The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: bring ’em back

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 459: THE STAR-GAZER

    (Mystic Comics v1 003, 1940)

    It must be something of a point of pride for a super-hero to get to the point where they are effective enough that super-villains are being hired specifically to get rid of them, and that’s where the Star-Gazer comes in. A criminal astronomer and/or astrologer, the Star-Gazer is approached by crimelord Dr Gair to get rid of the pesky Blue Blaze.

    In fact, not only has the Blue Blaze reached “super-villain contract hit” levels, he has reached the level where a custom monster is created just to destroy him! Rarefied stuff for a mere third appearance.

    The Star-Monster is a cool humanoid made out of a pile of chemicals and powered by the light of a particular star. It’s invulnerable and strong and more than a match for even the Blue Blaze’s enhanced strength, so it’s lucky for him that its activity is limited to the times that its patron star is visible in the sky.

    The Blue Blaze survives his initial encounter with the Star-Monster due to it adorably falling asleep once morning comes, then puts his respite to good use in his personal laboratory and discovers that stellar rays can be blocked by common or garden variety lead and lucky for him this is the 1940s when lead is easily sourced. One visit to a print shop with no Health and Safety officer on staff and the Star-Monster is safely encased in molten lead until I get my way and he is BRUNG BACK to take Snorlax-style naps all over modern comics.

    As for the Star-Gazer, he just doesn’t know when to admit defeat, in classic super-villain style. “Just after the hero neutralizes your invulnerable super-beast” is in fact the perfect time to either flee or surrender and live to fight another day. Sure, using crystals and prisms to hand-focus a stellar deathray is incredibly badass and if you manage to pull it off you will never pay for another drink at the 40s equivalent of the Bar With No Name again in your life, but realistically you’re an old man in a showdown with a Civil War-era post-human and it’s going to end, well, like it did, with the deaths of both the Star-Gazer and Dr Gair.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 454: THE GREEN TERROR

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

    The Green Terror gets off on the right foot with me, let me tell you. Sure he’s a mysterious figure who sends goons out to kidnap healthy young New Yorkers for unknown but surely sinister purposes, but those goons are dressed in green costumes and drive around in a green car with a green smokescreen and if there’s one thing I love, my friend, it’s a villain who sticks to a theme.

    The Green Terror is opposed by super-sleuth trio the Three Xs and well… I groused a while back about Marvel Comics fans constantly overwriting their own history and the Three Xs might just be the best recent example of that. Up until 2019 this was their only appearance and their entry on any given fan website probably read like that final panel: 1X is the leader, 2X the brains and 3X the muscle. Then Marvel Comics #1000 came out and did a really great, fun job of bringing together disparate and unconnected bits of Marvel Universe lore – the Three Xs were also the Scientists’ Guild from the Human Torch’s origin were also the Enclave who created Adam Warlock etc, and they were engaged in a generations-long scheme involving the Eternity Mask which was, it turns out, worn by everyone from the Operative to the Thunderer to the Masked Raider.

    And like I said: this is all great! It’s a fun way for a forgotten bit of comics lore to come back into focus! I just wish that there wasn’t such a tendency for more recent information to overwrite what came before.

    Grumbling aside, the Three Xs get jumped by a bunch of the Green Terror’s goons, then track them to an ocean liner and get jumped again, leading to them being captured. On purpose, or so they claim.

    (the Green Terror’s lieutenant really going for it here “Ah! More guests for the blood feast!” indeed)

    The blood feast in question involves draining the blood out of the kidnap victims in order to… inject? feed? it to this tall green hunk of jerky. Honestly, most information about the Green Terror is going to be speculative due to the fact that he’s a classic blowhard of a villain who yammers on and on about how great he is. If you take him at his word he’s an immortal superman who absorbs strength from the blood of his victims. On the face of the evidence, he’s a green guy with a blood fetish. The truth lies somewhere in between.

    Obviously any villain who can convincingly deliver the line “the Green Terror will always be the strongest man in the Universe!” about half a page before being punched out and apprehended is my kind of bad guy and should be BRUNG BACK post haste. Is he exactly the same or is he a withered green husk after 80-odd years in prison? Just how much blood will he steal and how much trash will he talk while doing so? I want to see it!

