The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: murderer

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 509: KING ROCKY THE FIRST

    (Blue Bolt v1 010, 1941)

    Some preamble: in Blue Bolt v1 007 the Green Sorceress managed to capture the Blue Bolt and thus in Blue Bolt v1 008 she was able to force Dr Bertoff to surrender to her forces. Her incompetent scientists subsequently triggered a series of devastating explosions while attempting to extract radium from Bertoff’s mineral fields, with the one positive effect of opening a passage to the surface world. The Green Sorceress then travelled to the surface to do espionage, followed by the Blue Bolt, who had escaped paralysis and freed Bertoff’s people since her departure.

    The Green Sorceress’ main surface henchman was gang boss Rocky Roberts, King of the Rackets, who got pretty thoroughly beaten up by the Blue Bolt but then manages to pop out of a little hatch in the Green Sorceress’ escape rocket and propose an alliance against Dr Bertoff and the Blue Bolt, to which the Sorceress agrees.

    This goes poorly! Rocky immediately takes over the Green Kingdom and declares himself King Rocky the Foist.

    Rather than rule in a traditional manner, King Rocky establishes himself as the head of a gang consisting of the Green Sorceress’ former army, with the citizens of the Green Kingdom being subjected to gang-style protection rackets, kidnappings, torture and garden-variety murder. This is a Jack Kirby idea, it has to be – even if he never made up another one to vex someone like Jimmy Olsen with the Sci-Fi Gangsterocracy is one of the most Kirby ideas I can think of.

    It’s tough to articulate but I respect King Rocky for his decision to murder the Green Sorceress. Believe it or not, it’s a refreshing change for a Golden Age villain, most of whom would see an attractive captive and start yelling about making her “my Queen!”

    But of course if you shoot at a super-villain you best not miss. King Rocky the Foist’s plans are interrupted by Blue Bolt and he meets the traditional end for a super-usurper: giant laser blast.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 509: KING ROCKY THE FIRST

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 509: KING ROCKY THE FIRST

    (Blue Bolt v1 010, 1941)

    Some preamble: in Blue Bolt v1 007 the Green Sorceress managed to capture the Blue Bolt and thus in Blue Bolt v1 008 she was able to force Dr Bertoff to surrender to her forces. Her incompetent scientists subsequently triggered a series of devastating explosions while attempting to extract radium from Bertoff’s mineral fields, with the one positive effect of opening a passage to the surface world. The Green Sorceress then travelled to the surface to do espionage, followed by the Blue Bolt, who had escaped paralysis and freed Bertoff’s people since her departure.

    The Green Sorceress’ main surface henchman was gang boss Rocky Roberts, King of the Rackets, who got pretty thoroughly beaten up by the Blue Bolt but then manages to pop out of a little hatch in the Green Sorceress’ escape rocket and propose an alliance against Dr Bertoff and the Blue Bolt, to which the Sorceress agrees.

    This goes poorly! Rocky immediately takes over the Green Kingdom and declares himself King Rocky the Foist.

    Rather than rule in a traditional manner, King Rocky establishes himself as the head of a gang consisting of the Green Sorceress’ former army, with the citizens of the Green Kingdom being subjected to gang-style protection rackets, kidnappings, torture and garden-variety murder. This is a Jack Kirby idea, it has to be – even if he never made up another one to vex someone like Jimmy Olsen with the Sci-Fi Gangsterocracy is one of the most Kirby ideas I can think of.

    It’s tough to articulate but I respect King Rocky for his decision to murder the Green Sorceress. Believe it or not, it’s a refreshing change for a Golden Age villain, most of whom would see an attractive captive and start yelling about making her “my Queen!”

    But of course if you shoot at a super-villain you best not miss. King Rocky the Foist’s plans are interrupted by Blue Bolt and he meets the traditional end for a super-usurper: giant laser blast.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 504: PROFESSOR X

    (Blue Bolt v1 005, 1940)

    Professor X has two of my favourite qualities in a minor super-villain: a famous name and a prior history. The first is the same kind of fun as when my friend named his cat after me. “What do you mean Professor X keeps getting up on the counter to steal ham?”

