{"id":4940,"date":"2023-10-31T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4940"},"modified":"2026-09-27T19:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T22:24:14","slug":"minor-super-hero-044-the-q-boat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4940","title":{"rendered":"MINOR SUPER-HERO 044: THE Q-BOAT"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Military Comics 001, 1941)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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This is stretching the idea of what a “minor super-hero” is quite a bit but I ultimately had to defer to my judgment rule about criminal groups: if one person were doing this would it make sense to categorize them such? And it would! The Q-Boat is just that<\/a>, a warship disguised as a harmless four-masted schooner in order to prey on Nazi convoy raiders. Swap out the disguised ship for a submarine and you have the Red Torpedo, a personal fave!<\/p>\n

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There are two interesting things about the Q-Boat the first is the fact that although it was a one-off story, whoever wrote it (probably Henry Kiefer?) left a lot of details to be filled in later. Specifically: what the heck is going on with the Q-Boat?<\/p>\n

As presented, the Q-Boat is not just a battle-capable schooner but a super-advanced miniature warship. It is crewed by Captain Foghorn (descended from John Paul Jones, speech balloons indicate that he’s speaking at top volume at all times) and a bunch of teen boys, including Bob Wayne, Dick Martin and Marmaduke “Freckles” van Weyden. Questions such as “where did the Q-Boat come from?” “why all the teen boys?” and “why is Freckles so good at making guided missiles?” all go unanswered (Captain Foghorn’s son-in-law is mentioned as having developed some of the tech on the Q-Boat but that just adds “who the heck is this son-in-law?” to the list).<\/p>\n

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The second interesting thing about the Q-Boat is the fun sibling dynamic between the child soldiers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Military Comics 001, 1941) This is stretching the idea of what a “minor super-hero” is quite a bit but I ultimately had to defer to my judgment rule about criminal groups: if one person were doing this would it make sense to categorize them such? And it would! The Q-Boat is just that, a warship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,13,4,1601,56,167,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14","category-group","category-minor-super-hero","category-q-boat","category-quality-comics","category-super-vehicle","category-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4940","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=4940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4941,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4940\/revisions\/4941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}