Saturday, July 2, 2022

MINOR SUPER-HERO 004: THE THREE ACES

(Action Comics 018-063, 1939-1943)


The Three Aces consist of Gunner Bill (blonde, bland), Fog Fortune (fat, Cockney - the kind of character who starts out 1% comic relief and increases by increments until he is unrecognizable. In this case he gets fatter and more faux-Cockney until his word balloons are up to 1/2 apostrophe) and Whistler Will (dark haired ladies man - more on him in a moment). They're fairly standard aviator type heroes except for a couple of things: they have a greater than average rate of running into stuff like lost civilizations and minor super-villains and they have Whistler Will.

Okay, maybe I'm bigging up Will a bit. For most of their adventures he's just your standard square-jawed lothario, but in Action Comics 022 they did a peek into his backstory and it made a big impression on me:


Whistler Will is some sort of feral desert child or fey spirit of the American Southwest or something, an implacable and free spirit of justice. He has a mystic othersense that tells him in this issue that his adopted sister is in trouble with enough advance notice to fly across the continent to help her. He does stuff like this fairly regularly and his mystic senses express themselves as eerie whistling. All of this is very cool. All of this is never referenced again.

Anyway, the Three Aces all fought in WWI so I guess I'll mark them as dead, with a dead? for Will because maybe he just went back to his home in the halls of Avalon or wherever.

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