Back to our regularly scheduled thread.....


Daring Mystery is such a pleasure to read after the eyesore repro of Marvel Mystery 1-4! Apparently this came out the same week as MMC 3, possibly a couple days earlier, on Oct. 30, 1939. The book itself is an odd assortment of one-shots that had ambitions of being continuing series, but most of them went nowhere at all. It makes this a little difficult to dive into, since you see the character have an adventure, and then that's the end of it, without the sense of an ongoing saga that makes comics satisfying to me, at least. It makes one meditate on what makes one character succeed and another fail. Sometimes, a bold graphic design can really carry the day (Cap) but more often than not it's the ones that have a depth of character and interesting or obscure motives that will make it, such as the Torch and Namor. But that lesson hasn't yet been learned by the creators of most of these strips, since few of the characters here have much of anything of interest about them, and they're all fairly interchangeable with others of their genre. Accordingly, most of them vanish without a trace, and some of them vanish for many months only to reappear all of a sudden (the Fiery Mask being a notable example).

Speaking of The Fiery Mask, this Joe Simon offering certainly has a lot of promise, with the walking corpses being a nasty and stunning visual. Other visual highlights include Dr. Jack Castle being bathed in the green ray, and the notion of a gigantic Mad Doctor. The appeal by the girl is pretty poignant too. I like the humorous last words of Dr. Castle. Alas, it all turns out just to be hypnosis (though that doesn't explain the green faces of the 'walking dead'). Somehow all this gives Jack superpowers, though it's hardly clear how---typical Marvel hand-waving. Jack leaves the Mad Doctor to die in the fire---if he didn't kill him outright. Basically, the story is all setup of a hero, only to drop him (until vol. 2 of the Masterwork, at any rate).

John Steele Soldier of Fortune: We start off with some very nasty villains indeed, shooting nurses in cold blood. While there's no mention of Nazis in this early story, there is a hastily scrawled (and totally out of perspective) swastika on the plane wing on page 7; I'd guess that the Nazis were what the artist probably had in mind, but that the story was completed before September 1, 1939, when it became crystal clear what the Germans' intentions were, and the swastika crudely added to hammer the point home. At any rate, being in a tank hit by a hand grenade surprisingly doesn't seem to faze our hero. After all this, gunfights, tanks, bombing, firing antiaircraft guns--what Steele really needs is some excitement. He's kind of a one-man Howling Commando team, doing superhuman feats on the battlefield only to be abashed by the girls. It's an amusing story, and one could have seen Steele becoming a regular feature, but he may be just a little early in the game for that. Had he premiered a year or two later, maybe he would have caught on a little better, but by that time the field was pretty crowded with anti-Nazi fare.

The Texas Kid. The horse's name is SPOT? Plenty of bizarre action poses throughout, making the artist sort of a prototype for Rob Liefeld. The raiders seem to be none too smart, given that they keep on with the plan to attack the Humboldt ranch, even after the Kid makes his presence known and it's clear that he's probably heard their plans. There are some good moments here, notably on the last page where the sheriff states that he intends to hang the banker too; that's a Depression-era sentiment that probably has some resonance today. Despite that, though, it's standard oater fare, without a lot to recommend it.

Monako, Prince of Magic. One of the few characters who will reappear (in #4). Apparently he really does magic? Although the caption states that the girls "seems to be crossing a bridge" so is it just an illusion? Does the artist/writer even know himself? It seems to go back and forth between real magic and mere illusion (though it doesn't seem credible that an illusionist would be able to set up the necessary things to manage his tricks). Monako is stuck somewhere between not being credible enough to have a real-life explanation, and not being bold enough to just assert that it's really magical. I do like the feeble attempt at generating a sense of depth, giving Monako an "old adversary" Mr. Muro. p. 3: kind of a wacky image, for Monako's spectral form to have to take a cab....Dr. Strange really has the advantage on this guy. Muro's "ingenious bomb"? Why, a can of gasoline with a long fuse! How "ingenious!" The top hat seems to be a little unwieldy for an action hero, and in #4, Monako will swap it for....a fez, which is hardly much more practical but does have the advantage of looking goofier.

Text story: The written description of the stampede of mad horses is quite well done and conjures up a dynamic mental picture, which the comic artists of the day would have been hopeless to manage, so this text story, unlike most of these throwaway pieces, really has some merit of its own. I have to say that "Mr. Spud" is a hilarious name for a character. I'm not sure I buy the notion of radio-controlled horses, though I expect giving them tinnitus through implants would send them into a rampage, so at least that part of it's pretty clever. Lot of trouble to go to, though, for not a lot of reward.

Flash Foster, football player. Well, we're certainly working our way through genres here. Pretty standard issue sports plot of gamblers fixing the Big Game, picking on Flash's fiancee Connie as his weak point. Interestingly, he ends up nearly throwing the game anyway---some hero. Did the extra point really used to be a pass into the end zone, rather than kicking it through the uprights? That'd be a two-point conversion nowadays. Or did the writer not understand football at all? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convert Wikipedia seems to think that the writer has no idea what he's talking about. It would have been interesting to see what the promised Rose Bowl story would have been, but how many different ways can you tell essentially the same story? Well, not more than one, apparently, because I think this is the last we see of old Flash Foster.

Phantom of the Underworld: This seems like a splash panel in search of a story, because there's nothing Phantomy here in the least. I do like the noir style, with the faces half-submerged in shadow much of the time. It does seem awfully coincidental for a detective to also be a "master surgeon." Go where the big bucks are, son! How many times could you make use of surgery skills in the course of crime-fighting? This is pretty much set up to be a one-shot, despite the promise of the splash. Love the image of the bunch of blind guys shooting their guns at random--wild stuff.

Wartime Wonders: Cannon fired from airplanes? This has some serious physics issues, especially for 1939 era aircraft. And what's with the "mystery weapon" explosive made entirely of air and wood? I get the feeling this guy was just making crap up and putting it on the page, figuring the kids wouldn't know any different.

Barney Mullen, Sea Rover. Is it my imagination, or did the author just combine Barney Google and Moon Mullins into one character here? There is quite the havoc in this short story, with all sides firing on Mullen as well as each other (the danger of neutrality, I guess), and a pack of mutineers to boot. It's a pretty exciting story, and one can see some potential for a series here, but Barney doesn't reappear, at least in this volume of Daring.




Last Edited By: gardibolt Dec 18 09 12:38 PM. Edited 1 times.