This caught my attention because there is a Golden Age Batman story where he fought either a criminal network or a spy ring whose members wore a third eye sticker on their foreheads as a form of identification (being the 1940s, all men wearing hats made it easier to conceal).

Does any know what this story was, or do I have to go through my Archives before this drives me crazy? (Or crazier, to be strictly accurate.)

Magicmaster was another Steranko creation, but he didn't draw it. It appeared in Double Dare Adventures. I believe he said somewhere that Joe Simon bought the ideas from him, but he didn't draw them. He said, in 1968, that Simon bought Glowing Gladiator, Spyman and Magicmaster, but didn't feel he drew well enough to do the feature. Comic Book Artist #19 has a piece about the presentations he delivered, from the interview in Comic Crusader #1, in 1968. In that interview, Sterank was unhappy with what they did with the properties and he took Spyman, rechristened it Agent X and took it to Tower, but he didn't like their editorial policies, then DC, who wanted to hire him as a writer, but not an artist. Paramount was supposedly interested in doing it as animation, but then shut down their animation department. Marvel passed on the idea, but Stan hire him to do SHIELD.

I suspect Simon was wary of Steranko, based on the way he drew superhero characters, compared to the way they were done in his time; plus, Steranko was still an art director at an ad agency and was pretty busy. He might not have trusted him to get the work done in time, which is the issues that ended up causing him problems at Marvel.

Here was Gladiator, vs Glowing Gladiator....



and Sorcerer vs Magicmaster...



You can see the originals, plus the rejected Spacewolf and Future American at Steranko's website.

He recycled unused ideas and designs, as that Future American's eagle design became the SHIELD eagle and he used something similar on the Heroes Unlimited Sourcebook, from Palladium Games.....





He reused this craft, in SHIELD....

Answering your question from a few pages back, "The Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E." and "The Girl from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E."(that's Betty) appeared in:

Life with Archie 45, 47, 49 & 51-63
Archie Giant Series 143 & 144
Betty & Me 6-8 & 10

And another real obscurity from Archie - the one and only issue of Soupy Sales has a story in which Soupy portrays "Secret Agent Philo Kvetch", as seen on the cover. Man, can he kvetch!

The art gallery at The Drawings of Steranko has this feature, some promo art for a proposed Agent X tv series.

The bad guys look a lot like the Breens, in Aeon Flux.  Doesn't say whether this was someone else's concept that Steranko was hired to do conceptual art or was him selling his own idea.

If you were to name a genre, at random, there is a pretty darn good chance that Charlton published a comic for it. Superheroes? Check! Westerns? Yup!, Martial arts? Hai! Romance? Mai oui! Surfing and cars? Are you kidding?



Flying Nurses?



Are you ready to give up?

Clog-dancing Martian Soap Opera?

Um.......Great Gazoo?



Anyway, the spy fad didn't pass them by. They started out with a character called Sarge Steel.....



He was the creation of editor Pat Masulli and was written by the prolific Joe Gill and drawn by one Dick Giordano. Sarge, as we learn, is his name, as in Sargent....as in Shriver.....as in Kennedy Family. He was actually a captain, in the US Army Special Forces, in Vietnam (though someone forgot to tell the colorist that Special Forces are the Green Berets.....



In his first issue, Sarge is a PI and ex-GI, having lost his left hand in Vietnam. His first case (well, the first we see) finds him hired by Asian honey Lin Ying, who wants to find her father. This gets him mixed up with the operations of Ivan Chung, a Communist terrorist and espionage agent, who organized the VC, in Vietnam. Steel was attached to the CIA, via Military Intelligence, to route out the VC. He captures Chung, but becomes targeted by the VC and loses his hand, trying to return a grenade that was thrown through a window, into a party that he was attending. Now, Chung has kidnapped Lin Ying's father and the pair end up his captives. Sarge is able to fight his way out and contact help.

That first issue also included a 3-paige back-up story about the real wartime Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the CIA. It kind of jazzes it up, but gets the basics right that it was founded by William J Donovan and placed advisors bin occupied territory, to organize and direct Resistance cells, in conjunction with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). These teams were usually 3 people, codenamed Jedburg Teams. It was from these ranks that US Army Special Forces was born, as Col Aaron Bank, the designer and founder of Special Forces, had served with the Jedburg Teams. he modelled the basic A-Team formation on the model of the Jedburgs, with communications specialists, advisors for explosives, small arms, heavy arms and medicine, who would train guerilla forces to fight against an unfriendly regime or train friendly governments in counter-insurgency tactics.

