The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: terrestrial nonhuman intelligence

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 643: THE MASTER

    (Fight Comics 003, 1940)

    Kinks Mason is back on the case! And just what sub-oceanic mystery is he attempting to solve by just wandering around underwater? Why, it’s Just Where is All the Salt Going? And somewhat astonishingly, he figures it out almost immediately: it’s going into this building.

    The building turns out to belong to a race of ocean-dwelling humanoids referred to only as the Amphibians, though I can’t imagine that that’s what they call themselves. I kind of appreciate how generic their design is, like a greatest hits of underwater humanoid features with the single eye added on for flair.

    The Amphibians are ruled by the Master, who similarly is a fairly generic comic book undersea ruler villain: he and his people have developed some cool offensive technology and are now out to conquer the surface world. The most intriguing thing about this whole setup is just what all the salt is for – I kept hoping that everything would be powered by a big glowing salt crystal but no such luck. 

    (Also the Amphibians refer to their tech as a “poison ray” but later it seems to be a generic ray gun, and while I of course appreciate an evocative name I would much prefer to see a ray gun – preferably salt-powered –  poison a guy)

    Kinks Mason is of course not going to stand for this sort of nonsense and so for the second time in as many issues he possibly wipes out an intelligent underwater species, this time using stray torpedoes from all of the partially-destroyed submarines littering the seafloor around the Amphibians’ base. Do adventure heroes ever have crises of conscience about this kind of thing?

  • 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.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 623: THE CYCLOP

    (Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

    Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd – not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut).

    Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by a tribe of one-eyed Beastmen, respectively.

    Surprisingly little is made of the fact that the Beastmen worship a hypnotically paralyzed woman. Ordinarily a reveal like this would be lead to the woman’s rescue being the focus of the rest of the adventure but this panel is her only appearance – is it possible that Captain Kidd thinks that she is merely a statue? A grim fate indeed. 

    Also: RIP Wango.

    The Beastman leader (referred to as “the Cyclop” throughout) of course turns out to be Perez, who went mad upon his discovery of the valley and somehow became the leader of the whole place. If I’m honest, the theoretical comic about the sequence of events that lead to that happening (and presumably to that poor woman becoming a goddess-statue) is more interesting than what we got.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 602: THE TALKING APE

    (Fantastic Comics 004, 1940)

    Pilot/ adventurer/ confusing-name-haver Captain Kidd has heard some disturbing rumours about a cult of beast-men planning an attempt to take over the Sahara region and so he sets out to investigate. After bribing a local man to show him the way (and then carelessly letting the local man get captured by the cult), Kidd finds a weird bunch of things all at once:

    -the cult is indeed made up of beast-men, hoofed humanoids with pig or wolf features who take their orders from:

    -the Talking Ape, a talking ape who derives its authority from:

    -the Ibkar Oracles, a quartet of young women who sit around huffing volcanic gasses and making prophecies all day, Oracle of Delphi-style.

    It’s an impressive setup for a local tyrant who wants to extort some nearby communities but hardly a threat to the larger North African populace – Captain Kidd runs off the entire beast-man force with a single strafing run in his plane!

    If the beast-men are a bit of a bust, that doesn’t change the fact that there is an ape and it is talking and about to murder the guide that Captain Kidd failed so thoroughly without even learning his name. Clearly it’s ape-fighting time.

    A short tussle reveals the shocking truth: the Talking Ape is in actuality a young woman! A young woman with extremely elastic limbs, seemingly, or possibly an extremely advanced ape suit with both robotic arm extensions and some sort of tesseract technology to fit those super-long lady legs into about half the space they require.

    Unfortunately for us, the unveiled Ape flings herself into a pool of lava rather than be captured, so we will never really have an inkling as to her motivations beyond Captain Kidd’s half-baked musings about her “conceiv[ing] the gorilla as a symbol of strength,” whatever that means. Stay in your lane, Captain Kidd: punching things.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 398: THE DARK VAPOR

    (More Fun Comics 072, 1941)

    The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel.

    The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism, all in a few short days.

    All this unwholesome business draws the attention of the Spectre, who quickly discovers that a) he cannot influence “Hiram Spiezel” like he could a normal man, b) “Spiezel” can see him, c) “Hiram Spiezel” is actually a banished evil entity from an ancient civilization picking up a bid for world conquest where it left off and d) the Dark Vapor entity is much more powerful than the Spectre. 

    The entity swiftly runs off the Spectre and gets back to the business of enacting a hostile takeover on the world. As an aside: I really appreciate the adaptability of this being – I mean, I assume that whatever civilization it originated in was not organized along the same lines as 1940s US capitalist society and yet it is perfectly comfortable in its new role as business mogul rather than Thunder Warlord or Priest-King or Grand Art Critic. Good job, Dark Vapor!

    Too bad for the Vape that the Spectre has an unspecified, vaguely Christian entity on speed dial, a literal deus ex machina for just such occasions. It supplies him with a power-boosting red aura, with which he in short order evicts the Vapor from Hiram Spiezel, hunts it down and imprisons it at the bottom of the sea, presumably to someday bedevil a civilization of intelligent octopuses with its preternatural pebble-stacking prowess.

