The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: minor super-villain

  • 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. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 812: PALYACHI, THE KILLER CLOWN

    (The Spirit, “Palyachi the Killer Clown”, 28 July, 1940)

    Ah, the crime clown. Always glad to see another one, and one with such an illustrious name, kind of! (I wanted to do some sort of riff on “but doctor, I am Palyachi” but a) it seems like the basic joke has existed jince the 1800s, the first place that Pagliacci was specifically named as the sad clown on the doctor’s couch might actually have been in Watchmen and b) I couldn’t think of one)

    This particular clown turns to crime at the urging of Nonspecific Circus Performer Marka, who puts off his marriage proposals with suggestions that he first kill her enemy Flipo the acrobat and then steal various riches for her. As is obvious to the reader but not to Palyachi, he will never actually do enough to win her heart, but that Palyachi, he just keeps on killing and trying.

    Marva does eventually see the danger of turning your unrequited suitor into an unstoppable killing machine, and so sells him out to the Spirit at the first opportunity. Unfortunately for her, while the Spirit is out hunting for Palyachi, Palyachi returns to where Marva is waiting for the Spirit (completely nude, by the way, because Marva is the horniest woman in a comic full of horny women). Palyachi finally goes completely mad and Marva meets her end at his hands.

    That’s a wrap on Palyachi, and despite the Spirit’s weird defense of him in the final panels, I have to say that no, I don’t think that it was all Marva’s fault. Call me a crank, but I don’t think that being really, really horny is a valid excuse for committing at least four murders, even if you sincerely believe that murdering people might help you get some.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 811: QUEEN RANA

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 811: QUEEN RANA

    (The Spirit Section, 14 July, 1940)

    Queen Rana is the bearer of the Amulet of Ra, a mystic artifact that grants immortality and invulnerability to the one who wears it. Rana’s one ambition in her immortal life is to have a “huge rock of gold” and to that end she has established herself as the ruler of a jungle tribe and turned them to banditry. Is this a good use of eternal life? No it is not. Is it likely to result in her getting a huge rock of gold? Almost certainly not. Is this the sort of ambition that, when achieved, is going to leave her feeling kind of hollow inside? Absolutely.

    Mr Mystic, at the behest of the council of Lamas who empowered him, sets off into the jungle to put a stop to Queen Rana and to destroy the Amulet of Ra, and here is where I personally developed a deep affection for Rana as a villain, because she approaches being immortal, invulnerable and, it turns out, immune to Mr Mystic’s magic as license to be just a complete roughneck brawler. She tackles Mystic and nearly cuts him in two while your typical comic book immortal would still be delivering their opening monologue about how lonely they get. It’s frankly the sort of behaviour we should see more in the immortal community.

    Unfortunately for me and my love of fun characters, the fact that Rana viewed immortality merely as an increased chance to get ahold of that big gold she coveted so much really did point to her being a dummy. Mr Mystic has basically no trouble at all in getting her to trade the Amulet of Ra for a big pile of gold that he, a man who she has seen create illusions mere minutes before has created out of thin air, and after that it’s all over, as Queen Rana’s two centuries of unaging catch up to her all at once. A sad end to a real scrapper of a character.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 811: QUEEN RANA

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 811: QUEEN RANA

    (The Spirit Section, 14 July, 1940)

    Queen Rana is the bearer of the Amulet of Ra, a mystic artifact that grants immortality and invulnerability to the one who wears it. Rana’s one ambition in her immortal life is to have a “huge rock of gold” and to that end she has established herself as the ruler of a jungle tribe and turned them to banditry. Is this a good use of eternal life? No it is not. Is it likely to result in her getting a huge rock of gold? Almost certainly not. Is this the sort of ambition that, when achieved, is going to leave her feeling kind of hollow inside? Absolutely.