So, Sarge Steel was a sort of spy, from day one; but, here, he is a private eye. He continues in that role, through issue #5, and would run into Ivan Chung, again, in that issue. His other PI stories deal with ex-Nazis and the like, as did many adventure series, on tv and in pulp novels. In issue 6, he is suddenly Sarge Steel, Special Agent, working for Washington....



The series ended with issue 8, but continued as Secret Agent, with issues 9 & 10, which continue to feature Sarge. He remains in spy mode, carrying his trusty Luger P-08 (favorite of spy films & tv), taking on Commies and ex-Nazis.

Meanwhile, Charlton assigned a new spy to cases, who would join Sarge steel in the final issue of Secret Agent (#10), but got her start in Career Girl Romances #38...



Our story finds Tiffany Sinn, Private Detective (notice a pattern here) in her office, when some hoods barge in and announce that she is going with them. She has a hot date and isn't taking this lightly....



In true Marlowe fashion, she gets clonked on the head and dragged off somewhere and she comes to in an office...that of Amos Mallory, top espionage boss. She is recruited to go into East Berlin and locate agent Rex Swift, the man who, at age 12, helped her escape from behind the Iron Curtain. He was working in West Berlin, when he disappeared into the Eastern sector and hasn't made contact, since. Tiffany is tasked to go into East Berlin, locate him and bring him out. She flies off to Berlin and enters the eastern sector, via taxi, then gets waylaid by the Stasi, who were waiting for her. She gets tossed into a cell with Rex! He says he is no traitor and she admits to being in love with him and they start swapping spit.....



Rex has a way out and pulls out a hidden garotte wire. He throttles a guard and Tiffany takes his pistol and they shoot their way out of the jail and get to the Wall and over, to safety.

It's all a bit thin and mushy; but, pretty exciting and a change of pace from the normal romance comic plot.

Tiffany gets cover billing, in the next issue of Career Girl Romances, though she looks like she is engaging in a slightly different career...



She doesn't get top billing, but, she gets the lead feature, as she is sent to St Louis, on a mission, where someone mistakes the scale of the Arch....



Tiffany and Rex are home, planning on getting married. Mallory and the CIA have other plans and Tiffany is kidnapped off the street and slapped around, in the car!



She is brought to Mallory, who says Rex has been arrested as a traitor, since no one yet knows he is innocent (and it will make Tiffany comply with their wishes). She is assigned to find and eliminate Rex's brother, Alfred, who is a Nazi. For whatever reason, she believes Mallory isn't lying, despite his shanghai-ing her, twice! She jets off to St Louis and then runs into her contact, Terry Terrell (ugh...), when she dumps him into the room of her hotel. He endears himself by knocking her around a bit and she starts to fall for him.

Pretty shallow dame, if you ask me!

They meet up again later and spot their man at Gaslight Square and tail him (after stopping to make-out) to the Gateway Arch..



The nut tries to climb the exterior of the Arch, with magnetic shoes, while shouting jibberish about the revival of the glorious Third Reich. he shoot Terry dead and Tiffany vows to get him. He has a bomb, but that is the end of the story. We are told it will continue in the next, but that turns out not to be the case. Instead, Tiffany shows up in Secret Agent #10...



The story finds Tiffany reminiscing about her past desires to be a housewife, but fate had other plans. We learn that she shot the neo-Nazi dead and no mention is made of Rex or the fact that the Nazi was his brother. Tiffany is told to take a flight to San Francisco, where an agent, posing as a stewardess, passes her a magazine, saying the fashions will be quite becoming to her.

Are we sure this isn't a lesbian pulp story?

She is picked up in San Francisco and transported to her new apartment and told about a plant that is under surveillance, where they believe aviation secrets are being smuggled out (while the letterer misspells "integral"
and "past". She checks out her new mod digs and her fully stocked wardrobe then reports to a lab, where she is undercover, as a lab assistant to Aldo Batemann (hey, he might be a relative, except for the spelling!). Aldo has a chemical reaction to Tiffany and invites her to a day at the beach, where he hangs out with sweaty, oily musclemen, then takes her for a swim and dinner at Fisherman's Wharf.

The CIA gets ansty and plants some phony plans inside the plant, to smoke out the spy. Aldo takes Tiffany out again to the beach. Tiffany notices he is wearing a different blue bathing suit and his workout routine is different.



She spots his contacts, watching from binoculars, at a hotel window. She radios in via her lipstick, but Aldo notices her and grabs her, dragging her to the surf. She uses a bit of judo then kicks the bejesus out of him, before help comes and arrests him. Tiffany stays to work on her tan, when the boss radios with a new assignment.

