The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: human hunter

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 950: HANS MEYER

    (Daredevil Comics 004, 1941)

    Bart “Daredevil” Hill and his fiance Tonia Saunders are accompanying their friends Jeff and Sue Hart on their honeymoon (!) yacht trip when they encounter the killer combo of rough stormy seas and a mysterious lighthouse that sends them right onto a reef.

    Happily for all involved (except two sailors who are swept overboard and never mentioned again) the yacht is merely wedged rather than sinking and there is a convenient nearby island. An inhabited one, even, as is revealed when the owner, a Hans Meyer, boats over to check on his new neighbours. 

    As you might have noted from when he described himself as the local dictator , Meyer is a prime creep who uses a floating lighthouse to draw ships to his island so that he can hunt their crews for sport, a la Count Zaroff of “The Most Dangerous Game” fame. He barely waits until breakfast is over before he hunts and nearly kills Jeff Hart, and only the Daredevil’s timely intervention prevents the coup de grace.

    I must give Meyer credit here: unlike most people in comics who see a costumed super-hero popping up well outside of their normal territory but coincidentally proximal to some people from back home, he actually puts two and two together and identifies the Daredevil as Bart Hill, and he loves it. I imagine that when you hunt humans for sport you are just itching for the day a vigilante-type super-hero crosses your path.

    I also have to give it to the creative minds behind the Daredevil for continuing to think up reasons for him to be wearing that spiked belt. “It protects him against bear hugs” is a valid, if very specific, reason!

    Having trapped the Daredevil in a pit, Meyer gets to brag a bit, and we learn the other part of his misanthropy, as foreshadowed by his leering at the ladies in his initial appearance. Not only does he hunt and murder the men who land on his island but he “marries” any women who do, and as he very conspicuously does not have any women on his island, we must assume the worst for them.

    Despite seemingly bringing along every weapon he owns (including some very uncomfortable looking knives just kind of shoved through a strap around his ankle), Meyer’s hero hunt goes poorly. Through sheer chance, however, he manages to bury and seemingly kill Daredevil by starting an avalanche.

    Meyer immediately scurries back home to marry Tonia Saunders against her will (and just why is the officiant in a cool mask, you ask? Because it was on the cover that way, as far as I can tell) and then gets himself shot by Jeff Hart, who Meyer never actually went back to kill after he was interrupted in the first place and who has seemingly been crawling slowly toward his vengeance the entire time since. All in all, it’s a memorable honeymoon for the newly-minted Mr & Mrs Hart!

    Categorized in: Location (Pacific Island), Murder (Hunting Humans for Sport), Real Folk – Fictional (Count Zaroff) 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 950: HANS MEYER

    (Daredevil Comics 004, 1941)

    Bart “Daredevil” Hill and his fiance Tonia Saunders are accompanying their friends Jeff and Sue Hart on their honeymoon (!) yacht trip when they encounter the killer combo of rough stormy seas and a mysterious lighthouse that sends them right onto a reef.

    Happily for all involved (except two sailors who are swept overboard and never mentioned again) the yacht is merely wedged rather than sinking and there is a convenient nearby island. An inhabited one, even, as is revealed when the owner, a Hans Meyer, boats over to check on his new neighbours. 

    As you might have noted from when he described himself as the local dictator , Meyer is a prime creep who uses a floating lighthouse to draw ships to his island so that he can hunt their crews for sport, a la Count Zaroff of “The Most Dangerous Game” fame. He barely waits until breakfast is over before he hunts and nearly kills Jeff Hart, and only the Daredevil’s timely intervention prevents the coup de grace.

    I must give Meyer credit here: unlike most people in comics who see a costumed super-hero popping up well outside of their normal territory but coincidentally proximal to some people from back home, he actually puts two and two together and identifies the Daredevil as Bart Hill, and he loves it. I imagine that when you hunt humans for sport you are just itching for the day a vigilante-type super-hero crosses your path.

    I also have to give it to the creative minds behind the Daredevil for continuing to think up reasons for him to be wearing that spiked belt. “It protects him against bear hugs” is a valid, if very specific, reason!

    Having trapped the Daredevil in a pit, Meyer gets to brag a bit, and we learn the other part of his misanthropy, as foreshadowed by his leering at the ladies in his initial appearance. Not only does he hunt and murder the men who land on his island but he “marries” any women who do, and as he very conspicuously does not have any women on his island, we must assume the worst for them.

    Despite seemingly bringing along every weapon he owns (including some very uncomfortable looking knives just kind of shoved through a strap around his ankle), Meyer’s hero hunt goes poorly. Through sheer chance, however, he manages to bury and seemingly kill Daredevil by starting an avalanche.

    Meyer immediately scurries back home to marry Tonia Saunders against her will (and just why is the officiant in a cool mask, you ask? Because it was on the cover that way, as far as I can tell) and then gets himself shot by Jeff Hart, who Meyer never actually went back to kill after he was interrupted in the first place and who has seemingly been crawling slowly toward his vengeance the entire time since. All in all, it’s a memorable honeymoon for the newly-minted Mr & Mrs Hart!

