The site index card for Columbia contains the following comment (not sure who's responsible for these):
"Other Columbia Comics creations were Marvelo the Monarch of magicians, - a possible forerunner to Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician -, the Face, Big Shot, Mickey Finn, Tony Trent and Sparky Watts."
Marvelo a "forerunner" to Mandrake the Magician? No, not possible. I'm not sure if whoever wrote that misunderstood the meaning of 'forerunner', or was just unaware that Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician began in June of 1934 -- almost six years before Marvelo's debut in BIG SHOT No. 1. (Or had the writer of that somehow gotten the impression that Marvelo was one of the newspaper reprint strips in BIG SHOT, and had already been around many years by 1940?) By this time in 1940, Fred Guardineer had already done one Mandrake knock-off (Zatara) for Action Comics No. 1 (and possibly others... I didn't check dates on possible candidates) -- but apparently every publisher seemed to want one, just like they all seemed to want a Flash Gordon clone. Surprisingly, Lee Falk's The Phantom did not seem to inspire nearly so great a rash of imitators (although his costume, or various elements of it, certainly was copied in enough different variations). At any rate, Mandrake seemed to inspire legions of comic book mystics and spellcasters -- more than any previously established hit character except the Lone Ranger and Tarzan. Perhaps the publishers saw the basic idea of a magician as less actionable in the legal sense, and therefore more of a safe bet.
Link to the book:
Big Shot 001
