The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: murderer

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 792: THE OCTOPUS

    (Target Comics v1 003, 1940)

    I’m going to start out by saying that I have no idea why this story is called “Return of the Octopus!” as this is as far as I can tell both the first and last appearance of the character. Both the title and the Octopus’ costume seem to be dramatic flourishes that don’t really play out in the text of the story.

    I do really like the Octopus’ costume, though. It’s got a lot of low-effort charm, though now that I think of it I have no idea how easy it would be to source a green sweater with a large octopus decal on it c. 1940.

    Sadly, the Octopus shucks his disguise after one panel when he has to answer an inquiry from Treasury Agent Chick Farrell at his funeral home front, and this is where the other part of his character design comes into play, as physically he embodies a whole set of characteristics that were associated with undertakers in the early 20th Century and beyond: cadaverous face, unnerving stare, unnatural posture, old-fashioned clothing – general creep vibes. This is of course a slander against the hard-working undertakers of the world, but what can you do?

    The extant copy of this comic is unfortunately missing the one or two pages that close this story. At the end of the part that is available, the Octopus has just murdered his accomplice (his kidnap victim’s crooked uncle) and is about to get away on a boat, so based on my long experience in reading comic books I’d say that there’s a 70/30 split on the odds of whether he eventually drowns or is arrested.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 783: PHATSO

    (Superworld Comics 003, 1940)

    Buzz “the Invisible Avenger” Allen and Will “also invisible but has no special name” Lawrence are taking an Alaskan vacation with some of the reward money they have earned via vigilantism (and it’s nice to see a variation on super-hero morality now and then – someone has to be accepting awards when offered, surely) when they, hard-core radio amateurs that they are, pick up a panicked broadcast from nearby. Making their way to the location, they find the man who sent the distress call dead and surrounded by weird ribbons of light.

    Finding that the light ribbons are solid, Buzz and Will make the amazing and completely understandable decision to grab onto them as they fly off, and end up being whisked even further North to a hidden city in the ancient Greek style.

    The lads attempt to bluff the city’s ruler, Phatso, with a bit of the old “cower before us for we are wizards” gag, but it turns out that this isn’t a primitive hidden city but a technologically advanced one, and a little bit of invisibility tech isn’t going to get so much as a shiver out of them. They also learn that Phatso is using the light ribbons to kill people and siphon the information from their minds in preparation for a full-scale Atlantean (did I mention that the city represents the remnants of sunken Atlantis?) invasion of the United States. The boys are unceremoniously paralysis-rayed and tossed in the clink.

    I really like Phatso’s villain patter, by the by. “I am Phatso, great, clever ruler of Atlantis. I can speak in any tongue and I am 212 years old!” is a terrific introduction. I just with his name wasn’t an as-far-as-I-can-tell purposeless pun, because it is annoying.

    Buzz and Will escape of course, and immediately blow up the machines that make Arctic Atlantis habitable by humans, with the wild justification that only the old people will die off and thus Atlantean civilization will be improved. Is this the morality of a hero who takes the reward cheques? Is this what I was asking for!!??

    (this is also part of a bit of a recurring theme in stories from Superworld Comics of “inflicting mass casualties” as a standard part of the heroic arsenal – the other examples are all from human vs alien stories that fall a bit outside of my self-imposed purview and so won’t be showing up here, but I assure you that it is there and it leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth once you recognize it)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 780: THE MUMMY

    (Funny Picture Stories v3 002, 1939)

    Like every other of my long-term projects, writing this blog has been an exercise in taking a simple premise (writing fairly succinctly about minor DC Comics super-villains) and expanding the scope until the seams start to creak (writing somewhat extensively about all super-villains and super-heroes and a bunch of other comics things and also maintaining a set of variably-useful indices about them all). This is all to lead into the fact that a comic I was just reading (Super Spy 001, 1940) contained a reprint of a story from a comic I read back when I started doing this and I was absolutely flummoxed that I had not written about the Mummy.

    We open in the palatial home of amateur Egyptologist Professor Stone, just in time to see him get murdered by someone with a creepy hand.

    Cops are soon swarming over the Professor’s residence, but that doesn’t stop the culprit from creeping back in to eliminate a potential witness in the victim’s niece and incidentally give us our first look at his mummy outfit. Not the most convincing getup with that huge exposed swath of visible and well-moisturized head, but I appreciate the green.

    This particular fake mummy also has mind control abilities thanks to the copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that he stole after murdering Professor Stone. These allow him to abduct Miss Stone and Police Detective Bull with ease.

    The super powers weren’t even the motivation for the murder of Professor Stone, it turns out. No, Stone was killed when he figured out that his fellow Egyptologist Dr Carver had been using Stone’s regular shipments of mummies from England as a way of smuggling drugs into the US, possibly because Carver’s plan doesn’t seem to include replacing the fake mummy after he steals and hollows it out each time.

    Also, Carver has built an entire acid pit in Stone’s basement, which is impressive but must have provided plenty of opportunities for Stone to cotton on to the fact that something was going on.

