[crashryan]

Thanks for another flood of Blue Beetle craziness. The second story in this collection (also the last, in reprint form) is the one of the most confusing comic stories I've ever read. What should be the splash page seems to be an unused cover. It has nothing to do with the story. The story itself starts in midstream. It's missing the first page, which unfortunately sets up the entire plot: murder of wealthy woman, stolen jewels, clue of left-handed killer, and the arrest of "The Ferret." The script is unclear by itself, but the artist does his part by using every cop-out known to man, topped off by a scene in which our hero visits the suspect's cell and clips his toenails (our page 18). It doesn't help that The Ferret looks like Dan Garrett. The whole thing is such an outrageous hack job that it's funny.

As for the missing first page, I speculate that Holyoke got this story from Fox inventory. Fox printed the first page of many stories on the inside front cover, which was printed separately from the inside pages. The first page probably got lost somewhere, but Holyoke didn't mind.

Link to the book: *** Link No Longer Exists: Blue Beetle Complete Collection Vol. 2: The Holyoke Years - Part 3 ***

[FraBig]

Yeah it's definitely a bizarre story, I had difficulties in understanding what was happening exactly lol

As for the theory about the missing page, it's true that Fox used to print on the inside covers, but it was, at least concerning Blue Beetle, something that only started when the character came back to them in 1944.
There are no stories that start in the inside covers in the early Fox publications, those that came before Holyoke's run of the character (1939-1942).
The main influence from Fox I could spot in Holyoke's comics comes from the very first issue of their run (#12) which is very much similar to Fox's style and was most certainly made for Fox, but ended up being published by Holyoke.

[crashryan]

There are no stories that start in the inside covers in the early Fox publications, those that came before Holyoke's run of the character

That's darned weird, then. Why would Holyoke have left out the first page of the story? It must have been drawn, given that the first printed story page is numbered "2" at the lower right. You'd think that if it was an editorial oversight they would have corrected it when reprinting the story in Real Hit Comics. Maybe the first page original art was lost before it could be photographed for BB #25, but the editor said "what the heck?" and printed the rest of the story anyway. For the reprint they simply re-used the existing negatives from #25, stripping out titles and teaser panels. Another Golden Age mystery we'll never solve.

[FraBig]

Exactly, seems like only the editor would know why they made this weird choice!