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[Robb_K]

Sorry for being a little late.  Being in Los Angeles makes me later in time than most of you.  My choices this week come from a request by Electricmastro, for taking a look at Avon's Western series.  So, I chose to compare 1951s The Hooded Menace with 1952s The Masked Bandit.  There's lots of action and some interesting art in these 2 books.  Unfortunately to my taste, they are from the early 1950s, and so they were likely to have only 36 pages, and so, likely to have several cramped stories.  But, I guess, upon reading them we will see if the storywriters made the best of their situation or flubbed it.  The colouring is interesting, as well. 

Every time I choose a non-Funny Animal or non-Cartoony Human-Character Comedy book, I jump into a relatively new experience of discovery.  The only Western comics I read as a child were a few Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Turok, Son of Stone.  I hope we all will enjoy these tales:

The Hooded Menace can be found here:        https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=14916

The Masked Bandit can be found here:          https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=34230

[Captain Audio]

.  The only Western comics I read as a child were a few Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Turock, Son of Stone.  I hope we all will enjoy these tales:

The Hooded Menace can be found here:        https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=14916

The Masked Bandit can be found here:          https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=34230

The original Turok Son of Stone comics were my favorite for as long as the series ran. The later incarnations not so much.
The Animated film was not so bad, though it had little connection to the comics.

I loved Hopalong. As a child not much bigger than a house cat I had a full Hopalong outfit and a tiny high grade black leather jacket I wore with it.
I those days my parents liked to dress me up like my favorite TV or movie characters and take me to meet the stars at state fairs and such. I have a photo of Fes Parker holding me up on his shoulder, me in my fringed buckskins and real coon skin hat. The coonskin hats are very nice to have in a cold winter. I got to ride a camel and an elephant that day, I was in heaven.

[Robb_K]

.  The only Western comics I read as a child were a few Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Turock, Son of Stone.  I hope we all will enjoy these tales:

The Hooded Menace can be found here:        https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=14916

The Masked Bandit can be found here:          https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=34230

The original Turok Son of Stone comics were my favorite for as long as the series ran. The later incarnations not so much.
The Animated film was not so bad, though it had little connection to the comics.

I loved Hopalong. As a child not much bigger than a house cat I had a full Hopalong outfit and a tiny high grade black leather jacket I wore with it.
I those days my parents liked to dress me up like my favorite TV or movie characters and take me to meet the stars at state fairs and such. I have a photo of Fes Parker holding me up on his shoulder, me in my fringed buckskins and real coon skin hat. The coonskin hats are very nice to have in a cold winter. I got to ride a camel and an elephant that day, I was in heaven.

Unfortunately, I've spent many days atop or around camels. For 6 years several came by below my bedroom window every morning in the hot season, along with a herd of goats.  But the Muezzin woke me up at 5:00, anyway, so it wasn't as much of a problem as it might have otherwise been.

I was a fan of Hoppy. My maternal grandfather looked the spitting image of him.  And my father looked very much like Roy Rogers. That's why I liked them as a kid. But, for whatever reason, the Western comic books didn't hold my interest the way the films, and later the T.V. shows did. I had a beebee gun, and also a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, just like so many of the boys.  I was a weird-looking site, playing pond hockey wearing a Montreal Canadiens jersey and wearing either a coonskin cap or a Sergeant Preston Royal Canadian Mounted Police hat.

I only read Turock in 1956-57.  Age 10-11.  After 1958 I was very busy with hockey and school (and an extra religious school) so, the little time left for ad-hoc activities like reading comics, I left basically for Carl Barks stories.

I never knew about any later Turok series or animated film. But, I imagine I would be disappointed in them, or outright hate them based on the 1960s to current drawing styles, page layout, and colouring styles.

Did you have a pair of silver filagreed six-shooters and leather holster to go with your "Hoppy outfit"?

[Captain Audio]

Did you have a pair of silver filagreed six-shooters and leather holster to go with your "Hoppy outfit"?

Oh yeah, silver pistols in black leather gun belt with silver studs and white fringe and matching vest and chaps. The vest and chaps were thick black cloth ,perhaps felt with the white fringe being plastic, there were conchos as well IIRC.
I had a Zorro wristwatch with Zorro bandana as well, still have the watch which I restored using parts from one found on Ebay. It runs okay, though about one minute off per day, which was better than it did when new. Still have the bandana as well. Unfortunately the display box the watch came in disintegrated when I picked it up after half a century in a forgotten drawer. That box was pretty cool, with a miniature Zorro hat that the watch band fit around like a hatband.

