The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: minor super-villain

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 822: THE TERROR

    (Thrilling Comics 003, 1940) 

    The Valery family have a problem: they are set to inherit a fortune from their deceased relative John Valery, but on the condition that they all live in the family estate, Valery Grange, for a full year, and danged if a mysterious character called the Terror hasn’t started bumping them off just as they were about to complete the terms of John’s will. Enter undercover police officer Peggy Allen, aka the Woman in Red, once again posing as a nurse. 

    Please note the final panel above in which the Terror appears on-panel with almost every remaining Valery, thus removing them from the suspect list. It’s a dirty thing to do to me, a person who like to try to solve a whodunnit.

    One of the few viable suspects, assuming that the Terror isn’t in cahoots with one of the Valerys, is the disappeared Horace Valery, but the Woman in Red finds his skeleton after chasing the Terror from the scene of the murder of Elton Valery into the unexplored depths of Valery Grange.

    The Woman in Red reveals her identity to Eleanor Valery (terrible infosec) and sets a trap that nets her one (1) the Terror, and wouldn’t you know it, he turns out to be Greeley Butler the family lawyer, who has been fiddling the Valery books to his own benefit and was killing off the family (extremely major crime) to cover for his embezzlement (not that bad, crime-wise). But where would mystery stories be if people didn’t see murder as a handy solution for their problems all the time, hey?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 821: KONG

    (Thrilling Comics 003, 1940)

    I can’t really devote a lot of energy to Kong because he just kind of makes me tired, conceptually. He’s a Yellow Peril dictator who has devoted a fair amount of time and resources to stealing both military secrets and entire scientists from the US as a part of his bid for world domination, opposed only by Doc Strange and his companion Virginia Thompson. All very exciting stuff in theory, but it all resolves into a kind of mush – it’s not even as racist as it could be, which is good but not remarkable.

    In the spirit of writing something interesting, here are the good parts of Kong’s story: 

    1. Location: Kong is the dictator of the Asian kingdom of Kachukuo, which was pretty fun to recognize as a stand-in for Manchukuo, the Chinese puppet-state established by the Japanese in 1932. I’m always chuffed to see Manchukuo come up both because it doesn’t really do so very often and because I managed to get pretty far into adulthood before I learned about this entire country, and the joy of learning about it is still fresh in my mind. Not that the history of Manchukuo itself is particularly joy-inspiring, but learning is learning.

    2. Rays. I like Kong’s big chunky ray technology. He’s got a red ray that brings the scientists out of the suspended animation he put them in for transport, a blue mind control ray (blue and red seem to come from the same machine) and a green death ray. What can I say, I like a ray, and I like colours.

    3. Wild Hill Warriors. At one point Kong tries to get rid of Doc Strong by subjecting him to gladiatorial combat and I just really like the fact that he managed to scare up some Germanic warriors fresh from the sack of Rome for the task. They don’t do very well but they’re fun!

    That’s about it for Kong. Doc Strange inspires a revolution in Kachukuo, chucks the dictator into his own chemical soup and thaws out the scientists with a little Alosun, bish bash bosh, start the countdown to the next Fu Manchu knockoff showing up.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 820: THE MYSTERY MAN

    (Thrilling Comics 002, 1940) 

    Metropolitan Hospital* is in trouble! A mysterious masked figure dubbed the Mystery Man** has been conducting a campaign of terror against the august institution that includes both seemingly random and seemingly targeted murders, the installation of a gang boss and his henchmen in one of the wards, and the theft of $100 000 worth of radium! It’s the perfect case for the Woman in Red to make her debut, as undercover police officer Peggy Allen is sent to the hospital as a nurse.

    * I was prepared to do my usual song and dance about how this comic was probably set in NYC but that there was no way to really be sure, but danged if I didn’t check and to my surprise there seems to be exactly one Metropolitan Hospital in the world. 

    ** And speaking of rare names, I was certain that we already had a Mystery Man on the books and that there would be all kinds of one shot Mystery Men in comics, like how there are dozens of guys named the Mask and the Masked Man and the Hood, but all we have now is Zoro the Mystery Man and all I can find otherwise is the time that Commissioner Gordon dressed up like a super-hero and called himself Mysteryman. Colour me surprised.

