The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: minor super-villain

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1004: THE GREEN HOOD GANG

    (Lightning Comics v2 002, 1941)

    The Green Hood Gang, who are unsurprisingly a gang who wear green hoods (and please note the rare and stylish nose cutouts on those numbers), make their debut by barging in and robbing the Raven after he himself had just gone to the trouble of holding up the guests of a party at the home of retired gangster Joe Russo.

    From there, the Green Hoods embark on a crime spree so ambitious in scope that Police Chief Lash is compelled to set aside his personal crusade against the Raven and team up with him to hunt them down.

    For most of this story I had assumed that the leader of the Green Hood Gang would turn out to be Joe Russo, coming out of retirement and starting out by robbing his own party guests, and I suspect that the writer of this comic was also of this opinion right up until they got to page eight out of ten, at which point the men under the hoods – previously very clearly regular American gangsters – are revealed to be Native South Americans. Further investigation by Lash and the Raven reveals that these men are dupes who have been promised that the funds they are stealing are to be put toward the construction of a temple in their homeland, but who are really working for a former bootlegger named Larue.

    While I wouldn’t call the Joe Russo version of this story very original or exciting, the Larue reveal is so out of left field that I am left baffled and bamboozled. If I can’t trust a comic book writer 85 years ago, just who can I?

    Categorized in: Colours (Green), Generica (Gangs), Objects (Hoods)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1003: THE CHIEF

    (Lightning Comics v2 001, 1941)

    The Chief is that most low-tier of costumed criminals: the masked manager of an underground casino. And not a particularly well-hidden casino either, seeing as Detective Danny “the Raven” Dartin just kind of stumbles upon its existence one night while eating in the beanery that is its front business, and Dartin’s boss Chief Lash leads a raid on the place almost simultaneously. I guess that’s why he wears the mask.

    Here we must explore the limits of the comic book disguise paradigm: yes, a simple black mask does to more than one might expect to hide one’s identity, but crucially that is in the absence of other distinguishing features. If, for example, you are a big-headed fellow with a combover and a missing pinky finger on your right hand that you advertise by wearing gloves all the time and just letting the empty finger flap around loose, you might want to think about a more comprehensive disguise solution.

    Speaking of which, here’s Mr Calhoun, big-headed President of the Chamber of Commerce with a missing pinky, and he has bullied the Police Commissioner into forcing Chief Lash’s resignation over not having caught the Raven yet. What a crazy, unrelated side plot to this whole underground casino business.

    Clearly the Chief/Calhoun is pretty secure in both his disguise and his ability to manipulate the police, because he immediately sets up a new casino inside of a drydocked yacht. This gives the Raven the perfect opportunity to grab him and use the threat of professional ruination to force the Police Commissioner to reinstate Chief Lash. Should the Commissioner himself probably be replaced due to his low resistance to extortion? Yes he should.

    Categorized in: Accessories (Casinos), Generica (Chiefs), Misc (Gang Bosses)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1002: MASTERMIND

    (Lightning Comics v2 001, 1941)

    Lash Lightning, while aimlessly flying around the countryside at night, encounters a footsore scientist named Amy Lane. Turns out that her castle (!) has been stolen by a man named Mastermind and that she has been walking for several hours in an attempt to get help. In a move that always seems kind of rude to me, Lightning immediately flies her all the way back to the castle to investigate. The mysterious Mastermind is no longer present when they arrive, but the castle’s laboratory is now filled with strange electrical equipment.

    But just where is Mastermind (who is also frequently called the Mastermind)? As you may recall from our one thousandth entry, he is in the middle of breaking Lightning’s recurring foe the Mummy out of jail in an attempt to wrangle the formula for his invulnerability coating out of him. You don’t see this kind of thing very often and I have to assume that the inherent egomania required to become a super-villain prevents most of them from acknowledging that anyone else might have a good idea.

    Upon returning to the castle and discovering Lightning and Lane in his newly-stolen laboratory, Mastermind demonstrates what the electrical equipment is for by using it to charge himself with lightning in this state he is immune to electricity (and only electricity, hence the need for the Mummy’s radium solution), can throw destructive bolts of lightning, and is able to teleport both himself and others, though just why this makes him resemble a dracula with glowing eyes is not explained.

    Mastermind and the Mummy demonstrate the value of teamwork by subduing Lightning with relatively little effort, then immediately revert to super-villain type and engage in a struggle for dominance that sees the Mummy reduced to a smouldering pile of medical gauze and Mastermind is left forever vulnerable to being punched in the face.