Hopalong Cassidy watches show up now and then on Ebay. Been meaning to get one.

[crashryan]

My brother and I also had the full Hopalong Cassidy regalia. One of our old home movies shows us shooting it out and dying in spectacularly theatrical fashion. We made so much racket as Hopalongs that my mother confiscated the outfits and bought no more TV western merchandise. Thus ended my life as a cowboy.

As for the books of the week...The Hooded Menace is so full of names, places, and dates that it sounds as if it were based on real events. However searching those details turned up nothing. I thought maybe it was based on the Klan, but while Oregon had its share of KKK action, that happened after the story's time period. However I must not have been the only one thinking of the Ku Klux, because on our page 7, panel three, Louis Ravielli drew the bad guy with the famous pointy hood and forgot to white the point out. This error started me looking for evidence that the Menace's hoods had been redrawn in other panels. Nope. It must have been an isolated mistake. As for all the "historical" detail, I guess the author just wanted his story to sound authentic.

Louis Ravielli was a competent if unexciting artist. He was at his best working from movie stills. His best bit here is the inside front cover. The litho-crayon-on-textured-paper technique he used for his pulp illustrations makes for an impressive image.

I'm not a fan of gangster stories (with the exception of some Charles Biro tales), and Mad Dog Killer Vincent Coll is about a particularly nasty practitioner of the trade. Ecch.

Avon rejiggered a lot of their Saint stories for other books. Like most of them, this "Mike Strong" adventure is too short to have much of a plot. Allen Ulmer's art is okay. His Simon Templar is acceptable, maybe a bit generic. The strange thing is his mouth. It's an old tradition that comic heroes can speak with their mouths closed, but during the course of this story Simon almost opens his mouth only twice (p. 27 pn. 2 and p. 29 pn. 2) during eight pages of shouting, fighting, cajoling, and whispering.

The Masked Bandit is surely a repurposed issue of Avon's Jesse James. All the names have been re-lettered (fitting poorly because "The Masked Bandit" is longer than "Jesse James") and Kinstler draws the lead character exactly as he did Jesse. In my opinion these two stories highlight the moral dilemma of making an outlaw the sympathetic star of a series. Other books took the easier course of having heroes believed to be outlaws but really good guys, in Robin Hood fashion. Not this one. Jesse, as I'll call him for convenience's sake, robs trains at gunpoint and shoots people. The scriptwriter goes through contortions to call Jesse a "hero" for delivering the treaty on time, when in fact the outraged sheriff on page 9 is right. It was Jesse who stole the treaty in the first place. It's also funny how the outlaws are "catapulted along the grisly road to death," apparently giving their lives to get the treaty through, but on page 9 everyone is alive sporting the cliched head bandage and arm sling, ready to chase Black Mike and take his ill-gotten loot for themselves.

The Sixgun Robin Hood gives Kinstler a chance to do a lively portrait of Douglas Fairbanks which has nothing to do with the story. Again the ethics are muddled. Jesse does indeed play the Robin Hood. Good for him. But he goes after Quane mostly to get the bounder's loot, the money, you'll remember, that was extorted from the locals. Once Quane is vanquished, before Jesse can empty Quane's safe...the ranchers give him the money themselves??! $50,000, mind you! In all, it's hard for me to drum up admiration for The Masked Bandit and his heroic crew. Everett Raymond Kinstler was a helluva artist and I love his work. But man, did that guy swipe!

Terror in a Top Hat! is a gangster story with horses. The protagonist is a worthless bum who gets what he deserves in the end. Whoopee. The people at GCDB who insist on turning Ed Robbins and Alice Kirkpatrick into Gerald McCann should study this strip. I can't think of any comics artist who was as consistent as Gerald McCann. Throughout his career he drew exactly the same way. The only change was near the end when he lightened up his inks a bit. "Terror in a Top Hat" is a textbook example of his artwork. His eye-level compositions almost never moved closer than a chest-up shot. In the majority of his panels the figures were all the same size and the same distance from the camera. His characters frequently stood at a slight angle or bent over slightly. McCann had mastered the quick-read silhouette. He took care to play white against black, black against white so that his panels were instantly understandable. All 30s pulp art technique, which is where McCann came from and how he developed his pen-and-drybrush drawing style. Monotonous, I admit, but solid, pleasing work. McCann also painted, including doing several covers for Classics Illustrated. In the late 50s he moved to Westport, Connecticut, and joined the staff of the Famous Artists School.

