The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: gang boss

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 335: THE THREAT

    (All-Flash 002, 1941) 

    The Threat is an example of a type of morality tale that was very popular in 40s and 50s comic books but never really went out of style: a tale of promise squandered in service to a life of crime. In this case, the subject is a crook named Tough Joe Connor, who swears revenge on Jim Kelley, the prosecutor who sent him to jail for ten years. 

    My summarizing powers are not up to this task, ergo, a timeline:

    1911 CE:

    -Jim Kelley sends Tough Joe Connor to jail. Connor swears revenge.

    -believing that Kelley got the better of him because he was more clever, Connor devotes himself to study.

    1917 CE:

    -Connor has become a model prisoner. He is a qualified lawyer, doctor and research scientist specializing in chemistry and physics. He is paroled 4 years early. On the outside, he is already wealthy due to research he did in prison.

    -Connor goes to visit Kelley. Ostensibly a good will visit, it is actually in order to provide an alibi: when thugs he has hired burst in and steal Kelley’s newborn baby, Connor takes a carefully choreographed bullet to the arm while “attempting to stop them”.

    -Connor meets and falls in love with a woman named Annie Crowley. They marry and he briefly goes straight (but keeps the baby).

    1923 CE:

    -Annie dies (possibly in childbirth, as they have a daughter). Connor resumes his quest for revenge and begins telling the boy, Roy, that Kelley killed his mother in order to turn him into a weapon against his own father.

    1937 CE:

    -Connor has consolidated underworld power in the region, becoming the Threat. He makes his first attempt on the life of now-Mayor Jim Kelley but both his criminal activities and his murder attempt are disrupted by the Flash. Roy heads to the family farm to lie low with his step-sister Ann.

    1941 CE:

    -The Threats’s power continues to grow. A second attempt on Mayor Kelley’s life ends with Joe Connor back in prison as one of his own henchmen.

    -Connor escapes in an old lye barrel. Severely burned, missing an eye, he adopts a series of new identities: an unnamed garage owner, plastic surgeon Doctor Cravath, mechanic Jake Boles. He finds Roy hiding out in the country and together they make an attempt on gubernatorial candidate Kelley’s life but once more the Flash steps in.

    -Connor makes one last push to kill now-Governor Kelley: he breaks Roy out of prison and arranges a big confrontation. All is for naught, as the Flash, Joan Williams and Ann Connor have pieced together the clues and revealed to Roy his real parentage. Faced with this and the futility of his life of revenge, Connor smokes a poisoned cigarette and dies.

    -Roy and Ann are now in love, which happens in these kinds of Secret Step-Sibling situations an unsettling amount.

    There are several interesting things about this sequence of events. The first, as seen above, is that young Roy, at age 5, chooses the name Roy Revenge for himself as part of his vendetta and keeps using it into his mid-twenties. It is, frankly, great – it’s exactly the kind of henchman name that a villain called the Threat would assign in a campy 60s comic, but earnestly, in the 40s.

    The second involves the fact that at this point Keystone City is not a thing and the Flash explicitly lives in New York City, which means that Jim Kelley was presumably Mayor of NYC (eroding La Guardia’s term by about four years) and Governor of New York (impacting Herbert H. Lehman).

    Meanwhile, the chronology of the story is fairly tentative – the actual timeframes are correct, but the dates are speculative. The crucial point is that four-year gap between Roy Revenge”s first attempt on Kelley’s life and the remainder of the story: as presented the bulk of the story is set in 1941, the year of publication, but the Flash is running around three years earlier than previously established. BUT! if we start the story in 1941 the bulk of the action takes place in 1945, which is even more temporally messy. Fun stuff for the old timeline!

    The Threat, ultimately, is a bit of a nothing villain but I like him nonetheless. Too bad about the wasted life, better luck next time, Joe.

    JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 0/1 

    (I know, he’s focused on the lawyer, but “judge and jury and prosecutor revenge killer” is just too long and even then someone is going to go after the witnesses and bailiffs. Better to be succinct)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 334: THE MONOCLE

    (All-Flash Quarterly 001, 1941) 

    I love a foppish gang boss, and the Monocle might just be the most foppish I’ve seen in some time. He’s got all the accessories: the monocle, natch, but also the eccentric mustache, cigarette holder, neat suit with nosegay and tiepin and pocket square and to top it off one of the more eccentric comic book hobbies I have ever encountered: a twee little garden where he displays his stolen gems in artificial flowers. Pretty great stuff.

