The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: mad science

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 310: ZARPO

    (Captain America Comics 009, 1941)

    Zarpo is a classic example of why if you are a government or large business, etc,  you should have a process for vetting wild crackpot claims from scientists who come to your door. When a man says to you, for example, “my name is Zarpo and I have invented a bomb that blows up after spending a certain amount of time near a human being,” perhaps consider not calling him a crackpot and throuwing him out of your office. Because: what if he’s telling the truth? You just might get blowed up is what.

    Zarpo is himself blowed up in a confrontation with very minor scythe-throwing Marvel character Father Time, shown here sporting the rare nose-forward style of super-hero mask. Love that nose!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 299: DOCTOR GRIMM

    (Captain America Comics 004, 1941)

    Doctor Grimm is your regular-style mad scientist, subtype Owns a Private Hospital and Conducts Unethical Experiments on the Inmates and Staff. He comes to Captain America’s attention when Bucky gets bashed on the head real good (teen sidekick head trauma is no laughing matter and I hope we never get an earnest comic about it) and has to be admitted for observation. Things get predictably creepy, with disappearing nurses, strange cries in the night and deformed patients.

    The real star of the story is Gorro here. Just look at him! A real classic Kirby man-monster with a thirst for human blood. I love him, and mildly begrudge Bucky for shooting him in the face about a page later. At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that Kirby never met a comic he wouldn’t draw a monster in, so we’ll be seeing guys like this for years to come.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 270: DR LORROF

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)

    Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs.

    Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium ray that is the only known weakness of his blob, a rare bit of non-hubristic caution from a mad scientist, especially from someone as unhinged as Lorrof is.

    Here’s the monster, called the Green Terror. Two things:

    1. This crowd really knows their lines

    2. This crowd is present because Dr Lorrof announced the impending emergence of the monster from it’s shell. The few hundred people who get eaten have to apportion at least some of the blame to themselves

    And you thought I was joking about the crabs. 

    Lorrof sadly doesn’t survive this confrontation with Electro – after the replacement crabs fail to destroy the robot, Lorrof himself attempts to do so with a vial of explosive goo, only to blow himself sky high.

    Obviously I reckon that this is exactly the sort of science villain that the Marvel Universe needs, if only for the fact that he yells things like “fiery demons!” when startled. And what are the Avengers going to do when confronted by the Green Terror Mk II at a time when hospitals don’t routinely hold a stockpile of radium? BRING Lorrof BACK so we can find out!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 266: DR BRUNO VAROZ

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010, 1940) 

    I like this guy. This guy is the fun kind of mad scientist with a lot of fun details. First of all he lives in a castle roughly the same size as the island it sits on, off the coast of Cuba. Secondly, he follows the rules of Mad Scientist Grooming, which state that they must either be impeccably groomed or, as with Dr Varoz here, look like they woke up in a compost heap.

    Varoz’ great discovery is a formula for artificial blood, which he uses to bring the dead back to life. Like aerial torpedoes (missiles) and airplane detectors (RADAR), artificial blood as something that both real-world and comic book people were trying to perfect in the 40s, but unlike the former we still haven’t quite gotten the handle on artificial blood, probably because it always seems to turn people into draculas or monsters or, as here, a bunch of skull-faced science revenants.

    And there’s a lot to like about these guys! They look great for one, they’re seemingly unstoppable for two, even though there’s nothing stopping them from being killed again – I guess they’re just too scary to stop.

    They’re also intelligent, which rules, and which is why they’re science revenants and not science zombies. They talk, fly planes, fire guns… Dr Varoz can stay forgotten as far as I’m concerned, but I would love to see his Corpse-Beings BRUNG BACK in some capacity.

    (I really like that the animated corpse is afraid of Electro)

    Dr Bruno Varoz’ other two claims to fame are this excellent two-headed monster and a pretty cold-blooded death via being thrown by Electro into the same acid pit pictured above; The monster, unaccounted for at the end of the story, would also be a welcome sight in a modern comic, if only in one of those crowd shots on Monster Island or in the Mole Man’s tunnels.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 266: DR BRUNO VAROZ

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010, 1940) 

    I like this guy. This guy is the fun kind of mad scientist with a lot of fun details. First of all he lives in a castle roughly the same size as the island it sits on, off the coast of Cuba. Secondly, he follows the rules of Mad Scientist Grooming, which state that they must either be impeccably groomed or, as with Dr Varoz here, look like they woke up in a compost heap.

    Varoz’ great discovery is a formula for artificial blood, which he uses to bring the dead back to life. Like aerial torpedoes (missiles) and airplane detectors (RADAR), artificial blood as something that both real-world and comic book people were trying to perfect in the 40s, but unlike the former we still haven’t quite gotten the handle on artificial blood, probably because it always seems to turn people into draculas or monsters or, as here, a bunch of skull-faced science revenants.

    And there’s a lot to like about these guys! They look great for one, they’re seemingly unstoppable for two, even though there’s nothing stopping them from being killed again – I guess they’re just too scary to stop.

