Sunday, October 9, 2022

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 177: BRAM THIRLA

(Captain Marvel Adventures 001, 1941)


I waffled a bit on this guy - he's just a regular-style vampire, after all. But a regular-style vampire is like a ninja or a xenomorph (or a knight, a pirate, a robot, etc): a deadly threat super-villain level singly, while also being easily killed when part of a group.

So: Bram Thirla demonstrates a couple of important safety concerns specific to comic book science. Firstly: if you must combine the practices of science and sorcery, at least do so in proper laboratory conditions, as performing experiments e.g., in a cemetery at midnight not only introduces quite a lot of unintentional variables but limits the ability to pre-plan safety precautions such as escape routes.

Secondly: when sourcing human remains or brains, go the extra mile and try to get ahold of a nice person's corpse. Sure it's easier to bribe the prison morgue attendant to release the body of a recently executed mass murderer to you but now you have a murderer's brain in your gorilla and that spells trouble. Or in this case: you've resurrected the body of a "mysterious and evil man" because nobody would object and now you're being eaten by a vampire.


The best part of this story is presented above: Captain Marvel and Bram Thirla are incapable of hurting one another, so are locked in a race against time: can Captain Marvel do enough research on vampires to figure out how to bump off Thirla before Thirla catches him in his Billy Batson form?


The comic isn't called Bram Thirla Adventures, so thanks to HP Lovecraft's seminal work The Vampire Legend, Billy prevails and Thirla is reinterred.

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