The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Quality Comics

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 751: THE MUMMY

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 751: THE MUMMY

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940) 

    Strange things are happening at the museum: knives are flying through the air, suits of armour are wandering around in a menacing fashion and things are getting pretty spooky. Head Curator Robbins asks his pal Kent Thurston (aka the Invisible Hood) to check things out, at which point the Mummy enters the picture, knocks out Thurston and kidnaps Robbins’ plucky daughter Betty.

    After grabbing Robins as well, the Mummy reveals his devious plan: Robbins must resign as curator. And that’s it. Unsurprisingly, the Mummy turns out to be Nolan, the Assistant Curator, who has admittedly hacked the whole promotion process with this bold scheme but who also has not done a particularly great job of deflecting suspicion from himself as the only person who is going to benefit from the scheme.

    As usual, the Invisible Hood’s power of invisibility is a real asset and he cleans up the gang with relative ease. He even does a bit of a challenge run by initially approaching dressed up as a second mummy, with a spooky twist once he removes his wrappings to reveal the nothingness within.

    Not the greatest fake mummy in comics history, but I’m happy to get any fake mummies.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 750: THE PHANTOM

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940) 

    It’s a tale as old as opera: macho newsman Chic Carter is pissing and moaning his way through a theatre review assignment when a dramatic figure suddenly murders the star and disappears into the bowels of the opera house. Chic is quick to connect this killing with two others that took place over the last twenty years and sets out to capture the enigmatic Phantom.

    Chic and the police stage a recreation of the fatal performance using the singer’s poor understudy and… it works! Too well, actually. The singer doesn’t get murdered (phew!) but the Phantom grabs her and runs off with Carter in hot pursuit, along with a suspiciously evil-looking actor. 

    It turns out that the opera’s male lead has been maintaining his position of prominence for the last twenty years by having the Phantom murder his rivals, and what a commitment to being the king of a moderate hill that is. Sure, opera was a lot more of A Thing circa 1940 than it is now and this is presumably the top NYC opera house, but keeping a whole-ass man in a secret basement apartment for two entire decades in order to remove a rival on average every ten years… it’s a heckuva commitment to your art is all I’ll say.

    In an unsurprising non-twist, the singer turns out to be a bad boss and shoots the Phantom dead for screwing up and kidnapping the understudy, only to be killed himself when the Phantom pops back up with a burst of dying berserker strength just long enough for revenge. Maybe if you hadn’t outsourced all of your murdering to underpaid contractors you’d be better at it, idiot.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 750: THE PHANTOM

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940) 

    It’s a tale as old as opera: macho newsman Chic Carter is pissing and moaning his way through a theatre review assignment when a dramatic figure suddenly murders the star and disappears into the bowels of the opera house. Chic is quick to connect this killing with two others that took place over the last twenty years and sets out to capture the enigmatic Phantom.

    Chic and the police stage a recreation of the fatal performance using the singer’s poor understudy and… it works! Too well, actually. The singer doesn’t get murdered (phew!) but the Phantom grabs her and runs off with Carter in hot pursuit, along with a suspiciously evil-looking actor. 

    It turns out that the opera’s male lead has been maintaining his position of prominence for the last twenty years by having the Phantom murder his rivals, and what a commitment to being the king of a moderate hill that is. Sure, opera was a lot more of A Thing circa 1940 than it is now and this is presumably the top NYC opera house, but keeping a whole-ass man in a secret basement apartment for two entire decades in order to remove a rival on average every ten years… it’s a heckuva commitment to your art is all I’ll say.

    In an unsurprising non-twist, the singer turns out to be a bad boss and shoots the Phantom dead for screwing up and kidnapping the understudy, only to be killed himself when the Phantom pops back up with a burst of dying berserker strength just long enough for revenge. Maybe if you hadn’t outsourced all of your murdering to underpaid contractors you’d be better at it, idiot.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 749: THE SABOTEURS

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940)

    Sometimes all you need is a group of mercenary saboteurs dressed in matching cloaks and gas masks to zazz up a story – Black X and his comic book contemporaries have faced and defeated hundred of sabotage plots in front of my now-jaded eyes over the course of my comics-reading career, and so it takes a bit more than your basic pseudo-Nazi in a suit and tie to get my attention. That there is a suit-and-tie pseudo-Nazi behind the scheme to blow up a city that is technically never called New York is irrelevant, as it’s the cloak-and-gas mask guys who matter.

    Black X and Batu do not of course let this campaign of destruction stand, and despite some unusually acrobatic fighting moves on behalf of the Saboteurs the whole bunch of them are brought to justice after only a moderate amount of infrastructure is exploded.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 749: THE SABOTEURS

    (Smash Comics 015, 1940)

    Sometimes all you need is a group of mercenary saboteurs dressed in matching cloaks and gas masks to zazz up a story – Black X and his comic book contemporaries have faced and defeated hundred of sabotage plots in front of my now-jaded eyes over the course of my comics-reading career, and so it takes a bit more than your basic pseudo-Nazi in a suit and tie to get my attention. That there is a suit-and-tie pseudo-Nazi behind the scheme to blow up a city that is technically never called New York is irrelevant, as it’s the cloak-and-gas mask guys who matter.

