The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: mad science

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 494: THE INVENTOR

    (Big Shot Comics 008, 1940) 

    It’s a very big stretch, even by the standards of my own Unofficial Name convention, to call this guy the Inventor but it’s literally the only thing he’s referred to as other than “the man” and I just can’t keep calling these guys “Unnamed Scientist.” I just can’t.

    So! The Inventor has invented a very cool remote-controlled humanoid robot with a special poison-spraying device in the chest. We’ll skip my usual speculation into the potential value that could be reaped by selling this design for industrial purposes rather than using it for mere bank robbery because the Inventor is in fact a mad scientist and thus cannot be held to the same fiscal standards as his more rational colleagues.

    Let’s take a second to appreciate the classic stylings of this robot: cylinder head, pincer claws, speaker ears… all the great robot features in one cool guy.

    This might be a Tom Kerry story but the real hero of the piece is this night watchman who chooses not to pointlessly die in an attempt to protect the bank he works at and instead lives to clue the two-fisted District Attorney in on the culprit’s identity as a robot. I appreciate you, fella.

    Tom Kerry tracks the robot back to its lair by the simple expedient of clinging to the underside of the remote-controlled auto-gyro used to ferry both it and the money back to the Inventor. There he takes advantage of the fact that like a surprising percentage of Golden and Silver Age robots, this one’s exterior shell is easily removed and repurposed as a costume.

    The Inventor is essentially epically pranked into signing a confession, Tom Kerry battles a knife-wielding maniac in his boxer shorts and the whole thing wraps up with a sock to the jaw. No word on what became of that poor nude robot, though.

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 004

    More mad science than criminal science or vice versa? You be the judge! 

    This guy, who seems to be neither bald nor ironically hairy enough for his name of Baldy Fluger to make sense, has a hypnotic ray and a plan: to use that hypnotic ray for crime. The Green Mask and Domino the Miracle Boy have something to say about that. (Mystery Men Comics 021, 1941)

    If there was any more to these three (respectively named Boris, Oscar and Unnamed Man) than what happens in the four panels above then I would be writing hundreds of words about them, but this is about it: three mad scientists, one of whom has one of the top lines in comics history (“They said I was a mad scientist but when I blast their children with my electron gun they won’t call me mad anymore!”) attack a steel mill for unclear reasons, possibly madness. The rest of the story involves them battling Lieutenant Drake of Naval Intelligence and Miss X. There’s a lot of electron gunning but no children are involved. (Mystery Men Comics 021, 1941)

    Renowned transplant surgeon Dr Moru just so happens to also be the mysterious person murdering people and stealing their hands, and all so that he can make beaucoup bucks giving gangsters brand new hands with brand new fingerprints. Until the Green Mask gets involved, of course. (Mystery Men Comics 029, 1941)

    Dr Murdo here had a death ray, an underground lair and a small army of goons but had the misfortune of crossing paths with Flexo the Rubber Man and being subdued with robot gas. (Mystic Comics v1 001, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 424: THE FIEND

    (Keen Detective Funnies v2 011, 1939)

    The Fiend is a mad scientist/ musician who has developed a supercharged organ capable of destroying structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge. And he does so, ostensibly as a showcase of his power in aid of his conquest of the world but possibly just as a whim – he’s your classic erratic comic book madman. G-Man Dan Dennis tracks him down with relative ease and the threat of the Fiend is ended forever.

    OR IS IT? No, it isn’t, because the next issue features something that is missing from a lot of Golden and Silver Age comic books: geopolitical ramifications. Specifically, all the nations of the world prick up their ears at the potential acquisition of a powerful new weapon of mass destruction and start mobilizing spies and secret agents to get after the Fiend’s technology. Including the US, whose attempt to negotiate with the Fiend for his schematics is foiled when some crooks make off with him.

    What everyone forgot, of course, is that the Fiend is a raving megalomaniac who turns on all of them at the first possible moment. Dan Dennis has to catch him all over again! Sadly for me, this is the end of the tale – I know that I would love to discover a long serial comic about the FBI managing negotiations with an erratic organist over his WMD but it seems like the good people at Centar Publications weren’t writing comics with me in mind.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 397: ADAM IGOROVICH

    (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

    Adam Igorovich! Your typical scientist unhinged by his treatment by the scientific community, who deemed his theories impractical and/or dangerous and/or insane, so now he is striking back at the world using those selfsame theories to get his back. If we’ve seen it once we’ve seen it a million times.

    There’s one important difference between the machinations of Adam Igorovich and those of, say, the Master (the last Russian-ish scientist we saw battle Dr Fate): while the master’s sonic death weapon was a finely tuned device capable of targeting everything from a person to a building, Igorovich’s technology is a solar magnet capable of stopping the rotation and orbit of the Earth and moving it closer to the Sun. The willingness to use apocalyptic technology like this in a simple worldwide extortion scheme is the difference between science and Mad Science. Take note, undergraduates!

    After he roasts portions of the Earth’s surface for a while via manipulation of it’s orbit (and what a wild thing to never be mentioned again, the fact that the whole world stopped moving for half a day. Twice!), Igorovich attracts the attention of Dr Fate and gets so thoroughly foiled that he chooses the classic mad scientist’s exit of blowing up his entire compound around him.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 397: ADAM IGOROVICH

    (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

    Adam Igorovich! Your typical scientist unhinged by his treatment by the scientific community, who deemed his theories impractical and/or dangerous and/or insane, so now he is striking back at the world using those selfsame theories to get his back. If we’ve seen it once we’ve seen it a million times.

