The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Captain Future

  • REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 014

    The last couple of 1940 issues of Startling Comics featured the adventures of time traveller Ace Buckley, something that has heavily flavoured this edition of Real Person Round-Up. 

    Alonso de Molina:

    Spanish conquistador who stayed behind after one of Pizarro’s excursions to the Americas and met a mysterious fate. Time traveller Ace Buckley finds his armour and impersonates him to a presumably face blind Pizarro. (Startling Comics 003, 1940)

    Atahualpa:

    Last of the Inca Emperors. Time Traveller Ace Buckley gives him a lot of good advice on how to deal with the incoming Spanish but he ignores it and is slain. (Startling Comics 003, 1940) 

    Commodore Edward Preble:

    Commander of the US forces besieging Tripoli during the First Barbary War, including cheeky time traveller Ace Buckley. (Startling Comics 004, 1940)

    Commodore Stephen Decatur:

    Commander of the USS Constitution (including crew member and time traveller Ace Buckley) during the Seige of Tripoli as part of the First Barbary War. Pedants take note: yes, I know he was a captain at this point.(Startling Comics 004, 1940)

    Fort Knox:

    Attacked by a bunch of crooks with a disintegrator ray. (Startling Comics 003, 1940)

    Francisco Pizarro:

    Encountered by and eventually tries to kill time traveller Ace Buckley while engaging his bloody conquest of the Inca Empire. Also Vincente de Valverde is there. (Startling Comics 003, 1940) 

    Hernando de Soto:

    The only person in 16th Century Peru with any chill, and so time traveller Ace Buckley rewards him with spoilers about his discovery of the Mississippi River. (Startling Comics 003, 1940)

    the Koh-i-Noor Diamond: 

    It’s a simple substitution as a crook steals the Kohinoor Ruby. (Startling Comics 003, 1940)

    William Eaton:

    Unconventional US consular agent to Tunis who played a key part in the US victory over Tripoli in the First Barbary War. Portrayed as a lunatic loose cannon loon in the Ace Buckley time travel story. (the fellow in blue on the left of the second panel above is Marine First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, who doesn’t play a huge role in the comic but is significant enough to note) (Startling Comics 004, 1940)

    Yusef Karamanli, Pasha of Tripoli: 

    Seen playing the villain during the Siege of Tripoli as part of the First Barbary War, as witnessed by time traveller Ace Buckley. (Startling Comics 004, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 768: THE PURPLE PLAGUE

    (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew “Captain Future” Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against!

    Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague’s henchmen (called variously the Purple Plague Mob, the Followers of the Purple Plague and the very cool Knights of the Purple Plague), and also with the not-very-genre-savvy police, who keep thinking that the brightly-dressed superhuman is doing the crimes instead of the horde of concussed gangsters littering the landscape around him.

    Future does eventually locate the actual Purple Plague himself and at that point it’s just a case of one übermensch versus a room full of regular guys plus one older guy in a robe. Even a gang of moderately cool-looking killbots barely slows down the inevitable mass pummelling.

    As a side note, one of the Knights of the Purple Plague is Andrew Bryant’s boss, Mr Devlin, who fires Bryant as a cost-cutting measure and thus inspires him to pursue the reckless line of research that ends with the accident that turns him into Captain Future. Was Devlin cutting costs in order to funnel profits from the Pacific Electrical Corporation to the Purple Plague, or was the Plague’s brand of villainy just an attractive prospect to a small-minded capitalist like Devlin? Either way this is a classic case of the villain inadvertently creating the hero who would destroy them.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 044

    A full hand of Better (Nedor/Standard/Pines) Comics characters for ye.

    Captain Future:

    When young Dr Andrew Bryant finds himself fired from his job as a… research physicist? electrical engineer?… at the Pacific Electrical Corporation he responds like any rational person would: by working day and night in in a desperate bid to finish his research in the time he has left, until his tired brain thinks its way into an industrial accident. Luckily for Bryant he lives in a super-hero universe, so when he crosses gamma and infra-red rays and blows up his laboratory he is not gruesomely killed but instead filled with super-energies.