    The Monocle is also a technically-minded villain, whose main line is planning knockout gas-centric crimes but with a sideline in deathtraps – his booby-trapped HQ does a better job than most at almost bumping off the Flash.

    Of particular note is that the Monocle hits upon the same discovery as an unnamed criminal scientist the year before: that though the Flash moves fast enough that he uproots shrubs and blows the clothing off of people in his wake, he also moves slow enough that a stroboscopic lighting setup will make it possible to effectively aim a firearm at him. He might even have actually killed the Flash if, succumbing to the deathtrap-maker’s hubris, he hadn’t left mid-battle to check on his gem garden.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 327: DR SMART

    (Human Torch v1 005a, 1941)

    I think I’ve mentioned the old three-act super-villain story structure of yore a couple of times, but there are a whole host of old comic book story styles that have fallen by the wayside and Dr Smart here stars in one of them: the book-length heist story. 

    Three pages into our tale, Smart and his crew, posing as a funeral procession, rob an armoured car. The remaining 38 or so pages concern the efforts of the Human Torch and Toro to capture the slippery little devil because to his credit Dr Smart is a guy who reads the paper and knows that the Torch is a cop and will be guarding the money he is after.

    Dr Smart’s entire scheme hinges on anti-Torch technology: asbestos suits; grenades that explode into asbestos bindings; super-cold liquid air bombs and smokescreens; thermite ammunition that won’t melt. The capper is a duo of tricked-out hearses equipped with asbestos linings and heatproof glass – a considerable portion of the issue is spent with Toro and the Torch either locked up in the back of one or fruitlessly trying to get Dr Smart and his henchmen out of the front. Smart might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t tried to be clever and bury the heroes with the loot – it was one too many things to juggle and he got pinched.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 326: BLACKJACK

    (Human Torch v1 004, 1941)

    Blackjack is your regular style gang boss who is operating at a scale sufficient to be considered super-villainous: he has an ocean liner and a private island equipped with various anti-Human Torch measures, including a fleet of nitrogen bomb-dropping bombers, all in service to one of my personal favourite supercrime setups: the escape ring (which of course involves paying a portion of your take to a third party in order to be spirited away from the reach of the authorities).

    Sadly for Blackjack the Human Torch has been a cop for a while now and he is gunned (well, fire-handed) dpwn while trying to escape.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 314: THE RED TERROR

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    A fairly undistinguished costumed gang boss, the Red Terror has three things going for him:

    1. he gets around in a very cool rocket-powered dirigible

    2. he is the only super-villain to face Golden Age underachiever the Human Top

    3. he really goes above and beyond in his attempt to rid himself of the Top, hitting him with, in quick succession: mountain lions, flame throwers, an avalanche and a bursting dam. That’s the kind of thoroughness that more villains should aspire to, although of course if it’s not enough to do the job you risk getting thrown from your own rocket-zep in retaliation.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 314: THE RED TERROR

    (Tough Kid Squad 001, 1942)

    A fairly undistinguished costumed gang boss, the Red Terror has three things going for him:

    1. he gets around in a very cool rocket-powered dirigible

    2. he is the only super-villain to face Golden Age underachiever the Human Top

    3. he really goes above and beyond in his attempt to rid himself of the Top, hitting him with, in quick succession: mountain lions, flame throwers, an avalanche and a bursting dam. That’s the kind of thoroughness that more villains should aspire to, although of course if it’s not enough to do the job you risk getting thrown from your own rocket-zep in retaliation.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 312: PLUTO

    (Red Raven Comics 001; Captain America Comics 001-003, 1940-1941)

    As originally presented, this is the literal Roman god of the underworld come down (up?) to Earth to stir up trouble as Rudolph Hendler, dictator of Prussland (mild aside – recently saw a fascist complaining about Nazis being vilified like it was a new thing, but we’ve always known that you suck, bro).

