The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Perisphere Payne

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 044

    Aliens! Mostly Martians!

    Treemen:

    Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, having gone to the Crusades, won the Crusades and returned home from the Crusades, now enters a fourth period of adventuring that is all about family. First, he rescues his little brother from the evil Black Baron, he now sets out to explore his father’s gold mines including the boarded-up one where his mother disappeared twenty years earlier.

    Inside, in addition to a variety of hostile reptile life, Richard encounters a some mostly-nude fellows called Treemen, who look like humans with very prominent upper canine teeth. I was pretty puzzled about their name until I looked a bit harder and saw that they also have awful-looking long curly fingernails. Is this where they get their name? From the fact that they look like they have roots? Horrible.

    Though Richard does do well initially, ultimately falls to the Treemen and is captured. It’s just lucky for him that the mighty Queen Martha of the Treemen turns out to be his mom. (Fantastic Comics 015, 1941)

    Mar-Men:

    The Mar-Men, under the leadership of the vile Craga, have been capturing human space crews to use as slave labour on their warships, a scheme that is ultimately foiled by the heroic Perisphere Payne. Being nothing more than green-skinned humans, the Mar-Men are generally unremarkable as aliens, though they are the only example that I am aware of of a Mars-derived species name that completely omits the “s” sound. (Science Comics 003, 1940)

    Martians: 

    As in every Space Rovers adventure, Ted Hunt and Jane Martin are just toddling around space one day when they notice a bunch of Martian soldiers seemingly lowering a woman to her doom in the Lost Valley of Mars. Upon rescuing her, they learn that she is the exiled Queen Mara of Thurn, whose kingdom has been usurped by her uncle/former regent Xark. The Space Rovers vow to help restore her to the throne, and as is so often the case are lucky to have picked a reliable narrator to back.

    The Martians (or more specifically the Thurnians, I suppose), have one of those weird mixes of technologies that you get in sci-fi adventure comics: they have charming little flying machines armed with projectile weaponry, but their soldiers are all armed with swords. None of this is a match for the Space Rovers’ tommy guns and rocket ships.

    Mara is restores to her throne with a little help from Ted’s jet pack and some phosphorescent paint, and Thurn is once more subject to the whims of the correct absolute monarch. (Exciting Comics 004, 1940) 

    Martian Anthropoids:

    These fellows are the major threat to Queen Mara in the Lost Valley, and while they’re basically just Martian cavemen I do appreciate that they look like Simpsons characters. (Exciting Comics 004, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 033

    Aliens. 

    Fifth Dimensional Beings: 

    These big-headed fellows feature in the origin story of Marvex the Super-Robot, but since we only see Marvex’ creator Bolo and his associates, we can’t really say too much about the culture of these Fifth Dimensional creatures. They have big heads, certainly, and a high enough degree of technology that Bolo is able to whip up a sentient robot on a whim, but whether that’s the sort of thing the population at large is getting up to or Bolo is the local equivalent of Lex Luthor is unknown and unknowable, alas. (Daring Mystery Comics 003, 1940)

    Green Devils:

    When Perisphere Payne seeks out a missing scientific expedition on an unnamed planet circling the star Polaris, he finds that they have come to mischief at the nubby little hands of the Green Devils, the planet’s native inhabitants who probably don’t call themselves that.

    While the Green Devils are just another band of primitives, eager to sacrifice the nearest blonde woman to their gods, they are also the most alien aliens that we have seen in a while and so I have a great deal of affection for them. Just look at their long noodly limbs! Their buggy eyes! Beautiful. (Science Comics 006, 1940)

    Pigwidgeons: 

    The final act of the story of the adventures of the Rocket and the Queen of Diamonds involves him leaving the Diamond Empire in his namesake rocket and her abdicating her throne to stow away and go with him. The Queen’s unexpected presence on the ship causes the Rocket to wreck the steering mechanism, and they crash on a strange planet.

    When they recover, the two find that they have been captured Gulliver-style by a group of tiny, rabbit-riding people called Pigwidgeons, who are melodramatic but ultimately good-hearted, and whose initial hostility is due to them mistaking the duo for… 

    … the Gromans, a species of human-sized fascists with a Roman Empire aesthetic to match their name. Though the Gromans have evidently been attacking the Pigwidgeons with impunity for some time, the arrival of the Rocket and the Queen shifts the balance of power, and over the next couple of issues the duo forge a new era of peace at the barrel of a ray gun. (Pep Comics 010, 1940)

    Pluvians:

    A plague is ravaging Earth in the far future of 1982, and Power Nelson has set aside his antipathy for the despotic government of Seng I to help them acquire the radium that they need to effect a cure. He sets out for the radium-rich planet Pluvius, where he meets the Pluvians, ruled by King Rari, and forget what I said about the Green Devils because these guys are my favourite aliens. Whether they have a smooth orange carapace or are wearing modified onesies is not specified and it doesn’t matter because they look fantastic either way, particularly as the sleek and retro-high-tech look it gives them is contrasted with their apparently Medieval society.