    AND SPEAKING OF OCTOPUSES! I enjoyed the Dark Vapor’s machinations but absolutely the greatest thing about their adventure is this illustration of them as a metaphorical octopus ensnaring the US in their horrible flesh-toned tentacles. Always a delight!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 398: THE DARK VAPOR

    (More Fun Comics 072, 1941)

    The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel.

    The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism, all in a few short days.

    All this unwholesome business draws the attention of the Spectre, who quickly discovers that a) he cannot influence “Hiram Spiezel” like he could a normal man, b) “Spiezel” can see him, c) “Hiram Spiezel” is actually a banished evil entity from an ancient civilization picking up a bid for world conquest where it left off and d) the Dark Vapor entity is much more powerful than the Spectre. 

    The entity swiftly runs off the Spectre and gets back to the business of enacting a hostile takeover on the world. As an aside: I really appreciate the adaptability of this being – I mean, I assume that whatever civilization it originated in was not organized along the same lines as 1940s US capitalist society and yet it is perfectly comfortable in its new role as business mogul rather than Thunder Warlord or Priest-King or Grand Art Critic. Good job, Dark Vapor!

    Too bad for the Vape that the Spectre has an unspecified, vaguely Christian entity on speed dial, a literal deus ex machina for just such occasions. It supplies him with a power-boosting red aura, with which he in short order evicts the Vapor from Hiram Spiezel, hunts it down and imprisons it at the bottom of the sea, presumably to someday bedevil a civilization of intelligent octopuses with its preternatural pebble-stacking prowess.

    AND SPEAKING OF OCTOPUSES! I enjoyed the Dark Vapor’s machinations but absolutely the greatest thing about their adventure is this illustration of them as a metaphorical octopus ensnaring the US in their horrible flesh-toned tentacles. Always a delight!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 381: NYARL-AMEN

    (More Fun Comics 065, 1941)

    Okay, so the guy on the throne is Nyarl-Amen, AKA the Ancient One AKA the Lost Wisdom AKA the Wonder Wisdom. Fifty thousand years ago he ruled the world from beneath the waves as head of the Nyarl-Amen Dynasty.

    Nyarl-Amen has lived in the City of Nyarl-Amen for one hundred thousand years…

    His arsenal includes the Magic Eyes of Nyarl-Amen…

    And together with his minions the Fish Men of Nyarl-Amen he seeks to reconquer the world and presumably establish a Second Dynasty of Nyarl-Amen. Whatever you say about this civilization, “It has too many names,” can’t be one of them.

    The thing is, all this repetition has left me unsure just whether we’re dealing with an immortal fish-man sea-wizard attempting to reclaim his glory after 500 centuries or a city with an upstart ruler and bad imagination. I suppose whether it’s Nyarl-Amen the First or Nyarl-Amen the Six Hundred and Fifteenth doesn’t really matter since Dr Fate ends up blowing up every single Nyarl-Amen mentioned thusfar.

    These guys should 100% be BRUNG BACK for one simple reason: the best thing about Aquaman stories is the weird collection of pulp novel civilizations that coat the DCU seafloor and these fish-head weirdos would enhance that immeasurably.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 381: NYARL-AMEN

    (More Fun Comics 065, 1941)

    Okay, so the guy on the throne is Nyarl-Amen, AKA the Ancient One AKA the Lost Wisdom AKA the Wonder Wisdom. Fifty thousand years ago he ruled the world from beneath the waves as head of the Nyarl-Amen Dynasty.

    Nyarl-Amen has lived in the City of Nyarl-Amen for one hundred thousand years…

    His arsenal includes the Magic Eyes of Nyarl-Amen…

    And together with his minions the Fish Men of Nyarl-Amen he seeks to reconquer the world and presumably establish a Second Dynasty of Nyarl-Amen. Whatever you say about this civilization, “It has too many names,” can’t be one of them.

    The thing is, all this repetition has left me unsure just whether we’re dealing with an immortal fish-man sea-wizard attempting to reclaim his glory after 500 centuries or a city with an upstart ruler and bad imagination. I suppose whether it’s Nyarl-Amen the First or Nyarl-Amen the Six Hundred and Fifteenth doesn’t really matter since Dr Fate ends up blowing up every single Nyarl-Amen mentioned thusfar.

    These guys should 100% be BRUNG BACK for one simple reason: the best thing about Aquaman stories is the weird collection of pulp novel civilizations that coat the DCU seafloor and these fish-head weirdos would enhance that immeasurably.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 285: DAKA

    (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) 

    Daka is Namor the Sub-Mariner’s uncle who is the first of many to usurp his throne while he’s off adventuring. He allies with the Nazis and the Seal People in a scheme to invade Argentina and it’s a testament to how little I can bring myself to care about Atlantean political drama that not even the Seal People can inspire me to write more about this guy.

  • CREEPS OF THE WORLD: LIMBOS

    (Marvel Mystery Comics 019, 1941)

    I think this giant man has the Limbos MO covered: cause earthquakes via lava manipulation, then attack.

    The real great thing about the Limbos, however, is the lower body. Give me this style of lizard-man any day. The poisoned bit is icing on the cake, really.