The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Comet

  • CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 005

    CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 005

    More wounds for the Catalogue of Wounds!

    Ace of Space:

    Shot in the left arm during an attempted skyjacking. (Feature Comics 041, 1941)

    the Black Hood:

    As part of Kip Burland’s journey to masked vigilantism he gets shot all to hell and back by the Skull’s minions. The shots we can see happening are all hitting him in the torso, and according to his hermit mentor there were at least eight of them. Sheesh. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

    Chic Carter:

    Chic takes a bullet to his right arm while contending with the Phantom’s very satanic boss. (Smash Comics 015, 1941)

    the Comet:

    Shot in the left shoulder by a gun-wielding member of an angry mob that is after him. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    the Fox:

    Severely whipped and beaten by the Night Riders during his origin. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

    Galahad: 

    Takes a sword blow meant for King Arthur, and while all these bullet wounds and so forth can get a little abstracted, this is a real overhand chop that has to be threatening to hit his lung. Galahad only survives due to Merlin’s magical intervention. (Top-Notch Comics 008, 1940)

    the Green Falcon:

    Takes an arrow to the left shoulder. (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941)

    the Shadow:

    Shot in the left arm by Zevox, aka the Head. (Shadow Comics v1 004, 1940)

    The Shadow’s left arm can’t get a break, as a few issues later it gets a throwing knife to the shoulder. (Shadow Comics v1 007, 1940)

    the Spider:

    I don’t know the precise number of times the Spider is shot here while tanking bullets to scare a gang but it sure is enough to impress his doctor. (Crack Comics 007, 1940)

    A year later, the Spider gets near-fatally shot in the chest by the Crow. (Crack Comics 018, 1941)

    Whiz, King of Falcons: 

    Silver Streak’s animal companion Whiz is struck in the bird-shoulder by a machine gun round. (Silver Streak Comics 010, 1941)

  • CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 005

    CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 005

    More wounds for the Catalogue of Wounds!

    Ace of Space:

    Shot in the left arm during an attempted skyjacking. (Feature Comics 041, 1941)

    the Black Hood:

    As part of Kip Burland’s journey to masked vigilantism he gets shot all to hell and back by the Skull’s minions. The shots we can see happening are all hitting him in the torso, and according to his hermit mentor there were at least eight of them. Sheesh. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

    Chic Carter:

    Chic takes a bullet to his right arm while contending with the Phantom’s very satanic boss. (Smash Comics 015, 1941)

    the Comet:

    Shot in the left shoulder by a gun-wielding member of an angry mob that is after him. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    the Fox:

    Severely whipped and beaten by the Night Riders during his origin. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

    Galahad: 

    Takes a sword blow meant for King Arthur, and while all these bullet wounds and so forth can get a little abstracted, this is a real overhand chop that has to be threatening to hit his lung. Galahad only survives due to Merlin’s magical intervention. (Top-Notch Comics 008, 1940)

    the Green Falcon:

    Takes an arrow to the left shoulder. (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941)

    the Shadow:

    Shot in the left arm by Zevox, aka the Head. (Shadow Comics v1 004, 1940)

    The Shadow’s left arm can’t get a break, as a few issues later it gets a throwing knife to the shoulder. (Shadow Comics v1 007, 1940)

    the Spider:

    I don’t know the precise number of times the Spider is shot here while tanking bullets to scare a gang but it sure is enough to impress his doctor. (Crack Comics 007, 1940)

    A year later, the Spider gets near-fatally shot in the chest by the Crow. (Crack Comics 018, 1941)

    Whiz, King of Falcons: 

    Silver Streak’s animal companion Whiz is struck in the bird-shoulder by a machine gun round. (Silver Streak Comics 010, 1941)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 018

    The hits flops just keep coming.

    This gang doesn’t bother to give themself a proper name even though their scheme is extremely big and loud: they have access to a magnetic ray device and have employed it to pull down multiple large buildings in scenic Midtown City, thus killing between one and four thousand people (a printing error obscures the exact number), all so that their demands for protection money from the owners of other buildings will be paid without question. It’s just as well that the Comet eye-beams them all.

