The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Fawcett Comics

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 339: THE FIREHAWK

    (Master Comics 004, 1940)

    The Firehawk is an extortionist of the particular kind that you get in comic book stories that have to clock in at under 5 pages: a dumb one. See, he has a pretty good threat to hold over the heads of his victims in that he can seemingly set them on fire at will. Since he’s operating on a movie set, he does so by mixing up batches of thermite-impregnated makeup that presumably self ignites after a set time. Like I said, a good threat. The problem lies with his timing: he dopes all of the makeup at once so that the actors are just igniting one after the other – there isn’t even enough time for them to consider paying up. Plus there’s the matter of his secret identity, the fourth lead in a film in which numbers 1 through 3 were set to be destroyed, which is at least a bit suspect.

    For all that, I love this guy for his costume if nothing else. “Green anthropomorphic cartoon bird” is an underrepresented theme in super-villainy.

    ****

    While thinking about this guy I suddenly had a revelation: in any given super-hero universe there would be a podcast about the super-villains of Old Hollywood. Without question! The only real question is just how many episodes would each villain generate. Sadly for the Firehawk, even though he is the genesis for the idea of the Super-Villains of Hollywood Podcast (an idea so powerful that it has propagated backward through the blog) he probably wasn’t fodder for more than one episode – neither Zarrow/ the Firehawk nor any of his victims seemed especially noteworthy in a “lurid true crime podcast” sense so I’ afraid that for the inaugural 

    Number of episodes of the “Super-Villains of Hollywood” podcast: segment, the answer must be one.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 338: THE BANDIT FORCE

    (Master Comics 004, 1940)

    This is a simple one because it’s simply a matter of scale, plus the fact that everyone involved is wearing a stylish purple cloak/ robe combo. A mass of bandits loot arsenals across the Eastern US, stealing tanks, artillery and armoured cars. Panic ensues!

    Soon enough, the band makes its goals known with a bold attack on that sweetest of targets: Fort Knox. And they almost get away with it! They actually have the gold loaded up and are speeding away before second-rate Fawcett character Master Man shows up and absolutely ruins everyone’s day.

    And of course the leader of the pack turns out to be the unnamed altruistic banker who somehow manages to sit in on every meeting about how to deal with the situation. What a surprise!

    ADDENDUM: I absolutely forgot to mention the most notable if underplayed thing about these guys: they use golden bullets for some unstated reason. A bizarre choice for a buncha gold thieves!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 338: THE BANDIT FORCE

    (Master Comics 004, 1940)

    This is a simple one because it’s simply a matter of scale, plus the fact that everyone involved is wearing a stylish purple cloak/ robe combo. A mass of bandits loot arsenals across the Eastern US, stealing tanks, artillery and armoured cars. Panic ensues!

    Soon enough, the band makes its goals known with a bold attack on that sweetest of targets: Fort Knox. And they almost get away with it! They actually have the gold loaded up and are speeding away before second-rate Fawcett character Master Man shows up and absolutely ruins everyone’s day.

    And of course the leader of the pack turns out to be the unnamed altruistic banker who somehow manages to sit in on every meeting about how to deal with the situation. What a surprise!

    ADDENDUM: I absolutely forgot to mention the most notable if underplayed thing about these guys: they use golden bullets for some unstated reason. A bizarre choice for a buncha gold thieves!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 337: DR DROWN

    (Master Comics 001, 1940)

    Dr Drown is a paragon of his sub-category of super-villain. Unfortunately for him, that is not a particularly exalted position, as he belongs to the Association of Seagoing Criminal Scientists and the membership of that group is heavily diluted by decades of Aquaman and Sea Devils and even Challengers of the Unknown foes with wilfully bad schemes.

    Dr Drown’s schemes aren’t too bad! He as a submersible yacht that he uses to torpedo and loot ships, which is a lucrative if very evil business model, with the sole flaw being that he keeps doing it in exactly the same part of the ocean which makes him very easy for his foe Shipwreck Roberts to track him down.

    Drown’s other claim to fame is as a tamer of sea monsters and it’s here that things really get going for me. The “brontosauruses” above are pretty light fare but check this out:

    I follow a lot of horror artists on various social medias and it’s still been a while since I’ve seen anything quite as unsettling as the Giantocrab. Why does it have human arms, for heaven’s sake?

    By contrast the Colostopus is merely a fun dome-shaped friend with a good name.

    Drown also deployed this Mechanosaurus in a later adventure but as the name suggests it was actually a monster-shaped submarine (a classic move but always sad to miss out on a real monster).

    As stated above, Dr Drown is a great example of a generally mediocre lot – I’d be right chuffed if he or one of his descendants were ever brung back.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 039: THE DEVIL’S DAGGER

    (Master Comics 001-020, 1940-1941)

    Devil’s Dagger! I love this guy. He has a lot of familiar things going on: a wealthy young man named Ken Wyman who works as a reporter in order to get the latest crime news and heads out at night in his souped-up car (the excellently named Speed Ghost) to kick butt accompanied by Pat Gleason, ex boxer and member of the surprisingly large Chauffeur/ Sidekick club.

