Almost missed commenting on this one!
CAT-MAN COMICS #17I've always had a soft spot for Cat-Man and The Kitten. I don't know exactly why. I like Charles Quinlan's art and his stories are generally entertaining. I read somewhere that Quinlan and a relative--his son?--wrote many of the scripts. It's fun to have a superhero with a feisty girl for a sidekick. Though, as Don Markstein pointed out, given the heat Batman and Robin took from moral protectors, it's odd that no one noticed Cat-Man hanging out with an adolescent girl. At least they aren't shown sharing a locker room.
Having heaped on all that praise I confess this Cat-Man story didn't impress me. I prefer the peacetime Cat-Man. His wartime adventures were hobbled by the need to fight evil Axis agents in every episode. This one moves fast and has its moments. I like how Captain Yokima pays the Rajah in scrip. But then he launches into one of those detailed explanations of his plan. As a reader I appreciate his thoughtfulness. Nevertheless it reminds me of a TV cartoon in which a secret agent is captured by the villain, who explains his plan, then tells the hero, "You know too much, so I must kill you!" To which the hero replies, "If you'd kept your stupid mouth shut I wouldn't know anything at all!"
The strangest note is the resurrection of Private Binks. Looking closely at the last panel I'm pretty sure it was a last-minute editorial change. Though both balloons were lettered by the same hand, the second one looks kind of squeezed in. The newspaper headline about Binks, only partly readable and stuck in the lower corner, looks even more like an afterthought. My hypothesis is that the editor decided it'd look bad to have an innocent GI be murdered. This isn't the only afterthought. In panel 5 of the last page Cat-Man's line "Give, Kitten" has been sloppily added to the balloon without the balloon being enlarged to fit it. I don't know why the line is there unless the editor felt a need to explain Katie's saying "Meow." The panel plays much better without the addition.
It's nice that Quinlan set the story in Australia, but as our genuine Australians have noted, he didn't put much effort into researching his backgrounds. The locales are generic and the cars are parked on the wrong side of the street. The Australian soldier speaks comic-book Cockney. Quinlan's splash page is catchy and his figures are up to his usual standard. However he can't make up his mind what size Katie is. She's supposed to be somewhere between 12 and 14 years old, but in some panels she barely comes up to his waist.
The Deacon was basically a Spirit clone without the benefit of a secret identity. He was a small-time hood who was shot when he tried to quit his gang. Bloodied and beaten, he hid out in an abandoned church. There he donned a set of Deacon Duds he found in a closet. He decided to reform and fight crime rather than practice it. The Deacon adopted a street kid, Mickey, for his sidekick. Nothing much was done with this origin. That's too bad. While comics probably wouldn't have wanted a strictly religious hero, it would have been interesting if The Deacon's moral sense inclined him to help crooks to reform rather than punching them out. Probably too deep for the Golden Age. If you're interested, The Deacon's origin is on our page 17 of the first issue of
Cat-Man Comics:https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=29020Maybe I read it too quickly, but this story didn't make sense to me. Sol Brodsky's art on this episode is pretty bad, too. If you want to see
truly wretched art, though, check out The Deacon's origin story.
Sol keeps up his artistic standard in
The Rag-Man. The Rag-Man debuted in the same issue as The Deacon. He's essentially the same character, with a beefy African-American with a minstrel show accent serving as sidekick rather than a wise-cracking street kid. I wish I had a dollar for every story in which a scorned scientist seeks revenge by killing a bunch of people. I'd never have to play the lottery again. At least this iteration features a little red devil egging him on. It's not until the final panel that we learn the pariah scientist had invented a formula for eternal life. Why didn't he do something with that instead?
The Little Leaders is another feature that had potential. I could see the kids doing the Hardy Boys thing solving crimes themselves in between gigs with the grown-ups. This story is a full-on promotional piece for wartime scrap drives, so there's no room for any serious detecting. It highlights one of the stupidest tropes in Golden Age comics. Look, I
know these are just comic books and I
know 1940s kids didn't analyze this stuff as does a seventy-something-year-old comic geek with too much time on his hands. But surely even 1940s kids would realize that a Fifth Columnist would be an idiot to parade around the American homeland in full Nazi uniform (or Japanese Army uniform, depending upon the column). Gimme a break! But then maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. Maybe 1940s kids spent so much time looking for spies in Nazi uniforms that they neglected to hassle some innocent German Americans with thick accents.
Walter Palais' art isn't too bad. He gives Katie a prettier face than Quinlan does and his Mickey is a darned sight better than Brodsky's. It's a capable job in all, except that he doesn't want to draw the wagon full of scrap. We needed to see it on the last page when the kids are grabbing junk off the cart and throwing it at the spies.
Blackout started in Holyoke's
Cat-Man #10 as a Dr Mid-Nite ripoff. By this episode they seem to have forgotten that he's blind and can see only with the goggles given him by kind Doctor Dismal. The artwork suffers from poor layouts and hasty finishes. We needed to see the factory layout on the last couple of pages to understand what's going on and to be sure the good guys didn't get blown up along with the bad guys.
You can't see much of Dan Barry's future greatness in
The Hood, but you can tell he had greater than average talent. Interesting how his fighting poses are inspired by (maybe swiped from?) Kirby & Co. Barry sure loves to draw the Claw's face. Did he also do the lousy lettering? By the way, this is a sequel to the Hood story in
Cat-Man #14, which was drawn in a far less grandiose style by Alan Mandel.
The Mysterious Bomber hints that it's a "true" story. Hogwash. But it deserves mention as possibly the only comic book war story in which a bunch of drunken GI's hijack a plane to bomb the enemy.
I have a vague memory of someone writing that
Men Against the Sea was based on a real event that happened to the writer's father / grandfather. I may have it mixed up with a similar tale in a different comic. Schaare's art has a certain Sam Glanzman vibe.
Lots to like in the American Cat-Man. How about the Australian version? To be continued.
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Topic: Reading Group #310 – Australian vs American Catman (Read 1378 times)
