The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Mister Midnite

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 040

    Lev Gleason’s finest!

    Lance Hale:

    Lance Hale is a soldier of fortune and jungle adventurer who is notable mainly for the fact that in his first appearance he is given super strength by a fellow with the pleasing name of Dr Grantland Grey so that he can help out on an expedition to the stars, and then after returning to Earth he just… stops using the armband that gives him his enhanced strength. He keeps on adventuring, don’t get me wrong, but as a regular jungle guy, ie, a colonialist race science fantasy figure. 

    Hale is slightly more interesting than his contemporaries in the jungle guy community by virtue of the variety of situations that he gets in: there’s the initial space trip that ends up turning into an interdimensional one and then a battle with invading animal men from a parallel world, a delve into a lost underground kingdom in which he incidentally becomes immortal, cursed demon-summoning gemstone action… I assume that the thrills are eventually going to stop coming but 1940 was almost all hits. (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

    Mister Midnite **HERO UPDATE**:

    As you may or may not recall, Mister Midnite is a hero in the classic formal wear style who has one very specific power, to stop clocks by yelling “time stop!” Well! So we thought! It turns out that in his second appearance, Midnite demonstrates a second power, that of being teleported to a vaguely defined location, and also when he has shouts “time stop!” I really wish that there were more than two Mister Midnite stories so that we would have some more data to use in piecing all this together, but as of now I must assume that he has some sort of vaguely defined wishing power and that “time stop!” is its trigger phrase, like Johnny Thunder and “say you.” (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

    the Silver Streak:

    The Silver Streak! Is notable for two (2) reasons, the first of which is that he is a the-title-of-the-comic-book character who doesn’t show up until issue 3, which is the opposite to how it often works, where the title character goes from proudly front and centre to gone in as many issues.

    The second and more interesting thing about the Silver Streak is his origin, which I have tried and failed to summarize in paragraph form, so here goes as bullet points:

    – the Silver Streak is a race car, or rather a series of race cars because every Silver Streak crashes, killing the driver. Nobody wants to drive for the Silver Streak team. The cars are crashing because they are being attacked by a giant fly.

    – the Silver Streak’s owner is Hindu mystic known only as the Swami. When an unnamed cab driver volunteers to drive the Silver Streak, the Swami hypnotizes him to be a great race car driver.

    – the unnamed driver is immediately killed by a giant fly.

    – BUT! The Swami has a hunch that the man is not in fact dead! He and a pal go to the cemetery and dig up the driver’s unmarked grave, and they are proved right! And what’s more, the prior hypnotic conditioning combined with the near-death experience has made the man (henceforth the Silver Streak) superhuman!

    The first adventure of the Silver Streak concludes with him stealing the latest prototype of his namesake car and using it to destroy the giant fly that “killed” him, and as presented he seems to have been on track to be a car-based super-hero. However, between Silver Streak Comics 003 and 004, the character was handed off from Jack Binder to Jack Cole and the Silver Streak became a guy with super speed, no car required. I don’t know if his origin is ever revised, but I do know that the Silver Streak has several sidekicks over the years and that they all get their powers via a blood transfusion from the man himself, so something’s going on there. Unless his blood was hypnotized too, of course – the Swami never returns, so his deal is never fully explored.

    Like a lot of super speed characters, the Silver Streak ends up being more about cool speed tricks than having a distinct personality, but he’s a fun read nonetheless. (Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)

    UPDATE 1941 

    Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor:

    We love to see a boy inventor, if only because our brains have been warped enough by the Venture Brothers that we can’t help but imagine their dysfunctional adulthood, and by “we” I mean “I”. Dickie Dean here is particularly good fodder for that little thought experiment, as he is compelled to sign over his inventions to the US government by his misplaced sense of patriotism, so he’s either in for a rude awakening or an increasingly delusional relationship to reality as he gets older. 

    Some inventions that Dickie fails to patent in 1940 include: 

    – a device that can replay sound waves and visualize shadows up to 2-3 weeks old

    – a device designed to stop all war by making air as thick as molasses and thus preventing bullets etc from moving fast enough to do harm (importantly, this air is still breathable)

    – an enclosed, submersible speedboat equipped with a device that abates flood waters via rapid electrolysis

    He does sell a magnetic antigravity device for use as a mid-air brake for airplanes, but only because his father is in dire financial straits.

