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Posts: 1677
Nov 17 11 4:03 PM
The police adventure comic strip Radio Patrol ran as dailies from 1933 - 1950, with Sundays going from 1934 - 1946. It was written by Eddie Sullivan, and drawn by Charlie Schmidt. It featured the adventures of Sgt. Pat (the strip's lead character), police woman Molly Day, Pat's partner Sam, and the courageous young boy Pinky Pinkerton. Both Pat and Molly seem to be Irish cops, in the tradition of the era. Molly is intelligent, courageous and competent, and is definitely one of the least sexist characters in the comics. Both Sullivan and Schmidt worked for the same Boston newspaper, and the series took place unofficially in and around the Boston area, and the surrounding countryside.
Radio Patrol was organized into distinct stories. Each new story has a title, put in the last panel of the preceding story. As in many narrative strips of the era, the daily strips and the Sunday strips had separate continuities and story lines.
Radio Patrol gave rise to a radio show, and a movie serial: Radio Patrol (1937), directed by Ford Beebe and Cliff Smith, with Grant Withers as the hero Pat, and silent film veteran Wheeler Oakman also in the film.
Radio Patrol has some features that recall the adventure comic strips of the 1930's: continuing story lines, a serious tone, a handsome hero, occasional action scenes, richly drawn art. But Radio Patrol is quite different in feel from the sf adventure series popular in the 1930's, such as Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Don Dixon, or such comic book imitations of these as Brad Hardy. Everything in Radio Patrol is strictly realistic. There are no elements of science fiction or the fantastic, and everything takes place on realistically depicted Boston city locations, or in the countryside. Hero Pat is always in realistic clothes of the 1930's, such as police uniforms, suits, or working man's clothes, when he is undercover. So are the other characters. This differs from Flash or Brick, who often were in exotic garb of different civilizations. Hero Pat was not the sole protagonist character of the strip, the way Flash or Brick seemed to be to sole stars of theirs. Instead, the point of view in Radio Patrol was often shared among a large cast of continuing characters, such as Molly, Pinky, Sam or the Buster. Both Pat and all the other Radio Patrol heroes are full of brain power, unlike the sf adventure heroes, who seem to stress brawn and fighting. While Pat is strong and good with his fists, most of the advances he and the other heroes make are due to smart detective work, not muscles. Pat also seems more modest and down to earth than Flash and Brick. He is content to be dating Molly, while Brick always seems to be romancing some new exotic princess.
The scripts in Radio Patrol were more tightly constructed than those in most sf adventure series, too. Every plot event in Radio Patrol flows directly and logically from the actions of one of the characters. This character can be a series hero, one of the many villains in the stories, or a suspect in a case. The interactions of the characters, and the plot events they generate, make up the entire story line and action of Radio Patrol. By contrast, in sf strips like Flash Gordon and Brick Bradford, the heroes are often exploring a strange new planet or lost civilization, and this fantastic world furnishes much of the plot of the story. What the individual characters do has much less bearing on the plot, than the strange world or environment which they are exploring.
There is a wry sense of humor running through Radio Patrol. This is not belly laugh style gags. Rather, it is a sense of absurdity and irony among the characters. The scripts often point this out explicitly. A character's statement or attitude will be referred to by others as comic or as "comedy".
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