    The Mystery Man is ultimately undone by his radium-thieving ways, as the Woman in Red is able to track it down with a radiation detector and pull the old “coat the loot in a florescent chemical gag” to expose the person who had been handling it (the fact that she was initially able to find it by feeling “an odd burning sensation” through both its container and a reasonably thick wall may be a bad sign for everyone involved, however).

    The Mystery Man turns out to be Dr Billings, the Assistant Superintendent of the hospital, and all this murder and mayhem was just a very extreme attempt to get a promotion. This kind of works, because he kills Hospital Superintendent Thorndyke about halfway through the story, but he doesn’t manage to stick the landing and dies in a fiery car wreck while fleeing the scene.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 819: THE MASK

    (Thrilling Comics 002, 1940)

    He may just be the leader of a gang of kidnappers, but the moment this fellow put on his nice blue mask and got all confident, he became special to me. This particular Mask (our ninth!) is brought in without too much fuss by short-lived Nedor Comics group the Three Comrades.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 818: THE FACELESS PHANTOM

    (Thrilling Comics 001, 1940) 

    Here’s a nice picture of the Faceless Phantom from his second appearance, before we delve into the muddy fiche images of his first.

    Scientific hero Doc Strange is just walking down the street one day when he hears a cry for help that leads him to an encounter with his first super-villain (the Faceless Phantom) as well as his long-term love interest (Virginia Thompson). The Faceless Phantom, it turns out, has just kidnapped Virginia’s father Professor Thompson in an attempt to get him to reveal the secret of his Delta Ray gun, which is a good old-fashioned sci-fi death ray.

    What follows is an astonishingly long (for a Golden Age story – 37 pages!) chase sequence, as Doc Strange, Virginia and New York Police Commissioner Baxter pursue the Faceless Phantom and Professor Thompson to the Central American republic of San Pedro and back. Along the way both Virginia and Baxter are captured and rescued and captured again, Doc fist fights multiple animals (a shark, a boa constrictor, crocodiles, a tiger, a pit full of cobras, an octopus and a gorilla), and Doc acquires several temporary companions, including:

    -Togo, hired as a bodyguard for Virginia; ultimately revealed to be an agent of (implicitly) the Chinese government looking to acquire the Delta Ray

    -Parker, a seaplane pilot who shuttles Doc around for the middle part of the story until he is almost killed in a plane crash and left behind in Florida

    -Jerry Adams, a newsie who Doc helps with his mortgage during a brief spell of train crash-induced amnesia

    Things eventually come to a head back in NYC where they started, with the Faceless Phantom armed not only with the Delta Ray but a stolen supply of Alosun, the “distillation of sun-atoms” that gives Doc Strange his super powers. Thus equipped, the Phantom and his men have effectively taken over the city.

    In order to combat a gang of death ray-wielding gangsters all hopped up on super serum, Doc really hunkers down and gets inventing. He comes up with two key bits of technology: suits of death ray-proof armour for a special detail of police officers to wear and a gas that neutralizes the effects of Alosun (something which one might reasonably expect to crop up to bite him in the ass in the future but not so, as far as I can tell). The subsequent gang round-up is almost 100% effective, with the exception being that the Faceless Phantom pulls his signature trick and disappears in a cloud of purple mist.

    Thanks to his Alosun-enhanced senses, this time when the Faceless Phantom disappears Doc is able to identify that he is doing so using an Ancient Egyptian alchemical preparation called Kalodin, and thanks to his well-stocked library he is then able to find a book that tells him how to counter Kalodin’s effects. Thus, the next time the Phantom tries to do a runner he gets a face full of reagent, followed by a sock to the jaw.

    The Faceless Phantom is unmasked, and surprising no one with any degree of genre savvy he turns out to be Police Commissioner Baxter, the character who tagged along with Doc throughout the adventure and mostly got kidnapped over and over again while the Phantom somehow learned all of Doc’s secrets. But he’s been caught and the long nightmare is finally over.

    OR IS IT? No, it isn’t, because Baxter still had some Alosun hidden away for a rainy day and he gets ahold of it just in time to ruin is own execution, thanks to a crooked prison guard. Side note: Baxter’s tattered clothing in the above panels is not as a result of his escape attempt – he was dressed in them already when he was led in. Was this some sort of attempt to save money on prison uniforms by giving condemned men the worst one or something?

