The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: extradimensional

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 033

    Aliens. 

    Fifth Dimensional Beings: 

    These big-headed fellows feature in the origin story of Marvex the Super-Robot, but since we only see Marvex’ creator Bolo and his associates, we can’t really say too much about the culture of these Fifth Dimensional creatures. They have big heads, certainly, and a high enough degree of technology that Bolo is able to whip up a sentient robot on a whim, but whether that’s the sort of thing the population at large is getting up to or Bolo is the local equivalent of Lex Luthor is unknown and unknowable, alas. (Daring Mystery Comics 003, 1940)

    Green Devils:

    When Perisphere Payne seeks out a missing scientific expedition on an unnamed planet circling the star Polaris, he finds that they have come to mischief at the nubby little hands of the Green Devils, the planet’s native inhabitants who probably don’t call themselves that.

    While the Green Devils are just another band of primitives, eager to sacrifice the nearest blonde woman to their gods, they are also the most alien aliens that we have seen in a while and so I have a great deal of affection for them. Just look at their long noodly limbs! Their buggy eyes! Beautiful. (Science Comics 006, 1940)

    Pigwidgeons: 

    The final act of the story of the adventures of the Rocket and the Queen of Diamonds involves him leaving the Diamond Empire in his namesake rocket and her abdicating her throne to stow away and go with him. The Queen’s unexpected presence on the ship causes the Rocket to wreck the steering mechanism, and they crash on a strange planet.

    When they recover, the two find that they have been captured Gulliver-style by a group of tiny, rabbit-riding people called Pigwidgeons, who are melodramatic but ultimately good-hearted, and whose initial hostility is due to them mistaking the duo for… 

    … the Gromans, a species of human-sized fascists with a Roman Empire aesthetic to match their name. Though the Gromans have evidently been attacking the Pigwidgeons with impunity for some time, the arrival of the Rocket and the Queen shifts the balance of power, and over the next couple of issues the duo forge a new era of peace at the barrel of a ray gun. (Pep Comics 010, 1940)

    Pluvians:

    A plague is ravaging Earth in the far future of 1982, and Power Nelson has set aside his antipathy for the despotic government of Seng I to help them acquire the radium that they need to effect a cure. He sets out for the radium-rich planet Pluvius, where he meets the Pluvians, ruled by King Rari, and forget what I said about the Green Devils because these guys are my favourite aliens. Whether they have a smooth orange carapace or are wearing modified onesies is not specified and it doesn’t matter because they look fantastic either way, particularly as the sleek and retro-high-tech look it gives them is contrasted with their apparently Medieval society.

    The Pluvians agree to supply the needed radium in exchange for Nelson’s aid against their rival society, the Hairy Guroos, about whom there isn’t much to say. They’re humanoids with luxuriant hair and beards living in a Medieval monarchy (albeit a matriarchal one, which is fun), and that’s about it. They do use radium boulders as ammunition in their catapults, which is a good indication that Nelson has come to the right planet.

    For once in a Golden Age comic the solution to a problem involving hostile aliens does not involve mass alien casualties. Instead, Power Nelson does a regime change, by kidnapping the warmongering Guroo Queen Wodo and leaving her more amiable sister Queen Leelee in charge. (Prize Comics 003, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 029

    The wonders of the cosmos!

    Spiny Scalemen: 

    The Spiny Scalemen are yet another group of gross-looking underwater humanoids who threaten the mostly peaceful nation of Amloza, and what’s worse, they’re doing it as part of a Nazi plot to take over the city and use it as a naval base. Thankfully Mogg the Fish-Man and only competent citizen of Amloza realizes that city walls are a bit of a useless affectation in an underwater environment and destroys the Scalemen by collapsing Amloza’s onto them. (Champ Comics 016, 1941)

    Categorized in: Body (Nonhuman Parts), Generica (Men)

    Flat Heads: 

    “Og, Son of Fire” was a comic adapted from a Big Little Book that was based on a series of short stories and also a radio show about Og, a young caveman who is trying to make his way in a hostile world. And importantly for the purposes of this blog, one of the things making the world more hostile is this tribe of ape men led by a fellow named Long Tooth. Heaven knows I love an ape man, but I love ’em even more when they’re called something fun like “Flat Heads.” See also the Flat Heads’ Sun God here. (The Funnies 013, 1937)