    I really am stuck on the fact that they haven’t bothered to give themselves a name, when they have such attention to detail that the hostages they grabbed in order to stymie the Comet were literally Mr & Mrs John Q. Public Priorities differ, I suppose. (Pep Comics 009, 1940)

    Buck Brady of the FBI is investigating a gang that is smuggling Malaysians across the Canada/ US border (because nobody would expect them to, that’s why) and the ringleader, when he shows up, is dressed fantastically. I cannot believe that more super-villains aren’t wearing big fur coats when they look so great when paired with a cowl mask. Anyway, he turns out to be Lieutenant Thomas of the US Border Patrol. (Prize Comics 003, 1940)

    Move over pre-2000s Wolverine, because this guy right here is possibly the most mysterious figure in comics. Samson and David track him to the hidden City of Erde after he initiates a series of attacks against the US, presumably with an eye on conquering it. But who is he? How did he become king of Erde and its population of cavemen? Where did he get the weaponry his cavemen are using in their attacks? Just how the heck did a whole city full of cavemen go unnoticed smack in the middle of the US, secret valley or no? (Samson 002, 1940)

    This unnamed mustachioed man is remarkable mostly for the number of pivots that he manages to pull off over the course of a 13-page story. He first attracts Samsons’s attention with a scheme to pit the presumably South American country of Ecuazil against its neighbour (sadly unnamed but probably something like Perile or Aregentuay) and then conquer both once they were both sufficiently weakened by the fighting. Once Samson and David put an end to that he hypnotically enslaved Samson for a while, then launched into a full-fledged invasion of the US. Pretty good range, I’d say.

    The US invasion plan also featured this amazing spindly-legged flamethrower tank. Bask in its pleasing aesthetics and questionable strategic value! Please also note David in these panels as this is a good representation of his role in the comic: all enthusiasm, willing to lasso absolutely anything, very low actual impact on events as they unfold but clearly Samson enjoys having him around.

    Finally, I don’t quite know why but I feel that I must highlight this sequence in which Samson hurls a man into a pit and then his lifeless body is just there for the next two panels. I want to frame this and hang it on my wall. (Samson 002, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 692: THE MASTER

    (Pep Comics 008, 1940) 

    It’s an old story, even this early in the history of comics: someone has developed a method for mass murdering people and is attempting to use it to extort money from a city, or else. In this case that person calls himself the Master and that method is some sort of electrical wave.

    The Comet of course is not cool with this kind of blatant super-villainy, particularly as he is still trying to rebuild his reputation after murdering dozens of people while hypnotized that one time. Lucky for him, the Master’s electric wave is vulnerable to the Comet’s disintegration ray for some reason – maybe it’s a Rock Paper Scissors situation and there’s a third form of energy that counters the Comet but can be defeated by the Master.

    Not content to admit defeat, the Master tries another classic gambit: he captures newswoman Thelma Gordon after correctly surmising that her repeated Comet-related front page scoops might indicate that she has some sort of connection to the man himself. And it works! The Comet is lured to a selected location and trapped in a glass net (because glass is the only material left unharmed by the Comet’s deadly eye beam and the Comet has had zero success in keeping that information under wraps). Unfortunately for the Master, catching someone in a glass net is not quite the checkmate move he assumed it was and he ends up on the wrong end of a death ray blast.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 685: SATAN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 685: SATAN

    (Pep Comics 002, 1940)

    Dateline: Florida! A huge and monstrous face has begun appearing in the clouds across the state to demand fealty! Coincidentally, armoured cars have been disappearing up and down the peninsula at about the same time as the facial appearances.

    The Comet is of course intrigued by this coincidence and decides to investigate. Plotting out the robberies on a map, he proceeds to the swamp located at the central point, and I’ve just realized that it’s a good thing that he’s right because the first thing he does is kick a man into the water and steal his boat and that would be a very embarrassing thing for a super-hero to have done to ,e.g., an innocent game warden. It’s no problem, though, because the guy was in fact an agent of Satan.

    Satan turns out to be a pretty cagey character: not only does he have a way of dealing with snoopers (dragging their boats through a whirlpool into his sub-swamp lair, as happens to the Comet) but he’s got an impressive level of knowledge of current super-hero news. He knows just who the Comet is and more importantly how to neutralize his major offensive ability, by welding his protective eye mask shut. And this is only the Comet’s second case!

    The mystery of both the monster in the clouds and the disappearing armoured cars, by the way, come down to the same thing: that old favourite, the mighty dirigible. One dirigible equipped with a high-powered projector and loudspeaker and a second with a powerful electromagnet, to be precise – as one is distracting everyone with a big face, the other is making off with the car and the cash (and the unfortunate driver and guards).

