The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Hawkman

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 237: CZAR THE UNKILLABLE MAN

    (Flash Comics v1 007, 1940)

    Like Echo or Hugo Strange’s Monster Men before him, Czar the Unkillable Man is arguably less a super-villain than a tool created by a super-villain, but where’s the fun in listing a buncha guys named Dr Samuels and Professor Tompkins or in this case Boris Nickaloff?

    Nickaloff is a bit of a mystery – he creates Czar by sculpting a complete human body – inside and out – out of “plasm-clay” and then shocking it to life with a shot of adrenaline. Is this meant to be mad science? Magic? A modern day Pygmalion story? No clues are given. Probably science if the adrenaline is any hint, but I prefer to think it’s reality-bending mad art.

    Nickaloff gets Czar to rob some banks and kill a bunch of people, and it’s here that he maybe turn out to be a bit less of a tool than old Echo after all, as he sets about his rampages with  a bit more gusto than is required. He also kidnaps Shiera Sanders in a fit of man-monster horniness, which is both telling and gross.

    Hawkman of course can’t let such wanton killing and reallocation of funds stand, and he eventually stumbles upon the Unkillable Man’s weakness: he still has to breathe. To be clear, he stumbles upon it because Nickaloff repeatedly states that it is Czar’s only weakness in a loud, clear voice, which favour Hawkman repays by killing the both of them via a set of bolas to the neck.

    (as seen above, Hawkman initially thinks that he is dealing with a vampire rather than a living statue and I must say that I love this kind of thing much much more than when the hero jumps to a wild conclusion that is correct. Keep up the dumbass guesses, Hawkman!)

    As an addendum, an honour! Hawkman gets a vote of thanks from the banks!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 237: CZAR THE UNKILLABLE MAN

    (Flash Comics v1 007, 1940)

    Like Echo or Hugo Strange’s Monster Men before him, Czar the Unkillable Man is arguably less a super-villain than a tool created by a super-villain, but where’s the fun in listing a buncha guys named Dr Samuels and Professor Tompkins or in this case Boris Nickaloff?

    Nickaloff is a bit of a mystery – he creates Czar by sculpting a complete human body – inside and out – out of “plasm-clay” and then shocking it to life with a shot of adrenaline. Is this meant to be mad science? Magic? A modern day Pygmalion story? No clues are given. Probably science if the adrenaline is any hint, but I prefer to think it’s reality-bending mad art.

    Nickaloff gets Czar to rob some banks and kill a bunch of people, and it’s here that he maybe turn out to be a bit less of a tool than old Echo after all, as he sets about his rampages with  a bit more gusto than is required. He also kidnaps Shiera Sanders in a fit of man-monster horniness, which is both telling and gross.

    Hawkman of course can’t let such wanton killing and reallocation of funds stand, and he eventually stumbles upon the Unkillable Man’s weakness: he still has to breathe. To be clear, he stumbles upon it because Nickaloff repeatedly states that it is Czar’s only weakness in a loud, clear voice, which favour Hawkman repays by killing the both of them via a set of bolas to the neck.

    (as seen above, Hawkman initially thinks that he is dealing with a vampire rather than a living statue and I must say that I love this kind of thing much much more than when the hero jumps to a wild conclusion that is correct. Keep up the dumbass guesses, Hawkman!)

    As an addendum, an honour! Hawkman gets a vote of thanks from the banks!

  • NOTES – FEBRUARY 2023

    The Whip is an okay character aside from the brownface bit but one thing I absolutely love about him is that although he does a credible job at the Ineffectual Secret Identity act he also just travels from town to town with an enormous black horse.

    (Flash Comics v1 005, 1940) 

    Names:

    This old dude shares his name with Kurt Busiek’s Astro City character Samaritan! The tally of comics characters named Asa Martin stands at 2! (Flash Comics v1 010, 1940)

    Same issue’s Hawkman story features a (bad) guy named John Denver!