I almost forgot Joe the Boob. I wish I had. The only good part is Rafael Astarita's artwork. Between Mad Dog Coll and Joe the Boob, this was a week for filler stories about no-good crumbs.

[The Australian Panther]

Interesting choices.

Hooded Menace
Crash said,

The Hooded Menace is so full of names, places, and dates that it sounds as if it were based on real events. However searching those details turned up nothing.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that these events never occurred.
More and More search engines are clearly becoming limited and unreliable.
Searching for Armed gangs or vigilantism in Oregon or the pacific northwest, brings up contemporty articles on what's going on now. Even searching for 'Historical ......' brings up the same stuff. People and organizations know how to 'game' search engines now and a lot of political and business effort goes into doing so.
Used to be that when you searched for something, the bottom of the pages shows how many relevant pages there were. Averaged at 2 to 3 hundred thousand - so you kept searching. Now they only want to satisfy those who game the system or pay for their entry, so they don't do that any more. 

The fact that the story is located in the Pacific Northwest makes we suspect that it is based on fact.
This is not an area that is associated with the KKK. And it seems too detailed for an average fictional story.
And also, why did Avon decide to highlight this story with a stand-alone title? 
   
But I digress.   

Louis Ravielli was a competent if unexciting artist. He was at his best working from movie stills. His best bit here is the inside front cover. The litho-crayon-on-textured-paper technique he used for his pulp illustrations makes for an impressive image.

Agreed. The cover is also very effective.
He is the kind of Artist that doesn't have a clearly identifiable style, but is very thorough in his compositions. An editors artist, more than a fan's 
This story is well-told and well-paced. It grips your attention. 
Ravielli pays particular attention to drawing Women.
Here is a story from Atlas that shows what he was capable of.
https://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2014/10/uncle-gideons-gold-louis-ravielli-1953.html
I believe a lot of Artists 'coasted' while doing comics and didn't always put 100% of their effort into it at all times. Ravielli's work somtimes fits that category. But his composition is great. 
Page five
First two panels are quiet and anticipatory.Next panel we see a women screaming, then panel by panel the chaos escalates until the final panel is one terrified face with the menace behind him.
And contrary to the impression some have come away with after reading this story, the horror is implied, not graphically shown. You are led to see it in your minds eye.
That is Hitchcockian, the masterful way to do horror. 
Ravielli achieves a lot with Faces.
Look at the face on page 11 bottom panel. You just know he is a rotten piece of work!
Page 17, " For every one of us, there will be two more to take our place!" Sound familiar? 
Mad-Dog Killer Vincent Coll
No art credit but I think its also Ravielli. Look at the use of the full panel face top of page 33.
Straight forward, well told, but too much dialogue for my taste. 
Forecast for Death!
Filler and reprint - and unrelated to the other two stories, as has already been said, so no comment.       
Comment on 'The masked bandit' in another post.
Cheers!   

[Captain Audio]

Interesting choices.

Hooded Menace
Crash said,

The Hooded Menace is so full of names, places, and dates that it sounds as if it were based on real events. However searching those details turned up nothing.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that these events never occurred.
More and More search engines are clearly becoming limited and unreliable.
Searching for Armed gangs or vigilantism in Oregon or the pacific northwest, brings up contemporty articles on what's going on now. Even searching for 'Historical ......' brings up the same stuff. People and organizations know how to 'game' search engines now and a lot of political and business effort goes into doing so.
Used to be that when you searched for something, the bottom of the pages shows how many relevant pages there were. Averaged at 2 to 3 hundred thousand - so you kept searching. Now they only want to satisfy those who game the system or pay for their entry, so they don't do that any more. 

The fact that the story is located in the Pacific Northwest makes we suspect that it is based on fact.
This is not an area that is associated with the KKK. And it seems too detailed for an average fictional story.
And also, why did Avon decide to highlight this story with a stand-alone title? 
   

Vigilance committees are far different from the three K type organizations, though tactics are very similar.
In Arizona for example there were hundreds of Vigilante lynchings but not a single victim was black.

The Hooded Menace bunch don't appear to be vigilantes or triple K type. They are simply criminal terrorists that wear hoods and robes to hide their identities.

