MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 837: THE SKULL

(Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

 

The Skull is the recurring foe of the Golden Age Black Hood, and as is common for such characters he is a kind of generalist super-villain willing to dabble in everything from theft to kidnapping to espionage to murder as circumstances dictate. He even indulges in a little housebreaking on occasion, and it is while doing so that he is interrupted by police officer Kip Burland, who he frames for the crime and then eventually attempts to have murdered when he refuses to give up on proving himself innocent. 

This of course is the origin of the Black Hood, as Burland recovers and trains under the tutelage of one of the Skulls other victims. Accidentally creating your own nemesis is one of the occupational hazards of being a successful super criminal, after all, and the Skull is so successful as he kind of did it twice, as Kip Burland's mentor is a different lawman who the Skull framed and ruined who swore revenge on him but then took too long preparing and had to be content with weaponizing another to do the deed.

By the time that Kip Burland is prepared to go into action as the Black Hood, the Skull has devised the first of what I now recognize as his signature: an overcomplicated scheme. Specifically, he has targeted the debut/masquerade ball being held for wealthy socialite Barbara Sutton, and has not only informed all of the guests that they must show up in their best jewelry so that he can steal it but has also announced his plans in the papers. I think that the intent is to ensure compliance through fear, but it really seems like he's just introducing ways that his scheme can go wrong.

The Skull's instructions are clear: he will steal the jewels off of the guests during the party and they are to keep quiet about it. None of them manage this, and each victim ends up being killed via a blowgun dart tipped with a poison that turns the human head all green and corpsey. Plus - and this is hard to see but trust me - the dart leaves a little skull-shaped mark at the point of contact.

The Black Hood eventually works out how the Skull is doing all this: he has disguised himself as hostess Mrs Sutton and has been shooting the darts out of a blowgun shaped like a cigarette holder. One dunk in an oversized decorative vase later, the case is solved!

(also please note that the Black Hood is in attendance in costume as himself. It still counts even if this is his first public appearance in costume) 

After the Black Hood turns the Skull in to the police at the end of his first costumed adventure, his ally the Hermit predicts that they will be unable to hold him, and what do you know but he's right. The Skull dramatically breaks jail and immediately puts another overly complicated scheme into action. Major Quentin Duff has invented the unspecified-but-presumably-valuable Iota Ray, and the Skull wants it, but is not prepared to do anything so simple as to steal the plans. Instead, he implements a simple three-part plan:

Step One: ambush Major Duff at his house and murder him just after he hands the Iota Ray plans over to Mrs Duff for safekeeping. 

Step Two: While Mrs Duff and Barbara Sutton are taking the plans from Washington DC via train, kidnap Duff and gaslight Sutton into believing that she was never there. This requires at least a half-dozen confederates as well as an appearance by the Skull as a Dr van Luks, a backward name so annoying that I audibly groaned when I worked it out.

Step Three: Once the plan falls apart, just try to murder everyone and take the plans off of Mrs Duff's body. Please note that this step was an option from the start, and that the theft could have been committed using the Major's gruesome murder as cover.

As 1940 draws to a close, the Skull is left shaking his fist after a speeding train as the Black Hood escapes with the plans. We will see him again in 1941!

SKULL SCORE: A very generous 2/5, considering that this particular Skull isn't actually missing any facial features. The combination of his emaciated face, sunken eyes and perpetual rictus goes a long way nonetheless. Plus he's green.

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 017

Guest stars from reality! 

Arthuriana: 

Galahad is an ongoing feature inthe 1940 issues of Top-Notch Comics, which always means that we're going to have a variety of very on- and off-brand characters from Arthuriana in supporting roles. King Arthur here functions mainly as a questing hub for Galahad to report to between missions, for instance. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Sir Kay, meanwhile, is very comfortably fulfilling his role as a low-level knight who can be defeated as a demonstration of basic competency. He also says his own name quite a lot. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

According to my copy of The Arthurian Companion, Lady Lynette appealed to King Arthur on behalf of her sister Lyonors, whose castle was being laid siege to by the evil Sir Ironsides and who was sent away with the green-around-the-ears Gareth rather than her preferred choices of Launcelot or Gawaine. Here, newly-minted knight Galahad stands in for Gareth and it is Lynette's own land that is under threat, (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

