— A startled, buxom brunette in an evening gown, recoiling in horror.
— A handsome blond hero bursting in with a handgun and a shirt open to expose his much-muscled chest.
— A hideous mad scientist leering over his hypodermics and test tubes.
— And, of course, a huge, menacing gorilla.
In other words, the “Dr. Mortal” cover for Fox’s Weird Comics 1 presented as typical a situation as you might find in the pulp magazines and comic books of the 1930 and 1940s.
And Victor Fox’s outfit knew how to cash in on the zeitgeist. He was a flying Fox, one well practiced at flying by night.
“Victor was short, round, bald and coarsely gruff, with horn-rimmed glasses and a permanent cigar clamped between his teeth,” recalled artist Al Feldstein. “He was the personification of the typical exploiting comic book publisher of his day — grinding out shameless imitations of successful titles and trends, and treating his artists and editors like dirt.”
One of the most shameless of those imitations was the Blue Beetle, which began as a blatant rip-off of radio’s Green Hornet.
Surprisingly, this Mystery Men character evolved into Fox’s most successful superhero, briefly spawning even his own radio series and a newspaper comic strip.
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| Later Blue Beetles by Gil Kane |
One of the Beetle’s best stunts was projecting a beetle symbol on walls to spook criminals — a trick so visually arresting that Spider-Man lifted it.
The slippery Fox lost the character to his printer, Holyoke Publishing, in 1942, then reclaimed it in 1944. The crimefighter — secretly armored, vitamin-powered beat cop Dan Garret — gained and lost superpowers such as flight and the ability to become a giant.
Whatever. When Fox folded, the Beetle moved on two new incarnations in Charlton Comics in the 1950s and 1960s, and then still more at DC Comics.
Despite his unpromising, disreputable origins, it seems like the Blue Beetle is always around, in one form or another. He’s even in The Watchmen, although he’s known as Nite Owl there.
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