The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: alien

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 621: THE EMERALD MEN OF ASPERUS

    (Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)

    The Emerald Men of Asperus live on an asteroid (named Asperus, natch), and I’m pretty sure that their plan is to move the Earth to the Asteroid Belt so that they can easily enslave as many Earthlings as they want, but it’s a bit hard to grok because the way the Emerald Men talk makes it plausible that they don’t know how the Solar System works. Like, it’s possible that they don’t know that Earth and Asperus orbit the same star? This is all further complicated by the fact that the Emerald Men kind of look like the Chad of Virgin/Chad meme fame. None of them actually do that super floppy walk of his but you can see it happening in a Fletcher Hanks comic and it’s distracting.

    Stardust the Super Wizard of course is on this plan immediately. Stealing and enslaving a whole planet? Not on his watch.

    Once Stardust stops the Emerald Men’s original barrage of planetary-control gas missiles, they make the unusual and very confident decision to attempt to tackle him head-on. And it seems like they might actually be a credible threat: 15-20 muscular dudes with a similar level of outlandish technology to his? AND they’re ray-proof, an amazing thing to be when you’re taking on Stardust “I have a ray for every occasion” the Super Wizard.

    But no, even without his signature rays Stardust is still something like twice the size of the average Emerald Man and he swiftly uppercuts every single on of them into submission.

    Even their last-ditch effort, involving anti-star-metal acid bombs designed to destroy the suit that houses most of Stardust’s power, fizzles due to the playground logic of Super Wizard stories as he merely emits a cloud of acid-proof dust to explode them before they reach him.

    The Emerald Men get off pretty easy for Stardust foes, particularly now that we know that being frozen but conscious forever is an option. They and their asteroid home are merely banished to the far reaches of space. A comparative mercy!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 611: THE COMMANDER

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    It happened again. Space Smith and Dianna were just noodling along through space when they found themselves captured and transported to the surface of a strange world by strange aliens. In this case the world is the annoyingly named Vacuum Meteor and the aliens are the extremely cool Vacuumites.

    Like the Robot Scientists before them, the Vacuumites don’t seem quite sure what to do with their new prisoners – it seems to be an opportunistic kidnapping. Lucky for them they have the decisive mind of the Vacuumite Commander at hand.

    The Commander orders that Space and Dianna be transformed into Vacuumites themselves using “vacuum ortho glows”. This suggests some interesting things about whether Vacuumites are a species or a condition, like a Dungeons & Dragons undead type that arises when someone dies in a particular fashion. Are there freeze-dried space mummies in the Spelljammer setting? There should be.

    Space and Dianna pull the old prisoner’s trick of yelling about being sick and then konking your guard on the head when they come to check on you (which works way more often than it should – why do so many villains hire compassionate prison guards?). After that it’s just a big brawl, during which the Commander makes an ill-advised unarmed charge ad a raygun-wielding Space Smith. An ignoble end for such a distinctive character.

    (I just remembered that space is a magic gas or something in Spelljammer and so our theoretical vacuum mummies wouldn’t work. Very sad)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 611: THE COMMANDER

    (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

    It happened again. Space Smith and Dianna were just noodling along through space when they found themselves captured and transported to the surface of a strange world by strange aliens. In this case the world is the annoyingly named Vacuum Meteor and the aliens are the extremely cool Vacuumites.

    Like the Robot Scientists before them, the Vacuumites don’t seem quite sure what to do with their new prisoners – it seems to be an opportunistic kidnapping. Lucky for them they have the decisive mind of the Vacuumite Commander at hand.

    The Commander orders that Space and Dianna be transformed into Vacuumites themselves using “vacuum ortho glows”. This suggests some interesting things about whether Vacuumites are a species or a condition, like a Dungeons & Dragons undead type that arises when someone dies in a particular fashion. Are there freeze-dried space mummies in the Spelljammer setting? There should be.

    Space and Dianna pull the old prisoner’s trick of yelling about being sick and then konking your guard on the head when they come to check on you (which works way more often than it should – why do so many villains hire compassionate prison guards?). After that it’s just a big brawl, during which the Commander makes an ill-advised unarmed charge ad a raygun-wielding Space Smith. An ignoble end for such a distinctive character.

    (I just remembered that space is a magic gas or something in Spelljammer and so our theoretical vacuum mummies wouldn’t work. Very sad)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 601: THE THINKER

    (Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) 

    After a couple of stories worth of interruptions, Space Smith and Dianna either finished the Brain off between issues or they and/or Fletcher Hanks forgot that he was an immanent threat to life on Earth because this issue finds them following a mysterious radio signal to sight-see a rare gold comet as it passes by the moon.

