More gods means more options. Katagwah, the Rain God: An unseen Native American rain god whose most fanatical adherent is attempting to perform a human sacrifice to bring rain to the Mojave Desert when Mr Mystic steps in to help the intended victim’s brother put a stop to the ceremony. I felt certain that the story would end with a rainstorm brought on by Mystic chucking the aggressor into the sacrificial canyon, but no such luck. God style: invoked. (The…
Now’s the time that we start pulling aliens from the vaults! So look out for a lot of A-names for the next while! Not the first one though, because something has to come up organically. Crillionites: Hailing from the planet Crillon (which boasts the majestic Crillion City, natch), the Crillionites are a caste-based society in which the Lords of Crillon (like from the title of the comic!) rule over a slave population via some sort of divine right. This societal order is…
As long as we’re dipping into the aliens of comics, we might as well go all the way and dig out all the various gods etc that people have made up too. Comic book divinities fall into a few broad styles: -real objects or creatures worshipped animistically but which do not display any real divine power -idols, verbal invocations or other trappings of religious worship without any indication that the being being represented is really real -actual supernatural beings, including:…
It’s Day Three of Round-Up Week here at the Curse of Skeleton Munroe. **UPDATE** the White Streak: Novelty Press is back at it again, exercising their compulsion to tone down the “fantastic” in their comic book stories. The White Streak has gotten a job as an FBI agent, and so he gets plastic surgery in order to make his inhuman face into that of a square-jawed white guy. Now instead of being the utterly fantastical ancient android in a bright…
Pretty diverse bunch this time. the Lone Rider: Another masked cowboy hero dispensing justice from the barrel of the gun in the Old Modern West to throw in the pile. The Lone Rider does have the distinction of having been created by Jack Kirby for a very short-lived comic strip and recycled by Eastern Color for comic book content. Having read through a decent chunk of the Lone Rider’s appearances, I’m pretty sure that Texas never actually put in an…
(Funny Picture Stories v3 002, 1939) Like every other of my long-term projects, writing this blog has been an exercise in taking a simple premise (writing fairly succinctly about minor DC Comics super-villains) and expanding the scope until the seams start to creak (writing somewhat extensively about all super-villains and super-heroes and a bunch of other comics things and also maintaining a set of variably-useful indices about them all). This is all to lead into the fact that a comic…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939 – Smash Comics 012, 1940) The Avenger is a cottage-industry villain, which is a term I just made up for particular kind of villain that you saw a fair amount in the Golden Age and then again in 1980s cartoons, wherein battling and thwarting them is the sole focus of a hero’s career – see also Mr H and the Conqueror. The Avenger is also a revenge-focused villain: he is really Jim Rowan, a man who…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939 – Smash Comics 012, 1940) The Avenger is a cottage-industry villain, which is a term I just made up for particular kind of villain that you saw a fair amount in the Golden Age and then again in 1980s cartoons, wherein battling and thwarting them is the sole focus of a hero’s career – see also Mr H and the Conqueror. The Avenger is also a revenge-focused villain: he is really Jim Rowan, a man who…
What’s that? The sign of who? That’s the guy. And the greatest and most unhinged sign of the Blue Beetle of all: (hover for issue numbers)
(Detective Comics 033, 1939) Can’t believe that I didn’t think of this before but The Guy Who Shot Batman’s Parents a) should already be here and b) is representative of a class of plot devices I’ll be calling Narrative Footballs. Narrative Footballs are big pivotal events, usually related to a character’s origin in some way, that get more and more significant over time and eventually become something that can be pinned to a villain in order to lend them a…