    OR! Since the Three Xs eventually became the Enclave etc of Adam Warlock fame perhaps they acquired the Green Terror from the authorities as part of their research into superhumanity. He’s floating in a tube in an abandoned lab right now after having his weird hair harvested to make cocoons or something and all he needs is for the right dummy to break in to steal the copper wiring to set him free!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 454: THE GREEN TERROR

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

    The Green Terror gets off on the right foot with me, let me tell you. Sure he’s a mysterious figure who sends goons out to kidnap healthy young New Yorkers for unknown but surely sinister purposes, but those goons are dressed in green costumes and drive around in a green car with a green smokescreen and if there’s one thing I love, my friend, it’s a villain who sticks to a theme.

    The Green Terror is opposed by super-sleuth trio the Three Xs and well… I groused a while back about Marvel Comics fans constantly overwriting their own history and the Three Xs might just be the best recent example of that. Up until 2019 this was their only appearance and their entry on any given fan website probably read like that final panel: 1X is the leader, 2X the brains and 3X the muscle. Then Marvel Comics #1000 came out and did a really great, fun job of bringing together disparate and unconnected bits of Marvel Universe lore – the Three Xs were also the Scientists’ Guild from the Human Torch’s origin were also the Enclave who created Adam Warlock etc, and they were engaged in a generations-long scheme involving the Eternity Mask which was, it turns out, worn by everyone from the Operative to the Thunderer to the Masked Raider.

    And like I said: this is all great! It’s a fun way for a forgotten bit of comics lore to come back into focus! I just wish that there wasn’t such a tendency for more recent information to overwrite what came before.

    Grumbling aside, the Three Xs get jumped by a bunch of the Green Terror’s goons, then track them to an ocean liner and get jumped again, leading to them being captured. On purpose, or so they claim.

    (the Green Terror’s lieutenant really going for it here “Ah! More guests for the blood feast!” indeed)

    The blood feast in question involves draining the blood out of the kidnap victims in order to… inject? feed? it to this tall green hunk of jerky. Honestly, most information about the Green Terror is going to be speculative due to the fact that he’s a classic blowhard of a villain who yammers on and on about how great he is. If you take him at his word he’s an immortal superman who absorbs strength from the blood of his victims. On the face of the evidence, he’s a green guy with a blood fetish. The truth lies somewhere in between.

    Obviously any villain who can convincingly deliver the line “the Green Terror will always be the strongest man in the Universe!” about half a page before being punched out and apprehended is my kind of bad guy and should be BRUNG BACK post haste. Is he exactly the same or is he a withered green husk after 80-odd years in prison? Just how much blood will he steal and how much trash will he talk while doing so? I want to see it!

    OR! Since the Three Xs eventually became the Enclave etc of Adam Warlock fame perhaps they acquired the Green Terror from the authorities as part of their research into superhumanity. He’s floating in a tube in an abandoned lab right now after having his weird hair harvested to make cocoons or something and all he needs is for the right dummy to break in to steal the copper wiring to set him free!

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 050: THE BLUE BLAZE

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

    Spencer Keen AKA the Blue Blaze is an interesting character. His origin for example has a couple of classic elements that were not yet classic at the time because it was 1940. Or rather it was 1852 because Spencer Keen is from the Past.

    Costume: like Barbara Gordon twenty-odd years later, the reason that the Blue Blaze has a super-suit ready to go is that he was on the way to a costume party when his origin happened.

    Origin: while the Blue Blaze is possibly the earliest super-hero to have the costume party outfit origin (and a cursory search turns up Miss Fury as the only other contender), the origin of his powers was probably already a cliche in the pulps. My Science Dad Made a Thing and I Got Powers From It has to be one of the all-time most common origins (particularly once Science Moms start getting equal representation) – heck, you could probably include Superman’s origin in that category if you were feeling puckish.

    Spencer Keen’s Science Dad discovered a weird blue flame that killed whatever it touched, only for them to come back stronger after some time had passed. For slightly unclear reasons he had resolved to destroy this blue blaze (the name of the guy! that’s where it’s from!) but before he could do so a tornado ripped through the area. Spencer Keen was seemingly killed buy in actuality was blasted with blue flame.