    Ultimately it all comes down to that old adage: no matter how well-prepared and capable of performing Ancient Egyptian mind control you are, you’re never ready to be shot in the back by a cop and dumped into your own acid pit.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 780: THE MUMMY

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 780: THE MUMMY

    (Funny Picture Stories v3 002, 1939)

    Like every other of my long-term projects, writing this blog has been an exercise in taking a simple premise (writing fairly succinctly about minor DC Comics super-villains) and expanding the scope until the seams start to creak (writing somewhat extensively about all super-villains and super-heroes and a bunch of other comics things and also maintaining a set of variably-useful indices about them all). This is all to lead into the fact that a comic I was just reading (Super Spy 001, 1940) contained a reprint of a story from a comic I read back when I started doing this and I was absolutely flummoxed that I had not written about the Mummy.

    We open in the palatial home of amateur Egyptologist Professor Stone, just in time to see him get murdered by someone with a creepy hand.

    Cops are soon swarming over the Professor’s residence, but that doesn’t stop the culprit from creeping back in to eliminate a potential witness in the victim’s niece and incidentally give us our first look at his mummy outfit. Not the most convincing getup with that huge exposed swath of visible and well-moisturized head, but I appreciate the green.

    This particular fake mummy also has mind control abilities thanks to the copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that he stole after murdering Professor Stone. These allow him to abduct Miss Stone and Police Detective Bull with ease.

    The super powers weren’t even the motivation for the murder of Professor Stone, it turns out. No, Stone was killed when he figured out that his fellow Egyptologist Dr Carver had been using Stone’s regular shipments of mummies from England as a way of smuggling drugs into the US, possibly because Carver’s plan doesn’t seem to include replacing the fake mummy after he steals and hollows it out each time.

    Also, Carver has built an entire acid pit in Stone’s basement, which is impressive but must have provided plenty of opportunities for Stone to cotton on to the fact that something was going on.

    Ultimately it all comes down to that old adage: no matter how well-prepared and capable of performing Ancient Egyptian mind control you are, you’re never ready to be shot in the back by a cop and dumped into your own acid pit.

  • 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 759: THE IRON HAND

    (Master Comics 006, 1940)

    While monitoring the world for trouble one day (using his Troublescope, natch), Master Man spots, in quick succession: an auto-gyro creating green rainclouds, a collection of mysteriously paralyzed wildlife, a full-fledged paralysis epidemic dubbed “the Living Death” in a nearby city, and the news that the preeminent scientist working to cure the plague has been murdered. He takes what I would say is a surprising amount of time to put two and two together and determine that these events might just be linked.

    The culprit behind all of these occurrences is the arch-criminal known as the Iron Hand, due to his iron hand. He has been dispensing the Living Death disease into the city’s reservoir using the green rain, and plans on expanding his operation world wide if he is successful in bringing the unnamed city under his heel. It’s a real shame that much of the rest of the story involves the Iron Hand’s minions vs Master Man in a series of retreat actions because the Iron Hand himself is barely present and he’s just the kind of bombastic jagoff villain I love.

    Master Man eventually works his way through all of the Iron Hand’s low-level doofuses in time to crash his auto gyro in a lake and drown him. There’s a teaser that suggests that maybe the drowning wasn’t quite enough to defeat such a cool villain, but as this is the final Master Man comic, it has to stand.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 759: THE IRON HAND

    (Master Comics 006, 1940)

    While monitoring the world for trouble one day (using his Troublescope, natch), Master Man spots, in quick succession: an auto-gyro creating green rainclouds, a collection of mysteriously paralyzed wildlife, a full-fledged paralysis epidemic dubbed “the Living Death” in a nearby city, and the news that the preeminent scientist working to cure the plague has been murdered. He takes what I would say is a surprising amount of time to put two and two together and determine that these events might just be linked.

    The culprit behind all of these occurrences is the arch-criminal known as the Iron Hand, due to his iron hand. He has been dispensing the Living Death disease into the city’s reservoir using the green rain, and plans on expanding his operation world wide if he is successful in bringing the unnamed city under his heel. It’s a real shame that much of the rest of the story involves the Iron Hand’s minions vs Master Man in a series of retreat actions because the Iron Hand himself is barely present and he’s just the kind of bombastic jagoff villain I love.

    Master Man eventually works his way through all of the Iron Hand’s low-level doofuses in time to crash his auto gyro in a lake and drown him. There’s a teaser that suggests that maybe the drowning wasn’t quite enough to defeat such a cool villain, but as this is the final Master Man comic, it has to stand.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 017

    The science is flying fast and loose in here.

    Professor Krauss’ theories about a method for passing matter through matter were scorned and laughed at, so he turned them to crime, killing three and robbing the New York subtreasury*. Unfortunately for him he also gave an interview about his theories, which really helped research-savvy reporter Chic Carter track down and capture him. (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

    *A Note on Subtreasuries: A frequent target for theft in the Golden Age or at least one that I’ve encountered 3-6 times, the New York Subtreasury was part of a US financial management system that distributed the storage of US gold reserves, but, critically, was phased out in 1920. I don’t know what all these guys were after in there but there sure wasn’t any gold.

