The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: good henchmen

  • 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 728: THE GREAT BRAIN

    (Science Comics 007, 1940)

    Perisphere Payne, futureman of the year 2000, has his work cut out for him when six Earth battle rockets go missing and then subsequently attack their home planet! And upon defeating their seemingly traitorous crews, Payne discovers that they are being remotely mind controlled via a chunky black box stuck to each of their backs in a place that looks like it would be pretty annoying to live with. Good thing they’re mind controlled and presumably not capable of being annoyed, I guess.

    Following the mind control carrier wave to an unnamed planet, Perisphere Payne and his associate Doyle (and here I was going to make a joke about Doyle also being named after a defunct bit of architecture but in trying to find one starting with D I discovered that it’s surprisingly hard to do that. Therefore, we’re gonna call him Trylon Doyle and be done with this whole tangent) are attacked by what are clearly centaurs but are consistently called satyrs, which is about as annoying as being unable to find a list of defunct symbolic architecture.

    Payne and Doyle are eventually captured by the centaurs satyrs centaurs and ushered into the presence of the Great Master, aka the Great Brain, a human brain in a glass ball who wants to conquer the human race for unclear reasons.

    Luckily for Payne, Doyle, humanity and basically everyone except for centaurs and centaur-lovers, though the Great Brain was savvy enough to make their dome ray gun proof, they forgot about the ballistic properties of the humble Oscar statuette. Once released, the Brain’s energies start a chain reaction that destroys the whole planet, centaurs and all.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 722: DR DOOM

    (Science Comics 003, 1940)

    Flashback to my times in the Fiction House content-recycling mines of Planet Comics! What we have here is a Dr Doom story nestled snugly into an issue of Science Comics just where Dr Doom stories always go, but it’s not the right Dr Doom! Was this a story about a different science villain that was renamed to fit the space, or did “Richard Crater” (Dick Briefer, possibly) just kind of freestyle a fill-in gig and go wildly off-model? Who can say?

    What I can say is that this Dr Doom is a villain both more entertaining and more ambitious than our regularly scheduled one. Instead of tormenting a handful of people for his own entertainment, this Dr Doom is blowing up buildings as part of a campaign of terror designed to put him in charge of the world, and he shows off some fantastic bombast while expositing all of this. “Fools! Fools! Fools!”

    Of course this sort of thing can not allowed to go on, and since this Dr Doom is very much not a future-man, J Edgar Hoover sends the rough and tumble Bob Steele to take care of him.

    Bob doesn’t have much trouble making his way to Dr Doom’s lair – he merely hops out of his plane and into the remotely-piloted one that Doom uses as a relay for his destructive ray, and after that it’s just a matter of waiting to be flown back to a mountain full of costumed goons and then beating all of those goons up. Simple stuff.

    Bob and Dr Doom provide an object lesson on the limits of bombast as a tool in everyday life, as it proves ineffective in convincing Bob not to punch Dooms lights out and smash up his laboratory. So long Dr Doom, it’s neat that there are two of you (and more to come).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

    (Science Comics 001, 1940)

    Dr Doom, another super-villain with his own series (I swear that they’re rare over all but 1940 sure is a fertile year for them), lives in an unspecified future and is your classic mad science polymath, as demonstrated by his various schemes:

    In his very first outing, Dr Doom decides to do some extreme testing of his latest formula and uses it to shrink Jan and Wanda, two otherwise-nondescript youths who just happen to also be his recurring nemeses going forward. They escape of course and, after defeating a crab and regaining their former size, haul him back home to Jupiter with them to face justice.

    Of course Dr Doom also escapes and makes his way back to his laboratory. His next two schemes are also shrinking-based: in Science Comics 002 he kidnaps people (including Jan and Wanda) and forces them to battle insects to the death, while Science Comics 004 sees him shrinking Jan and Wanda’s home city of Daru on Jupiter to use as his personal playground. This adventure ends with Doom himself shrunk and on display in a museum of oddities, an event which seems to put him off the field of shrinking entirely going forward.

    In Science Comics 005, Dr Doom unleashes cosmic ray mutations from the depths of the Grand Canyon in a bid to conquer the US. Also the Grand Canyon is expanding for some reason? This is perhaps the most incoherent Dr Doom story and ends with his equipment just exploding out of nowhere.