    (the tornado also ties into the origin of the Blue Blaze’s costume, by the way. It killed so many people that they were all buried as quickly as possible, meaning that Keen went into the ground in fancy dress)

    Spencer Keen hibernates in his coffin for 88 years, then emerges as the Blue Blaze when he is disturbed by graverobbers working for Professor Maluski. As the Blue Blaze, Keen is generically physically and mentally enhanced and invulnerable to small arms. He also has some degree of telepathic power – he passively absorbs knowledge about the world while in hibernation and has some sort of sense of where and when danger is afoot. Initially, the Blue Blaze operated as a regular-style super-hero with a secret lair, a laboratory and a cool car, but his last adventure introduced the very cool concept of him returning to the grave once he had dispensed justice upon some fools and then reemerging in a new location when he is needed once again.

    I am honestly surprised that the Blue Blaze hasn’t been BRUNG BACK in some capacity yet. Not only is he conceptually interesting with his whole “emerge from the grave to smite evil” gimmick but he’s preloaded with an interesting state of being: a completely knowledgeable and up-to-date human whose social development stopped when he was early 20s at latest, in the 1850s. Rife with potential!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 453: PROFESSOR MALUSKI

    (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1941)

    Professor Maluski is the first foe faced by the Blue Blaze after his hibernative period and while he has a lot of cool stuff (huge underground base full of crazy machines, gangster henchmen, a weird gem that flies under its own power and drags its target along in a tractor beam, etc) the real reason that he is getting his own entry rather than being tossed in the next Mad Science Round-Up is the same reason that the Blue Blaze was woken up by a couple of grave robbers: Professor Maluski is making science zombies.

    And not just any science zombies! This is the only full-length view we get of any of them but it appears that they are in fact the upper thirds of human corpses, floating around on columns of light. Probably. It’s a wild and eerie visual and a real shame that it’s not highlighted more.

    Professor Maluski of course learns too late that you gotta build in a few more safeguards when constructing an army of the undead, as his control unit is smashed in a fight with the Blue Blaze and he is killed in the subsequent zombie rampage. I could take or leave the professor himself, but his science zombie tech is so neat that I demand that it be BRUNG BACK by some enterprising young villain – we’re overdue for a take on urban exploration that involves old super-villain lairs.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 443: THE UGLY QUEEN

    (Mystery Men Comics 022-023, 1941)

    The Ugly Queen is our first real foray into the heady world of societal beauty standards as motivation for evil (though there’s an element of that sort of thing in Setap’s first appearance and we’ve certainly encountered a fair few characters rejected by society for ugliness and deformity). Her status as a royal is called into question by the end of her appearances but she does cut a powerful figure, with an undersea castle full of weird snake-men that she draws Rex Dexter of Mars to.

    Two things about the Ugly Queen’s appearance:

    -the design of her face is amazing. 

    -if what she’s looking for is acceptance rather than universal acclaim then the Ugly Queen has absolutely been looking in the wrong places. I’m only moderately Extremely Online and I could name more than a few places where she could, as they say, Get It.

    So yes, it’s clear that the real villain was societal beauty standards all along. Wait. No, it was the Ugly Queen – she just dropped “thousands of atomic bombs” on a city to kill one beautiful woman.

    She also captures handsome men and swaps their heads out for those of animals when they refuse her marriage demands. And while writing all this out I realized just what I liked most about the Ugly Queen: she isn’t doing any of this because she feels the sting of societal rejection. She’s doing it because it’s fun and the social stuff is a flimsy excuse. Like all of the best villains, the Ugly Queen is having a great time.

    Her first appearance ends with a cow-headed man flooding her underwater palace and seemingly killing all within, but worry not because in the very next issue:

    She’s back, baby.

    Once again I am struck by how cool the Ugly Queen looks. And she knows it! She clearly wore that superfluous helmet so that she could take it off dramatically in front of… some snake men, I guess.

    This time, Rex Dexter brings his fiance Cynde along and the Ugly Queen undercuts my previous point a bit by caring enough about how she looks to set up a mind transfer between the two of them so that she can rock Cynde’s conventionally attractive face. Although she does start gloating about it to Rex Dexter the second that she thinks that she has gotten away with it, so maybe it’s more of a prank body swap than a desperate attempt to be something else.

    All’s well that ends well, however, as the Queen’s snake-man subjects, who turn out to be slaves, immediately revolt once they see the Ugly Queen tied to a chair, and then once she is stabbed by one of them it turns out that the mind-transfer tech she had used was the kind that switches the minds back when either of them dies. Seems to go against the spirit of the malicious mind switch, but what do I know.

