Friday, November 18, 2011

Justice is Served!: The Scourge of the Underworld Files 3: Hate-Monger

This is part three of a series of posts examining the original Scourge storyline in the 1980s to 1990s, in which an organization devoted to the assassination of super-villains, usually with a modified submachine gun with explosive shells went into action, usually uttering the catch-phrase "Justice is served!" just after killing the villain. Adapted from material I previously wrote in the 1990s on an older website. Previously I was going from memory but in 2014 I purchased the Scourge of the Underworld. I also have the most recent Marvel Index volumes. I am therefore editing this series accordingly. This series covers Iron Man#194 to USAgent#4. It does not cover subsequent appearances of characters called Scourge as all subsequent appearances deviated in key ways from the original concept. On the other hand, hits that were considered unsuccessful even at the time are covered. For successful hits, postmortem uses of victims are now noted.

SECRET WARS II#2 August 1985 by Jim Shooter (writer) and Al Milgrom, Steve Leialoha and Joe Rubenstein (artists)
Victim: Hate-Monger (“H.M. Unger”)
Disguise: Unknown
Synopsis: After the Hate-Monger's defeat in a confrontation with the Fantastic Four and the Beyonder, Scourge, hidden in an alley, guns down the Hate-Monger, revealing him to be an artificial lifeform.
Is it key to the Scourge storyline? No.
Does it tie in to the main story? Only to the extent that Secret Wars II covers events from Fantastic Four#279-281. Since Psycho-Man begins using the Hate-Monger there, Scourge's hit actually ties more into the Fantastic Four issues.
Postmortem use of victim: Unger has not been recreated as of February 2015. He was the third of four (to date) villains using the Hate-Monger name and hate motif but otherwise bearing little resemblance to one another.

Other comments: This is the first Scourge victim to be killed in his initial storyline, as well as the only one to be an artificial lifeform. Scourge's disguise, if any, is not actually seen here. While the gun the Scourge uses is referred to by She-Hulk as a raygun, it actually looks fairly similar to the gun Scourge used to kill the Miracle Man.

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