World War II ended with VJ Day on Aug. 14, 1945, sending both soldiers and the superheroes they’d read about into peacetime.
They’d probably had enough of colorful exploits.
And exactly a year later, MLJ’s Black Hood 19 hit the newsstands, where it must have come as something of a shock to readers.
There, police officer Kip Burland became the first major comic book superhero to have his secret identity exposed by a criminal, jettisoning one of the genre’s central conventions.
So, in The Black Hood Versus Needlenoodle, a Dick Tracyesque villain lures the Man of Mystery into a trap by kidnapping his friend Sgt. McGinty.
Proving that his weirdly shaped head contained brains, Needlenoodle said, “There’s only one person who could possibly stop me — the Black Hood! So I decided to find out just who the Hood is and get rid of him!”
“Whenever the Hood appears, you Burland have always been known to pop up. So either you’re the Hood or you know who he is.”
Lucky that most criminals weren’t that smart, or we’d have had no superhero stories at all.
The villain’s scheme works, and Burland resigns from the police department, setting up shop as the Black Hood Detective Agency (with his masked visage painted on his office door as a logo).
It’s always interesting to me to see how superhero comics reflect American culture. If the troops were mustering out, so were superheroes, metaphorically.
Over at Fawcett Comics, Spy Smasher went through a similar experience in Whiz Comics 76 (July 1946).
If superheroes represented naïve, four-color idealism, private eyes came tinged with hard-boiled skepticism in black and white.
But both genres romanticized lone wolf operators who could deal out justice with speed and independence, a mythic American attitude also popularized in the western.
Turning superheroes into private detectives may have seemed like a way to have the characters “grow up,” just as their original audience had in the previous eight years.
Cheryl Spoehr:
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you mention Spy Smasher and The Face, excellent costumed heroes who have been undeservedly forgotten.
As I recall the stories of Tony Trent, he took The Face mask, one and only, irreplaceable, with him when he was stationed at the Asian front. He lost it to “Babbling Brooks,” an intellectual reporter who would rather be at the opera than there, who was portrayed as a ‘commie-symp’ type throughout the series and an ‘effeminate egghead’ type. Not sure if Brooks wore it,
but others did.
Eventually Tony gave it to another soldier, who became more of a two-fisted hero than the more intelligent and cleaver Tony Trent. Tony's girlfriend and other staff members of the series knew the new guy was the real Face, and found it hilarious that the new guy had a phobia for horror movies and monsters, but wasn't afraid of bullets....then HE loses the unique mask ,and I can’t recall how, eventually it is buried with a commie-fighting Chinese warlord. Over and over, the series took a “we need real men to fight the commies, not eggheads and sissies” attitude, and the former warlord was supported by the main characters.
But, while the series was re-named “Tony Trent,” and now spy agent reporter Tony had his own comic, The Face never completely went away. Time and again, Tony had to cover his face and use his Face voice to defend folk from his old archenemies.
As Big Shot Comics ground to a depressing halt, Tony took a machine gun to his old enemy “The Fencing Master” and his men. Meanwhile, Sparky Watts was trying to convince his now wheelchair-bound bride that he still loves her and is not just marrying out of pity.
The postwar world was not kind to the original characters in Big Shot Comics.... note that letters on Sparky's romance divided by gender, boys said dump her, what good is a cripple, and girls said nothing has changed, marry her.....the postwar world laughed and partied, but had sad roots.....
Oh, and "NeedleNoodle"? No wonder the guy became a crook, fate was not kind to him!
Eric Akins:
ReplyDeleteGreat commentary.