(Super Spy 001, 1940)
A series of bank robberies rock the community of Unnamed Comics Book City, USA. Witnesses place local physician Doc Anderson at the scene of each crime, but when detectives look into it they find that he has a terrible alibi for each one: he was home alone. It sounds like an open and shut case, but another robbery occurs while the police are at his house. Just what is happening? Could the fact that the title of this comic is "the Twin Terror Case" play into it?
The cops give up on Dr Anderson as a suspect following the alibi thing, even though they subsequently capture a zombie-like double of him at the scene of one of the crimes. The alibi is just that good. Fortunately for the forces of law and order, while Anderson might have figured out the ultimate crime hack he did not reckon with boorish local jock Gary Ross and his dislike of being snubbed by a casual acquaintance. Ross follows Anderson to an old abandoned house, where he witnesses the creation and destruction of an Anderson duplicate (this seems to be the necessary process to destroy the Anderson in police custody too, if you're wondering).
Ross beats up Anderson until he spills the beans: while attempting to earn more money by inventing something cool, he figured out how to create a mentally-controlled duplicate of himself and immediately hit upon the idea of using it to rob banks. As is the custom, I now present my problems with this scheme:
1. Obligatory screed about how this is a very poor use of this technology. Depending on just how organic and subject to human frailties these duplicates are they could represent either a significant or world-changing advance in human labour. Heck, even if they are 1:1 duplicates of the human body, a human body that can go into a dangerous situation with minimal concern for its safety would revolutionize mining, manufacturing, space travel if range was no impediment... so many industries.
2. Anderson keeps the machine in an old abandoned house for some reason instead of his own basement. I know that for plot reasons it's so that Gary Ross can follow him to a second location, but it's still a very strange thing to do.
3. The duplicates are so perfectly useful as alibi-generators that Anderson gets too invested in generating alibis rather than getting away with his crimes. If he'd only put a disguise on the duplicate and then made sure to establish an actual alibi rather than sitting at home while a double of him maches into a bank holding a sign that says "DOCTOR ANDERSON?" then he might just have gotten away with it.
Unfortunately for humanity as a whole and people in high-risk jobs in particular, Gary Ross is a philistine and a thug and smashes up the duplication machine because it is "trouble-making." Also I'm no fancy big city lawyer, but I think that this might mean that Anderson is going to walk free once the prosecution is asked to prove this wild duplication theory that they are advancing.
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