    Mr Mystic, at the behest of the council of Lamas who empowered him, sets off into the jungle to put a stop to Queen Rana and to destroy the Amulet of Ra, and here is where I personally developed a deep affection for Rana as a villain, because she approaches being immortal, invulnerable and, it turns out, immune to Mr Mystic’s magic as license to be just a complete roughneck brawler. She tackles Mystic and nearly cuts him in two while your typical comic book immortal would still be delivering their opening monologue about how lonely they get. It’s frankly the sort of behaviour we should see more in the immortal community.

    Unfortunately for me and my love of fun characters, the fact that Rana viewed immortality merely as an increased chance to get ahold of that big gold she coveted so much really did point to her being a dummy. Mr Mystic has basically no trouble at all in getting her to trade the Amulet of Ra for a big pile of gold that he, a man who she has seen create illusions mere minutes before has created out of thin air, and after that it’s all over, as Queen Rana’s two centuries of unaging catch up to her all at once. A sad end to a real scrapper of a character.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 810: MR MIDNIGHT

    (The Spirit, “Mr Midnight”, 14 July, 1940)

    Mr Midnight is your classic police taunter, a crook who not only thinks that they have the wherewithal to pull off the perfect crime but is so confident that they decide to tip off the cops to their plans. In this specific instance, the villain is a dapper blue-skinned fellow who has not only informed the police but the Spirit as well, and further has declared that he will commit his murder in the very office of Police Commissioner Dolan. And he does it! Ellison Wright, Midnight’s erstwhile blackmailer, dutifully shows up and drops dead at the stroke of midnight, and since Happy O’Day, the coroner, declares the death as due to heart failure, Mr Midnight walks right on out the door afterward.

    This is where your “perfect crime” criminals often make their mistake, because while the fact that it can’t actually be proven that Mr Midnight killed Wright might keep the police off of his back, the Spirit is a vigilante, and doesn’t exactly have to worry about things like “the letter of the law” or “evidence” or “not showing up in someone’s house unexpectedly”. He just has the fact that Midnight said that he was going to commit murder to go off of, plus the knowledge that Happy O’Day just loves to call any unexplained death heart failure – not a month and a half earlier he said that Denny “the Spirit” Colt had died of heart failure, after all.

    Indeed, Mr Midnight is almost comically eager to confess that he did it. Midnight, aka John Caliban, was once a stage heartthrob whose life was ruined when he fell in love with a married woman. Blackmailed into poverty by Ellison Wright and turned blue seemingly incidentally by a cosmetics mishap, Caliban murders first his lover and then Wright. 

    What was Caliban’s next move going to be? Impossible to say now, because though he almost gets away when he beans the Spirit with his human skull prop and sets his house on fire, Midnight is captured and dragged back to police headquarters, only to take the ultimate way out via his own poisoned fingernails. A shame – a dapper blue guy would have made a fine addition to any rogue’s gallery.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 809: GANGA LIN

    (The Spirit Section, 7 July, 1940)

    Our first Mr Mystic foe! Mystic’s old pal Mr Cooper brings him in because he’s worried about his daughter Erica’s involvement with a religious group (cult) called the Temple of Lin. It’s always a real toss-up whenever this kind of thing crops up as a comic book plot, between the cult being a total con job and it having some legitimate but sinister basis, and in this case it’s the latter. Mr Mystic goes to the Temple of Lin and after some enhanced interrogation (i.e. partially melting local Lin Temple head Mamsa Lin) learns that Erica Cooper has been mystically transported to the Paradise of Lin, a hidden city in the Himalayas.

    In the meantime, Erica has discovered that perhaps life in a cult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as she is horrified to learn that the Paradise of Lin has a kind of celestial “one in, one out” policy and that in order for her to enter requires the sacrifice of a slave girl. Also, they have slaves, which I would also call a red flag. Luckily for all the women involved in this little altercation, this is the point at which Mr Mystic appears to challenge the cult’s leader, the eight-foot tall mystic Ganga Lin, to a battle to the death.

