(Exciting Comics 006, 1940)
The Space Rovers are Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, two young adults whose dads built a spaceship and who were compelled to steal that ship rather than see it and its ray cannon fall into the nefarious hands of some ambiguously foreign spies. Subsequently, they have just the worst luck at getting back to Earth, with each issue of Exciting Comics featuring some space danger that derails their progress.
This time around they come across another spaceship in the Asteroid Belt, seemingly dead in space. Upon boarding they find a bunch of solid gold statues in unpleasant poses.
Suddenly, an alien! This is Orro, a very cool space monster with a stupid and sinister plan: hang out in the middle of nowhere one of the more hazardous places in the Solar System until fellow space travellers happen upon his spacecraft and investigate, then use his special gas to turn them to gold. Then, once this has happened enough times, Orro will simply melt down all of the statues and be rich forever!
Setting aside the morality of the whole situation... surely logistically it would be far easier to buy a few cows or the alien equivalent than to just wait an unknowable amount of time for space travellers who may or may not be coming (and that's assuming that every passing spaceship would even bother to check out a seeming derelict. What of the space-cowards, Orro?). Even if you have no problem with murder, victims must be easier to source on a planetary surface, right? Plus, you can have access to TV and take-out food while you perpetuate evil.
The greatest surprise and betrayal of the entire story is not that there is a murderous gold-hungry alien lurking on a derelict ship preying on the altruistic and curious but that the cool-looking alien murderer is actually just a bald guy.
One small comfort to salve my disappointed soul is the fact that though Orro is not in fact a cool green tentacle alien, he is almost certainly an alien of some kind, as the Space Rovers have in their travels discovered human-shaped aliens on Mercury, Venus, Mars and the asteroid Ceres and are about to meet the same on the Jovian moon Ganymede and on Jupiter itself. Orro could be from just about anywhere (okay probably not Mercury or Venus or Ceres based on observed tech levels but any of the rest).
Ted and Jane manage to subdue Orro during an attack by Ganymedean space pirates and doesn't actually make it to the second half of the story as he is killed by a stray ray cannon blast - an unusual time for such a distinctive villain to die, but I suppose he was surplus to requirements in the ensuing capture by and escape from the pirate fleet.
Farewell to Orro: you may have over-complicated a plan more than anyone else on this blog.
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