MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 498: THE ROCKINGHAM BANDIT

(Big Shot Comics 016, 1941)

The Rockingham Bandit is a masked fellow who commits robberies and murders in the town of Rockingham (natch) who turns out to be a balloonist from a nearby circus who is framing another guy from the same circus in an attempt to steal his girl. Two items:

1) The frame works like this: the Rockingham Bandit does a crime and then leaves behind an item identifiable as belonging to the target. The Rockingham PD are apparently even dumber than your typical comic book cops and don't question the fact that this guy is doing crimes while seemingly shedding a constant stream of monogrammed items (he does have a weirdly large number of such items, though).

2) This is a Charlie Chan story and like all Charlies Chan comics (all Charlie Chan everything?) is pretty good! If you completely tune out everything that Charlie Chan says.