The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: pirate

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 929: THE BEAU

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 929: THE BEAU

    (Silver Streak Comics 010, 1941) 

    The
    Beau is a piratical figure who uses his uncanny resemblance to the
    heroic Pirate Prince to take over the latter’s ship and make off with all the treasure he had gathered in order to buy slaves and set them free. Although his motivation seems to be 100% loot and 0% perpetuation of slavery I suppose that we must consider the impact of his theft on others and give him a few more Evil Points for his deeds.  

    The
    Beau makes the interesting decision to adopt a very adversarial and
    abusive relationship with the Pirate Prince’s crew, rather than for
    instance, playing things cool and making up a believable lie about
    taking the treasure to be cleaned. They are therefore quite receptive
    when the real Pirate Prince, disguised as the Beau, shows up to challenge his rival to a duel to the death. In conclusion, a bad plan, poorly executed, but I like the name and you know I love a pirate.

    Categorized in: Fraud (Heroic Impostors),  Origin (Villains of the Past), Theft (Piracy)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 029

    You’ll never believe how close these guys get to being name-brand super-villains! 

    The Great-Great-Grandson of Lafitte is a flamboyant character who runs a protection racket on coconut plantations on the US Virgin Islands. Is he really a descendant of the great pirate captain? Who can say, but what is certain is that he puts on a good show before getting his block absolutely knocked off by US Navy goofs Spark Stevens and Chuck Lawson. (Wonderworld Comics 009, 1940)

    Some classic fake haunting shenanigans by a group of spies assigned to disrupt the work of US government scientist Dr Sloan. Punched and apprehended by K-51. (Wonderworld Comics 013, 1940)

    The Killer is head of a gang of extortionists and kidnappers who target rich men around an indeterminate US metropolis. True to his name, the Killer murders his targets whether they pay up or not, which I personally think might be a poor long-term strategy. We shall never know, because in the short term the Flame gets involved and roasts the entire gang before delivering the Killer to the authorities. (Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)

    Professor Z has so many villainous accessories – an eye patch, a castle, a tiger, terrible hair, henchmen dressed in colour-coded, vaguely sci-fi uniforms – that it may surprise you to learn that his entire operation is set up so that he can commit insurance fraud. Perhaps the out-of scale trappings are what attracts the attention of the Phantom Rider.

    This adventure is personally annoying to me because while the Phantom Rider was previously absolutely set in the Old West, at the end of this one he calls for the authorities and two regular cops rock up. It’s yet another time that the line between the past and present in a Western comic is so blurry that you could ride a horse through it and I will never stop grumbling about this when it happens. (Wonderworld Comics 015, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 829: LOBELO

    (Thrilling Comics 008, 1940) 

    Lobelo is a modern day pirate, as you might guess from the splash panel above, and while my strong pro-pirate bias means that he was an easy inclusion in the ranks of the minor super-villain he is also a source of great frustration to me.

     

    First, though, I will note one thing that I really like about Lobelo and that is his array of costumes. Not only does he wear two distinct pirate outfits during the course of the adventure but he wears a separate classic early-1940s suit-cape-and-mask number while he is robbing the Metroploitan Museum in New York. This is clearly a man who loves an outfit – it’s like he’s padding out an action figure line over here.

    My problem with Lobelo is that he goes into piracy because he is the descendant of the famous 16th Century pirate Redhand. He sets up his headquarters on Redhand’s Crossbones Island and he is hunting for Redhand’s treasure with the help of Redhand’s map, which he stole from the museum. So why the heck doesn’t he call himself Redhand, or Redhand II, or something other than his own last name? The gall of it!

    (I’m also somewhat put out that the comic features a costume party and Doc Strange attends in a tuxedo rather than his super-suit. I suppose that Lobelo is attending in (one of) his super-villain outfit(s) at the very least)

    Lobelo has a pretty good run thanks to some poison he feeds Doc Strange at the party having a long-term weakening effect but ultimately comes up against the simple fact that he is a man armed with a sword versus a man who is completely invulnerable to harm and able to powerbomb a battleship. Lobelo is so outmatched here that maybe Doc Strange doesn’t need to kill him like a bear swatting a salmon, and yet he does. So long, Redhand Lobelo.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 805: THE GREAT ONE

    (The Funnies 042, 1940)

    I had great hopes for the Great One, a pirate captain so mysterious that he wears a full-face hood (with nostril holes! The rarest hood hole!) even while hanging out on his own South Pacific island inhabited solely by his own fanatical crew. The black skull insignia alone inspired me to hope that there might be some fun mystery behind that hood for Bruce McKay, formerly Sky Master but now Sky Ranger, to solve when he and his companions are captured by one of the Great One’s lieutenants. 