    Undeterred, Mastermind sets out to enact his ultimate scheme: to extort money from the US government in exchange for not helping the Axis to take over America, and as the government (in the form of this room full of Army officers) refuses to pay up based solely on the threats of a goth, he sets out to do just that.

    Mastermind seeks out a nearby cell of pseudo-Nazi spies and offers his services as a saboteur, then proves that he can deliver the goods by blowing up the Washington Monument. I am not ashamed to admit that I yelled aloud when I read this part of the book – that’s the sort of high-tier, messing-with-national-symbols villainy that you don’t get a lot of in this era.

    Mastermind’s pitch to the spies is of course successful and he goes on a real sabotage tear, though none of it is as crazy or memorable as that initial salvo. By this point Lash Lightning has recovered and escaped, and the two have a final confrontation back at Amy Lane’s castle as Mastermind is nipping back for a quick recharge. Instead of that pick-me-up, however, he gets thrown to his doom on the rocks below.

    OR DOES HE??

    No he does not, because Mastermind is back in Lightning Comics v2 002 and he’s explicitly rather than implicitly collaborating with the Nazis. This time, he’s got a mind control serum that he uses to take over the minds of everyone at Fort Hancock.

    And just why does he mind control an entire fort worth of soldiers? Why, to both prevent them from operating the shore defenses as the Nazi fleet is sailing into the nearby city’s harbour and as auxiliary troops for the subsequent shelling and invasion of that city, of course.

    Lightning is of course not going to stand for this kind of thing: he blows up/drives off the fleet, cures the men of the Mastermind’s control with a careful application of electricity and takes care of Mastermind himself with the careful application of a sock on the jaw.

    In his third appearance in Lightning Comics v2 003, Mastermind escapes jail by arranging to have himself sent a tiny recharging device that appears to just plug into the electrical outlet that I never really pictured 1940s prison cells as having but which gives him enough juice for one teleport away.

    This time around, Mastermind steals an experimental dirigible equipped with heat and paralysis rays and uses it to prep the way for yet another Nazi invasion by attacking US defense facilities.

    Not only does Lash Lightning show up and take him down with an almost insulting level of ease, but he does so accompanied by a pretty devastating put-down. It’s the old law of diminishing returns, as a villain who started out as a formidable opponent becomes more and more of a pushover as time goes on. Mastermind jumps to his death rather than being captured this time, only of course he doesn’t because he is a teleporter.

    Sure enough, when Mastermind returns in Lightning Comics v2 004, he confirms that teleportation saved his bacon. This time around he is working for the Nazis yet again, but rather than paving the way for invasion he is attempting to destroy some war materiel making its way from America to the UK via Canada. And speaking of Canada, since Lash Lightning prevents the supplies from being destroyed as they cross the border, the bulk of this issue takes place in my home country. Specifically, Mastermind is the very first super-villain who we have encountered doing supercrime in the province of Quebec!

    Not great supercrime, mind you. He does manage to poison Lightning, but instead of taking proper advantage of this he just throws him off of a roof, something that he would ordinarily survive and something I think would be reasonable to assume he would survive even while half dead.

    And yes, he does survive, returning to to punch out Mastermind’s lights and foil all of his plans. It’s back to prison for our pale friend, and this time they must have made sure to check all of his incoming cake deliveries a bit more thoroughly because as far as I can tell he never appears again.

    Categorized in: Origins (Evil Equivalents), Powers (Teleportation), Professions in Crime (Masterminds)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1001: BARON KRAWMAN

    (Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

    Whiz Wilson and his Futuroscope are once again engaging in the Doctor Who style of time travel, in which you just kind of pop into a random time and place and ask a bystander how things are going. In this case he has ended up in Florida in the year 3000, and the vest-wearing Florida Man he speaks to is pretty smug about how great things have been for the past thousand years. Perhaps he is rounding up or thinking extremely locally, because previous Whiz Wilson stories have established a general civilizational collapse in 2040 CE and a more localized one in South America around 2500 CE.

    More importantly, as if summoned by the words “these are wonderful times,” this is the moment that a squad of giant robots attack the city.

    Whiz Wilson is as ever a man of action and takes advantage of a poorly-secured access hatch on the back of one of the robots to get inside and beat up the pilot. This in turn causes the over-cautious leader of the robot pilots, now revealed to be a man named Baron Krawman, to recall his forces.

    Joining the queue of robots in his newly-commandeered ride, Whiz follows them to a domed underwater city “about ten miles” off the Florida coast.

