(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)
Ramun the Evil One aka Ramun the Great is a hypnotist/ stage magician with a simple if short-sighted plan: 1) open a club in New York 2) have it become popular with the wealthy social set 3) hypnotize rich guys 4) profit
(aside: just look at that charming picture of a man who thinks he's an ape! The little dance!)
The short-sighted part goes hand-in-hand with the profit, as once Ramun has induced his victims to hand over all of their fungible wealth he orders them to drive into the Hudson River and drown themselves, and he's done this more than a dozen times over the course of two weeks. This is... not smart. "Hey, every victim went to the Egyptian Gardens and got hypnotized just before withdrawing all their monies from the bank and disappearing" is a thought that even the most dull-witted police officer will eventually have, to say nothing of Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians.
Ramun does find an unorthodox counter to the common super-villain problem of invisible magic-men creeping around in their lairs: train an ape to deal with it. And he comes as close as anyone to killing Marvelo, so good job Ramun!
Ramun blows himself up at the end of the story but manages to recover enough for he and Edpo the ape to return in Big Shot Comics 019, wherein they have switched their focus from larceny to espionage. This time, Ramun seems to have some actual, non-hypnosis-based magic to call on, but it's not quite enough.
Ramun, Edpo and their unnamed employer end up simultaneously perforated and drowned at the climax of the story, and while this is exactly the kind of off-panel "nobody could survive that" death that Ramun came back from the first time he was doomed by a far more insidious foe than mere bullets: popularity. Big Shot Comics 020 was Marvelo's final outing and so Ramun would never get his chance to return.
No comments:
Post a Comment