The Second Galahad adventure features Queen Guinevere as the victim of a robbery: her possibly-magical Golden Chalice has been stolen. (Top-Notch Comics 006, 1940)

The culprit in the chalice theft is the Earl of Pellam, and I'm just going to assume that these names aren't just random collections of appropriate-sounding syllables. King Pellam features in a version of the tale of the Fisher King, which makes this a pretty ironic crime for him, with the grail of it all. (Top-Notch Comics 006, 1940)

Further, in the Pellam version of the Fisher King story, the Dolorous Stroke responsible for his eternal wound is dealt to him by the not-quite-a Knight of the Round Table Sir Balin le Sauvage, and so while it's a bit unusual to find a Sir Balin here in the Earl of Pellam's employ, it is perhaps on-brand that he ends up striking down his boss while trying to retrieve the Golden Chalice from Galahad. (Top-Notch Comics 006, 1940)

This very monk-like Merlin the Magician first shows up during the knight of the griffin affair and acts as and occasional magical support character thereafter. (Top-Notch Comics 007, 1940)

King Pellinore shows up to help Arthur fight off a joint invasion by the kings of Ireland and Denmark. (Top-Notch Comics 008, 1940)

The Lady of the Lake eventually shows up to give Galahad a magic sword, once he proves worthy to draw it, and she even gets a chance to do the whole "rising up out of the water with a sword" thing after Galahad loses it in a moat - when your whole raison d'etre is handing out swords you have to know all of these tricks. 

The sword itself has the terrible name "Scabor," and miiiiiiight be a reference to King David's Sword, which it resembles solely in the fact that it too could only be drawn by a worthy knight and that only Galahad qualified. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)

Now for some non-Arthurian characters: 

Christopher Columbus: 

The Ghost and a couple of guys from the 20th Century end up in 1492 sailing the ocean blue with Columbus on the Santa Maria, and of course the Ghost is instrumental in making sure that the voyage to the New World is successful, which is a much less valorous achievement through modern eyes than it would have been in 1940. There's a bit at the end where the Ghost is allowed to fly the ship back to Spain so that they can catch the time-beam home, which I think ties into an early 20th Century bit about the Santa Maria going missing during the voyage, even though as far as I can tell it just got damaged and left behind. (Thrilling Comics 007, 1940)

George Washington: 

During a jaunt to the American Revolution in Professor Fenton's time machine, the Ghost not only helps deliver the news of the impending Hessian attack to Washington but both suggests the crossing of the Delaware and uses yogi magic to make it possible. (Thrilling Comics 009, 1940) 

Nero: 

This is the first time that Nero has shown up in the Real Person Round-Up and I'm gonna call it: it's never going to be a flattering depiction when he does. This time, he orders the Ghost and his two time travel companions tossed in the Colosseum to die in glorious combat. (Thrilling Comics 008, 1940) 

Oliver Cromwell: 

During another of the Ghost's jaunts into the past to recover some of the various Important Men that science-crook Professor Fenton had stashed away in Commonwealth-era England, he runs into the Lord Protector himself: Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell employs the Ghost's talents to quash a rebellion by the Duke of Northumberland and I was all set to point out that the guy in the comic didn't look anything like the real historical character but upon looking into it it seems that though there have been many Dukes of Northumberland at the point in time that this comic was set there had not been any for about a century and would not be another for at least twenty-five years. This isn't as fun to point out! (Thrilling Comics 006, 1940) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 836: MORGANA LE FAY

(Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940) 

It's another version of Morgan le Fay, less than two weeks after the last one! Will le Fay end up being the mythic/fictional character with the greatest number of comic book interpretations? Possibly!

This version of Morgan le Fay, Morgana le Fey, is after revenge on Galahad for the death of her husband the Knight of the Griffin and so sends out squads of knights to find him and bring him back to be tiger food. Unfortunately for her, her knights are pretty unprofessional and fail to question the fact that the "Galahad" that they capture is unusually scrawny and meek and in fact turns out to be Garlan, Galahad's squire, doing a bit of roleplay while his boss is asleep.

Once the real Galahad shows up, Morgana's men prove to be as inadequate at combat as they are at knight-identification and she is forced to play her trump card: the Monster. An eight-foot tall green guy who looks like he just stepped out of a science fiction comic, the Monster proves to be a match for Galahad and his horse.