    The shock of his last scheme failing so thoroughly seems to have had a profound effect on Dr Doom, because at this stage he enters his “revenge on humanity” period. To that end, in Science Comics 006, he develops and unleashes the Grey Mold Disease and sets it loose on the world until he is forced to reveal the antidote by Jan and Wanda when they threaten to inject him with the even more deadly Green Mold Disease.

    Next, in Science Comics 007, Doom uses a magnetic ray in an attempt to throw the entire Earth off its orbit and into the Sun, but misjudges the gravity on his planetoid base and goes flying off into space himself while fleeing from Jan. As always there is no word on how he gets out of this seemingly inescapable doom, but this is the one I’m most curious about.

    Science Comics 008 is a bit of a break for Dr Doom, as he settles down in Long Island with his amazing screaming robot Lodi. Attempting to wipe out humanity is pretty hard work, so Doom and Lodi are taking it easy by merely blasting various humans into a hostile alternate dimension filled with cannibalistic ogres. 

    (this and the previous story also appear to be set in or around 1940, which likely means that they were either a) repurposed from some already-finished art or b) produced by someone who didn’t particularly care about continuity. See also: Jan and Wanda going from space adventurers to reporters for the New York Daily Star)

    Dr Doom’s appearance in Big 3 001 is another stab at destroying humanity, as he facilitates a Venusian invasion by producing deadly mists. Two notes about this one: 1) the Venusians are amazing looking little weirdos and 2) his attempted revenge on Jan and Wanda by making them but not their potential offspring immune to the mists so they must wander alone through a dead world is harsh as hell.

    Dr Doom’s final appearance (and only appearance in 1941) in Green Mask 004 involves him attacking passing space shipping from a base on Uranus. It’s a bit of a ho-hum scheme to go out on, but at least it features some weird little homunculus creatures that Doom makes out of cats. More villains need more little critters around just kind of being moderately useful.

    In a lot of previous adventures Jan and Wanda haul Dr Doom off to prison or just kind of leave him to rot in whatever bombed-out laboratory they just escaped from but this is the one where they genuinely attempt to kill him by bombing his lab from orbit. It’s pretty understandable after all of the trouble he’s caused them, but they don’t bother to confirm the kill and so we leave Dr Doom alive and stranded on Uranus. Did he ever get out of there to vex them again? We can never know.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 712: DR DEKKAR, MASTER OF MONSTERS

    (Prize Comics 005, 1940) 

    Comic book features with the villain as the lead were one of the rarer subgenres of the Golden Age, and so I must note that this is our third instance of one with a monster-maker as the lead. Fun!

    We first encounter Dr Dekkar here after he has advertised for an assistant and thus brought one Diane Clark to his laboratory-castle on the English moors. There’s a part of me that wants to get very critical of the concept of accepting a job whee you will be living with your boss sight-unseen but I know that that was a thing that many people did in fact have to do in the past – particularly women, who were making up most of the live-in childcare and nursing workforce. And there’s a lot ove very harrowing fiction built around the premise of accepting one of those jobs and turning up only to find yourself in a Weird Situation, so this one checks out!

    Case in point: Diane soon learns that the job in the isolated castle, that she was given sight unseen after answering a newspaper advertisement and which has her sharing a residence with two overtly creepy men and a third (unseen, screaming) presence, might just be a little sketchy. Specifically, she learns that the screamer is Dr Dekkar’s last assistant, who has been turned into a kind of ape-man by Dekkar’s experiments with hormone injection.

    And to add insult to injury, it turns out that Diane hasn’t been brought in as an assistant after all, but is simply the next experimental subject!

    Luckily for Diane, her fiance Bob Trent has a poor sense of the boundaries between personal and private lives and shows up on her first day at her new job to see how she’s doing. Chaos ensues: Dekkar’s real assistant Wilkins releases and is killed by the ape-man; the ape-man makes off with Diane and is subsequently killed by Tom; the castle burns down and Dekkar is presumed dead.

    You know what they say about presuming that a super-villain is dead, though: they always crawl back out of the woodwork to press U and ME in some sort of diabolical deathtrap. And indeed, Dr Dekkar is back again one month later with a collection of animal men and a thirst for vengeance.

    In an impressive move for a comic book scientist, Dekkar has continued in his prior avenue of research instead of tossing it all and starting over in the field of robotics or making frankensteins. His hormone treatments have gotten precise enough that he is able to make humanoid creatures out of animal life, including an almost fully human Tiger Woman, with the dual caveats that a) the creatures must be given an injection every six hours or lose their human forms and b) human brain matter is an important part of the recipe and oh, look! Diane and Bob have human brains! What a wonderful coincidence!

