Number 902


"I've just seen a Face, I can't forget the time or place..."


I've gone on record a couple of times saying I think the Face had a pretty stupid schtick. He wore a suit and his costume was a green mask which wouldn't scare a 6-year-old. Artist Mart Bailey wanted us to believe he could scare crooks and the whole Japanese army, until the character gave up the mask after World War II and appeared in his civilian identity as Tony Trent.

Apparently, from notes I've gotten from a couple of my readers when I've shown the Face, they forgive the Face for wearing a funny-looking mask, and I have been gently chided for my complaint. After all, this is only a comic book character. I have to agree with that. But it also has to do with driving down the freeway just before last Halloween and becoming aware of a car in the next lane pacing me. When I looked over the passenger was looking at me; he was wearing an old man mask, and it startled the bejabbers outta me.



I maintained my composure and stayed on the road. I turned, outwardly calm, back to my driving. I did not want the young whippersnapper in the mask to know I needed to change my underwear.

So I guess the Face's mask would scare someone, and now I know it would be most likely me.

This is the final posting from Sparky Watts #1, 1942.

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 Number 901


The Skyman and the killer rain


As promised, this is the Skyman story from Sparky Watts #1, 1942.

The Skyman, written and co-created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Ogden Whitney, had a good run during the 1940s. I think the Skyman was a cut above many of the heroes of the time, and it was because of the creative crew. Idea-wise, the Skyman is a mixture of several aviation strips with that rich playboy-as-hero we saw so much of in early comic books.

I like these early Skyman adventures because of Whitney's clear ink line, his careful composition and above-average drawing. He kept his distinctive style his whole career, as any Herbie fan will tell you. Whitney's life was something of a tragedy; he was reputed to be an alcoholic, and when his wife died he went around the bend and was evicted from his apartment. The widow of ACG editor Richard Hughes said Whitney died in the early 1970s.

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My Sea Hunt Memory

A longtime buddy posts about the Sea Hunt comics put out by Dell in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sea Hunt was a TV show that ran from 1957-1961, and longer in reruns (which was where I encountered it). It featured Lloyd Bridges as a scuba diver; I seem to recall that one or two of his sons also appeared on the show occasionally.

I don't have any recollection of any specific episodes of the show itself, but in 1964 my mom took me and my sister to the New York World's Fair. My best memory at that fair was seeing a guy wheeling several baskets full of strawberries. Being a little wise-ass I asked him if he had any free samples, and no kidding he gave me a humongous strawberry! Better still, when my sister demanded that I share it with her, Mom said that since I was the one to ask for it, I could have it all.

Anyway, there was a Sea Hunt exhibit at the World's Fair and since I'd seen the show on TV, I wanted to check it out. It was basically a scuba diver in a giant glass tank, with Lloyd Bridges (on tape) narrating the story of a dive that suddenly went awry. A giant octopus attacked him!

Well, in the tank, the diver grabbed a very fake-looking plastic octopus and pretended to grapple with it. The whole thing was very cheesy. Okay, big deal, right?

Except that even as I was griping how fake it was, I realized that only a year or two earlier I would have been enthralled, and oddly that made me feel a little sad. Not at my earlier self for having been a credulous little kid, but at my (then) current self for being unable to suspend disbelief. It was an odd thing; I realized I was growing up and getting just a tad more sophisticated, and it was a little dismaying.

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The Undying Brain

How about another tale from the April 1951 issue of Adventures into the Unknown #18, and because it's been awhile since we've had a multi-post theme around here, this will be the start of a bunch of bloody brain stories to gently carry us out of February 2011.

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Frew #1593 - Walker's Ride

 Writer: Claes Reimerthi
Artist: Sal Velluto

This comics is scanned & edited by Kit Walker.

Sharing after additional editing. Enjoy!

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Super-Swipes #7: The Olympics

As I have mentioned in the past, Mort Weisinger operated on the assumption that his readership turned over completely every seven years, and so he had little compunction about swiping stories from that long ago. Here's an example that fits the time pattern precisely:


Action #220 is the September 1956 issue, while Action #304 is the September 1963 issue. Note in particular that in the earlier story, DC was capitalizing on a current event, as 1956 was an Olympic year, while in 1963 the games were a full year away.

The stories are very similar as you can see from these opening panels:


On the next page, things do diverge a bit; in Action #304, Lana Lang happens along in her helicopter and is pulled into space along with Superman, whereas in Action #220 Superman travels alone. There turns out to be an important reason for this difference.

In both stories, a scientist from an alien world has sent out the attraction ray to bring Superman to his planet for the Interplanetary Olympics. In both stories, the prize is the same:


That's rather interesting in that one of the promises of nuclear power back in the 1950s was that it was supposed to be ridiculously inexpensive; in fact the claim was that it would be too cheap to bother metering. That certainly didn't prove to be the case.

In both stories, Superman performs very poorly:


But Weisinger (and writer Leo Dorfman) do have a substantial change in Action #304 to the Action #220 ending (tentatively credited at the GCD to Edmond Hamilton). In the original, Superman discovers that the top contestant, Bronno, is a robot, and that the reason for his own weakness in the stadium is that a block of Kryptonite was used in its construction.

In the revised version, Superman was intentionally losing, because he caught onto the fact that the games were rigged. It turns out that the contestants and the scientist who had brought him to the alien world were actually crooks, hoping to tap Superman's powers and use them to evade the law. Naturally, Superman didn't intend to help them, and in fact the story ends with the interplanetary police arresting the trio.

This also reveals why Lana was brought along with him. In the original, Superman was puzzled by his own weakness, but with the revised ending Lana had to be the one expressing surprise. Note in particular that in the panel where Superman's climbing out of the water, that he carefully avoids lying. "I'm doing what I can," not "I'm doing the best that I can."

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Number 900


Watts this? Sparky Watts hits the hay with Hitler!


Part 2 of Sparky Watts #1 from 1942 finds Sparky deep in Germany and deep in trouble. You know you're in trouble when you wake up in the morning and the face you see next to you on the pillow is Adolf Hitler.

See yesterday's posting for the first part of the story, and more about Sparky Watts.

On Wednesday I'll show you the Skyman strip by Ogden Whitney from this comic book, and on Friday we'll wrap it up with The Face by Mart Bailey. Columbia Comics, which published Big Shot Comics, Sparky Watts, The Face and Skyman, had a trio of winners with those characters, at least for the better part of the 1940s, because they were all gone by 1950.

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