    I really love his Prohibition-Era villainy as well, particularly as I had it in my head that he specifically was a bootlegger and thus that all of his great inventions were in service of that – dirigibles full of Canadian whiskey? The axe-proof barrel? The mighty Beer-Bot? Fun stuff. The suicide vest, by contrast is a bit much and not particularly fun, but does establish his bona fides as a legitimate threat.

    Prof. X is on a classic Judge and Jury Revenge Killer tear, targeting Hogan, the cop who brought him in and Johnson, the lawyer who put him away, who since then has become the District Attorney of Centro and close personal friend of local super-hero Sub-Zero.

    Due to this last fact Professor X is forced to turn his genius to the creation of anti-Sub-Zero weaponry, including cold-proof cars, an unfreezable gun that fires superheated bullets and his iconic costume which – you guessed it – is insulated  and renders him immune to Sub-Zero’s freezing powers. And he almost manages to beat Sub-Zero! His only mistake is in having uninsulated water pipes in his secret lair and leads to him being sent to jail inside a large block of ice.

    Professor X returns in the next issue in an attempt to finish getting revenge on DA Johnson as well as new target Sub-Zero (he also tries to kill Sub-Zero’s girlfriend Mary but I don’t think he has a specific grudge against her), and this time he’s accompanied by a costumed henchman named Rat. Once again he very nearly pulls it off but this time his fatal flaw is a lot more fatal, as he misjudges a jump during his escape and does a header out a fourth story window. An ignominious end to be sure.

    JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/3

    But death is not the end for Professor X! Blue Bolt v1 007 features a gambler named Rocky Garret who has acquired the Professor’s anti-Sub-Zero tech as insurance against interference in his baseball-fixing scheme (and it’s a good idea for him to do so, as his scheme is Not Very Good – a lot of it is literally just putting the wrong numbers on the scoreboard which… isn’t good.  It’s a bad plan.)

    Sadly this is it as far as Professor X’s legacy goes. I was kind of hoping that Sub-Zero would be confronted with a guy in a mesh bodysuit every now and again going forward, but alas, it was not meant to be.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 504: PROFESSOR X

    (Blue Bolt v1 005, 1940)

    Professor X has two of my favourite qualities in a minor super-villain: a famous name and a prior history. The first is the same kind of fun as when my friend named his cat after me. “What do you mean Professor X keeps getting up on the counter to steal ham?”

    I really love his Prohibition-Era villainy as well, particularly as I had it in my head that he specifically was a bootlegger and thus that all of his great inventions were in service of that – dirigibles full of Canadian whiskey? The axe-proof barrel? The mighty Beer-Bot? Fun stuff. The suicide vest, by contrast is a bit much and not particularly fun, but does establish his bona fides as a legitimate threat.

    Prof. X is on a classic Judge and Jury Revenge Killer tear, targeting Hogan, the cop who brought him in and Johnson, the lawyer who put him away, who since then has become the District Attorney of Centro and close personal friend of local super-hero Sub-Zero.

    Due to this last fact Professor X is forced to turn his genius to the creation of anti-Sub-Zero weaponry, including cold-proof cars, an unfreezable gun that fires superheated bullets and his iconic costume which – you guessed it – is insulated  and renders him immune to Sub-Zero’s freezing powers. And he almost manages to beat Sub-Zero! His only mistake is in having uninsulated water pipes in his secret lair and leads to him being sent to jail inside a large block of ice.

    Professor X returns in the next issue in an attempt to finish getting revenge on DA Johnson as well as new target Sub-Zero (he also tries to kill Sub-Zero’s girlfriend Mary but I don’t think he has a specific grudge against her), and this time he’s accompanied by a costumed henchman named Rat. Once again he very nearly pulls it off but this time his fatal flaw is a lot more fatal, as he misjudges a jump during his escape and does a header out a fourth story window. An ignominious end to be sure.

    JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/3

    But death is not the end for Professor X! Blue Bolt v1 007 features a gambler named Rocky Garret who has acquired the Professor’s anti-Sub-Zero tech as insurance against interference in his baseball-fixing scheme (and it’s a good idea for him to do so, as his scheme is Not Very Good – a lot of it is literally just putting the wrong numbers on the scoreboard which… isn’t good.  It’s a bad plan.)

    Sadly this is it as far as Professor X’s legacy goes. I was kind of hoping that Sub-Zero would be confronted with a guy in a mesh bodysuit every now and again going forward, but alas, it was not meant to be.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 501: THE DEAD HEAD GANG

    (Blue Bolt v1 002, 1940)

    Just a simple costumed extortion gang, but I really dig their skull masks if not their habit of killing the extortees regardless of whether they pay up or not. Too bad for them that Sergeant Spook was on the case.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 498: THE ROCKINGHAM BANDIT

    (Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

    The Rockingham Bandit is a masked fellow who commits robberies and murders in the town of Rockingham (natch) who turns out to be a balloonist from a nearby circus who is framing another guy from the same circus in an attempt to steal his girl. Two items:

    1) The frame works like this: the Rockingham Bandit does a crime and then leaves behind an item identifiable as belonging to the target. The Rockingham PD are apparently even dumber than your typical comic book cops and don’t question the fact that this guy is doing crimes while seemingly shedding a constant stream of monogrammed items (he does have a weirdly large number of such items, though).

    2) This is a Charlie Chan story and like all Charlies Chan comics (all Charlie Chan everything?) is pretty good! If you completely tune out everything that Charlie Chan says.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 497: RAMUN THE EVIL ONE

    (Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

    Ramun the Evil One aka Ramun the Great is a hypnotist/ stage magician with a simple if short-sighted plan: 1) open a club in New York 2) have it become popular with the wealthy social set 3) hypnotize rich guys 4) profit

    (aside: just look at that charming picture of a man who thinks he’s an ape! The little dance!)

    The short-sighted part goes hand-in-hand with the profit, as once Ramun has induced his victims to hand over all of their fungible wealth he orders them to drive into the Hudson River and drown themselves, and he’s done this more than a dozen times over the course of two weeks. This is… not smart. “Hey, every victim went to the Egyptian Gardens and got hypnotized just before withdrawing all their monies from the bank and disappearing” is a thought that even the most dull-witted police officer will eventually have, to say nothing of Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians.

    Ramun does find an unorthodox counter to the common super-villain problem of invisible magic-men creeping around in their lairs: train an ape to deal with it. And he comes as close as anyone to killing Marvelo, so good job Ramun!

    Ramun blows himself up at the end of the story but manages to recover enough for he and Edpo the ape to return in Big Shot Comics 019, wherein they have switched their focus from larceny to espionage. This time, Ramun seems to have some actual, non-hypnosis-based magic to call on, but it’s not quite enough.

    Ramun, Edpo and their unnamed employer end up simultaneously perforated and drowned at the climax of the story, and while this is exactly the kind of off-panel “nobody could survive that” death that Ramun came back from the first time he was doomed by a far more insidious foe than mere bullets: popularity. Big Shot Comics 020 was Marvelo’s final outing and so Ramun would never get his chance to return.

    UPDATE: Ramun makes a completely unexpected return in The Face 001!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 494: THE INVENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) 

    It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t.

    So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential value that could be reaped by selling this design for industrial purposes rather than using it for mere bank robbery because the Inventor is in fact a mad scientist and thus cannot be held to the same fiscal standards as his more rational colleagues.

    Let’s take a second to appreciate the classic stylings of this robot: cylinder head, pincer claws, speaker ears… all the great robot features in one cool guy.

    This might be a Tom Kerry story but the real hero of the piece is this night watchman who chooses not to pointlessly die in an attempt to protect the bank he works at and instead lives to clue the two-fisted District Attorney in on the culprit’s identity as a robot. I appreciate you, fella.

    Tom Kerry tracks the robot back to its lair by the simple expedient of clinging to the underside of the remote-controlled auto-gyro used to ferry both it and the money back to the Inventor. There he takes advantage of the fact that like a surprising percentage of Golden and Silver Age robots, this one’s exterior shell is easily removed and repurposed as a costume.

