MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 897: MR SKELETON

(America's Greatest Comics 001, 1941)

Mr Skeleton is one of the handful of minor super-villains who are foundational to this blog, the true weirdos who my mind turns to whenever the subject of obscure comic book characters comes up, and so it's a real relief  to have him finally hsow his face here. This will keep happening at least until we reach 1978 and train-themed super-villain Casey Jones appears here.

There are three really important aspects to Mr Skeleton that keep him in my thoughts:

1. Appearance 

He's a chalk-white, twelve to eighteen foot tall man with an emaciated frame, huge hands and feet and a real pumpkin head with the face of a cartoon villain. It's an extraordinary look, made even more so by his choice to dress in green trunks, a yellow halter top and a green cape. And he has eccentric facial hair!

It's a look that works well as both an over-the top campy cartoon villain and as a source of horror - just imagine that face looming out of the shadows at someone. 

2. Plans and Methods 

Mr Skeleton's goal, as far as it is articulated, is to conquer the United States, but he doesn't really get into the how and why of this because he is busy with step one: recruitment. 

Specifically, Mr Skeleton needs generals to lead an army against the US, and he has what he seems to think is a surefire method of recruiting them: he kidnaps them and threatens to skeletonize them. This is a tactic that would probably work on me.

Oddly, Mr Skeleton's first step in his attempted conquest is to assassinate FDR, a task which he assigns to his most shifty aide. Who fails, by the way, and is skeletonized for his trouble. But why attempt to massively destabilize the US government when you're still trying to recruit generals for your army of conquest? Honestly, MR Skeleton could probably benefit from a few kidnapped executive assistants. 

3. DEATH 

After being foiled by Minute-Man a couple of times, Mr Skeleton decides to get his recruitment program back on track in the most direct manner possible, by marching into the nearest Army camp and grabbing a fresh batch of generals. While he is doing so and simultaneously beating up the entire US Army, he is confronted by Minute-Man once again and ends up being smacked so hard that he turns into a kind of bone explosion. I guess he really was mostly just skeleton, however that works.

Obviously I believe with all my heart that they should bring back Mr Skeleton - his mixture of goofy and horrifying is always welcome in comics, battling Batman or Wild Dog or somone. You don't even have to stretch too far to have him come back since he was already some sort of skeleton-man: just put him back together. 

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 068

A few classic minor super-heroes. Bulletman and Bulletgirl in particular have just barely managed not to remain relevant - I suppose the pointy helmet is too much of a hurdle for the modern audience.

Bulletman: 

Jim Barr is perhaps the most thoroughly-motivated super-hero of the Golden Age. He is:

a. from a long line of police officers

b. the son of a famed police officer who was murdered for being too good a cop and who

c. told the young Jim that he must become a police officer while on his death bed 

d. and after all that he was too scrawny and bookish to be a cop and so had to settle for being a forensic scientist

Jim ends up working in his father's old station under the command of Sergeant Kent, a pro-torture bully who is often held up as the greatest of all the cops in the city, and who is also the father of love interest Susan Barr. 

Jim's personal project is a serum that will destroy "all germs and toxins" in the human body, including that which he believes to be the source of crime and violence. He chooses to test this serum out on himself and his body, freed from a variety of invisible ailments, develops into a physical paragon over the course of a night's sleep.

(Sergeant Kent really earns his reputation as a great police officer by failing to notice that his colleague has basically doubled in size over night. In his defense, Jim is wearing big clothes)

Jim decides that the best way to use this new power is to operate outside of the law, probably due to all of his time hanging around with top cop Kent. He uses his now super intelligence to build the Gravity-Regulator Helmet, which allows him to fly and also generates a force field that augments his natural resilience to make him nigh-invulnerable and able to smash through things head-first (I swear that somewhere I read a story in which it was explained that it made him bulletproof by drawing the bullets to the helmet but danged if I can find it now.). His costume, yellow jodhpurs and all, is assembled out of things that were lying around at the police station, no mention of where. (Nickel Comics 001, 1940)

