The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: bandit

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 380: THE ASSASSINS

    (More Fun Comics 065, 1941)

    It’s another version of a revival of the Assassins! These Assassins are very into the accuracy of it all and have their own Alamut HQ and their own top guy named Hassan (presumably followed by Ibn Sabbah but it’s never said in full). Commitment to the bit is not quite enough to save them once second-rate Lawrence of Arabia Lance Larkin gets on the case, however.

    This group were based out of Iran, unlike the Order of Assassins or the Society of Assassins, our previous claimants to the title of The Order of Assassins, Returned, For Real. Of the three, these latest guys are the least assassin-y – they operate a bit more like your standard comic book desert bandits.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 371: THE BLITZ GANG

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 371: THE BLITZ GANG

    (Minute-Man 002, 1941)

    AKA the Blitz Force AKA the Panzer Gang.

    I almost started out by saying that the idea of a criminal gang operating along military lines was an old one but no, it isn’t yet. It’s not a new idea – there might be half a dozen examples in this list so far and I’m sure it cropped up more than once in the pulps – but it’s not quite the mid-tier trope that it eventually will be.

    This time, the idea for a criminal army is inspired by US pre-war military training program crime czar Boss Donker and his don’t-say-he’s-a-Nazi pal Baron Marz have hatched a scheme that takes advantage of the readily-available supply of Army-trained men: arm them and loot cities wholesale (with an optional attempt to conquer the US for “the Fatherland,” wherever that is.

    And of course it all goes swimmingly until Minute-man shows up.

    The best part of the story by far is this bit here. Baron Marz has seemingly killed Minute-Man with a falling block of stone and Slippy, the only former gangster army recruit who doesn’t want to return to a life of crime, is about to take up the mantle in his honour. It’s actually kind of too bad that Minute-Man wasn’t actually dead, because having the identity change hands this way might have given him an interesting hook at last – maybe it could have been a series about person after person taking on th role of Minute-Man as needed and as the previous one falls instead of about a third-rate Captain America knockoff.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 368: GENGHIS KHAN THE SECOND

    (Minute-Man 002, 1941)

    Genghis Khan the Second, like our poor deceased pal Stuporman, is a giant quasi-superhuman imported from far-off Mongolia by a gang boss for use as exotic muscle.

    The difference between Stuporman ad our guy here, however, is that he is not content to be anyone’s stooge. Genghis Khan the Second bumps off his would-be masters on page 2 of the story and promptly sets his Mongolian Horde to looting and pillaging the countryside using their mastery of horse-mounted archery (I assume). It’s honestly the gang boss’ own fault he gets it in the neck – imagine assuming that someone who chose the nae Genghis Khan the Second being content to act as second fiddle in what appears to be a two-person gang.

    Of course the Army eventually gets involves, and Minute-Man, as part of that army, ends up dropping a mountain on the whole lot of them. It’s fine. The real star of the story for me is the teen in the above image – I reckon that those middle three panels are one of the better bits of comedy I have seen in a Golden Age comic.

    ADDENDUM: forgot to mention that the guy who imports GKII and his Mongol Horde lives in one of the castles of California’s popular Castle District.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 349: THE GHOST KILLERS

    (Master Comics 012, 1941)

    Maybe someday I’ll wish that I had started out putting all of the various gangs of masked Western outlaws in group posts like the generic villains or mad scientists. But maybe not, because the major difference between those three groups is that the other two are par for the course in a super-hero comic while masked outlaws are frequently the only interesting thing about a Western comic.

    Anyway: the Ghost Killers (unofficial name – they are hard to find and they kill witnesses) are fun because they are made up of the remnants of the White Arrow’s gang and achieve their ghostly status by operating out of the town jail, coming and going via some loose bars until Marshal Buck Jones gets wise and slaps leather, rendering one of them and actual ghost and sending the other two to big boy jail.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 345: THE WHITE ARROW

    (Master Comics 008-011, 1940-1941)

    A regular-style Old West outlaw chief with the somewhat lyrical name of Santos Figaro, the White Arrow’s main distinction is that he was a multi-issue rather than one-off foe of Marshal Buck Jones.  

    Jones himself is far more interesting than poor Santos Figaro, being a real-life cowboy actor cast as an Old West lawman (probably – I think I’ve mentioned before that the media of the 1930s-40s doesn’t draw a lot of distinction between the Old West and the contemporary West and that sometimes the only way you find out that a series is one or the other is 50 instalments in when the protagonist hops a plane to Chicago). Jones replaced former marshal Bill Crane in Master Comics 006 in a sadly lost-to-history adventure that might contain clues as to whether he was the Buck Jones or just a Buck Jones. 