In those days the motive for wearing a hood was equal to what modern day robbers and kidnappers want to accomplish when wearing ski masks and hoodies. It hides the face and breaks up the outline so even a good guess at height and weight may be way off. No hair color or beards showing etc.

If a member of a mob that flogged a man were easily recognized he could expect a bullet in the back the next time the victim saw him, or his house burned down while he slept. People seldom allowed the law to handle such things.

PS
Try searching " Vigilantes Oregon 19th century". There are some interesting historical hits that way.

[SuperScrounge]

The Hooded Menace

The Hooded Menace - There was no governor Brownlow in Oregon in 1903. There was outgoing governor T. T. Geer (for 15 days) and George Chamberlain. I was already questioning the accuracy of this, then I found myself wondering if any of this was true?

Mad-Dog Killer Vincent Coll! - Okay for what it was.

Forecast For Death! - Okay, but nothing special. Probably more interesting that it's a reprint of a Saint comic story with the serial numbers filed off. Although listening to episodes of The Saint radio show (here on CB+) it kind of lacked the style and panache of a good Saint story.


The Masked Bandit

The Masked Bandit's Death Ride - Villains with a heart of gold are a tough sell and I think the writer dropped the ball making him sympathetic. He cold-bloodedly shoots the Pinkerton man, so he looks like a ruthless murderer. Then we're told he shot to wound, but even a shot intended to wound can be fatal. If he'd simply held the man at gunpoint and had a confederate tie up the Pinkerton man, he'd seem much less villainous. Why take the treaty to deliver it himself? The train didn't seem to be damaged so it could have delivered the treaty just like intended.

How 'Mini-Gym' Turns Plant "Drip" Into Success Dynamo - I love how bloodthirsty Betty is about Tom's ability to beat people up. I can just imagine them out on a date and her pointing out some guy and saying, "Kill!"

The Sixgun Robin Hood! - Might have been better as the first story as it's more sympathetic for the main character.

Death At The Rodeo - As I was finishing this, my mind started wandering and when I finished reading I couldn't remember what I just read.

Terror In A Top Hat! - Eh, okay bio piece.

Joe "The Boob" Quinto - Okay. Oddly enough this was apparently based on the life of a criminal called Joe "The Boob" Santore who's life had been told in two previous comics (Crime Must Pay The Penalty #1 [33] & Famous Crimes #7), but, as far as I can tell, this was not a reprint.


Comparison

Well, the disparate stories made a comparison tough. The Hooded Menace wasn't strictly a western, it was more a crime story set in the early 20th century.

The Masked Bandit did have the better art though.

[gregjh]

I'm a big fan of westerns so I was looking forward to these but honestly, I felt like I wanted to go back to the Tim Holt comics after a few minutes of each.

Hooded Menace can't decide what it wants to be. It provides lots of historical detail dropped inside panels arranged - to my amateur mind - in a messy and ugly manner with a font to match. The dialogue felt very lazy to me and the Ku Klu...sorry I mean the "fun club" looked like a bunch of middle-aged men behaving like violent or spoilt teenagers. They began speaking normally and then suddenly started saying "da" instead of "the" and similar anomalies.  The drawings matched the dialogue and organisation in being bland at best and ugly and lazy at worst. I'm not usually this harsh with my reviews, but there was something I didn't like about this comic.

Masked Bandit Was an improvement. We had more detail in the sketches and characters who knew their role. The storyline was hardly original or even unpredictable but it was still a good read. Still, nothing I would feel drawn to come back to.

[Captain Audio]

It just occurred to me that the Hooded Menace story does owe something to the destruction of the Triple K in post civil war Tennessee.
Governor Brownlow of Tennessee had been a Unionist and had been jailed and beaten by Confederate troops during the war. A Confederate officer had him freed when he found Brownlow was near death after months of starvation and abuse.
In the years after the Civil War he stirred up the hatreds of many Tennesseans who'd suffered under the Confederate occupation. When the Klan raised its head they became hunted men in much of Tennessee and were soon disbanded , only to take root in many other states, including some Northern states where they gained political power.
After the Civil War those Tennesseans who despised the Confederacy most actually assassinated twelve former Confederate Generals in reprisal for the executions of Unionist in Tennessee.
Brownlow demanded that ex Confederates be flogged with 400 lashes if they remained in Tennessee.

The Klan began much like the Fun Club of this story. It was originally just a bunch of yahoos that liked to scare superstitious ex slaves and rough up carpet baggers, but that soon changed.

