Post by redsycorax on Jan 23, 2024 22:43:07 GMT
In this fifth and final vignette of the retrospectively labelled "Glorious People's Vanguard" (Yeong-gwangseuleoun Inmin-ui Seonbongdae), we come to the exploits of the North Korean super-scientist known as Leudeu Keulosyeo (or "Red Crusher), who had several battles with the American action-hero "Captain Marvel" during the Korean War. Sung-Ho Yun was a particularly strong influence within the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea. His forceful arguments within the communist country's science ministry were responsible for encouraging several innovative and challenging projects during the duration of the conflict and he is believed to have mentored both the Red Vulture and Mile High Mightiest Mong before they also encountered Captain Marvel and his Marvel Family. However, ambiguity surrounds the final fate of this brilliant scientist.
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[FROM: FILES LKSHY-12/52, LK-SHY-01/53, AND LK-SHY-03/53:]
PROLOGUE: BEFORE 1952:
Sung-Ho Yun was born in 1912, after Korea was invaded and annexed by Imperial Japan. While what loose evidence exists about his early life suggests that he was born to an academic professional family, relative privilege was no preventative barrier against the arduous turmoil and persecution that Imperial Japan exerted against its unwilling adjacent Northwest Asian colonial satapry. Due to absence of medical facilities and forced food importation to the Japanese mainland, many North Koreans died from preventable diseases, malnutrition or starvation, or were subjected to illegal abduction, brutal interrogation and torture or extra-judicial execution. At some point, judging from a single, faded photograph in the CIA archives at Langley, one such Japanese military covert operations group may have been responsible for the killing of Sung-Ho Yun's parents. Seeking vengeance, the adolescent Sung-Ho Yun joined the Communist Party of Korea and escaped to the Soviet Union. There, he is reported to have impressed his Soviet instructors with his brilliant aptitude and expertise in engineering, meteorology, physics and chemistry. In the 1950s, the KGB arranged for his return to his homeland.
The deaths of his parents may have been responsible for Sung-Ho Yun's development of an implacable obsession with revenge against the foreign desecrators and assailants of his homeland. Such a tragic loss in early life often manifests itself in implacable trauma and perceived reprisal against the sources of that magnitude of loss beforehand. In Sung-Ho Yun's case, that may have been expressed through a disciplined and thorough concentration on development of his scientific expertise to the exclusion of all else.
What is certain is that Sung-Ho Yun is recorded to never have married during the time that he was active as an adversary of the American and allied United Nations forces during the last months of the Korean War. There is no record of a wife or family. Moreover, as can be seen from the epilogue, his postwar fate is equally ambiguous.
DECEMBER 1952: NAL-ADIENINEUN SEUPAIKEU BOL BALSACHE
The World's Mightiest Mortal and Colonel Sung-Ho Yun first encountered each other during the event titled for the use of his first active battlefield scientific intervention against the United States and United Nations allied forces. The burly, bearded figure turned up on the communist country's terrain in December 1952, several months before the other members of his informal cohort of fellow North Korean metahumans. Sung-Ho Yun unleashed his devastating ambulatory and flying spiked metal projectiles against the allied armed forces at the Yongpo battlefield and initially, the projectiles hammered and immobilised all in their path, enabling the Chinese and North Korean armed forces to hold territory that they had earlier taken. It is unknown what technology Sung-Ho Yun used to fabricate the projectiles, but they seem to have common composition registers with a subset of anti-gravitium meteorites. It is plausible that Song-Ho Yun might have located a mass meteorite fall and used his discovery to unleash the new terror weapon against his country's enemies.
However, Captain Marvel's appearance turned the tide, leading an incensed Colonel Yun to attack the imperialist action hero, only to fall afoul of the former's invulnerable anatomy. Yun then picked up an injured South Korean soldier and threw him at one of the projectiles, causing Captain Marvel's intervention to prevent the unfortunate soldier's impalement and transfer him to medical care elsewhere. In the ensuing chaos, Colonel Sung-Ho Yun beat a hasty but prudent retreat. Captain Marvel stayed in the Korean theatre, subsequently foiled an attack on an allied airfield and tracked the aerial spiked ball projectiles back to a specially reconfigured North Korean tank. Launching another series of projectiles to prevent Captain Marvel's apprehension of "Leudeu Keulosyeo", the World's Mightiest Mortal resumed his pursuit, only to find that the tank tread led to a deep river bordered mountainous terrain, before ending. Unbeknownst to the American action hero, the tank had amphibious capabilities and Colonel Yun's laboratory outpost was concealed at the submerged foot of a subaquatic mountain.
