Heck of a way to get someone to their bachelor party.
Keen Detective Funnies #19
Centaur Publishing (April, 1940)
Continuing to go through the comics and see what will continue and what won’t in the new schedule. The last issue was something of a mix, and this issue is missing a few pages both at Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comics Museum, which had an outage earlier this week but is back and running. I wish my other preferred scan site was so I could read more Malibu Ultraverse comics, but nothing I can do about that. Losing that is what convinced me to curb my schedule and get other projects going.
Now if I could only get other projects going.
The Masked Marvel
This story is missing the first few pages, but they’re old comics. The fact that we can recover this many is amazing given the times this managed to survive from. A mobster gets out of jail just as his old boss is shot. Another man convinces him to take over, and the Masked Marvel…doesn’t do much of anything. He has a fair reason, mind you. He’ll let the crooks take out each other and then comes up with a plan to snag the rest. He’s more concerned about innocent people not getting hurt. It’s fair. I kind of wish he hadn’t shown himself in the end. I kind of like the idea of the crooks not knowing a masked hero stopped them. Might be a concept to explore.
Spark O’Leary: Radio Newshawk
An inventor comes up with an invisible suit and foreign spies try to steal it. Spark, who was covering the suit you can’t see for his radio broadcast–you know, the thing without visuals–gets caught up in reclaiming it and saving the professor. Too bad everything gets lost in a fire, but I guess The Invisible Hood didn’t need the competition, anyway. It’s okay, but I blame the times for it not reaching full story potential.
Dean Masters, DA by Claire S. Moe
So if I can read the slightly faded text correctly, this set of stories is set in Bay City. We don’t usually get locations for the heroes in this story unless they’re international crimefighters like the Masked Marvel. Even then we don’t always know where he is. The plot is actually pretty good. Dean wins re-election as district attorney just as a mobster tries to use his little brother’s gambling debt to control the DA. He has other plans, and he’s pretty clever about it. The presentation, however, is just kind of dull. Again, I blame the times and the page count, but I review the results and this could have been better.
Two notes before we continue: the scans from Comic Book Plus available as of this writing start shifting between color, black & white, or all red by this point in the images. Also, there’s an odd little section between comics. “How To Be An Amateur G-Man” by Fred Woods might have meant well between the gangs of the period and World War II, but while Fredrick Wertham was worried about people emulating the crooks in this story, this was probably the unsafer option.
Captain Forsyth & Sergeant McClain: Spy Hunters by L Field
The battalion is called to join the war. Forsyth is taken from his unit and joins an intelligence group trying to get control of an enemy occupied village to get their plans. McClain is so out of the story that Forsyth takes over partway through, meaning even the narrator gets kicked out. Otherwise it was a darn good war story. It’s the closest thing this comic has come to actually hunting spies…by making Forsyth a spy. Oops.
Dan Dennis: FBI by Sam Gilman
I’m starting to realize “Dan” was a popular hero name in the Golden Age, with or without a superhero costume. A notorious spy group is operating in town, so Dan and Tick have to stop them. The spies are clever, though I question just how the information was (literally) wrung from a flower in that manner. Still, it was an interesting bit of espionage.
We aren’t getting any gag strips this issue. I’m certainly not complaining. Our next bit of short strips is “Clever Clues”. Can you solve the one-panel mysteries without turning the comic around? Can you turn the comic around on a computer monitor? Not that they had those back then…
TNT Todd: Ace G-Man
A crime syndicate called the 1000 And 1 are after Todd. Why him specifically? His name’s in the title. The three men in charge dress like the KKK (but they’re not) and love to exposite about their shared leadership. The story won’t pay off until next issue, which unfortunately will take longer to get to under the new schedule. Sorry, folks, but it’s not like I’m stopping you from reading ahead. The story’s kind of stiff and so’s the art (I know, my house is made of glass), and there’s not much of it there.
The Eye Sees by Frank Thomas
I don’t think I’ll ever accept this story in this particular comic. Yes, the one that had invisibility suits a few stories ago and just gave us hooded hoods that weren’t the Invisible Hood. It just feels out of place to see the Eye take down a group of insurrectionists after they kidnap a newspaper boy they think might have overheard their plans to blow up the offices of the Unamerican Affairs committee (before the damage McCarthy did to it). The Eye tricks them with the boy’s help. It just seems kind of silly overall.
Dean Deaton: Scientific Detective: “Dilemma Of The Deep” by Harry Francis Campbell
We’ve changed Dean’s title to something that doesn’t sound made up. The Conqueror and Dean both race for the radium from the villain’s plane last story…and that’s all I can really tell you. The story gets cut off because they don’t have those pages to scan. So I’m missing the beginning and the end of the comic.
overall
We have most of the comic at least. It’s a better mix than last time, so I’m adding it to the continue reading list. Of course, I’m not sure we call this “Funnies” since the gag comics were mercifully removed in favor of short stories but still worth reading. Maybe someday we’ll find the missing comics like they’re finding new Doctor Who episodes.
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