[Robb_K]

I can't wait until next Sunday to post my reviews and comparisons of the 2 books, because I cannot type for a long period, nor look at the bright screen for a very long straight-through stint, because I've just had my 2nd cataract operation within 5 weeks, so both my eyes are sensitive.  I'll have to cover one story at a time.  I will put it all in one post, as usual, but by adding each feature's review one at a time in individual editing modifications. 

Hooded Menace
Terror of The Northwest - This first story segment, based on what really happened in Tennessee directly after The US Civil War, (rather than what happened in Oregon after The Spanish-American War).  But, what would be the problem in telling real history?  It could be that IF the writer had to spend a lot of time researching, to make sure all the details would be correct, that amount of work wouldn't have been worth the low-level comic book storywriting pay.

The artwork, to me, was a little lower than average for an early 1950s Western.  But, I feel that the colouring is well below par, and their wasn't enough variety in the staging and perspectives.  There were some "amateurish basic No-Nos", like showing the soldiers' entire bodies, and just cutting off their feet (one of the first things an artist, especially a storyboarder, learns.  I also got very little feeling of emotion.  I know that cranking out tonnes of penciled and inked pages at low-level comic book pay is mundane, often boring, and often grueling work.  But I felt that this artist was especially unconnected emotionally to this job. 

All of the description above fits the 2nd story segment, "Reign of Terror", just as well.  "The Fun Club" murdered  some people, and extorted many others at gunpoint, and yet participants to those felonies get only 5 years hard labour and permanent banishment as punishment.  IF we are to assume that the one example of a sentence was for one of the lesser offenders, why did the author not use one of the key leaders as the single example?  Clearly, the author didn't spend much time thinking about this assignment that he cared little about.  That was during the heyday of comic books, when demand for decent quality writers and artists often outstripped supply.  People were hired, even if their work was shoddy.  These days, as I have always done, my heart is in my work, or I wouldn't be doing it.  The pay for the hours put in does not translate into making a living.  Many comic book artists and storywriters do that work just for love of the genre, and a higher percentage of their living wages from higher paying projects, like animation, illustration, live action films, TV, magazine, and book work. 

Mad Dog Killer, Vincent Coll
I know well, the story of Dutch Schultz.  And, I remember reading a little about "Mad Dog" Vincent Coll.  So, I assume this story is based on true events.  I find it interesting that the first two stories had their settings (geographic locations and era) changed drastically, while the third story tells true historical facts as its basis.  I can just hear Walter Winchell's raspy voice reading the narration boxes in this story as news headlines. The artwork is on the same level as the two Hooded Menace segments.  But the colouring and staging was a little better (maybe roughly average for the period).  The story is tighter, like a police procedural.  Not a great entertaining story, but not a waste of time.

Forecast For Death
A very short story about a an inheriting woman's brother trying to kill her by having his hypnotist friend give her suicidal post hypnotic suggestions.  A decent plot.  But these few page stories don't have time enough to establish a detailed setting (so the reader can really feel like he/she is really there, living in the story), or to build up any character traits, or develop some suspense in the plot (which also must be quite thin due to inadequate time and space to do so).  The action is fast, furious, and choppy.  the story doesn't flow well.  It's more like highlights of a decent, longer story.

Overall, this book is run-of-the mill.  Clearly slightly lower than average for its period.  And it's a book that's not very entertaining to me.  If it were a series, rather than a one-shot, I wouldn't waste time reading other issues.


Masked Bandit
This book's cover is quite well drawn and staged, and starts to build interest from the reader.  The introduction page was also well-drawn and has interesting poses, to compel the reader to want to start reading the story.  The artwork, staging and colouring in this book are much better and more professional than in "The Hooded Menace".  Everett Kinstler was really an excellent artist.  I wouldn't mind reading other Western-themed stories, by him, as well as seeing his work in other genres.

"The Masked Bandit's Death Ride"
The artwork and staging are good.  The story is "possible", but not terribly believable.  And it is predictable (but that can't be helped.  So, are we to believe that The Masked Bandit opened the bullet shells, poured the gunpowder into a small pile, lit it with a match, and it exploded just enough to explode open his cell door, AND make a large hole in his cell wall, big enough for him to run out, and jump on a horse and ride away, while townsfolk were running towards the jailhouse to see what the explosion was about.  Uncanny good luck, as often occurs in Western fiction.

