I didn’t think they could make the helmet look worse. I underestimated their ability to screw it up.
The Peacemaker #4
Charlton Comics (November, 1967)
WRITER: Joe Gill
“The Fire World”
ARTIST: Pat Boyette
EDITOR: Dick Giordano
The Fighting Five: “The Card Carrier”
ARTIST: Monte & Bache
This might not matter in the archives, or hopefully even as it goes live, but at the time of writing this Sunday night, Comic Book Plus was having server issues where they store their images, including ads. The Digital Comic Museum doesn’t have the comic at all. So for the review I had to go to the same legally questionable site I get my Ultraverse comic scans to review. Hopefully by the time you read this the link goes to a page with actual scanned comics. At first I thought DC might have tried to pull them despite being in public domain like the other Charltons since they have done this with some of Billy Batson’s “Captain Marvel” adventures. That does not appear to be the case, but I thought I should warn you in the name of full disclosure. If they don’t fix it before I’m ready to go over the final issue, which the questionable site doesn’t have, we may have a hole in the reviews for awhile.
Christopher has given up his job as a peace emissary to focus on his science. His latest invention is a formula that protects the wearer from great heat. Mr. Blaze, a failed circus fire eater who is obsessed with fire and heat, steals a sample sent to a government laboratory and investigates a volcano with strange goings on to test it. He finds a race of lava men, and their shared love of heat makes him their leader as he opts to conquer the world. Blaze forces Peacemaker to make more of the formula and a plane he can use to being world conquest, but Peacemaker left a few flaws in both that allow him to save the day. The lava men return to their volcano and Peacemaker seals it with his “absolute zero generator” freezing gun. But is Mr. Blaze dead or will he be back?
Probably not in this series, but that’s for the best. Mister Blaze is a lame villain, a fire-eater who keeps burning himself but have a strange love of heat. That’s the best you have, Gill? The helmet, a special heat-resistant helmet he designed after Vulcan, the god of fire, looks dumber than his usual helmet and I wouldn’t have thought that possible. At one point, Peacemaker says that his powers are failing him, but he has no powers. The whole story is a mess.
As for the Fighting Five’s continuing adventure, Frenchy gets caught trying to tail the bad guys to their base. The kid who lost the card was found dead. Long story short, it turns out the publisher was actually an anti-commie zealot who wanted to force the Cold War to get hot by framing the liberal organization for attacking the conservatives and that the commies were involved. Most of which we’re told in exposition after the fact. This story ends on a terrible note. It’s kind of a mess as well. At least they didn’t spend the story questioning their lady member as being a commie still.
Overall this is a terrible issue and I almost wish Comic Book Plus wouldn’t get this comic back up to spare me from the last issue. I don’t think I’ll be that lucky because they don’t want their site to fail, but I wouldn’t miss not seeing how this ends. I still don’t understand what DC saw in this comic.
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