The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: mad science

  • 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! 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 113: RAYMOND RALL

    (More Fun 062, 1940)

    Look at this damn nerd. He’s got a lightning cannon and a robot army and he bothered Dr Fate for a whole afternoon. Good riddance to him, I say. Raymond Rall. Ridiculous.

  • MINOR SUPER -VILLAIN 103: THE BAT

    (More Fun Comics 055, 1940)

    An economics professor who dresses in a bat-winged robe and injects college students with experimental “artificial blood” while they sleep, the Bat is probably more the story of a man’s mental breakdown than a super-villain.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 097: THE WIZARD

    (More Fun Comics 052-054, 1940)

    The Wizard is the kind of guy you get in comics who develops a robot army and a few different types of rays, destructive and otherwise, and immediately turns around and takes over (what I assume to be) his home town. I do appreciate that he looks like someone who has been sitting in a basement or a cave soldering robot faces for twenty years, but it’s no excuse for incivility.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 097: THE WIZARD

    (More Fun Comics 052-054, 1940)

    The Wizard is the kind of guy you get in comics who develops a robot army and a few different types of rays, destructive and otherwise, and immediately turns around and takes over (what I assume to be) his home town. I do appreciate that he looks like someone who has been sitting in a basement or a cave soldering robot faces for twenty years, but it’s no excuse for incivility.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 096: PYTHON

    (Feature Comics 036, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? Simply put, Python lives in a creepy castle somewhere in New York State and spends his time stealing the brains of great thinkers to wire up to his machine so that he can plunder their knowledge. And he decorates with the shrunken heads of his victims, and he has a surgically mind-controlled goon named Kreeper.

    What is interesting about them? Aside form the above which is pretty solid villain stuff, the most interesting thing about Python is that he has absolutely no connection to snakes in any way. It just seems to be, like, his name? Wild stuff.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 096: PYTHON

    (Feature Comics 036, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? Simply put, Python lives in a creepy castle somewhere in New York State and spends his time stealing the brains of great thinkers to wire up to his machine so that he can plunder their knowledge. And he decorates with the shrunken heads of his victims, and he has a surgically mind-controlled goon named Kreeper.

    What is interesting about them? Aside form the above which is pretty solid villain stuff, the most interesting thing about Python is that he has absolutely no connection to snakes in any way. It just seems to be, like, his name? Wild stuff.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 096: PYTHON

    (Feature Comics 036, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? Simply put, Python lives in a creepy castle somewhere in New York State and spends his time stealing the brains of great thinkers to wire up to his machine so that he can plunder their knowledge. And he decorates with the shrunken heads of his victims, and he has a surgically mind-controlled goon named Kreeper.

    What is interesting about them? Aside form the above which is pretty solid villain stuff, the most interesting thing about Python is that he has absolutely no connection to snakes in any way. It just seems to be, like, his name? Wild stuff.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 075: “UNCLE”

    (Adventure Comics 057, 1940)

    As I’ve said before, sometimes a character is very clearly a super-villain but chooses no name for themself, in which case for administrative purposes I pick something that the text boxes or other characters refer to them as and go with that. Scientists are usually easy – they just go by their name. This fellow, on the other hand, is basically only ever referred to as “Uncle,” so Uncle I call him.

    And Uncle is a credible threat! He tries to ransom the world by threatening to destroy it by knocking it off of its orbit, then actually tries to do it in a fit of pique – it’s only the timely intervention of Sandman that saves the day.

    In the last entry, when I was talking about mad scientists as perfect characters to bring back as reformed? This is the kind of guy I had in mind. What a gift to a cast!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 074: DR TOGG

    (Adventure Comics 057, 1940)

    Yet another Hourman science-villain. Dr Togg was really into hybridizing dogs and buzzards in various fun ways. Such a cool guy was he, in fact, that he was brought back as an ancillary character in the 90s Hourman series, himself mutated into a partial dog/buzzard in a retconned final encounter with Hourman before he was sent to prison.

    Thinking about him (and fellow Hourman foe Iker in about 50 entries or so), has made me realize just how much I love the concept of the reformed mad scientist with their struggles to comprehend scientific ethics and their weird little mutations and leftover minions. A few recent Marvel series have featured the concept but I would still consider it to be underutilized.

    There’s our guy.