The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Dan Williams

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 042

    GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 042

    Celebrated by none… until now. And then only mildly.

    Slavin:

    This masked man is the leader of a gang who have been systematically robbing warehouses and then burning them down. The culprit turns out to be Slavin, the general manager of the warehousing company, and not the red herring suspect Slivers, owner of the company (who is ugly, and therefore more likely to be evil than the handsome Slavin). PI Dan Williams is too enlightened to judge others based on their appearances though, and busts the right man.  (Exciting Comics 014, 1941)

    the Black Baron:

    After wandering around Europe and North Africa and only really hitting up the Crusades long enough to kill Saladin, Sir Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, returns home to find that his younger brother Roland is missing and a very rude man called the Black Baron is squatting on his lands.

    The Black Baron seemed like he might get a numbered entry by name alone but alas, he’s a true scrub. The Golden Knight and his friends murder all of his men with what I would call embarrassing ease and the Baron passes up an opportunity to get away with his life for another shot at the gold he is convinced that Roland is hiding from him. The Golden Knight then enacts a little Crusader-style justice on him. To death. (Fantastic Comics 014, 1941)

    Unnamed Fascists:

    What do you do when you’re notorious comic book oddball Fletcher Hanks and you need to draw a selection of Axis leaders but the US comics industry isn’t yet 100% on board with just explicitly depicting Hitler as an evil villain and so you need to have a bit of plausible deniability? Masked Axis leaders, obviously! (Fantastic Comics 014, 1941)

    Kong:

    This fellow, name of Kong, has a super-sub and is looking to use it to extort some quick cash from the future state of New America. A classic plan!

    Kong’s cachet is spoiled somewhat by the fact that the heroic Sub Saunders just walks in through the front door of his underwater base and lays him out with a single punch. As a villain it is very hard to come back from something like this. (Fantastic Comics 015, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 961: DR ZINN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 961: DR ZINN

    (Exciting Comics 009, 1941)

    Dr Zinn feels like a character who is somehow aware of my classification system and who is desperate not to be relegated to the ranks of the Generic Costumed Villain (yes, the “costumed” part has lost all meaning, I know) and so has shoehorned as many extra details into his appearance as possible to force me to give him Minor Super-Villain status. “what if I wasn’t just a super tall hypnotist, but also obsessed with snakes? And what if I ran a cult, the Cult of the Serpent, full of mind controlled thralls and they were also obsessed with snakes?” And I guess it worked.

    Dr Zinn’s main goal in his one appearance is to get ahold of the contents of a safe deposit box owned by a Mr Britt and his daughter, and while they never lay out what exactly is in there I certainly hope it’s securities or deeds to property or something, because if that little bundle of paper is meant to be cash then it’s like ten thousand dollars tops (I guess the Britts could have gotten their hands on some vanishingly-rare ten thousand dollar bills but we’re still not talking about multiple millions) and even in 1941 that’s not enough money to go to so much effort for.

    Zinn is captured after Edith Britt hires PI par excellence Dan Williams, who really undercuts the threat of hypnotic mind control by giving him a couple of eyes full of black pepper. 

    Addendum: I almost forgot to mention that Dr Zinn (whose first name is Mephiste, by the way) comes to the attention of the law when he orders some poisonous snakes through the mail and some get out and kill two postal workers, and he just grabs the rest and skedaddles out of there.

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 014

    Once again the also-rans.

    A bunch of small-time crooks get paid to fake the death of Titano (the largest gorilla in captivity!) for an insurance scam and of course use him to rob a series small-town banks. If only they had thought a bit more ambitiously they might have made the big time. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

    This Yank Wilson adventure features a fairly by-the-book super-spy ring headed by Count Lustig von Blackgard. They plot, they scheme, they are ultimately foiled. This mysterious radio message is the only mention of a higher-up, but their moniker – the extremely evocative Neuromania – was too good to pass over without comment. (there is of course the possibility that Neuromania is the spies’ home country. Either way, it’s great). (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