    Categorized in: Body (Heads)

    the Flies:

    While the Barrangees of Planet Barrang have had a lot of problems with insects over the years – they famously grew giant and drove the Barangee population underground, while insect-worshipping Barrangee priests stymied any attempt to reclaim the surface – their most troublesome foes were always the giant flies. These creatures have adapted to their new size by becoming active hunters rather than scavengers, and the Barrangees are a favourite prey. Couple this with the fact that Earthman Captain Tornado and his cohort have encouraged the Barrangees to move above ground and you get situations like the above, in which a Fly abducts a Barrangee child in broad daylight.

    The Flies are the most intelligent and organized of the Barrang insect species featured in the “Captain Tornado” feature, and they make war on the Barrangee city under the direction of their Fly King until Tornado bring knowledge of both firearms and insecticide to the planet and effectively counters their offensive. (Popular Comics 054, 1940)

    Categorized in: Animals (Insects), Extrasolar (Planet Barrang)

    Fourth Dimensional Creatures:

    After foiling several of Satan Rex’s attempts to destroy humanity, scientific adventurer Jon Linton and his pals return to their first love: tinkering around with spaceships. And since Jon et al exist in an adventure comic, the first test flight of their new rocket turns into an out-of-control flight through space at never-before-seen speeds, careening directly through planets without touching an atom and ending up on a world where thought and reality intersect, kind of like that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

    During their pell-mell flight through space, Linton and pals are briefly visited by these tentacle-legged lizard monsters, who appear to be kind of generically hostile for a few minutes before fading back into the ether. Just what the heck is going on?

    Jon hits upon the answer with his customary swiftness: these are inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension, and the ship briefly intersected with their space. Does this justify the seeming aggression that their show to the people on the spaceship? We cannot accurately judge, alas. (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 007, 1940)

    Categorized in: Extradimensional (Fourth Dimension)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 008

    ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 008

    Magical adventurer Kardak the Mystic is drawn into a series of adventures among the various nonhuman intelligences of the world when his new love interest is kidnapped by some of them and he sets off in pursuit. Here are the ones he meets in 1940:

    the Fishtails: 

    The Fishtails, inhabitants of “the lost continent, Anderras!” are the ones who start Kardak’s undersea adventure off when they kidnap Lorna to fulfil a prophecy that they require a “white, Earth Queen” to protect them from destruction at the hands of their enemies. Setting aside the shades-of-Namor racial aspect of this interspecies deal, this all works out for the Fishtails, as though Lorna has very little in the way of offensive capability, her paramour is able to defeat the Fishtail’s enemies the Mocha Men with relative ease. 

    Not only is this one of the rare occasions in which a human woman is made the ruler of a nonhuman group without having to suffer the gross overtures of their king, but Lorna and Kardak are allowed to leave once everything is settled, no fuss! Truly the Fishtails are a wonder civilization. (Top-Notch Comics 004, 1940)

    the Mocha Men: 

    The Fishtails’ enemies, the Mocha Men, are fairly generic hostile undersea humanoids, though they do have several points in their favour:

    1. a fun alliterative name.

    2. four gangly arms, which makes for a fun silhouette.

    3. they ride giant sea spiders into battle, which is very fun.

    4. their leader is called the Magator, and it’s always fun when one of these supposedly alien civilizations uses a properly unique and weird title instead of something like King. It’s fun!

    The Mocha Men are ultimately defeated (though not wiped out, unusually for the time) by Kardak so that he and Lorna can return to the surface and continue their voyage to India (Top-Notch Comics 004, 1940)

    the Glass Men:

    The Glass Men, aka the Looking Glass Men, are solar-powered glass humanoids who live in a glass valley somewhere in the magical realms traversed by Kardak the Mystic and his companions on their way from the Louisiana bayous to the lands of the Master Brahmins. The Glass Men, in my opinion, are very confrontational for guys made of glass. They also appear to have zero power storage capability, as they collapse immediately once Kardak cuts off the sun’s rays with an illusory eclipse.