    As an aside, Dekkar sure has made some interesting choices here: make a woman out of a tiger, dress her in a fur bikini and teach her to smoke using a cigarette holder… I’m just saying that if this were a modern comic then Dekkar’s search history would have some very specific booleans going on in it.

    The Tiger Woman is of course horny for Bob and lets him free only to turn on him once he expresses some desire to leave with the date he came with. This leads to Bob being carried off by the amazing Condor-Man, who gets far too little on-panel time.

    (shout out to Dr Dekkar for wearing something approaching proper attire for a surgical theatre: just look at that face mask!)

    Bob manages to escape the Condor-Man and return just in time to see his plan take effect: he had somehow managed to replace the beast-men’s hormone injections from the night before with water and now they were all reverting to their former states with remarkable speed. Bob and Diane haul ass out of there while Dr Dekkar is messily devoured by his own test subjects (there is a “will Dr Dekkar return next month?” caption at the end, but since he did not I guess the tigers really did do him in).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 691: THE CLAW

    (Pep Comics 007, 1940) 

    The Press Guardian’s only recurring villain, the Claw has what can only be described as an eclectic career: In his first appearance he’s a sort of freelance spy chief working to aid the I-assume-European country of Shironia in its attempt to conquer neighbouring Lanfia by committing acts of sabotage in the US and framing Lanfia as the perpetrator so that America will withdraw its support of Lanfia. The Press Guardian exposes the scheme and sends the Claw and his henchmen to a presumed watery grave.

    Pep 008 drops a bombshell: the Claw could, in fact, swim. Instead of drowning, he made his way to the Central City docks and set up an insurance scam whereby he and his crew of rowdy sea dogs sunk their own ships for a tidy profit. The only flaw in the plan: the Claw kept on murdering nosy reporters who got too interested in all the shipwrecks going on, and you know that the Press Guardian is going to show up to check something like that out. The Claw ended up in the drink again, presumed dead but with more of a question mark than before.

    And that question mark was justified! Pep 009’s Press Guardian adventure begins with he and his aide Cynthia Blake investigating an extremely suspicious want ad for “young, healthy women with no living relatives” and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the Claw again. He’s been turning people into beast-men using animal hormone injections and he’s decided to finally branch out into making beast-women. The Press Guardian is even less into this scenario than the others and wastes little time in beating everyone up and forcing the Claw to reveal the antidote to beast-manism. When last seen the one-handed villain is being chased down by a mob of former beast-men, with murderous intent. Surely the Claw has finally met his end?

    No dice. The Claw returns one last time, in Pep Comics 010, with a knife-wielding green-skinned weirdo named the Goon in tow. The Goon and the Claw have been kidnapping women from a bit of cottage country called Rocky Point – has he gone back to making beast-women? Is he trying to ruin the Press Guardian’s home paper, the Daily Express, who are involved in the development of the region somehow? No, he’s trying to drive people off so that he can steal a radium deposit that’s located on the land.

    The Claw suffers a fairly ignominious defeat in the face of what can’t have been a very hard kick from Cynthia Blake. For all that he’s been tenacious, he’s also always been very easily defeated and while in a real-world way I know that that is because the Press Guardian was a second-tier character with a smaller pagecount than a headliner like the Shield, in my heart of hearts I prefer to believe that he’s just a scrawny little wiener. Or maybe it’s because he hangs out in radium-filled caves all the time, who can say.

    Though the Goon is captured, the Claw just scampers away, and since he isn’t in what turns out to be the Press Guardian’s final outing in Pep Comics 011, he’s just… at large when all is said and done (though again: radium cave. The Claw might not have been troubling humanity for much longer after this particular escapade).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 687: PRINCESS LING FOY

    (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    Princess Ling Foy probably belongs in the Problematic Round-Up with all of Fu Chang’s other enemies (and Fu Chang himself, of course) – she’s just as steeped in racist tropes as any of them, right down to her dumb name. But… I have to say that I like her hat.

    I also like her minions, the Warriors of Brass, which strongly resemble robots but which are by all accounts magical creations. Let’s spit the difference and call them automata, and honestly it doesn’t really matter because Fu Chang destroys them all with what must be some wildly powerful acid.

