The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Marvel Mystery Comics

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 274: THE BRAIN

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 018, 1941)

    The Brain is your classic nerd gang boss, of the common subvariety that are almost clever enough to succeed but get in their own way. His core plan this ish is solid as far as supercrime goes: rob an Army payroll and frame the Human Torch for it via the use of what is essentially one of those suits that stuntmen wear in order to set themselves on fire (which as an aside kind of makes me reconsider just how upsetting the Human Torch would be to see). He even has a decent plan to get rid of the Torch is he manages to figure out whodunnit.

    The Brain’s real failing lies in underestimating Toro, the Torch’s teen sidekick and avid shirt avoider. While the Human Torch is afforded an entire elaborate deathtrap of his own, the Brain’s entire plan to deal with Toro is to assume that he can take him in a fight.

    And he can’t! It’s not even close! Toro is basically exactly as powerful as the Human Torch, plus he’s a teen boy, a notoriously wily bunch! This is frankly embarrassing for the Brain.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 273: MOR THE MIGHTY

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 017, 1941)

    Mor the Mighty is part of one of my favourite types of super-villain: the magic user who has mastered a couple of spells and intends to see just how far they can get with them. In this case, our friend here seems to be limited to enlarging animals and conjuring stacks of explosives – though he might be juicing the stats of the animals a bit, too.

    That’s not bad for a guy with a villainous bent – you could engage in a little extortion or theft, maybe set yourself up as a regional gang boss.

    Just kidding, of course. Mor’s big plan is to send out his henchmen (including the excellent ape-man Zabu) and giant kitty to spread terror, confident that this will enable him to conquer… I assume the US. He says universe, but you gotta allow for hyperbole.

    To Mor’s credit, the Marvel Universe is not yet very well-supplied with magical protectors, which is what usually spells their undoing – if you rock up to a generalist like Dr Fate with nothing but a couple of 2nd level spells and an ape-man under your belt then you’re not going to be long for this world.

    Mor, on the other hand, is paired off against Electro, and beats him! His hopes for universal domination are ultimately dashed due to the fact that he doesn’t confirm the kill on Professor Zog as well, and one rapidly repaired robot later Mor is toast.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 273: MOR THE MIGHTY

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 017, 1941)

    Mor the Mighty is part of one of my favourite types of super-villain: the magic user who has mastered a couple of spells and intends to see just how far they can get with them. In this case, our friend here seems to be limited to enlarging animals and conjuring stacks of explosives – though he might be juicing the stats of the animals a bit, too.

    That’s not bad for a guy with a villainous bent – you could engage in a little extortion or theft, maybe set yourself up as a regional gang boss.

    Just kidding, of course. Mor’s big plan is to send out his henchmen (including the excellent ape-man Zabu) and giant kitty to spread terror, confident that this will enable him to conquer… I assume the US. He says universe, but you gotta allow for hyperbole.

    To Mor’s credit, the Marvel Universe is not yet very well-supplied with magical protectors, which is what usually spells their undoing – if you rock up to a generalist like Dr Fate with nothing but a couple of 2nd level spells and an ape-man under your belt then you’re not going to be long for this world.

    Mor, on the other hand, is paired off against Electro, and beats him! His hopes for universal domination are ultimately dashed due to the fact that he doesn’t confirm the kill on Professor Zog as well, and one rapidly repaired robot later Mor is toast.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 272: KARL SCHWAB

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)

    Karl Schwab is part of a long tradition of villains who spend years and years meticulously preparing for their big moment, only for it to come crashing down the second that a super-hero, adventurer or plucky kid with a pet monkey gets involved. Usually this involves lurking in an old castle or cemetery lair while tinkering or planning or brewing or growing homunculi but Karl actually managed to get caught already, somewhere around 1931, and while he’s been stewing in a federal prison all of his little minions have been carrying on for him.

