The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: bring ’em back

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 337: DR DROWN

    (Master Comics 001, 1940)

    Dr Drown is a paragon of his sub-category of super-villain. Unfortunately for him, that is not a particularly exalted position, as he belongs to the Association of Seagoing Criminal Scientists and the membership of that group is heavily diluted by decades of Aquaman and Sea Devils and even Challengers of the Unknown foes with wilfully bad schemes.

    Dr Drown’s schemes aren’t too bad! He as a submersible yacht that he uses to torpedo and loot ships, which is a lucrative if very evil business model, with the sole flaw being that he keeps doing it in exactly the same part of the ocean which makes him very easy for his foe Shipwreck Roberts to track him down.

    Drown’s other claim to fame is as a tamer of sea monsters and it’s here that things really get going for me. The “brontosauruses” above are pretty light fare but check this out:

    I follow a lot of horror artists on various social medias and it’s still been a while since I’ve seen anything quite as unsettling as the Giantocrab. Why does it have human arms, for heaven’s sake?

    By contrast the Colostopus is merely a fun dome-shaped friend with a good name.

    Drown also deployed this Mechanosaurus in a later adventure but as the name suggests it was actually a monster-shaped submarine (a classic move but always sad to miss out on a real monster).

    As stated above, Dr Drown is a great example of a generally mediocre lot – I’d be right chuffed if he or one of his descendants were ever brung back.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 039: THE DEVIL’S DAGGER

    (Master Comics 001-020, 1940-1941)

    Devil’s Dagger! I love this guy. He has a lot of familiar things going on: a wealthy young man named Ken Wyman who works as a reporter in order to get the latest crime news and heads out at night in his souped-up car (the excellently named Speed Ghost) to kick butt accompanied by Pat Gleason, ex boxer and member of the surprisingly large Chauffeur/ Sidekick club.

    There are two really interesting things about the Devil’s Dagger: 1. really good costume. 2. he’s a mission-driven vigilante. Once he rids Carterville of the sinister Jeff Marlowe… he finds out about Jeff’s boss, Mr H. But once he gets rid of him, that’s it! Wyman unmasks, retires, maybe takes the job at his father’s bank, who knows? It’s so rare for a super-hero to have a finite career, not just in the Golden Age but any time! How refreshing!

    Of course after saying that I would be a monster to suggest that the Devil’s Dagger be brung back, and I am not! I do however think that the identity would make for quite a fun legacy hero! Picture it: Carterville has once again become a crime-ridden hellhole, perhaps even under the thumb of a superannuated Mr H (or a corrupted Ken Wyman!), and someone stumbles across the unpublished memoirs of Ken Wyman and takes inspiration from them – maybe an underpaid employee at the Daily Blade, now stripped of assets by venture capital and printing a ten-page synopsis of the top clickbait of the week? Heck, maybe this time it’s a whole group of dagger-wielding vigilantes. Fun!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 336: ADAM ADDAMS

    (All-Flash 003, 1941)

    Like the Threat before him, Adam Addams is a revenge guy. Unlike the Threat, Addams is… I won’t say more petty, but perhaps less focused – they include the woman who didn’t marry him, the man she married instead, the man who refused to give him a medical license because he talked about glands too much, and anyone who contributed to one of his prior revenge schemes going wrong. If he has a particular focus, it’s Dr French, the man what married the woman. About half of the issue involves attempts by Addams to ruin French’s life and the other half is all about killing as many of his enemies as possible.

    Contrary to Addams’ big talk about changing your face with glandular treatments, he actually uses bog-standard rubberoid masks. Maybe they’re just easier than mutating your head every time you want to put on a disguise, because he does turn out to have the goods, gland-manipulation-wise…

    To whit, he posts up on a tropical island and mutates a herd of horses into beefcake centaurs! Centaurs who he then flies back to NYC and parachutes into Dr French’s hospital for a good old fashioned rampage, because nothing ruins a medical reputation like a centaur attack.

    Special shout out to Oats, the doofus centaur who ruins the whole operation by being too horny.

    Extra special shoutout to the unnamed and very professional centaur pilot in his little hat.

