrous face on the purple clouds that billow from the volcano.

    It’s all so… low-rent. He’s set himself up with all of this super-villain infrastructure to what? Extort resources out of a small community? Maybe organ harvesting or something? If he plans on moving on to greater things he doesn’t get around to saying it on-panel – just as well he suffers the fate of most volcano-dwelling crooks: death by exploding volcano.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 077: THE MASTER

    (All American Comics 010, 1940)

    The Master, in one of those escapades that causes a lot of trouble for folks who feel compelled to work out what’s in continuity and what isn’t, briefly took over NYC using an electricity projector, killed hundreds if not thousands of people, and mobilized a full fascist organization before being stopped by G-2 operatives Red, White and Blue and Doris West.

    Which, to be fair, is the answer. You have to explain whether or not Namor actually sank the Italian fleet or Batman killed Carl Kruger but there are legions of Golden Age characters whose troublesome exploits can be excised willy-nilly and Red, White and Blue are some of the most thoroughly forgotten of the bunch for all that they appeared in four or five different books at various times during the early 40s.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 048: THE EMPEROR

    (Whiz Comics 006, 1940)

    A smuggler who founds an island haven for fugitive criminals, the Emperor makes a key mistake: he forgets that the citizens of his island empire are all murderers and acts like a tyrant. Predictably, he gets murdered.

    2025 UPDATE: I just reread this story and I think that it’s imperative that I note that the Emperor, aka Scarface Otto Krug, was specifically an ambergris smuggler.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

     (Action v1 002, 1938)

    Early on in Tex Thomson’s adventuring career, he and his pal Bob Daly found themselves in a hidden city called, appropriately, the Sealed City. There they met the leader, or Gorrah, of that city and eventually discovered that he was an usurper who they quickly helped overthrow. There it would end for your average hidden-city-usurper but not this Gorrah, no sir. He came back half a dozen times, indulging in schemes such as:

    -turning people into weird cyborgs

    -turning people into weird rat-men

    -attempting to take over Turkey

    -fixing boxing matches

    and so on. 

    By his last appearance, he was dealing with Mr America instead of boring old Tex Thomson and it wasn’t a very fair fight. Over the years he had shed his super-science, his one-time hypnotic power and even his flamboyant costume and was merely a one-eyed agent of some unspecified Foreign Power (ie, the Nazis) tasked with bombing libraries, which somewhat ignominiously (if predictably) ended with him being blown up by his own bomb. A sad end to be sure.