The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: evil equivalent

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 356: OLBAID THE GREAT

    (Master Comics 016, 1941)

    I almost missed the fact that this guy is an evil equivalent of El Carim! I somehow read that opening blurb and thought that his name was Diablo but it’s not, it’s Olbaid – he has a backward name like El Carim!

    What’s more, Olbaid has roughly equivalent magical powers to El Carim, and uses magical items to supplement them just like him. In Olbaid’s case, this involves the Snake Pool, a magical pool of water that turns humans into constrictor snakes, suitable for use as snakey minions.

    While Olbaid is not a stage magician like El Carim, he does have a show business tie via his stable of ex-circus performer henchmen, including cowboy Rifle Ralph, lariat artist Roper Pete and an unnamed knife thrower.

    Sadly for Olbaid, the similarities between him and El Carim end when it comes to power levels and their magical duel ends with Olbaid in jail and the snakes restored to humans who hopefully can’t remember being used to squash a bunch of people.

  • 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 286: GROSSO

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 286: GROSSO

    (Marvel Mystery Comics 024, 1941)

    It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper evil equivalent, so here’s Grosso to show us how it’s done! Golden Age Vision, see, is from an extradimensional realm usually called Smokeworld that’s full of smoke and that the Vision travels to and from via (you guessed it) clouds of smoke. Smoke is kind of his whole deal. Grosso, by contrast, is from the World of War-Dust, with war-dust being defined as clouds of metallic particulate like aluminum. Whether the dust strictly has to have been generated in the production of armaments isn’t really addressed – Grosso is a vocal enough fan of war as a concept that I reckon he wouldn’t appear in the dust produced by,  say, an electric fan factory even if he had the option.

    The fact that Grosso know the  Vision by sight raises further questions about Smokeworld and the World of War-Dust existing in some sort of particulate-based continuum – perhaps the aforementioned dust from electric fan production would open a portal to a world of morally neutral people obsessed with moderate breezes.

    The fact that Grosso’s hinder is so juicy merits further study.

    The back half of the story is taken up with a big fight between Grosso and the Vision where it becomes clear that Grosso is either made of metal dust or manifesting a body on Earth using metal dust: his primary attack (other than big punches) is firing busts of aluminum dust and his arm is disabled when Vision squirts some water on it. The full ramifications of this are left unexplored because the Vision subsequently ups the ante and employs the Ultimate Liquid: molten lead. Grosso hasn’t been seen since, probably due to being dead.

    Obviously I’m totally into this guy and  think he or some other representative of the World of War-Dust should be BRUNG BACK – it’s not like we up and stopped making weapons of war, after all. Having alien warmonger frat bros pop up in your factory from time to time should be a thing in the Marvel Universe. There should be insurance for it!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 234: THE WITCH

    (Flash Comics v1 005, 1940) 

    Long-running foe/ally/love interest of Golden Age master of disguise the King (or King Standish, if you want to go by his full name), the Witch probably deserves a more thorough examination than I’m going to give her, but the fact is that though she is a good character and an admirable foil to the King, the King himself is a bit dull. Sorry, Witchie.

    I will say that the New Orleans-set King story in World’s Finest 002, in which the Witch is revealed to be a descendent of pirate Jean Lafitte and that her father was actually a crook who had kidnapped her as a baby to spite a different crook and in which she loses not one but two fathers… is a good time, will read again.

    ADDENDUM: I don’t know if she’s telling the truth here, but the idea tht the Witch’s criminal upbringing was messed up enough that she doesn’t even have a name is enough to make me like her 10x more. (Flash Comics v1 009, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 127: THE SKY DEMON

    (Slam-Bang Comics 006, 1940) 

    The Sky Demon is a heretofore-unseen old enemy of Diamond Jack who starts strong with an overall Satanic look and a little skull on the front of his trunks – just the right amount of accessorizing to make a pretty basic super-outfit pop.

    I also love his plot to conquer Earth and/or wipe out humanity: get some gorillas, give them wings and revolvers and let them loose. I can’t say whether or not his plan would have succeeded because he was fatally prevented from carrying it out by Diamond Jack.

    Gorilla-based schemes aside, I really like the parallel of Diamond Jack the magic ring-powered hero vs the Sky Demon and his little magic cape. A sub-ecosystem of heroes and villains weilding magic items of various kinds sounds like it could be interesting comics fodder!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 127: THE SKY DEMON

    (Slam-Bang Comics 006, 1940) 

    The Sky Demon is a heretofore-unseen old enemy of Diamond Jack who starts strong with an overall Satanic look and a little skull on the front of his trunks – just the right amount of accessorizing to make a pretty basic super-outfit pop.

    I also love his plot to conquer Earth and/or wipe out humanity: get some gorillas, give them wings and revolvers and let them loose. I can’t say whether or not his plan would have succeeded because he was fatally prevented from carrying it out by Diamond Jack.

    Gorilla-based schemes aside, I really like the parallel of Diamond Jack the magic ring-powered hero vs the Sky Demon and his little magic cape. A sub-ecosystem of heroes and villains weilding magic items of various kinds sounds like it could be interesting comics fodder!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 102: ZOR

    (More Fun Comics 055, 1940)

    Zor is from pretty early in the Spectre’s run, back when his concept was “resurrected dead guy” rather than “literal embodiment of the Wrath of God”. More specifically but also vaguely, he was an “earth-bound ghost” which was never really defined but was a pretty powerful thing to be.

    Zor was also an earth-bound ghost, only he was older and thus more powerful than the Spectre, and also evil:

    Zor makes a couple of Golden Age appearances to vex the Spectre before being set adrift in inter-cosmic space. Many years later, he was brought back in Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison, now serving as an evil equivalent of Zatara (and given the first name Zachary) and foe to Zatanna. Given the cosmic nature of the story, this works for me: Zor is whatever he needs to be to oppose his foe of the moment. Honestly, I can think of no better person to bring back a character like Zor. Not many creators would read a story in which a villain shoots bullets out of his eyes:


    And make it canon:

    10/10, top marks. I know Zor is technically Solomon Grundy now but bring him back again anyway.