(Mystery Men Comics 022-023, 1941)
The Ugly Queen is our first real foray into the heady world of societal beauty standards as motivation for evil (though there’s an element of that sort of thing in Setap’s first appearance and we’ve certainly encountered a fair few characters rejected by society for ugliness and deformity). Her status as a royal is called into question by the end of her appearances but she does cut a powerful figure, with an undersea castle full of weird snake-men that she draws Rex Dexter of Mars to.
Two things about the Ugly Queen’s appearance:
-the design of her face is amazing.
-if what she’s looking for is acceptance rather than universal acclaim then the Ugly Queen has absolutely been looking in the wrong places. I’m only moderately Extremely Online and I could name more than a few places where she could, as they say, Get It.
So yes, it’s clear that the real villain was societal beauty standards all along. Wait. No, it was the Ugly Queen – she just dropped “thousands of atomic bombs” on a city to kill one beautiful woman.
She also captures handsome men and swaps their heads out for those of animals when they refuse her marriage demands. And while writing all this out I realized just what I liked most about the Ugly Queen: she isn’t doing any of this because she feels the sting of societal rejection. She’s doing it because it’s fun and the social stuff is a flimsy excuse. Like all of the best villains, the Ugly Queen is having a great time.
Her first appearance ends with a cow-headed man flooding her underwater palace and seemingly killing all within, but worry not because in the very next issue:
She’s back, baby.
Once again I am struck by how cool the Ugly Queen looks. And she knows it! She clearly wore that superfluous helmet so that she could take it off dramatically in front of… some snake men, I guess.
This time, Rex Dexter brings his fiance Cynde along and the Ugly Queen undercuts my previous point a bit by caring enough about how she looks to set up a mind transfer between the two of them so that she can rock Cynde’s conventionally attractive face. Although she does start gloating about it to Rex Dexter the second that she thinks that she has gotten away with it, so maybe it’s more of a prank body swap than a desperate attempt to be something else.
All’s well that ends well, however, as the Queen’s snake-man subjects, who turn out to be slaves, immediately revolt once they see the Ugly Queen tied to a chair, and then once she is stabbed by one of them it turns out that the mind-transfer tech she had used was the kind that switches the minds back when either of them dies. Seems to go against the spirit of the malicious mind switch, but what do I know.
In conclusion, the Ugly Queen rules, long live the Ugly Queen. It’s unlikely that someone will ever BRING BACK the character but I know I’d love to see her again.
