{"id":2720,"date":"2023-03-20T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=2720"},"modified":"2026-09-27T17:15:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T20:15:43","slug":"minor-super-villain-259-the-power-stealers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=2720","title":{"rendered":"MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 259: THE POWER STEALERS"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Hit Comics 008, 1941)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they’re stinkers of the highest order – their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge – but when you spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about supercrime in a super-hero universe you get opinions about these kinds of things. If these guys had developed this technology I’d have something to say about the risk\/reward of crime vs commercial application, but they’re clearly a bunch of criminal goons and probably stole it, so using it for crime makes sense!<\/p>\n

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Further, they are genre-savvy enough to recognize Hercules as the only super-hero in their particular pocket of the Quality Comics proto-universe. Setting out to preemptively take care of the super-opposition never actually works, but I always appreciate the effort involved.<\/p>\n

(also I love that they call Hercules a hick. So often the little interesting details about a character fall by the wayside – it’s great that Hercules is consistently the super-hero from the country)<\/p>\n

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The guy in purple is a bad liar.<\/p>\n

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The guy in green is a loveable jerk.<\/p>\n

The gang of shirtless goons is everything I could wish in a bunch of cannon-fodder henchmen, down to the guy with a knife clutched in his teeth.<\/p>\n

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Finally (well, for my purposes. Finally <\/i>finally, they get beat up), they actually have a plan! They manage to chuck Hercules into quick-drying cement and cheekily make him into a statue to be displayed on their front porch! And he’s there for weeks<\/i>! Very good job, boys.<\/p>\n

(though if they hadn’t chiseled off all that extra cement then maybe he wouldn’t have managed to get free. Food for thought, dead fictional men)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Hit Comics 008, 1941) I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they’re stinkers of the highest order – their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge – but when you spend a little (or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,51,36,13,50,280,23,1749,56,7,1345,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14","category-extortionist","category-good-henchmen","category-group","category-hercules","category-hit-comics","category-minor-super-villain","category-power-stealers","category-quality-comics","category-the","category-theft","category-unofficial-name"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720","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=2720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}