    Baxter resumes his life as the Faceless Phantom, pledging to make the whole country pay. Thanks to his Kalodin-derived invisibility and his residual Alosun strength he is able to form a gang and start up a crime spree with great alacrity.

    As is often the case, a successful crimewave becomes a systematic campaign of terror and looting becomes a plan to take over the US by kidnapping the entire Senate. This is the point at which Doc Strange catches up with the Phantom – that’s him in the lower right in gangster cosplay – and strikes back by packing the Senate galleries with gun-toting lawmen who engage the Faceless Phantom gang in what I would call an irresponsibly large gun battle. No senator catches a stray bullet on panel though, so I guess you could call the operation a success.

    Things come to a head on the wing of a plane in which the Faceless Phantom is escaping with a re-re-re-kidnapped Virginia. Though both hero and villain are juiced up on Alosun, Doc wins out in the end and punches the Phantom clean off of the plane, at which point he dusts off his hands and declares that the Faceless Phantom is finally dead, despite the fact that his own Alosun-powered body has survived similar falls on many occasions. Will this come back to bite Doc Strange in the ass? Only in that he will be more surprised than he should be when the Phantom returns in 1942. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 817: ELENA

    (The Spirit Section, 9 June, 1940)

    Elena is Mr Mystic’s recurring female foe, the Tigress to his Zatara. Unlike the Tigress, however, Elena isn’t in it for the money but rather as an agent of chaos out to maximize the amount of war and bloodshed in the world, as in her first appearance, in which she is acting as the power behind the throne of fascist dictator Karoly Gore.

    The final confrontation between Elena and Mr Mystic is also the introduction of the concept that two magic users are unable to affect one another via magic, which is foundational to the Mr Mystic mythos and also a pretty good way to make your wizard duels more likely to be fist fights if that’s what you like to draw. Don’t worry about Elena in that last panel – it’s a deceptively short cliff, and Mr Mystic collars her soon after this jump.

    Though she is set to be executed for her role in Karoly Gore’s administration, Elena escapes by means of some death-feigning pills provided by her old friend Dr Gung, and hopefully it’s the kind of fake death that put you in a coma of some sort because she has to be shipped from Central Europe to Hong Kong before Gung can wake her up and that would be a heckuva long time to stare at the inside of a coffin lid. Though Mr Mystic shows up soon after Elena to harsh the vibe, he focuses a bit more on Dr Gung’s unholy experiments than making sure that she doesn’t get away. Dr Gung WILL RETURN in the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up.

    Elena returns a few weeks later to interfere in the politics of the… Asian? country of Cadiwa, which is styled as India-ajacent, yes, but whose premier meets up with Elena in Nigeria and so, given the lack of any other geographic hints, I keep wanting to say is in Africa. This appearance marks the beginning of a potential romance between Elena and Mr Mystic, expressed by both when Elena is wounded while trying to escape.

    Budding romance or not, the next time that Mr Mystic pops in to check up on her he finds that she has been up to her old chaotic tricks and has been influencing King Bahroud of Cadiwa to declare war on his neighbours, thus ending centuries of peace. Clearly, this cannot stand. 

    Mr Mystic and Elena bicker their way into a magical duel, and while I said earlier that magic-users not being able to affect one another with their spells led to a lot of fist fights, that was only a partial truth, because it also leads to this kind of magical battle in which each party summons proxies, such as Mr Mystic’s giant kitty cat, to fight on their behalf. 

    Elena is defeated and reveals that her magic was granted to her by a “Cardin the Terrible” on the condition that she never lose a magical duel. Which she has just done, so bye-bye magical powers. Further, losing her magic causes Elena to turn into a small child.

    Now… there is an important question about this whole situation that is never actually answered: does Elena turn into a child as a part of the “lose a duel; lose your powers” curse as a cheeky little joke by Cardin the Terrible or because she was a child given the form of an adult as part of getting those powers? This is important mainly because Mr Mystic returns her to her adult form at the end of the episode and then they basically immediately become engaged, and it’s a very different situation, depending. 

    Cardin the Terrible himself shows up in the next installment, looking to torture Elena to death for failure, but we don’t learn too much more about him than this classic Bad Boss behaviour. Just why did he send an agent out into the world to spread chaos and war? Not a clue. What is certain however is that Mr Mystic totally murderizes him, which weirdly would indicate that he was less magical than his own protege.