    The Pluvians agree to supply the needed radium in exchange for Nelson’s aid against their rival society, the Hairy Guroos, about whom there isn’t much to say. They’re humanoids with luxuriant hair and beards living in a Medieval monarchy (albeit a matriarchal one, which is fun), and that’s about it. They do use radium boulders as ammunition in their catapults, which is a good indication that Nelson has come to the right planet.

    For once in a Golden Age comic the solution to a problem involving hostile aliens does not involve mass alien casualties. Instead, Power Nelson does a regime change, by kidnapping the warmongering Guroo Queen Wodo and leaving her more amiable sister Queen Leelee in charge. (Prize Comics 003, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 728: THE GREAT BRAIN

    (Science Comics 007, 1940)

    Perisphere Payne, futureman of the year 2000, has his work cut out for him when six Earth battle rockets go missing and then subsequently attack their home planet! And upon defeating their seemingly traitorous crews, Payne discovers that they are being remotely mind controlled via a chunky black box stuck to each of their backs in a place that looks like it would be pretty annoying to live with. Good thing they’re mind controlled and presumably not capable of being annoyed, I guess.

    Following the mind control carrier wave to an unnamed planet, Perisphere Payne and his associate Doyle (and here I was going to make a joke about Doyle also being named after a defunct bit of architecture but in trying to find one starting with D I discovered that it’s surprisingly hard to do that. Therefore, we’re gonna call him Trylon Doyle and be done with this whole tangent) are attacked by what are clearly centaurs but are consistently called satyrs, which is about as annoying as being unable to find a list of defunct symbolic architecture.

    Payne and Doyle are eventually captured by the centaurs satyrs centaurs and ushered into the presence of the Great Master, aka the Great Brain, a human brain in a glass ball who wants to conquer the human race for unclear reasons.

    Luckily for Payne, Doyle, humanity and basically everyone except for centaurs and centaur-lovers, though the Great Brain was savvy enough to make their dome ray gun proof, they forgot about the ballistic properties of the humble Oscar statuette. Once released, the Brain’s energies start a chain reaction that destroys the whole planet, centaurs and all.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 724: BONTO OF DUOTANIA

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 724: BONTO OF DUOTANIA

    (Science Comics 004, 1940) 

    Perisphere Payne, a kind of outer space troubleshooter (whose name, by the way, was meant to sound cool and futuristic but because the Perisphere was one of the cool and futuristic building-mascots of the 1939 World’s Fair is in fact equivalent to someone today calling themselves Crystal Palace Collins, Parthenon Pete, or indeed Perisphere Payne) gets a wild alert on his televizo one day: the entire city of Freeton has been levitated off the surface of the Earth! Setting off in hot city-pursuit, Payne finds not only the city but he and his crew are captives in an enormous spaceship.

    All questions of  who exactly is responsible for this are cleared up by the appearance of Bonto of Duotania, a giant two-headed alien and generally jolly guy.

    Payne’s bluster earns him a place as one of Bonto’s pets, and en route he gets the lowdown from another pet, Janice of Venus: Bonto and his people come from the twin asteroids of Jutania (presumably aka Duotania) and are blessed not only with a second head and increased size but also an overabundance of cruelty and selfishness. He has captured Freeton as a source of slaves, with the slight implication that the rest of humanity will follow. (Please not also Bonto’s cool two-headed Jutanian pets)

    The real practical problem with using slave labour to run your high-tech society, of course, is that your slaves will inevitably have to learn how to use your high-tech equipment if you want everything to be done as efficiently as you are used to, which is how Perisphere Payne becomes proficient enough in the use of Bonto’s magnetic tractor beam that he is able not only to deposit Freeton back in the giant spaceship for transport back to Earth but also do a cheeky alien genocide on his way out the door. I’m shaking my finger at you, Perisphere Payne – this might be a standard heroic move in the 1940s but as an enlightened future-man you ought to know better.