     Jupiter and the other Roman gods aren’t so hot on this plan and send Mercury down to Earth to combat cousin Pluto. A simple tale. The very mild complication comes from Marvel’s fondness for retcons and rcontextualizations. After the Enernals were introduced in the 70s, a number of characters from the 40s and 50s were retroactively said to actually be the Eternal Makkari, including Mercury here.

    He was also said to be Hurricane, the near-identical hero who faced Pluto in his next couple of appearances. But if Mercury/ Hurricane was not actually a member of some godly pantheon, who was Pluto?

    In an unsurprising twist, Pluto was revealed to be Kro, a villainous member of the Deviant race who features in the same 70s series as Makkari. I don’t know a lot about Kro but I guess that it’s in-character for him to (in order) start a version of WWII, run a murder-for-hire gang, unleash a plague in the Amazon and attempt to take over a place called Groton City via the medium of repeated subway accidents.

    The really important thing is that his first couple of appearances were drawn by Jack Kirby so he looks like a perfect evil creep. Of course there might be an argument that he no longer qualifies as a minor super-villain because the Pluto identity has been rolled into the larger Kro identity but where’s the fun in that?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 311: THE GOLD LEECHES

    (Red Raven Comics 001, 1940)

    The Gold Leeches are not terrifically interesting villains, but there are precisely two interesting things about them and that’s enough for me. Uninteresting preamble: Zeelmo, the Gold Leech (unofficial name) is a gold-obsessed gang boss with a few super-scientific gadgets (the Gazegrapho Machine for remote  viewing and the Trembling Death gas which kills via accelerated aging) and a birds-and-skeletons decorating motif that I wish had come up more often.

    Zeelmo attempts to recruit B-tier Golden Age Marvel hero the Red Raven as a minion and ends up chucked into the Trembling Death gas and then blown up for his efforts. That’s interesting thing 1, by the way: being the only Golden Age foes of the Red Raven.

    Interesting thing 2 is that Ratoga, one of Zeelmo’s lieutenants, immediately takes over his organization as Gold Leech II (name still unofficial) and I love it. I know that it can be a bit of a slippery slope from “what happens to the villain’s organization when to villain is killed?” or “who builds all those villain hideouts?” to deeply unfun comics about logistics but I love this sort of thing – more second fiddles should step up like this. 

    Anyway, Ratoga gets smothered by Red Raven in a huge pile of gold.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 302: THE FANG

    (Captain America Comics 006, 1941)

    Comics history seems to have taken the Fang as a Japanese agent but I’m pretty sure that as written he’s a Chinese American gang boss who’s working for the Japanese against the Chinese government. Either way, he’s your basic pulp holdover Asian gang boss with swarms of fanatical hatchet-man and a pronounced lack of humanity down to his namesake fangs. Part of me always wants to skip guys like this but they’re just as much a part of comic book history as the Big Wheel or the Hypno Hustler.

    EDIT: Just noticed that he wasn’t even actually technically hired by the Japanese! His employer was “an Asiatic aggressor nation” – Marvel seems to be a bit less inclined to name  and shame them than they were the Nazis.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 301: THE CAMERA FIEND

    (Captain America Comics 006, 1941) 

    The  Camera Fiend is your regular gimmicked-up gang boss who parlays the classic comic book camera gun into a modestly successful career in theft that sees him almost getting away with the British Crown Jewels before being beaten down by Cap and Bucky. He is of course playing off the idea of the rabid photography fanatic from the advent of cheap personal cameras.

    I was going to criticize him for having such a grotesque costume while attempting to do stealth assassinations with a poison dart-firing camera but now that I think of it I guess the point is that the Fiend is so wild in appearance that nobody would suspect  Bucky Barnes’ high school teacher Professor Hall of being the killer in question. I will however critique his choice to attempt to kill Captain America in front of about 20 witnesses as seen above. Still, this is exactly the sort of low-level crook I’m always in favour of being BRUNG BACK, even if it’s a legacy-of-a-legacy-of-a-legacy character: the Camera Fiend begat the Home Movie Murderer begat the Home Movie Murderer II (this time it’s on VHS) begat Selfie Stick or the Gram etc.