Sunday, October 29, 2023

MINOR SUPER-HERO 042: THE BLUE TRACER

(Military Comics 001-016, 1941-1942)


The Blue Tracer is your standard guy-with-a-super-vehicle hero: "Wild Bill" Dunn, an American engineer serving with the British in Ethiopia, finds himself the only survivor of an ambush by a race of would-be world-conquering superhumans called the M'bujies. He and Anzac Boomerang Jones team up to build the multienvironment supercraft the Blue Tracer and foil the M'bujie plans (by killing them all).

There seems to be a consensus online that the vehicle is the Blue Tracer and Bill Dunn is not but I will not be joining them in that: there is a long tradition of super vehicle pilots sharing a name with their craft and anyone who goes to the trouble of putting together an outfit as ostentatious as Dunn's is deserves to have a code name.


The Blue Tracer itself just might have the distinction of being the ugliest super vehicle I have ever seen - it looks like something that really was kitbashed together out of random WWII vehicles in a homemade workshop. It's so ugly, in fact, that I find it charming. 

I looked up whether it was ever referenced again and evidently one of the Freedom Fighters teams used a cool plane called the Blue Tracer. Booooooo! Bring back the ugly Blue Tracer! The Blue Tracer can't be cool.


Also charming: Boomerang Jones, Bill Dunn's Australian gnome of a sidekick. It is both weird and refreshing to encounter an Australian character in an era before the tropes of the accent were really embedded in the popular consciousness.

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