The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Rex Dexter of Mars

  • 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 431: EMRO, LORD OF DIAMONDS

    (Mystery Men Comics 016, 1940)

    As our story opens, huge diamonds are raining down on Earth. Upon contact with a human, they expand to engulf and imprison them.

    Earth authorities sensibly contact space hero Rex Dexter of Mars who has once again been sidetracked in his seemingly straightforward quest to travel from Earth to his home planet. In a nice change of pace from most Rex Dexter adventures, Rex and his pal Cynde have not stopped due to some mortal peril but for a romantic interlude on the hot and steamy planet Eros.

    Setting aside my usual question of just where Eros is that it can be stopped off at between Earth and Mars, I want to get to the real point of this entry: digging into some speculative xenobiology! The native Erosite (nice demonym!) here only gets one panel to shine, but what an impression they make! How does a creature evolve to resemble a twee little Cupid-style bow and arrow? Could they be analogous to Earth insect life, with the “bow” as two whirring wings? Or are they a snakelike species equipped with tiny flying machines? Is the unnatural positioning of the bow relative to the plane of the ground indicative of a partially unseen structure like an air jellyfish, or that the bow is an extrusion into three dimensional space by a higher-dimensional creature? I love it! More outlandish aliens in fiction, please!

    Moving on. Here we meet Emro, Lord of Diamonds. Emro is pretty standard as far as mineral-based alien designs go: a faceted crystalline humanoid, though with a really terrific skull face. I do however appreciate the mention of his home planet of Gemro having left the Solar System. As Emro’s plan is to annex the Earth so that the Gemrovians (another nice demonym!) can have sun access again it seems as though the planet’s departure was fairly recent and not some prehistoric event, this adds weight to the theory that all of the extra planets that Rex and Cynde are visiting are in fact asteroids and not additional planetary bodies that have joined the solar system in the 60-400 years between 1940 and Rex Dexter’s time.

    But enough forensic future astronomy – this post is about speculative xenobiology! And here we have a real development: though Emro is a crystalline humanoid with a cool skull face, his fellow Gemrovians are revealed to be shaped vaguely like bacteriophages, all big heads tottering around on a couple of spindly legs. This suggests a couple of possibilities: Gemrovians could operate in a eusocial caste system, with the humanoid form being reserved for breeding castes. Or they could have a more mutable form than organic life – Emro might have chosen to be humanoid as part of his scheme of conquest or for some personal reason.

    The key to defeating the Gemrovians lies in the fact that Earth paralysis weapons are deadly to them. When tested, this effect applies to the diamonds used in the initial attack on Earth as well, indicating that those were, in fact, Gemrovians. This suggests another possibility: that the Gemrovians have a complex life cycle like that of an insect or amphibian, with several morphologically different stages. Perhaps the person-absorbing diamonds are analagous to eggs or pupae and the absorption behaviour is a passive predation tactic!

    Anyway. Emro, Lord of Diamonds, I salute you.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 429: LORD MARVEL

    (Mystery Men Comics 004, 1939)

    Here we see Lord Marvel, a weird little creep who lives on the planet Ursis (as with many planets in the Rex Dexter comics, Ursis is ambiguously placed: Dexter and his companion/ lover Cynde are constantly sidetracked on the comparatively short voyage from Earth to Mars and always seem to end up on extra-solar planets. The writers of Golden Age sci-fi comics often seem to have a fairly fuzzy grasp of the positions and distances of various locations in space. Are these adventures happening on various asteroids? Is the Rex Dexter solar system much more crowded than our own? Who can say?). Marvel’s stated goal is universal domination, and to that end he wants to steal Earth’s Moon, destroying Earth in the process. Rex Dexter opposes this, of course, and Lord Marvel is left for dead in the flaming wreckage of his laboratory.

    The real appeal of Lord Marvel is his design sense: just look at this amazing robot!

    And this one! This robot is actually originally from Mars, which leads to Lord Marvel’s downfall due to Rex Dexter being able to communicate with it in Martian and turn it against him.

    Even the controls of his doomsday devices have little skulls on them. Good job, Lord Marvel. You weird creep.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 429: LORD MARVEL

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 429: LORD MARVEL

    (Mystery Men Comics 004, 1939)

    Here we see Lord Marvel, a weird little creep who lives on the planet Ursis (as with many planets in the Rex Dexter comics, Ursis is ambiguously placed: Dexter and his companion/ lover Cynde are constantly sidetracked on the comparatively short voyage from Earth to Mars and always seem to end up on extra-solar planets. The writers of Golden Age sci-fi comics often seem to have a fairly fuzzy grasp of the positions and distances of various locations in space. Are these adventures happening on various asteroids? Is the Rex Dexter solar system much more crowded than our own? Who can say?). Marvel’s stated goal is universal domination, and to that end he wants to steal Earth’s Moon, destroying Earth in the process. Rex Dexter opposes this, of course, and Lord Marvel is left for dead in the flaming wreckage of his laboratory.

    The real appeal of Lord Marvel is his design sense: just look at this amazing robot!

    And this one! This robot is actually originally from Mars, which leads to Lord Marvel’s downfall due to Rex Dexter being able to communicate with it in Martian and turn it against him.

    Even the controls of his doomsday devices have little skulls on them. Good job, Lord Marvel. You weird creep.