    Aside from Addams’ revenge schemes his other major interest is in recreating the hard water formula that gave the Flash his powers (because the Flash has very poor infosec and it’s trivially easy to find out where and how he did so). To that end, he kidnaps Jay Garrick’s old chemistry professor and forces him to work on finding the formula. And he finds it! Adam Addams acquires Flash-style super-speed! He gets beat up by the actual Flash because he has no fine control yet, but surely this marks a dark new day in the annals of crime!

    Not a chance. In a move that smacks of “we have to wrap up the issue now”, Addams takes his own life after the Flash foils what is frankly a medium-sized plot. It’s fairly unsatisfying, to say the least. Thankfully, I have a solution: Addams didn’t blow up, he entered the Speed Force. He can come back at any time!And I want that! I want him to be brung back! Because as uninteresting as the Speed Force and its related heroes and villains have become through proliferation it can only be improved through the application of a guy who can whip up a pack of centaurs on a month’s notice.

    ADDENDUM: I was wrong! He does change some of his henchmen’s faces via glandular treatments!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 325: DOCTOR SENDACH

    (Human Torch v1 002, 1940)

    As our story opens, what is presumably New York City is under siege by a mysterious killer who drains their victims of their blood. Dr Jack “the Fiery Mask” Castle decides to get involved. He sets a trap by announcing to the paper that he has a lot of blood on hand and then waits for the fiend to show up – too bad for him it’s not just one guy, as twenty blood-hungry maniacs show up and beat the tar out of him.

    But! The Fiery Mask had cleverly doped the blood with florescent chemicals visible to his weird glowing eyes and he manages to track it to the castle district of New York State, where he finds them reporting back to famous missing stomach specialist Dr Sendach. None of this is tremendously exciting and Sendach probably would have ended up in the Mad Scientist Roundup but…

    He’s super cuckoo! Sendach, it turns out, has developed an artificial stomach and installed it in a series of unfortunates without considering what the side effects of such a procedure might be. Turns out: it’s bad! They all lost the ability to produce blood and became science vampires! Now a reasonable man would take this as a sign that it might be time to revisit the drawing board, but not old “I shall prove my theories if I have to drain the world of its blood” Sendach, who determines that the Fiery Mask shall be his next subject. Somewhat predictably, the subsequent struggle ends with Sendach being devoured by his own minions.

    I don’t think that I would advocate for Dr Sendach to be BRUNG BACK, but the Sendach Artificial Stomach would be a fun thing for an aspiring villain to dig up at the US Patent Office as a way to control their minions via regular necessary transfusions.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 320: THE LEGION OF THE DOOMED

    (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

    There’s not much substance to the Legion of the Doomed, but there’s a lot of cool ideas, so lets knock them out.

    a) a weird figure imposes a baby on a couple dwelling in haunted hill country. The baby, it is later revealed, cries with the voice of a man.

    b) subsequently, a killer begins stalking the streets of a nearby city, probably New York. Panic ensues! The Fiery Mask is on the prowl.

    c) somewhat unsurprisingly, the killer and the baby turn out to be one and the same! There’s a missed opportunity for more creepy adult-acting baby, one of my favourite comics tropes. The Fiery Mask witnesses this transformation and manages to stop the next murder…

    d) … and pursues the killer back to whatever level of Comic Book Hell they came from. The Legion of the Doomed are slain! The city is safe! No questions have been answered:

    Why do these killings? Not sure.

    Why the whole ruse with the baby? No idea.

    Has the Legion of the Doomed actually been stopped? Not saying.

    Which actually opens the possibility of these guys being BRUNG BACK. I mean, supernatural killers are a dime a dozen, but these guys bring a creepy baby to the mix, plus they’re very easy to kill. Say they’re on some sort of ~80-year sacrifice cycle and you’re good to go. And it’s a perfect chance to bring the current Fiery Mask out of limbo!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 316: THE VAMPIRE

    (Daring Mystery Comics 002, 1940) 

    The Vampire has the distinction of appearing in the only Golden Age featuring Mister E, possibly the biggest nonentity in the collection of heroes brought back in The Twelve. He’s whatever: he has a drug that makes your heart explode and his major plot involves trying to get control of an oil company (and marry a woman against her will after killing her father, in case you though he might be a bit sympathetic). He is one of the few comic book super-villains to dress like the villains from 1940s super-hero movies though, so that’s something.

