The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: local superstition

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 871: THE MONSTER

    (Zip Comics 002, 1940) 

    Mr Satan is summoned to the charmingly-named Shadow Pond to solve a series of disappearances among a group of scientists who have secluded themselves there. Upon arriving he immediately finds himself in the middle of an attack by a humanoid monster (the Monster, of course. Annoyingly, it is never once referred to as the Monster of Shadow Pond, which would be a pretty great name). He manages to pull a young woman away from the attack and is shortly thereafter introduced to the cast of characters at Shadow Pond:

    Professor Heaslip: Mr Satan’s client and the de facto leader of the scientific group.

    Mrs Heaslip: the Professor’s younger wife, recently rescued from the clutches of the Monster by Mr Satan.

    John Heaslip: the Professor’s brother, a scientist in his own right. Narrowly avoided being killed by the Monster in its first attack.

    Blake: Scientist and acquaintance of Mr Satan. Blake gets mentioned a fair amount throughout the story but only makes one appearance. Probably killed by the Monster.

    Richards: Scientist. Killed in the first attack by the Monster.

    Slade: Scientist. Killed in the attack that Mr Satan witnessed.

    Unnamed Scientist: Killed at some point by the Monster.

    Is someone in this motley crew actually the Monster? Not the dead ones, obviously. 

    Mr Satan does some investigating and is himself almost killed by the Monster. In the process he discovers that the scientists’ missing bodies are caught in a whirlpool beneath the surface of the pond, explaining why they have not surfaced.

    A plan to kill the Monster with a bomb goes awry when the device, built by John Heaslip, goes off without warning and almost kills both his brother and Mr Satan

    This explosion provides Mr Satan with the final key to the puzzle: he tracks down the conveniently-not-at-the-site-of-the-explosion John and Mrs Heaslip and confronts them with the truth: this whole affair has been about the illicit love that they share. The Monster was born out of an attempt to murder Professor Heaslip so that his widow and brother could be together (and also so that they could steal his radium ray, a device that literally had not been mentioned before it was revealed to be a motivation for murder, and which I think was added late in the game to make the story a bit less sordid). A sad and grubby resolution indeed.

    We also get to see the full Monster getup, and while some of the other diving-suit-modified-to-look-like-sea-monster examples we have are a bit more monstery, this might just be the best looking weird diving suit. Lust look at that eye stalk/periscope!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 871: THE MONSTER

    (Zip Comics 002, 1940) 

    Mr Satan is summoned to the charmingly-named Shadow Pond to solve a series of disappearances among a group of scientists who have secluded themselves there. Upon arriving he immediately finds himself in the middle of an attack by a humanoid monster (the Monster, of course. Annoyingly, it is never once referred to as the Monster of Shadow Pond, which would be a pretty great name). He manages to pull a young woman away from the attack and is shortly thereafter introduced to the cast of characters at Shadow Pond:

    Professor Heaslip: Mr Satan’s client and the de facto leader of the scientific group.

    Mrs Heaslip: the Professor’s younger wife, recently rescued from the clutches of the Monster by Mr Satan.

    John Heaslip: the Professor’s brother, a scientist in his own right. Narrowly avoided being killed by the Monster in its first attack.

    Blake: Scientist and acquaintance of Mr Satan. Blake gets mentioned a fair amount throughout the story but only makes one appearance. Probably killed by the Monster.

    Richards: Scientist. Killed in the first attack by the Monster.

    Slade: Scientist. Killed in the attack that Mr Satan witnessed.

    Unnamed Scientist: Killed at some point by the Monster.

    Is someone in this motley crew actually the Monster? Not the dead ones, obviously. 

    Mr Satan does some investigating and is himself almost killed by the Monster. In the process he discovers that the scientists’ missing bodies are caught in a whirlpool beneath the surface of the pond, explaining why they have not surfaced.

    A plan to kill the Monster with a bomb goes awry when the device, built by John Heaslip, goes off without warning and almost kills both his brother and Mr Satan

    This explosion provides Mr Satan with the final key to the puzzle: he tracks down the conveniently-not-at-the-site-of-the-explosion John and Mrs Heaslip and confronts them with the truth: this whole affair has been about the illicit love that they share. The Monster was born out of an attempt to murder Professor Heaslip so that his widow and brother could be together (and also so that they could steal his radium ray, a device that literally had not been mentioned before it was revealed to be a motivation for murder, and which I think was added late in the game to make the story a bit less sordid). A sad and grubby resolution indeed.

    We also get to see the full Monster getup, and while some of the other diving-suit-modified-to-look-like-sea-monster examples we have are a bit more monstery, this might just be the best looking weird diving suit. Lust look at that eye stalk/periscope!

  • DIVINE ROUND-UP 015

    Hate and deception abound in this batch of deities.

