Number 1910: Man (and heel) of Steel

Steel Sterling had a unique twist to the secret identity business...the superhero dressed in a suit and tie and pretended to be his own twin brother. One brother a superhero, the “twin” a private detective, and a heel with women.

I have shown Steel before, and the same things always bug me about the character. He jumped into a vat of molten steel to be come the Man of Steel. Steel was then hardened like steel rather than becoming a steel girder for a skyscraper.

Steel can fly, but has some unique powers: he can magnetize himself to a car so he can follow it (in the days before GPS tracking), and he can also tune into the radio by positioning his tongue to his teeth. Maybe for his amusement he could tune in The Shadow or The Jack Benny Show.

 I showed Steel Sterling’s origin story in 2011, and as a bonus, I am throwing in a story from Zip Comics #11. Just click on the thumbnails.

Number 1239: The inside joke

There’s an inside joke in this Steel Sterling story. Charles Biro wrote his buddy, Bob Wood, into the story as “Pig-Pan Wood.” His face, we are told on the wanted poster, “resembles that of a pig.” I wonder if Wood had any foreknowledge of this alleged joke, or what he thought of it.

About 15 years later Wood killed a woman in a hotel during an alcoholic binge. That tale is told in Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped, Crime Does Not Pay. It’s an excellent anthology of lurid stories from the Biro-Wood edited Crime Does Not Pay comic book, which had its own nefarious history. These pictures of Bob Wood and Charlie Biro are from the book:

If anyone had a pig-pan it wasn’t Wood.

I found a real Pig-Pan — the resemblance is striking, you must admit — while surfing through some local mugshots. Yes, I entertain myself, not only by reading comics, but gawking at ID photos of people who end up in jail with their pictures posted on the Internet. The man whose photo this is was charged with “failing to register as a sex offender.”

From Zip Comics #11 (1941), by Joe Blair and Charles Biro:

Number 1074


Man of Steel


Monday we had a story set in MLJ Comics' transition period from superheroes to Archie Comics, and today we reach back to MLJ's beginnings.

In his early days Superman was known as the "Man of Tomorrow" and MLJ's Steel Sterling was the Man of Steel. Sterling debuted a couple of years after Superman, in Zip Comics #1. Superman later became the Man of Steel.

Steel Sterling, as you'll see in his origin story from said Zip Comics #1, 1940, had a reason for being the Man of Steel. He jumped into a vat of molten steel and came out a superhero. I do not recommend you try this, but in comic books I guess it's as likely an origin as Superman arriving on earth as a baby from Krypton, or Eel O'Brien falling into a vat of chemicals and becoming Plastic Man.

The story is credited by the Grand Comics Database to Abner Sundell, and the artwork to Charles Biro, who later rose to fame (and infamy) by creating Crime Does Not Pay.*












*There is a text story in Zip Comics #1 with art by a young Mort Meskin, author uncredited. It's about the notorious kidnapper/murderer William Edward Hickman, executed in 1928 for a horrible mutilation killing of a child. It reads like something Biro would have used later in Crime Does Not Pay. When reading several online articles about Hickman I saw his victim was twelve years old, not eight as this two-pager says. Nowhere else but in this article did I read anything about Hickman taking a really long time to die on the gallows, while witnesses stood around watching him fight the noose by using his neck muscles. Did that actually happen, or is this some fever dream by a comic book writer?

Number 279


The Twisted Mr. Twisto


There's no secret to Charles Biro's approach to comic book writing. Focus on the bad guys. Villains are intrinsically more interesting that goody two-shoes good guys. The last time I showed classic Biro was a Daredevil story in Pappy's #229.

Biro's best covers are classics of pulpish sleaze. The cover to MLJ Comics' Zip Comics #9, November 1940, from which this Steel Sterling story is scanned, is a good example. Headless men, their brains in see-thru tubes, are having a punch-up with Steel. There's no story like that, but as a cover it's worth a lot of sales.

As for Mr. Twisto, the bad guy from this circus-based story, he's a villain firmly in the Biro tradition.

******

Harry Shorten was involved with MLJ Comics from its earliest days. He worked on Archie and other features. He is probably best known to a later generation of comics fans for publishing Tower Comics and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He even published the infamous Midwood Books. With Al Fagaly, also an MLJ alumnus, he created the There Oughta Be A Law! newspaper comic strip, which ran from 1944 to 1984. Like Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time, the strip that inspired Law, Shorten's strip was a combination of irony and funny names. In these examples check out "Cringely," "Glandula," "Polyp," etc. These strips come from a 1969 Belmont Books collection.