What happened then is surmise, but it is suspected amongst many analysts that Captain Marvel has either metamorphic abilities or juvenile associates. One of them must have made their way into the base and was subsequently captured, after becoming aware that the concealed North Korean base served as a factory, arsenal and launch site for thousands of the deadly aerial projectiles. Fortuitously, the Captain must have been watching his young ally, as he dug a trench in front of the oncoming flying spiked projectiles, immobilising them. Although Colonel Yun was captured, nevertheless, he managed to escape when the train carrying him to a prisoner of war camp in South Korea was hit by a Chinese air attack and its captives freed.
JANUARY 1953: BULG-EUN BEONGDAE:
Colonel Yun's next encounter with the World's Mightiest Mortal came about apparently after Captain Marvel discovered the existence of uncanny adverse weather events in North Korea. As to how Colonel Yun created the phenomena, it is possible that he may have worked with the Red Vulture and Great Red Brain on Operation Red Star, the construction of North Korea's first and only space station in low earth orbit, several months earlier. As a consequence, Yun may have been able to master sufficient expertise at astrophysics with the assistance of Soviet space and meteorological researchers and therefore constructed a weather control device. It achieved some deadly use before Captain Marvel was alerted and flew across the Pacific toward Northwest Asia and another encounter with the North Korean super-scientist.
As he flew over the Korean peninsula, the Captain witnessed the murderous and deliberate electrocution of US GIs and other allied soldiers and the anomalous meteorological behaviour. Suddenly, he spied a particularly strong skyborne electrical impulse headed for an ammunition dump before he intercepted it with the assistance of an abandoned tank and then utilised electrified barbed wire for a similar purpose. Meeting local US Army personnel, he was told that the "Red Crusher" had escaped from captivity several months earlier. The Captain then encountered his assailant for a second time, but was blinded by another of Colonel Yun's inventions, a "Lightning Gun" that produced phenomenal amounts of electrical energy. Once more, "Leudeu Keuleosyeo" was able to escape while his opponent was incapacitated.
Retreating to another covert base, Colonel Yun fielded a large-scale "Lightning Canon" to cause a massive electrical storm above South Korea with the objective of totally disrupting the allied war effort, only to have Captain Marvel fashion an immense lightning rod to neutralise the attack. In his second assault, Colonel Yun ordered his device loaded into a bomber jet, intending to take his battle aloft in order to renew his earlier attack. However, the Captain foiled his "red lightning" attack with a glass tube that siphoned Yun's lightning ball bombardment toward the North Korean side, before he attacked the North Korean aircraft itself. Before he could intercept it, one can only surmise that Colonel Yun did not want his 'wonder weapon' to fall into enemy hands and thus destroyed it. Due to the early impairment of his eyesight after Colonel Yun had used his Lightning Gun against him, Captain Marvel failed to notice Colonel Yun's distant parachute deploy and land the super-scientist back in North Korean territory.
MARCH 1953: BULG-EUN ANGAE:
Colonel Yun's final encounter with Captain Marvel came as a consequence of the super scientists second attempt to use adverse weather events against the Allied forces. As a byproduct of his lightning weapons, he had learnt how to generate artificial fog banks that had some unwanted additional attributes- they contained microparticles that could obstruct and distort radar detection of incoming vessels or enemy vessels. He only lacked sufficient North Korean military funding to develop his latest idea into concrete reality. And thus, Captain Marvel encountered a thick fog in which two US Navy vessels almost collided until his intervention and deflection of their paths from one another. Confronting Colonel Yun for a third time, he was startled when the burly scientist disclaimed responsibility for the new phenomenon afflicting the allies, until "Leudeu Keuleosyeo" took the opportunity to escape, running into an adjacent impenetrable fogbank. Rather than waste time pursuing his opponent, the Captain soared aloft and compacted several Soviet MiG fighter jets into a jet cannon, dispelling the offensive fogbank from the Korean Sea.
In a twist of events, US Army Infantry Major William Baird turned out to be responsible for the adverse weather events, having used it originally with the intention of stopping North Korean vessels in their tracks. However, also airborne, Colonel Yun abducted Baird, taking him to his latest laboratory quarters behind enemy lines with his new adverse weather event device. Given his own expertise, it took Colonel Yun no time at all to reverse engineer it and cannibalise remaining componentry from his Lightning weapons to construct his own Bulg-Eun Angae- "Red Fog" project. Given his own scientific expertise, Colonel Yun deployed adhesive, petrochemical and amber-laden fog against his Allied opponents, only to be foiled by Captain Marvel's use of water and sand to obstruct his opponent's machinations. Ultimately, Captain Marvel destroyed the Fog Machine, but Colonel Yun escaped behind enemy lines for a third and final time.
