Hobbling in with my final comment...
Keen Detective Funnies #20A quick comment on the word "Funnies" in the title. Others have pointed out that American newspaper comic sections were once popularly called "the funny papers" or "the funnies." That's how my dad (born 1917) and my mom (b. 1922) referred to them (my brother and I called them "the comics"). It makes sense since 99% of newspaper strips from their start in the late 1800s through the early 1930s were humor strips. I haven't dug too deeply into the earliest adventure strips, but from what I've seen the first ones appeared in the late 1920s. They were rare. I have a copy of the April 1933 issue of
Fortune magazine, with a long article about contemporary comic strips titled "The Funny Papers." The only adventure strip they acknowledge is the
Tarzan daily which began in 1929.
Buck Rogers, which started at the same time as
Tarzan, isn't mentioned. Neither is
Dick Tracy, which started in 1931. The article refers to continuity strips that aren't especially funny like
Little Orphan Annie and
Gasoline Alley, but the overwhelming message is that the funny papers are funny and are big business. The
Fortune article appeared at an interesting time: the very next year marked the debut of two newspaper strips that would conquer the world,
Flash Gordon and
Terry and the Pirates. To be fair, both strips ran for about two years before catching the public imagination.
Years ago I read a magazine article from the early or mid-1940s complaining that "The Funnies Aren't Funny Anymore" because they'd been taken over by blood-and-thunder adventure comics. I'd love a chance to reread that article.
Anyway, back to our feature presentation.
Great frenzied-action cover!
The Eye is more homicidal than ever. He(?) is apparently a fierce protector of American immigration law. Just when did smuggling clueless immigrants into the USA become a capital offense? The Eye not only murders the traffickers but also takes sadistic pleasure in watching them die. Nice guy!
Dean Denton: I'm not all that conversant with magnetic mines, but this switching-polarity gimmick seems mostly hooey. I wonder if afterward Denton used his cyclotron to smash a few atoms. Tex Blaisdell's panel compositions are awkward though his art is competent. I liked Harry Campbell's art better.
Dan Dennis: This makes two DD's in one comic. Sam Gilman's art is barely adequate. The well-drawn car on page 22 calls attention to the sloppy drawings everywhere else. The story is routine.
How to Be an Amateur G-Man: That's a really nicely-lettered logo. What the heck does tapping dots onto a paper have to do with one's nerve health? A dictionary code is useful and hard to break, but numbering every word in two copies of the dictionary??!! The version I learned in junior high (from Herbert Zim's
Codes and Secret Writing was much quicker. You encoded each word by writing the dictionary page number followed by the number of the word on that page. 75-18 would mean page 75, 18th entry. The sender and receiver of the code had to have identical editions of the same dictionary to decode a message.
Wasn't
TNT Todd the name of a one-shot Golden Age superhero? As a G-Man he isn't much. The story reads as if writer/artist Victor Pazmino is setting things up for Mr Death to take over the strip. Is this the same Victor Pazmino who did all those cartoon strips as VEP? It's not the most common name. The art is crude.
Detectionotes: Can you firearms fans confirm that a large-caliber bullet fired from a distance would put a neat hole in window glass? I thought it'd break the glass whether fired close or from afar.
Dean Masters, D.A. packs much frenetic action into six pages. The more I tried to understand the plot the less sense it made. Clair Moe's art isn't as strong as in the earlier issue.
Spy Hunters: I'd never heard of L(ochlan) Field, so I looked him up on Lambiek. Seems he left comics in 1942 to "pursue a military career." In the 60s he was teaching at an art school in Vermont. Field's Caniff-inspired art looks like someone who'd be pretty good with a couple of years' practice. The framing device of talking to the reader is an odd choice. The story is okay.
The Masked Marvel has been demoted to a back-up feature and he seems to have lost his remaining Z-men. He also seems to have gained super powers.
Crime Crushers: Intrigued, I googled William Sheridan and learned that this description is accurate. Sheridan was active from 1886 into the early 1910s. He had a photographic memory ("eidetic" seems to be the proper term) and was instrumental in finding and arresting countless baddies for the NYPD. I found a newspaper article from 1910 stating that "an affliction of the eyes" had caused Sheridan to retire. He had entered into a
"partnership with William J. Burns, former secret service man, who is official guard of the 1,400 banks in the American Bankers’ association, a trust formerly held by the Pinkerton agency." Sheridan died in 1934 at the age of 73.
With any luck this link will take you to a copy of the 1910 article:
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SPDN19100129.2.31A funny goof: The easy-reading version of the article at the left side of the screen was generated by automated character recognition. A phrase in the headline,
will guard banks as partner of Burns is rendered as
will guard banks as partner of bums.In this episode
Spark O'Leary acts more like a private police force than a radio newsman. The story lurches from point to point and the abrupt ending is a classic. O'Leary has nothing to do with the capture of the crook or the rescue of the hypnotist. The hypnotist rescues himself!
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Topic: Reading Group #323- Keen Detective Funnies (The Eye) (Read 1061 times)