    Alas, such is not the case. Bruce is pressed into service as a scout pilot for the Great One’s fleet and quickly betrays him to the first freighter captain he sees. His fleet is blown up thanks to the fact that the freighter in question was hauling a load of hand grenades and the Great One himself dies ignominiously and still masked, in a fall from a cliff. I should have known it was all over when they didn’t bother to colour his robe in the second issue.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 773: CAPTAIN DEATH

    (Super Comics 027, 1940)

    Pirate Captain Death comes into conflict with Jim Ellis and his brother Bud when the former, a dead ringer for Death, is shanghaied by the slightly less villainous Captain “Iron” Shard in an attempt to bluff his way onto Death’s Forbidden Island headquarters and steal his treasure.

    This “identical hero/villain duo” situation is hardly unprecedented in fiction, and there are broadly two ways that it plays out. In the first, the villain is not so bad as their reputation might suggest, and things play out like a classic comedy of errors. This is the other way, in which the villain is so over the top and evil that looking like him is almost a moral challenge to the hero.

    After being talked up as an evil dude for a fair number of issues, our first look at Captain Death is when he sails into the comic just as Jim Ellis and Captain Shard have come to terms and are about to leave for less perilous climes. Captain Death sets the tone by immediately sinking Shard’s ship and picking off the swimming survivors with a rifle. Evil stuff! Of course Jim and Bud manage to make their way to land and over the course of the next few issues Jim takes a tremendous amount of abuse but eventually switches places with Death and he and Bud skip town at the next available port. Weirdly Captain Death never returns, as far as I can tell. Maybe he’s not as big on vengeance as other pirates.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 771: CAPTAIN DAVY JONES JUNIOR

    (Super Comics 027, 1940)

    A tough-talking femme fatale pirate captain is a pretty good foil for super magic jungle guy Magic Morro – he might be able to walk through fire and juggle three grown men like rubber balls but one thing that he definitely can’t do is hit a lady, not even a pirate lady.

    And speaking of her being a lady, that sure is an interesting name for a 1940s lady pirate, I wonder where she got it? My initial thought was that it was just a cheeky reference to the sea spirit with the famous locker, but then one of Jones’ grizzled old pirate crew members mentions sailing with her father, which introduces the possibility that it is her literal name and that her dad performed a rare cross-gender junioring. Fun!

    In addition to having a dynamite name, Captain Davy Jones Junior just generally rules. She and Morro’s crew come into conflict over a treasure map that has been split into thirds and that they each have part of. They agree that whoever finds the third piece will get the whole treasure, at which point Jones begins trying to double cross Our Heroes: trying to steal their portion of the map, trying to seduce Magic Morro over to her side, preparing to steal the treasure anyway after Morro finds it, etc. Ultimately the question of just who is going to get the treasure is decided by a third party, a crazed hermit who blows up the island rather than let the others get their filthy hands on his precious gold. We last seen Captain Davy Jones Junior as she is stranded, presumed dead, on the smouldering wreckage of what was once a tropical paradise, but fret not! A little bird (in the form of me reading ahead) has informed me that she returns in 1941!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 651: THE RAIDERS

    (Green Giant Comics 001, 1940)

    The Raiders are a piratical group with a two-pronged approach to acquiring gold on the briny deep: 

    1. learn of  gold shipments via a spy network operated by a member known only as “the Spy Chief”

    2. employ the super-scientific creations of submarine captain Dirck to wreak havoc on gold bearing ships and then escape.

    The whole thing is going swimmingly and even Rex Norton, the Black Arrow, is making very little headway against them until they make the mistake of trying to eliminate him using some of the Spy Chief’s spies. Here’s where the Raiders’ fatal flaw comes in: no two of them can stand one another. In the course of their operation, spies Borgu and X-13 bicker hard enough to spill every vital secret that their organization has to Norton’s hot little ears, and are distracted enough by infighting that he escapes and captures them without difficulty.