    This happy fellow has no name but makes up for it with a laundry list of distinctive features: missing left eye, hunch, catlike upper lip, pointy ears, bizarrely long hair on his forearms, etc. He lives under a fake man-eating tree in… probably the African jungle and spends his days torturing and poisoning people for no stated reason until he is killed by Captain Kid using his own poisoned melon. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

    This is Nipon, ruler of an unnamed Asian country (wink, wink) from that period in late 1940 through 1941 when the Axis powers were very clearly the villains on everyone’s minds but the US was remaining neutral so you couldn’t in good conscience make the leader of a foreign nation the villain of your story. These guys are usually either extremely obvious stand-ins named, like Arnolf Hilter or Menito Bussolini (in which case they get added to a Real Folk entry) or so generic that I forget them entirely. Nipon is kind of neither – like, he’s obviously a stand-in for the Emperor of Japan but extremely generically, but also he has a very fun look! (Fantastic Comics 013, 1940)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 013

    Here come the also-rans.

    We’ve got another Leader, and this time he’s not a generically-fascist spy but the head of a gang looking to extort the New York World’s Fair via a series of bombings. Of course the Fantom of the Fair cannot let this stand and quickly tracks them down to a small island base.

    If the first reason I included the Leader aka Relmar here is because I enjoy a monocled man with a high opinion of himself then the second is the fact that the Fantom, without ever actually saying a word, lays such complete waste to Relmar, his men and his entire island. Don’t mess with the World’s Fair, is the message I’m getting. (Amazing Adventure Funnies 001, 1940)

    A masked saboteur of no clear allegiance, Biff Durgo aka the Masked Man is the poorly-disguised sole foe faced by Pack Morgan, Super Detective. (Detective Eye 002, 1940)

    Lead by the mysterious “One”, gangsters Face Greer and Shiv Scarpino are bleeding the city of Midtown dry. That’s why Mayor Kurt Piersole calls in trigger-happy detective Gunner Thompson, only it’s not, because when it all shakes out it turns out that Mayor Piersole was indulging in the old trick of establishing his innocence by being the one to call in the forces of order. It was a cliche in 1940 and continues to be to this day and then as now it ends one way: the One wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was and ends up on the wrong side of his own hired gun. (Exciting Comics 001, 1940)

    John Blodgett kills his partner Samuel Forbes in order to make off with his claim on a lucrative gold mine but fails to reckon with the fact that Forbes’ daughter Caroline might just wonder what happened to her father and so has to don a mask and engage in some truly half-assed attempts to bump both her and private eye Dan Williams off before they uncover his dumb secret. (Exciting Comics 001, 1940)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 013

    GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 013

    Here come the also-rans.

    We’ve got another Leader, and this time he’s not a generically-fascist spy but the head of a gang looking to extort the New York World’s Fair via a series of bombings. Of course the Fantom of the Fair cannot let this stand and quickly tracks them down to a small island base.

    If the first reason I included the Leader aka Relmar here is because I enjoy a monocled man with a high opinion of himself then the second is the fact that the Fantom, without ever actually saying a word, lays such complete waste to Relmar, his men and his entire island. Don’t mess with the World’s Fair, is the message I’m getting. (Amazing Adventure Funnies 001, 1940)

    A masked saboteur of no clear allegiance, Biff Durgo aka the Masked Man is the poorly-disguised sole foe faced by Pack Morgan, Super Detective. (Detective Eye 002, 1940)

    Lead by the mysterious “One”, gangsters Face Greer and Shiv Scarpino are bleeding the city of Midtown dry. That’s why Mayor Kurt Piersole calls in trigger-happy detective Gunner Thompson, only it’s not, because when it all shakes out it turns out that Mayor Piersole was indulging in the old trick of establishing his innocence by being the one to call in the forces of order. It was a cliche in 1940 and continues to be to this day and then as now it ends one way: the One wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was and ends up on the wrong side of his own hired gun. (Exciting Comics 001, 1940)

    John Blodgett kills his partner Samuel Forbes in order to make off with his claim on a lucrative gold mine but fails to reckon with the fact that Forbes’ daughter Caroline might just wonder what happened to her father and so has to don a mask and engage in some truly half-assed attempts to bump both her and private eye Dan Williams off before they uncover his dumb secret. (Exciting Comics 001, 1940)