    Dubbing himself Captain Future (because he represents the future state of humanity, natch) and donning a pretty minimal costume, Bryant sets out to mete out fist-based justice on the world using a suite of super powers including: mind reading, remote viewing, the ability to both hear and broadcast radio, flight, enhanced strength, energy blasts and a magnetic forcefield that repels bullets but is ineffective against cowardly blows to the head. Sometimes his powers run out or are used up and he has to scurry off and blast himself with radiation again, which makes him one of the earlier super-heroes to have that kind of narratively-interesting power limitation. Plus he is occasionally vulnerable to high levels of electricity or other energy disrupting his powers in a kryptonite kind of way – he’s just a “my powers don’t work on this specific material” away from the Limiting Your Super Powered Character trifecta! (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    Mystico:

    When scientist Dr Slade needs to test his Vita-Ray device to see if it really can resurrect the dead like he thinks it can, does he start out on easy mode with a selection of freshly deceased lab mice like some sort of rule-following nerd? He does not! Instead, he gets ahold of a 2000-year-old mummy, perhaps the most dead guy available, and turns the power up as high as it can go. And it works! The mummy is restored to life! And also his flailing causes a power feedback that results in an explosion that kills everyone involved… maybe the lab mice would have been a good starting point after all.

    The one person to survive the lab explosion is the newly-resurrected mummy, who turns out to have a wide array of magical powers – lucky for the narrative that Slade grabbed the wizard mummy and not some minor aristocrat’s 3rd Dynasty failson or an unlucky desiccated tomb robber. Dubbing himself Mystico, the formerly-ancient Egyptian fast-tracks his assimilation to future society with some new clothes and a top-of-the-line car.

    In a fortuitous turn of events for the local authorities, Mystico also adopts a set of conventional American values and immediately sets his vast powers to the task of rooting out crime. I suppose that if you’re an ancient and powerful wizard suddenly thrust into a strange world your options boil down to overthrowing the status quo (super-villain), maintaining the status quo (super-hero) or keeping your head down and living a quiet life (boring comic book). (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    Dr X:

    At first glance, Dr X slots neatly into the category of “scientist super-villains who headline their own comics serial” alongside such luminaries as Dr Doom and Landor, Maker of Monsters. After all, he’s a creepy looking rodent-man whose primary field of study is seeing just how many dangerous alien worlds he can send his niece Cynthia’s astral form to without really briefing her on what she’s getting into first, or indeed without a clear idea of exactly what happens to someone if their astral form is eaten by an alien dinosaur.

    But no, Dr X is a good guy! He tries his hardest to keep Cynthia and her boyfriend Bob Stone from getting eaten by those dinosaurs (after metaphorically delivering them to them on a platter, sure, but the thought is there), and even staves off an invasion of Earth by the Moon! Truly we must all learn not to judge a book by its sinister cover.

    That said, is it reasonable that Alan Moore made him a weird creepy murderer in the pages of Terra Incognito? Completely! (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

    the Masked Rider: 

    The Masked Rider is really Bronc Randall, cowboy and ex-rodeo performer, who returns home after two years to find small-town Western injustice running rampant and decides to do something about it by donning a small cloth mask and otherwise changing nothing about his fairly distinctive look. And it works! The Masked Rider then goes on to dispense justice for another dozen issues or so. 

    (is the Masked Raider another Western comic that fooled me into thinking it was set in the Old West until several issues in when someone rocked up in a truck? Indeed it is)

    This is actually Better Publications’ second Masked Rider, appearing one month after the one we have already encountered if I have my dates right. Plus, there was a bit of text fiction featuring a third Masked Rider in Best Comics the previous year. Did someone at the company have a thing for the name or is the Masked Rider just one of the most generic Western hero monikers? (Startling Comics 001, 1940)