    Dickie Dean is also interesting for the fact that he is from New Castle, Pennsylvania, a real place with a regular amount of history but not otherwise a big name in city circles. Also I just reread the bit where I roasted Dickie for giving away his patents and I want to make it cleat that the part I think is foolish is giving them to, like, the FBI, not donating them to humanity. (Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)

    UPDATE 1941 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 730: THE LITTLE MEN

    (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

    Normally I try to put things in my own words and really work out the ins and outs of the motivations of the super-weirdos I write about, but I gotta be honest: I have so little idea of what the Little Men’s problem is (problems are?) that I’m just going to point to the intro caption: they’re trying to rid the world of all beautiful women. Simple as that.

    Why are they trying to rid the world of all beautiful women (and/or all beauty, as their leader puts it)? Not a clue. Are they just weird incel creeps or is it something more? No idea.

    One point in favour of the Little Men not being a weird misogynistic serial killer cult (not just a weird misogynistic serial killer cult, at least) is the fact that they have an artificial man with the amazing name Noman, though as with his creators we have so little information to work from that we can’t say for sure if Noman is an android, a homunculus, a frankenstein or something else. It’s all very genre dependent!

    (Mister Midnite is also there)

    The only real clue that we get to the nature of the Little Men is unfortunately also very genre-dependent: during Mister Midnite’s battle with Noman a “strange gas” is released from a cool heart-shaped container. The gas is harmless to humans, but disintegrates the Little Men on contact, indicating that yes, they were not human, but what were they then? Were they: magical beings, aliens, homunculi, magical constructs, earthbound spirits, underground beings, extradimensional creatures, reified fictional beings, elementals, thought projections, time travellers, mutants, chronal echoes, genii loci, regular guys who all had an extreme allergy… there just isn’t enough information, and so we must simplify: they were a bunch of weird little creeps, and the gas was creep remover, which they shouldn’t have just left lying around.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 540: THE WILL-O-WISP

    (Silver Streak Comics 001, 1939)

    As we open, simply everyone’s worried about the Will-o-Wisp, a mysterious crook who shows up at crime scenes and steals what other crooks were about to make off with. The police chief looks bad because he can’t catch the Will-o-Wisp! The gangs are mad because they keep getting robbed by the Will-o-Wisp!

    The Will-o-Wisp’s big mistake comes when he butts in on the mugging of Neal Carruthers III, aka Mister Midnite, which of course arouses his interest. I guess you could argue that that wasn’t precisely a mistake because the Will-o-Wisp didn’t know that he was making it, but what about the fact that his next move was to extort the police chief for $50 000? Even without knowing that the chief and Neal Carruthers were friends that’s just plain playing with fire.

    Mister Midnite of course crashes the cash handoff and manages to figure out the Will-o-Wisp’s secret: that he is not in fact a small ball of light capable of speech but a very gutsy ventriloquist who just saunters up and takes the loot while his victims are distracted by a light on a fishing line or some other apparatus. It’s a bold, bold plan, with one huge point of failure: the first time someone looks away from the light and says “who’s that guy?” you’re screwed.

    Speaking of “who’s that guy?”, one thing that never gets resolved is who exactly that guy is. I assume that he’s meant to be an unknown outsider but thanks to the ambiguity of the simple art combined with the spot colouring everyone looks very similar to one another. I honestly can’t say if one of the cops or crooks introduced in other scenes are supposed to also be the Will-o-Wisp. 

    All we can do is wait for someone to do a gritty reboot of Mister Midnite and give us a satisfying Will-o-Wisp origin (dark sorcerer who gained the ability to gorily eject a glowing orb from his nasal cavity in exchange for the souls of the innocent, I assume).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 540: THE WILL-O-WISP

    (Silver Streak Comics 001, 1939)

    As we open, simply everyone’s worried about the Will-o-Wisp, a mysterious crook who shows up at crime scenes and steals what other crooks were about to make off with. The police chief looks bad because he can’t catch the Will-o-Wisp! The gangs are mad because they keep getting robbed by the Will-o-Wisp!