    Karl’s actual plan is to take over the US – we don’t see a lot of it in action due to interference from the Angel, but Phase I involves electrifying NYC. We can only speculate what the next step would be – establish a foothold from which to invade the rest of the US? Install similar systems in other cities , or activate ones that are already there? There’s even a bit of good old crypto-fascism, as Karl does a fair bit of exclaiming in German and talking about his home country being cooler than the US. Whether he’s working for the Nazis or not will never be known, as it’s still mid-1941 (Marvel is a bit more likely to have explicit Nazi villains than other major publishers of the time, but not on US soil, by and large).

    All of this speculation is rendered moot by the big fight that occurs between Karl and the Angel, during which Karl’s generator is activated at full power, overloads and explodes. Karl takes a piece of shrapnel to the back, while his minions conveniently all die from the sound of the blast, broadcast over their helmet radios.

    (this is one of those things that would galvanize me to another long-term open-ended project if I was just a little bit different of a kind of nerdlinger. If I had any knowledge of cartography etc I’d be figuring out where all the lairs and abandoned castles and sewer bases full of desiccated corpses in rubber suits were. Instead I compile spreadsheets estimating how many desiccated corpses there are. To each their own I guess)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 271: PRINCE OMEI

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)

    This guy’s a real ding-dong, and I was sorely tempted to just pass him by. I couldn’t in good conscience not mention a guy who not only hypnotizes Professor Zog and (by proxy) Electro as his minions and does so while wearing both an eye patch and a monocle. PLUS he’s one of my favourite types of villains: a complete failure. Literally all he does after acquiring his new giant robot/ robot operator team is deal with some organizational strife in his gang, then Zog breaks free of his mental influence and Omei ends up blowing himself up in what is becoming a running theme in the world of Electro’s villains. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 270: DR LORROF

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)

    Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs.

    Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium ray that is the only known weakness of his blob, a rare bit of non-hubristic caution from a mad scientist, especially from someone as unhinged as Lorrof is.

    Here’s the monster, called the Green Terror. Two things:

    1. This crowd really knows their lines

    2. This crowd is present because Dr Lorrof announced the impending emergence of the monster from it’s shell. The few hundred people who get eaten have to apportion at least some of the blame to themselves

    And you thought I was joking about the crabs. 

    Lorrof sadly doesn’t survive this confrontation with Electro – after the replacement crabs fail to destroy the robot, Lorrof himself attempts to do so with a vial of explosive goo, only to blow himself sky high.

    Obviously I reckon that this is exactly the sort of science villain that the Marvel Universe needs, if only for the fact that he yells things like “fiery demons!” when startled. And what are the Avengers going to do when confronted by the Green Terror Mk II at a time when hospitals don’t routinely hold a stockpile of radium? BRING Lorrof BACK so we can find out!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 269: THE BRAIN OF PROFESSOR DONAIRE

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) 

    I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I’m from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn’t need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain.

    Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would bother to investigate the nearby vicinity when large numbers of corpses are found in quick succession.

    But the similarities to Python don’t end there! Like Python, Donaire lives in an old stone structure (a temple rather than a castle, buts still) retrofitted with a modern lab, has a big bald goon with a K name (Karlo to Python’s Kreeper) and the corpses he’s dumping are sans brain.

    Unlike Python, Prof Donaire has no interest in the brains of his victims. No, he’s a body thief. He’s scooped out his own brain and put it in a jar and now can control five seperate bodies on the 40s equivalent of a Local Area Network. And as always with any kind of body part thief, Donaire is just salivating at the thought of adding a toned super-hero bod to his collection.

    Luckily for the Angel, merely having the bodies of a bunch of athletes does not grant Donaire the reflexes or fighting abilities of their original owners. Likewise, being able to mobilize four bodies for a melee doesn’t convey the ability to coordinate their attacks. The Angel is perfectly fine.

    All good things come to an end, however, and Professor Donaire learns a bit too late the primary rule of having an disembodied brain: don’t just, like, put it on a shelf or other easily accessed location in a glass jar. In this particular case, Donaire ends up setting his own lab (and therefore brain) on fire but the Angel would have been completely justified in nailing it with a jump-kick.

