The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: cult leader

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 422: THE MASTER

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 002, 1939)

    Another day, another guy named the Master. This Master is escaped lunatic Pierre Lacroix, leader of the Hooded Cult and would-be world conqueror. Lacroix maintains the loyalty of his cult via drug addiction and has a castle HQ. This is all penny-ante stuff.

    The most important thing about the Master is his shirt. It’s like, a sweatshirt with attached cowl? Obviously other villains have been doing similar things with robes for years at this point but I feel like this was something special even if my knowledge of the future of super-villain costume design tells me that it is an evolutionary dead end. 

    Anyway, he dies in an explosion but his contributions to villainous fashion will live on.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 411: SATAN REX

    (Amazing Mystery Funnies v2 011, 1939)

    We’ve all read a comic in which a scientist is rejected for his wild-but-true theories and goes a bit bonkers and criminal, but Satan Rex really went for it. Originally Eric von Hochwalt, who developed the Theory of Relativity ten years before Einstein and dealt with his subsequent rejection by disappearing into the Himalayas, founding a city full of people who worship him as a god, conquering the aging process and eventually taking a few stabs at destroying the world that wronged him, in the far-off year 2009.

    Everything Satan Rex does is over-the-top and baroque: his minions have cryptic science tattoos on their foreheads, for example.

    And his doomsday device is incorporated into the Temple of the Golden Man, the state religion of his City of the Mists. If there’s a choice to be made, Satan Rex will go with the fanciest option. He makes at least three passes at destroying the Earth and/or humanity before his heroic foil Jon Linton accidentally travels to the far corners of space and time. Did Satan Rex try again, unopposed? It shall remain a mystery!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 367: KOROZAN

    (Minute-Man 001, 1941) 

    Korozan is a not-quite-Japanese spylord whose two gimmicks are a) that he is very ugly and b) that his spy cell are all basically a cult dedicated to that cool idol, with Korozan as the cult leader/ godhead. Nothing really interesting is done with the cult angle beyond an abortive sacrifice – it’s just your standard Yellow Peril stuff about foreigners and their savage religions. Korozan gets kicked into a furnace and that’s the end.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 342: THE MASTER

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 342: THE MASTER

    (Master Comics 007, 1940)

    Once more we find ourselves with a cult on our hands, and it’s my favourite kind of cult: a) completely fictional and b) just a bunch of bored rich people taking what probably started as an excuse for some light swinging or BDSM way too seriously. It’ the Cult of Jama the Devil-God, folks! Officially broken up by the US government in 1919, they have in fact been lurking in the shadows of the probably-New York upper crust since then, with a particular focus on molding wealthy orphan Imelda Loree (born on the Feast Day of Jama, parents possibly murdered by the cult) into a living goddess figure. This process seems to require either virginity or some sort of spiritual isolation because the main thing tat they do to prepare her is to murder any man who even seems like he might be interested in her.

    And of course this is where my favourite Golden Age adventurer Zoro the Mystery Man comes in, because if there’s a society event where people are trying to hook up, it’s a fair bet that he’ll be there. He witnesses the fourth “keep Imelda Loree from getting any” murder and it’s at that point that the cult is finished.

    But what of this Master character, you ask? Why he’s Murdock Daw, leader of the cult and huge creep. In classic cult leader fashion, Daw has been duping the Jama cultists for decades in order to enrich himself, and in true creep fashion he seems to have been angling to marry Imelda Loree since she was roughly two years old, and even if I’m reading things wrong he has absolutely been having her suitors murdered in order to make her desperate enough to marry him – real creep behaviour, if you ask me.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 261: THE SACRED ONE

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940)

    The Sacred one is a pretty bog-standard cult leader in a way that was cliched even in 1940: he’s got a bunch of people in a castle in the New York countryside somewhere and they kidnap beautiful white women to sacrifice to their Fire God until the Angel shows up to murderize them. 

    The only really interesting things about him are the questions that the loose plotting leaves you with: he has hypnotic powers – were these given to him by the Fire God or did he have them already and use them to set himself up as a cult leader? Are all of these guys sequentially using the same castle or is NY just lousy with them?

    The biggest question (and the creepiest part of the story) is what exactly is the nature of the Sacred One’s cult. Once he takes a header into his own pit trap, the cultists all silently line up and shrink down into nothingness. Is this the Sacred One’s death curse? Some sort of ritual suicide? Did they never actually exist in the first place but rather were the creations of either the Sacred One or the Fire God? We will never know!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 261: THE SACRED ONE

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 261: THE SACRED ONE

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940)

    The Sacred one is a pretty bog-standard cult leader in a way that was cliched even in 1940: he’s got a bunch of people in a castle in the New York countryside somewhere and they kidnap beautiful white women to sacrifice to their Fire God until the Angel shows up to murderize them. 

    The only really interesting things about him are the questions that the loose plotting leaves you with: he has hypnotic powers – were these given to him by the Fire God or did he have them already and use them to set himself up as a cult leader? Are all of these guys sequentially using the same castle or is NY just lousy with them?