    Probably the most interesting thing about the Vampire is the fact that like so many features in Daring Mystery Comics Mister E was a one-off, which means that he is still at large to this day. Fun! BRING BACK this very very old man and his old machinations! Mister E has retired – who can save us from the Vampire?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 313: DR KLUTCH

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    Dr Klutch is your basic criminal scientist. His major distinction is that he got beat up by the Tough Kid Squad in their only recorded outing, but there are a couple of other points worthy of discussion here.

    The first is that we have a clear timeline for this guy. Many, many super-villains are clearly operating at a level that would require years of work to establish or have a lengthy if nebulous criminal record, but with Klutch here we know: in 1926 he murdered his research partner Dr Danger in revenge for not sharing his findings and in the subsequent 16 years he became a successful enough criminal scientist to be identified on sight by even beat cops.

    (not sure how great of a scientist he was, given that it took the entire 16 years to track down the Danger Twins, one of whom was adopted by Danger’s friend Professor Moxon – follow a few leads, buddy!)

    Point two is merely that the idea of murdering someone and then perpetually electrocuting their twitching skeleton is fairly metal.

    But the real kicker is that Klutch eventually gets ahold of Dr Danger’s serum by extracting it from the blood of Danger Twin Wally. Klutch is a super-powered criminal scientist! The serum is a bit ill-defined but the gist of it seems to be that it enhances your trained abilities, and Dr Klutch is trained in fightin’, science and EVIL.

    Sadly, the closest we get to seeing the full chemically-enhanced might of Klutch’s evil mind is a plan to rob several banks at once – mid-tier super-villainy at best, but perhaps he was working up to it. BUT, in an exciting turn of events, Klutch was captured at the end of the story, leaving the door open to my favourite potential BRUNG BACK scenario: the super-powered crook who gets out after 80+ years of cooling his heels in the klink. After all, he’s full of serum! Who knows what that does to the aging process?

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 036: THE TOUGH KID SQUAD

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    I occasionally opine about the relative obscurity of one super-hero or another and it’s tricky to judge such a thing objectively, especially when it’s about a suite of characters who are all 100% unknown to the world at large. Despite this I am confident in my assertion that the Tough Kid Squad are the most obscure Marvel characters ever to receive their own title, even if it did only last one issue.

    The Tough Kid Squad is an obvious attempt by Marvel to replicate the formula of the Young Allies, but the technology to boil down a concept and recast it misfired somehow. The real key to a 40s kid gang is the mix of personalities – as seen in the Young Allies’ Smart Kid, Fat Kid, Tough Kid, Racial Stereotype and two Super-Hero Kids. The Tough Kid Squad on the other hand, is as follows:

    Wally Danger: Together with his brother Wally forms the Danger Twins, the Super-Hero kid Element of the team. Orphaned at a young age, the twins were raised separately after Tom was stolen by a crook to be his protege. They both benefit from a serum that their father gave them as infants which enhances their trained abilities. Wally mostly acts as the Smart Kid.

    Tom Danger: Raised to be a crook but his better nature shone through when he met his long-lost twin, Tom is a Tough Kid to his core.

    Derrick Dawes: A former school bully who was befriended after a beating from Tom. Tough Kid.

    Butch: A guy on the school football team who is befriended off-panel. Supposedly a Fat Kid based on the action but is drawn as and acts like a Tough Kid.

    Eagle: The football team also had a Racial Stereotype to befriend, albeit one who mostly acts like a Tough Kid. Eagle also presents the conundrum common to comic book racial stereotype characters: that because part of the joke of them is that they are acting against stereotype by being the hero of the piece they are often driving the action in the most interesting ways. 

    The main point of this breakdown is that true to its name the Tough Kid Squad is a real one-note kid gang. It is in fact weirdly tough to figure out if there is a true knockoff kirby in the bunch, in fact – they’re kind of all part of one gestalt knockoff kirby, with Eagle looking most the part and Tom acting it.

    Obviously I think the name should be brung back, and I’m kind of disappointed in Marvel for not dredging it up during the 50-State Initiative time – it might have been the only thing to make the fact that Hellcat was the entire Alaska Initiative team all by herself more fun. As for the members themselves… they are a bit generic, but the fact that the Danger Twins are all hopped up on serum offers the easy possibility for a couple of unaging characters to have been secretly operating for the last 80+ years, which is always fun.