    Black X and Batu do not of course let this campaign of destruction stand, and despite some unusually acrobatic fighting moves on behalf of the Saboteurs the whole bunch of them are brought to justice after only a moderate amount of infrastructure is exploded.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 748: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

    (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

    The Hunchback of Notre Dame is just that, a modern version of the fictional character, and seemingly just as damaged by society as his predecessor. He is manipulated into working as an assassin for Madame Doom, who is in Paris (presumably on behalf of the Nazis) to disrupt peace talks helmed by US Ambassador Blank but is being effectively countered by the Black X and so must operate through a deniable dupe asset.

    Just what the deal is with the Hunchback is down to three distinct possibilities, all fairly equally outlandish, but all are predicated on the fact that Notre Dame has a hunchbacked bellringer in 1940, like it’s a prerequisite for the job. The possibilities:

    1. That the people of Paris are correct in their belief that this Hunchback of Notre Dame is a direct descendant of Quasimodo, the original, which would imply not only that Quasimodo had a child at some point but that his physical condition was one which was passed down through a line of bellringers for almost 500 years.

    2. Similar to Possibility 1. Quasimodo has a child, but in this case, the Hunchback of Notre Dame Gene is recessive and his descendants are not generationally indentured cathedral slaves. This latest member of the family would thus be reviving an old tradition by being a delusional misfit urban legend.

    3. The citizens of Paris are credulous fools and all hunchbacked bellringers are not, in fact, related. In this scenario we must assume that it’s the job that is so terrible that it drives these poor men mad.

    Regardless of his actual origin, the Hunchback meets his end after attacking Black X in a jealous rage over Madame Doom’s affections. Riddled with bullets, he falls to his death. Black X is still horny for Madame Doom at this point, so she is allowed to leave.

  • REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 012

    Lotta Hitlers in this one.

    Adolf Hitler: 

    Thalga, supreme dictator of Govania, is a clear Hitler analog. (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

    This unnamed Hitler-with-a-goatee comes with a bonus, very tired-looking, FDR! (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

    Hitler look-alike Rudolph Hitz acts as political representative and spy chief for Hitler act-alike dictator Holtz in a plot to rob the US gold reserve at Fort Knox-alike Fort Adam, only to meet defeat at the cold metal hands of Bozo the Iron Man. (Smash Comics 007, 1940)

    Hitlin is a Hitler stand-in who we never actually see and who acts as a motivation for the villains of the piece in their struggle to defeat Hugh Hazzard and his Iron Man, Bozo. Almost charmingly, Hitlin’s followers are called the Batzis or the Batzi Tribe. (Smash Comics 008, 1940) 

    There’s a lot of competition for the title of “most unflattering on-the-nose Hitler analog,” but Motler here might just take it. He’s top five, if nothing else – just an absolute bad’un. Like Hitlin and Holtz before him, Motler is thwarted by Bozo the Iron Man. Unlike them, he then falls off of a cliff and dies. (Smash Comics 009, 1940)

    Franklin D Roosevelt: 

    Briefed on the approach of the Metallic Army by intelligence agent Wings Wendall (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

    Gill Fox:

    Golden Age comics man Gill Fox might not be the coworker most often inserted in stories as a gag but he sure is the one I notice the most. Here he is as a college track star. (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

    Hollywood Crowd:

    Quality Comics comedy character King Archie O’Toole ends up in Hollywood and attends the usual star-studded party, featuring lightly parodic versions of Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, WC Fields, Clark Gable, the Marx Brothers, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and possibly Joe E. Brown,  Laurel and Hardy and Edward G Robinson, plus a guy who looks very specific and who I could probably figure out if I knew the right things to look for.  (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

    Joseph Stalin:

    Stalin is in the upper right panel here ordering the invasion of Finland, but I include the rest of the page for a history repeats itself kind of view vis-a-vis the invasion of Ukraine. (Smash Comics 010, 1940)

    Unknown:

    This right here is the kind of thing that preys on my mind: a character with a roughly equal chance of being completely made up or being a reference to a real person who I might know immediately if I were reading the news regularly in 1940, but who would take no small amount of research to identify now without stumbling upon a Wikipedia page titled List of Deposed German Intelligence Officials. (Smash Comics 008, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 747: THE GREEN GHOST

    (Smash Comics 011, 1940) 

    If there’s one thing that Kent Thurston, aka the Invisible Hood, has in spades, it’s wealthy friends who are having crime problems. In this case, the friend is financier John Barr and the problem is the Green Ghost, a costumed thief who has been popping up all over the local area to rob the rich, even when they’re being extra sneaky about what they’re doing.