    Elena spends the remainder of 1940 keeping her head down as Mr Mystic’s companion/fiance, though she does spend some time in the future as a captive of the Moon King and almost getting murdered in place of the Goddess of Fire.

    Elena’s run in the Spirit Section and as Mr Mystic’s fiance comes to an end in the second-to-last episode of the year, on 22 December, 1940. Mr Mystic had butted heads with his occasional ally/personification of death/future Divine Round-Up subject the Shadowman a few times in the weeks leading up to this, and the Shadowman’s response was to take away the thing that Mr Mystic loved best, i.e., Elena. There’s some pretty heavy allegory work going on that makes it unclear if Elena has fallen in actual love with the Shadowman and gone to live with him in the afterlife, or if the whole thing is just standing in for her dying and the love that Elena is expressing is just an expression of the natural cycle of life and death. Either way, Mr Mystic is sad, but worry not: he’s standing next to his new love interest Penny Douglas in that second last panel. The man move fast!

    So here’s to Elena, a fun villain and adequate supporting cast member who I hope is somewhere in a loving relationship with Death. Eat your heart out, Thanos.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 816: THE MASTERMIND

    (The Spirit, “the Mastermind Strikes”, 6 October, 1940)

    The Mastermind is really Joel Kenner, a mayoral candidate who tries to get his Tough on Crime campaign a boost by murdering both of his campaign managers and blaming the deaths on the Spirit. This ends poorly for Kenner, who ends up stabbing himself with his own knife like a complete dolt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 815: ORANG, THE APE MAN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 815: ORANG, THE APE MAN

    (The Spirit, “Orang, the Ape Man”, 1 September 1940)

    After an indeterminate time away (ten to fifteen years, I reckon), Dr Hoyd returns to the United States from Europe and reconnects with his colleague Dr Egel. Upon retiring to Egel’s home, Hoyd is astonished to meet Orang, an orangutan who Egel has imbued with human-level intelligence via training and brain surgery. Dr Hoyd is astonished and delighted by this.

    Hoyd is far less impressed when he tries to reconnect with his daughter Elsa who he had entrusted to Dr Egel to take care of following the death of his wife and I guess just… never really communicated with after that? I say this because Dr Egel has used her as the subject of another of his experiments and regressed her to a wild ape-woman, and maybe Hoyd would have known that something was up if he was in regular contact with his kid.

    Dr Hoyd, broken-hearted, is prepared to take the law into his own hands and murder Egel for his actions, but is talked out of it by the Spirit. He is then immediately murdered by Egel, using Elsa as his weapon.

    Simultaneously, Orang has some sort of mental break when it dawns on him that he has human reasoning but is not human and determines that he must kill Egel in revenge for his now tormented existence, and while I don’t agree with the philosophical underpinnings of Orang’s reasoning, it is about time for Dr Egel to get his comeuppance, so I’ll allow it.

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    Orang slays Elsa and then tracks Dr Egel to the docks, where he kills his creator and then ends his own life. A sad end.

    OR IS IT? No it is not, as Orang turns out to have a thick skull or a shaky hand and survives his own suicide attempt. After seeking out medical treatment he ends up in the care of Police Commissioner Dolan. I quite like the Orang/Dolan dynamic, which is an odd couple-type relationship founded on an argument about whether you can arrest someone for being a talking ape, but Orang eventually spoils it by kidnapping Ellen Dolan and running off to Borneo to be with his people.

    The Spirit of course sets off in hot pursuit and catches up to the two of them just as Orang has finally worn out his welcome with the group of orangutans he set up house with in Borneo. It seems that “meeting a sad and lonely end” was always his destiny, as he ends up being killed by rival ape Aaka whilst being dramatically silhouetted against the Moon.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 814: SARKU

    (The Spirit Section, 25 August, 1940)

    I’ve mentioned before that the foes faced by magical Golden Age super-heroes break down into roughly three types: 1) regular crooks who are there to be clowned upon, 2) legitimate threats with equivalent magical power of their own and 3) crooks with a little magical power, who provide a Iof a challenge but are ultimately also clowned upon. Sarku is the third type, and has set out, fresh out of prison, to get revenge on those who put him there. Also, like all magic users in “Mr Mystic,” Sarku has an innate resistance to magic that makes even low-level practicioners more of a challenge to Our Hero than they would be to a Zatara or a Yarko.