    They’re also intelligent, which rules, and which is why they’re science revenants and not science zombies. They talk, fly planes, fire guns… Dr Varoz can stay forgotten as far as I’m concerned, but I would love to see his Corpse-Beings BRUNG BACK in some capacity.

    (I really like that the animated corpse is afraid of Electro)

    Dr Bruno Varoz’ other two claims to fame are this excellent two-headed monster and a pretty cold-blooded death via being thrown by Electro into the same acid pit pictured above; The monster, unaccounted for at the end of the story, would also be a welcome sight in a modern comic, if only in one of those crowd shots on Monster Island or in the Mole Man’s tunnels.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 265: THE MAD DOCTOR

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 009, 1940)

    This one, while not being particularly spectacular as a whole does contain a lot of fun elements. Let’s count them off!

    We open on our hero one a one-issue trip to Europe (1) where he pooh-poohs the local superstitions (2) about a castle full of vampires who steal young women (3).

    The Angel – for it is he who pooh-poohs – quickly gets mixed up in an attempted vampiric abduction and, surprise surprise, the guy isn’t actually a vampire at all (4). A shame, because I love it when vampires are wretched little weasels instead of cool guys in evening wear.

    It turns out that the supposed vampire clan is actually a front for an unnamed mad scientist – “Mad Doctor” is a captions-only unofficial name (5) – who is kidnapping the young women for use as test subjects (6) in his mind-swapping machine (7) and he intends to place his latest victim’s mind into the body of a gorilla (8).

    Lucky for the hapless fraulein, the Angel shows up, there is a fracas and the whole place ends up exploding (9).

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 212: ECHO

    (Detective Comics v1 049, 1941)

    The story elements of this aren’t anything special: a mad scientist builds a giant robot (or something) and sends it to get revenge on the world what shunned him for his wild ideas about building giant robots (or something). Eventually he gets sloppy and the Crimson Avenger tracks him back to his lair and in a twist of mild irony the order that was meant to cause the ultra-literal Echo to kill the Crimson instead results in the death of the scientist.

    Echo is a perfectly fine example of the giant robot but the only really interesting part of this whole story is that it’s a bit ambiguous what exactly he is? Like he’s probably a robot, but read this:

    “A horrible experiment,” “a man-made giant.” He could be a frankenstein, or a weird clone beast or a cybernetic humanoid toadstool! He’s almost certainly supposed to be a robot, but the mind boggles at the possibilities! If only the Crimson Avenger hadn’t tossed him off a cliff!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 168: DR KRUG

    (Blue Beetle Comics 008, 1941)

    Dr Krug! I cannot tell you his motives, because he never goes into them! Dr Krug! He wants to destroy NYC York City , and he’s going to do it with gorillas! Dr Krug! Specifically, explosive gorillas! Dr Krug!

    That’s really all there is to the guy. He somehow figured out how to make time-bombs out of gorillas and went from there. As far as I can tell from the action of the story his plan is to have the gorillas get arrested and then blow up the police stations they are taken to. This is simultaneously one of the weirdest and least cost-effective ways of destroying a city that I have ever encountered – I think he may have started with about eight gorillas, to boot. If he hadn’t fallen in the gorilla pit and exploded he would have been having a long hard talk with his gorilla supplier before long.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 168: DR KRUG

    (Blue Beetle Comics 008, 1941)

    Dr Krug! I cannot tell you his motives, because he never goes into them! Dr Krug! He wants to destroy NYC York City , and he’s going to do it with gorillas! Dr Krug! Specifically, explosive gorillas! Dr Krug!

    That’s really all there is to the guy. He somehow figured out how to make time-bombs out of gorillas and went from there. As far as I can tell from the action of the story his plan is to have the gorillas get arrested and then blow up the police stations they are taken to. This is simultaneously one of the weirdest and least cost-effective ways of destroying a city that I have ever encountered – I think he may have started with about eight gorillas, to boot. If he hadn’t fallen in the gorilla pit and exploded he would have been having a long hard talk with his gorilla supplier before long.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 140: IKER

     (Adventure 064, 1941)

    Yet another Hourman mad scientist foe, Iker (properly Dr T.Z. Iker, but the only time that shows up is on a mailbox) is a classic Victim of Orthodoxy, having been kicked out of the Science Club by the hidebound Dr Orr for espousing “fake theories”.

    Said fake theories enable Iker to build a machine capable either of creating lifeforms out of energy drawn from the 5th Dimension or of drawing lifeforms from the 5th Dimension and giving them form – it’s explained in a bit of a rush in the second-last panel – and he uses them for a bit of crime and revenge before being driven mad by his technology’s destruction in the climactic battle of the adventure. The important part is that some of them are knife-wielding dwarves and one of them is a giant version of himself named Normo.

    SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? is a moot question as I discovered when I did my customary check: he already has, in JSA v1 005, 1999, as a rehabilitated employee of Tylerco!