    The biggest question (and the creepiest part of the story) is what exactly is the nature of the Sacred One’s cult. Once he takes a header into his own pit trap, the cultists all silently line up and shrink down into nothingness. Is this the Sacred One’s death curse? Some sort of ritual suicide? Did they never actually exist in the first place but rather were the creations of either the Sacred One or the Fire God? We will never know!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 246: KARVAC

    (Flash Comics v1 014, 1941)

    Karvac himself is strictly ho hum territory: a would-be world conqueror who leads his army of heat ray-toting goons on a path of destruction before being beaten up by Hawkman. Snoresville, man.

    BUT: the method by which Karvac managed to acquire his army of heat ray-toting goons, now that’s the kind of comic book nonsense that we love around here.

    Karvac, you see, unearthed rites and rituals connected to Scorio, Alligator God of the Phoenicians, and established both a temple and cult of worshippers to Scorio in the Eastern US, in order to cast ancient ritual magics and bring Scorio to him.

    AND IT WORKS! Korvac summons a god! And that god promptly tells him how to make heat rays for his army of goons to tote! (it’s not exactly clear in the text whether the army of goons are also the Scorio cultists that Hawkman sees performing rituals at the temple earlier in the story, but it’s narratively satisfying to think so)

    Scorio eventually gets banished back to the otherworldly swamp that he usually hangs out in, and as far as I know has never made a return appearance. But he should! Korvac might’ve been a dud, but an ancient and vengeful alligator god who can hand out secret knowledge to evil men is a really neat foe for a guy like Hawkman, particularly once his reincarnation bullshit really gets going – Katar Hol might not know Scorio from a hole in the ground but Scorio knows a soul no matter how many times it’s been reborn. BRING BACK Scorio!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 246: KARVAC

    (Flash Comics v1 014, 1941)

    Karvac himself is strictly ho hum territory: a would-be world conqueror who leads his army of heat ray-toting goons on a path of destruction before being beaten up by Hawkman. Snoresville, man.

    BUT: the method by which Karvac managed to acquire his army of heat ray-toting goons, now that’s the kind of comic book nonsense that we love around here.

    Karvac, you see, unearthed rites and rituals connected to Scorio, Alligator God of the Phoenicians, and established both a temple and cult of worshippers to Scorio in the Eastern US, in order to cast ancient ritual magics and bring Scorio to him.

    AND IT WORKS! Korvac summons a god! And that god promptly tells him how to make heat rays for his army of goons to tote! (it’s not exactly clear in the text whether the army of goons are also the Scorio cultists that Hawkman sees performing rituals at the temple earlier in the story, but it’s narratively satisfying to think so)

    Scorio eventually gets banished back to the otherworldly swamp that he usually hangs out in, and as far as I know has never made a return appearance. But he should! Korvac might’ve been a dud, but an ancient and vengeful alligator god who can hand out secret knowledge to evil men is a really neat foe for a guy like Hawkman, particularly once his reincarnation bullshit really gets going – Katar Hol might not know Scorio from a hole in the ground but Scorio knows a soul no matter how many times it’s been reborn. BRING BACK Scorio!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 152: NYOLA

    (All-Star Comics 002, 1940)

    Nyola is an Aztec priestess of Yum-Chac, the god of rain. As you might expect, the indigenous religions of the Americas are treated with utmost dignity and she is not portrayed as a fanatic who, for example, would kidnap a woman for human sacrifice based on tangential offense done to her faith. Also, Hawkman doesn’t then follow her back to Mexico and bring the might of the authorities down on an indigenous religious group that is, yes, killing people but still doesn’t quite seem like the right call. Or wouldn’t if he had. Which he didn’t.

    Despite her seeming death at the end of her first appearance she later shows up in the Roy Thomas version of the Monster Society of Evil in All-Star Squadron with actual powers! Guess Yum-Chac is on the list of legit deities in the DCU!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 027: SKULL-FACE

    (Detective v1 032, 1939)

    Skull-Face is a villain I love. He looks, predictably, like a guy with a skull-face, yet he runs a “beauty cult” which might just be a very intense spa? Whatever it is, he steals all of his clients’/ congregants’ money and then kills them with a special drug that makes them drown themselves/ have heart attacks. And he’s very proud of his villainy, which I love. Other salient Skull-Face features:

    -caveman butler named Sam

    -underground, partially-flooded castle in Maine

    -leaves tiny ivory skull as a calling card at the scene of his victims’ deaths, thus undermining his own careful planning of natural-seeming causes

    -hunted by the swimsuit-clad sister of one of his victims

    -despite living in a partially-flooded castle, cannot swim and thus drowns at the end of the story

    Just a really good weirdo villain who they should BRING BACK.

    EDIT TO ADD: Hadn’t really thought about what role Skull-Face would fill in the modern DCU but upon 5 minutes reflection you could absolutely make him the head of a beauty product Multi-Level Marketing scheme and keep everything else the same. 

    SECOND EDIT:

    SKULL SCORE: 3/5 Pretty skully but also unsettlingly fleshy.