Sunset Bain

It's important to look your very best when you're doing your very worst...

If there's a high society party in New York City, you'll find glamorous socialite Sunset Bain at the centre of it. No matter if it's in her luxury penthouse apartment or a function further from home, Sunset will be there, rubbing shoulders with mayors, congressmen, and even the odd senator... unless she's called away for business. Her living quarters are decorated with priceless antiques and her guest lists are exclusive to the crème de la crème, but quite where she gets the money for her jet-setting lifestyle is shrouded in mystery. Even her unusual name gives her an intriguing allure, but Sunset isn't giving anything away...

The truth is that she works for the money, as a respectable businesswoman in the field of terrorism. Madam Menace is the armourer to the underworld, bringing ruthless efficiency to the dealing of illegal munitions. Deep underground beneath Sunset Bain's penthouse is a sprawling complex staffed with scores of henchmen and engineers working on her designer weaponry, a catalogue containing such delights as electromagnetic stasis fields, sonic disruptors, and roaches that digest human flesh. Menace's elite clientele includes criminals, revolutionaries, and anarchists, both domestically and internationally, but she only conducts her business in temporary bases of operations that she can quickly "liquidate" when no longer needed.

And to Madam Menace, it is business. She is truly merciless in her negotiations, preferring not to haggle with her inferiors, and suggesting the destruction of any interfering parties if they hold no commercial value. Her pursuit of Machine Man was once purely for profit, as she thought only of the sales she could make by reverse engineering his technology into an army of living robots, but after he proved detrimental to her plans too many times, her vast riches and resources are being rechannelled for the purpose of revenge.

Fiction

Hosting a party in her luxurious penthouse, Sunset Bain was called away from a simping congressman by her butler Rollins, who had received a special letter for her – a secret signal from her henchmen that she was required. Getting changed and descending in a private elevator, Madam Menace greeted Krager in her underground complex. Krager had managed to steal Machine Man's left arm, and offered it to Menace for $20,000. Refusing to haggle from her price of $1000, Menace introduced him to her flesh-eating roaches, and the vagrant quickly accepted her offer. Madam Menace planned to use the arm to capture Machine Man, in order to reverse engineer him to mass-produce robotic super-soldiers and wholesale them for profit.

The next day, after Machine Man was equipped with a power booster to enhance his radio receivers, he tracked the arm to a seemingly-abandoned riverside warehouse, where Madam Menace and her men sprung her trap, subduing him with an electromagnetic blast and stasis field. Menace had a brief tête-à-tête with Machine Man, wondering aloud about his decidedly unrobotic personality. After a henchman informed her that her boat was ready, Menace left for a pre-arranged meeting with a client, leaving Machine Man in the company of a pair of her goons.

Out on a boat in New York Bay, Menace met her favourite anarchist, Zarkoff, and offered him the chance to have a loyal robot army. Machine Man, having broke free, interrupted the meeting. Zarkoff took the opportunity to double cross Menace, swiping the sample case containing the robot's arm. Menace followed him and zapped him in the shoulder and, knowing when to liquidate her assets, tossed the sample case overboard. Zarkoff hit the button on his exit strategy, and the hidden explosives on the ship detonated. Though Machine Man quickly determined that he was the only one caught in the blast, he was left brooding over the uncertainty of Madam Menace's survival. Arms and the Robot!

Notes

Sunset Bain on Marvel Database, an external wiki

• The last panel of "Baron Brimstone and his Sinister Satan Squad!" implies that Bain's debut story was intended to be called "Macabre Means Murder!". Whether or not that means her nom de guerre was intended to be "Madam Macabre" is unknown.