The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

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  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 001

    I feel a little bad about what I said in the Armo post. The generic masked guys are, after all, trying their best, even if they aren’t quite measuring up to my standards. So while I can’t quite bring myself to write an individual post about each one, there’s no harm in doing a roundup of them every now and again, starting with the guys that Blue Beetle fought in 1941:

    Ivor Nick: 

    This guy had a lieutenant named the Wart and a dirigible that he eventually fell off of! (Blue Beetle v1 006)

    Mason: 

    This guy sabotaged his own construction company for convoluted reasons! (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

    Carveth Manners: 

    This guy killed his own father for not that much money, honestly! (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

  • GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 001

    I feel a little bad about what I said in the Armo post. The generic masked guys are, after all, trying their best, even if they aren’t quite measuring up to my standards. So while I can’t quite bring myself to write an individual post about each one, there’s no harm in doing a roundup of them every now and again, starting with the guys that Blue Beetle fought in 1941:

    Ivor Nick: 

    This guy had a lieutenant named the Wart and a dirigible that he eventually fell off of! (Blue Beetle v1 006)

    Mason: 

    This guy sabotaged his own construction company for convoluted reasons! (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

    Carveth Manners: 

    This guy killed his own father for not that much money, honestly! (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 167: ARMO

    (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

    What makes them a super-villain? It’s the helmet! That kind of welder’s mask-looking helm is the key to my super-villain-appreciating heart. Otherwise, Armo is a gang boss who robs armoured cars and ends up launching himself into the sea while trying to run down the Blue Beetle.

    Honestly, Blue Beetle antagonists in this era are almost all guys in suits wearing masks but otherwise acting like standard gang bosses. If I didn’t include the filter of having to be just a leetle bit interesting this blog would be a parade of unnamed guys with brown/ white/ blue masks for weeks. Just chumps for days.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 167: ARMO

    (Blue Beetle v1 007, 1941)

    What makes them a super-villain? It’s the helmet! That kind of welder’s mask-looking helm is the key to my super-villain-appreciating heart. Otherwise, Armo is a gang boss who robs armoured cars and ends up launching himself into the sea while trying to run down the Blue Beetle.

    Honestly, Blue Beetle antagonists in this era are almost all guys in suits wearing masks but otherwise acting like standard gang bosses. If I didn’t include the filter of having to be just a leetle bit interesting this blog would be a parade of unnamed guys with brown/ white/ blue masks for weeks. Just chumps for days.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 166: LUGO, THE HARPIE OF HORROR

    (Blue Beetle Comics 006, 1941)

    I skip a lot of generic villains from the non-Marvel or DC families of comics, because everyone existing together in a big shared world is the thing about comics that makes me get out my spreadsheets and my extensive tagging system. A guy like Lugo, though, demands at least a little attention.

    One thing to know about him off the bat is: he’s an underwater guy. This happens a lot in comics starring underwater heroes such as Sub Saunders – just an surface thing transposed 1:1 to the depths. So Lugo is a bird-man, but he flies underwater and steals women to be his undersea brides off the coast of Florida. I really love his design, particularly his chicken feet and umbrella wings. Not so hot on the woman-kidnapping, but he gets his ass kicked successively by a snake-dragon, a stalactite and Sub Saunders before he gets the chance to take it any farther than abduction.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 165: THE EEL

    (Blue Beetle v1 006, 1941)


    What makes them a super-villain? I’ll be honest. The Eel’s initial plot – take over     NYC York City ‘s shipping industry in order to starve and thereby ransom the city – was, while ambitious, a bit old hat and I was going to write him off as another jagoff gang boss with a decent moniker. But then! He reveals his Room of Horrors(!) where he pickles his enemies alive(!!), and, well, how could I not?

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 164: THE MASKED MAN

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 164: THE MASKED MAN

    (Batman Comics 008, 1941)

    I got pretty excited when reading this story, as it concerns murders among the cast and crew of a play called the Superstition Murders and there’s a lot of kerfuffle about bad luck and jealousy and drunk has-been actors and I was hopeful that it might boil down to my favourite motive for supercrime: mad art. Just as mad as mad science but it really makes you think, you know?

