The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: rejected by society

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 641: ONE-EYE

    (Fantastic Comics 013, 1940) 

    One-Eye is a stylish fellow with a real bone to pick with humankind, who have apparently rejected him for the heinous sin of Having Only One Eye, I guess? Unless having a widow’s peak and a long waxed mustache are considered disfigurements? I suppose that cultural mores do change over time and it is 8000 years in the future… in any case, the point is that he’s upset at the world and has decided to kill humanity off.

    To that end, One-Eye has gathered together a collection of generic mutants, all of whom are more interesting looking than him (and one of whom appears to be wearing some shockingly high-cut booty shorts).

    Among these recruits is this “giant devil-octopus” which a) has six arms, b) appears to be made of human skin and c) is the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a comic in a long time.

    By contrast Kuga the man-eating giant cat is a walk in the park, a beauty to behold! Plus it is stuck in a too-small room so that One-Eye can drop people down a trap door in his office and have them slide directly into its mouth. Barely threatening at all!

    Ultimately Sub Saunders beats up the mutants, blows up One-Eye’s undersea base and hands him over to the authorities.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 614: KOZAR

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 614: KOZAR

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    Once again the nations of he world of the year 10 000 CE are faced with an oceanic menace. Twenty ships have been sunk – seems like a case for Sub Saunders! Could we be faced with yet another jerk ruler from the population of undersea humans? It seems likely! (aside: gotta give a shoutout to Thog here: having a name like that in a comic from 1940 is absolutely an early indicator that you are a villain yet he has rejected nominative determinism to instead serve the public goo. Good on ya, Thog)

    But no! After five issues and four separate evil underwater rulers we have a c-c-c-combo breaker in the form of Kozar, a scientist with a weirdly concave face. I mean, sure, he is an antisocial guy who does rule an area under the ocean, but he’s originally from the surface! It’s totally different!

    Kozar has some terrific henchmen at his disposal – forget your Frogmen and Mermen: the Sea-Weed Men are the new greatest underwater goons of the year 10 000. I especially like that their flowing fronds accidentally evoke the 1970s stock character of the Fringed Clothing Hippy.

    Kozar’s motivation for sinking airships and killing hundreds of people is an unspecified rejection by society. The two most common reasons for this type of rejection are for having really wild out-there scientific theories or for being a creep/looking like a creep and if it’s not stated outright then you can usually tell which it is. It’s not crystal clear with Kozar but… I reckon he was a real creep and a half.

    Kozar actually manages to defeat Sub Saunders pretty decisively by catching him in a mechanical clamp! He actually might have won, except for the fact that his undersea base has one small design flaw: if someone’s not constantly monitoring the air pressure etc it will flood and implode. To me personally that seems like an important thing to have multiple automatic failsafes and backups on but what do I know, I’m not a mad genius. Maybe the real thing that Kozar was rejected by society for was his rejection of OSHA guidelines.

    Though the story ends on a bit of a melancholy note we must take heart that the Sea-Weed Men are okay. Maybe without the stress of being under the thumb of a homicidal madman they can build a free and just society on the ocean floor.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 533: THORGA

    (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939) 

    Thorga! Exiled from Western society because of his “mad plans”, he emerges from the mountains of Tibet with a high-tech army, intent on conquering Europe!

    Thorga! He fields a mighty airforce of advanced planes, a mechanized infantry of advanced tanks!

    Thorga! He is the first foe faced by Fox Features’ Samson and so his main role is as a demonstration of Samson’s power as he destroys not only the planes and tanks but the regular infantry to boot (who, might I note, are not only dressed in excellent henchman costumes but apparently referred to as “Thorganians”, a top-notch henchman name).

    Thorga, not only defeated by Samson, not only killed by Samson but buried under the wreckage of his lab in a callback to Original Samson’s final hurrah.

    Thorga. He served his purpose.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 323: GORE

    (Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942)

    Like he says in his dying moments above, Gore is a weird-looking guy who lashes out at society via a series of radio-themed deathtraps, always preceded by a broadcast of the letter D in Morse Code. As a villain he’s all right – he gives the Thunderer a run for his money at least. My major gripe with him is that there was ample opportunity for him to be called the D Killer or the Radio Killer or just D but no, he has to go by his stupid actual name. Bah.

    This radio skeleton is partial compensation, at least.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 270: DR LORROF

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)

    Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs.

    Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium ray that is the only known weakness of his blob, a rare bit of non-hubristic caution from a mad scientist, especially from someone as unhinged as Lorrof is.

