NOTES - MARCH 2024

The Foot Test For Guns:

I sincerely can't believe we've found another person trying the Foot Test For Guns, the worst of all ways to see if a gun is working. (Big Shot Comics 004, 1940)

Kids Playing Super-Heroes:

Jibby Jones is a pretty weak sauce comic strip (seen here in comic book reprint, natch) but dang if I'm not intrigued by this Moon Man character. (Big Shot Comics 005, 1940)

Honours:

Jeff Cardiff, Spy-Chief saves Washington DC from being exploded by unspecified foreigners and is rewarded with the very official-sounding honour of "Greatest Espionage Achievement of the Year" by FDR himself! And is that J Edgar Hoover in the background? Probably! (Big Shot Comics 006, 1940)

Who is Lazy Ray?:

I've been reading Big Shot Comics from the Columbia Comic Corporation for the last week or so and I believe that I've spotted an in-joke. But who is the "Lazy Ray" referenced in the two panels? Both Spy-Chief (above) and the Face (below) are Mart Bailey joints, so it could be a personal joke of his or it could be a joke among the contributors of this magazine as a whole (like the seeming industry-wide joke of putting Gil Fox's name in as a reference at every opportunity - wish I'd though to screenshot those as I came across them). The only Ray associated with Big Shot that I can find is Ray McGill, who seems to have mainly done gag panels. Who can say but I shall be watching out for Lazy Ray going forward.

MORE LAZY RAY SIGHTINGS:

"the Face" (Big Shot Comics 011, 1941)

"the Face" (Big Shot 018, 1941)

Nova Scotia:

It's not like it matters to the plot but the action of this Marvelo story takes place largely on a beach on Cape Breton. (Big Shot Comics 013, 1941)

the Fate of Mu:

A fairly straightforward account of a Pacific continent sinking, with the fun added detail that it's because of Earth's lost second moon exploding. It's never actually called Mu and in fact it's Atlantis that gets namechecked, but a close reading of the relevant text suggests that the two continents merely sank at the same time, so Atlantis was also presumably moonstruck.

Really fond of these little bug-eyed guys, by the way. (Big Shot Comics 014, 1941)

Weed Propaganda:

Santy Claus:

To the extent that the Columbia Comic Corporation has a shared universe, Santa Clause is confirmed real in it. (Big Shot Comics 020, 1941)

Drawn Without Reference:

(Blackstone Super-Magic 001, 1941)

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!