    Fu Chang spares Ling Foy’s life but also rejects her proposal that they rule Chinatown together (and “ruling Chinatown” is just as nebulous a concept as when all those Fantomah villains were attempting to conquer “the Jungle” – are you going to be sending a representative to the San Francisco City Council or is this just a glorified protection racket?) which of course returns her to the path of crime precisely one second after Fu Chang gives her a second chance. Ling Foy heads right home to make a fairly low-effort sympathetic magic effigy out of wax, but regardless of quality it works. The only way Fu Chang is able to keep going is with the help of an infusion of healing juice from his magic chessmen, and even then he’s walking around with his arm in a sling.

    Having failed to gain revenge on Fu Chang by killing him, Ling Foy now summons an imp in an attempt to murder his fiance Tay Ming and once again the chessmen save the day, as tiny man battles tiny demon in a scene much more action-packed than a Fu Chang comic usually gets.

    The imp spills the beans on Ling Foy’s location and since Fu Chang can’t bring himself to harm a lady, Tay Ming takes out the trash.

    (If you read the Fu Chang entry and were wondering about what exactly the mermaid figure was used for, then this is your lucky day! As Ling Foy dies, the wax effigy of Fu Chang falls out the window into San Francisco Bay with a couple of knives still in it. The mermaid swims down and removes them, thus saving Fu Chang from a lifetime of feeling like he had two knives stuck in him)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 677: MARS

    (National Comics 001, 1940) 

    Once Jock Kellog decides to turn his back on his playboy ways and put his inherited magic cloak to use as Merlin the Magician, he really goes for it. He hits the battlefields of WWII to aid the beleaguered soldiers of the front and ultimately rises into the realm of the gods to confront Mars, God of War and Destruction himself. 

    Mars turns out to be a huge jerk bully who is inciting nations to fight for his own amusement – a bit more Ares than Mars to be honest but I’ll let it go.

    Eventually, Merlin and Mars engage in Thrilling Hand to Hand Combat with the continuation of the war as the stakes, and after some back and forth that is cleverly mirrored in the progress of some armistice talks, Merlin wins! World War Two is over! As usual, this kind of “war can and will be avoided” story is very depressing in hindsight.

    But wait, there’s more! As in any story involving gods, demons and so forth, there is a high chance of some of my favourites the anthropomorphic personifications showing up, and show up they do! First off, Merlin encounters the embodiment of Peace chained to a bunch of weaponry like something out of a political cartoon and pledges to free her.

    Merlin also has to battle Mars’ henchmen Hunger and Poverty before he can get to the main event, and while there is a certain logic to the two of them making a person more susceptible to being either the perpetrator or victim of war I am sad that they don’t have a bit more allegorical oomph. Why couldn’t Hunger use those big fangs of his to sap Merlin’s life force or something? Still, even a bargain basement anthropomorphic personification is an anthropomorphic personification and I love me some anthropomorphic personifications. Hunger and Poverty can stay. The guys, not the things that they stand for. Those suck.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 675: THE EYES

    (Miracle Comics 002, 1940)

    The Eyes is a spy chief (singular) who has a cool gimmick (contact lenses or similar which can emit powerful light beams to spooky effect) and goes all in on it as a theme. Specifically, the Eyes is all about destroying eyes via blinding light, acid or simple traumatic injury – honestly a pretty effective thing to threaten most people with, even if they are for example very loyal to the aircraft company they work for. It ultimately takes Dash Dixon, whose eyes are presumably three times as powerful as the average man’s, to take him down.

    One more thing about the Eyes is that his henchmen all have their own gangster-style nickname – variously Finger, the Switch and Trusty – and that’s pleasing to me.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 675: THE EYES

    (Miracle Comics 002, 1940)

    The Eyes is a spy chief (singular) who has a cool gimmick (contact lenses or similar which can emit powerful light beams to spooky effect) and goes all in on it as a theme. Specifically, the Eyes is all about destroying eyes via blinding light, acid or simple traumatic injury – honestly a pretty effective thing to threaten most people with, even if they are for example very loyal to the aircraft company they work for. It ultimately takes Dash Dixon, whose eyes are presumably three times as powerful as the average man’s, to take him down.

    One more thing about the Eyes is that his henchmen all have their own gangster-style nickname – variously Finger, the Switch and Trusty – and that’s pleasing to me.