    Professor Abbot, disgraced former physics instructor at Stamton College, has developed a machine capable of paralyzing the population of a small city long enough for his men to rob it blind, but since the device also disrupts electrical signals this draws the attention of lineman Tom Dalton, aka Magno, the Magnetic Man. Abbot proves to be unusually well-prepared for the appearance of the local super-hero at his hideout and disables Magno with a prepared dose of knockout gas, which is really, really impressive, I have to say. 

    Abbot’s downfall comes in the form of every villain’s worst enemy, the deathtrap. Sure, slinging Magno down a well to slowly drown is satisfying, in an evil kind of way, but it introduces the possibility of him escaping from the trap, and if he does that then you are screwed. Just stab him with a wooden stake or something if you need to avoid using metal!

    Anyway, Magno of course escapes from the trap and ends up blowing Abbot, his machine, his hideout and his gang to high heaven by the medium of some hastily smashed up mad science equipment. (Smash Comics 014, 1940)

    This unnamed scientist does a bit of old-fashioned grave robbing in order to get only the finest parts for his frankenstein (though the fact that he made sure to include the brain of a scholar doesn’t seem to have played out in the mentality of the creature) which he then uses a growth hormone on and makes huge, super strong and bulletproof. Dubbed Brutus and deemed unstoppable, this creation is sent out to loot and plunder.

    I always appreciate it when a character has to contend with a foe who is their rough equivalent from time to time – this is part of the appeal of Hellboy, for example – and Brutus offers just that opportunity for Bozo the Iron Man, being essentially a Bozo-shaped and-sized human of equivalent strength. Brutus manages to win the day in their first encounter by hitting Bozo over the head hard enough that Hugh Hazzard is knocked out through the armour of his robo-suit, but their second bout results in the deaths of both Brutus and his unnamed creator. (Smash Comics 014, 1940)

    Across the US, buildings, trains, planes and ships begin sailing off into the sky, accompanied by a totally radical visual effect of a giant green mummy that I’m not 100% certain is actually visible to regular non-comic-reading witnesses – it’s never commented on in any case, and if I saw a giant mummy carry a train off into the void I assure you that you would hear me speak of little else.

    The culprit turns out to be one Doctor Robb, an unscrupulous archaeologist who murdered his colleague Professor Hill in order to steal an ancient artifact called the Power of Tutkamen (named after original owner Ra Tutkamen, natch).

    Robb presumably refines his control over the power, as he seems to be using it to plunder passing shipping from his island base and that’s hard to do if you’re just blasting ships and planes into orbit. The party comes to an end once the Invisible Hood gets involved, as Robb discovers to his chagrin that having the power to levitate anything you see doesn’t help you very much in a confrontation with an invisible guy. Rather than be captured, Robb does a header out the window of his lighthouse HQ. (Smash Comics 016, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 753: THE GHOST GANG

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940) 

    The Ghost Gang have a winning formula: commit a robbery and then high-tail it back to the Old Abandoned Peters Mansion (charmingly referred to a couple of times as the Haunted Hide-Out), where they transform into ghosts and can murder cops and/or drive them insane with impunity.

    It’s not a foolproof scheme, however. For one thing, you really have to complete that first step and actually get to the house, as evidenced by this poor fellow being bravely shot in the back by these two cops as he closes the garage door.

    For another and much more important thing, they aren’t actually turning into ghosts – it’s all a trick! This is important, because if there’s one real flaw to this plan it’s the “murdering cops” part. If all the gang was doing was driving them insane then maybe they could have gotten a few more days out of their arrangement but it’s just as well for them that Hugh Hazzard and Bozo the Iron Man show up to beat the tar out of them because there’s a pretty good chance that an NYPD bulldozer was already on its way to bring the whole house down around their ears, ghosts or no.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 750: THE PHANTOM

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940) 

    It’s a tale as old as opera: macho newsman Chic Carter is pissing and moaning his way through a theatre review assignment when a dramatic figure suddenly murders the star and disappears into the bowels of the opera house. Chic is quick to connect this killing with two others that took place over the last twenty years and sets out to capture the enigmatic Phantom.

    Chic and the police stage a recreation of the fatal performance using the singer’s poor understudy and… it works! Too well, actually. The singer doesn’t get murdered (phew!) but the Phantom grabs her and runs off with Carter in hot pursuit, along with a suspiciously evil-looking actor. 

    It turns out that the opera’s male lead has been maintaining his position of prominence for the last twenty years by having the Phantom murder his rivals, and what a commitment to being the king of a moderate hill that is. Sure, opera was a lot more of A Thing circa 1940 than it is now and this is presumably the top NYC opera house, but keeping a whole-ass man in a secret basement apartment for two entire decades in order to remove a rival on average every ten years… it’s a heckuva commitment to your art is all I’ll say.

    In an unsurprising non-twist, the singer turns out to be a bad boss and shoots the Phantom dead for screwing up and kidnapping the understudy, only to be killed himself when the Phantom pops back up with a burst of dying berserker strength just long enough for revenge. Maybe if you hadn’t outsourced all of your murdering to underpaid contractors you’d be better at it, idiot.