"The Sixgun Robin Hood"
Now we get to the even harder to believe "Cowboy with the Robin Hood Syndrome" legend story.  I have a hard time believing that the ranchers GAVE $50,000 they found in their tormentor fake landlord's safe to The Masked Bandit and his gang, as payment for The Masked Bandit and gang having given them one rent payment, and proving that their fake landlord didn't own the property.  I might have believed that they'd give the gang $10,000 of it, and kept the rest as it was mostly made up of their gauged, illegal previous rental payments. The entire story is hard to believe, and surely not well thought out.  Ideally, writers for such a series should have been researching old newspaper stories to find interesting stories to emulate (ideally, recombining events from different places and times to make new, fictional stories containing plausible, realistic types of events that actually had taken place in America's West during the late 19th Century.

"Death At The Rodeo" - Text Story
This is one of the best-plotted 2-page text stories I ever read.  Many are stories with no plot, and are stretched to make it to the end of Page 2.  More are 3 to 4-page plots worth, crammed and jammed into 2 pages, and their story flow is wrong, everywhere(beginning, early development, climax, epilogue).  This one is a perfect plot for 2 pages, and progresses at the proper speed in the right places.  Despite being somewhat predictable, it was not a burden to read through it, as most text stories usually are. The author even was able to inject a little bit of character into The Rodeo owner, his Cowgirl Daughter, her fiancee(the hero cowpuncher), and even the villain, in just a short 2 pages of text.  Achieving THAT, as well as a proper-flowing story plot, in a mere 2 pages, and even having a little suspense, is quite a good job of writing.

I do, however, find it hard to believe that The Rodeo's owner brought his bag of money with him to the hospital, where he is holding it while lying in bed.  Any nurse, cleaning woman, janitor, or unauthorised "visitor", could snatch that bag from him at any time.  That's more of a Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge type last story panel.

"Terror In A Top Hat"
Interesting story.  No man could outdraw Ben Thompson.  He went on a trail of ego-driven murders, until he was killed by a saloon owner's dog!  Just desserts!

Joe, The Boob, Quinto
Apparently Avon's obligatory "modern day" story.  I wonder if this is a true story, or the gangster's name and city's location were changed.  But, I never heard of any Joe "The Boob" in Philadelphia, or anywhere else.  And a Google search on him came up with nothing.  The story is not memorable at all, being about an egotistical, violent gangster's rise to power, and predictable death at the hands of a competing gang. This was by far, the weakest story in this book.

Overall, this book was quite a bit better than "The Hooded Menace", because the artwork and the stories were better, on the whole.

[gregjh]

People were hired, even if their work was shoddy. 

What is your opinion on the layout of the panels in that comic?

[SuperScrounge]

I wonder if this is a true story, or the gangster's name and city's location were changed.

As far as I could tell the story was based on a criminal named Joe "The Boob" Santore. Why the last name was changed, I don't know.

[crashryan]

Even back then they often worried about getting sued. Maybe Santore's family was still around and Avon wanted to dodge legal action. Maybe even reprisals from hoods. Who knows?

[Robb_K]

People were hired, even if their work was shoddy. 

What is your opinion on the layout of the panels in that comic?   

I think you are referring to my reference to "The Hooded Menace".  As I stated above, I think the artist had too many consecutive or nearby panels which have a shot from nearly the same distance away, and only changed the angle of view slightly.  I also don't like that the artist had several shots where BOTH of the 2 main characters in the scene had parts of their bodies cropped out of the panel view.  Also, he often placed almost all of the people's bodies in scenes, but cut off their feet and ankle area.  That is a very amateurish error.  My editors probably would have warned me against that once, and if I did it again they'd probably have just told me ("Sorry, we have no more work for you.")  There were too many good storyboarders and finishing artists competing for comic book work by the time I started in the late 1970s.  In the 1940s, when the comic book industry was just starting out, the demand for good artists outstripped the supply, so art students and wannabe hobbyists had great chances to break into that field of work.  And there were lots of amateurishly-drawn stories published.

This is not to say that ALL the views and staging in "The Hooded Menace" was weak.  There were several pages of really good mixing of differently-oriented panels, with distant shots alternating with mid distance and close ups focusing on, and lead the readers eye to what was important to portray.  It's just that there were too many pages hurt by the errors, and the overall staging and layouts were much better, on average, in "The Masked Bandit"

The panel layouts in the two modern-day stories in "The Hooded Menace" book seemed better, overall, than those in The two "Hooded Menace" segments (chapters).

