Must be hard to shower with one of those. Is it waterproof? The hand, people.
Sarge Steel #1
Charlton Comics (December, 1964)
“Pearls Of Death”
CREATOR: Pat Masulli
SCRIPT: Joe Gill
ARTIST: Dick Giordano
Today we expand pre-DC Blue Beetle with other pre-DC acquisitions, with the other Charlton comics characters they picked up. I can only due the ones in public domain, but I don’t think that’s a problem with Charlton characters. When we get to the Marvel (Shazam) Family down the road it’s allegedly an issue, but that’s a problem down the line. You may know Sarge Steel today…and admittedly I don’t because I never followed the character…but what was he like back then?
Sergeant isn’t a rank, but his name, or that’s how it looks to me because I’m pretty sure “Captain Sergeant” isn’t a military rank. Steel lost his left hand in Vietnam, needing it replaced with a steel one. Now the man indirectly responsible comes into his life when a woman tries to hire the private investigator to save her father. He had pearls he brought from Vietnam, and Ivan Cheung, the Chinese soldier turned terrorist, grabbed him to steal them. Steel and the girl, Lin Ying, end up captured by Cheung’s men, but he manages to send them on a fake trek for the jewels while his secretary, Bessie, became worried about her missing boss and aware of Cheung’s history in crime and with Steel. She calls the CIA, whose timely intervention aids Steel in rescue both Lin and her father.
What they got right: Sarge Steel is definitely the ladies man PI character of the period, but with all the best qualities of the time. He’s not suave and sophisticated but he is a good man with an eye for the ladies, and of course the story ends with the hero getting the girl (who will probably disappear by the next story). His secretary is as smart as she is sexy, but she’s not a sexpot. She’s just naturally attractive. Steel doesn’t blame all Vietnamese for his lost hand, which we do see the origin of in a flashback.
What they got wrong: Although the odds of running into the guy he busted during the war, and whose goons were responsible for that lost hand, are kind of low. The story gets interrupted by two unrelated comic stories and an article about World War I.
What I think overall: I’ll be trying to go through the pre-DC Charlton characters in proper time order, but this is an interesting one to start out on. By this point DC was doing more superheroes again and less crime stories, so unless he was just part of the package, this seems like an odd choice. Maybe they wanted their own Dominic Fortune, a similar character over at Marvel? Whatever the case, I rather enjoyed this story and though I’m not usually a detective story fan, I may stick around for this one.
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