    In conclusion, the Ugly Queen rules, long live the Ugly Queen. It’s unlikely that someone will ever BRING BACK the character but I know I’d love to see her again.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 427: THE TUSK

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 022, 1940) 

    I want to be clear: there is very little to talk about re: the Tusk. I just find his weird face fascinating. Eponymous tusk plus weak chin plus huge eyes plus bonus enormous combover makes this guy a visual feast! Plus he’s a Masked Marvel foe and I love that guy.

    Just look at the faces he ends up pulling to highlight the tusk! Real great stuff.

    Oh, and as for the villainy: the Tusk has a super accurate bomb sight that allows him to blow up banks from super high altitude. I guess these mystery explosions cause enough confusion that his men can swoop in and loot unchallenged. The Masked Marvel also ends up being blamed for his crimes but the Tusk doesn’t have anything to do with that.

    I don’t know the context in which the Tusk could be BRUNG BACK but I wholeheartedly support and advocate for it. He would be a perfect addition to any rogues gallery that regularly gets together to kvetch about their foe. Just glaring in the back, tusk gleaming…

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 427: THE TUSK

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 022, 1940) 

    I want to be clear: there is very little to talk about re: the Tusk. I just find his weird face fascinating. Eponymous tusk plus weak chin plus huge eyes plus bonus enormous combover makes this guy a visual feast! Plus he’s a Masked Marvel foe and I love that guy.

    Just look at the faces he ends up pulling to highlight the tusk! Real great stuff.

    Oh, and as for the villainy: the Tusk has a super accurate bomb sight that allows him to blow up banks from super high altitude. I guess these mystery explosions cause enough confusion that his men can swoop in and loot unchallenged. The Masked Marvel also ends up being blamed for his crimes but the Tusk doesn’t have anything to do with that.

    I don’t know the context in which the Tusk could be BRUNG BACK but I wholeheartedly support and advocate for it. He would be a perfect addition to any rogues gallery that regularly gets together to kvetch about their foe. Just glaring in the back, tusk gleaming…

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 419: PSYK

    (Funny Picture Stories v2 001-003, 1937)

    I think I recently mentioned the dreamlike quality of some Golden Age comics. This is one of them, and only partially because the villain operates out of some sort of pocket dimension in the collective human subconscious. 

    Psyk is a would-be world conqueror with three really good tricks in his arsenal: travel between Earth and the aforementioned Realm of the Subconscious, the ability to raise the dead and mental domination of both the raised dead and the living. His plan seems to be to raise an army of dead and living thralls and then transport them to strategic invasion points. It’s not a bad plan, even if the thralls are all armed with swords and nothing else.

    Psyk is opposed by Jack Strand, who ultimately prevails by exploiting Psyk’s two weaknesses: a power-sapping “ray” (and here I think they’re using ray in the not-much-used sense of a radiation rather than a beam of energy) and the fact that each person affected by Psyk’s power has a weak point where that power entered their body – this point is the only vulnerable place on a thrall’s body and so they cover it with a very obvious and easily removed green piece of metal. Strike a living thrall in the spot and they are freed from Psyk’s power; do the same to a dead thrall and they die for good.

    What’s odd is that Psyk himself has such a spot: his cheekbones (as you might be able to tell from his stylish green cheek armour). What does this imply? Is Psyk himself just a thrall to a more powerful being? Maybe! Doesn’t matter though because Jack Strand punches him right in the cheek and blows up his dream castle.

    He’s an interesting guy, Psyk – definitely has the feel of a character bridging the pulp/comic transition. I’d love to see him BRUNG BACK in a limited series told in a more modern style.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 047: THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN

    (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 003, 1940)

    Just a cheeky super-hero for you today: the Headless Horseman! The Headless Horseman is an utterly standard western hero except for their lack of a head. They made maybe two appearances in Centaur comics before fading into the mists of history. A shame, because I really like the simple spin a fake supernatural Western hero gives things – I can’t think of too many of them other than the various Ghost Riders. The cowboy ones, not the motorcycle ones.

    You may have noticed a cheeky gender neutral pronoun or two up above and that’s because the Headless Horseman… is actually a Head-Having Horsewoman! Her name is Betty and in addition to having no assigned last name she is pretty scantly characterized outside of her vigilantism – she was educated Back East, she runs a saloon along with her… mother? and is friends with the doofus sheriff’s deputy, who functions as her source of breaking crime information.

    Utterly charming concept. BRING her BACK immediately, someone.