The story is by David Kaler and art is by Jim Aparo, while Gary Friedrich wrote her two previous appearances, in Career Girl Romances and Charles Nicholas handled art on her debut and Luis Dominguez on the St Louis tale. Friedrich was born and raised in Jackson, MO and was a friend of Roy Thomas, who helped him break in, at Marvel. Gaslight Square was a real location, as it was the center of the entertainment district, with various clubs and nightspots. Good luck trying to climb the arch, magnetic shoes or not.

Steve Skeates and Dick Giordano handle Sarge Steel's lead story, where Sarge Steel and his girl, Linda Velvet, are being shot at, after a night on the town....



See, Giordano could do fashion. Take notes wannabe comic artists....your characters can't always be in spandex, leather jackets or body armor.

Sarge hits the guy, but before he can check him out, the dude fires again and hits Linda, as she tries to stand up. he gets her to medical attention, then returns to the scene of the shootout, to look for clues. He starts checking around to see why someone might be gunning for Linda. The police provide no revelations and shaking down hoods doesn't get answers. He returns to his office (he is still a PI,except when he takes assignements fromt he CIA) and someone from the Agency is there to talk to him about the shoot-out. The man says Linda Velvet is an agent for The Third Hand, a freelance spy ring.



They get word of something happening at the hospital and arrive to find the place a wreck and Linda dead, from a gas grenade. After clearing his head, Sarge goes to Linda's apartment and rouses the super to let him in. he assumes he is another cop and says his buddy is already up there. Sarge busts in and catches them cold...



Another agent gets the drop on him, but he pastes the palooka with a steel left and and flesh & bone right. He ducks a gunshot and the enemy skidaddle and Sarge meets Sarah Tempest, Linda's neighbor. Sarge spots a phot of a man named John Vance, a "two-bit gunsel" Sarge has run into before. he asks about him and Sarah said she has seen him around Linda's place. They were once engaged. Sarge figures he got Linda mixed in with The Third Hand. He goes looking for him and gets nabbed by Vance and some goons, who are looking for something. Sarge fights back....



He corners Vance and grills him but he isn't the boss. Sarge heads back to his office to find the real boss....Sarah Tempest....



That leads to convoluted explanations...



fall out between schnooks....



And then Sarge disarms Sarah, after she shoots Hobart. Turns out, they were looking for a stuffed rabbit, which Steel had in the trunk of his car, after giving it to Linda, who returned it to him.

These were the two main spy features for Charlton, though Sarge Steel was always a sort of PI/Spy hybrid, with excellent art by Giordano. Tiffany was at her best with Aparo on art though her stories cater more to romance fans, with her lusting after her co-workers, but she gets to play the hero more than most romance leads. The Aparo story lets her be more of a spy, but the emphasis is still on looks, clothes and romance, even in a more macho book, like Secret Agent. The amount of violence against women is rather troubling; but, Bond slapped a lot of women around in the 60s (and so did Sean Connery).

Charlton had one more minor foray into the spy world, in the pages of E-Man, of all things....



It wasn't the lead feature, which gave us the debut of Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton's wonderful hero Alec Tronn, aka E-Man. It is the back-up story, from Tom Sutton, featuring The Knight.



Our story begins as The Knight is awoken by a message to report to the boss at 0745. He gets up, showers and gets into spy togs, complete with black turtleneck, shoulder holster, and double breasted blazer, complete with knight's symbol. he then reports to the headquarters for CHESS, the Command for the Hinderance of Espionage, Sabotage and Subversion... and not the musical....



Someone needs to tell the video director that muy thai fighters do not wear boots!

The Knight is agent Link Chain (his parents must have hated him) and he runs into his buddy, Marko Tulsa, who will be his Rook on this assignment. They in turn meet Mari Halliday, who is to act as Bishop. They report to the King and Queen for assignment. Link gets chewed out for a bar brawl, then they get down to brass tacks. Top government contractor Molloy Electronics is believed to have been infiltrated by enemy spies. The Knight will go undercover, as an engineer, with the Rook acting as back up, on the loading dock. Bishop issues them with identification, a belt that has an infra-red camera in the buckle and a burlar's kit in the lining of the belt. She also issues him a submachine gun (side loading, like a Sterling or Sten, but not drawn exactly like either) and they are sent off, after Link tries to hit on Mari and goes down in flames. Link reports to the company. he is given a tour and then gets to work. he stays into the night, saying he needs to catch up on things and has the run of the place. His burglar kit gets him into a locked office and the camera takes shots of the files. He spends all night taking shots and then gets the film to the Bishop. He then has to do his cover work, with no sleep! A secretary tells him that "Jon Jacobi" (Tulsa's cover name) wants to see him on the docks. He goes down and Marko tells him to get into his truck. There, he finds the submachinegun.



