(Lightning Comics v2 002, 1941)
The Green Hood Gang, who are unsurprisingly a gang who wear green hoods (and please note the rare and stylish nose cutouts on those numbers), make their debut by barging in and robbing the Raven after he himself had just gone to the trouble of holding up the guests of a party at the home of retired gangster Joe Russo.
From there, the Green Hoods embark on a crime spree so ambitious in scope that Police Chief Lash is compelled to set aside his personal crusade against the Raven and team up with him to hunt them down.
For most of this story I had assumed that the leader of the Green Hood Gang would turn out to be Joe Russo, coming out of retirement and starting out by robbing his own party guests, and I suspect that the writer of this comic was also of this opinion right up until they got to page eight out of ten, at which point the men under the hoods - previously very clearly regular American gangsters - are revealed to be Native South Americans. Further investigation by Lash and the Raven reveals that these men are dupes who have been promised that the funds they are stealing are to be put toward the construction of a temple in their homeland, but who are really working for a former bootlegger named Larue.
While I wouldn't call the Joe Russo version of this story very original or exciting, the Larue reveal is so out of left field that I am left baffled and bamboozled. If I can't trust a comic book writer 85 years ago, just who can I?
Categorized in: Colours (Green), Generica (Gangs), Objects (Hoods)
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