    A quick and stealthy search of the city leads Wilson to an imprisoned woman who introduces herself as Betty Walters, Krawman’s former assistant. She tells him that a) the city is part of the lost continent of Atlantis that Krawman stumbled upon (though how it was missed during a thousand years-plus of intensely ocean-facing Florida life is beyond me) and b) that he is bent on destroying civilization because they laughed at him. Annoyingly, she does not explain why all of Krawman’s minions are nigh-identical bearded beefcakes, because that is all that I am asking about. Was he experimenting with cloning? Are these the descendants of lost Atlantis? Does he just have a type? 

    Whiz and Betty return to the commandeered robot and engage Krawman in thrilling robot-hand-to-robot-hand combat for the future of Florida, a combat that ends with Krawman dead and his city flooded. Once again Whiz Wilson has saved the people of a time period so far in his own future that his bones are naught but dust. Hooray!

    Categorized in: Accessories (Giant Robots), Origins (Villains of the Future), Royalty (Barons)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1001: BARON KRAWMAN

    (Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

    Whiz Wilson and his Futuroscope are once again engaging in the Doctor Who style of time travel, in which you just kind of pop into a random time and place and ask a bystander how things are going. In this case he has ended up in Florida in the year 3000, and the vest-wearing Florida Man he speaks to is pretty smug about how great things have been for the past thousand years. Perhaps he is rounding up or thinking extremely locally, because previous Whiz Wilson stories have established a general civilizational collapse in 2040 CE and a more localized one in South America around 2500 CE.

    More importantly, as if summoned by the words “these are wonderful times,” this is the moment that a squad of giant robots attack the city.

    Whiz Wilson is as ever a man of action and takes advantage of a poorly-secured access hatch on the back of one of the robots to get inside and beat up the pilot. This in turn causes the over-cautious leader of the robot pilots, now revealed to be a man named Baron Krawman, to recall his forces.

    Joining the queue of robots in his newly-commandeered ride, Whiz follows them to a domed underwater city “about ten miles” off the Florida coast.

    A quick and stealthy search of the city leads Wilson to an imprisoned woman who introduces herself as Betty Walters, Krawman’s former assistant. She tells him that a) the city is part of the lost continent of Atlantis that Krawman stumbled upon (though how it was missed during a thousand years-plus of intensely ocean-facing Florida life is beyond me) and b) that he is bent on destroying civilization because they laughed at him. Annoyingly, she does not explain why all of Krawman’s minions are nigh-identical bearded beefcakes, because that is all that I am asking about. Was he experimenting with cloning? Are these the descendants of lost Atlantis? Does he just have a type? 

    Whiz and Betty return to the commandeered robot and engage Krawman in thrilling robot-hand-to-robot-hand combat for the future of Florida, a combat that ends with Krawman dead and his city flooded. Once again Whiz Wilson has saved the people of a time period so far in his own future that his bones are naught but dust. Hooray!

    Categorized in: Accessories (Giant Robots), Origins (Villains of the Future), Royalty (Barons)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1000: THE MUMMY

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1000: THE MUMMY

    Number 1000!!*

    (Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

    The Old Man of the Pyramids summons (F)lash Lightning to his thundercloud lair to warn him about trouble at Midton College, and he is right, as can only be expected of a wise old oracular father figure. This particular trouble is called Professor Vatz and is a professor of chemistry who is ready to give up academia for the heady world of supercrime.

    Vatz’s new career is founded on two inventions: his “Hotlight,” a ray gun that seems to spit out both bright light and great heat sufficient to kill a regular person or knock out a superhuman figure like Lightning, and a radium compound that makes ordinary cloth into a form of armour resistant to conventional attack. Vatz decides to apply this solution to mummy wrappings, and while I can kind of see that being a way to ensure that the his armour is applied as close to his body as possible, but just what his justification is for using wrappings from an actual mummy is completely inscrutable to me.

    As always, mummy wrappings are a fantastic look and they are only enhanced by the fact that Vatz either chooses to leave the little flyaway portions of his hair sticking out of the sides or simply does not care that they are. It’s some very very strong bald guy energy and perhaps the most significant addition to the mummy look in two thousand years.

    The newly-fledged Mummy recruits a few gangsters and goes on a mild crime spree but is soon tracked down by a recovered Lightning. This leaves the problem of the Mummy’s invincibility to solve, and Lightning does so with aplomb: if the wrappings are the vehicle for the invulnerability, simply remove the wrappings before applying violence.

    (please note that the Mummy had a calling card all ready to go, and it’s a cute one. He only ever gets to use it the once, however)

    The Mummy returns in Lightning Comics v1 006, in what is effectively a bottle episode. Professor Vatz, given far both too much credit for a rapid reformation and unfettered access to the prison laboratory, is able to recreate his radium solution and take over – but not actually escape – the prison he has been locked up in.