    I’m usually pretty good at catching allusions and so forth in these old comics but I have no idea why Joe Magee = “always bungling something” (Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

    Places: It’s a bit hard to make out but the flash on this armoured car seems to place Seguro in “New Texirona” rather than New Mexico, which might just be the most egregious example of 40s comics writers avoiding real place names that I’ve ever encountered. (Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

    This is how I order in restaurants, too. (Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

    Number of references to “the Third Degree” aka the cops torturing someone as a positive thing this month: 3

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 235: THE ORDER OF ASSASSINS

    (Flash Comics v1 005, 1940)

    It’s another version of the old Order of Assassins, this time as a revival founded by a supposed descendant of Hassan-i Sabbah, the original Assassin of yore, though since he died in 1124 AD there’s a decent chance that anybody is his descendant. 

    Legitimacy aside, this buncha yahoos operates out of a city-fortress called Alamut (but somewhere in the vicinity of Egypt rather than Iran) and is engaged in a somewhat nebulous plot to conquer the world by assassinating various leaders, including that of the very delicious-sounding nation of Frappe. Hawkman foils this scheme with a few well-placed sling bullets, but even though their leaders are killed, the bulk of the organization survives, possibly as part of the next iteration of the Order, whenever that crops up.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 235: THE ORDER OF ASSASSINS

    (Flash Comics v1 005, 1940)

    It’s another version of the old Order of Assassins, this time as a revival founded by a supposed descendant of Hassan-i Sabbah, the original Assassin of yore, though since he died in 1124 AD there’s a decent chance that anybody is his descendant. 

    Legitimacy aside, this buncha yahoos operates out of a city-fortress called Alamut (but somewhere in the vicinity of Egypt rather than Iran) and is engaged in a somewhat nebulous plot to conquer the world by assassinating various leaders, including that of the very delicious-sounding nation of Frappe. Hawkman foils this scheme with a few well-placed sling bullets, but even though their leaders are killed, the bulk of the organization survives, possibly as part of the next iteration of the Order, whenever that crops up.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 232: THE THOUGHT TERROR

    (Flash Comics v1 004, 1940)

    I have complicated feelings about the Thought Terror! He has both good and bad traits! 

    Off the bat, the basics. His costume choice is pretty entry level for the Golden Age, but suitable for a guy who employs eye-based super-powers (which he does) and wants to project a certain aura of fear. 

    His name, by contrast, is both unusual and bad, and made all the worse for the fact that it’s almost good. Terror is usually a decent word to use in a name but it just doesn’t have the gravitas to work with a mealy word like Thought. The Thought Tyrant, the Thought Titan, the Thinking Terror… there had to be a better name.

    But maybe a poorly thought-out name is appropriate for this guy, because he’s not a very good planner in general. See, he has these amazing hypnotic powers, and he uses them to convince a little cult of people that he has amazing precognitive powers. He tells fortunes at a hundred bucks a pop and then fulfils them by planting hypnotic suggestions in his subjects’ minds, causing them to act out his predictions.

    Ordinarily, I’d be cheering for this guy – the thing that thinking a lot about super-villains does is give you a lot of opinions about how they should all just stick to easy small-scale scores and that’s what this is – but TT must be getting bored, because he’s making predictions like “you’re going to get drunk and wander into traffic,” and if you’re running a cult complete with costumed goons in New York City in a SUPER-HERO UNIVERSE the thing you absolutely do not want to do is draw attention to yourself by, for instance, killing someone.

    (this does of course happen – Hawkman shows up and ruins the whole operation, including the Thought Terror’s mind)

    One point in the Thought Terror’s favour is his use of costumed goons, in this case dressed just like him and given a dose of hypnotic mind-over-matter treatment such that they are physical powerhouses. Always a great choice, costumed goons. Plus they’re called the Mesmerized Men, a great name!

