Number 1533: I spy, with my little Eye...

“The Eye Sees” by Frank Thomas appeared for a short time in Centaur Publication’s* Keen Detective Funnies, and in a couple of reprint issues, Detective Eye. The Eye was a mysterious creature whose origin was never explained, although in one issue the splash panel proclaims, “The Eye! A symbol of the haunting voice of man’s inner conscience! That mystic all-powerful force that causes evil deeds to boomerang and destroy those who plot them!” With that sort of mystical status you’d think The Eye would be an unseen force, but it has a physical presence, as we see in this story (the second published) from Keen Detective Funnies #18 (1940) when it is spotted by one of the gang members plotting sabotage.

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*Centaur has the distinction of being a comic book company that went out of business during comics’ original heyday. According to Wikipedia, “Centaur Publications, Inc. ceased production at the end of 1940, but continued to produce comics under the name Comic Corporation of America. Centaur ceased publication four years later, primarily due to poor distribution.”

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 Here’s the first story featuring The Eye. Just click on the thumbnail:

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Number 401


Tom Trojan


For Pappy's #400 a couple of days ago I showed you Sparky Watts #6, but originally I had another plan. I wanted to show you the whole of The Eye #1 from 1965, an amateur comic book entirely written and drawn by Biljo White, who was also called Captain Biljo.

I googled Biljo's particulars online, only to find out that Bill Schelly, who has documented the first wave of comics fandom of the early 1960s, now has the rights to The Eye, which were given to him by Biljo himself. You can order several books on early fandom from Schelly, including reprints of Biljo's Eye stories.

Ahem. Well, so much for that plan. But while The Eye #1 has two stories of Biljo's titular hero, it also features an older private eye story he did called "Blind Baby Blues," featuring Tom Trojan. :: OK, we're all grownups around here. (We are grownups, aren't we?) We all know Trojan is a brand of condom and a private investigator is also called a dick. So we've all got our yuk-yuks out of the title, haven't we? Good. ::

Biljo's career was as a firefighter, but comic books were a passion. He kept them in a block building called The White House Of Comics behind his house in Columbia, Missouri. Biljo's art was strictly old school. When I saw it originally in his fanzine, Komix Illustrated, I loved his cartoony style, which harkened back to another era. The Tom Trojan story appears to have been drawn in the early 1950s, complete with headlights and bondage. The Eye stories, even with their influences from Bob Kane's Batman, were drawn in the mid-'60s and appear more polished.

Biljo died in 2003 at age 73.

The postscript to all of this is that I sat down and listed the names of those guys that were important in those early days of comics fandom: Don Thompson, Ronn Foss, Richard "Grass" Green, Howard Keltner, Steve Gerber, Jerry Bails, Biljo White...sadly, all now gone.

Postscript to my postscript: A few hours after posting this I read of the death of yet another important early fan, Tom Fagan. I wrote about the visit my wife and I made to Tom's house in Vermont in 1970. Like Biljo, Tom was a great Batfan.

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