Number 2410: Facing the Face

Years ago in this blog I criticized the Face’s mask. Why? I thought it was silly. I just didn’t think any criminals or enemy combatants in a war zone would fall over in a dead faint or be terrorized by a rubber mask. Some people disagreed with me, and now, after many years of looking at super heroes from the early years of comic books (1939-42) there were a lot of super heroes who wore sillier costumes, had sillier origins, or even worse, just copied other super powered or non-super costumed heroes. The Face’s mask, for a gimmick, was at least the only one that I have found so far, so I’ll give it credit for that.

The artwork was done by one of the top professional artists from that era, Mart Bailey. He was drawing comic books very early in a style more like a newspaper comic strip artist. When I look at this Face episode from Big Shot Comics # 3 (1940) I see a guy who was far ahead of many of his contemporaries in the field. He shared Big Shot with Ogden Whitney, who drew Skyman in a style that is also more professional than much of the early comic book artwork. (And Whitney kept that style for the rest of his career, until the late sixties at least.) I will also bless Big Shot Comics editor Vincent Sullivan for bringing us Sparky Watts by the off-the-wall Boody Rogers, who made a good counterpoint to Bailey and Whitney.

The Face story is credited to Gardner Fox.