[MarkWarner]

Those more observant of you might have noticed that I did not make my usual Wednesday reading group post and it is now Saturday!! I am sorry, but I have been grappling with doing an upgrade on my desktop machine. At the moment a truce has been called, so I can make the undone things become done things.

So, better late than never is this week's book Invisible Scarlet O'Neil #1 https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=60283 The story we are concentrating on is the first one The Case Of The Madman's Revenge

Apologies again!!!

[SuperScrounge]

I was wondering what happened to Invisible Mark Warner.  Good to know it was just a computer problem.

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Meet Russell Stamm - Kind of nice to see a write up on a comic creator at this point in time (1950)

The Case of the Madman's Revenge - While you could argue the man was mad (angry, that is) I would hardly call him a madman. So was this an original story to the book or was it a pieced together Sunday sequence? (It didn't seem to have the 3 or 4 panel rhythm of a daily.) Okay, but nothing special.

Calling All Sleuths - 4 out of 5.

The Case of the Second Key - Uhhhh... yeah... The writer should should have read some Minute Mysteries to learn how to build a decent mystery in a limited space, there wasn't even a pause in the story to give the readers a chance to figure who did it from the clues.

The Case of the Hit and Run Killer - Not bad. This one did feel like a cut up daily.

Holly of Hollywood - Cute.

Winnie the Waitress - Eh, guessed the punchline on the first page.

Bloodless Murder - Eh.

How Good a Detective Are You? - Okay.

[crashryan]

Pass me some A-1 Sauce; I'm going to eat some words. When I was in college I read Invisible Scarlet O'Neil in the newspaper collections room and I didn't like it. The Chester Gould influence on the art was the first thing that rubbed me the wrong way, and dumb plots were the second. Scarlett went into my "Yuck" file.

The first story in this book has everything I didn't like about ISO'N. Overblown, stupid story; grotesque Chester Gould-style art.

But the second story! Damn, this is good! Well-plotted and involving, and the ironic ending works perfectly. Even the artwork is at a more adult level. So I guess I'll be giving Scarlet another try. I hope I'll find other similar stories.

As for the crime fillers, I knew my law just fine but I wasn't a very good detective. The other fillers...pfui.

[mr_goldenage]

Well I for one loved the ISO Stories....even though I've read them all before. Artwork? 1st story had a bigfoot type character as the victim, so to me the more cartoony art was ok. 2nd story? Perfect in it's art and the payoff was done quite well I thought. The rest? Bah! I've two Big Little Books of ISO and those I think are quite well done.

Richard Boucher AkA Mr_Goldenage

[narfstar]

I have the Whitman hardcover ISO and enjoyed it. The first story was OK. Nothing special but I did enjoy it.

[Morgus]

One of the reasons this site is so addicting is that I'm always finding out about new artists and comic books. I'd never even HEARD of Scarlet O'Neil, invisible or not, and you guys have her collected and down cold. Way cool. The whole enterprise reminds me of those multiple choice fill-in-the-blanks stories MAD still runs from time to time...to take a little from column 'A', mix with Column 'B' and down the line. I bet when they sat around dreaming this up, they saw the idea of DICK TRACY knock off art as a plus...The idea of good girl art in a sheer dress must have been pretty hot back in the day, without actually showing anything. and Crashryan and the rest were right. The second story was better.

[SuperScrounge]

Russell Stamm assisted Chester Gould on Dick Tracy before the creation of Invisible Scarlet O'Neil.

[crashryan]

I looked Stamm up in the Lambiek Comiclopedia and discovered that after leaving the comics biz in 1955, he "opened Russ Stamm Productions in Chicago, creating designs, storyboards, and animation and producing 'Jolly Green Giant', 'Charlie the Tuna' and 'Hostess Cup Cake Twins' commercials." He was only 53 when he died in 1969.

[MarkWarner]

I was not sure what to expect in this book. But after the one page which introduces us to Russell Stamm and Scarlet O'Neil, I think I have a better idea.

After reading the main feature "The Case of the Madman's Revenge", it is what I imagined, but better. I really enjoyed the frivolous story and the art was great.

A one pager, which fills you in on criminal slang, may well prove useful to me, so I studied it very hard.

Next up it's another Invisib... Oh, no it's not, it's a bird called Jackie Paige and a bloke called Lieutenant Gil Mason. It was Okish I quite liked the art, the story (if you could call it that) was pants!

But now we really do have another Invisible Scarlet O'Neil. I found this one rather confusing and what a REALLY strange ending.

Holly of Hollywood and Winnie the Waitress were both rather jolly. This book has feel good factor! But we are heading to the end with a text story Bloodless Murder which is pretty good

I failed the "How Good A Detective Are You?", but it is a failure as well. Certainly would not win any Spelling Bee prizes "All the clews and data"! Which also reminds me. I find it strange when I see or hear (OTR) the word "data" used in contexts well before computing.

Verdict: A hit! This could easily have been a 68 pager which included a couple more Invisible Scarlet O'Neil stories. I like her!

[crashryan]

Yeah, "data" has been around forever; in school in the last century we learned it meant numbers, especially things like all the raw values that go into making charts, graphs, and such. Believe it or not there are still people here fighting the "singular or plural" war (the winner: singular by popular acclamation). In my entire life I've never heard a person refer to a single ledger number as a "datum" but apparently that's what it is.

The business of "clew" has always puzzled me. It seems to have been an American fad in the 1920s, for I've seen it in countless crime potboilers from that period. However it's always used as if it were a Briticism (that must be a word; the spell-checker didn't object). To give the story that touch of English clawss, don'tchew know. Funny thing is the OED says "clew" is a very rare form and I've never seen it in Lord Peter Wimsey novels.