![](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgz5v_1KahH6ZY1xNNqEpiyF07P58IZazoPpdVGYcwa8WU6nWrCW-mXMo-y47vGTb0dxr68P_iNGhHTH4KL5GkQCP4WO76qZ8IwFRhvVwi6WQOlScMNX8fXGyn_6D_ZycLvjKirf1gnLMdSij_I5qDQtjGtTv43lidbtFwhCtgjRDCqN8jb_WerUZWbRmQ8\/w520-h640\/576b%20grundo%20the%20great%20champion%20comics%20010%201940.jpg\" "\\"grundo")
<\/a><\/div>\nThere are a few things to like about Grundo the Great: his mustache, his name which sounds like it’s what Miss Grundy would be called in a 1960s Archie Comics fantasy series about the heroic students battling the teachers as evil warlords, the fact that he has a “crew of mad chemists and technicians” in his mountaintop castle somewhere in the Midwestern US… Lot of good stuff. His ultimate aim, to take over America, is a little standard but you have to admit that it’s villainous.<\/p>\n
If Grundo (his real name, by the way: Lars Grundo) has a major flaw, it’s in going too big, too early. In order to raise funds for his mad science crew he pulls a heist of the fabulous Taj Mah Jewels while they are being transported by plane, exactly the kind of crime that attracts the attention of a super-hero like the Human Meteor.<\/p>\n
(side note: this is the second “Taj Mahal Jewels” sound-alike I’ve encountered from the year 1940 – the first being the Green Mask and the Taj Lamah Jewels – and that’s the sort of coincidence that makes me think that there was a famous Taj Mahal Jewels exhibition in 1939 or 1940. Turns out that “Taj Mahal” is one of those search terms that really blows out your results with a lot of unrelated information. There was a “Taj Mahal Emerald” on display at the 1939 NY World’s Fair but that’s about as far as I’m going to get without doing actual research so I’ll just assume that that’s what inspired both)<\/p>\n