If I had to classify Bulletman's personality, I would go with "extremely no-nonsense" or maybe "wooden, which is why it is important that he is eventually joined by his female counterpart: 

Bulletgirl: 

Bulletgirl is the aforementioned Susan Kent, daughter to good cop/bad cop Sergeant Kent and member of Bulletman's supporting cast from the beginning. For about the first year of Bulletman's adventures she fills a low-effort version of the Lois Lane role: curious about the hero's identity but not especially proactive about trying to uncover it. She also gets kidnapped and targeted for death a lot thanks to her father's skill at making enemies. Then, in Master Comics 012, Bulletman is knocked out in a collision with Triple Threat's super vehicle and Susan learns that he is actually Jim Barr. Jim obligingly tells Susan the secret of his origin but resolutely refuses to consider teaming up with her.

Susan of course injects herself with the serum and crabs a spare Gravity-Regulator Helmet and costume (though she goes for hot pants over jodhpurs) the instant that Bulletman is out of the room, and This is a very good illustration of why I am so fond of Bulletgirl: she has all of the personality that Bulletman lacks. She's scrappy and quippy and after an issue or two of "too dangerous for girls" chauvinism from Jim is a full partner in the superheroic exercise. She does get kidnapped and left behind a bit more than I'd like but that's comic books in a nutshell. 

In conclusion: Bulletgirl! (Master Comics 013, 1941)

Minute-Man: 

Like Jim Barr, Jack Weston is the son of a dead hero, though Jack's father Robert Weston died during the Battle of Chateau-Thierry in World War I. We don't get nearly as much background on Jack, other than the fact that he was raised by his father's friend General Milton, but thanks to Milton, Jack becomes Minute-Man, a patriotic super-hero, in what is kind of presented as a draft.

Jack is sent to join the Army as a lowly Private so that he can keep an eye out for sabotage and espionage affecting the armed forces. Despite having no super serum or particular special training, he proves to be physically near-superhuman as he engages a variety of costumed and non-costumed foes over the course of his mid-length career.

Minute-Man also dabbles in leaving calling cards, which I always like to make note of. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

Doctor Voodoo **UPDATE**: 

In Whiz Comics 017, Doctor Voodoo returns home to find that Maxinya (the Heaven-Woman, natch) has gone missing. He tracks her abductors through the jungle until he comes across their destination: a European castle, smack in the middle of the Amazon. 

The mystery deepens as Voodoo enters the castle and finds what seems to be an entire Medieval court, headed by the boorish King Richard, who seeks his aid in conquering the jungle. 

Doctor Voodoo refuses to help King Richard, and so is forced to meet the knight Sir Ganal in combat. Voodoo prevails and wins Ganal over to his side, complete with a promise to reveal the origin of the castle's presence in the jungle. Alas, this shall never come to pass, because the story does a hard pivot in the next issue. 

King Richard plays the whole jungle conquest/attempted murder thing off as if it was some sort of test, and sends Doctor Voodoo off to meet with his court wizard. He. in turn, transports Voodoo back in time to the 1400s or thereabouts to retrieve a magical McGuffin called the Golden Flask, with another promise to explain what this whole affair is about once he returns.

Unfortunately for all us completionists out there, the explanation never comes because Doctor Voodoo never returns. He bops around the oceans for about a year and actually does manage to get his hands on the Golden Flask but his feature is cancelled before he can return it to the wizard and find out just what the heck is going on. Maxinya is waiting for him still, presumably. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 371: THE BLITZ GANG

(Minute-Man 002, 1941)

AKA the Blitz Force AKA the Panzer Gang.

I almost started out by saying that the idea of a criminal gang operating along military lines was an old one but no, it isn't yet. It's not a new idea - there might be half a dozen examples in this list so far and I'm sure it cropped up more than once in the pulps - but it's not quite the mid-tier trope that it eventually will be.

