The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: murderer

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 631: DABLO, LAST OF THE RAY MEN AND THE HOOD

    (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

    THIS. IS. GREAT. We open on the trial of Dablo, Last of the Ray Men, and immediately we must ask: who are the Ray Men? And let me tell you that there is no answer beyond “guys who could shoot rays.” Dablo here shoots rays out of a big hole in his forehead but did they all do that? No clue! This is the kind of worldbuilding that people like Alan Moore will eventually get up to in the 80s – implying that there are weird and wonderful things all around by reference and allusion. It’s really neat!

    Whatever the Ray Men were, there are only one of them left and he, Dablo has just been sentenced to death by Judge Ord.

    On the eve of Dablo’s execution (via guillotine, by the way. Nobody’s thought up a cool futuristic execution method by the Year 10 000. Also there is capital punishment in the Year 10 000) a mysterious figure who we will later learn is called the Hood appears and restores the Last Ray Man’s ray powers, to the delight of all.

    The Hood is pretty generic, but he meets the criteria for a minor super-villain. Obviously he must take a back seat to the Last of the Ray Men.

    Come the morning of the execution and we finally get to see this famous ray that everyone’s been talking about. It does not disappoint! Dablo blasts fools left and right before making off with Judge Ord!

    This is a Sub Saunders story so of course Dablo has an undersea lair. Just who was this red-haired unfortunate? No idea, but I have a hunch that they met their end at the wrong end of a ray.

    The back half of the story is unfortunately much more concerned with the Hood (who turns out to be Judge Ord, crooked and looking to take control of the unnamed future city the trial of Dablo took place in. Will future society reexamine their relationship to capital punishment once the corruption present at the very highest echelons of their legal system comes to light? Probably not), who does a header off of a cliff after revealing his plans to Sub Saunders. The far more dynamic and interesting Dablo survives, presumably to be re-sentenced to death by another judge. There ain’t no justice.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 630: SKULLFACE KURD

    (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

    Every once in a while a comic book crook will organize a gang along military lines and that’s just what Skullface Kurd here has done. He’s got super-tommy guns. He’s got an air force. He has three hundred thousand men, which is more than a hundred thousand more than were in the US Army as of 1939. Hell, they’re in New York City and according to the historical population numbers on Wikipedia about one in 24 people in the city must have been in this gang. It’s a very large gang, is what I’m saying.

    Usually the turning point of these stories happens when, after an initial success, the criminal army proves too individualistic/undisciplined/cowardly to hold together under the counterattack action of the police and/or super-heroes. But not the Skullface Kurd Mob! They bomb, gas and shoot their way to victory and are about to execute the NYPD en mass when Stardust the Super Wizard shows up and overcomes them with rays and mental might.

    Skullface himself gets perhaps the most extreme torso crush of any Stardust villain. He’s like a tube of toothpaste.

    Kurd and presumably all 300 000 of his men are exiled on a far distant planet covered in gold and jewels where the gravity is so strong that they cannot move but the air is somehow so nourishing that they are going to just stand around and think about what they have done for hundreds of years. Classic Stardust, in other words.

    SKULL SCORE: 1/5. Skullface Kurd is a disgrace to the skull community. He has gritted teeth? That’s all? He isn’t even emaciated? He isn’t even bald? For shame, Skullface Kurd, for shame. He still gets one point for the teeth, but it’s a grudging point.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 623: THE CYCLOP

    (Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

    Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd – not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut).

    Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by a tribe of one-eyed Beastmen, respectively.

    Surprisingly little is made of the fact that the Beastmen worship a hypnotically paralyzed woman. Ordinarily a reveal like this would be lead to the woman’s rescue being the focus of the rest of the adventure but this panel is her only appearance – is it possible that Captain Kidd thinks that she is merely a statue? A grim fate indeed. 

    Also: RIP Wango.

    The Beastman leader (referred to as “the Cyclop” throughout) of course turns out to be Perez, who went mad upon his discovery of the valley and somehow became the leader of the whole place. If I’m honest, the theoretical comic about the sequence of events that lead to that happening (and presumably to that poor woman becoming a goddess-statue) is more interesting than what we got.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 619: GYP CLIPP

    (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) 

    Mr Clipp here is our first villain with “Gyp” or “Gypsy” as a part of their name, and there are going to be a lot of them. On the one hand you have to cut the old-time creators a bit of slack, as the World Romani Congress didn’t officially vote to reject the term and all of its derivatives until 1971, but on the other hand they knew. “Gyp” is in the Top 50 in my spreadsheet of all the nicknames I come across (yes of course I have one of those) and unlike Red, Doc, Slim or Happy it is only ever given to crooks.

