MEDIA IN COMICS 009

I hope you like media from comics, because I certainly do and I am going to keep doing these.

Comics:

Bullied bootblack Timothy Smith just wants to buy a comic book with his last nickel and he has a whole selection of Fox Features titles to choose from, but what draws his eye is a book called The Land of Magic, a comic so fantastical and majestical that he wishes himself away to live inside its pages the next time he gets beaten up. (Green Mask v1 007, 1941)

We never actually see the Colossal Guy comic book, but this Colossal Guy superfan is evidence enough that he is a character with get-up and go. Enough to inspire Captain Bruce Blackburn to invent his alter ego of the Destroying Demon, in fact. (Feature Comics 039, 1940)

"Ripley's Believe it or Not" had enough cultural caché in its time that there are innumerable plays on it in comics, just as there were imitators in real life. These mostly differ by how successful a play on the name they have: "Don't You Doubt It," as consulted by Eve Colby as part of one of Spy Smasher's cases, is about average. (Whiz Comics 005, 1940)

Magazines:

I have a lot of affection for the concept behind Jim Dolan, two-fisted magazine editor, who solves crimes and then writes about them for Daring Detective Magazine. The magazine itself is fine. (Slam-Bang Comics 001, 1940)

Movies:

We never learn more about The Big Snatch other than that it is a mystery thriller. The big joke here is of course that the star of the film is comics creator Joe Devlin. (Smash Comics 014, 1940)

Likewise, we never learn much about the Western Hearts of the Range other than the fact that it starred the blowhard Sheriff O'Toole. (All-American Comics 021, 1940)

Melody of 1941 here is likely a play on Broadway Melody of 1940 and as such a musical, and stars a couple of classic mixed-up name actors in Tyrone Taylor (Tyrone Power/ Robert Taylor) and Myrna Rogers (Myrna Loy/ Ginger Rogers). (Detective Comics v1 046 1940)

We have no information at all about Old Bill. It has a pretty big premiere for a movie with such a drab name, so it must have something going for it. (Action Comics v1 028, 1940)

Oriental Horror is the name of the hit movie that made Barry Moore's name just before he quit acting, moved back to Center City to become a police scientist and adopted the identity of the Scarlet Seal based on the yellowface character he played in the movie. I would venture a guess that the film is not considered an enduring classic in the present day DC Universe. (Smash Comics 016, 1940)

She Made Him Love Her! is the name of a romantic movie attended by Sisty and Dinky, aka the daughter of the future Red Tornado and the brother of teen cartoonist Scribbly, aka the future Cyclone Kids, after the former falls in undying love with the latter. And to be fair to her the duo are canonicall later married, so this is a proven tactic. Eventually.

The movie itself might be loosely based on the film They Knew What They Wanted, or I might be grasping at straws. (All-American Comics 012, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO 027: THE DESTROYING DEMON

(Feature Comics 039-040, 1940-1941) 

This is a bit of a complicated one. So: "Captain Bruce Blackburn - Counterspy" was a strip that started in Feature Comics 032 in media res with the cover of the titular Captain and his colleague Lieutenant Jackson having been blown. The two then fake their deaths and a government plastic surgeon alters their appearances so that they are virtually identical, thus allowing them to operate as an incredibly efficient spy team with a flawless ability to generate alibis.

Then, in Feature Comics 038, Blackburn, posing as a man named Black, joins the Un-American Band, a thinly-veiled analog of the German-American Bund, a group whose shadow loomed much larger in the pages of the comics than they ever did in history. And in Feature 039, Blackburn, as Black, encounters this guy:

"Colossal Guy" here does two things: 1. prove my thesis that kids playing super-heroes in comics is always great and 2. give Bruce Blackburn a good idea.

See, the Un-American Band, being pseudo-Germans, are all intensely superstitious. This is a known thing about Germans and pseudo-Germans! Thus, the simple application of a cheap devil costume and a bungee rig is enough to throw their entire plot into confusion.

Sadly, Blackburn only wheels out the Destroying Demon (AKA the Destroying Devil, AKA the Avenging Demon) rig one more time, to contend with a force of crypto-Nazi dwarf saboteurs posing as refugee orphans. He does borrow a technique from the Jay Bird and dangle perilously from a plane for this one, though. I really wish he'd kept it up and that this strip had just kept adding more and more layers: government agent who faked his own death and was surgically altered to look like another guy posing as a bundist who is also a super-hero and then the other guy ends up posing as his arch-enemy and then they both pretend to be space aliens battling for control of Earth's water and then...

The Destroying Demon is one of the few Golden Age hero identities that I wouldn't like to see as a returning legacy character. Rather, I want it to reappear as an officially sanctioned super-hero identity for government agents in the DCU - just agent after agent complaining about having to dress up like a pantomime devil in order to infiltrate a super-hero fight club or whatever. Fun!