Thursday, May 18, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 281: THE WEIRD GHOST OF AMBER SWAMPS

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 021, 1941)


I got lazy here and clipped the setup, sorry. In brief, the story takes place at Chellcroft, the swampland mansion of wealthy Georgian C.J. Miller (just one letter off from being quite funny), formerly a centre of art and society but now fallen into disrepair.

To make things worse, the Weird Ghost of Amber Swamps has started haunting the property and killing people, including Norton, the poor butler pictured fleeing the house in the above image.


You can't have a murderous ghost, even a weird one, in a super-hero universe without someone showing up to check it out, and in this case it's the Angel who turns up to pretty quickly discover that the Weird Ghost of Amber Swamps is in fact a Weird Living Man of Amber Swamps, albeit a huge one.


More specifically, it's the owner of the house, C.J. Miller, armed with a rubberoid mask and a wild razor blade/ fishing rod weapon that allowed him to kill at a distance. The fact that C.J. Miller was a celebrated angler (and built like a brick shithouse, let's not forget) makes for a quicker unmasking than usual - a bit of a flaw in the old ghost routine.


Turns out that Miller is broke and that committing a series of gruesome murders and then killing himself and pinning it all on the ghost is preferable to anybody finding out that he's broke. Real rich guy shit that us poors wouldn't understand. Sadly, he does not get his wish, as not only does he trip and kill himself with his own gimmicked fishing rod like a clown but he does so in front of a reporter. Haw haw haw, says I.

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