    It therefore both makes sense and is very annoying that a Fletcher Hanks villain would be named such, because this is possibly the Platonic ideal of a Hanks story. Clipp and his pals here have an over-the-top plan to amass wealth: stop the rotation of the Earth, thus flinging all other humans off into space so that they can have all of the good stuff for themselves. And don’t worry about the good stuff also flying off into the endless void because they’ve used rays to stick everything that isn’t humans down.

    Then we have one of those iconic Fletcher Hanks panels of all humans flying off into the lemon void. This is the kind of thing that Roy Lichtenstein would have been stealing if he wasn’t a coward.

    After successfully ejecting all other humans from the planet, Clipp makes the amazing choiceto kill his two accomplices so as not to have to split the take, and while I was initially going to make a big deal about what a wild decision this is, it is in fact extremely consistent with his other actions in the story. You don’t get to the point that Clipp is at without something very wrong with the way you look at the world, but does he not realize that having unlimited wealth on an empty planet is a meaningless thing or does he simply not care and is content to sit on a pile of gold by himself until the canned goods run out, like a horrible little dragon?

    We will never know the answer, because, deus ex machina, Stardust the Super Wizard shows up before anyone even has time to asphyxiate and uses one of his highly specific rays to restore everyone to their starting location!

    Stardust of course does not waste time: Clipp is crumpled up in a big fist and tossed into space. This is the kind of Direct Action Irony we have come to expect and love from the big man.

    The last few Stardust stories have featured crooks being taken to prison instead of messily killed and I kept thinking that that was unusually merciful for a character I had thought of as very harsh in his punishments, but if they’re all being shipped off to the Floating Prison of Eternal Space to be frozen yet aware for all eternity… that’s in character.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 606: THE BLACK DEATH

    (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

    In Fantastic Comics 004 Sir Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, seeking his Crusading companions, arrives in the small village of Namara and learns that it has been cursed for the past ten years after a young girl fell down a well and her father blamed everyone but himself for it and cursed the village. The Golden Knight of course heads down that well because where the heck did that girl go? After a few battles with giant spider-scorpions and the like he finds the now-adult Alice ruling a race of underground winged people and they fall in love.

    (side note: the reason that the Golden Knight couldn’t find his companions was that the writer forgot that he was in North Africa somewhere between Fantastic Comics issues 002 and 004 so he was teleported back to Europe)

    Sir Richard and Alice leave the city of the Winged People and are immediately set upon by a quartet of evil knights in service to the Black Death, owner of a nearby castle and dedicated jerk.

    The Black Death tosses Alice in a locked room and proceeds to torture the Golden Knight for information on the Winged People but hasn’t reckoned with just how proactive Alice is compared to your average Golden Age adventure heroine. For his underestimation of her he is rewarded with a dagger in the back.

    Amid all the chaos subsequent to Alice stabbing the Black Death it comes out that he is, in fact, her father Bawala. Rather than merely curse one village and move on from the mysterious disappearance of his daughter, Bawala instead settled down nearby and became a horrible murderous tyrant. Only now, as he is dying does he see the error of his ways in the person of the daughter he allowed to wander off and fall down a well. He was not, in fact, made into a horrible person by the circumstances of his life but was a horrible person all along.

    It’s a rare heroic patricide!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 597: NEGUS

    (Fantastic Comics 003, 1940)

    An evil African witch doctor with a magical orb, a cool tree house and a real commitment to being Chaotic Evil, Negus meets a swift end once Captain Kidd comes looking for his imprisoned and mind controlled pal Arndt Barrows Colonel Bennet (as with a surprising number of Golden Age comics, the writer seems to have lost track of the name of this secondary character over the course of a 5 page story).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 595: THE VOICE

    (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

    Captain Kidd and his pal Freddy land on the… Southeast Asian? island of Morgia, known to be rich in gold but critically not to ever export that gold. As the heroes of the piece, Kidd and Freddy are of course there to just look around and seeing the sights, not to scoop up a bunch of gold on the cheap. Certainly not.

    Instead of free gold tourist hotspots they find dozens of local people dead of that one torture where a bamboo plant grows through you. The one living guy they find takes them to an elaborate temple with a flooded tunnel entrance.

    Inside, the duo find a cloaked man referred to only as the Voice, who appears to be running a combination cult and scam where he gets gold in exchange for whiskey. He’s also responsible for the bamboo torture outside if his hilarious non-apology is anything to go on, though why he’s having people killed is never elaborated on. 

    The Voice’s entire scheme relies on the flooded entrance to keep firearms from entering the temple, a measure that Captain Kidd has defeated by putting his pistol in Freddy’s hat. Suddenly, all bets are off!