    The only thing that the Mummy seems to be unable to replicate in prison is his Hotlight. Instead, he sports a much cooler “Nitro Gun” that shoots explosive pellets. He is also able to whip up a “Lightning Arrester” to drain the electric energy from Lash Lightning’s body when he inevitably turns up to foil the Mummy’s plans.

    Despite the fact that he is able to disable Lightning and throw him into the prison gas chamber, the Mummy does not account for the possibility that his lightning powers might return to him and allow him to escape. He is soon recaptured in the exact same manner as he was in their first encounter and I must say that the fact that Professor Vatz failed to account for this – perhaps by means of a tricky little knot or fastener – really lowers him in my estimation.

    In the Mummy’s final appearance, in Lightning Comics v2 001, he is broken out of a prison hospital by Lash Lightning’s new archfoe Mastermind, who is hoping to learn the secret of Professor Vatz’s radium coating in order render himself immune to harm. 

    The Mummy makes three key mistakes in his dealings with Mastermind: 1) he tries to negotiate after the initial deal has been struck, proposing that the radium formula be revealed in exchange for the secret to Mastermind’s own ability to command lightning. This might work if the Mummy were dealing with a reasonable person, but Mastermind is a super-villain, a class of inherently unreasonable people. 2) The Mummy escalates the confrontation to a physical one without first applying the radium solution and thus rendering himself immune to harm, and 3) he gets himself obliterated by a lightning bolt. he does therefore mess up Mastermind’s plans by taking his formula to the grave, but it must be cold comfort when one is a smouldering corpse.

    Farewell, the Mummy. You weren’t a very good super-villain but you were an entertaining one.

    Categorized in: Accessories (Anti-Hero; Heat Rays), Day Jobs (College Professors), Supranormal Beings (Mummies)

    *technically Fang Ryan is number 1000 and the Mummy is number 999, but I like mummies more than snake-themed gangsters so I fudged it for the sake of the round number.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 999: FANG RYAN

    (Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

    We meet Fang Ryan after he grabs a payroll from the recently-deceased messenger who was in the process of delivering it. He then escapes despite the fact that Police Detective Danny “the Raven” Dartin is on the scene to engage him in thrilling gunplay, but drops his signature weapon, a stick with a couple of snake fangs on one end. It’s a neat gimmick: the stick has a reservoir full of poison inside of it, so when Fang whacks someone with it they die of what looks like a snakebite. It is therefore a shame that he does not actually use this item in the story (aside from in killing the courier, implicitly).

    Since Ryan has lost his weapon, the Raven knows that he will need a new supply of snake venom to make another, and waits in ambush for him at the zoo from which he had previously sourced the stuff. Sure enough, Ryan shows up in time for a fist fight, which ends in… perhaps not the only time that a super-hero is knocked out by a zebra but surely one of a very limited number of times that it happens.

    When a supercrook has rendered a super-hero unconscious and captured them, there are a few ways that they can proceed. The standard approach is of course to place the hero in a deathtrap in full costume and then leave the room, followed closely by “go to unmask them but take so long that they wake up and start fighting you again.” Fang Ryan instead opts for one of the rarer options and just immediately unmasks the Raven, and thanks to the gunfight from earlier he even recognizes him!

    Ryan’s next thoughts are both good: frame the Raven for his next job and expose the Raven’s identity, thus taking all the focus off of him and his piddly little crime spree. Where it all falls apart that he tries to do both at the same time instead of sequentially, as he calls up Dartin’s boss and rats him out before heading out to do the next robbery.

    The one-two punch of this means that when an insomniac sees the Raven and reports him to the cops, the entire police force shows up to get him rather than a car or two worth of guys.

    Meanwhile Dartin has escaped from where Ryan left him hogtied in the woods and shows up to avenge his honour. He ends up killing Ryan in a shootout, which somehow completely overwrites the part of Police Chief Lash’s brain that heard the information about Dartin being the Raven. It’s just the luck of the costumed vigilante, I guess.

    Categorized in: Animals (Snakes), Body (Nonhuman Parts), Fraud (Identity Theft (Hero Impostors))

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 998: THE CHIEF

    (Liberty Scouts Comics 002, 1941)

    The Chief is one of two things, either a not-very-specific Hitler stand-in who is leading his forces from the front in an attempted invasion of the US, or the representative of such a figure in such an invasion. Either way, he is clearly a pseudo-Nazi. When we meet the Chief he is preoccupied with discovering the identities of the mysterious figures (who we know to be the Liberty Scouts) who have been thwarting his attempts to weaken the US war effort.

