The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: secret knowledge

  • NOTES: FEBRUARY 2025

    Secret Knowledge: 

    This is mostly me not wanting to sign up for a Fandom account but confidential to the Dickie Dean page on the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki:

    -Dickie Dean is said to be 14 in the splash blurb of his first appearance in Silver Streak Comics 003

    -in the same story he receives a telegram from J Edgar Hoover in which he is addressed as Richard 

    -in Silver Streak Comics 006 he is addressed as “Richard Bruce Dean”

    Memes of Yore – Hamburgers: 

    Can’t have a hamburger without onions. (Feature Funnies 048, 1948)

    Honours:

    Swashbucking reporter Chic Carter receives the Moravian Military Cross for his role in fighting off an invasion force. (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

  • NOTES – DECEMBER 2023

    Weaknesses: 

    A very specific weakness for the Spectre: a once-in-a-hundred-million-year alignment of constellations that surely will never happen again. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

    Misc:

    This is my first encounter with Golden Age Johnny Quick so I’m not sure if the slow-down formula that he uses in the third panel above is a regular thing or a one-off but it sure has been left by the wayside. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

    EDIT: He does it again in More Fun Comics 072! 

    Memes of Yore – Keep ’em Flying!

    Johnny Quick (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

    Green Arrow and Speedy (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

    Drawn without reference:

    A wonderful 11-legged spider! (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

    Origins:

    Poor ol’ Earth-Two Aquaman. Nobody even remembers that he exists half the time, plus he got eliminated in the Crisis. Anyway, here’s his origin: his dad found Atlantis and trained his son to breathe water (also a cheeky Fate of Atlantis – it sank and now Aquaman lives there). (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

    Great Folk:

    I had completely forgotten about this story, but the old man who hoots and hollers and calls for detective Russell Granville until he’s on the case is the spectacular character find of 1939. Really, really great way to build up the detective before his appearance and I’m a bit sad that this is the only Russell Granville story because that old man needs more panel time. (Keen Detective Funnies v2 011, 1939)

  • A VEXING CONUNDRUM: KEYSTONE CITY

    In short: the state of online wiki-based comics scholarship run by people with poor reading comprehension and an adherence to post-hoc continuity decisions makes it very hard to determine when Jay Garrick explicitly starts operating out of Keystone City as the Flash.

    Flash Comics v1 001 features his origin at Midwestern University, which has since been located in Keystone, but does not mention the city by name. For the rest of 1940 at least, he is pretty explicitly in NYC. No idea when the move happens, guess I’ll have to keep on reading and see.  

  • RANCE KEANE MEETS SHARK EGAN: THE CROSSOVER EVENT OF 1941

    (Feature Comics 045-046, 1941)

    Golden Age crossovers were a pretty rare thing, other than in places like All-Star Comics where that was the whole idea, but one place you occasionally encounter them is in the kind of adventure strips that filled out the bulk of anthology comics before the super-heroes really got into full market domination mode, and especially if the same person was working on both characters and wanted to have them meet up and say what a good series of adventures each other was having. 

    The weird thing about this meetup is that Rance Keane, a Quality character and star of the strip, is meeting Shark Egan, a Dell character whose own adventures had been cancelled more than a year earlier, in Popular Comics 053! The characters are roughly equivalent – Shark is a sea dog-style adventurer while Rance is a cowboy who transitioned into the same – but this dockside mutual admiration moment is very unlikely!

    If I were to advance a theory it would be to speculate that Rance Keane scribe William A Smith might have had a hand in Shark Egan too – some of the earlier strips in Popular look a bit like his work – and decided to reappropriate his creations once they were defunct at Dell. We will never know what his plans were though, as both Shark and Rance made but one more appearance in Feature 046 before setting off for parts unknown.

    (Shoutout to Comic Book Plus user Ed Love, who is the only person I could find mentioning this in a cursory search)

  • NOTES: JULY 2022

    Costumes: All-Star 005 features the debut of Hawkgirl, and a stunning revelation about her and (presumably) Hawkman’s costumes:

    the green part ain’t tights it’s boots! 

  • NOTES: JULY 2022

    Costumes: All-Star 005 features the debut of Hawkgirl, and a stunning revelation about her and (presumably) Hawkman’s costumes:

    the green part ain’t tights it’s boots! 

  • NOTES: JUNE 2022

    NOTES: JUNE 2022

    Names: Green Lantern encounters a villainous pharmacist named Mortimer Pestle (All American 029, 1941)

    Secret Knowledge: I checked all of the wikis and the blogs and this is the only place you’ll find this info: Whitey Smith and Blooey Blue of Golden Age quartet Red, White and Blue have the real names Whitefield and Heermance, respectively. (All American 033, 1941)