Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 4

 And we're back, looking at more of Jon Linton today. Maybe it's worth reminding novice game Editors that it is important to make sure your non-Hero characters fail, so the Heroes can succeed instead.

I get that it's more dramatic to blast the ceiling away (even when it doesn't make sense to do so; I had this issue with the TV show 24 in the past...), but isn't Jon worried about debris falling on his own workers? Better unionize, people! 

The N in N-ray could stand for nitrogen; well before the nitrogen bomb, nitrogen was already being used in TNT and other explosives. The next page suggests it stands for neutrons, though. Which is interesting, because we were much further away from neutron bombs than nitrogen bombs in 1940.

20,000 MPH is super-fast, barely attainable by today's technology (we can only achieve it with satellites in outer space). That's (roughly) Mach 27, traveling through Earth's mesosphere, and...well, I'm not qualified to say how safe that would be, but with so much at stake in this story, I think it's certainly reasonable to take chances!

References to atomic power might seem visionary for 1940, but New York Times articles from then were already pretty specific about how atomic power would work -- "We have been brooding over the atomic power houses which are to do away with coal and in which uranium-235 is to sputter array in water and make energy so cheap that it will hardly pay to read meters..." (https://www.nytimes.com/1940/06/09/archives/science-in-the-news-atomic-power.html)

I'm less convinced by the science behind "Jon! We're dropping!" Wouldn't an equal and opposite reaction push them backwards instead of downwards? Unless...instead of being repelled from the force field, maybe the field is draining power from the rocket? But since it's an atomic-powered rocket, that's some impressive energy draining!

Spoiler: Jon saves the day, but Satan Rex escapes to fight another day.

But not to fight Speed Centaur, who is busy knocking hats off of bad guys. I find that image funnier than it probably deserves, particularly since, on the other side of the panel, Speed is kicking that guy so hard it probably would kill someone in real life.

The reference to a previous adventure, as vague as it is, was pretty rare in the golden age. Continuity didn't get talked about a lot because it was not assumed anyone was keeping back issues. 

Panels 4 and 5 serve to remind us that Speed is completely naked most of the time. I find the concept of centaurs disturbing on all kinds of levels, and this is just one of them.

I can just imagine the future producer of the Mister Ed TV show reading this as a boy and thinking, "Hmm, a talking horse..."

I cannot figure out why Simp and Flame are in quotation marks, while Speed and Reel are not. Simp and Reel are both nicknames. Flame is the horse's real name. Is Speed Speed Centaur's real name? Does that make Centaur his real surname? This feature makes my head hurt.

"I know, Reel, but they're only the hirelings! I want the big shot of this racket."

"But couldn't we have followed them and seen if they let us back to the big shot?"

".......Why do you leave all these decisions up to me? I'm just a horse with half a human on me!"

"Dope" is slang for a variety of illegal drugs, including marijuana, opium, and cocaine, so it's hard to say exactly what's in those pills. It probably is not marijuana, as I doubt you could infuse enough into a pill form to significantly affect a horse. 

Although Speed is acting like he spotted the pills before eating out of the feed-bag, he's sure acting like he's high on something -- because this is the second time he let the bad guys just get away.

Second spoiler: Speed wins!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)