Lucky for Galahad, Garlan is on-hand to save the day by delivering the poorly-named magic sword Scabor to him as he and the Monster are battling in the depths of Morgana's moat. It's a heroic act for the lad, and it really underscores how terrible it was when he was captured earlier in the story and Galahad did not go after him because he was late for a meeting.

Presumably Morgana le Fay would have continued to vex Galahad going forward, but the series ends while she is planning her next move. 

DIVINE ROUND-UP 009

I came across Jumbo Comics 031 while filling in gods from my backlog in another Divine Round-Up entry and realized that the array of entities represented in the Stuart Taylor story in that issue should be presented as a block.

Mercury: 

This story begins as most Stuart Taylor stories do, with reckless use of time travel technology. Specifically, Taylor's love interest Laura Hayward has travelled back to Ancient Greece to buy a new hat, because as we know: women be hat shopping. It's practically all they think about!

Laura's Twentieth Century charms are apparently too much for the local deities to bear, because before Stuart can collect her and be condescending about headwear she is kidnapped by Mercury and spirited away to Olympus, which among other things places the gods of this issue in the hybrid Greco-Roman Pantheon.

the Oracle of Delphi: 

Stuart and Dr Hayward's next move is to consult with the Oracle of Delphi to get a line on how exactly they might follow Mercury and recover Laura from him, and I must say that I really enjoy this weird wisp-of-air version of the Oracle, despite it being tremendously off-model. 

Medusa: 

The Oracle directs Our Heroes to seek information from Medusa, who turns out to be depicted in typical style, though somewhat more enormous than is generally the case. I do appreciate that this issue answers the age old question: "is Medusa vulnerable to ray gun blasts?" 

the Evils Contained in Pandora's Box: 

The final stop on Stuart and Hayward's quest is to retrieve a laurel wreath from inside of Pandora's Box, which is just sitting in a field in the middle of nowhere. The comic kind of glosses over the fact that Stuart Taylor is responsible for unleashing the Evils of Mankind, but I am fully prepared to do so, as it might just be his worst snafu in a career full of the reckless and unthinking use of time travel. 

The specific evils released from this version of Pandora's Box are: 

Disease - a classic for a reason. The generic ghost look suggests that the artist did not want to draw a lot of pustules.

Greed - an evil little pig man. 

Hunger - another one right out of the classic Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse set. Much more gruesome than Disease, when the opposite is usually the case.

Intolerance - I was going to call this guy an unusual inclusion, but on reflection I'll bet that most Pandora's Box lineups include Hate, which isn't far off. Definitely looks intolerant.

and bringing up the rear... 

War, aka Mars: 

What is unusual inclusion is not War, who I reckon is there pretty often, but specifically Mars, God of War. Is the implication that this fairly major god was powerless until released by human hands? Is the War who is usually depicted in PB lineups some sort of aspect of war or a specific type of warfare? No clue. What is certain is that Stuart Taylor knocks this War's block off.

And speaking of block-knocking, that's what also happens to Mercury once Taylor, Laurel wreath firmly on brow, makes his way to Olympus to finally rescue Laura. The story ends on a fairly limp callback joke about women and their genetic predilection for hat-shopping, one which I rolled my eyes at even before I realized that Laura wearing the divine laurel wreath as a regular hat at the end would be a much better bit. (Jumbo Comics 031, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 835: KING QUANTUS

(Top-Notch Comics 007, 1940)

Streak Chandler's adventures on Mars conclude with a space battle with Kalox, deposed king of the Gas Men, as he attempts to destroy the planet in retribution for losing his throne. Streak and his pals prevent this, but at the moment of their triumph they find themselves in the clutches of yet another villain, the pirate King Quantus, and spirited away to his secret headquarters on the Jovian moon Io.

In addition to being a space pirate, King Quantus is big on slavery: he not only maintains a creepo harem of captured women but has a laboratory full of enslaved scientists. All this does nothing to save him from a good old American ass-kicking once Steak Chandler manages to sneak up on him, however.

Quantus rallies his forces in an attempt to destroy Chandler and recapture his companions, but while he is doing so, Chandler's erstwhile ally Lura leads a revolution of Quantus' many slaves and captives.

Lura, having been recently romantically rejected by Streak, turns on her former companions and announces herself as the new space pirate queen of Io. Between her and the still-at-large King Quantus, Streak's space adventures appear to be just beginning but alas, we never get to see any of them as this is the final installment of his strip.