    Wildly, Thought Terror (without the “the”, not that it improves the name) was brought back in the year of our Lord 2005 along with several other Golden and Silver Age Hawkman foes (Thought Terror specifically in Hawkman v4 039). He’s just kind of a super-torturer, though, and he just kind of disappears halfway through the issue. I guess that’s about as good as he could hope to get.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 231: UNA CATHAY

    (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

    Big fan of Una Cathay! The criminal scientist-type super-villains that you get in the Golden Age could get a little samey after a while – even if they all had their individual weirnesses, they were all of a common stripe – and it’s amazing how fresh a well put-together lady-villain makes the old tropes seem. 

    Una’s main deal was extracting the secret of eternal life from a young scientist named Dick Blendon who, unfortunately for her, was an old college pal of Carter “Hawkman” Hall.

    Like our old pal the Lord of Life, Una’s preferred technique was to administer to her victims a drug that simulated death and then grave-rob their bodies and pretend that she was bringing them back from the dead instead of reviving them. Unlike the Lord of Life, she kept her faux revenants in big jars that she claimed to be full of life-sustaining fluid. Love love love a guy in a big jar with his head poking out. Amazing visuals.

    Una also brings a kind of ambiguously ethnic element to her villainy, which of course means that she has voodoo powers that she nearly manages to kill Hawkman with except that Shiera somehow knows the warning signs of an incipient voodoo execution and saves his ass.

    Everything comes crashing down for Una Cathay after that: Hawkman lets all of the men out of their jars, her pal Count Torgoff falls off a roof while trying to stab Hawkman to death and she herself dies in a Hawkman-caused car accident. It’s almost like you shouldn’t turn to violent crime in your search for immortality, lest violence be meted back unto ye. Or something!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 230: ALEXANDER THE GREAT

    (Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

    On the one hand, Alexander the Great is your standard criminal scientist with an ego as big as his great big head who tries to extort the city of New York just as soon as he has developed the technology necessary to do so, in this case a density increasing ray.

    On the other hand, I like him a whole lot more than most criminal scientists. He’s cool! he wears a tux and is kind of suave! He does have that big ol’ dome, which I love on a science villain. He invites Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders over for dinner in an attempt to negotiate Hawkamn’s uninvolvement with his scheme in a sequence that is so cordial and charming that he might have also been angling for a threesome. Hawkman stabs him in the neck with a trident, which is if nothing else, not a common way to die. 

    Top marks to Alexander the Great, in other words. I wish he had showed up again outside of that one All-Star Squadron story that also had Sieur Satan in it.

    BONUS:

    Hawkman takes the density ray as a trophy!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: HATH-SET 1940

    What was Hath-Set up to in 1940?

    That’s actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s origin story.

    Of course, it didn’t start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some 3000 years later to do it all over again. Nice and simple. But comic books are comic books, so all three of these fools have been reincarnated more times than any reasonable person would care to count, including retroactively as characters like the Silent Knight. Hath-Set himself doesn’t always show up – his piddly number of appearances in any incarnation would probably net him the status of minor super-villain if he wasn’t such an integral part of the Hawks’ origin story.

    As for Doctor Hastor: he electrocutes passengers on the New York subway system in an attempt to extort the city for big bux but before he can get any further Hawkman shows up, there’s some back-and-forth that includes an attempt to sacrifice Shiera Sanders to Anubis, and Hawkman shoots Hastor dead with a crossbow.

    Don’t worry, he’ll be back!

  • SUPER-VILLAIN YEARBOOK: HATH-SET 1940

    What was Hath-Set up to in 1940?

    That’s actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s origin story.

    Of course, it didn’t start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some 3000 years later to do it all over again. Nice and simple. But comic books are comic books, so all three of these fools have been reincarnated more times than any reasonable person would care to count, including retroactively as characters like the Silent Knight. Hath-Set himself doesn’t always show up – his piddly number of appearances in any incarnation would probably net him the status of minor super-villain if he wasn’t such an integral part of the Hawks’ origin story.

    As for Doctor Hastor: he electrocutes passengers on the New York subway system in an attempt to extort the city for big bux but before he can get any further Hawkman shows up, there’s some back-and-forth that includes an attempt to sacrifice Shiera Sanders to Anubis, and Hawkman shoots Hastor dead with a crossbow.

    Don’t worry, he’ll be back!