Smash Comics #8 - pt. 4

Today we're picking up where we left off with Invisible Hood, still fighting his way through a modern medieval castle (a villain's favorite real estate!).

Here we see that objects being carried by the Invisible Hood are not themselves invisible.

We also get the first occurrence of the phrase "friendly ghost" in all of comics-dom. Take note, future Harvey Comics employees!

"Why, Kent - what are you doing here? And why are you also soaking wet, like I am? Say...you're not really the Invisible Hood, are you?" - Tom would say if he weren't a comic book character.

Brace yourself, because we have some really racist pages of Paul Gustavson's Flash Fulton to get through now. All you need to know is that Flash has come to the Amazon to find a missing explorer. Lots of people have come down here to search for Roger Hart, but none have succeeded. So maybe Flash can be forgiven for being suspicious when this native turns up as such a convenient guide.

It's bizarre how often South American natives are drawn looking like African natives in some of these early comic book stories. This is an example of what indigenous Amazonians looked like circa 1940.

Now one detail he got right I thought was wrong -- voodoo really is practiced in Brazil. It would be an imported religion, though, not something the indigenous cultures would practice.

Being a comic book, it should be no surprise Flash can speak with the native. The surprise is that Flash knows the native's tongue and the native isn't just speaking in broken English.

Brazil has states,not districts, and there is no Kitawa state in Brazil. "Kitawa" doesn't even look like a South American word and, indeed, the only Kitawa I can find is in Papua New Guinea!

Again, Paul is right on some details; there are/were cannibals in the Amazon.

"Hey, our guide just jumped overboard!"

"You think we should just let him go since he helped us get this far?"

"No, there's a chance he'll betray us. Let's both shoot him in the back!"

Okay, enough of that! I think you can guess that they used sound effects to startle the superstitious natives, ho hum.

Turning now to my second favorite feature, John Law, Scientective! In many ways, John Law is like a second draft of Harry Campbell's earlier character, Dean Denton (featured heavily in my repackaging of Funny Picture Stories, on sale now!). Just like how Dean had to figure out who his nemesis, The Conqueror, was, John is narrowing down which of 13 suspects is The Avenger.

And, along the way, we get some science lessons, like how to leave threatening messages on other people's windows.

Sometimes the science is a little shaky for a science-based hero. I mean, compared to the average golden age comic book story, this still reads like an issue of Scientific American. But I can't figure out how the short wave heat inducing transmitter -- we call those electric heaters today -- managed to set the mattress on fire, but not the ceiling above it.

Now, John's scheme to unmask the Avenger is a little convoluted here and may require some explanation. It isn't obvious, but you have to assume that The Avenger is calling John in panel 8 to gloat. It certainly isn't a smart move on The Avenger's part, but John did bait him with the newspaper headline and villains have to save vs. plot to keep from gloating when given the chance.

It's worth pointing out that this is a time before there you could access multiple phone lines with the same phone. So if you wanted to have 13 phone lines, as John sets up here, you need 13 telephones to do it.

Also note the cartoon of Hitler with swakstikas for eyes on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes we have to look at Gill Fox's Wun Cloo, despite the painful racism of it, because there are interesting concepts hidden in here. Now, getting a robber to agree to pull into a gas station and park over the car lift is probably the hard part, but if he falls for it, you can lift it off the floor and threaten to set the floor on fire so he can't get out safely.

This is actually a bit of clever naming; the Tennessee Valley is large and the Tennessee Valley Authority built 50 of these dams since 1933. So when you call it the Tennessee Valley Dam, that can be a real dam, without knowing which one.

So Wings hunts down the "pirate dirigible" (even though it's pretty clear a foreign government is responsible for this attack, and for the life of me I can't figure out why he's shooting at the little gondola and not the giant bag of hydrogen directly above it. Does Wings just not like easy victories? "Getting the engine" is definitely a bad result on a random complications table for aerial combat.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)