    Categorized in: Location (Pacific Island), Murder (Hunting Humans for Sport), Real Folk – Fictional (Count Zaroff) 

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 028

    GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 028

    Scoundrels! Mid-tier scoundrels! 

    Simon Rudd loves games and gambling and taking chances, and somehow that has led him to a South Pacific island where he wears a full tuxedo and bosses around a local tribe all day. When ocean adventurer Lance O’Casey and his companions wash up on his shores, Rudd engages in a little Most Dangerous Game action with them, presumably out of sheer boredom. This being a Lance O’Casey story, his ultimate fate is to be socked in the nose. (Whiz Comics 010, 1940)

    Ordinarily these round-ups have four characters in them, but I’m breaking tradition today and making it either two or seven, depending on how you look at it, because today we look at all of the crooks and ne’er-do-wells who have gotten their hands on Ibis the Invincible’s Ibistick.

    The Ibistick is first stolen by an unnamed thief as Ibis searches for Taia’s mummy in a likewise-unnamed European city. His role in the story is mainly to provide an object lesson of just how the Ibistick works: anyone can use it to, for example, make so many gold coins that they start falling out the window and make you easier to track down, but just try to harm Ibis, the wand’s true owner, and your magic will rebound back on you. In this case, the thief is turned to gold. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)

    Murder Malone is a pretty rotten character whom Ibis and Taia first encounter while investigating trouble at a town of orphan boys – the trouble turns out to be that Malone’s gang has enslaved all of the boys and is forcing them to manufacture weapons. The experience leaves Malone with a desire to own the magic wand that played such a major role in his undoing, but once he gets ahold of it he makes the classic mistake and ends up turning himself into a toad. (Whiz Comics 005, 1940)

    The very next issue features our old pal the Hobo-Millionaire getting all the power in the world and turning himself into ice with it.

     

    In Whiz Comics 007, Ibis and Taia travel to Hollywood to see the stars, whereupon they fall in with unscrupulous movie producer Carl Brand, who initially offers to buy the Ibistick and then manages to steal it. He then of course tries to turn Ibis into a rabbit and is made one himself, but unlike the rest of those who have made the same mistake, Brand is given a second chance by Ibis and turned back.

    He of course repays this mercy by kidnapping Taia in another bid to get his hands on the wand, only to ultimately be murdered by Piang the Terrible as part of his bid to acquire it.

    Piang finally gets ahold of the Ibistick in Whiz Comics 010, only to immediately screw it up by attempting to remove “all magical powers” from Ibis, which of course rebounds on him, leaving him open to be “accidentally” tossed off of a cliff by the hero.

    When Piang is stripped of all magical power, the Ibistick flies out of his hand and ends up in a nearby river. From there, it finds its way into the hands of an escaped convict with the unlikely name of Grom Deeters, who weirdly is the only alternate wielder of the Ibistick to almost get away with it, thanks to his initial impulse to merely imprison Ibis and Taia upon meeting them, rather than devising some gruesome magical death for them.

    Deeters makes his way to Egypt, where he is undone by his own impulse to be a horny creep: since Taia was the last woman he saw, he summons her to him to try and put the moves on her, then inadvertently animates the Sphinx, then has to summon Ibis in order to calm it down (this incidentally means that in  the Fawcett universe the Sphinx is located a few hundred feet away from where it would normally be found).

    The longer that Deeters has the wand, the longer it becomes clear that his initial successes were the merest flukes, as after attempting to bribe Ibis into convincing his wife to “go for” him he commands Taia to stab Ibis to death, only to of course be the one to taste her blade. 

    That’s all of the Ibistick thieves of 1940 – stay tuned for more in 1941. 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 582: BARON BLOOD

    (Detective Eye 001, 1940)

    Not the first knockoff of Count “the Most Dangerous Game” Zaroff we’ve met, and certainly not the last. Baron Blood incorporates quite a lot of elements that you’ll find in various adaptations of the story: the island castle with built-in lighthouse to draw victims in via shipwreck, the monocle and prominent facial scar and the pack of hunting dogs and huge hunting guide/servant.

    What sets the Baron apart from the rest of the bored island-dwelling human-hunting aristocratic crowd is that for one he is not actually a baron but an escaped maniac. For two, he both dresses like a super-villain (orange chain mail!) and employs a staff composed of guys dressed as Vikings and armed with machine guns. Really great stuff, top score on the henchman front. Like the original and a lot of knockoff Zaroffs he also gives himself a bit of a hunting handicap, in his case using poisoned darts fired from a sling – some real eccentric villain behaviour.

    He of course (of course) meets his end at the point of his own darts after Dean Denton tackles him from out of a tree. Just carrying around a fistful of them like that is a Health and Safety nightmare in a regular workplace, let alone a jungle island where man hunts man.