The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: minor super-villain

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 026: THE MONK

    (Detective v1 031-032, 1939)

    The only reason this guy’s minor is that Batman shoots him dead in 1939. I know he’s made a few reappearances over the years but mostly they’re retellings of that first story. Also I guess they’re calling him the Mad Monk now? Weird.

    My point is that Batman deserves a vampire nemesis so they should BRING HIM BACK.

    ADDENDUM: it’s very strange to me that in Batman: Red Rain it’s Dracula who vampires Batman and not the Monk, an established vampiric Bat-villain.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 025: THE MASTER

    (Detective v1 030, 1939)

    I like the Master because he is simultaneously brilliant enough to invent a mind control device capable of enslaving a significant portion of the US Government and dumb enough to brag about his machine to a federal agent not ten feet away from it. Machine smashing ensues.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 025: THE MASTER

    (Detective v1 030, 1939)

    I like the Master because he is simultaneously brilliant enough to invent a mind control device capable of enslaving a significant portion of the US Government and dumb enough to brag about his machine to a federal agent not ten feet away from it. Machine smashing ensues.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 024: THE FACE

    (Adventure 044, 1939)

    Another early Sandman villain. A fairly standard master of disguise who was later reworked into an axe-wielding maniac in Sandman Mystery Theatre.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 023: MOBRUNE

    (Adventure 041, 1939)

    A fanatic radio preacher of no specific religion, Mobrune bolsters his reputation by predicting disasters that he then causes.

    SPECIFICALLY, Mobrune seeds snow clouds with nerve toxin, completely wiping two small cities off the map. A bad dude!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 022: THE TARANTULA

    (Adventure 040, 1939)

    Standard masked crook, remarkable only for being the Sandman’s first foe. Shows up later in one or two crowd scenes.

    This story is also notable for being the only time Golden Age Wesley Dodds tucks in a little doll version of himself before heading out as Sandman, a charming bit that was later adopted as an ongoing thing in Sandman Mystery Theatre.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 021: THE GHOST

    (Action v1 002, 1938)

    Love a fake undead villain – it’s a tossup between sheet ghosts and fake mummies for my absolute Number One, with fake skeletons and Flying Dutchmans and Headless Horsemen crowding onto the Bronze pedestal together – so much, in fact that I might be rounding this guy trying to haunt some folks off of some oil land up to super-villain undeservedly. But WHO’S GOING TO STOP ME IF I AM?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 020: THE GORRAH

     (Action v1 002, 1938)

    Early on in Tex Thomson’s adventuring career, he and his pal Bob Daly found themselves in a hidden city called, appropriately, the Sealed City. There they met the leader, or Gorrah, of that city and eventually discovered that he was an usurper who they quickly helped overthrow. There it would end for your average hidden-city-usurper but not this Gorrah, no sir. He came back half a dozen times, indulging in schemes such as:

    -turning people into weird cyborgs

    -turning people into weird rat-men

    -attempting to take over Turkey

    -fixing boxing matches

    and so on. 

    By his last appearance, he was dealing with Mr America instead of boring old Tex Thomson and it wasn’t a very fair fight. Over the years he had shed his super-science, his one-time hypnotic power and even his flamboyant costume and was merely a one-eyed agent of some unspecified Foreign Power (ie, the Nazis) tasked with bombing libraries, which somewhat ignominiously (if predictably) ended with him being blown up by his own bomb. A sad end to be sure.