    Wangwa, God of Hate: 

    Wangwa, God of Hate is the personal god of Okoro, medicine man of the Blancas and enemy of Doctor Voodoo. I’ve never decided if the Evil Medicine Man trope is mere condescension toward native spiritual practices or a porting over of the Evil Vizier archetype to jungle comics, and in all honesty it’s probably both. Anyway, Okoro fits the mould to a T and he worships the god of hate. Sorry he’s so fuzzy.

    God Style: Idol (Whiz Comics 008, 1940) 

    Cheops:

    Adventurer Clip Carson and his archaeologist companion Jim Blake are searching for the fabled lost tomb of Cheops one day when they find themselves in the midst of an entire cult dedicated to the worship of what is apparently the resurrected Pharaoh himself. Carson and Blake are captured by the cult, upon which the supposed Cheops – with very little prompting, mind you – reveals himself to be Sergeant Beatty of the local colonial government, out to seize the treasures of Cheops for himself. Blake and Carson of course escape, and along the way Beatty is exposed as a fraud and torn apart by his former devotees. 

    The deep need for modern Egyptians in adventure fiction to turn to Ancient Egyptian religion, but only in the most secret, cultish, conspiratorial way is another one of those things that you end up wondering about once you read it enough times. Is it merely a fun and easy way to inject some mysterious action into your story? If so, why does it crop up instories set in Egypt so much more than ones set in Greece of Italy? Is it racism again? 

    God Style: Complicated – Cheops/Khufu could be considered to be a deified ruler of Egypt, even though the practice of doing so became common something like a thousand years after his time. Plus this is just some dude posing as him. (Action Comics v1 016, 1939)

    Doolong: 

    Remember Korieg the Sea Devil from a little while ago? Well, the same island people who hate that guy just love to worship Doolong, “god of [their] ancestors”. Not too much detail on Doolong, other than a) his idol is just a little face mounted on the wall and b) he slings a very accurate prophecy – he totally predicts the arrival of Tex Thomson and his party on the island, even if the small matter of Tex being the Princess’ destined mate is inaccurate. 

    God Style: Idol (Real?) (Action Comics v1 011, 1939)

    the Druid God: 

    This is possibly only obvious to someone who lives in the area, but the “group of islands” being indicated in the above image is clearly Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Was Cape Breton seen as a place just far enough outside of the everyday for things like shipwrecks and secret cults to happen in, or did “Reynolds of the Mounted” scribe and lifelong resident of New York State Art Pinajian just trace a random bit of Canadian coastline and call it a day?

    Speaking of shipwrecks and secret cults, the first of those happens when Sergeant Reynolds heads toward the last known location of missing rich guy Johnny Westlake. Like Johnny, Reynolds washes up on the shore and is found and nursed back to health by local Pierre Dulac.

    Westlake has been on the island long enough to be able to relate the local legend of the Druid Cave, a spooky cave surrounded by spooky rock formations and regarded with fear by the superstitious islanders, who believe that though the cave is full of gold it is also cursed and that anyone venturing inside will die. Reynolds and Westlake venture inside after finding a local fisherman dying on the nearby beach and discover that the cave does in fact contain an ancient treasure and that the curse is probably just plain old asphyxiation thanks to some natural gas deposits.

    Here’s where the cult comes in: the islanders just kind of spontaneously develop it after finding Westlake emerging from the cave shortly before an explosion rocks the countryside. Never trust a group who turn to human sacrifice as a first option, is what I always say.

    In the end, the real culprit behind the murders and explosions turns out to be Pierre Dulac, who, far from being an altruistic soul, has been manipulating the situation to bring maximum chaos as a distraction while he sneaks off with the treasure. He didn’t reckon with Reynolds’ tenacity, of course, and ends up exploding along with the treasure and all evidence of whatever fantastic culture produced the Druid Cave. The islanders just kind of scatter, presumably to keep the worship of the Druid God alive in secret.

    God Style: Invoked (Feature Comics 045, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 688: THE HUNCHBACK HORROR

    (Pep Comics 004, 1940)

    We open on Inspector Bentley in the midst of a cocktail party to celebrate the engagement of his friend the Earl of Crackenthorpe. By way of entertainment, the Earl recounts the legend of the Crackenthorpe Curse: a thousand years ago, the progenitor of the Crackenthorpe line made his fortune the old-fashioned way, by summoning a demon and asking it for riches. Ever since, the brides-to-be of the heirs to the Crackenthorpe title must present themselves to the demon in a particular room in Crackenthorpe Manor, leading many of them to die of fright.

    All this talk of ancient spooky customs activates fiance Lady Brenda’s plucky nature and she marches upstairs to present herself. Suddenly, a scream! Is the demon real? Lord Crackenthorpe charges to the rescue and when the dust clears, the demon is gone and the Earl is dead. Murder most foul! 

