Number 2101: Thunderfist punches again

Canadian fans of American comic books, in color, replete with dozens of superheroes punching bad guys and enemies of Democracy, lost access to those books with governmental decisions on wartime exigencies. Comic books just weren’t considered important enough to be imported during those years. So Canadians grew their own comic book industry on a tighter budget than Americans, putting out comic books in black line, the so-called Canadian Whites. Active Comics was one of the wartime titles, with its own superhero, Thunderfist. You can read about Thunderfist in a posting from this past February by clicking on the link beneath this story.

Murray Karn, still a teenager when he drew Thunderfist, did a fair job with the artwork, although there are some Flash Gordon swipes here and there (common in American comic books, also). The story, by E.T. LeGault, commits the same sin as many American comic books, by telling us in captions what we are looking at in pictures. It also feeds into wartime xenophobia with a caption about “foreign-looking men” — but that came from the insecure times in which it was created.

In this story I like the giant robot. As you regular Pappy readers know, I am drawn to stories with robots, and also gorillas. Maybe it came from watching the cheapo/ultra cheeseball Robot Monster movie when I was a kid. They showed it several times on television when I was a youngster. I believe it permanently affected me.

From Active Comics #3 (1942):

Here is the Thunderfist story from Active Comics #2. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 2009: From north of the border: Thunderfist!

Thunderfist was a character created for Canadian comic books after American comics were banned from Canada as “non-essential imports” in the early days of World War II. Thunderfist was drawn by Murray Karn in an Alex Raymond-Hal Foster style. There are some crudities in the art, a problem shared by many American comics. Karn was young; he joined Bell Features of Canada when he was 18. After the war and the end of the Canada comics industry he emigrated to New York and had a career in advertising.

For economic reasons these early comics were printed with four-color covers and black line interiors, and are known as Canadian whites.

Thunderfist is described in an article on Karn in the website Southampton Artists by Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey: “. . . The artwork by Murray Karn made [Thunderfist] the slickest of all the Canadian costumed heroes. Thunderfist was actually Randy Steele, who worked tirelessly on strange electrical inventions. He created, for instance, ‘a bullet-proof uniform charged with hundreds of electric volts powerful enough to kill a dozen men at once’. Thunderfist featured an uncanny mythology of technology and weaponry, which he used as the keys to world salvation.”

From Active Comics #2 (1942):