Monday, April 17, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 261: THE SACRED ONE

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 003, 1940)


The Sacred one is a pretty bog-standard cult leader in a way that was cliched even in 1940: he's got a bunch of people in a castle in the New York countryside somewhere and they kidnap beautiful white women to sacrifice to their Fire God until the Angel shows up to murderize them. 

The only really interesting things about him are the questions that the loose plotting leaves you with: he has hypnotic powers - were these given to him by the Fire God or did he have them already and use them to set himself up as a cult leader? Are all of these guys sequentially using the same castle or is NY just lousy with them?


The biggest question (and the creepiest part of the story) is what exactly is the nature of the Sacred One's cult. Once he takes a header into his own pit trap, the cultists all silently line up and shrink down into nothingness. Is this the Sacred One's death curse? Some sort of ritual suicide? Did they never actually exist in the first place but rather were the creations of either the Sacred One or the Fire God? We will never know!

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