    (X-13 seems to be coded as the Black Arrow’s femme fatale/ friendly enemy and probably would have been a recurring antagonist if Rex Norton had ever reappeared)

    The bickering extends all the way to the top, as the Spy Chief and Dirck the Inventor basically do Rex Norton’s job for him in a mutual betrayal that he barely has to intervene in to take down the entire organization.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 645: SNEELY

    (Fight Comics 004, 1940)

    Kinks Mason is deep sea fishing with some friend when one of them lands a swordfish that is covered in gold and jewels! Just where did these riches come from? The answer is unguessable!

    Upon reaching the ocean floor, Kinks discovers that the swordfish was covered in pirate gold, and furthermore, he finds the pirate! Sneely (Pirate Terror of the Seven Seas, the Great, the Magnificent) is an old-time pirate who claims that he drank a magic potion that allowed him to live seemingly indefinitely underwater and who guards his ill-gotten treasure both personally and with a school of trained swordfish. Is attaining near-immortality and then spending it guarding a pile of shiny metal that only has value if you actually spend it on something a huge waste? Indeed it is! It’s absolute dragon behaviour is what it is.

    Sneely is exactly the kind of weird wild completely un-fleshed-out villain that you get for a character like Kinks Mason who a) isn’t one of the real top-tier guys in the book he appears in and b) has a niche role. Every issue, Kinks dives into the ocean for 5 to 8 pages and he has to find a challenge to overcome down there and sometimes it’s a, immortal amphibious pirate with the world’s most Xtreme Hoarding Problem. 

    Probably the best thing about Sneely is the one that never got capitalized on: that he’s seemingly still alive at the end of the story, as Kinks Mason just konks him on the head with a thighbone before making off with the treasure. And while an immortal amphibious pirate squatting on a pile of gold at the bottom of the ocean is a bit of an underwhelming idea for a comic book, an immortal amphibious pirate who Wants His Treasure Back is a cool recurring enemy. I say BRING BACK Sneely, in concept if not as an actual character.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 627: CHONG

    (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

    Chong is basically just a pirate, but there are three things worth noting about him. The first is that his name is Chong in a comic book published in 1940 and he is not a horrendous Asian stereotype of one sort or another. It’s a low bar and he cleared it with aplomb.

    The second thing is Chong’s weapon of choice, an enormous spiked wheel that rises out of the depths to wreck ships. It’s not precisely a War Wheel but so far it’s a close as we’ve seen and since the real thing doesn’t actually debut until 1952. Is it the most efficient way to loot ships? No. Is it a huge spiked wheel? Yes.

    The third thing is just how bad Chong is at killing Sub Saunders. Sub handily avoids the ersatz War Wheel, two goons and two explosions in quick succession and while, yes, not getting killed by villains is basically a hero’s entire job they usually end up getting knocked around a little bit at least. Chong doesn’t even manage to ruffle his foe’s hair.

    Even the appearance of Zobbo, Chong’s amazing man-ape bodyguard, barely fazes Saunders. Chong is just that bad at his job.

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 012

    Management not responsible if some of the villains are not technically costumed.

    This fellow, known as the Boss, was the masked publisher of a newspaper known as the Weekly Tattler which functioned as a vehicle for his blackmail business: pay up or get your secrets printed in the next edition. He turned out to be the husband of one of the paper’s victims, which makes little enough sense that I reckon that they got to the end of the story without adding any good suspects so went with the only possibility. Also he gets shot by his very gullible underling after the Fox barely implies that there’s a double cross on. (Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941)

    Inferno tangles with crook Jake the Fake and his henchmen as they make a break for the Mexican border disguised as a shipment of mummies, a top tier thing to pretend to be. (Blue Ribbon Comics 017, 1941)

    If you have to be a very generic pirate so hard up you have to kidnap guys from the US Navy to run your radio equipment in a mid-level (by Golden Age standards) racist adventure well then you’d better have a great name like the Scourge because that’s really all you have going for you. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    Like the Scourge, the Obermaster here is a real waste of a good villain name on a real damp squib of a character. He is Samson Gorth, a criminal mastermind with no real plan. No, that’s not accurate. He has a plan to incite war between the US and Japan by attacking their respective shipping using planes with false insignia but beyond that his goals are a mystery. Is he hoping for plunder? A chance for war profiteering? No clue and thanks to special agent Bruce McKay, Sky Master, we’ll never find out. Because the Obermaster is dead. In case that wasn’t clear. (The Funnies 035, 1939)