    Back to the Comet: Satan’s anti-super-hero savvy extends only so far. Despite his acumen in capturing the Comet and neutralizing his power, Satan has fallen prey to the super-villain’s hubris by leaving him to die in a deathtrap rather than merely shooting him in the head. You see, the really important thing about the Comet’s visor is that it’s just a sheet of glass and thus easily breakable, which the Comet does by the simple expedient of headbutting a rock. After that, it’s just a matter of utterly obliterating not only both dirigibles but the entire swamp base. Satan is toast.

    OR IS HE? In a shock twist, Satan returns in Pep Comics 003 and manages to capture the Comet again, this time taking the trouble to pop him into a glass tube and thus completely neutralizing his powers! (and also delighting me personally, because the name Satan is very ambiguously used in his first appearance and I really appreciated this confirmation that it really is his nom du crime. For my records).

    Satan’s got big plans for the Comet – no cheesy deathtrap this time, no sir. Instead, he brings in put-upon hypnotist Doc Zadar in order to put the Comet to work for him.

    And this isn’t your namby-pamby “can’t be forced to violate your deeply-held morals” hypnotism, this is the real hard-core shit. The Comet goes on a destructive and violent crime spree under Satan and Zagnar’s direction. Notably, this is when he kills a whole bunch of cops, which informs the rest of his Golden Age career by making him one of the few super-heroes who the police have some real justification for constantly trying to gun down (I mean, they still shouldn’t just be trying to execute him in the street, but it’s nice to see them doing it for a reason other than “he’s running away from me even though I’m threatening to kill him!”)

    Once again Satan is undone by his own hubris: this time his failure to see that cheating and abusing the man who controls the actions of a living death ray generator might be a bad idea, and he gets gruesomely dissolved for his mistake. Unfortunately for Zagnar, he forgets the first rule of owning a living death ray generator: always put the safety cap back on. He too is dissolved and the Comet is free to have cops try to gun him down in the street forevermore.

    BONUS: All this Comet talk had me feeling nostalgic and I looked up 1983’s The Comet 001, which I had as a kid. It’s a pretty maudlin book primarily concerned with the Comet castigating himself over what a violent and murderous vigilante he was, and the splash page reflects this via the floating ghosts of the dead who haunt him – note all the cops from Pep Comics 003 at the top there. But just who is that at the lower left?

    I am 75+% certain that this is the monster face that Satan was projecting onto the clouds in Pep 002, which is a pretty hilarious thing to be haunting a depressed 80s super-hero. “I contributed to the death of the airship as a viable mode of transport when I murdered those dirigibles!”

    (the real if boring answer is that it probably is the face from the clouds but, as Satan himself is never actually pictured in the severely abridged version of the story in this comic, the face is being retconned into being his)

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 033

    Minor super-heroes, we got ’em.

    Little Giant: 

    Professor Rednow has some inventions to test and he has secured an orphan boy named Rusty for that purpose. Rusty is first given a serum that is supposed to turn him into a big hunk of beefcake but instead he becomes a kid with super strength. He then gets an outfit with anti-gravity properties that allow him to leap around like a small Hulk and finally is coated in “impurvogen,” a high-tech chemical that renders him invulnerable.

    In case you were having some doubts about Professor Rednow’s devotion to scientific ethics: I don’t think that he has any. It’s just lucky for young Rusty that all of this stuff works or he might end up buried in the Professor’s back yard alongside half a dozen other orphan boys.

    Rusty and the Professor end up moving to NYC and becoming special deputies in the NYPD but, as with the Phantom Knight before him, the Little Giant only really had a couple of adventures and the second one continues to be out of my price range. (OK Comics 001, 1940)

    the Shield:

    The Shield is Joe Higgins, “G-Man Extraordinary,” an FBI agent who battles threats to the US using a super-suit of his own design (a design that supposedly was the reason for Captain America switching from his original shield to the round one so as not to look too much like his patriotic counterpart, by the way). 

    Over the years the Shield’s status is subject to the usual comic drift: his powers go from being solely derived from his suit to involving some sort of super serum or ray or two of those, or all three. We’re talking about the 1940 version of the character, though, and he was all suit, baby. The suit itself did slim down considerably from the first issue to the second, but we can chalk that up to a refinement of the technology (and to the more form-fitting top being a bit more flattering than the big chunky breastplate look).

    One thing about the Shield that I had never known prior to reading his first appearance was that his motivation for becoming a costumed crimefighter was that his father died in the Black Tom Explosion as a result of German sabotage during WWI. Thus, the Shield has the Batman origin but for espionage!  (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

    UPDATE (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

    the Comet:

    John Dickering is a scientist who invents a gas that when injected gives him super jumping abilities. Too late he learns the reason that so many scientists do extensive testing before trying out serums etc on themselves, as the gas also gives him disintegrating ray vision that can only be held in check by a glass visor, Cyclops-style. Thus, he becomes the Comet.

