The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Crack Comics

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 020: THE RED TORPEDO

    (Crack Comics 001-020, 1940-1942)

    The Red Torpedo is Jim Lockhart, a guy who came up with a design for the ultimate one-man submarine and turned that into his whole personality. This is a not-uncommon Golden-Age comics trope that kind of petered out once the world was no longer awash with mechanized combat – Silver Age super-vehicles tended more toward the exploration side of things.

    So: Jim Lockhart, young US Navy officer resigns his commission after being told that his submarine design was unworkable. He builds it anyway, with the help of his fiancé, Meg, then seemingly leaves her behind as well – a “Peggy” show up as his assistant a few issues later but after that he’s a strictly one-man operation. 

    Lockhart shows up here and there in the extended DCU – most notably in a Roy Thomas engineered cull of the old Quality Comics characters in All-Star Squadron back in the day. Like most of the others killed off in that ish, Red Torpedo got better and shows up whenever someone needs a really good submarine for something.

    Good luck finding it but the thing that really cemented my love for this guy is the Crack Comics installment of the Next Issue Project. A really lovely, simple, melancholy story about a submarine man.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 183: X-1

    (Crack Comics 003, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout.

    What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain’s name that is frankly wasted on this capitalist pigdog.

    The real draw, though, is those submarine pirates! Check out those dreamy mantled masks, that skull-and-crossboned conning tower! It’s hard to go wrong with submarine pirates but by Jove I’ve seldom seen any done more right.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 183: X-1

    (Crack Comics 003, 1940)

    What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout.

    What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain’s name that is frankly wasted on this capitalist pigdog.

    The real draw, though, is those submarine pirates! Check out those dreamy mantled masks, that skull-and-crossboned conning tower! It’s hard to go wrong with submarine pirates but by Jove I’ve seldom seen any done more right.

  • MINOR SUPER-HERO 019: THE CLOCK

    (Funny Picture Stories/ Funny Pages/ Feature Comics/ Crack Comics, 1936-1944)

    The Clock has the distinction of probably being the earliest masked crimefighter and definitely that of being the earliest one to stick around, which would make him the earliest super-hero if Dr Occult hadn’t made his debut in 1935. A lot of the details about him are fairly cliché, both because they were cribbed from existing pulp clichés and because the Clock helped define the clichés of the genre.

    So: Brian O’Brien is a wealthy playboy who puts on a tuxedo and mask and fights crime at night. He leaves calling cards for his foes, is often thought to be a criminal himself and is friends with police Captain Kane in his civilian identity while enjoying a somewhat fraught relationship with him while masked.

    Over the years the Clock has a few different associates – above find Pug Brady, a down-on-his-luck guy who happens to look just like Brian O’Brien. They team up for a couple of years until Pug is unceremoniously chucked for a tough orphan girl named Butch about whom I know almost nothing, so it’s a bit of a qualified statement when I say that by far my favourite member of the Clock family is the Orchid:

    The Orchid appears a handful of times and her gimmick is that she is also a crimefighter, and one who is slightly more on-the ball than the Clock: she may know his secret identity, she can always get a message to him and most of the time she disappears at the end of a case, with the exception of the time she was distracted by her own kidnap-victim father. The Orchid only makes a handful of appearances but she’s a winner in my books: bring her back, I say – fold her into the backstory of the Black Orchid!

    So: the Clock is a solid Golden Age strip. Sadly, he will likely never see the light of day again. DC owns roughly seven dozen masked adventurers in suits and included in that number is Midnight, who would be a straight palette-swap of the Spirit if they had bothered to give him a different-coloured suit. Thusfar, he’s the one they pull out in the rare cases that a suited crimefighter who isn’t early Sandman is required, while the Clock and the Mouthpiece and Destiny and Just n’ Right and Devil’s Dagger and Diamond Jack and Cosmo, Phantom of Disguise all twiddle their thumbs in purgatory.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 182: THE BIG SHOT

    (Crack Comics 001, 1940)

    A series of facts about Golden Age super-hero comics:

    -most of them take place in cities

    -they are either set in a specific location (e.g. Wonder Woman being in Washington DC or the Red Bee in Superior City) or an unidentified large city

    -in the latter case, over time the city acquires characteristics that either lead to it becoming its own thing (e.g. Batman’s unidentified large city becomes Gotham) or being identified as New York City

    Now there are plenty of exceptions to this (Superman starts out in Cleveland which quickly becomes Metropolis; plenty of Golden Age heroes didn’t stick around for their location to gel, etc etc) but it does happen a fair amount and it leads to situations like the above, wherein the Clock, who lives in an unidentified large city clearly based on NYC, arrests crimelord the Big Shot and learns that he is in fact Mayor Kozer! And then over the years it becomes more and more clear that Clock stories are set in New York and you end up with an alternate history of the office of Mayor of New York City in which Fiorello la Guardia is presumably repeatedly ousted from office only to be reelected following the various Evil Mayor Arrested by Vigilante scandals. This is the sort of thing that really gets my heartrate up!

    Anyway: the Big Shot, folks.

    EDIT TO ADD:

    This isn’t even the first Mayor of NYC that the Clock is responsible for the arrest of: one year earlier he helped send Mayor Tull up the river! (Feature Comics 022, 1939)