The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: demons

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 562: THE HARBINGERS OF DEATH

    (Wonderworld Comics 008, 1939)

    As part of Yarko the Great’s second encounter with Death, he and the hapless Madame Punai journeyed to a sort of pastiche underworld (e.g., their journey took them through the Biblical Valley of Death but also involved this unnamed boatman ferrying them across the River Styx). And as with any good underworld pastiche there are some allegorical foes to get past before their goal is reached – the Harbingers of Death!

    Like I said, these guys are allegorical demon guardians, so there isn’t much more to them than the expression of their allegory. First Pain, aka Burning Pain, appears to crush Yarko to his burning body. Good allegory! Pain can overwhelm you – though in a more in-depth work perhaps Yarko would be left with a burn or other lingering reminder of this battle rather than walking away unscathed after hurling pain into the abyss.

    Fear appears next, and I really appreciate that he himself is a fearful creature rather than the more common monstrous fear-beasts that inflict fear by being big and spiky. Like Pain, Fear cannot stand up to Yarko’s overwhelming machismo and slinks back into the shadows from whence it came.

    Finally, Horror is a master of the jump scare and as someone who is particularly vulnerable to that tool of the filmmaker’s art I really appreciate seeing him (them?) be flung off a cliff, probably not to their doom due to being a demon but at the very least to their major inconvenience.

    And there you have it: three lil’ henchmen, three anthropomorphic personifications, three notches in Yarko the Great’s belt.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 556: THE DEVIL

    (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    Maybe it’s because the MLJ version of the Devil is so fresh in my mind but… this is an underwhelming version of the Devil. He teams up with Death – and it’s a measure of how lacklustre this Devil is that I’m going to deal with the Death separately rather than treat them as a duo – to eliminate their common enemy Yarko the Great. Death does all the legwork toward this goal so we’ll discuss that later (I am however going to count them as our first Revenge Squad, one of the best things in comics).

    Aesthetically, this is a classic Devil, though one missing the trident and tail. And like many interpretations of the classic Devil, it suffers from the fact that it looks like a guy in a costume, down to the fact that the horns seem to be incorporated into a cowl rather than being organic. And that can work! I’ve seen plenty of interpretations of the purposely foppish Devil getting one over on those who underestimate him. This Devil, by contrast, has a guy named Beppo with a knife and a skin-tone shirt.

    The Devil does in fairness manage to capture Yarko by the simple expedient of having his other, non-Beppo henchman (Killer Kirby, if you must know) blindfold his magic eyes. The Devil attempts to roast Yarko alive in a special chamber but Yarko escapes by the simple expedient of wiggling his magic eyes out from under the blindfold, and any deathtrap that a guy can blink his way out of has got to be counted as a dud.

    With Yarko free, the devil is immediately

    BANISHED TO HELL

    and it says something that the coolest part of his whole endeavour is the moment that he was soundly defeated. Frankly, he might as well have been a costumed gang boss as the Prince of the Damned, and it just occurred to me how wild it would be if he was just a guy in a costume trying to put one over on Yarko and getting banished to Hades for his efforts. Real of Fake, the Devil bit off more than he could chew.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 532: THE DEVIL

    (Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941)

    This is the same guy as the Dictator but on his time off, I guess? Mr Justice kind of gave up on him after the Green Ghoul incident – maybe he just couldn’t get up the energy to keep running a Nazi Germany analog.

    I think he continues to pop up and empower Mr Justice foes but more importantly he has some very cute little trident-wielding imp goons. No hell-dimension is complete without them!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 527: THE GREEN GHOUL

    (Blue Ribbon Comics 016, 1941)

    The Green Ghoul is a demonic creature either summoned or created by the demon known as the Dictator as a very successful method of getting Mr Justice to leave him alone. He appears on a US beach and lays waste to an unfortunate couple before heading to the unnamed New York City-alike that Mr Justice calls home.

    Like I said, the Green Ghoul is a distraction, so it’s understandable that its plans lack nuance. To whit, his initial plan is just indiscriminate slaughter.

    Having lured Mr Justice back from Europe, the Green Ghoul now needs to occupy his attention, and having murdered and possessed Assistant Mayor Tracey Keen he sets his sights on conquering Unnamed City.

    Also, he LOOKS GREAT. There could e a conversation about how nobody noticed that Keen was obviously a possessed corpse but he is a previously unseen character created expressly for the purpose of being killed off in this story, so maybe he was just Like That already and the Green Ghoul got lucky.

    For a being of great if undefined infernal power, the Ghoul’s plans for municipal domination are surprisingly conventional: he wants to become the mayor. Granted, he wants to do so by killing and possessing the incumbent but it’s still fairly mundane as far as demonic power plays go. Fortunately for Mayor Clark he is unlike his assistant a member in good standing of Mr Justice’s supporting cast and so the various attempts on his life are foiled.

