The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: fake god

  • DIVINE ROUND-UP 004

    Can you ever have enough made-up gods? 

    the Goddess of Fire: 

    Crooks Raoul and Victor Ladron hatch a scheme while hiding out on the South Pacific island of Kumoni: since the idol of the local Goddess of Fire looks identical to former super-villain Elena they will engineer her kidnapping, hypnotize her into impersonating the goddess and then kill her to prove that they are more powerful than her and thus deserve to make off with the temple gold. This plan is of course complicated by the fact that Elena is engaged to the nigh-omnipotent super-hero Mr Mystic, and the Ladrons meet a fiery end. 

    God style: idol only (The Spirit Section, 3 November, 1940)

    the Gansha:

    Adam Starr of the Space Legion is on the hunt for space pirate extraordinaire Black Michael, and no mealy-mouthed warning about a “water-god” who has “destroyed all who ventured near his cursed waters” for “untold ages” is going to stop him from searching the Martian canals.

    Starr’s manly skepticism doesn’t pay off this time, as Gansha the Water-God turns out not only to be real but to be a monstrous carnivorous fish that almost devours both him and his submersible without even needing to chew.

    Sadly for monster fans and fish fans alike, Gansha is unceremoniously blown to smithereens when Black Michael attempts to use it as a deathtrap to get rid of Starr without checking to see if he might have a ludicrously overpowered atomic sidearm on his person. Presumably the Martians are happy – the ones who like boat rides and don’t belong to any kind of Gansha-worshipping sect, at least.

    God style: animist (Crash Comics Adventures 003, 1940) 

    Golo:

    We get little in the way of detail on Golo, save that they are worshipped “from Ubangi to the Sudan” and that displaying a Golo fetish can grant safe passage in those areas. And that adventurer Ted Crane thinks it’s all poppycock, of course.

    God style: idol only (Exciting Comics 005, 1940) 

    the Ice Gods: 

    Stuart Taylor and his pals have been time travelling again, and this time they’ve ended up in the clutches of a prehistoric trip at the surprisingly rapid dawn of the last Ice Age, the environmental effects of which have been personified as the malevolent Ice 

    God style: animist (Jumbo Comics 028, 1941)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 020

    We’re stretching the definition of the term “generic” this week, folks.

    Carr, the self-styled Planetary Potentate, is released from the insane asylum that he is imprisoned in when a resurrected sub-sea dinosaur called the Amphisaur crashes into it. He sets out to claim his rightful place at the head of society, along with his friend/ companion/ army, the wild man Simeo.

    While murdering and robbing a gas station attendant, Carr learns of the Amphisaur and its role in their escape and vows to aid his newfound ally against the forces of the enemy as represented by former mummy/current magical super-hero Mystico.

    At this point in the story I am fully expecting the pair to have a meaningful interaction with the Amphisaur, something along the lines of them interfering with Mystico’s second attempt to kill it and then either riding it around as a war-beast or getting eaten by an uncaring monster. Instead, they are unceremoniously knocked out by the Amphisaur’s death-throes. Mystico doesn’t even know that they’re there! (Startling Comics 004, 1940)

    Boris Ivanoff is not a particularly remarkable freelance spy in most respects, but he really does have a flair for the theatrical. I really like the flashlight bit above, but I really really like the fact that he wears that sheet ghost outfit for the entire adventure for no stated reason. The authorities already know his name, where he is and enough about his plans to substitute secret agent Q-13 for his new recruit, for heavens sake. They don’t even bother to dramatically unmask Ivanoff at the end, because the sheet is apparently just an affectation! (Super-Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940)

    This fellow is really Jay Jackson, publisher of newspaper the Morning Star, who extorts money out of people by threatening to print scandalous articles about them and then murders the ones who refuse to pay. He is very frustrating to me because I find his weird Halloween mask disguise very charming, except that I have read this story and know that it is a racist Chinese caricature, which is the opposite of charming. Annoying!

    Jackson is also the subject of what is possibly the most extreme version of the bit where a super-hero scares a confession out of someone I have ever read, in which Magno collapses an entire skyscraper on top of him, seemingly with no guarantee that he will survive the process. Plus, there are like half a dozen other crooks in the building when it comes down and none of them are extracted from the wreckage in time to confess their wrongdoings. (Super-Mystery Comics v1, 1940)

    Adopting the role of the high priest of the local Tiger-God might have seemed like a good way to take control of a region that contained a rich gold mine, but all too predictably it ended up with this fellow being thrown into his own tiger pit once he is revealed as a fraud by adventurer Scotty of the Skyways. (Super Spy 001, 1940)

  • PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

    Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

    The Great Green Turtle:

    The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

    The Lama:

    The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen – Thuggees, natch – from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

    The Fire God:

    If there’s one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it’s finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he’s off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God’s character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

    The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer’s cop-out when they don’t want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