    Instead of watching the comet on its flyby, Space and Dianna are hit with a ray that disables their spaceship before being drawn to the surface. There they find themselves the captives of the Thinker and his army of headless goons. And here let me say that while it is not great that the Thinker’s only stated goal is to acquire Dianna as his “Empress-Goddess”, there is a clarity of purpose there that is a bit refreshing after seeing so many villains attempt to wed unwilling women as a mere opportunistic afterthought.

    Whether the Thinker had greater plans or if getting married to a woman and keeping her in a “flame-girdled Cage of Solitude” was his only goal in life will have to go unanswered because he learns the same hard lesson as so many other big-headed creeps in comics do: all of your big-head smart plans can be undone in an instant by some thoughtless violence. 

    RIP the Thinker: you should have controlled for muscleheads.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 596: THE ROBOT SCIENTISTS OF VENUS

    (Fantastic Comics 003, 1940) 

    The Robot Scientists of Venus are not particularly noteworthy villains on a lot of axes but they are the bosses of perhaps the most visually distinctive groups of the Golden Age, the Leopard Women of Venus.

    What other comic could offer a visual like this: a bevy of bodacious blonde babes in red leopardprint bodysuits, surfing through space on lizard monsters and blazing away with their head-guns? Other Fletcher Hanks comics, I guess, plus early Wonder Woman. But the point stands!

    (here is where I will put a brief aside on the notion of “transmitting” as it exists in Fletcher Hanks comics. Conceptually, transmitting involves just that, the transmission of matter along a light or radio beam of some kind. In practice, it’s more like just being able to fly around in space without any kind of life support like the Leopard Women here)

    Sadly, the Leopard Women are mere vassals of the dominant Venusian race and we don’t really see them again. Happily, the dominant Venusian race are these cool robots! Their leaders appear to be these robot scientists, who seem to be running these Leopard Woman space raids without any clear goals. Sure, they plan on turning Dianna into a Leopard Woman but that seems to be more of a spur-of-the-moment decision.

    Luckily for them, Space Smith escapes before they have to figure out what to do with him. The rest of the adventure is just a series of encounters with colourful robots as they make their way to their spaceship, starting with these (delightfully and conscientiously masked) robot surgeons.

    Everyone in this panel is grumpy.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 592: ORRO

    (Exciting Comics 006, 1940)

    The Space Rovers are Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, two young adults whose dads built a spaceship and who were compelled to steal that ship rather than see it and its ray cannon fall into the nefarious hands of some ambiguously foreign spies. Subsequently, they have just the worst luck at getting back to Earth, with each issue of Exciting Comics featuring some space danger that derails their progress.

    This time around they come across another spaceship in the Asteroid Belt, seemingly dead in space. Upon boarding they find a bunch of solid gold statues in unpleasant poses.

    Suddenly, an alien! This is Orro, a very cool space monster with a stupid and sinister plan: hang out in the middle of nowhere one of the more hazardous places in the Solar System until fellow space travellers happen upon his spacecraft and investigate, then use his special gas to turn them to gold. Then, once this has happened enough times, Orro will simply melt down all of the statues and be rich forever!

    Setting aside the morality of the whole situation… surely logistically it would be far easier to buy a few cows or the alien equivalent than to just wait an unknowable amount of time for space travellers who may or may not be coming (and that’s assuming that every passing spaceship would even bother to check out a seeming derelict. What of the space-cowards, Orro?). Even if you have no problem with murder, victims must be easier to source on a planetary surface, right? Plus, you can have access to TV and take-out food while you perpetuate evil.

    The greatest surprise and betrayal of the entire story is not that there is a murderous gold-hungry alien lurking on a derelict ship preying on the altruistic and curious but that the cool-looking alien murderer is actually just a bald guy.

    One small comfort to salve my disappointed soul is the fact that though Orro is not in fact a cool green tentacle alien, he is almost certainly an alien of some kind, as the Space Rovers have in their travels discovered human-shaped aliens on Mercury, Venus, Mars and the asteroid Ceres and are about to meet the same on the Jovian moon Ganymede and on Jupiter itself. Orro could be from just about anywhere (okay probably not Mercury or Venus or Ceres based on observed tech levels but any of the rest).