[gregjh]

Thanks Robb. On further reflection, I think the main reason I dislike the comic is the colouring. There's something bland about it. It reminds me of when my students mix every paint colour in one pot expecting a rainbow and it becomes a dark, murky slush. To be fair, I don't know if that is by design or if it's just the age of the paper itself.

[The Australian Panther]

Robb said,

Unfortunately, I've spent many days atop or around camels. For 6 years several came by below my bedroom window every morning in the hot season, along with a herd of goats.  But the Muezzin woke me up at 5:00, anyway, so it wasn't as much of a problem as it might have otherwise been. 

Robb, that's a side of you we were not aware of!

I have been atop one Camel. As you will know and others won't, A camel kneels and you mount while it is on it's knees and then it gets up - and up - and up! An unforgeable experience.
Little known Australian fact, we used camels for desert work from the late 19th century, most were let go, so we were the only country in the world with a stock of wild camels. So they were in demand in the middle east for breeding and also for movies. The camels in De Mille's 10 commandments? I'm not sure, but I think also Laurence of Arabia.  All Aussies!
The one I rode was being used to take tourists on a trek in NorthWest NSW and I was a tourist officer involved in publicising the trek. 

Cheers!
 

[The Australian Panther]

So,

The Masked Bandit.

Yes there is a parallelism in the names,of these books but not much in common in the content.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=34230

I love those BnW frontispiecers in the Avon books, they are worth the price of admission as far as I am concerned.
Some of Kinstler's best work is in these.

Masked Bandits death ride.
Don't know if this is supposed to be a true story, but I doubt it. The story starts badly with the bandit shooting the Pinkerton detective. We clearly see him shoot the man in the stomach, and stomach wounds are among the most cruel and painful. So, by me, they lost all sympathy for the character.
Can't fault the art, it's not Kinstler's best but as you would expect it is heads and shoulders above most.
The villainous Stock and Station agent who sells guns and whisky to the Indians was a staple of Western stories at this time. So a pretty standard story.
The Six-gun Robin hood.
The crooked greedy big rancher without a legitimate claim to his land who squeezes out the small cattlemen and has a gang of ranch hands who are like a Chicago 20's gang is also a consistent cliche in Western stories of the period.
As is the 'outlaw' hero who beats him.
Is this where US Superhero stories have their origin?
My library this year has a number of large print Western novels and story collections of US Western writers of the pulp years. I enjoy these, and read them quickly. And I have read the plots of both these stories more times than I can count.
So, for me, not stimulating, or very believable, actually.
Terror in A top-hat.
Not a huge fan of Gerard McCann - as a comics artist, not as an artist - he is an excellent draftsman, but I find his style unsuitable for superhero stories. However his work for Classics Illustrated on Jules Verne's 'Off on a comet' is still vividly in my memory.
No complaints about his work here.
The story is seriously disjointed and unclear.
There appears to be some narrative missing between panel 2 and 3 on page 3 of the story.
Don't know if this is supposed to be a true story or not, but what we have here is a portrait of a sociopath.
Joe 'the boob' Quinto.
Nice work from Rafael Astarita
https://www.askart.com/artist/Rafael_Jerard_Norman_Astarita/122363/Rafael_Jerard_Norman_Astarita.aspx
Another story shoe-horned in from somewhere else.
Does fit here thematically tho.
Not much else to say about it.

Thank you, Robb.       
 

   

[SuperScrounge]

Little known Australian fact, we used camels for desert work from the late 19th century, most were let go, so we were the only country in the world with a stock of wild camels.

The US Army tried using camels as mounts in the American southwest in the 19th century. It failed and all the camels were turned loose. Not sure what happened to those camels.

As is the 'outlaw' hero who beats him.
Is this where US Superhero stories have their origin?

Technically the early superheroes were generally based on pulp characters.
Early superheroes were either an outsider trying to help Justice or a person rising up against a corrupt system.
Which, in a way, that second type could describe the American colonists rising up against England in 1776. 

[The Australian Panther]

The US Army tried using camels as mounts in the American southwest in the 19th century. It failed and all the camels were turned loose. Not sure what happened to those camels.

Yeah, I was aware of that. Ore or two western stories [and I think I've seen a western movie with a camel in it] refer to that.

Cheers!

