The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: gang boss

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 653: RADION

    (Green Mask v1 003, 1940)

    Radion first comes to the attention of the Green Mask and Domino the Miracle Boy when he makes an attempt on the life of their beloved laundry delivery boy, Jerry. After much running around after the hooded mastermind and his gang and multiple concussions for both of our heroes, Radion is eventually unmasked as… Jerry’s boss, Mr Pelson. There are two things to take away from this:

    1) The increased chance of being a super-villain that comes from knowing a super-hero’s civilian identity extends to the most tenuous of links.

    2) It never hurts to be a good boss.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 630: SKULLFACE KURD

    (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

    Every once in a while a comic book crook will organize a gang along military lines and that’s just what Skullface Kurd here has done. He’s got super-tommy guns. He’s got an air force. He has three hundred thousand men, which is more than a hundred thousand more than were in the US Army as of 1939. Hell, they’re in New York City and according to the historical population numbers on Wikipedia about one in 24 people in the city must have been in this gang. It’s a very large gang, is what I’m saying.

    Usually the turning point of these stories happens when, after an initial success, the criminal army proves too individualistic/undisciplined/cowardly to hold together under the counterattack action of the police and/or super-heroes. But not the Skullface Kurd Mob! They bomb, gas and shoot their way to victory and are about to execute the NYPD en mass when Stardust the Super Wizard shows up and overcomes them with rays and mental might.

    Skullface himself gets perhaps the most extreme torso crush of any Stardust villain. He’s like a tube of toothpaste.

    Kurd and presumably all 300 000 of his men are exiled on a far distant planet covered in gold and jewels where the gravity is so strong that they cannot move but the air is somehow so nourishing that they are going to just stand around and think about what they have done for hundreds of years. Classic Stardust, in other words.

    SKULL SCORE: 1/5. Skullface Kurd is a disgrace to the skull community. He has gritted teeth? That’s all? He isn’t even emaciated? He isn’t even bald? For shame, Skullface Kurd, for shame. He still gets one point for the teeth, but it’s a grudging point.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 575: NAD NEUROD

    (Champion Comics 009, 1940) 

    Nad Neurod is a gang boss with an ambitious and not-uncommon-in-comics scheme: knock out the power and other utilities so that you can take advantage of the resultant confusion and loot an entire city (NYC in this case) at once! Even more importantly, he and his gang provide the perfect test/demonstration of the Human Meteor’s powers in his first foray into the outside world.

    (Nad Neurod is also exactly the kind of moniker that makes my Backward Name Senses tingle, but I’ll be danged if I can find any evidence of anyone named Dan Doruen existing ever, let alone in 1940. I’d put money on it being a reference to something, but sadly I must place it on the big Pile of Unsolvable Puzzles and move on with my life)

    Neurod and his cronies have a particular role to play, and that is to be a reasonably credible threat that a super-hero can thrash on their first outing, and they serve their purpose admirably – they completely flummox the authorities of New York City (probably) and are themselves flummoxed (and mostly killed) by the Human Meteor.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 574: DUKE DAROLDI

    (Champion Comics 007, 1940) 

    Someone is kidnapping foreign dignitaries and then hanging their skeletons in public spaces! Weird! Sinister! Diplomatically complicated!

    The culprit turns out to be gang boss Duke Daroldi, who is killing the diplomats as part of an attempt to involve the US in WWII and then step in and take over once the combatants are all sufficiently weakened. This is a stunningly hubristic plan, especially considering the maybe five other guys in Daroldi’s gang. I assume that the steps goes something like:

    1. kill diplomats

    2. draw the US into the war in Europe

    3. ????

    4. profit

    We never get to see Duke Daroldi’s plan come to fruition, because Johnny Fox is on the case. He infiltrates Daroldi’s yacht using the surefire “get captured” method, escapes, is recaptured, learns that the diplomats are being skeletonized using the old classic method: a school of piranhas, escapes again and finally engages Daroldi in a high-stakes fistfight in the yacht’s crow’s nest. 

    Daroldi ultimately meets his end, not in his own piranha tank as would be narratively satisfying, but in a simple fall after being uppercutted out of the ship’s rigging by Johnny Fox. No followthrough. No commitment to the bit. Finis.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 574: DUKE DAROLDI

    (Champion Comics 007, 1940) 

    Someone is kidnapping foreign dignitaries and then hanging their skeletons in public spaces! Weird! Sinister! Diplomatically complicated!

    The culprit turns out to be gang boss Duke Daroldi, who is killing the diplomats as part of an attempt to involve the US in WWII and then step in and take over once the combatants are all sufficiently weakened. This is a stunningly hubristic plan, especially considering the maybe five other guys in Daroldi’s gang. I assume that the steps goes something like:

    1. kill diplomats

    2. draw the US into the war in Europe

    3. ????

    4. profit

    We never get to see Duke Daroldi’s plan come to fruition, because Johnny Fox is on the case. He infiltrates Daroldi’s yacht using the surefire “get captured” method, escapes, is recaptured, learns that the diplomats are being skeletonized using the old classic method: a school of piranhas, escapes again and finally engages Daroldi in a high-stakes fistfight in the yacht’s crow’s nest. 

    Daroldi ultimately meets his end, not in his own piranha tank as would be narratively satisfying, but in a simple fall after being uppercutted out of the ship’s rigging by Johnny Fox. No followthrough. No commitment to the bit. Finis.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 568: THE GORGON

    (The Comics 002, 1937)

    The Gorgon is not the most spectacular villain but does provide us with a couple of interesting contrasts to our last few entries. Firstly, we can contrast him with the Masked Czar and note how his lack of major identifying features enhances the anonymity afforded by a simple black mask.