    The Glass Men capture Kardak et al with relative ease, at which point we learn that they are one of those types of nonhuman entity that convert enemies into beings like themselves via the application of concentrated solar radiation. Thankfully for Kardak and pals they have access to a magic turban.

    King Rexa of the Glass Men is also extremely cool-looking, as Joe Corallo and Butch Mapa recognized when they used him as the basis for the demonic figure haunting the hero in the recent Kardak the Mystic one-shot for Archie. Probably a good call to go with the cool claws rather than the original disc-shaped hands on that guy. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

    the Beast-Men: 

    The Beast-Men, like the Glass Men before them, are merely speed bumps along the route that Kardak, Lorna and Balthar are taking to their destination. I do like their style, though they do seem to complicate things a bit more than is strictly necessary – why insist that trespassers must be killed by Beast-Men in animal form only? Why drag things out with gladiatorial combat when the three have already been taken prisoner? I guess it must get boring living in a pocket dimension. (Top-Notch Comics 010, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 668: THOTH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 668: THOTH

    (Jungle Comics 011, 1940)

    We begin with a very comic book (or monster-of-the-week TV show) setup. Camilla notices and comments on the ancient Magician’s Pool and then is almost immediately compelled to enter that same pool and disappear from the realms of man.

    Camilla’s aide/paramour Sir Champion turns to local wizard Warlock (not that Warlock the Wizard, but it is wild that there are two of them) for help and learns that the Magician of Magician’s Pool fame is Thoth, an evil jerk who the people of the Lost Empire tossed through the pool to another dimension hundreds of years earlier. Also, it turns out that the pool links to another dimension on nights of the full moon.

    Meanwhile, Camilla has also learned these things from Thoth himself, who has been spending his time in the unnamed dimension taming weird monsters and is now ready to use them to conquer the Earth. Camilla is of course having none of this but her attempts to prevent it using violence are thwarted as Thoth and all others in his presence are immune to mundane weaponry. On an unrelated note, did I mention that Warlock the wizard gave Sir Champion a magic sword and shield?

    This is a pretty Sir Champion heavy episode overall – he encounters a cute girl who turns out to be a less attractive green assassin and so is okay to slay and then is taken to the home of a cool nude giant dude who I wish we knew more about! As it stands, Sir Champion gets directions and a guide from him and we never see him again.

    Sometimes I get a bit lazy and just do a bullet point summary as my first draft of these entries and what I had here was simply “MAGIC SWORD, ASSHOLE” an I think that stands. Thoth (asshole) gets a magic sword to the heart and ceases to become a threat to the world as a whole and the Lost Empire in particular.

    Camilla and Sir Champion make their way home, accompanied by the giant naked laughing guy’s little beaƒt friend, which would be significant to later plots and stories in a different time, but this is the Golden Age and an extradimensional creature of unknown nature and provenance coming to Earth has no further impact.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 633: CHONGO

    (Fantastic Comics 012, 1940)

    Flip Falcon’s Fourth Dimension Machine has served various roles as a sort of all-purpose portal to adventure over the course of his tenure in Fantastic Comics, starting out as an interplanetary teleporter allowing access to the various planets of the Solar System and later acting as a time machine. Now it is entering what I believe to be its final form as a gateway to the Fourth Dimension itself, a weird hellscape of the imagination briefly seen in Flip’s encounter with Lucifer.

    In addition to bordering on all times and places, the Fourth Dimension seems to also contain if not the entire afterlife then at least some version of Hell, occupied by the Demi-Things. Ar the Demi-Things demons? The souls of the damned? Some sort of third thing? Whatever they are, Chongo is the worst of the bunch and thanks to the bizarre dimensional pseudo-physics he is able to steal a radio beam and re-purpose it into a death ray/ surf board.

    He immediately attacks Earth with this ray and unfortunately I must report that it looks very cool. It’s a skeletonizing ray!