    Here’s the monster, called the Green Terror. Two things:

    1. This crowd really knows their lines

    2. This crowd is present because Dr Lorrof announced the impending emergence of the monster from it’s shell. The few hundred people who get eaten have to apportion at least some of the blame to themselves

    And you thought I was joking about the crabs. 

    Lorrof sadly doesn’t survive this confrontation with Electro – after the replacement crabs fail to destroy the robot, Lorrof himself attempts to do so with a vial of explosive goo, only to blow himself sky high.

    Obviously I reckon that this is exactly the sort of science villain that the Marvel Universe needs, if only for the fact that he yells things like “fiery demons!” when startled. And what are the Avengers going to do when confronted by the Green Terror Mk II at a time when hospitals don’t routinely hold a stockpile of radium? BRING Lorrof BACK so we can find out!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 223: THE VULTURE

    (Doll Man 001, 1941)

    The Vulture! Flying thief extraordinaire! Terror of NYC for about a week!

    In reality the Vulture if a very weird looking guy named Aylmer who is predictably upset at his treatment by an uncaring world but seemingly mostly about being short. Hey, if Quality Comics New York is an accepting enough place that that’s all this guy gets bullied about then I have to give it to them, honestly.

    The really interesting thing about Aylmer/ the Vulture is not his technology (impressive as a homemade flying suit is) but the fact that he gets away at the end of the story and never appears again. Now, Doll Man comics aren’t quite as obsessively catalogued online as, say, Batman comics but as far as I can tell, this dude never ends up paying for the theft of millions of dollar worth of jewelry, the kidnapping of Martha “will someday be Doll Girl” Roberts or the murder of his own father, and in the Golden Age of Comics, motto Crime Does Not Pay, that is a wild and wooly thing to happen.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 223: THE VULTURE

    (Doll Man 001, 1941)

    The Vulture! Flying thief extraordinaire! Terror of NYC for about a week!

    In reality the Vulture if a very weird looking guy named Aylmer who is predictably upset at his treatment by an uncaring world but seemingly mostly about being short. Hey, if Quality Comics New York is an accepting enough place that that’s all this guy gets bullied about then I have to give it to them, honestly.

    The really interesting thing about Aylmer/ the Vulture is not his technology (impressive as a homemade flying suit is) but the fact that he gets away at the end of the story and never appears again. Now, Doll Man comics aren’t quite as obsessively catalogued online as, say, Batman comics but as far as I can tell, this dude never ends up paying for the theft of millions of dollar worth of jewelry, the kidnapping of Martha “will someday be Doll Girl” Roberts or the murder of his own father, and in the Golden Age of Comics, motto Crime Does Not Pay, that is a wild and wooly thing to happen.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 220: THE IMP

    (Doc Savage Comics v1 004, 1941)

    An unnamed dwarf performer at the Famous Three Ring Circus, billed as the Smallest Man in the World, the Imp is even more remarkably able to secretly build himself a robotic gorilla-shaped exoskeleton in secret while travelling with said circus.

    As is so often the case when a comic character becomes a villain in response to societal scorn and rejection, the Imp ends up taking things too far by using his gorilla suit to rob banks and kidnap the object of his affection, ultimately leading to a confrontation with generic superguy Ajax the Sun Man and one of the more graphic on-panel suicides of the Golden Age.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 146: THE RED DRAGON

    (Adventure 069, 1941)


    An early example of quite a few villain tropes, the Red Dragon is a guy who turns to evil because he was rejected by society due to his deformed face (1). He then decides to set himself up in opposition to the heroic Shining Knight, choosing to become the Red Dragon – less dramatic than a Bizarro-style evil opposite situation but still an evil opposite situation (2).

    After his first (unsuccessful) foray into crime, he is recruited by the Hand to battle the Seven Soldiers of Victory as part of one of the earliest examples of a super-villain team-up (3), some years before the Injustice Society and such became commonplace.

    Pretty good for a fairly ordinary hooded villain.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 146: THE RED DRAGON

    (Adventure 069, 1941)


    An early example of quite a few villain tropes, the Red Dragon is a guy who turns to evil because he was rejected by society due to his deformed face (1). He then decides to set himself up in opposition to the heroic Shining Knight, choosing to become the Red Dragon – less dramatic than a Bizarro-style evil opposite situation but still an evil opposite situation (2).

    After his first (unsuccessful) foray into crime, he is recruited by the Hand to battle the Seven Soldiers of Victory as part of one of the earliest examples of a super-villain team-up (3), some years before the Injustice Society and such became commonplace.

    Pretty good for a fairly ordinary hooded villain.