{"id":4255,"date":"2022-07-17T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-17T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4255"},"modified":"2026-09-27T18:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:32:11","slug":"minor-super-hero-005-red-white-and-blue-and-doris-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4255","title":{"rendered":"MINOR SUPER-HERO 005: RED, WHITE AND BLUE AND DORIS WEST"},"content":{"rendered":"

(All American Comics 001-071 plus appearances in All-Star, World’s Finest, New York World’s Fair Comics and Comics Cavalcade, 1939-1946)<\/p>\n

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They keep coming up, so I might as well spare a word for Red, White and Blue. The concept is simple: three childhood friends, each of whom went into a different branch of the armed forces (and each of whom has a convenient nickname) work for G-2\/ US military intelligence to root out enemy plots, most often in partnership with G-2 operative Doris West. Red Dugan (Marine) is their leader, while Whitefield “Whitey” Smith (Army) provides muscle and Heermance B. “Blooey” Blue (Navy) is mainly comic relief.<\/p>\n

Their stories are great looking and generally pretty entertaining but if they have one great flaw it’s in the character personalities: Whitey and Blooey are both complete comic relief dum-dums, which leaves Red and Doris to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of moving the actual plot forward, which theoretically works great because they’re both portrayed as quite competent, particularly Doris. What really drags a lot of the stories down, though, is Red’s constant macho assertions that Doris shouldn’t go into danger and his pooh-poohing of her hunches etc as mere womanly fabulation. So many<\/i> Red, White and Blue stories have an interminable middle portion in which Doris has basically figured everything out and Red refuses to listen to her.<\/p>\n

I’m less familiar with the RWB stories that take place after the US enters the war and the boys are deployed. The few I’ve read from that era take the form of letters home to Doris or one of their parents telling of their war exploits. I’ll check back in if there’s anything worth writing about there (especially if we eventually learn Red’s real first name – secret knowledge<\/i>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(All American Comics 001-071 plus appearances in All-Star, World’s Finest, New York World’s Fair Comics and Comics Cavalcade, 1939-1946) They keep coming up, so I might as well spare a word for Red, White and Blue. The concept is simple: three childhood friends, each of whom went into a different branch of the armed forces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,446,17,13,4,726,1018,2181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-69","category-all-american-comics","category-dc-comics","category-group","category-minor-super-hero","category-misogyny","category-red-white-and-blue","category-secret-agent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4256,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4255\/revisions\/4256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}