    There’s a bit of story padding in which Mr Justice and the Green Ghoul (plus Mr Justice love interest Pat Clark) duke it out in a dinosaur-infested subatomic world but things eventually come to a head in the space between the mundane world and the spiritual one, one of the few places that an immortal being can be killed, where the Ghoul hopes to do just that to Mr Justice. Unfortunately for the Ghoul, the immortal killing golden knife cuts two ways and he ends up as a cloud of green ocean pollutants.

    killed because he challenges mr justice to a battle to the death in the void between – cuts both ways

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 526: THE DICTATOR

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 526: THE DICTATOR

    (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941)

    I had two surprises coming to me when I read the first appearance of this fellow: 1) though there are a fair few Golden and Silver Age comics that posit some sort of supernatural element to the evils of the Axis power – deals with the Devil, influence by one or another god of war, etc – but this is the earliest example I’ve seen of one of their leaders actually being a supernatural evil.

    If I had previously said that the Dictator’s Shadow was about as close as you could get to someone being a Nazi without actually dipping over the line and just saying it, this comic has somehow elasticized the line and dragged it way over to the other side. The Dictator is Hitler in all but name, and they don’t even go to the trouble of replacing the swastika with another symbol or making up new names for the countries he invades. There are such a small number of changes, in fact, that I will list them now: Germany is referred to as Mitteleuropa (which is a term for Central Europe fairly closely associated with the German imperialism of both World Wars), the Bavarian Alps are instead the Vabarian Alps, and Goebbels is instead called Deenbee (a maddening name because it feels like I should be able to work out a meaning behind it).

    (later there are look-alike analogs of a lot of top Nazis, seen here)

    Mr Justice demonstrates the even-handed political neutrality that comics of the past were always known for and bursts into a staff meeting to give Hitler the Dictator “the most vicious beating a man ever experienced”, as you do.

    Again, this is all politically neutral stuff.

    This conflict continues for a few issues: first, the Dictator arms his nameless Himmler-analog with an anti-ghost potion and sets him the task of killing Mr Justice. This ends in not-Himmler’s  death but also in an important realization for Mr Justice: that the Dictator wields only temporal power in the world, that he can only act through agents. Accordingly, the net two Mr Justice stories concern him killing off analogs of Goering, Goebbels and von Ribbentrop t erode the Dictator’s power base.

    And that’s where it ends, kind of. After Mr Justice strikes, the Dictator returns fire by sending future entry the Green Ghoul to attack America. It take three issues to deal with that guy, and by the next time he shows up the Dictator is just the Devil again – whether or not he is still cosplaying as Hitler is not addressed. I guess that this is going to continue to be a thing when the villain in question is a cosmically evil being, right? They just pack up and go home at the end? A bit unsatisfying from a narrative perspective.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 387: NEGAL

    (More Fun Comics 067, 1941)

    Negal is some sort of demon lord who has been allowing ghosts to leave his realm and harass a guy on Earth. He gets very easily intimidated by Dr Fate’s ability to blow up a skull and doesn’t appear again until Countdown to Mystery in 2007, wherein he is a bit more of a threat.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 320: THE LEGION OF THE DOOMED

    (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

    There’s not much substance to the Legion of the Doomed, but there’s a lot of cool ideas, so lets knock them out.

    a) a weird figure imposes a baby on a couple dwelling in haunted hill country. The baby, it is later revealed, cries with the voice of a man.

    b) subsequently, a killer begins stalking the streets of a nearby city, probably New York. Panic ensues! The Fiery Mask is on the prowl.

    c) somewhat unsurprisingly, the killer and the baby turn out to be one and the same! There’s a missed opportunity for more creepy adult-acting baby, one of my favourite comics tropes. The Fiery Mask witnesses this transformation and manages to stop the next murder…

    d) … and pursues the killer back to whatever level of Comic Book Hell they came from. The Legion of the Doomed are slain! The city is safe! No questions have been answered:

    Why do these killings? Not sure.

    Why the whole ruse with the baby? No idea.

    Has the Legion of the Doomed actually been stopped? Not saying.

    Which actually opens the possibility of these guys being BRUNG BACK. I mean, supernatural killers are a dime a dozen, but these guys bring a creepy baby to the mix, plus they’re very easy to kill. Say they’re on some sort of ~80-year sacrifice cycle and you’re good to go. And it’s a perfect chance to bring the current Fiery Mask out of limbo!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 061: THE DEMON

    (Action Comics 022, 1940)

    Whether the capital-D Demon is actually a lowercase-d demon is never actually resolved, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. He shows up when a friend of Tex Thomson’s named Cary James ignores local superstitions to visit an island in the Indian Ocean, where he is quickly captured and murdered by the Demon, who then assumes his appearance and identity via fell majicks.

    The Demon’s only goal seems to be to murder everyone who knew the original Cary James, but whether there is a further motive to his actions is left unexplained, as one of James’ friends happens to have a mystic amulet that is the only thing capable of defeating him. The amulet must be applied directly to the forehead, like so:

    Love that bop on the head action. I also love that though this is ostensibly a Tex Thomson adventure, he basically acts in the role of observer, as the locket-thrower Dr Drummond drives much of the action of tracking, trapping and ultimately destroying the Demon. Huzzah for competent non title characters!