“Yesterday’s” Comic> Blue Beetle #51

You have to respect a villain who worked his varsity sweater into his costume. That takes effort.

Blue Beetle #51

Charlton Comics Group (August, 1965)

“Mentor The Magnificent”

WRITER: Joe Gill

PENCILER: Bill Fraccio

INKER: Tony Tallarico

no colorist, letterer, or editor credited…sucks to be those guys!

[Read along with me here]

Now Dan is teaching at a university. Boy gets around. One of his fellow professors, Professor Clugg, has built a robot that he can mentally control. He also is secretly attracted to his assistant, Miss Appleton, whom he doesn’t realize is into him as well, despite not being as handsome as Dan. Some girls are more into brains…no, Dan has those as well. Anyway, both of them notice how attached Dan is to the scarab, and so Clugg uses hypnosis to make Dan tell him all about it. He also tries stealing the scarab, but Dan gets it back and later that night swaps it with a fake for Mentor, Clugg’s robot, to steal instead before it attacks Fort Knox. Blue Beetle fights the robot and wins, possibly killing Clugg since his mind was in the robot.

Well this story is a mess. The plot is sound, but I’m starting to think Lucky Comics’ Beetle Girl is actually descended from this Dan despite sharing the last name spelling of the original. Dan makes it way too obvious the scarab means something to him, drops it in battle at one point, and is easily hypnotized into spilling his guts about it. (Funny thing is the comic also features an ad about how to learn hypnotism.) By the way, it’s also solar powered thanks to Ra the sun god. We get an explanation of his powers, but you know it’s just going to be whatever the writer wants like it has been since the Holyoke days. The art and action are okay for the time, and the jocks that picked on him are sorry for how they treated him after he dies, but that’s the only positives coming out of this story.

Since the format has allowed some extra time I’ll actually discuss the back-up story that has no credits. “Slight Error” has two astronauts headed for Venus but getting lost for a year, meeting some aliens who are convinced they’ll be friends because reasons, and helps them return to Earth. You can see why I don’t discuss the back-up stories.

Overall this run isn’t really impressing me. The character really hasn’t been good since the first Fox run, and I’m not sure how it lasted long enough to read Ted Kord. We’re only a few issues in (the weird numbering system makes it look longer) to the Charlton years and it’s not really off to a good start.