“Yesterday’s” Comic> Top Notch Comics #1

Yes, some adults do still play with the toy cars they collect. What’s wrong with that?

Top Notch Comics #1

M.L.J. Magazines, Inc. (December, 1939)

Yet another new Golden Age anthology for us to examine, folks. This (cover dated) year has given us a few. This one actually starts with an interesting story idea along the lines of the World Trade Center or me and Op-Center: Mirror Image, in that we didn’t expect certain events to happen, and yet they did. Meanwhile there are a bunch of other stories as well. Do any of them ever make a return? Let’s start reading and find out.

[Read along with me here]

The Wizard

Our first magical hero of the book, or rather a dude who invents all kinds of impossible things. That also works for the name (though his outfit is closer to Zatara, but both types of hero tend to be way overpowered in the Golden Age. “The man with the super brain” who stops all the plots against our government. Our hero’s real name is Blane Witney, supposedly a descendant of George Washington’s chief aid (making this a good one to review on July 4th), who has a brother in naval intelligence that gives him his missions. Apparently their family has a longer history of protecting America from enemies within and without in pretty much every war. Now the Wizard has to stop Jatsonia from blowing up Pearl Harbor. Could this be where Japan got their idea? Most of the story is the backstory of the Witney family in general and Blane specifically, making the actual adventure just kind of standard.We’ll have to see what later issues do with him.

Scott Rand In The Worlds Of Time by Eando Binder

“Eando”. Heck of a name. (UPDATE: Cornelius Featherjaw has some interesting trivia about that in the comments.) Scott is the assistant to Dr Joel Meade and pilot of Meade’s flying “time car”. If you can’t guess, it travels through time. Going to confuse a lot of people in the wrong time periods. For example, they go to ancient Rome and watch the Vikings attack the place. Scott decides to side with the Vikings for some reason. Personally I wouldn’t root for either side. The Romans didn’t do my people any favors but the Vikings are the might dragon riding warriors we see in more recent story. No heroes in this story. They take a viking survivor named Thor and a princess named Elda, accused of witchcraft in Egypt (she doesn’t look Egyptian)… so basically what if Bill & Ted were smart science guys instead of dumb rock dudes. After they teach them English they visit dinosaurs before going home. I wonder all these stories are more series set-up than a good standalone.

Swift Of The Secret Service

Our hero is Rex Swift, who solves a crime before the story starts and goes on vacation. If not for the fact that vacations are never relaxing in crime stories, and the dude killing his uncle for the insurance (and likes to call everyone “old fool”), this could have just been Rex visiting family and relaxing. Is Comic Book Plus’s scan missing a page or did the story really stop short just after Swift confronts the killer? At least this story isn’t just setting up the series.

Air Patrol: “Sky Raiders Of The Western Front”

This one follows Ben Johnson, an American pilot who decided to join the English Royal Air Force in World War II against the Nazis. This kind of thing actually did happen until America finally entered the war on its own. Now he wants revenge on the German who killed his friend when the two were kids…I’m guessing during the first World War? The dialog here is really bland and I guess the story is going to continue next issue even though there’s no cliffhanger. So we’re back to set-ups, but at least the other two stories managed to be interesting.

“Lucky” Coyne: Undercover Man

Interesting. I don’t cover the text stories for time, but Lucky here gets a text story and then a comic story. In the comic, Lucky and his assistant, Jean Markham, go in disguise. Not telling you as who because I linked to the comic, but you’d think any set-up would have been in the text story. However, this series set-up gives us a good story all the way through, making us follow people we don’t know is Lucky until the end. It was one of the better introductory stories in this book and the others should have taken note if they could have.

The Mystic

Ah, here’s the actual overpowered magic occult man hero. Pitting these guys against normal crooks is only interesting to see how they mess with the villains. No, wait, tricked again. He’s just a stage magician a fortune telling scam operation is mad at for exposing them and tries to kill them. The Mystic and his unnamed fiance manage to get away…and that’s it. No comeuppance for the villains, and nothing stopping them from trying again. Plus another magical hero fakeout, and no names for our heroes. This really didn’t do anything bad, but it didn’t do anything that great, either.

The West Pointer

Keith Kornell is another descendant of a great real world war hero, this time Andrew Jackson. His father was also in the battle of the Hindenburg Line, the second time that’s come up in this comic. No relation to the famous blimp outside of home location. Otherwise all we have is Keith being accepted to West Point and being totally awesome at everything because he studied and trained at a level you’d have to be Batman to improve on. Golden Age Batman, anyway. Today’s Batman would be ridiculously over-educated for West Point. That’s the story. He befriends a jealous upperclassman and that’s the story. Not very exciting.

One 1940s casual racism gag strip–I thought I should warn you–and sports trivia later and we get our next story.

Manhunters by Jack Cole: “Master Forgers”

The last story outside of one final gag comic. Dragnet meets 1940s CSI in this tale of how science foiled a check forgery operation, plus how the scam was done. Allegedly a true story, the names the were changed to protect the innocent.

overall

Maybe the next issue will be better without having to introduce so many series at the same time? I hope so, because the better stories didn’t try to hard to pilot the entire concept, though overall this was an interesting comic. We’ll see in later issues where this goes and how long we’ll continue.