    There’s one important difference between the machinations of Adam Igorovich and those of, say, the Master (the last Russian-ish scientist we saw battle Dr Fate): while the master’s sonic death weapon was a finely tuned device capable of targeting everything from a person to a building, Igorovich’s technology is a solar magnet capable of stopping the rotation and orbit of the Earth and moving it closer to the Sun. The willingness to use apocalyptic technology like this in a simple worldwide extortion scheme is the difference between science and Mad Science. Take note, undergraduates!

    After he roasts portions of the Earth’s surface for a while via manipulation of it’s orbit (and what a wild thing to never be mentioned again, the fact that the whole world stopped moving for half a day. Twice!), Igorovich attracts the attention of Dr Fate and gets so thoroughly foiled that he chooses the classic mad scientist’s exit of blowing up his entire compound around him.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 373: THE JUNGLE SCIENTIST

    (More Fun Comics 063, 1941)

    I won’t lie to you: this initial panel really did all the work in guaranteeing the Jungle Scientist some time in the spotlight rather than a place in a mad science roundup with three other randos. There are exactly two reasons for that: 1) that he was supplied with a name in the very title of the piece and 2) that wretched little outfit that he has assembled for himself. This man was divorced just before he moved to the jungle.

    So after his divorce, the unnamed Jungle Scientist moved out into the middle of nowhere, assembled a terrific look and proceeded to create animate, carnivorous trees “by almost impossible grafting.” The next phase of his plan, that Congo Bill and his pal Professor Kent have shown up just in time to foil, is to implant the brain of his step-daughter into one of the trees. And yes, the step-daughter fits into the divorce narrative I am constructing – she could be the child of a recent (and not very picky) second wife, for example.

    It all ends as you might expect, with the scientist’s special protective perfume getting washed off just before he flees into a grove of man-eating trees. In a way though, isn’t death the ultimate divorce?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 354: THE MASKED MAN

    (Master Comics 015, 1941)

    This really illustrates how the life of a mysterious adventurer is different from that of the rest of us: while driving through Florida, Zoro the Mystery Man stops at a random mansion, is rebuffed when he seeks admittance, and decides to snoop around. While you or I might discover, say, a private birthday party or merely a normal family who don’t particularly want to entertain every stranger who knocks on their door, Zoro instead finds a masked figure who is busily mutating the mansions inhabitants into ape-men. I guess once it happens to you a couple of times you just get an instinct for it?

    Hi-jinks of course ensue, culminating in the revelation that the culprit is Garvey, the black sheep of the family who presumably chose the ape-man route of seeking revenge because it was cooler than merely shooting up the joint. The point is, his name is Garvey Rantrill.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 325: DOCTOR SENDACH

    (Human Torch v1 002, 1940)

    As our story opens, what is presumably New York City is under siege by a mysterious killer who drains their victims of their blood. Dr Jack “the Fiery Mask” Castle decides to get involved. He sets a trap by announcing to the paper that he has a lot of blood on hand and then waits for the fiend to show up – too bad for him it’s not just one guy, as twenty blood-hungry maniacs show up and beat the tar out of him.

    But! The Fiery Mask had cleverly doped the blood with florescent chemicals visible to his weird glowing eyes and he manages to track it to the castle district of New York State, where he finds them reporting back to famous missing stomach specialist Dr Sendach. None of this is tremendously exciting and Sendach probably would have ended up in the Mad Scientist Roundup but…

    He’s super cuckoo! Sendach, it turns out, has developed an artificial stomach and installed it in a series of unfortunates without considering what the side effects of such a procedure might be. Turns out: it’s bad! They all lost the ability to produce blood and became science vampires! Now a reasonable man would take this as a sign that it might be time to revisit the drawing board, but not old “I shall prove my theories if I have to drain the world of its blood” Sendach, who determines that the Fiery Mask shall be his next subject. Somewhat predictably, the subsequent struggle ends with Sendach being devoured by his own minions.

    I don’t think that I would advocate for Dr Sendach to be BRUNG BACK, but the Sendach Artificial Stomach would be a fun thing for an aspiring villain to dig up at the US Patent Office as a way to control their minions via regular necessary transfusions.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 315: THE ZOMBIE MASTER

    (Daring Mystery Comics 001, 1940)

    The Zombie Master has layers. Top level is deeds: he is a scientist who kidnaps people on the fringes of society and uses a combination of hypnosis and radiation to turn them into bright green mind controlled thralls – fairly standard stuff for a mad scientist. Next though, is his origin: he felt rejected by society because of his great height – something like 20 feet tall, according to some sources – and so moved underground in order to work in isolation (and as a side note he mentions that he’s been working for about 50 years, so he’s a rare Golden Age character who we have an approximate age for: somewhere in his late 60s or early 70s seems reasonable). A giant scientist!

    The next layer is only interesting to me: he is not given a name in the story. Luckily, the Zombie Master moniker is later assigned to him because there’s no really good option in the text and I’d’ve ended up calling him something like Unnamed Giant Scientist.

    For our final layer we must note that the Zombie Master is a part of the origin story of the Fiery Mask, and that the Fiery Mask was one of the characters who appeared in J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve, wherein it was revealed that he had not received his powers due to an explosion in the Zombie Master’s lab but essentially by murdering the previous Fiery Mask – the Zombie Master was just a story he made up in order to cover for himself/ assuage his guilt. The greatest trick the Zombie Master ever pulled, it seems, was to have never existed at all.

    (which of course makes him a perfect candidate to be BRUNG BACK – what better foe than a nonexistent giant science man?)