    Flip Falcon of course sets out to defeat the evil Chongo but the ultimate victory must go to the greater society of Demi-Things, who rally together and basically beat him to death once he is removed from the shelter of his death ray. I guess this might be considered some sort of redemptive act – does this lend credence to the Demi-Things = lost souls theory? I believe that we’ll be seeing more of them in the future, so we’ll just note that down without drawing any conclusions just yet..

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 633: CHONGO

    (Fantastic Comics 012, 1940)

    Flip Falcon’s Fourth Dimension Machine has served various roles as a sort of all-purpose portal to adventure over the course of his tenure in Fantastic Comics, starting out as an interplanetary teleporter allowing access to the various planets of the Solar System and later acting as a time machine. Now it is entering what I believe to be its final form as a gateway to the Fourth Dimension itself, a weird hellscape of the imagination briefly seen in Flip’s encounter with Lucifer.

    In addition to bordering on all times and places, the Fourth Dimension seems to also contain if not the entire afterlife then at least some version of Hell, occupied by the Demi-Things. Ar the Demi-Things demons? The souls of the damned? Some sort of third thing? Whatever they are, Chongo is the worst of the bunch and thanks to the bizarre dimensional pseudo-physics he is able to steal a radio beam and re-purpose it into a death ray/ surf board.

    He immediately attacks Earth with this ray and unfortunately I must report that it looks very cool. It’s a skeletonizing ray!

    Flip Falcon of course sets out to defeat the evil Chongo but the ultimate victory must go to the greater society of Demi-Things, who rally together and basically beat him to death once he is removed from the shelter of his death ray. I guess this might be considered some sort of redemptive act – does this lend credence to the Demi-Things = lost souls theory? I believe that we’ll be seeing more of them in the future, so we’ll just note that down without drawing any conclusions just yet..

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 609: LUCIFER

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    Scientist-adventurer Flip Falcon has a machine that allows him to enter the Fourth Dimension and come out, effectively, anywhere. He’s used it to visit various other planets and will use it to travel through time – it’s an adventure machine, basically. The fact that it can detect something as vague as “a disturbance somewhere” is both on point and completely meaningless – when you can go anywhere and anywhen, you can always find a disturbance (he does sometimes let Adele come along, by the way).

    This turns out to be Flip’s first adventure to take place in the Fourth Dimension itself and the first time that the Fourth Dimension is suggested to have a supernatural element, as he encounters Lucifer himself! And his magical mouth!

    Perhaps I gave the disturbance-detector too hard of a time, because the disturbance it somehow detected was Lucifer getting ready (did he finally accrue enough power or just make the decision?) to destroy planet Earth!

    Lucky for the Earth and all who dwell on her, the trail of energy that Flip leaves behind as he travels not only functions as a lifeline to his home but in a bit of a deus ex machina turns out to have anti-demonic properties! Flip securely ties up Lucifer and then… just goes home. It’s a very confident move, assuming that the Great Adversary, a being capable of destroying whole planets, will never escape from your improvised knot, and if he does (he does, we’ll be seeing him again) he won’t bother blowing up the planet out of embarrassment or something. And just because that’s exactly what happens is no reason not to ask questions.

    Update 1941

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 609: LUCIFER

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    Scientist-adventurer Flip Falcon has a machine that allows him to enter the Fourth Dimension and come out, effectively, anywhere. He’s used it to visit various other planets and will use it to travel through time – it’s an adventure machine, basically. The fact that it can detect something as vague as “a disturbance somewhere” is both on point and completely meaningless – when you can go anywhere and anywhen, you can always find a disturbance (he does sometimes let Adele come along, by the way).

    This turns out to be Flip’s first adventure to take place in the Fourth Dimension itself and the first time that the Fourth Dimension is suggested to have a supernatural element, as he encounters Lucifer himself! And his magical mouth!

    Perhaps I gave the disturbance-detector too hard of a time, because the disturbance it somehow detected was Lucifer getting ready (did he finally accrue enough power or just make the decision?) to destroy planet Earth!