Two months later, the Korean War ended.
EPILOGUE: YUILHAN SAENGJONGJA:
With that, Colonel Yun faded from the history books. CIA analysts are unsure why, but the absence of any further North Korean nollaun mugi ("wonder weapons") and his disappearance from active military life have led to subsequent theories. One is that Colonel Yun himself became gravely ill and needed to be placed in suspended animation until a cure for his medical condition could be found.
Another is that Kim Il-Sung developed paranoia about potential 'threats to his regime' after the Operation Red Star incident and the duplicity of Red Vulture, given his thwarted coup, which may have meant he therefore arranged for Yun's assassination or execution, despite the benefits nollaun mugi might have generated for his nation. While contemporary analysis of the North Korean regime emphasises its grotesque cult of personality around the Kim dynasty, the limitations of the aforementioned and their megalomania, could even the vainglorious, egotistical likes of Kim Il-Sung have been that blinded to the potential benefits otherwise to order the demise of one of his country's most brilliant scientists?
A third possibility is that at some point, Sung-Ho Yun became disillusioned with the backwater personality cult and authoritarian quagmire that North Korea was becoming and attempted defection to the south. Either the North Korean authorities learnt about and killed him beforehand, or he perished en route to South Korean territory.
What is significant is that unlike many of his other companions recorded in the Glorious People's Vanguard dossier, Colonel Sung-Ho Yun does not have any memorial, recorded state funeral or subsequent commemoration or valorisation for his service to his country and it is as if he had vanished from the face of the earth after the end of the Korean War, despite being the longest lived member of that august retrospectively designated 'grouping.' If Colonel Yun had sought to defect, had been judged a security risk to the Kim regime, or developed a terminal illness that incapacitated him, that might explain his apparent erasure from North Korean archival records.
His final fate remains unknown.
Major Isabella Ramsey
November 12, 1975.
Central Intelligence Agency
Northwest Asia Analysis Division
Langley, Virginia
Sources:
"Captain Marvel Battles the Red Crusher" Captain Marvel Adventures 139: December 1952
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-139/full
"Captain Marvel Battles the Red Lightning Blitz" Captain Marvel Adventures 142: March 1953
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-142/full
"Captain Marvel Fights the Fatal Fogs" Captain Marvel Adventures 144: May 1953
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-144/full
++
[FROM: FILES LKSHY-12/52, LK-SHY-01/53, AND LK-SHY-03/53:]
PROLOGUE: BEFORE 1952:
Sung-Ho Yun was born in 1912, after Korea was invaded and annexed by Imperial Japan. While what loose evidence exists about his early life suggests that he was born to an academic professional family, relative privilege was no preventative barrier against the arduous turmoil and persecution that Imperial Japan exerted against its unwilling adjacent Northwest Asian colonial satapry. Due to absence of medical facilities and forced food importation to the Japanese mainland, many North Koreans died from preventable diseases, malnutrition or starvation, or were subjected to illegal abduction, brutal interrogation and torture or extra-judicial execution. At some point, judging from a single, faded photograph in the CIA archives at Langley, one such Japanese military covert operations group may have been responsible for the killing of Sung-Ho Yun's parents. Seeking vengeance, the adolescent Sung-Ho Yun joined the Communist Party of Korea and escaped to the Soviet Union. There, he is reported to have impressed his Soviet instructors with his brilliant aptitude and expertise in engineering, meteorology, physics and chemistry. In the 1950s, the KGB arranged for his return to his homeland.
The deaths of his parents may have been responsible for Sung-Ho Yun's development of an implacable obsession with revenge against the foreign desecrators and assailants of his homeland. Such a tragic loss in early life often manifests itself in implacable trauma and perceived reprisal against the sources of that magnitude of loss beforehand. In Sung-Ho Yun's case, that may have been expressed through a disciplined and thorough concentration on development of his scientific expertise to the exclusion of all else.
What is certain is that Sung-Ho Yun is recorded to never have married during the time that he was active as an adversary of the American and allied United Nations forces during the last months of the Korean War. There is no record of a wife or family. Moreover, as can be seen from the epilogue, his postwar fate is equally ambiguous.