This time, the idea for a criminal army is inspired by US pre-war military training program crime czar Boss Donker and his don't-say-he's-a-Nazi pal Baron Marz have hatched a scheme that takes advantage of the readily-available supply of Army-trained men: arm them and loot cities wholesale (with an optional attempt to conquer the US for "the Fatherland," wherever that is.

And of course it all goes swimmingly until Minute-man shows up.

The best part of the story by far is this bit here. Baron Marz has seemingly killed Minute-Man with a falling block of stone and Slippy, the only former gangster army recruit who doesn't want to return to a life of crime, is about to take up the mantle in his honour. It's actually kind of too bad that Minute-Man wasn't actually dead, because having the identity change hands this way might have given him an interesting hook at last - maybe it could have been a series about person after person taking on th role of Minute-Man as needed and as the previous one falls instead of about a third-rate Captain America knockoff.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 369: ILLYRIA, QUEEN OF SPIES

(Master Comics 012-014, 016-017, 019-020; Minute-Man Comics 001-002, 1941)

Illyria, Queen of Spies! (AKA Queen Spy, Spy Queen, Queen of All Spies, Queen of Foreign Spies, etc) Definitely in the running for my favourite of the "recurring femme fatale spymaster" subgenre of super-villain, particularly as she is a foe to Minute-Man, one of the most bland piles of wallpaper paste ever to wear a patriotic costume.

Beyond merely distracting me from how bored I am by Minute-Man, Illyria provides interest via a fairly wide range of plots and schemes and thus is kind of hard to boil down into a pithy summary. So: a numbered list:

1. In her first appearance Illyria wears a snazzy orange robe, the better to whip off when captured so as to take advantage of Minute-Man's "won't hit girls" policy and get away. She and her three distinctive henchmen spend the issue shooting down US Army aircraft on behalf of their unspecified nation using a special blindingly-bright plane (Master Comics 012, 1941)

2.In her second outing, Illyria engages in the already-old gag of using war games as a cover to massacre soldiers with real bullets. The interesting aspect of the story is that she is established as an explicit Axis agent (though of a never-specified power) and recruits spies from the other Axis powers to aid her in her schemes (Master Comics 014, 1941)

3. This one's just an attempt to kidnap a scientist who has developed a new explosive. It is the origin of the "Queen of Spies" part of her moniker, though. This adventure also marks the first time that Illyria is actually captured, as she is just as slippery as any recurring femme fatale  (Master Comics 014, 1941)

4. After precisely one issue in the hoosegow, Illyria breaks out (that poor nurse) and attempts to blow up a Fourth of July celebration. (Master Comics 016, 1941)

5. In service to a pretty rote kidnapping, Illyria deploys both a remote-controlled bomber and X-33, an extremely cool robot soldier who is sadly (for him) not at all waterproof. (Master Comics 017, 1941)

6. Master Comics 019 & 020 are concerned with boring old espionage focused on stealing bombers and bomber plans: ho hum. Illyria does step up the villainy to include slavery in the latter appearance, though.

7. Minute-Man 001 features Illyria and her drum-playing chum in a scheme to cause a native uprising on the US-held island of Barracoon in the Gulf of Mexico. The main draw of the story is Illyria's keen voodoo dance hat but if you want to read a comic that inadvertently highlights the evils of colonialism then this is the one for you, along with about 90% of all Golden Age comics set outside of Europe or North America. And some of the ones set in North America, too.

8. Illyria's final appearance in Minute-Man 002 retroactively establishes that the Queen of Spies has been working for the heretofore unmentioned Green Hood, who is tired of her getting foiled all of the time. It's a bit of an anticlimax for her, as the story is much more concerned with the Green Hood than her. Still, she manages to get away at the end, joining the ranks of the surprisingly populous "recurring femme fatale spies who don't end up getting caught by dint of not recurring that extra time."

(at least I reckon that was her last appearance. She was captured at the end of Master Comics 020, dated November 1941, while Minute-Man 002 was the Winter Issue, dated September to December 1941)