    Mr Mystic and Ganga Lin engage in astral combat, much as Mystic’s inspiration Yarko the Great did with his foe Shaddiba, only even more homoerotically, with their fully nude and well-muscled astral forms clad only in their signature headwear. Mr Mystic of course comes out on top with a cool astral hawk-on astral deer kill, and he and Erica head back to the US, leaving only one question unanswered: did either of them think to free that poor slave girl/human sacrifice?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 808: THE BLACK QUEEN

    (The Spirit, “The Black Queen”, June 16, 1940)

    We first meet the Black Queen as the otherwise-unnamed defense lawyer in the murder trial of gangster Slot Gorgan. She already has a reputation for being brilliant, and that reputation proves to be accurate, as Gorgan is acquitted despite the evidence against him.

    Upon returning to the Black Queen’s penthouse, we learn that she is in fact the very first in the Spirit’s long line of female villains, as it turns out that she is the brains behind Gorgan’s gang. Unfortunately for Gorgan and the Black Queen, the Spirit has been engaging in the long-standing comic book tradition of getting mad about not-guilty trial results, and so has preceded them to the apartment. Now he knows about about the Black Queen’s crime ties and that Slot was actually guilty.

    The Spirit manages to wrangle a confession out of Slot in the presence of the District Attorney, which results in a retrial for the same murder he was originally accused of (and while I am not even remotely a lawyer I reckon that this is exactly what double jeopardy is supposed to be about? Or is it one of those things where he was tried for second degree murder the first time and first degree the second?). This time, the Black Queen’s brilliant legal mind is merely able to get his sentenced reduced from death to life imprisonment, but importantly she herself is still running the gang when the episode concludes.

    The Black Queen returns a few weeks later having made the astonishing decision to move from being the secret head of her gang (smart, secure) to personally leading them in a raid on the New York Sub-Treasury building* (dumb, risky). Why do this when her prior setup was so good that she got to the end of a “crime doesn’t pay” comic with her crime career still intact? Since she talks about taking 25 million dollars for herself and splitting town, I can only assume that she has grown tired of the admin of running a gang while being a successful attorney and just wants to retire.

    *this might be the fifth time I have read a story in which crooks try to rob the New York Sub-Treasury, and having looked it up to see if it was a thing I have found that a) it was – the US used to keep stores of cash and gold in a few major cities, presumably due to longer travel times in the past and b) the sub-treasury system was phased out in the 1920s. The Black Queen and her fellows are actually trying to break into a building now known as Federal Hall, administered by the National Park Service, and in 1940 occupied by exhibits relating to the New York World’s Fair. This raises the question: is the major divergence of the various super-hero universes from our own in fact the passing of the Independent Treasury Act of 1920?

    Though the Black Queen’s gang are captured before they can get away with either fifty million dollars or some dioramas about the history of finance, she alone manages to escape in her private yacht. Thanks to a timely intervention by the Governor’s island defense batteries, the yacht is disabled (a very rare artillery-based entry in my collection of cops shooting fleeing suspects), but the Black Queen herself remains at large for a second appearance in a row thanks to a frankly amazing hand grenade throw that disables the Spirit’s flying car. 

    The Black Queen’s third and final appearance is also the one in which she makes the jump to being a full-fledged femme fatale in the (eventual) grand Spirit tradition, and I say that not just because she has started wearing hot pants and a bustier as her everyday outfit.

    No, what really puts the fatale into this femme is the fact that she is going around giving men the literal kiss of death via some poisoned lip gloss. I’m not even sure why she kills this guy – just for the hell of it, I suppose, as he seems to be totally okay with working for her.

    But just what was that guy killed for? Why a formula for creating artificial diamonds, which means that along with the sub-treasury thing from earlier, the Black Queen has engaged in two of the biggest non-crimes in comics history!

