The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Monster

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 486: THE MONSTER

    (Big 3 006, 1941)

    The Monster, while an imposing figure engaged in some extremely villainous and questionable activities – kidnapping wealthy young women from some sort of summer camp – ultimately fails to satisfy.

    And here is exactly why: this is the kind of story that benefits from a bit of mystery: a red herring or two; a few suspects – but this George Benson guy not only is the singular suspect but has spent twenty-plus years saying things like “you will live to regret the day” and trying to ruin the lives of the woman who turned him down, the man she chose over him and their child. Worst of all, the inciting incident that lead to him dressing up in orange jodhpurs and a stupid mask is him pursuing the affections of the child and very reasonably being turned down for being an old creep (to be clear, she is an adult at the time. He is just a double or even triple adult). 

    He doesn’t even have the dignity to get killed at the end. Just a sad old spiteful creep in a mask.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 486: THE MONSTER

    (Big 3 006, 1941)

    The Monster, while an imposing figure engaged in some extremely villainous and questionable activities – kidnapping wealthy young women from some sort of summer camp – ultimately fails to satisfy.

    And here is exactly why: this is the kind of story that benefits from a bit of mystery: a red herring or two; a few suspects – but this George Benson guy not only is the singular suspect but has spent twenty-plus years saying things like “you will live to regret the day” and trying to ruin the lives of the woman who turned him down, the man she chose over him and their child. Worst of all, the inciting incident that lead to him dressing up in orange jodhpurs and a stupid mask is him pursuing the affections of the child and very reasonably being turned down for being an old creep (to be clear, she is an adult at the time. He is just a double or even triple adult). 

    He doesn’t even have the dignity to get killed at the end. Just a sad old spiteful creep in a mask.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 156: OOM THE MIGHTY

    (All-Star Comics 003, 1940)

    Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon – still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror.

    The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied that he was a spirit that was possessing a bronze grotesque, but later appearances – Oom, like Nyola before him, was Roy Thomased into the Monster Society of Evil in the pages of All-Star Squadron – treat the body as his own, thus introducing the question of why the city of Cliffland New Jersey was festooning their buildings with prehistoric statuary. Whichever is the case, possibly the most interesting thing about Oom is the fact that sometime in the last 30ish years he seems to have made the leap from Justice Society/ Spectre villain to Marvel Family foe, presumably via the Monster Society link.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 038: THE MONSTER

    (More Fun 039, 1939)

    A man who trained a pair of great danes to steal, leading to a city-wide panic after glimpses of the dogs caused people to assume that some sort of creature was involved, which then lead to newspaper front pages. The Radio Squad eventually got their man, though sadly the dogs did not survive.