    Inspector Bentley quickly ascertains the major suspects: fiance Lady Brenda, brother and new earl Lionel Crackenthorpe, butler Wiggins and monocled cousin Osbert Beal.

    After a bit of running around, it turns out that Osbert was the culprit all along, despite not being in line for the Earldom. Not in line, that is, unless the only other claimant was executed for the murder of his brother. It wasn’t much of a plan but it came close to working – if only Inspector Bentley hadn’t been on the case. Lady Brenda gets engaged to the newest Earl in a somewhat mercenary move and everyone by Osbert lives happily ever after.

    (burning question: the demon-introduction tradition hadn’t been followed for centuries, according to the Earl. So how did Osbert know that he could take advantage of it as part of his scheme? He wasn’t shown among the collection of upper-class twits haw-hawing and egging Lady Brenda on… was he just improvising?)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 684: THE TERROR OF ROCKY POOL

    (Pep Comics 002, 1940)

    Like the Mayfair Monster before him, the Terror of Rocky Pool is interrupted mid-murder by Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard. Just like last time, his trusty stick has little effect, though instead of breaking over a head of iron it meets no resistance at all. Unlike last time, Bentley is too late to save the victim, who swiftly bleeds to death from a too-small wound. Bentley is informed that the culprit is the Terror of Rocky Pool and that it makes its vampiric lair at the bottom of that same body of water.

    A subsequent interview with the victim’s family introduces a couple of suspects: his adoptive cousin Joan Edmunds and biological cousin John Blake, who are in love, even though Joan was the victim’s fiance. They only marry cousins in Little Rockham it seems. Also the victim’s uncle, a kindly man who raises leeches as a hobby and Joan as his daughter. Can’t be him, obviously.

    After a few vampire chases and a lot of yelling, Bentley gets to the bottom of things and it’s even more unsavoury than all of the cousin-marrying and cousin-cuckolding. It turns out that kindly Uncle Blake was the Terror all along, using in order, a local superstition, anticoagulant leech saliva and an underwater tunnel from the pool to his house in order to kill one nephew and attempt to frame the other because he was in love with his own adopted daughter. We truly are dealing with the most depraved depths of supercrime here.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 683: THE MAYFAIR MONSTER

    (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

    Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard is an investigator with the same case profile as the Scooby-Doo Gang: he regularly encounters the supernatural in the course of his job and day-to-day life and just as regularly exposes them as guys in masks and so forth.

    In this case, Bentley is taking his evening constitutional when he interrupts an honest-to-goodness werewolf attack! He even breaks his signature weapon, his cane on the thing’s head!

    Taking the victim – Brenda Joyce – home, Bentley meets her godfather/guardian, Sir Rupert Napier, and learns from Brenda’s own occult library that the creature he had faced was the fabled Mayfair Monster, a local legend presumably from before Mayfair became an upper class neighbourhood of London.

    Bentley’s suspicious are raised by some squirrely behaviour on Sir Rupert’s part and he engages in a bit of subterfuge whereby the “Brenda Joyce” sent home to convalesce is in fact Bentley in a wig. Sure enough, the Mayfair Monster makes a repeat appearance in Brenda’s bedroom that night and is swiftly subdued and unmasked.

    It’s certainly a convoluted way to murder your own ward for her money – I suppose the idea was to establish the existence of the werewolf with the very public first attack so as to have a ready-made suspect for the eventual murder. But why wear a monocle under an iron wolf mask?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 584: THE LEOPARD MEN

    (Exciting Comics 002, 1940)

    Recently graduated top college athlete Ted Crane and famed anthropologist Professor Hawkins (and Hawkins’ daughter Betty, who stowed away as all young women had to if they were going to have adventures in the 40s) set out to find Kenya’s lost Konogo Tribe but almost immediately meet opposition from one of the Leopard Men. Despite being a supposedly mythical group, this Leopard Man has a gas-dispenser in his mouth that really knocks Ted for a loop while it gets away.

    Even with the additional help of rubber plantation owner J. Atkins Bullard, the party is being harried by Leopard Men at every turn. Why if anything it seems to be worse after he joins them! How can this be?

    It turns out (of course) that Bullard is taking advantage of the local superstitions about the terrible Leopard Men in order to make it easier to kidnap the Konogo as slaves for his plantation. A terrible man! Also a very unobservant one, as somehow in the months and months that he had been leading raids on this poor community he never noticed that the centre of the Konogo village is dominated by a huge solid gold idol.

    Ted Crane, by the way, is a pretty by-the-book adventure character with the addition of a completely football-centric worldview: all of his allusions and most of his fighting are football flavoured. It’s novel!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 584: THE LEOPARD MEN

    (Exciting Comics 002, 1940)

    Recently graduated top college athlete Ted Crane and famed anthropologist Professor Hawkins (and Hawkins’ daughter Betty, who stowed away as all young women had to if they were going to have adventures in the 40s) set out to find Kenya’s lost Konogo Tribe but almost immediately meet opposition from one of the Leopard Men. Despite being a supposedly mythical group, this Leopard Man has a gas-dispenser in his mouth that really knocks Ted for a loop while it gets away.

