March 1948: The Biggest of All Game

By the time Harvey Comics’ Green Hornet Fights Crime 38 appeared on the newsstands in February 1948, the title was a bit redundant. 

After all, the Green Hornet was then a more famous crimefighter than even Batman.

By then, the masked publisher had already been fighting crime for a dozen years on radio, the heir to the mission of his even-more-famous great-uncle, the Lone Ranger.

Fran Striker and George W. Trendel’s Detroit-based Green Hornet radio adventures originally aired for 16 years, and listening to them made me realize that the character’s crime-fighting strategy is much better worked out than most. 

It’s really almost plausible in comparison to, say, Batman’s or Spider-Man’s. 

Posing as a mysterious master criminal, Britt Reid is able to infiltrate and intimidate criminal operations that are often marginally within the law. When he exposes and destroys them, it’s dismissed as the action of a rival gangster, and no one figures out what he’s really up to. He also has the resources of a major newspaper to back up his operations and provide him with intelligence. 

The approach was pretty well thought out, and retained those flashy superhero elements that made the Lone Ranger so successful — the mask and costume, the symbolic weapon, the daring and faithful friend, the spectacular and speedy transportation.

Trendle said he sought to “…show that a political system could be riddled with corruption and that one man could successfully combat this white-collar lawlessness.” 

Britt Reid initially hunted “…the biggest of all game! Public enemies that even the G-Men cannot reach!” But that perennial national busybody J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like the implication, so the announcer’s line was changed to “…public enemies who try to destroy our America!”

The Green Hornet’s licensed comic book adventures began in 1940 with Holyoke, but in 1942 switched to the more durable Harvey Comics for a lengthy run under various titles, including Green Hornet Comics, Green Hornet Fights Crime and Green Hornet, Racket Buster.