    Regardless, the “Buck Jones, Frontier Marshal” feature closed its doors after the real Buck Jones died in 1942. Given that, it is somewhat ironic that Master Comics was one of the books to eventually carry the adventures of Old West cowboy Tom Mix based on the Western actor who had died in 1940.

    UPDATE: I finally got to read Master Comics 006, in which Buck Jones takes over for Bill Crane, and it’s almost but not quite as unclear about the time period as the issues I already had access to. Buck Jones is a famous actor moving to what is effectively the past for a bit of a break from modern life and when Crane is wounded he is sworn in as the new marshal. Jones is simultaneously a recognizable celebrity and living in a place with no technology more modern than the steam engine. Baffling!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 172: THE LARGEST MAN IN THE WORLD

    (Bulletman 001, 1941)

    The Largest Man in the World is exactly what it says on the tin: an unfeasibly enormous dude. By himself, not much of a threat so long as he gets a regular supply of molasses to eat. It’s just too bad for society that he is spotted by crooks and used as a living siege weapon to rob and kill.

    The really remarkable thing about the Largest Man in the World is that his gangster pal is Machine Gun Kelly. Like, the real guy – the actual real-world crook. This is completely wild to me for two reasons. Firstly, Machine Gun Kelly was jailed in 1933 and died in prison, so when this comic came out he had not been a real-world crime concern in over 8 years.

    Secondly, I think I’ve mentioned how Golden Age comics frequently went out of their way not to use actual country names, and with people, even criminal people, it’s even more pronounced. Al Capone isn’t going to show up in a comic, but Al Tyrone, Al Maloney or Andy Carpon will. Hell, Adolf Hitler largely appears under light pseudonyms before the US enters WWII. It’s weird and wild to see Machine Gun Kelly just running around talking about his machine gun, and that’s before they kill him – a man who will go on to live for another 13 years in prison, remember – off!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 169: THE SWAMP MASTER

    (Blue Beetle Comics 010, 1941)

    Once again I am faced with the painful dichotomy of a villain with all of the trappings I love – he’s a bombastic loudmouth with a bunch of costumed henchmen, who uses simple trickery to appear superhuman – but uses them in service to some frankly uninspired crimes.

    In this case, the Swamp Master (great name, too!) emerges from the swamp (natch) with his wet-suited Swampmen and a saurian monster that is actually a disguised series of cranes and flatcars. Driven by a lust for cold hard cash, he and the Swampmen steal whole trains and remove them to the swamp for looting.

    The problem with this scheme is… everything? Stealing and looting entire trains (and murdering everyone on board!) might be a viable money-making scheme if you’re mobile, but just sitting in one place and doing it over and over, particularly in a super-hero universe, is a surefire ticket to jail or the grave, and the Swamp Master is lucky that he got the former.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 105: THE SKULL

    (More Fun Comics 056, 1940)

    It’s somewhat weird, but this is the second guy named the Skull to operate out of the Belgian Congo in 1940. I say somewhat because it’s one of a handful of places that name-checked in comics set in Africa at the time. Once you get past Belgian Congo, Egypt, Libya, Algeria or South Africa it’s pretty much Jungle or Desert as locations, and half of those countries made the list because there were a bunch of comics about the French Foreign Legion early on.

    Anyway, the Skull. He’s the first foe of Congo Bill and he wears a little skullcap-cum-helmet, which I like. I also like the weird yellow pee-stain they keep putting around his mouth. I don’t know why it’s there but it makes him very distinctive.

    SKULL SCORE: 2/5 The lipless mouth and barely-there nose evoke a skull, sure, but if I was in charge of giving him a nickname would I call him Skull? Or would it be Chompers?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 105: THE SKULL

    (More Fun Comics 056, 1940)

    It’s somewhat weird, but this is the second guy named the Skull to operate out of the Belgian Congo in 1940. I say somewhat because it’s one of a handful of places that name-checked in comics set in Africa at the time. Once you get past Belgian Congo, Egypt, Libya, Algeria or South Africa it’s pretty much Jungle or Desert as locations, and half of those countries made the list because there were a bunch of comics about the French Foreign Legion early on.

    Anyway, the Skull. He’s the first foe of Congo Bill and he wears a little skullcap-cum-helmet, which I like. I also like the weird yellow pee-stain they keep putting around his mouth. I don’t know why it’s there but it makes him very distinctive.

    SKULL SCORE: 2/5 The lipless mouth and barely-there nose evoke a skull, sure, but if I was in charge of giving him a nickname would I call him Skull? Or would it be Chompers?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 104: THE WOLF MAN

    (More Fun Comics 055, 1940) 

    The Wolf Man:

    – has a bunch of trained wolves

    – wears a wolfskin outfit complete with wolf head cowl

    – constantly refers to himself as the Wolf Man

    – exclusively robs prospectors in the Canadian wilderness.

    The Wolf Man puts in too much effort, in other words.