The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: engine killing ray

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 551: THE MAD PROFESSOR

    (Smash Comics 004, 1939)

    It’s a classic set-up: squat in some out-of the-way location – an isolated island, a desert, or as in this case the mountains of Alaska – bring down planes or draw in ships using a big magnet or fake monster or as here an engine-killing ray, and bingo bango bongo you have your own fleet. You can supply your own crew or save even more money like the Mad Professor by subjecting the existing crew to a little light mind control.

    Exactly why the Mad Professor (unofficial name used in captions) is doing this is never elaborated on. As far as I can tell he’s got about 11 or so bombers which is hardly enough for the usual “take over the US” goal. Maybe he’s just after Alaska.

    One thing’s for sure: the Mad Professor has not been doing this for long. His organization is riddled with problems, including very lax prisoner handling guidelines that allow escapee Wings Wendall to roam free for a while before he’s even missed. 

    Even more problematic is his mind control process. Uh, beyond it being a mind control process to begin with, that is. But logistically he has more than a hundred captured US Army bomber crew, all of whom are drugged into servitude. Judging by the timeline of the comic, the drug lasts a maximum of about two days and the drugees come back to themselves almost instantly upon it wearing off. And yet the Mad Professor and his men are seemingly administering doses on an ad hoc basis to the entire group, just before it wears off. The capacity for catastrophic failure is enormous, even without a G-2 agent roaming the facility!

    (also note Wings Wendall displaying the weird anti-beard bias that I mention in the Memes of Yore entry)

    Like I said, all of the captured pilots are close to recovering from their drugged state and they easily overpower the salaried staff. The Mad Professor gets away but then Wings Wendall takes him out with his own ray, all without anyone getting a coherent list of goals out of the guy.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 546: PROFESSOR DWYER

    (Smash Comics 003, 1939)

    When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he must contend with that most classic of comic book man-monsters: a gorilla with a human brain, wearing a suit.

    Dwyer isn’t the biggest villain, per se – he robs a safe, transplants a brain from a presumably-unwilling man into a gorilla and briefly kidnaps an elevator boy – but he certainly does manage to rack up an impressive checklist of mad science achievements before being taken into custody:

    – fired and in fact confined to an asylum due to the unorthodox nature of his research

    – asylum escapee

    – castle HQ

    – gorilla henchman

    – in fact gorilla henchman with a human brain

    – engine killing technology

    – death ray technology

    It’s an impressive resume, capped off by his complete lack of physical ability that leads to him being captured  with exactly no trouble despite being armed. The gorilla-man unfortunately does not survive.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 546: PROFESSOR DWYER

    (Smash Comics 003, 1939)

    When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he must contend with that most classic of comic book man-monsters: a gorilla with a human brain, wearing a suit.

    Dwyer isn’t the biggest villain, per se – he robs a safe, transplants a brain from a presumably-unwilling man into a gorilla and briefly kidnaps an elevator boy – but he certainly does manage to rack up an impressive checklist of mad science achievements before being taken into custody:

    – fired and in fact confined to an asylum due to the unorthodox nature of his research

    – asylum escapee

    – castle HQ

    – gorilla henchman

    – in fact gorilla henchman with a human brain

    – engine killing technology

    – death ray technology

    It’s an impressive resume, capped off by his complete lack of physical ability that leads to him being captured  with exactly no trouble despite being armed. The gorilla-man unfortunately does not survive.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 535: VON HAUPT

    (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

    Von Haupt is  more like a journey through the traits and attributes of a style of  super-crook than a character: Aviator Captain Kidd is flying over an unspecified jungle when his plane is forced down by an engine-killing ray. Captured by costumed goons, Kidd is brought to a jungle fortress before a vaguely European man  with a German-sounding last name and a monocle. Though threatening, this exchange turns out to be a job interview, as von Haupt needs a few good men to help him take over  the world.

    Von Haupt claims to be (and indeed is) physically immortal due to his experiments but makes sure to clearly signpost his weak point, a withered hand encased in a keen metal gauntlet.

    He demonstrates his power, as well as the razor sharp claws on his gauntlet.

    And finally falls from grace (into vat of sulphur). The weak point comes into play as the gauntlet comes off. The fortress explodes, but Captain Kidd gets out in the nick of time.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 477: THE DICTATOR’S SHADOW

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 477: THE DICTATOR’S SHADOW

    (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

    The Dictator’s Shadow is the “head of the fifth column in America” and the major villain of patriotic hero the Lone Warrior and his kid brother Dicky, in the vein of the Red Skull. A notable thing about him is that he is not explicitly a Nazi, which is both unusual for someone whose name is so evocative of Hitler as the capital-D Dictator of the day but also for a character appearing in Banner Comics, where the writers were a little more willing to have Nazi villains than in your DC or your Quality mags.

    The Dictator’s Shadow’s (what an odd thing to type) major trick is his so-called “shadow projecting ring,” the function of which is a bit opaque but which allows him to appear to be in one place while actually being in another and with which he was able to escape the Lone Warrior and Dicky in 2/3 of their encounters.

    In their final encounter, the Dictator’s Shadow employed one of the greatest deathtraps in comics: he essentially had a door with an active volcano behind it and when things got too real he opened that door. This inevitably backfired on him and he ended up dead. He probably would have kept on returning if the Lone Warrior and Dicky weren’t second-tier characters at an also-ran company, but them’s the breaks in the high-stakes game on intercontinental fascism.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 001

    Like costumed villains, there are a lot of scientists out there doing crimes involving superscience but just missing the levels of interest, ambition or scale to graduate to true super-villain status. Sometimes this is because of poor planning or lack of vision and others just have the misfortune to run into a protagonist while still in the initial stages of their venture. And don’t they deserve a forum just as much as the generic costumed villains we all love?

    Julius Korn: 

    Our first science fiend is Julius Korn, who takes over a lighthouse with his crew of misfits in order to use his ray machine to sink passing ships. It’s unclear just why he does this – is it a weapons test, a piracy scheme, fifth column activity or plain sadism? – but he is thwarted by sea rover Dusty Dane and his pal Big Mike Cardigan and ends his days like so many other comic book scientists: exploding along with his invention. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

    the Professor: 

    The Professor here operated a scheme whereby he used a magnetic engine killing ray to bring down mail planes in Arizona’s Painted Desert. As befits a scientist operating in cowboy territory, he was willing to get his hands a bit dirtier than your typical effete science-man, but even that wasn’t enough to save him from the Fargo Kid. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)

    Unnamed Scientist: 

    This unnamed fellow went to the trouble of developing anti-Flash technology – specifically, glasses with rotating lenses that allow him to see fast-moving objects – to protect his kidnap gang rather than, say, moving to another city (or marketing his glasses somewhere, natch) (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

    (Trophy Room bonus: the Flash keeps the glasses)

    Dr Jennings: 

    This here’s Dr Jennings, who works in a research lab with Jay “the Flash” Garrick and kidnaps a lot of people to live out his dream of establishing a colony on Mars but then is betrayed by his venture capitalist partner Enzil who just wants to establish himself as a Martian tyrant in a story that feels oddly prescient somehow? Anyhow the Flash is more focused on rehabilitation than your average Golden Age hero and so Jennings is allowed to go back to his old life after Enzil is vaporized by spider-aliens. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)