DECEMBER 1952: NAL-ADIENINEUN SEUPAIKEU BOL BALSACHE
The World's Mightiest Mortal and Colonel Sung-Ho Yun first encountered each other during the event titled for the use of his first active battlefield scientific intervention against the United States and United Nations allied forces. The burly, bearded figure turned up on the communist country's terrain in December 1952, several months before the other members of his informal cohort of fellow North Korean metahumans. Sung-Ho Yun unleashed his devastating ambulatory and flying spiked metal projectiles against the allied armed forces at the Yongpo battlefield and initially, the projectiles hammered and immobilised all in their path, enabling the Chinese and North Korean armed forces to hold territory that they had earlier taken. It is unknown what technology Sung-Ho Yun used to fabricate the projectiles, but they seem to have common composition registers with a subset of anti-gravitium meteorites. It is plausible that Song-Ho Yun might have located a mass meteorite fall and used his discovery to unleash the new terror weapon against his country's enemies.
However, Captain Marvel's appearance turned the tide, leading an incensed Colonel Yun to attack the imperialist action hero, only to fall afoul of the former's invulnerable anatomy. Yun then picked up an injured South Korean soldier and threw him at one of the projectiles, causing Captain Marvel's intervention to prevent the unfortunate soldier's impalement and transfer him to medical care elsewhere. In the ensuing chaos, Colonel Sung-Ho Yun beat a hasty but prudent retreat. Captain Marvel stayed in the Korean theatre, subsequently foiled an attack on an allied airfield and tracked the aerial spiked ball projectiles back to a specially reconfigured North Korean tank. Launching another series of projectiles to prevent Captain Marvel's apprehension of "Leudeu Keulosyeo", the World's Mightiest Mortal resumed his pursuit, only to find that the tank tread led to a deep river bordered mountainous terrain, before ending. Unbeknownst to the American action hero, the tank had amphibious capabilities and Colonel Yun's laboratory outpost was concealed at the submerged foot of a subaquatic mountain.
What happened then is surmise, but it is suspected amongst many analysts that Captain Marvel has either metamorphic abilities or juvenile associates. One of them must have made their way into the base and was subsequently captured, after becoming aware that the concealed North Korean base served as a factory, arsenal and launch site for thousands of the deadly aerial projectiles. Fortuitously, the Captain must have been watching his young ally, as he dug a trench in front of the oncoming flying spiked projectiles, immobilising them. Although Colonel Yun was captured, nevertheless, he managed to escape when the train carrying him to a prisoner of war camp in South Korea was hit by a Chinese air attack and its captives freed.
JANUARY 1953: BULG-EUN BEONGDAE:
Colonel Yun's next encounter with the World's Mightiest Mortal came about apparently after Captain Marvel discovered the existence of uncanny adverse weather events in North Korea. As to how Colonel Yun created the phenomena, it is possible that he may have worked with the Red Vulture and Great Red Brain on Operation Red Star, the construction of North Korea's first and only space station in low earth orbit, several months earlier. As a consequence, Yun may have been able to master sufficient expertise at astrophysics with the assistance of Soviet space and meteorological researchers and therefore constructed a weather control device. It achieved some deadly use before Captain Marvel was alerted and flew across the Pacific toward Northwest Asia and another encounter with the North Korean super-scientist.
As he flew over the Korean peninsula, the Captain witnessed the murderous and deliberate electrocution of US GIs and other allied soldiers and the anomalous meteorological behaviour. Suddenly, he spied a particularly strong skyborne electrical impulse headed for an ammunition dump before he intercepted it with the assistance of an abandoned tank and then utilised electrified barbed wire for a similar purpose. Meeting local US Army personnel, he was told that the "Red Crusher" had escaped from captivity several months earlier. The Captain then encountered his assailant for a second time, but was blinded by another of Colonel Yun's inventions, a "Lightning Gun" that produced phenomenal amounts of electrical energy. Once more, "Leudeu Keuleosyeo" was able to escape while his opponent was incapacitated.
Retreating to another covert base, Colonel Yun fielded a large-scale "Lightning Canon" to cause a massive electrical storm above South Korea with the objective of totally disrupting the allied war effort, only to have Captain Marvel fashion an immense lightning rod to neutralise the attack. In his second assault, Colonel Yun ordered his device loaded into a bomber jet, intending to take his battle aloft in order to renew his earlier attack. However, the Captain foiled his "red lightning" attack with a glass tube that siphoned Yun's lightning ball bombardment toward the North Korean side, before he attacked the North Korean aircraft itself. Before he could intercept it, one can only surmise that Colonel Yun did not want his 'wonder weapon' to fall into enemy hands and thus destroyed it. Due to the early impairment of his eyesight after Colonel Yun had used his Lightning Gun against him, Captain Marvel failed to notice Colonel Yun's distant parachute deploy and land the super-scientist back in North Korean territory.
