Delicious over-the-top Wallace craziness. Tommy Cawler actually has some depth and ends up a sympathetic character. Solid Graham Coton art. One odd note: in the final panel Dick's heart-throb Sybil Lansdown has suddenly turned into a twelve-year-old! I can certainly understand Dick's baffled expression.
Another oddity...on a number of pages certain dialogue and captions are typeset rather than hand-lettered like the rest of the story. This sort of thing usually means the story was a cut-and-paste job taken from another source (e.g. a newspaper strip). I thought the Wallace tales in [i]Super Detective Library[/i] were original to the comics. Am I wrong?
By crashryan
A year later I re-read this classic. The first time around I missed the most likely explanation for the typeset captions and dialogue. The reproduction (probably from a Xerox copy) is quite poor. I think the folk at "Digital Comic Nostalgic Creations" re-lettered the text that was too broken up to read. For that I thank them.
The story is even screwier than I remember. I don't understand why Havelock & Co undertook their convoluted plan in the first place. They could easily have manipulated the "feeble-minded" heir into letting them loot the estate without turning him into Bigfoot, and without sacrificing a (presumably not feeble-minded) nephew for a test run. It's like swatting flies with an antiaircraft gun. There's a reason Edgar Wallace is not known as a Realist author.
By K1ngcat
Realistic it's not, but lordy, it ain't half creepy! Nice one, Edgar.
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