    Sure enough, the Green Ghost shows up to rob Barr of the wad of cash he’s packing for business purposes, and his powers are not limited to money-sensing, as Barr’s attorney Ward proves when he empties his pistol into him to absolutely no effect.

    Not to worry, though, because Barr’s next business deal is super-duper secret: he’s going next door to buy a big gem, for cash, and only Barr, his neighbour, his neighbour’s secretary Jack Gray, Kent Thurston and Ward know about it, and you know that old saying: five people can absolutely keep a secret. But despite all of these amazing precautions wouldn’t you know it, the Green Ghost shows up again and  not only steals the gem but kidnaps Barr as a hostage! I’m beginning to think that doing business deals for cash in private homes is a bad idea for some reason!

    Barr proves to be unusually plucky for a financier and manages to subdue the Green Ghost all on his own, at which point he learns the annoying secret: there are, in fact, two Green Ghosts! It’s a pretty good gag, and if they hadn’t kidnapped a guy and then revealed all their secrets to him I’d say that they were another mark in the “smart villains” column. As it stands, they’re going to have to do a murder at minimum to get things back on track.

    It is at this point that the Invisible Hood steps in and unmasks the Green Ghosts as 1. Barr’s attorney Ward and 2. his neighbour’s secretary Jack Gray, who have been using their rich guy-adjacent status to get the skinny on all the secret deals these guys have been doing to avoid paying taxes, and since the bulletproof thing was in retrospect a clear setup to boost the Green Ghost’s reputation they are easily apprehended by a gun-toting invisible man.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 746: THE LUMINOUS EYES

    (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

    London is in the grip of terror! An ominous figure with huge glowing eyes is terrifying/attacking people in the streets and in their homes! The city is in an uproar – where could the Luminous Eyes strike next? And to make the whole situation even more confusing, the only purpose of these attacks appears to be the theft of various common items, all green.

    When there’s trouble in this particular fictional version of London, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard is the one to call, and indeed he almost corners the Luminous Eyes on his first attempt, only to lose his own green hat (and also attempt to shoot a fleeing criminal in the back, I might add). Still, this represents progress.

    Through some wild deduction that we are not really privy to, Cook arrives at the conclusion that all of this theft-of-ggreen has been preparation for an attempt to steal the Royal Crown Emeralds (not actually a part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, I checked) from the Tower of London. Further, he has deduced that the Luminous Eyes is not a man at all! Instead, he has been matching wits with an East Indian Panola (a fictional type of chimpanzee, I checked) with surgically-implanted owl’s eyes, and that the prior thefts were all part of an elaborate training regimen by the creature’s creator.

    And speaking of that creator, this is what I was talking about yesterday in the Bat entry! Is training a surgically-modified chimpanzee to steal green objects as part of an attempt to steal an emerald crown a reasonable thing to do? Of course not, unless you’re in a comic book universe. In a comic book universe, such a plan has a reasonable chance of working, and even if it doesn’t you’re only down a chimp. And an owl, I suppose. Heck, the creator of the Luminous Eyes even gets away with it!

    (it turns out that this is the 1000th post that I’ve made on this blog, and unlike many of the other Milestone Posts, this one falls on a character that I actually have a lot of affection for! Here’s to the nxt thousand!)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 746: THE LUMINOUS EYES

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 746: THE LUMINOUS EYES

    (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

    London is in the grip of terror! An ominous figure with huge glowing eyes is terrifying/attacking people in the streets and in their homes! The city is in an uproar – where could the Luminous Eyes strike next? And to make the whole situation even more confusing, the only purpose of these attacks appears to be the theft of various common items, all green.

    When there’s trouble in this particular fictional version of London, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard is the one to call, and indeed he almost corners the Luminous Eyes on his first attempt, only to lose his own green hat (and also attempt to shoot a fleeing criminal in the back, I might add). Still, this represents progress.

    Through some wild deduction that we are not really privy to, Cook arrives at the conclusion that all of this theft-of-ggreen has been preparation for an attempt to steal the Royal Crown Emeralds (not actually a part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, I checked) from the Tower of London. Further, he has deduced that the Luminous Eyes is not a man at all! Instead, he has been matching wits with an East Indian Panola (a fictional type of chimpanzee, I checked) with surgically-implanted owl’s eyes, and that the prior thefts were all part of an elaborate training regimen by the creature’s creator.

    And speaking of that creator, this is what I was talking about yesterday in the Bat entry! Is training a surgically-modified chimpanzee to steal green objects as part of an attempt to steal an emerald crown a reasonable thing to do? Of course not, unless you’re in a comic book universe. In a comic book universe, such a plan has a reasonable chance of working, and even if it doesn’t you’re only down a chimp. And an owl, I suppose. Heck, the creator of the Luminous Eyes even gets away with it!

    (it turns out that this is the 1000th post that I’ve made on this blog, and unlike many of the other Milestone Posts, this one falls on a character that I actually have a lot of affection for! Here’s to the nxt thousand!)