    There are two really interesting things about the Devil’s Dagger: 1. really good costume. 2. he’s a mission-driven vigilante. Once he rids Carterville of the sinister Jeff Marlowe… he finds out about Jeff’s boss, Mr H. But once he gets rid of him, that’s it! Wyman unmasks, retires, maybe takes the job at his father’s bank, who knows? It’s so rare for a super-hero to have a finite career, not just in the Golden Age but any time! How refreshing!

    Of course after saying that I would be a monster to suggest that the Devil’s Dagger be brung back, and I am not! I do however think that the identity would make for quite a fun legacy hero! Picture it: Carterville has once again become a crime-ridden hellhole, perhaps even under the thumb of a superannuated Mr H (or a corrupted Ken Wyman!), and someone stumbles across the unpublished memoirs of Ken Wyman and takes inspiration from them – maybe an underpaid employee at the Daily Blade, now stripped of assets by venture capital and printing a ten-page synopsis of the top clickbait of the week? Heck, maybe this time it’s a whole group of dagger-wielding vigilantes. Fun!

  • NOTES – SEPTEMBER 2023

    Memes of Yore:


     Women be loving hats. (All-Flash 001, 1941)

    Decoration:

    On the island nation of Felicia, the chairs are monogrammed with a big F (Master Comics 001, 1940) 

    UPDATE: And the shields.

    Drawn without reference:

    The majestic pterodactyl. (Master Comics 007, 1940)

  • SUPER-HERO COSTUME PARTY

    This bit where Hawkman intends to attend a costumed event as himself but doesn’t quite make it (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) made me realize that I’ve missed a few examples of super-heroes attending costume parties as themselves, one of my most favourite tropes in comics! Time for some catchup rectification!

    Here’s the Red Gaucho being mistaken for someone who was dressed as him, who is then impersonated by a third person in a story that was not called “Too Many Gauchos” but could have been (Nickel Comics 006, 1940)

    Similarly, Rex Tyler attends a costume party as Hourman and gets mistaken as part of a whole gang of Hourmen who are planning on sticking the place up (All-Star 003, 1940)

    And finally we have USA, the Spirit of Old Glory attending a party in her own costume with no impostors to horn in on her idea. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 181: THE SWAMP DEVIL

    (Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)

    The Swamp Devil! Part of a couple of fairly populous subgroupings of supercrook: the “kill or scare off folk in order to do a land-grab” type and the “pose as a figure from local legend in order to capitalize on preexisting fear, etc” cohort (a frequently paired duo). Specifically, the Swamp Devil is actually Woggs, an engineer tasked with draining part of the Great Dismal Swamp to create more farmland who is instead flooding nearby farms and using a combination of mind control gas and his monsterized diving rig/ costume to scare off or murder the locals. Later, he plans to return and buy up the fertile farmland cheap.

    I gotta say… this seems like a lot of effort to go to for swamp-adjacent farmland. Most guys who pull this kind of scheme are after a quicker payoff: deposits of oil or precious metals, pearl beds, buried treasure… Sure you can get rich off farming but it’s a lot more of a long-term plot than your average small-time supercrook is geared for – presumably he’s going to have to change his name, right? Or a similar level of obfuscation to cover for the fact that Mr Woggs is back for the land he failed to secure the last time around in his official capacity? Just as well he gets stomped by Captain Marvel, really.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 180: KING OF THE CRATER

    (Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)

    This rockabilly-looking feller is King of the Crater and I like him quite a bit. His plan, as laid out above, is to weaponize a seam of magma that runs under the Rockies and the Andes in order to lay claim to a strip of territory running the length of the Americas. It’s not a bad plan if you subscribe to the attitude that violent conquest is an acceptable means of achieving control over territory. Or that control over territory is a desirable end in itself, I guess. 

    It is a plan that is vulnerable to the supposition that it might just be easier to establish a lucrative monopoly on geothermal power production, of course. Also Captain Marvel. The plan is and was vulnerable to Captain Marvel.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 179: THE BEAST-RULER

    (Captain Marvel Adventures 003, 1941)

    The Beast-Ruler’s origin is simple: for reasons of his own, Dr Sivana builds a human out of animal parts – the muscles of a gorilla, the memory of an elephant and yes, the life-force of a thousand beasts – and that creation promptly rebels and runs off with the remaining beasts that have not had their life-forces squeezed out. A real rookie mistake on Sivana’s part if you ask me – this isn’t his first time toying in God’s domain and he should have lab procedures covering such as a rebellious super-powered humanoid.

    Speaking of super-powers, the Beast-Ruler has ’em (and speaking of names, that’s a bad one). He’s got the full suite of enhanced physical abilities, plus he can communicate with animals, a trait that he quickly uses to organize an army of beasts as a prelude to wiping out humanity. A pretty smart move on the part of the animals, honestly, but Captain Marvel ultimately prevails over this force with the help of other animals who choose to side with the human race.

    The breakdown of the animal armies is interesting: wild animals are all on the Beast-Ruler’s side, while Captain Marvel has dogs, cats and a selection of domesticated farm animals, but not all of them. Sheep are firmly on the side of the Beast-Ruler and the loyalty of pigs and horses seem to be split, with some representation in each army. If we’re honest, most of the pro-humanity animals were fooling themselves, but they manage to distract the more sensible beasts long enough for Captain Marvel to send the Beast-Ruler head first off a waterfall.