    Ted and Jane manage to subdue Orro during an attack by Ganymedean space pirates and doesn’t actually make it to the second half of the story as he is killed by a stray ray cannon blast – an unusual time for such a distinctive villain to die, but I suppose he was surplus to requirements in the ensuing capture by and escape from the pirate fleet. 

    Farewell to Orro: you may have over-complicated a plan more than anyone else on this blog.

  • NOTES – AUGUST 2024

    Cops Shooting Fleeing Suspects: 

    The cops try to gun down the fleeing Sphinx. (Exciting Comics 004, 1940)

    Aliens:

    Can’t get over how much these alien bat-folk look like they’re Simpsons characters (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

    It’s a shame that these Mercurians are weird misogynists, because I really dig their look. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) 

    A few issues later, Flip is back on Mercury and meets these giant insect-men and their queen, whose father (never seen) somehow made his way to Mercury and mated with a giant insect-man. Mated with a giant insect-woman, I suppose. It’s a heckuva thing to contemplate. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

    Honours:

    Yank Wilson declared Public Hero No. 1 at an official banquet. (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 010

    We have mad scientists at criminal scientist prices.

    Dr Koch is one of the many people hungry to get their hands on the secret vitamin supplement that turned the Champ (derogatory) into the Champ (aspirational) after its creator Dr Marlin is murdered. Koch’s mild claim to fame is the fact that he’s the first one to get ahold of the formula long enough to do anything with it. What he did, specifically, was to mix up a big batch and pump it directly into a poor guy named Cris, thus turning him into a lumpy rage-filled monster-man.

    Koch gets away at the end of his encounter with the Champ and his little pal Henry (Cris sadly does a header off a cliff) but characters later in the story talk about him as if he’s dead. Dead or hiding out in a cave in Mexico: either way he’s not bothering the Champ any more. (Champ Comics 011, 1940)

    Dr Bolms (excuse me, Doktar Bolms) here is a mere gangland plastic surgeon, which was enough to draw the attention of Secret Agent Z-2 here but not necessarily enough to draw ours. What really sets him apart from his peers is the fact that he has captured a government agent named Monty Wood and has been practising facial surgeries on him. Horrible! (Crash Comics Adventures 001, 1940)

    Dr Sax is a doctor/spy who needs Tornado Tom’s good good blood to rejuvenate his spy chief, but since he’s an evil man he is determined to take all of his blood instead of just some of it. (Cyclone Comics 005, 1940)

    These youngsters are the Space Rovers, Jane and Ted, a coupla youths who were forced to flee in Jane’s father’s spaceship rather than have it and its ray cannons fall into the hands of enemy spies and now just kind of ping pong around the Solar System in the hopes of getting home. Their first port of call is Mercury, where they have the misfortune of meeting the Mercurians of Thian, who only live twenty years, are mad about it and thanks to their head scientist Flaedo here have exactly one proposed solution: capture longer-lived beings and vivisect them.

    I love his little mustache! Don’t worry, he gets electrocuted in the Space Rovers’ escape. (Exciting Comics 002, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 019

    Look at all these dang guys

    Lobo, the Flying Sleuth: 

    Lobo, the Flying Sleuth, aka the Lobo, had a pretty short run. But! He’s a cowboy and a pilot and a detective. That’s a lot of things! (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

    Doctor Miracle:

    We’ve seen guys like Dr Miracle before: the nigh-omnipotent magician with so much power at his fingertips that his only real challenge is in finding a foe tough enough that he doesn’t defeat them instantly. He’s even got the obligatory Huge Asian Manservant, a Nepalese man named Akim depicted with all of the racial sensitivity that one might expect from 1940s comics.

    Dr Miracle’s real mark of distinction is that he is also a scientific hero, as likely to be blasting a foe with disintegration rays as to be slinging spells. 

    It’s a neat bit of variation in his adventures and of course it gets dropped almost immediately, as his second appearance establishes him as a student of the Elders of the aptly-named City of the Elders in Tibet. After passing a test to show his magical aptitude, Dr Miracle is sent out into the world to battle injustice, with Akim coming along as a… gift? Unsettling. (Champion Comics 009, 1940)

    Doctor Hormone:

    Doctor Hormone exemplifies a particular sort of cultural ingestion/ regurgitation of scientific ideas that permeates all fiction but really found a home in the medium of comic books. Any sufficiently impressive scientific discovery can be reinterpreted as being tantamount to magic, the major example of which is of course the part that radiation would play as a catch-all origin in the Silver Age (and nanotech and genetic engineering in turn as time marched on) but as in any field there are many also-rans for every big hit: vitamins and radio waves and transistors (in the case of Silver Age Iron Man) as science-magic that can accomplish any task. With Doctor Hormone it’s hormones. Obviously.