    The Voice makes his escape while Captain Kidd is dealing with his huge goon Twist but unfortunately for him this is a case of Chekhov’s Flooded Tunnel and he drowns during his escape attempt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 592: ORRO

    (Exciting Comics 006, 1940)

    The Space Rovers are Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, two young adults whose dads built a spaceship and who were compelled to steal that ship rather than see it and its ray cannon fall into the nefarious hands of some ambiguously foreign spies. Subsequently, they have just the worst luck at getting back to Earth, with each issue of Exciting Comics featuring some space danger that derails their progress.

    This time around they come across another spaceship in the Asteroid Belt, seemingly dead in space. Upon boarding they find a bunch of solid gold statues in unpleasant poses.

    Suddenly, an alien! This is Orro, a very cool space monster with a stupid and sinister plan: hang out in the middle of nowhere one of the more hazardous places in the Solar System until fellow space travellers happen upon his spacecraft and investigate, then use his special gas to turn them to gold. Then, once this has happened enough times, Orro will simply melt down all of the statues and be rich forever!

    Setting aside the morality of the whole situation… surely logistically it would be far easier to buy a few cows or the alien equivalent than to just wait an unknowable amount of time for space travellers who may or may not be coming (and that’s assuming that every passing spaceship would even bother to check out a seeming derelict. What of the space-cowards, Orro?). Even if you have no problem with murder, victims must be easier to source on a planetary surface, right? Plus, you can have access to TV and take-out food while you perpetuate evil.

    The greatest surprise and betrayal of the entire story is not that there is a murderous gold-hungry alien lurking on a derelict ship preying on the altruistic and curious but that the cool-looking alien murderer is actually just a bald guy.

    One small comfort to salve my disappointed soul is the fact that though Orro is not in fact a cool green tentacle alien, he is almost certainly an alien of some kind, as the Space Rovers have in their travels discovered human-shaped aliens on Mercury, Venus, Mars and the asteroid Ceres and are about to meet the same on the Jovian moon Ganymede and on Jupiter itself. Orro could be from just about anywhere (okay probably not Mercury or Venus or Ceres based on observed tech levels but any of the rest).

    Ted and Jane manage to subdue Orro during an attack by Ganymedean space pirates and doesn’t actually make it to the second half of the story as he is killed by a stray ray cannon blast – an unusual time for such a distinctive villain to die, but I suppose he was surplus to requirements in the ensuing capture by and escape from the pirate fleet. 

    Farewell to Orro: you may have over-complicated a plan more than anyone else on this blog.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 591: THE CULT OF DEATH

    (Exciting Comics 006, 1940)

    The Cult of Death comes into conflict with adventurer Ted Crane and his pals as they look for their associate, Egyptologist Dr Turner, in Luxor. Despite its very evocative name, the Cult of Death seems to sort of broadly worship the concept of Ancient Egypt and resent those who would pry into its secrets – Dr Turner has in fact been killed by them for seeking the lost tomb of King Mephtet.

    Does the cult’s leader Phator shares his followers’ beliefs? It’s up for debate, but whether it is for the glory of the Cult of Death or that of himself he seeks to drive the colonial forces out of Egypt and assume control.

    For unclear reasons the keystone of Phator’s plane is the destruction of the Aswan Dam (or “Assuan Dam” as it is called here), which, granted, would flood part of Egypt. How exactly that would lead to the Cult of Death’s ascension to power is never spelled out.

    It’s a moot point anyway, as Phator has sent his two most clownish dunces to place the bomb on the dam and they end up not only blowing themselves up but only flooding the region that the Temple of Death is located in. The entire Cult is wiped out save fore Phator himself, who must face colonial justice on his own.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 588: THE MASK

    (Exciting Comics 004, 1940) 

    Famed Broadway star Sandra Cummings is dead, either by her own hand or anothers’, and she has for some never explained reason left behind a note detailing the extent of political corruption in NYC and more importantly naming the names of those involved. This note is immediately stolen and soon afterward someone pretending to be the Mask starts extorting and murdering those named in the note.

    I’ve said it before: impersonating a super-hero is completely understandable move. It’s easy to disguise yourself as someone in a mask and your average comic book cop is so dumb and gullible that they would arrest the Pope if they found a dead body with a note reading  “I did it – the Pope” next to a red shoe. You get to trade on your target’s reputation and maybe have them arrested or killed – win/win!

    Of course, there are many downsides to this plan, and the Mask impostor fails to think of all of them. For a start, any masked vigilante worth their salt will never be caught by the cops. As has been established, they are very dumb! Also – and I cannot stress this enough – if you are going to frame and ultimately attempt to kill a super-hero it is a very good idea not to choose one who kills people. Because they will probably kill you.

    The fake Mask turns out to be Dr Lawrence Reid, a guy who just kind of shows up an makes a lot of noise about things. If he has any deeper motivations (other than to get real paid) he does not bother to reveal them before the real Mask guns him down like a trademark infringing dog.