    Lucky for the Earth and all who dwell on her, the trail of energy that Flip leaves behind as he travels not only functions as a lifeline to his home but in a bit of a deus ex machina turns out to have anti-demonic properties! Flip securely ties up Lucifer and then… just goes home. It’s a very confident move, assuming that the Great Adversary, a being capable of destroying whole planets, will never escape from your improvised knot, and if he does (he does, we’ll be seeing him again) he won’t bother blowing up the planet out of embarrassment or something. And just because that’s exactly what happens is no reason not to ask questions.

    Update 1941

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 570: OO-LHAT

    (Champion Comics 003, 1940)

    There’s a lot to like about ol’ Oo-Lhat. He appears in a gross-sounding mist after explorer Walt Worthington and his aide Snowball (did you know that there was a whole category of racist nicknames for African American characters that has largely been forgotten and that involves naming them after something very black or very white? Well now you do) discover a lost Egyptian tomb containing a blazing scarab (the gem cut, not the insect) that drew them into a pocket dimension when touched.

    Oo-Lhat captures the duo and forces them to listen to his life story, employing a magical teevee called the Curtain of Ammon to do so.

    A priest of Osiris at Karnak, Oo-Lhat gives it all up and switches allegiances to Set in order to obtain gold, power and the love of a beautiful woman.

    This is where Oo-Lhat starts to make the transition from small-b to big-b Bad Guy. He makes his way to the Oasis of Memthet, where a cult had gathered to worship the same scarab encountered by Walt and pal. Oo-Lhat takes over by the simple expedient of murdering all of the other contenders.

    Discovering the pocket dimension accessible through the scarab, Oo-Lhat moved his cult into it and had them build a city, from which they raided caravans under the somewhat grandiose name of the League of Assassins – pretty sure just jumping out of a portal and stabbing someone is just regular murder, bro.

    The real appeal of the scarab dimension, though, was the fact that time essentially did not pass there and so the population was essentially immortal – even those killed by gross bodily trauma came back as weird ghosts. Possibly the best aspect of this is the fact that animals could not properly comprehend this state of being and so immediately died and came back, and as they presumably had an imperfect vision of themselves they came back wrong, leading to the city being full of weird lumpy camels.

    The timelessness of the scarab world eventually backfires on Oo-Lhat and his followers when the temple is buried in a sandstorm, trapping them for thousands of years with nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs.

    Oo-Lhat is all set to resume his ways as an “assassin” but his followers have other ideas. Presented with the choice of whether to leave or stay, every single one of them leaves. Including Oo-Lhat, after a little five-fingered persuasion from his lieutenant Kardak.

    The explorers eventually follow (along with some babes they found and fell in love with) and discover the final fate of Oo-Lhat and the League of so-called Assassins: time spent in the pocket dimension, it turns out, was not avoided so much as deferred: Oo-Lhat, the League and even the babes were reduced to skeletons the instant they exited.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 464: THE ELEMENTAL

    (Amazing-Man Comics 009, 1940)

    The Elemental! An extradimensional intruder who insinuates itself into the unspecified future world of hero the Magician from Mars via the music of unwitting dupe Bill Wend. Is this a future with wildly relaxed standards for professional music performance or has the musical director of Concert Hall also being influenced by the Elemental? This question will go unanswered, alas.

    Having achieved its goal of entering our reality, the Elemental feeds not only on the crowd’s fear but the crowd itself – I think. Though the extremely florid writing of this panel is wonderful, it’s not too clear if “feeding on human energy” is meant to be literal or not. It does literally eat large portions of the crowd, so either way it is feeding on them.

    Earth’s  armies prove useless against the Elemental, so the Magician from Mars is forced to step in in a kicky new costume.

    This fight between a giant lady and a giant green guy is absolutely the highlight of the story. Both are so powerful that they almost pull a Superman/ Doomsday and battle to the death, but though they are both still alive at the end they are severely weakened. The Elemental disappears while the Magician from Mars is lauded as a hero.

    Eventually, the Magician follows a string of mass kidnappings and discovers a man identified only as the Mad Professor has been capturing people and feeding them to the Elemental in exchange for future consideration when further elementals are summoned to conquer the planet. Seemingly following a hunch, the Magician sings “one of the most beautiful songs in the world” and discovers that, yes, what was summoned via music can be banished in the same way. The Mad Professor she merely collapses a wall on.