    By the time Mr Mystic has been brought in on the case, Sarku has already murdered the (police?) Commissioner of the unnamed Indian city he was incarcerated in and escaped via some handy teleportation magic. Though Mystic interrupts his attempt on the life of the French Consul, Sarku escapes again, this time into the far future world of 2050 AD.

    (just what had prevented him from time travelling or indeed merely teleporting out of his prison cell over the ten years of his incarceration is not elaborated upon. Perhaps he only just got the knack)

    Sarku does a bit of premature gloating before learning that Mr Mystic can also travel through time, and the two are quickly engaged in a high-speed rocket chase to the Moon. 

    Mystic ends up shooting Sarku down as they approach the Moon’s surface, and he makes the grim choice to pop his corpse into a handy corpse container (originally intended for the evocatively-named by alas never-seen “Moon King’s mummy”) as a sort of general warning to all would-be murderers who might be wandering around on the Moon. That’s it for Sarku!

    But perhaps I spoke too soon! Sarku is back in the next “Mr Mystic” installment, and though we don’t get to see any mummies, we are treated to a Moon King, as a not-so-dead Sarku is brought before Tan Tan, King of the Moon by his subjects. It turns out that he wasn’t quite dead when Mr Mystic shoved him in that tube, which is great for him now but horrifying in retrospect.

    Tan Tan turns out to have a weird crush on the (to him) historical figure of Elena, former Mr Mystic villain and current Mr Mystic fiance (stay tuned for her entry), and trades Sarku a space fleet for her.

    Sarku’s attempt to get revenge on the entire population of Earth for a 1930-1940 AD prison sentence that almost nobody in 2050 AD would have been alive at the same time as, let alone had anything to do with, is foiled once again by Mr Mystic, who leaves nothing to chance this time as he socks Sarku out the spaceship’s hatch and into the void of space (Tan Tan, by contrast gets a mere sock in the jaw for his creepy Elena-napping. The perks of royalty, eh?).

    REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/2+

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 813: YAGOR

    (The Spirit, “The Death Dolls”, 4 August, 1940)

    In terms of villainy, Yagor ain’t much. Formerly chief engineer at the Battle Arms Co, Yagor murdered the inventor Kalin and stole his inventions and is trying to sell them on when the Spirit tracks him down in a small New England town. Though he gets the drop on the Spirit and captures him when he shows up to take him in, Yagor is undone by his own poor salesmanship and the crucial lack of imagination possessed by munitions buyer Emil Kampf, who dismisses a working robot soldier as a useless toy without, for instance, considering the possibility inherent in a bit of armour plating.

    Among Yagor’s many shortcomings is dismal salesmanship and specifically his failure to present Kampf with the other invention that he stole from Kalin, a smaller automaton capable of tracking a person across tens if not hundreds of kilometres, navigating such obstacles as sheer walls and subway systems, in order to kill them via explosion. Instead, he sends one, charmingly named Jepetto, to kill Kampf.

    (perhaps the oddest thing about this assassination is that as Jepetto is tracking down and killing Kampf Yagor and the Spirit are in New England listening for news of the explosion on the radio, and while this is in the days when the Spirit’s adventures were still set in New York City, the whole process must have taken hours if not days to complete, even if the “dark. mysterious fishing village” of Cape Haven were somehow both at the Southern border of Connecticut and “out of the tourist route.” Just standing around at gunpoint for three days while a small robot walks down the East Coast)

    But perhaps I am giving Yagor too much grief. After all, he was the chief engineer at that munitions company, not the chief salesman. Surely after bungling two whole opportunities to sell his robots (I’m counting the assassination because I think that loading that little robot up with a couple of water balloons or the like would have been a very good proof of concept indeed) he will rally and hike up his pants and really put in a good effort in his next black market arms presentation. What’s that? He just loaded all of his remaining Death Dolls (which is what the little assassin-bots are called) into a big robot soldier and sent them to attack New York for no good reason? Yagor, no. You’re going to get caught by the Spirit!

    Yagor got caught by the Spirit, you guys.