    There are a number of remarkable things about the Comet over the years but the only ones relevant to the 1940 version of the character are 1. the fact that he has one of the truly great Golden Age costumes and 2. just how very willing he is to kill his foes. I guess when all you have is a disintegrating ray every problem looks like a disintegratable nail. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

    the Rocket:

    The Rocket is your classic example of an explorer coming to a lost/hidden/alien world and becoming its greatest champion. The most common example of this is your garden-variety jungle adventurer, with “modern man transported into an effete future” and “guy falls through hole into underground world” being other common examples.

    The Rocket’s adventures, on the other hand, happen… somewhere. He
    arrives via his namesake rocket ship – is the Diamond Empire located in
    the future? on an alien world? on a lost mesa or in a hidden valley? No
    idea, never addressed. He just shows up because he heard there was a hot
    queen running the joint and that’s all we get.

    After a rocky start, the Rocket manages to win over the titular Queen of Diamonds, going from her slave to her bodyguard to eventually becoming her lover/ adventuring companion. And if you read the above panels you might have noticed how very racist the Queen’s origin story is, another thing that is extremely in keeping with this man-in-a-strange-land style comic: white guy exceptionalism. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

  • NOTES – DECEMBER 2024

    Drawn Without Reference: 

    The Rocket and the Queen of Diamonds find themselves facing a very off-model spider in the lad of the Batmen. (Pep Comics 003, 1940)

    Cops Shooting at Fleeing Suspects:

    I was briefly tempted to give the cops of the MLJ universe a pass on shooting at the Comet because he did after all kill a bunch of them while mind controlled but then I remembered that a) that’s still no excuse to gun someone down in the street, and b) it’s still bad that they’re just blazing away at a flying man in the middle of a large city full of other people. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

     And they do it again… (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

     And again… (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

    … and again (in a crowded state legislature building!) (Pep Comics 008, 1940)

    Louisiana cops try to blow away Naval Academy Midshipman Lee Samson for escaping jail and stealing a police car. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

    Crossovers:

    Oft touted as the first super-hero crossover in comics, the Shield shares a total of four panels with the Wizard as they both set out to foil some dastardly Mosconian spies. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    Less frequently mentioned are the brief encounters between the Wizard and Lee Samson, aka the Midshipman and the Shield and Keith Kornell, aka the West Pointer, two very similar and very dull military academy students from different branches of the military-industrial complex. And they are less interesting, so that makes sense.

    The next issue features another appearance by the Wizard, this one less highly touted as it’s the second time it happened plus he just shows up to loan the Shield a plane. I personally think that that’s remarkable, as Golden Age crossovers tended more toward the one-off. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

    Minutia: 

    The Shield briefly pitches pro baseball under the name the Masked Marvel, as part of an investigation into a protection racket targeting players. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)

  • NOTES – DECEMBER 2024

    Drawn Without Reference: 

    The Rocket and the Queen of Diamonds find themselves facing a very off-model spider in the lad of the Batmen. (Pep Comics 003, 1940)

    Cops Shooting at Fleeing Suspects:

    I was briefly tempted to give the cops of the MLJ universe a pass on shooting at the Comet because he did after all kill a bunch of them while mind controlled but then I remembered that a) that’s still no excuse to gun someone down in the street, and b) it’s still bad that they’re just blazing away at a flying man in the middle of a large city full of other people. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

     And they do it again… (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

     And again… (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

    … and again (in a crowded state legislature building!) (Pep Comics 008, 1940)

    Louisiana cops try to blow away Naval Academy Midshipman Lee Samson for escaping jail and stealing a police car. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

    Crossovers:

    Oft touted as the first super-hero crossover in comics, the Shield shares a total of four panels with the Wizard as they both set out to foil some dastardly Mosconian spies. (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    Less frequently mentioned are the brief encounters between the Wizard and Lee Samson, aka the Midshipman and the Shield and Keith Kornell, aka the West Pointer, two very similar and very dull military academy students from different branches of the military-industrial complex. And they are less interesting, so that makes sense.

    The next issue features another appearance by the Wizard, this one less highly touted as it’s the second time it happened plus he just shows up to loan the Shield a plane. I personally think that that’s remarkable, as Golden Age crossovers tended more toward the one-off. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

    Minutia: 

    The Shield briefly pitches pro baseball under the name the Masked Marvel, as part of an investigation into a protection racket targeting players. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)