    Mad Ming:

    Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren’t still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he’s just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

  • PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

    Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

    The Great Green Turtle:

    The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

    The Lama:

    The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen – Thuggees, natch – from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

    The Fire God:

    If there’s one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it’s finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he’s off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God’s character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

    The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer’s cop-out when they don’t want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

    Mad Ming:

    Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren’t still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he’s just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 625: BOLOCH

    (Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

    Sub Saunders is just cruising around in the ocean when his submarine is swept into an underground cave, the home of the fantastic Cave Things! I was very excited when this comic started but sadly this is the most we see of Cave Things slithering and creeping around like this. They still have a lot going for them as far as humanoid creeps go but it’s real sad that we don’t get to see more creeping and crawling.

    Anyway, the Cave Things worship a god called Boloch and of course there’s a guy inside exploiting them via a speaker setup. His plan hits a real snag when Sub Saunders notices the big open door on the front of Boloch’s idol and just hops inside.

    Boloch (the man inside the statue is also named Boloch, which suggests that he named his fake god after himself?) bangs his head on a table after being socked by Saunders and passes away. And since Sub Saunders emerged from the flames of Boloch unscathed, he himself is acclaimed as Boloch in human form and allowed to leave peacefully.

    The trope of an advanced outsider taking advantage of an isolated community by posing as a god and/or repurposing an idol or other religious infrastructure to their own ends is a long-established one, but the real head-scratcher with regard to Boloch is just how in the heck he even knew there was a community of weirdos to take advantage of on the ocean floor, let alone how he set everything up. We shall never know, thanks to the efforts of that brave table.

  • PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 001

    The kinds of character that are a part of comics history so it would be wrong to ignore them but are also pretty racist (usually – I’m sure that eventually I’ll find something else distasteful enough to put here) and unpleasant to dedicate a whole lot of time to. We’re going with a round-up!

    Our first culprit is George Harvard AKA Big Sun, a guy with a way too complicated plan to sell oil to the Axis out of the Florida Everglades under the cover of being a geological surveyor or prospector or something. He comes to the attention of adventurer Clip Carson due to not accounting for his partner maybe poking around looking for samples like their job is supposed to be? It’s a bad plan.

    I’m mad at myself for finding Big Sun’s mask so cool looking, but it’s mitigated by how dumb his gimmick is: he has a shiny breastplate on under his robe and he reveals it flasher-style to blind his foes. Hence the name, I guess. (More Fun Comics 069, 1941) 

    I didn’t even know that Zingaro was an Italian slur for people of Romani descent until I looked up this guy – just why it was used as the name of a fellow trying to take over Mexico I will never know. On the one hand he is stopped by weirdo character the Voice so that’s good. On the other, he gets away so there’s a chance he could appear again, which is bad. It’s okay though: the Voice only ever had two adventures and this is the second one.

    Thankfully there aren’t too many characters whose names are racial slurs. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

    I don’t know if you could call it lucky, per se, but it is kind of fortunate for the purposes of this round-up that I’m hitting a lot of the major categories of racist super-villains all in one go. We’ll see if this questionable luck holds for the fourth entry.

    So: Banga the Elephant God is predicated on the old trope that indigenous peoples are so credulous and superstitious that they will believe that anything (eg, a big mean elephant with a guy in a skull mask on it) is a god or other supernatural occurrence – in this case the people of the hidden jungle civilization of Yenya are helped along by the fact that the human part of the Banga gestalt is actually their witch doctor (called a “wizard doctor” in this case, which is kind of a neat linguistic variation if nothing else). Banga is eventually unmasked by jungle hero Morak the Mighty and meets his dual ends.

    As with so many racist characters it is very unfortunate that Banga the Elephant God looks sick as hell. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

    The very next issue we have more of the same: a bunch of white guys dress up like the very cool looking Lizard-Lion Men of local legend and fleece ivory out of villagers in… Malaysia? If Rex King aka Black Fury stayed put between issues then it’s Malaysia.

    There’s not too much to these guys: one of them hides inside the statue of the Lizard-Lion in the local temple and says for the locals to bring all of their ivory hence and then costumed goons go beat up anyone who refuses. And then Black Fury beats them up. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)

    We didn’t hit all the greats in one go – there’s a lot of untapped racism coming up once we hit the comics of 1942 after all – but it’s a good – bad? – sample.

  • PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 001

    The kinds of character that are a part of comics history so it would be wrong to ignore them but are also pretty racist (usually – I’m sure that eventually I’ll find something else distasteful enough to put here) and unpleasant to dedicate a whole lot of time to. We’re going with a round-up!

    Our first culprit is George Harvard AKA Big Sun, a guy with a way too complicated plan to sell oil to the Axis out of the Florida Everglades under the cover of being a geological surveyor or prospector or something. He comes to the attention of adventurer Clip Carson due to not accounting for his partner maybe poking around looking for samples like their job is supposed to be? It’s a bad plan.

