Number 2128: Firebrand zaps right out of the comics

There were two Golden Age characters named Firebrand: one from Quality Comics (see the link below) and one from Harry “A” Chesler. The Quality Firebrand lasted 13 issues in Police Comics, and the Chesler Firebrand made it for one issue of Yankee Comics. (There were reportedly more stories of the character in Harvey Comics later, but I have never seen them. According to the Public Domain Superheroes website, there is a question as to whether it is the same Firebrand as the one from Yankee.)

This Firebrand, from the aforementioned Yankee Comics #1 (1941). drawn by Charles Sultan, was a lineman who got zapped while working on a power line. He was taken into care by a professor who experimented and juiced him up good with electrics. All he had to do was clench and unclench his fists. And he could leave the ground by just jumping and the electricity made him airborne. Wow. He took care of the bad guys, and yet apparently no readers felt a tingle of electricity from the pages when they read about him. Or, perhaps since he appeared after the Quality Firebrand, Busy Arnold, Quality’s publisher, may have called Harry “A” and threatened to bring down some legal lightning bolts. At this late date nobody really knows, and this Firebrand is one of those one-and-done superheroes from early comic books.

Here is a tale of the Quality Firebrand from Police Comics #5, which I posted in 2013. It is included with a tale of a strange Batman, and a link to a Bad Batman. You have been warned!

Number 2025: “...to pop a copper”: Bulletman, Bulletgirl battle Black Spider

Here we go again: another story of a face-blind parent, who doesn’t recognize his own daughter while she is in her super heroine identity. And she doesn’t wear a mask, just a metal bullet-head helmet. Truly, it is easier to believe someone has super powers than they are unrecognizable to a parent or loved one.

Enough about that. At least the stories in Bulletman #1 (1941) were well drawn by Charles Sultan, a former pulp magazine artist, who went into comics in the late thirties. He continued in comics for years after the war, but eventually became a publisher of men's magazines. As David Saunders notes in his biography of Sultan, he may have been a front man for an organization needing someone with a clean record to go on record as being the publisher of magazines with sexual content.

Whatever. He had art talent. Sultan had excellent training from some top illustrators of the era, and for its time his comic art captures the sophisticated styling of artists such as Lou Fine and Reed Crandall.

Number 1818: Mr Murder

I suspect, not having read every pulp magazine and comic book ever published (although some days it feels like it), that the plot device of a rich person being threatened with murder by some demented villain for the purposes of extortion must have been common. It just doesn’t ring with originality. One of the most famous from the genre is the Joker’s introduction in Batman, when the Joker pulled off “the grinning death.” Mr Murder doesn’t go that far in this Bulletman episode, but the plot seems inspired by that, and probably numberless other stories before Batman.

Here’s a hint: when a story is only 8 or 9 pages long, every new, non-series character should be suspected of being the alter ego of the disguised, slouch-hatted villain. Not trying to spoil the story for you...I’m just sayin'.

The Grand Comics Database gives Charles Sultan credit for the artwork. The story is from Fawcett’s Master Comics #15 (1941):

Come back tomorrow, when I bring back the Thanksgiving Turkey Awards for the most oddball story I have read all year.

Number 1641: Do you believe in spooks?

It is October, and we lead up to Halloween with some spooky stories . First up is a tale of a ghost detective from Adventures Into the Unknown #4 (1949), then a two-pager about a sailor and a ghost.

“Specialist in Spooks” begins provocatively. The caption in the splash panel asks, “Do ghosts exist? We say NO.” It then goes on to tell its story without trying to disprove the existence of the supernatural. Personally, I say NO to whether ghosts exist, also. That doesn’t stop me from shuddering in the middle of the night — especially after reading ghost stories, then hearing mysterious noises from downstairs. As a human being I am hard-wired for a primitive superstition, deep inside my brain, that there might be something to those stories. It probably comes from ancestors of thousands of years in the past, huddling together around a nighttime fire or in a cave, fearful of the invisible world and things coming out of the darkness.

The Grand Comics Database attributes the art to Charles Sultan. Art on “St. Mary’s Spectre” is credited to Max Elkan.

Number 1621: The patriotic hero

Minute Man, the “One Man Army” was yet another hero wrapped in the American flag, jumping in to fight enemy agents and saboteurs. In this episode from Fawcett’s Master Comics #12 (1941), he does just that when he investigates who is causing experimental aircraft to fail.

From a historical point of view, a story like this, published less than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the global fray, shows an attitude that we would eventually have to go to war. With a hero like Minute Man we couldn’t lose!

According to the Grand Comics Database, the story is drawn by Charles Sultan.