    The Will-o-Wisp’s big mistake comes when he butts in on the mugging of Neal Carruthers III, aka Mister Midnite, which of course arouses his interest. I guess you could argue that that wasn’t precisely a mistake because the Will-o-Wisp didn’t know that he was making it, but what about the fact that his next move was to extort the police chief for $50 000? Even without knowing that the chief and Neal Carruthers were friends that’s just plain playing with fire.

    Mister Midnite of course crashes the cash handoff and manages to figure out the Will-o-Wisp’s secret: that he is not in fact a small ball of light capable of speech but a very gutsy ventriloquist who just saunters up and takes the loot while his victims are distracted by a light on a fishing line or some other apparatus. It’s a bold, bold plan, with one huge point of failure: the first time someone looks away from the light and says “who’s that guy?” you’re screwed.

    Speaking of “who’s that guy?”, one thing that never gets resolved is who exactly that guy is. I assume that he’s meant to be an unknown outsider but thanks to the ambiguity of the simple art combined with the spot colouring everyone looks very similar to one another. I honestly can’t say if one of the cops or crooks introduced in other scenes are supposed to also be the Will-o-Wisp. 

    All we can do is wait for someone to do a gritty reboot of Mister Midnite and give us a satisfying Will-o-Wisp origin (dark sorcerer who gained the ability to gorily eject a glowing orb from his nasal cavity in exchange for the souls of the innocent, I assume).

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 012

    They just keep on coming.

    the Champ:

    The Champ is Captain America if Dr Erskine was a nutritionist rather than a… biologist? Biochemist? Whatever Dr Erskine was a doctor of. A sickly, bullied boy, the Champ (no other name given) was so-called by his bullies because he won at nothing. Scientist Dr Marlin, pitying the Champ, provides him with an experimental food supplement that over a period of seven years transforms him into a physical and mental paragon, the Champ of everything. (I really appreciate the writing on the description of the supplement – one could almost suspect that someone behind the scenes was considering a merchandising spin-off)

    Though the Champ tangles with spies and the like he is at his essence a college athlete character and so a lot of his stories are concerned with the surprisingly high-stakes world of betting on and rigging varsity level athletics, which is… not the most exciting subject matter for a comic. (Champion Comics 002, 1939)

    the Golden Knight:

    The Golden Knight is a heroic Crusader, a fairly popular genre of historical hero in the Golden Age and one that is very much out of favour now. He’ll probably come up again because he operates in an even more heightened comic book reality version of the Crusades than most of his peers, as evidenced by his first adventure, in which he stumbles upon what amounts to a group of Saracen Fifth Columnists lurking in an underground fortress in the English countryside.

    The Golden Knight (aka Sir Richard of Warwick) is also notable for the nonchalance with which he receives a vision of a sword-bearing lady in a one-piece swimsuit telling him to go to war. Unflappable, we call it. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

    UPDATE 1940

    the Arrow:

    The Arrow, a very early costumed hero indeed, is simply an enormous guy in a hoodie (I mean, it’s basically a hoodie) who alternately kills criminals with a bow and arrow and threatens to do so to get what he wants. I have a slightly outsized level of affection for him because he approaches superheroics like I do an open world game like Skyrim.

    The Arrow does eventually get a more super-heroic look (roman sandal style lacing on his shins, a belt) and about the same time he gets shunk down to more average human proportions, possibly because the idea of a roughly seven foot guy with a carefully guarded secret identity was getting hard to write around. (Funny Pages v2 010, 1938)

    UPDATE 1940 

    UPDATE 1941 

    Mister Midnite:

    mister midnite

    Mister Midnite is Neal Carruthers III, a wealthy sportsman who dresses up in a tuxedo and domino mask to fight crime, with a watch face set to midnight as his calling card and the police on his tail. The only thing that really sets him apart from the horde of other besuited vigilantes is his weirdo power, which is that he can shout “stop, time!” and cause clocks to stop. Although in rereading the first Mister Midnite story again… he might just be able to stop that one clock in that one clock tower? It’s a dumb and bizarrely specific power and Mister Midnite is just lucky that I find that kind of thing charming. (Silver Streak Comics 001, 1939)

    UPDATE 1940 (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)