Number 2172: Captain Flash and the monster from the mirror

Captain Flash had a short run for a small publisher, Sterling. His first issue was published in 1954, before the Comics Code was implemented, and the subsequent three issues have Code seals on them. I believe that some publishers were looking to find titles that would sell after they couldn’t publish horror comics. (Sterling published one with the title Tormented, a title dropped under the Code.) None of the superheroes, including Captain Flash, lasted very long. It took another year and yet another Flash (no relation to Captain Flash), the Silver Age revival of the Golden Age Flash, to finally start turning out successful superheroes.

Captain Flash, created by Martin Smith and artist Mike Sekowsky, had another of those superhero origins that we in the real world know would kill a person. In this case a massive dose of radiation. The Captain also had another of those familiar young boys following him; a kid had no superpowers at all.

In this story from issue #1 (1954), Captain Flash encounters a being from the mirror. It ends with a promise from Captain Flash to continue the fight. He does, in issue #2, but my source is damaged so I don’t want to show it. Suffice it to say Captain Flash is in the same predicament at the end of that chapter, also. And Mirror Man does not appear in #3 or #4. He must still be out there. Maybe in your mirror.

I also noticed the Captain Flash logo bears some similarity to the later logo for DC’s Flash. Just saying.

Number 2047: Every good criminal enterprise must start somewhere

 As long as heroin has been illegal there have been smugglers bringing it across borders. The tactics used by the gang in “‘H is for Heroin” seem crude by today’s standards, but the smugglers have gotten much better over the decades since this “Drug Racket Exposed!” — as the cover banner calls it — in Down With Crime #3, in 1952. The good guys are still using undercover cops to infiltrate the gangs. The gangs have gotten very sophisticated, and much more deadly.

The story was drawn by Mike Sekowsky. The Grand Comics Database doesn’t guess at an inker or a writer.

The publisher was Fawcett, a company which also published a full line of magazines and paperback books, besides comic books. Crime has always been big business, whether writing about it, showing it in popular media, including novels, television and the movies, or being a criminal (not advised).

Number 1981: Here comes the Sun Girl!

Sun Girl was one of a handful of female superdoers that Timely/Marvel Comics published after World War II. As mentioned in Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, Sun Girl’s powers were ill-defined, even though she had a three-issue run of her own title, and appearances in that publisher’s flagship title, Marvel Mystery Comics.

In this episode, from Marvel Mystery Comics #89 (1948), some odd-looking phantoms appear on the streets of New York, and Sun Girl is drafted to go after them. They have already cost one man his life, but plucky as she is, she goes into their dimension after them.

The Grand Comics Database lists Mike Sekowsky and Carl Burgos as artists. With this issue Marvel Mystery had just a couple of issues left to go before cancellation. The core group, Human Torch, Captain America and Sub-Mariner were still appearing in the title, but the comic book that had launched the publication company that later became Atlas Comics and then Marvel Comics, was gone before the 1950s began.

Number 1694: One awful night

“One Awful Night With a Fiend,” from Ace’s Hand of Fate #10 (1952), is about a director of snuff films. I remember reading an article in the 1970s about snuff films, which some thought at the time to be an urban legend. Perhaps someone in Hollywood read the same article or heard the same legends. It was the plot of at least a couple Hollywood movies (8MM with Nicolas Cage, for one.)

My remembered '70s article was written in the days before video tape for consumer use became common, and before the Internet and digital media. With those technologies if people can think of it, they can do it. We have had sickening examples of  real snuff films on the Internet — hooded, homicidal monsters beheading innocent people for political purposes.

So where was I? Oh yeah. This 63-year-old comic book story about snuff films, drawn by Mike Sekowsky and Vince Alascia.

**********

My interest in crime* comics grew out of the furor in the early '50s, just as I was becoming a regular reader of comic books. In a perverse way all of the shouting from the pulpits and the “experts” giving example after example of the dangerous effects of comics made me curious. I was drawn to Doc Wertham’s Seduction Of the Innocent in a way he could not have imagined: I used it and its references to “bad” comics to put out want lists of what I was most curious about.

John Adcock, who does the excellent blog (much recommended), Yesterday’s Papers, has posted a short history of Gershon Legman and his own war against comic books.  Legman was known as a crank, in both his writing and personal life, but his conclusions about comic books are thought-provoking. It is just that we have to consider the source.

The article is “Gershon Legman Vs the Crime Comic Books.

Crime comics were assumed to be aimed at children. That demographic has parents and teachers and other guardians of the interests of minors, and they became alarmed by all of the negative press about the effects of comic books on young minds. If you go back to some of my postings of crime comics you will see many examples of some of the worst, including some of the most alarming panels, sure to have attracted the attention of anyone leafing through their childrens’ comic book collection during that era.

I have said this before: nowadays, with all that is available in movies, on television, and lord help us, the nightly news programs, these comic books, now over 60 years old, seem almost quaint. My showing them is part and parcel of that fascination I formed back in the fifties from all of the strident voices raised against what I saw as a fun and relatively harmless hobby — collecting comics.

It is also fair to say that comics weren’t all that were singled out by critics. But the rest of the sex, crime and sleaze publishing of the time were ostensibly read by adults. A cover like this, of a prose magazine aimed at adults, devoted to true crime stories, doesn’t seem all that far removed from a comic book cover. 

The same formula used in the comics applies: the promises of illicit thrills, violence and sex await you if you plunk down your money for this publication.


*Horror comics, also, but for the sake of this essay I’ll stay on the subject of crime comics.

Number 1402: Don’t let me kill again!

This story from the Standard Comics 1953 issue of Who Is Next #5 (actually #1 — and only issue) is inspired by a real-life case. In 1946 Chicago a message was left behind at a crime scene:

Click on the picture for a short article on Heirens, which includes a two-page Life magazine article from 1946 about the case.

The so-called Lipstick Killer was caught and identified as William Heirens. Heirens died in prison at age 83, after serving the longest term of any inmate in the U.S.

In this story, drawn by Mike Sekowsky and an unknown inker, ugliness is the motive. A poor homely schmuck from a dysfunctional home kills beautiful girls because they are repelled by his looks. I’ve always found plots like that kind of cheap. If that was a motive for murder there wouldn’t be anyone left.

Number 446


To know the secret of the Black Dungeon is to die...


"Black Dungeon" is from 1951, Mystic #2. The Atlas site, www.atlastales.com, says the artist is Mike Sekowsky.

I owned Mystic #2 until about 2000 when I sold it on eBay. Ever do that? Sell something and immediately kick yourself for doing it? I've done it too many times. My bum is sore from those self-kicks. I felt lucky to find the story in one of the Marvel reprint books of the '70s, Beware #8, 1974.

I like the splash panel, although it doesn't have anything to do with the story, nor does the original 1951 cover, but in its own right the story is pretty good.