MARCH 1953: BULG-EUN ANGAE:
Colonel Yun's final encounter with Captain Marvel came as a consequence of the super scientists second attempt to use adverse weather events against the Allied forces. As a byproduct of his lightning weapons, he had learnt how to generate artificial fog banks that had some unwanted additional attributes- they contained microparticles that could obstruct and distort radar detection of incoming vessels or enemy vessels. He only lacked sufficient North Korean military funding to develop his latest idea into concrete reality. And thus, Captain Marvel encountered a thick fog in which two US Navy vessels almost collided until his intervention and deflection of their paths from one another. Confronting Colonel Yun for a third time, he was startled when the burly scientist disclaimed responsibility for the new phenomenon afflicting the allies, until "Leudeu Keuleosyeo" took the opportunity to escape, running into an adjacent impenetrable fogbank. Rather than waste time pursuing his opponent, the Captain soared aloft and compacted several Soviet MiG fighter jets into a jet cannon, dispelling the offensive fogbank from the Korean Sea.
In a twist of events, US Army Infantry Major William Baird turned out to be responsible for the adverse weather events, having used it originally with the intention of stopping North Korean vessels in their tracks. However, also airborne, Colonel Yun abducted Baird, taking him to his latest laboratory quarters behind enemy lines with his new adverse weather event device. Given his own expertise, it took Colonel Yun no time at all to reverse engineer it and cannibalise remaining componentry from his Lightning weapons to construct his own Bulg-Eun Angae- "Red Fog" project. Given his own scientific expertise, Colonel Yun deployed adhesive, petrochemical and amber-laden fog against his Allied opponents, only to be foiled by Captain Marvel's use of water and sand to obstruct his opponent's machinations. Ultimately, Captain Marvel destroyed the Fog Machine, but Colonel Yun escaped behind enemy lines for a third and final time.
Two months later, the Korean War ended.
EPILOGUE: YUILHAN SAENGJONGJA:
With that, Colonel Yun faded from the history books. CIA analysts are unsure why, but the absence of any further North Korean nollaun mugi ("wonder weapons") and his disappearance from active military life have led to subsequent theories. One is that Colonel Yun himself became gravely ill and needed to be placed in suspended animation until a cure for his medical condition could be found.
Another is that Kim Il-Sung developed paranoia about potential 'threats to his regime' after the Operation Red Star incident and the duplicity of Red Vulture, given his thwarted coup, which may have meant he therefore arranged for Yun's assassination or execution, despite the benefits nollaun mugi might have generated for his nation. While contemporary analysis of the North Korean regime emphasises its grotesque cult of personality around the Kim dynasty, the limitations of the aforementioned and their megalomania, could even the vainglorious, egotistical likes of Kim Il-Sung have been that blinded to the potential benefits otherwise to order the demise of one of his country's most brilliant scientists?
A third possibility is that at some point, Sung-Ho Yun became disillusioned with the backwater personality cult and authoritarian quagmire that North Korea was becoming and attempted defection to the south. Either the North Korean authorities learnt about and killed him beforehand, or he perished en route to South Korean territory.
What is significant is that unlike many of his other companions recorded in the Glorious People's Vanguard dossier, Colonel Sung-Ho Yun does not have any memorial, recorded state funeral or subsequent commemoration or valorisation for his service to his country and it is as if he had vanished from the face of the earth after the end of the Korean War, despite being the longest lived member of that august retrospectively designated 'grouping.' If Colonel Yun had sought to defect, had been judged a security risk to the Kim regime, or developed a terminal illness that incapacitated him, that might explain his apparent erasure from North Korean archival records.
His final fate remains unknown.
Major Isabella Ramsey
November 12, 1975.
Central Intelligence Agency
Northwest Asia Analysis Division
Langley, Virginia
Sources:
"Captain Marvel Battles the Red Crusher" Captain Marvel Adventures 139: December 1952
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-139/full
"Captain Marvel Battles the Red Lightning Blitz" Captain Marvel Adventures 142: March 1953
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-142/full
"Captain Marvel Fights the Fatal Fogs" Captain Marvel Adventures 144: May 1953
www.comiconlinefree.org/captain-marvel-adventures/issue-144/full