Captain Triumph, singular, is actually two characters, one living...one dead. Lance and Michael Gallant (appropriate last name for a super hero) are identical twins. They even share a birthmark on their wrists. Michael gets blown up by some Nazi saboteurs, and Lance swears vengeance. He is visited by the ghost of Michael, who tells him when there is some derring-do what they will dare to do to get vengeance against Nazis. Lance just rubs the birthmark and
voila! Lance now has Michael's powers, bequeathed to him by “The Fates of Greek Mythology” and becomes a superhero with the name Captain Triumph. I'm showing the origin story here, so you can see how it works. I notice that Michael doesn't get a funeral. He is dead, yet quick to reveal himself to Lance, explaining the new super hero job, and there is no mourning or a pretense of grieving for a dead brother.
Captain Triumph appeared in
Crack Comics for a few years, originally drawn by Alfred Andriola. Andriola’s career was resurrected a few times. He began as an assistant to Milton Caniff on
Terry and the Pirates, then got the job of doing the
Charlie Chan comic strip. Charlie Chan was a popular detective character of the time, but the comic strip only lasted a short time and if I’ve got this right, was cancelled after Pearl Harbor. Perhaps it was like today, when people don’t distinguish Asians from each other. Andriola then became an assistant on the Dan Dunn comic strip, which ended a year later. The day after it ended Andriola was back with Kerry Drake, a comic strip character in the Dick Tracy tradition that went on in newspapers until Andriola died in 1983.
The origin story of Captain Triumph is from
Crack Comics #27 (1943):