    In conclusion: the Brain of Professor Donaire should absolutely be BRUNG BACK.

  • NOTES – MAY 2023

    Folk:

    Luther Robinson and Lynne Harris! These folks are hard to categorize! They’re not villains, despite being antagonists to Namor the Sub-Mariner, because Namor is very much a villain at least half of the time. They’re not heroes, despite eventually allying with Namor to fight Nazis, because they definitely attempt to commit at least one genocide against the people of Atlantis. 

    They’re adventurers, they’ve both been surgically modified by Atlantean scientists to be amphibious, and Lynne is one of a long line of women to be abducted by Namor with romantic ill-intent (and she’s, like, third one, in a mere handful of stories). They’re interesting artifacts of the way comic book universes come together, and that’s great.

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010-026 (sporadically), 1940-1941) 

    Vision foe Rhamu Rondi is your bog standard crooked mystic character and will make no further appearances here, but the Buddha Signal is objectively great – even early Jack Kirby knew what was up with regard to villainous décor.(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)

    Names:

    Fella name of Barney Bailey here, which is a pretty great moniker for an exhibiter of curiosities to have. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)

    Panel fun:

    Sub-Mariner x Human Torch (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 017, 1941)

    Whether this is Namor’s personal flag/ crest or a more general Atlantean symbol, this bit of regalia must be noted. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 018, 1941)

    Biographical Details: Namor the Sub-Mariner weighs 198 pounds, according to the ring announcer during his foray into the world of boxing (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 020, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 268: GNORR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 013, 1940)

     

    The history of spaceflight is of course very different in a super-hero universe. For example, Empress Nara of Ligra, featured in a previous post about Professor Zog being knighted, was actually an Earth-woman who arrived on Ligra as an infant because her father invented an interstellar spacecraft sometime around 1920 or so. This it is practically unremarkable that Professor Zog was invited on a trip to the Moon in 1940 by Dr Simon Crane and his daughter Betty. Also Electro came along.

    And having reached the Moon almost 30 years earlier than we in this dimension did, Zog and the Cranes encountered the other side of the super-hero universe coin (if the first side read EASY SPACE TRAVEL, that is): there’s always going to be one or more evil space-creeps when you get where you’re going.

    In this case, the space-creep is Gnorr, self-styled Emperor of the Moon! Last of his kind, thousands of years old and cute as hell! Just a big roly poly head with four wee little tentacles and a wall-eye: I love him. Too bad for him and me that he set his sights on the conquest of Earth, because that’s always the cue for Professor Zog to take a hand – Gnorr ends up blown to high heaven and the Marvel Universe was poorer for it.

    Gnorr also has some pretty great moon-robots in his employ, for the record.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 268: GNORR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 013, 1940)

     

    The history of spaceflight is of course very different in a super-hero universe. For example, Empress Nara of Ligra, featured in a previous post about Professor Zog being knighted, was actually an Earth-woman who arrived on Ligra as an infant because her father invented an interstellar spacecraft sometime around 1920 or so. This it is practically unremarkable that Professor Zog was invited on a trip to the Moon in 1940 by Dr Simon Crane and his daughter Betty. Also Electro came along.

    And having reached the Moon almost 30 years earlier than we in this dimension did, Zog and the Cranes encountered the other side of the super-hero universe coin (if the first side read EASY SPACE TRAVEL, that is): there’s always going to be one or more evil space-creeps when you get where you’re going.

    In this case, the space-creep is Gnorr, self-styled Emperor of the Moon! Last of his kind, thousands of years old and cute as hell! Just a big roly poly head with four wee little tentacles and a wall-eye: I love him. Too bad for him and me that he set his sights on the conquest of Earth, because that’s always the cue for Professor Zog to take a hand – Gnorr ends up blown to high heaven and the Marvel Universe was poorer for it.

    Gnorr also has some pretty great moon-robots in his employ, for the record.