    Sadly, the real motive for the crimes is simply base capitalism: if playwright Johnny Glim (good name) can tank the production, rights to the script revert to him and he can sell it to Hollywood for beaucoup bucks. But while you know I am all in favour of creator-owned properties I cannot stress enough that multiple homicide is not a good way to go about securing them and his capture by the Batman is a righteous one.

    Number of Episodes of the “Super-Villains of Hollywood” podcast: Part of a poorly-received later season attempt to profile villains who almost got to Hollywood.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 163: PROFESSOR RADIUM

    (Batman Comics 008, 1941)

    Professor Henry “Radium” Ross has things stacked against him from at least three different angles by my count. First, he’s a classic Victim of Orthodoxy as his research is rejected as too fantastic by a stick-in-the-mud institute director and he feels compelled to test his radium-based cure for death on himself. It works, but turns him into a radioactive man in the process, and he starts to go mad from a combination of radiation poisoning and (presumably) grief after he accidentally kills both his partner and his sweetheart (that’s angle no. 2, by the way).

    The third misfortune to strike Professor Radium is Batman, who is much more of a protector of capital than he will be later and consequently is more concerned with preventing Ross from stealing the valuable drug that he need to treat his condition than with helping him get better. They fight and Prof Rad goes into the harbour, presumably to drown. OR DOES HE, the final caption box asks? No, depending on which comic book reality you live in. He makes an appearance as part of a squad of radioactive bad guys in Infinite Crisis, so at least one version of him evidently hangs out for up to 70 years before getting motivation to do some evil.

    They should have brought him back beforehand (or used him since). He’s neat.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 163: PROFESSOR RADIUM

    (Batman Comics 008, 1941)

    Professor Henry “Radium” Ross has things stacked against him from at least three different angles by my count. First, he’s a classic Victim of Orthodoxy as his research is rejected as too fantastic by a stick-in-the-mud institute director and he feels compelled to test his radium-based cure for death on himself. It works, but turns him into a radioactive man in the process, and he starts to go mad from a combination of radiation poisoning and (presumably) grief after he accidentally kills both his partner and his sweetheart (that’s angle no. 2, by the way).

    The third misfortune to strike Professor Radium is Batman, who is much more of a protector of capital than he will be later and consequently is more concerned with preventing Ross from stealing the valuable drug that he need to treat his condition than with helping him get better. They fight and Prof Rad goes into the harbour, presumably to drown. OR DOES HE, the final caption box asks? No, depending on which comic book reality you live in. He makes an appearance as part of a squad of radioactive bad guys in Infinite Crisis, so at least one version of him evidently hangs out for up to 70 years before getting motivation to do some evil.

    They should have brought him back beforehand (or used him since). He’s neat.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 162: THE CLOCK MAKER

    (Batman Comics 006, 1941)

    A few different longstanding comic book bits make early appearances in the tale of the Clock Maker. First, Bruce Wayne has to go to a boring old board meeting at one of the many companies that he has an stake in, but that meeting sows the seeds of crime. Specifically, they all go to a clock store together afterward and Atkins, the evil board member who wants to gain sole ownership of the clock company for some reason, meets Elias Brock, an unhinged old man who loves clocks so much that he gets violently angry at the thought of wasting or killing time.

    Which leads to the second recurring comics motif: the calculating villain convinces an unstable person to do their killing for them. Brock takes out two board members and almost gets Bruce Wayne before Batman works out the plan, then kills Atkins and almost blows up a decent part of Gotham before being pitched out a window by Robin.

    A side note is that the comic itself seems to somewhat agree with the clockmaker with regard to the precious nature of time – the man himself is a bit of an anticapitalist…

    … while Batman expresses more of a rise and grind mentality, completely unsurprisingly.