    As we join the Doctor and his destined-to-be-bullied granddaughter Jane Hormone, he has just been saved from age-related death by a youthening hormone. He and Jane subsequently set out to help the beleaguered nation of Novoslavia defend themselves from the depredations of Germany/Russia analog Eurasia.

    Hormone’s first major antagonist is Rassinoff, aka Assinoff, a Novoslavian official secretly working for Eurasia and dosed with donkey hormones by Jane due to his initial bad vibes. Assinoff is exactly the jackass that his form reflects and is a very satisfying villain to see be repeatedly defeated and humiliated.

    Highlighting some of the more noteworthy hormone effects: the youth hormone (calibrated to make anyone who takes it 25 years old) is cool and fun when used on the elderly but the implications of using it on the young swiftly become horrific. At least the baby was turned into an adult man to save his life – these poor boy scouts are signing up to be adult child soldiers.

    It’s not particularly visually interesting but Hormones second appearance concerns his deploying a gas-based hormone that turns Eurasians into Novoslavians, which raises the question of just what they thought a hormone was over at Popular Comics.

    In Popular Comics 056, Assinoff tries to destroy Hormone’s credibility by injecting Novoslavian citizens with random samples from a captured selection of Hormone’s work, which completely backfires when it turns out that the Novoslavian national character is extremely okay with being turned into some random animal. It’s a nation of furries! 

    These eagle-men pilots are the first of many Novoslavian animal-man hybrids, btw.

    Issue 57 of Popular Comics involves Novoslavian locust, wasp, termite and rat hybrids going out into the world to gather up plagues of their respective animals to unleash on Eurasia. Pictured here is the rat-man, my personal fave.

    The ultimate expression of Hormone’s hybridization efforts are these five Novoslavian volunteers who were turned into fleas and then restored to human form. Though they no longer look like fleas, they retain proportional jumping, flea-strength, etc, Spider-Man style. And the transformation is very gross-looking!

    So that’s Doctor Hormone in a nutshell: a bit light, plotwise, but full of charming characters and a cavalcade of new and interesting concepts in body horror. (Popular Comics 054, 1940)

    Martan the Marvel Man:

     I feel a bit bad making Martan follow Dr Hormone, honestly, because his adventures are at least as wild, but they aren’t as unique. In brief: Martan and his wife Vana are Antacleans, aliens from a super-advanced race a few million light years off. They kind of accidentally land on Earth and almost immediately get mixed up in the affairs of primitive humans. At first it’s regular old “they war amongst themselves, how foolish!” stuff but eventually they discover in incipient invasion by Antaclea’s ancient enemy the Martians and really throw their weight behind the Earth cause: supplying technology, setting up a world government etc. – Martan and Vana’s impact on the world is much greater than your typical comic book characters’. (Popular Comics 046, 1939)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 534: THE BRAIN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 534: THE BRAIN

    (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

    We open on Space Smith and his girlfriend Dianna (sometimes Diana) having a trans-Lunar space-date ruined by Martian Imp Men and I am immediately struck with the dilemma engendered by nearly all Fletcher Hanks stories: follow through on my impulses and post most if not all panels or be judicious for the sake of space and readability? I went with the latter but it hurt.

    So in lieu of my posting every panel that features the great/horrible Martian Imp Men let’s just pause and appreciate how great they are.

    Space Smith and Dianna awaken in the laboratory of the great Martian scientist Skomah and learn that they have been kidnapped by Skomah’s 7th son, also called Skomah, aka the Brain, aka the Central Brain aka the Great Martian Central Brain.

    Really appreciate the detail that the Brain’s head is so big that it has to be held up with two special robot arms.

    Like a lot of big head smart guys, the Brain is convinced that it is his destiny to rule all of creation and is planning to start with Earth. He’s also a huge creep in the same was as a lot of those guys and a lot of super-villains in general, in the “capture a woman and declare that she will be your queen” way.

    Luckily for Dianna, a guy with a head so big he is literally bolted to the ground is not the hardest guy to get away from, even if he has a bunch of D&D 5e kobolds working for him. She and Space Smith get away incredibly easily, in fact, and spend the next few issues trying to get back to Mars to put a permanent end to Skomah the 7th (they never do actually get there. Perhaps they just lost interest when it became clear that the Brain was all talk. Or Fletcher Hanks just forgot).

    BONUS MAN-EATING MARTIAN MOSQUITO