    Even with the additional help of rubber plantation owner J. Atkins Bullard, the party is being harried by Leopard Men at every turn. Why if anything it seems to be worse after he joins them! How can this be?

    It turns out (of course) that Bullard is taking advantage of the local superstitions about the terrible Leopard Men in order to make it easier to kidnap the Konogo as slaves for his plantation. A terrible man! Also a very unobservant one, as somehow in the months and months that he had been leading raids on this poor community he never noticed that the centre of the Konogo village is dominated by a huge solid gold idol.

    Ted Crane, by the way, is a pretty by-the-book adventure character with the addition of a completely football-centric worldview: all of his allusions and most of his fighting are football flavoured. It’s novel!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 583: THE SPACE EMPEROR

    (Exciting Comics 001, 1940) 

    The Space Emperor first makes himself known to the solar authorities of 3964 AC (and no, I do not know what the C stands for) by either sending or allowing to escape an intelligence agent named Sperling who was investigating trouble on Jupiter for the President of Earth. Sperling has been transformed into a beast-man so horrible to behold that the President’s assistant kills him on sight but not before he can get the word out. Clearly, this is a job for Major Mars.

    Major Mars beards the Space Emperor in his lair via the classic “pretend to be captured” gag but immediately loses him. It seems that this villain has a few tricks up his sleeve! Specifically, he has acquired “the Magic Belt of the Ancients,” an artifact of some long-vanished Jovian race which allows him to become invisible and/or intangible and is presumably also what allows him to turn humans into ape men.

    Per his name, the Space Emperor has big big plans for these powers. His first step toward universal domination is to take over Jupiter by both turning the Earth colonists into apes and forging a cult/revolutionary force out of the native Jovians (who absolutely should revolt, let’s be clear – the Earth colonists use them as mine labour and limit their rights in some very historically familiar ways). 

    While he seems on track to take over Jupiter, the Space Emperor absolutely suffers from a classic excess of ambition. With a movement based on personal appearances and frequent demonstrations of power (not to mention the Jovians’ preexisting devotion to the Ancients), he is going to have a heck of a time scaling up even to a conquest of the Solar System without some significant changes.

    The Space Emperor is ultimately defeated when Major Mars gets him with a surprise attack and manages to wrest the Belt of the Ancients from him (and this is why you don’t advertise the source of your power, folks). He of course turns out to be Vice-Governor Kells, the only extraneous named character in the story, and the day is saved!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 564: THE GHOST OF WINTER RANCH

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 564: THE GHOST OF WINTER RANCH

    (The Funnies 030, 1939)

    This fellow is from a story starring Gene Autry, singing cowboy. It’s printed in a comic put out by Dell that mostly features reprints of comic strips and that’s probably what this is? Even though online sources suggest that the first Gene Autry comic strip started in 1940 and this came out in 1939? Ultimately, these are mere details. The important fact is that this is my most favourite style of putting a film cowboy actor in an adventure comic: the real Gene Autry is just riding around in the Western US – Montana, in this case – with some sixguns and a guitar, having adventures but also doing all of the singing and movies that are his bread and butter. It’s somehow slightly less plausible than when they just drop Tom Mix or Buck Jones into the Old West with no justification but the weirdness makes it fun.

    As for the comic itself, we find one “Rowel” Collins (I had to look this one up – a rowel is the pointy wheely bit on a spur, so this is just a more Western version of calling someone Spike) who has just discovered that the mine full of useless ore that he sold as part of his former ranch is in fact a mine full of extremely valuable pitchblende and since Rowel Collins is a dastardly character (just look at his evil mustache!) he vows to get the money that the mine is worth by hook or by crook.

    Lucky for Rowel, there are a lot of local superstitions for him to take advantage of: the ranch is situated on a piece of land called the Devil’s Ironing Board; the pitchblende is in the Devil’s Cave and crucially the ranch is supposed to be haunted (by a cow leg-stealing ghost?). Rowel immediately heads to a nearby shack to activate his old crony Smoky Plants.

    Smoky, as the glowing Ghost of Winter Ranch, only really takes one pass at scaring off ranch owners Dan and Peg Winters and since they have the moral support of Gene “ain’t scared of no ghosts” Autry Rowel has to resort to gunplay and kidnapping to force the sale.

    Rowel and Smoky almost get away with it, in fact, but it turns out that hatching a scheme to sell a mine full of radioactive ore and knowing anything about radiation are two different things and they both end up dropping dead of radiation poising due to the radium they used to make the Ghost’s glowing robes. It’s terrible, terrible poetic justice.