    I assume that he was called the Gorgon because “anyone who has seen his face is now dead” but it would have been nice to have it in the text of the story.

    Indeed, the Gorgon’s disguise was effective enough that he was able to operate in his capacity as the Assistant State’s Prosecutor while also being a masked gang boss. It took fingerprint evidence for anyone to figure his game out.

    The Gorgon also provides a bit of contrast with the Falcon here, as his adventure was also abruptly cancelled before the resolution, but where the Doctor Doom feature probably would have continued as a cat-and-mouse game between Doom and the Falcon, the conventions of Crime Doesn’t Pay comics like Tom Beatty’s are such that the Gorgon was going to be rounded up in two issues, tops.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 566: THE MASKED CZAR

    (The Comics 001, 1937) 

    The Masked Czar is a very minor masked gang boss who provides an object example into why most masked gang bosses are fairly physically average specimens. Villains like the otherwise-unnamed Czar here – the tall, the short, the fat, the thin, the bald or the exceptionally hirsute – tend to go in for different ways of concealing their identities that might stand a better chance of working than a thin strip of fabric. Or they go all out, Penguin style, and lean into their appearance. What I’m saying is: this guy ain’t fooling nobody.

    The Masked Czar also provides an insight into the process of serialized storytelling, and particularly into the perils of reformatting it into a linear experience. Above are the final two panels of the G-Man Jim adventure in The Comics 001. G-Man Jim certainly is in a pickle, huh?

    And here are the first two panels of the G-Man Jim story in The Comics 002, in which we see that he is, in fact, not in a pickle. Say goodbye to the Masked Czar, kids!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 566: THE MASKED CZAR

    (The Comics 001, 1937) 

    The Masked Czar is a very minor masked gang boss who provides an object example into why most masked gang bosses are fairly physically average specimens. Villains like the otherwise-unnamed Czar here – the tall, the short, the fat, the thin, the bald or the exceptionally hirsute – tend to go in for different ways of concealing their identities that might stand a better chance of working than a thin strip of fabric. Or they go all out, Penguin style, and lean into their appearance. What I’m saying is: this guy ain’t fooling nobody.

    The Masked Czar also provides an insight into the process of serialized storytelling, and particularly into the perils of reformatting it into a linear experience. Above are the final two panels of the G-Man Jim adventure in The Comics 001. G-Man Jim certainly is in a pickle, huh?

    And here are the first two panels of the G-Man Jim story in The Comics 002, in which we see that he is, in fact, not in a pickle. Say goodbye to the Masked Czar, kids!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 556: THE DEVIL

    (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

    Maybe it’s because the MLJ version of the Devil is so fresh in my mind but… this is an underwhelming version of the Devil. He teams up with Death – and it’s a measure of how lacklustre this Devil is that I’m going to deal with the Death separately rather than treat them as a duo – to eliminate their common enemy Yarko the Great. Death does all the legwork toward this goal so we’ll discuss that later (I am however going to count them as our first Revenge Squad, one of the best things in comics).

    Aesthetically, this is a classic Devil, though one missing the trident and tail. And like many interpretations of the classic Devil, it suffers from the fact that it looks like a guy in a costume, down to the fact that the horns seem to be incorporated into a cowl rather than being organic. And that can work! I’ve seen plenty of interpretations of the purposely foppish Devil getting one over on those who underestimate him. This Devil, by contrast, has a guy named Beppo with a knife and a skin-tone shirt.

    The Devil does in fairness manage to capture Yarko by the simple expedient of having his other, non-Beppo henchman (Killer Kirby, if you must know) blindfold his magic eyes. The Devil attempts to roast Yarko alive in a special chamber but Yarko escapes by the simple expedient of wiggling his magic eyes out from under the blindfold, and any deathtrap that a guy can blink his way out of has got to be counted as a dud.

    With Yarko free, the devil is immediately

    BANISHED TO HELL

    and it says something that the coolest part of his whole endeavour is the moment that he was soundly defeated. Frankly, he might as well have been a costumed gang boss as the Prince of the Damned, and it just occurred to me how wild it would be if he was just a guy in a costume trying to put one over on Yarko and getting banished to Hades for his efforts. Real of Fake, the Devil bit off more than he could chew.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 523: NATCHA

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 523: NATCHA

    (Blue Ribbon Comics 008, 1941) 

    Technically, Natcha is just another costumed gang boss, but she has a lot more style than you usually get with those.

    This being MLJ’s Hercules, Natcha is thematically linked to one of his iconic Twelve Labours, in this case the theft of the Girdle of Hippolyta. Of course, this version of Hercules was ridding the ancient world of evil rather than atoning for his own crimes via arbitrarily hard tasks, so the girdle doesn’t come into it and Hippolyta is implied to have been a villain of some sort whom Hercules reformed.

    Natcha’s victim here ends up as an ad hoc sidekick to Hercules for this adventure and gets saddled with the name “Little Zooey” for no apparent reason, despite his vigorous protests.

    I really like Natcha! She’s much more of a bruiser than most lady crooks of the Golden Age! Sure she’s a crook but she’s a crook with panache. Not that that helps her when a literal demigod shows up on her doorstep, even if he does have to take care of Little Zooey.

    Both Natcha and Little Zooey are set to reappear in future Hercules adventures but are instead banished to comic book limbo thanks to the Hercules feature never appearing again, a sad end for about one and a half good characters. Natcha in particular should absolutely be BRUNG BACK the next time someone takes a pass at reviving the Archie super-heroes even if Hercules is left in the big pile of also-rans with Lancelot Strong and the Wizard.