    I’m mad at myself for finding Big Sun’s mask so cool looking, but it’s mitigated by how dumb his gimmick is: he has a shiny breastplate on under his robe and he reveals it flasher-style to blind his foes. Hence the name, I guess. (More Fun Comics 069, 1941) 

    I didn’t even know that Zingaro was an Italian slur for people of Romani descent until I looked up this guy – just why it was used as the name of a fellow trying to take over Mexico I will never know. On the one hand he is stopped by weirdo character the Voice so that’s good. On the other, he gets away so there’s a chance he could appear again, which is bad. It’s okay though: the Voice only ever had two adventures and this is the second one.

    Thankfully there aren’t too many characters whose names are racial slurs. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

    I don’t know if you could call it lucky, per se, but it is kind of fortunate for the purposes of this round-up that I’m hitting a lot of the major categories of racist super-villains all in one go. We’ll see if this questionable luck holds for the fourth entry.

    So: Banga the Elephant God is predicated on the old trope that indigenous peoples are so credulous and superstitious that they will believe that anything (eg, a big mean elephant with a guy in a skull mask on it) is a god or other supernatural occurrence – in this case the people of the hidden jungle civilization of Yenya are helped along by the fact that the human part of the Banga gestalt is actually their witch doctor (called a “wizard doctor” in this case, which is kind of a neat linguistic variation if nothing else). Banga is eventually unmasked by jungle hero Morak the Mighty and meets his dual ends.

    As with so many racist characters it is very unfortunate that Banga the Elephant God looks sick as hell. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

    The very next issue we have more of the same: a bunch of white guys dress up like the very cool looking Lizard-Lion Men of local legend and fleece ivory out of villagers in… Malaysia? If Rex King aka Black Fury stayed put between issues then it’s Malaysia.

    There’s not too much to these guys: one of them hides inside the statue of the Lizard-Lion in the local temple and says for the locals to bring all of their ivory hence and then costumed goons go beat up anyone who refuses. And then Black Fury beats them up. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)

    We didn’t hit all the greats in one go – there’s a lot of untapped racism coming up once we hit the comics of 1942 after all – but it’s a good – bad? – sample.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 357: MUMBO JUMBO

    (Master Comics 016, 1941) 

    I always have an instinct to skip the really racist ones, but I think it’s better to acknowledge them? There’s lots of messed up shit in old (and new) comics, folks. 

    Anyway, Mumbo Jumbo is a guy named Graynor who poses as a voodoo god/ priest in classic (often quite racist) comics style and uses the believers at his command in order to… get revenge on his old boss. It’s a shocking lack of ambition on top of everything else – just as well that he gets murderated by Zoro the Mystery Man’s pet cheetah.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 307: RA THE AVENGER

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 307: RA THE AVENGER

    (Captain America Comics 008, 1941) 

    Ra the Avenger is actually Henry Sanders, an explorer who discovered and eventually sold the fabulous Egyptian Ruby of the Nile, then dressed up in faux Ancient Egyptian gear to murder all who stood in his way on a quest to steal it back again.

    That is, unfortunately, about all we can say about this guy because he’s one of those fellas who gets punched out and hauled off to jail without really spelling out the Why of their turn to costumed villainy.  An educated guesser might suppose that he sold the gem unwillingly due to some critical need and was determined to get it back. Or maybe the gem holds some sort of  curse that drives him to recover and return it? That’s fun, let’s go with that! It even clears up some of the fuzziness about the distinction between Ra  the god and the pharaoh who was buried with the gem: they must be the same, a magician powerful enough to be conflated with a god and to impose his will on a tomb robber thousands of years in the future. What a cool story I’ve read into this (though a bit of a bleak future for Sanders, possessed and locked up in a US prison)!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 307: RA THE AVENGER

    (Captain America Comics 008, 1941) 

    Ra the Avenger is actually Henry Sanders, an explorer who discovered and eventually sold the fabulous Egyptian Ruby of the Nile, then dressed up in faux Ancient Egyptian gear to murder all who stood in his way on a quest to steal it back again.

    That is, unfortunately, about all we can say about this guy because he’s one of those fellas who gets punched out and hauled off to jail without really spelling out the Why of their turn to costumed villainy.  An educated guesser might suppose that he sold the gem unwillingly due to some critical need and was determined to get it back. Or maybe the gem holds some sort of  curse that drives him to recover and return it? That’s fun, let’s go with that! It even clears up some of the fuzziness about the distinction between Ra  the god and the pharaoh who was buried with the gem: they must be the same, a magician powerful enough to be conflated with a god and to impose his will on a tomb robber thousands of years in the future. What a cool story I’ve read into this (though a bit of a bleak future for Sanders, possessed and locked up in a US prison)!