[Captain Audio]

The US Army tried using camels as mounts in the American southwest in the 19th century. It failed and all the camels were turned loose. Not sure what happened to those camels.

Yeah, I was aware of that. Ore or two western stories [and I think I've seen a western movie with a camel in it] refer to that.

Cheers!

The King of Siam once offered to send elephants to US president Lincoln.

[Robb_K]

The US Army tried using camels as mounts in the American southwest in the 19th century. It failed and all the camels were turned loose. Not sure what happened to those camels.

Yeah, I was aware of that. Ore or two western stories [and I think I've seen a western movie with a camel in it] refer to that.

Cheers! 

The King of Siam once offered to send elephants to US president Lincoln. 

I think there is still a wild herd of them roaming southern Arizona descended from those who were set free. I seem to remember a story Carl Barks wrote and drew in which Donald's recently-bought camel runs away and roams the desert, which brought up the Arizona ferrel herd into a conversation with some of my Danish co-workers.  Or, perhaps Carl, himself, told me that he got the idea for that story from reading about, and seeing photos of that ferrel herd in National Geographic Magazine.  I have a foggy memory of that having happened, as well.  I think both of those conversations occurred some years apart. But I can't remember in which order.

[Robb_K]

Robb said,

Unfortunately, I've spent many days atop or around camels. For 6 years several came by below my bedroom window every morning in the hot season, along with a herd of goats.  But the Muezzin woke me up at 5:00, anyway, so it wasn't as much of a problem as it might have otherwise been. 

Robb, that's a side of you we were not aware of!

I have been atop one Camel. As you will know and others won't, A camel kneels and you mount while it is on it's knees and then it gets up - and up - and up! An unforgeable experience.
Little known Australian fact, we used camels for desert work from the late 19th century, most were let go, so we were the only country in the world with a stock of wild camels. So they were in demand in the middle east for breeding and also for movies. The camels in De Mille's 10 commandments? I'm not sure, but I think also Laurence of Arabia.  All Aussies!
The one I rode was being used to take tourists on a trek in NorthWest NSW and I was a tourist officer involved in publicising the trek. 
Cheers!   

I worked for The UN and The World Bank on development projects in Africa, The Middle East, and The Far East for the 20 years before I started cartooning. I worked about 14 of those years in Arab countries (almost 6 years in Jordan) I rode a camel in Wadi Rum and in the back canyons of Petra, because donkeys can't take you very far in one day.  So, once you've seen all the close-in (more touristy areas), and you want to see the farther ones, you need to ride a camel there.  I also worked 3 years in Sudan, 3 in Egypt, 2 in Morocco, almost 2 in Syria, 2 in Ethiopia, parts of 1 in Sierra Leone, 1 in Malaysia, 1 in Turkey.  I worked mostly on water and sewer design, solid waste facility design, airport design, and industrial/commercial residential development project planning/design and environmental impact reports.  I started writing Disney Comics stories, and drawing storyboards for Dutch Disney in my spare time in The 3rd World (mostly at night) for about 6 years before I quit my civil engineering/environmental planning work with The UN in 1989, when I also started working for Danish Disney, which, combined with The Dutch Disney pay, was enough to live on, bouncing between the 2 countries(which I've been doing since'89 (adding in a 3rd domicile in Munich, Germany (the extra family visit flat formerly owned by my main work partner's mother).  I started taking drawing courses in Den Haag at the age of 40.

[Captain Audio]

I was watching a video about the Leper King Baldwin the other day and ran across an interesting fact. During a pitched battle with Saladin's army Baldwins knights pressed their attack with such vigor that the Saracens fell back and became mired down in a salt marsh. Saladin was very nearly captured or killed but his personal bodyguard sacrificed themselves to give him time to escape, on of all things a pet racing camel.
I suppose the huge feet of the camel were equally useful in running on marshy ground as they were in sand. Once in the open a small headstart would have made it impossible for the already tired out chargers of the knights to catch up with him.
IIRC that was the second time Baldwin handed Saladin his hat and sent him flying, so no wonder he was leery of attacking Jerusalem directly till after Baldwin passed away from his terrible illness.

[gregjh]

The King of Siam once offered to send elephants to US president Lincoln.

Thought I had replied to this but maybe I deleted my own comment by accident.

In Thailand this story is taken as true and it is the origin for the term "white elephant". That's because it is told that the elephant was albino, an obvious burden.