Number 820

Hooded Menace

I don't know whether the Hooded Menace (aka "the Fun Club"), told in this 1951 Avon one-shot comic* under their Realistic Comic imprint, was an actual gang, or strictly fictional. Various supremacist groups have been active in the West and Pacific Northwest, even recently. The Hooded Menace is set in the early 1900s.

As they spread their lawless terror these groups engendered a lot of popular fiction. Paperback books used to put these goofballs on the covers and it was probably good for a few sales. Just reaching onto my paperback shelves I've come up with at least one:

Louis Ravielli, a competent artist whose work shows up in comics of the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, did the art chores on The Hooded Menace, including the inside cover, and presumably the cover as well.

*I don't believe any other publisher did what Avon did. They would name a comic after the lead story, as in Phantom Witch Doctor, then use some inventory crime or horror stories to pad out the comic book. In the case of The Hooded Menace there's a true crime story about Mad Dog Coll and a private eye tale to back up the title feature.

Number 82


The Dead Who Walk


Comic book companies usually try to capture readers' attention and get them to keep coming back to ongoing titles. This comic, The Dead Who Walk, under the imprint Realistic Comics, is an unnumbered, one-shot title.

The Dead Who Walk was released in 1952 as part of the horror comics boom of the era. It must've sold pretty well because it's not an uncommon title to find.

The artwork for The Dead Who Walk is credited by the Grand Comics Database to Joe Orlando, pencils and inks.

The story moves at a breakneck pace. For such a short story there are a lot of characters: Kent, his fiancée, Anne, her brother Jack, Dr.French, a "man of cold, scientific logic," and the evil brothers who are stealing bodies, George and Walt Bacon. That isn't even counting the named corpses animated by the pair of body snatchers: Juan Fernandez, Foley the mechanic, Torelli the importer…talk about packing a lot into a small space! The story, which concerns "egos," (i.e., "souls") jumping from body to body, reads like a weird menace pulp magazine tale of the 1930s and '40s, where plots like this were common. A Realistic Comic it might have been, but realistic it wasn't.