Invisible Scarlet O’Neil #3
This was a well-crafted book. The Artwork is decent. I like the bright colours and use of light and shadows used for mood. I notice The Chester Gould style, with over-emphasized and distorted faces of the criminals. I like the use of just the invisible character's ink outline, with no fill colour, to show that person's position and movements. I like the little stars emanating from an unseen character to indicate from where the dialog or thinking balloon's text comes, to show that invisible character's position better than the light blue colouring or unfilled area inside the character's inked outlines, do. However, when the protagonist is the invisible character, it is important to the reader to see the hero's movements; so I understand why the latter method was used in the case of the latter 2 books, who are superheroes, whose actions are an important part of their fight against crime and all wrongdoing. In the case of "The Invisible Man", the story is a tragedy about a normal man, who becomes a wrongdoing villain (albeit not from his own choice), and so, no longer is a protagonist.
I find it interesting that there is an information page to warn kid readers against falling for criminal tricks (scams) used by common rackets. The other filler pages are testing the readers' detecting skills, to provide a vehicle to instill some self-participation in their heroes' work, to get them more involved in the genre.
School For Crime
The story starts by stating that Scarlet is a detective. And she is a partner of private detective, Sandy Randall in a private detective service company. The story starts paced fairly quickly, as most comic book stories do, as compared to text short stories, because of page limitations of the comic book format. At least, due to the fact that this was adapted from a newspaper comic strip, this story takes up almost all of the book. Only a few informational pages about detective work, and entertaining/informational pages are added. The main villain, Malignant (great name!), and his henchman for his current crime job, are well-developed. Malignant is a crafty, but brutal criminal, who has a favourite "hit man" to rub out his enemies, and uses late teens or early 20s slum kids, who are desperate for cash, to do his dangerous "dirty work", and doesn't mind, at all, having them die, one by one in the dangerous criminal activities (because moving on to a new crime crew for each caper, leaves no accomplices that can identify him to police as the mastermind of the crimes).
We see the theme of this series in Scarlet's actions, that she is a very savvied, brave and confident, self-assured, independent partner in her firm, and really the lead in her partnership's operations. This is opposed to the traditional detective series, where the male detective is the boss, and the beautiful young woman is his underling employee (learning the trade from him, or just acting as a shill for him, mainly to get information, or pull the criminal into a trap).
Scarlet proves to be fearless, sharp, innovative, and very athletic. She certainly was one of the first female comics (newspaper strips and comic books) heroes and superheroes.
Author
Topic: Reading Group #302 - Invisible People (Read 2129 times)