    The Black Queen has also seduced a jeweller named Abner Ames into acting as a fence for her. The Spirit goes pretty far out of his way to rescue this guy from getting the Kiss of Death and make sure that he isn’t held criminally responsible, and while I commend him for being nice to Ames’ poor wife in this way I would humbly suggest that she would be better off without him.

    (the above panels also reveal that the Black Queen’s calling card is the queen of spades, and as someone who loves categorizing things I am just pleased as punch to have confirmation on exactly which black queen she was going for with than name) 

    Ames having been saved, there is a thrilling chase that culminates in a fight on the superstructure of a bridge. Though the Black Queen almost gets him, the Spirit manages to take her in. Sadly for those of us who enjoy her style, the Black Queen chooses to take her own life rather than face trial, even though she might have been the first person in history for whom self-representation was a good idea.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 807: DR COBRA

    (The Spirit, “The Origin of the Spirit”, June 2, 1940)

    Poor Dr Cobra. He goes to all the trouble to put together a sewer lair and develop some weird green slop that puts people into a state of suspended animation and he doesn’t even get to lay out what his plans for the stuff were. No, PI Denny Colt has to show up and get doused in slop and become the Spirit and now that’s all that anyone ever remembers about the affair. 

    Dr Cobra ends up being the first collar by the newly-disinterred Spirit, with a little help from Police Commissioner Dolan. Oh the ignominy. 

    Unfortunately for Dr Cobra, he knows that the Spirit is Denny Colt, and so the laws of narrative demand that he be tied up as a looses end. In the second installment of “the Spirit” he escapes by bamboozling Dolan’s daughter Ellen, but of course he is immediately tracked down by the Spirit and ends up exploding.

    This all feels a bit thin, and that’s because there’s not too much to Dr Cobra beyond being an origin catalyst. It’s a terrible thing to happen to a villain. He has a handful of appearances over the years, but I’m 90% certain that every one of them is a retelling of the Spirit’s origin story, and though I can’t find an example I am certain that there’s at least one of those in which Cobra is replaced with the Octopus. It’s no way to treat a criminal scientist, I tell you.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 806: THE SCOURGE

    (The Funnies 050, 1940)

    The Scourge is a bandit chief operating in the nonspecific Medieval-pastiche England of the Black Knight, and let me tell you, he is a terrific villain. His amazing look is one thing – just how many Golden Age villains have the confidence to use eye makeup to accentuate their air of menace? – but on top of that I have seldom seen a villain so eager and joyful to torture a peasant woman. Just an amazingly hateable guy, with a really top-notch crew of evil oafs to boot.

    Though the poor woman’s husband and sons set out to avenge her, they prove no match for the Scourge and his band of ruffians, and it falls to the Black Knight and a local hunk to get the job done. 

    It does of course turn out that a good look and a bad attitude will only take you so far, particularly when your follow-up to a a successful heist is to get drunk in the woods for a week straight. The Black Knight and his unnamed and shirtless assistant make quick work of the lot of them once they are able to approach them on equal footing, and the Scourge meets his end by the Black Knight’s Blade.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 805: THE GREAT ONE

    (The Funnies 042, 1940)

    I had great hopes for the Great One, a pirate captain so mysterious that he wears a full-face hood (with nostril holes! The rarest hood hole!) even while hanging out on his own South Pacific island inhabited solely by his own fanatical crew. The black skull insignia alone inspired me to hope that there might be some fun mystery behind that hood for Bruce McKay, formerly Sky Master but now Sky Ranger, to solve when he and his companions are captured by one of the Great One’s lieutenants. 

    Alas, such is not the case. Bruce is pressed into service as a scout pilot for the Great One’s fleet and quickly betrays him to the first freighter captain he sees. His fleet is blown up thanks to the fact that the freighter in question was hauling a load of hand grenades and the Great One himself dies ignominiously and still masked, in a fall from a cliff. I should have known it was all over when they didn’t bother to colour his robe in the second issue.