{"id":2225,"date":"2023-10-05T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-05T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=2225"},"modified":"2026-09-27T16:58:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T19:58:15","slug":"minor-super-villain-353-the-purple-hoods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=2225","title":{"rendered":"MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 353: THE PURPLE HOODS"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Master Comics 013-014, 1941) <\/p>\n

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I’m not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story – the one with the Ghost Killer gang – was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought there would be some very exciting<\/i> gang continuity if any of the former Ghost Killers, already relict of the White Arrow gang, had joined up with the Purple Hoods. That’s an unprecedented three gangs!<\/i> Alas, Snake and Cope were sent to jail and the counter reset.<\/p>\n

Ephemeral hopes and dreams aside, the Purple Hoods are crass capitalist crooks: their big scheme involves kidnapping Mexican farm labourers and pressing them into slavery in a secret oil refinery. Ah, the romance of the Old West!<\/p>\n

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And speaking of the Old West, this story is a perfect illustration of the weird liminal space that the West occupied in the 40s imagination: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal or a contemporary one? Does this issue offer any clues? The ascent of oil as a valuable resource does overlap with the Old West, and steel oil barrels of the kind pictured above are a 20th Century invention, but one of the major conflicts of the story is a business rivalry between two competing stagecoach lines and while I can find evidence of stagecoaches being used<\/i> into the early 20th Century I doubt that they were such a going concern as that.<\/p>\n

What I’m getting at here is that I don’t know which way the anachronisms are going: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal with forward-thinking villains or a modern marshal in an overly romanticized setting? Who knows!<\/p>\n

(I must note that I do appreciate the Purple Hood leader getting his own special version of the gang costume)<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM:<\/p>\n

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Two issues later (Master Comics 016, 1941), the story is clearly set in the Old West! Answers have been forthcoming at last!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Master Comics 013-014, 1941)  I’m not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story – the one with the Ghost Killer gang – was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,553,61,175,462,13,23,1232,169,191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14","category-buck-jones","category-capitalism","category-fawcett-comics","category-great-costumes","category-group","category-minor-super-villain","category-purple-hoods","category-slaver","category-villains-of-the-past"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2226,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225\/revisions\/2226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}