November 1965: That Other Man of Steel

Like superheroes, fictional private detectives generally find themselves in the freelance justice business. And yet unlike superheroes, private eyes have rarely thrived in comic books. Perhaps they just aren’t colorful enough for four colors.

My favorite of the lot was Charlton’s Sarge Steel, a private detective created by Pat Masulli, scripted by Joe Gill and drawn by Dick Giordano. 

Steel appeared in 10 issues of his own title from December 1964 through October 1967, finally resurfacing much later in DC Comics.

The character updated the 40-year-old image of the heroic private investigator by setting it against the background of a contemporary war. Max Allan Collins has noted that Steel was the first fictional private eye to be a Vietnam veteran. 

And like a superhero, that experience provided him an “origin.”

Steel was on furlough, dancing with a pretty girl in Saigon, when a Viet Cong hand grenade was lobbed into the room at him. Seizing it in his left hand, the stoic, grimacing hero held the grenade out the window as it exploded.

So it was that Steel found himself sent home sporting a relatively “realistic” superhero attribute — a shiny steel fist that could be used to batter down doors or even a deflect a stray bullet. He hit people only with his right, however, because his left would have killed them. 

The title of his title shifted from Sarge Steel Private Eye to Sarge Steel Special Agent to Secret Agent.

At the time Sarge Steel was published, Charlton Comics was on the way to establishing a brand featuring marginally more realistic heroes than DC or Marvel, to be billed in ads as “Action Heroes” rather than superheroes. 

They included an unauthorized Jungle Tales of Tarzan title, a commando unit called The Fightin’ Five, the masked western hero Gunmaster and a handful of out-and-out superheroes — Captain Atom, Thunderbolt, Son of Vulcan and a Blue Beetle powered by ancient Egyptian magic (soon replaced by a non-super-powered version).