    Though he makes a decent try at it, the Chief just barely fails at an attempt to destroy both the Liberty Scouts and the President of the United States while they are meeting at Liberty House. Their next encounter, by contrast, ends with him capturing the Scouts and gloating about his plans before leaving them tied up next to a bomb. It doesn’t work out, of course, but setting up a deathtrap that will kill the hero while you are in a second location is a core super-villain activity. It’s enrichment for them.

    The Chief is at the forefront of Axis superweapon technology, with such innovations as a secret naval base in a hollowed-out iceberg off Newfoundland, a fleet of remote-controlled ships housed in that base, and heat ray cannons mounted on those ships, with which New York City as the first move in his invasion of the US.

    Though New York ends up taking some heat ray fire, the Liberty Scouts (conspicuously not dead, as is the norm when super-heroes are left in deathtraps) show up in time take control of the robot fleet and turn the rays on the Chief’s own forces.

    Though the Chief makes a valiant attempt to escape to fight another day, he ends up flying his plane directly into the path of a heat ray and exploding.

    The Liberty Scouts face a second Chief in Liberty Scouts Comics 003, who is also attempting to conquer the US on behalf of the same faux-Nazi government (they have the same crossed-knives symbol standing in for the swastika). This time the plan hinges on stealing a super knockout gas developed by Liberty Scout member Smokey and deploying it nation-wide, and once again the Chief’s deadliest enemy proves to be aviation safety, and he doesn’t even have a convenient heat ray cannon to blame for it: he just up and crashed his plane.

    Categorized in: Generica (Chiefs), Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest (United States))

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 998: THE CHIEF

    (Liberty Scouts Comics 002, 1941)

    The Chief is one of two things, either a not-very-specific Hitler stand-in who is leading his forces from the front in an attempted invasion of the US, or the representative of such a figure in such an invasion. Either way, he is clearly a pseudo-Nazi. When we meet the Chief he is preoccupied with discovering the identities of the mysterious figures (who we know to be the Liberty Scouts) who have been thwarting his attempts to weaken the US war effort.

    Though he makes a decent try at it, the Chief just barely fails at an attempt to destroy both the Liberty Scouts and the President of the United States while they are meeting at Liberty House. Their next encounter, by contrast, ends with him capturing the Scouts and gloating about his plans before leaving them tied up next to a bomb. It doesn’t work out, of course, but setting up a deathtrap that will kill the hero while you are in a second location is a core super-villain activity. It’s enrichment for them.

    The Chief is at the forefront of Axis superweapon technology, with such innovations as a secret naval base in a hollowed-out iceberg off Newfoundland, a fleet of remote-controlled ships housed in that base, and heat ray cannons mounted on those ships, with which New York City as the first move in his invasion of the US.

    Though New York ends up taking some heat ray fire, the Liberty Scouts (conspicuously not dead, as is the norm when super-heroes are left in deathtraps) show up in time take control of the robot fleet and turn the rays on the Chief’s own forces.

    Though the Chief makes a valiant attempt to escape to fight another day, he ends up flying his plane directly into the path of a heat ray and exploding.

    The Liberty Scouts face a second Chief in Liberty Scouts Comics 003, who is also attempting to conquer the US on behalf of the same faux-Nazi government (they have the same crossed-knives symbol standing in for the swastika). This time the plan hinges on stealing a super knockout gas developed by Liberty Scout member Smokey and deploying it nation-wide, and once again the Chief’s deadliest enemy proves to be aviation safety, and he doesn’t even have a convenient heat ray cannon to blame for it: he just up and crashed his plane.

    Categorized in: Generica (Chiefs), Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest (United States))

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 997: THE ZOMBIE WITCH

    (Jungle Comics 024, 1941)

    The Zombie Witch (aka the Queen of the Zombies, aka Celie) is, as the name suggests, a witch with a penchant for raising the dead – often while they are still actively being mourned. She demonstrates a few other magic powers (e.g., scrying in a bowl of water, crocodile charming) but the zombie thing is her bread and butter.

    So what, specifically, does she want a bunch of reanimated corpses for? Well! I won’t say that it’s for a good reason but it certainly an innovative one: Celie has pulled a con on some unscrupulous fellows and convinced them that a worthless mountain is full of gold, and is now going to sell them zombie labour to work the mines. It’s not a bad way to use up surplus zombies, if you ignore the horror.

    Tabu of course objects to the fraud just as hard as he does to the necromancy, and wastes no time in ratting the Zombie Witch out to her clients. They in turn waste no time in murdering her, but not before she orders her zombies to “kill the white men,” thus in turn sealing their dooms. Only Tabu makes it out alive.

    Categorized in: Accessories (Henchmen (Zombies)), Careers in Magic (Witches), Fraud (Con Artistry)