Number 2055: Steel Fisticuffs

Steel Fist was another short-lived superhero, with five appearances in Blue Circle Comics. This is the origin story from issue #1 (1944). Blue Circle was one of those comic books that (at least to me) looked cobbled together with left-over material from somewhere. Those were the days of paper rationing, and anyone with a ration could get into the publishing business. Comic books were great sellers during World War II, often selling out their press runs.

Characters didn’t even have to be original. Steel Fist (Timothy Slade, steelworker) got his hand dipped in molten steel by Nazi saboteurs. That must have been the same magic that a few years earlier allowed Steel Sterling to get his whole body immersed in molten steel and come out invincible. Unlike Steel, Timothy didn’t get any other super powers, but  oh, baby! could he throw a wicked punch!

Henry Carl Kiefer is credited with creating Steel Fist. Kiefer was one of those older artists (born in 1890), who came into the comic book field in the thirties after working as an artist doing illustrations in pulp magazines for several years. H. C. Kiefer was familiar to me from issues of Classics Illustrated. He was also a journeyman who did artwork for many different comic book publishers. He died in 1957.

And speaking of Steel Sterling, here is his origin from Zip Comics #1. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 815

Maureen Marine

I believe Harold Delay (sometimes spelled DeLay) is the artist for this strip from the short-lived Blue Circle Comics. It's a well-drawn but silly feature from Blue Circle Comics #1. Unlike the Land Of The Lost story I showed you in Pappy's #706, this soggy saga is told straight-faced, without the whimsy of the EC children's comic.

Blue Circle Comics was one of a series of titles put out by Rural Home Publishing, who also did Blazing Comics.

Harold Delay was an old-time illustrator, working on book illustrations at the turn of the 20th Century, drawing for pulps in the twenties and thirties, then into comics for a time in the forties. I can't find any birth or death information on Delay, so if you know please tell me. He was one of a group of artists* who were working long before comic books existed, and whose drawing still reflected an earlier era. Maureen, for instance, looks like a girl out of a storybook from the pre-World War I era. In 1941 and '42 Delay did outstanding adaptations of Gulliver's Travels and Treasure Island in Target Comics, which fit his style well.

*Besides Delay I can think of H. (Henry) C. Keifer (who also had a strip in Blue Circle Comics #1), Alex Blum (sometimes under the name Alex Boon), H. (Harry) G. Peter, longtime Wonder Woman artist, and George Carlson (Jingle Jangle Comics).