July 1950: King for a Brief Day

If superheroes were fading in 1950, maybe secret agents were the coming thing?

During the spring of 1950, DC Comics launched their new Danger Trail title, introducing secret agent King Faraday. Writer Robert Kanigher and artist Carmine Infantino kept him busy with stylish, globe-trotting intrigue.

The hero’s name — King Faraday — was an obvious pun. The maudlin Queen for a Day was then a popular game show on radio, and would later move to television.

Danger Trail would last only five issues, but DC did successfully capitalize on a different trend, romance comics. Sensation Comics had shed its superhero backup stories in favor of romance features, and in Sensation Comics 98, even Wonder Woman kept busy managing Steve Trevor’s love life.

DC did get a jump on the coming frontier hero craze with its feature Tomahawk, which had pushed Robin off the covers of Star Spangled Comics.

King Faraday would later appear in Showcase reprints during the James Bond craze of the mid-1960s, and in a Danger Trail four-issue series in 1993.

Although DC was a decade too early to capitalize on the secret agent trend, spies certainly were on people’s minds in 1950. 

In January, German emigre and physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to Britain’s MI5 that he was a Soviet spy who, for seven years, had stolen stole top secret data on U.S. and British nuclear weapon research for the USSR. That same month, President Harry Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb in response to the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb in 1949.

Paranoia was rampant. Also that year, the famed singer Paul Robeson failed to persuade U.S. officials to reinstate his passport, which had been revoked because of his alleged communist sympathies. In a speech in Wheeling, WV, Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy accused the U.S. State Department of being filled with 205 Communists. 

And that summer, the Korean War began. Gen. Douglas MacArthur would threaten to use nuclear weapons there.