    The Inventor is essentially epically pranked into signing a confession, Tom Kerry battles a knife-wielding maniac in his boxer shorts and the whole thing wraps up with a sock to the jaw. No word on what became of that poor nude robot, though.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 494: THE INVENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) 

    It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t.

    So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential value that could be reaped by selling this design for industrial purposes rather than using it for mere bank robbery because the Inventor is in fact a mad scientist and thus cannot be held to the same fiscal standards as his more rational colleagues.

    Let’s take a second to appreciate the classic stylings of this robot: cylinder head, pincer claws, speaker ears… all the great robot features in one cool guy.

    This might be a Tom Kerry story but the real hero of the piece is this night watchman who chooses not to pointlessly die in an attempt to protect the bank he works at and instead lives to clue the two-fisted District Attorney in on the culprit’s identity as a robot. I appreciate you, fella.

    Tom Kerry tracks the robot back to its lair by the simple expedient of clinging to the underside of the remote-controlled auto-gyro used to ferry both it and the money back to the Inventor. There he takes advantage of the fact that like a surprising percentage of Golden and Silver Age robots, this one’s exterior shell is easily removed and repurposed as a costume.

    The Inventor is essentially epically pranked into signing a confession, Tom Kerry battles a knife-wielding maniac in his boxer shorts and the whole thing wraps up with a sock to the jaw. No word on what became of that poor nude robot, though.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 485: THE CONDOR

    (Big 3 005-006, 1941)

    As far as super-villains go, the Condor is a simple concept: the modern pirate. But the modern pirate is a classic character type! Murder on the high seas! Sneering braggadocio! Calling people swabs!

    And the Condor himself fits the role to a T. It doesn’t hurt that he’s such a well-designed character: who knew that a guy in a black suit would look so good as a pirate with the simple addition of a cape and tricorn hat? I couldn’t find a good picture of his face in profile but it is similarly well-designed, with a combination of intense eyes, beaklike nose and slight overbite really giving the predatory bird vibe.

    It’s not quite as on-theme, but the Condor’s plan to loot NYC York City is suitably villainous. Plus:

    … he has crooked politicians on his side! Including the mayor! (and here we must indulge in a brief aside: the Blue Beetle, like many super-heroes, operates out of a nonspecific urban landscape strongly influenced by New York City. It gets referred to as York City once or twice early on but for the most part goes nameless. But the thing is, it’s near a lot of places like Westchester and New Jersey that place it in the NYC neighbourhood, so I’ve been saying that it’s New York for a while now. Mayor Dorth here is just one too many anomalous mayors for me to ignore – I’m forced to conclude that the Blue Beetle operates out of a metropolis that may or may not be called York City and like Golden Age Gotham City essentially occupies the same geography as New York without being New York)

    And while many criminal mayors in comics are merely corrupt, Mayor Dorth is a proper wrongun – not only does he cover up the murder of Councilman Hals here by framing Joan Mason but he both helps set up the Condor’s raid on the city and attempts to betray him and make off with the loot himself. This of course only gets him killed but you have to appreciate the dynamism.

    The Condor is seemingly drowned by the Blue Beetle at the end of his first appearance but pops right back up again in the next issue to attack Dr Lane of the city museum. It’s a bit low-stakes after looting the entire city but the Condor still gives it his all.

    It’s all rather tawdry at the end: Dr Lane and the Condor have been smuggling uncut diamonds and Lane is for some reason attempting to double-cross a notably murderous pirate. There’s a lot of running around and attempted murder before the Condor is once again seemingly killed by the Blue Beetle, this time via a sock to the kisser that sends him into a ship’s boiler.

    Like Countess Belladonna before him, the Condor has all the hallmarks of a villain who would continue to return to plague the Blue Beetle if only Fox Features hadn’t had that unfortunate financial trouble and lost control of the character for a couple of years. Alas, he was forgotten during the Beetle’s time at Holyoke.