It turns out that the entire plant is a front for a spy ring. They need to get out, fast, but soon find themselves in a gun battle, with security. Their only hope is that the Chessman, with their Pawns, arrive in time. They hole up and wait the next wave of goons, when the Bishop turns up, in combat gear, letting them know that CHESS has captured the plant and taken the survivors into custody. They can stand down. Mari asks Link out to dinner, now that the mission is over and he accepts, but he ends up face down at the table, fast asleep, after a night without sleep and the stress of combat.



This is a fun little tale, from Nicola Cuti and Tom Sutton. Sadly, it was the only appearance of the character. The CHESS organization is nicely thought out, with the KING and Queen as the bosses, Bishops as the mission controllers, Knights as the field agents and Rooks as support, with Pawns acting as the ground troops. All of this is conveyed over a total of 8 pages,, as we meet everyone, get the mission briefing, undercover work and the gun battle. Good, exciting stuff and I would have loved to have more; but, it was not to be. Other issues of E-Man featured Steve Ditko's Killjoy, with a Right Wing, though humorous satire of the rights of the accused (the crooks cry fowl when they are denied their rights to commit crimes), Travis, a sci-fi Wally Wood-esque feature, Liberty Belle (another Ditko creation), and Rog 2000 (with John Byrne).

Charlton did also publish Vengeance Squad, but it is more of an action/adventure pulp series (a mix of private eye/mercenary/men's adventure pulp) and The Fightin' 5, who are more of a Blackhawk military adventure feature. Beyond that, Nightshade and captain Atom were both government agents, though working as superheroes.

Sarge Steel is more of a private eye strip than a spy feature, at the heart, but it tread both worlds pretty thoroughly and is probably comparable to Secret Agent X-9/Secret Agent Corrigan, fromt he newspapers. As stated in the into post, spy fiction grew out of detective fiction, moving away from murder mysteries and the like into a different kind of mystery, as the detective is a government agent, trying to uncover those behind conspiracies against the government. Tiffany Sinn, ironically, is closer to real espionage work, when she goes to East Berlin, while the St Louis adventure is a mix of counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, making it more of an FBI adventure. Same for her last story.

Writers in entertainment tend to get the role of the CIA mixed up. They are chartered to handle foreign intelligence gathering and are specifically prohibited from conducting operations inside the United States. That area belongs to the FBI (and now to the Dept of Homeland Security). Many of these tales deal more in counter-espionage than actual intelligence work; but, there you go.

Next time, we head back in time, before Bond was a phenomena, to a comic book spy, with a pun, for a name. Join us as we head out to explore The Danger Trail.

Our next James Bond actually predates James Bond, by about 3 years. he even had a goofy name, before such characters as Vesper Lynde, Auric Goldfinger or Pussy Galore. I'm talking about King Faraday....


(Band named after Tintin characters; how appropriate!)

King Faraday debuted, in 1950, in the pages of a new comic, The Danger Trail.



There were 5 issues of the series, though King Faraday appears only in issues 1-4 (in story) and only as the feature mascot, for the letters page, in issue 5, the last. The series is pretty much what it sounds like, hard-boiled, macho adventure stories, of the kind you'd have found in the pulp magazines, like Black Mask, Adventure, The Argosy, or any of the dozens of others. It had a lot in common with the "men's adventure" pulp magazines that popped up in the 40 and continued through the 1970s, though their real heyday was the 50s to the early to mid 60s. These were macho tales of daring do, often wartime adventures or against Nazi war criminals, dictators, criminals, and similar. The covers and interior pages featured lurid stories of violence and sex (more often implied than detailed, with more prose given to the violence) and covers to match, from artists like Earl Norem, Mort Kuntsler and Syd Shores. Martin Goodman's company put out tons of the stuff, as did other companies. This was DC comics attempt to do something along those lines. if I were to hazard a guess, I'd bet on Robert Kanigher being the driving force behind this magazine. He was the main writer, though Ed Herron and David Vern are also well represented in the book. On thing is for certain, the title features some of the best artists at DC, in the post-War era, with Carmine Infantino, Alex Toth, Frank Giacoia, Bob Oksner and humor pages from Hy Rosen and a few others. the 5th and final issue features Johnny Peril, who spent more time in comics like The Unexpected.

In his first story, King Faraday is not a government agent and his profession isn't really clear, though his inspiration definitely is: the hard-boiled detective. It is pretty clear that Kanigher is aping the style of the great hard-boiled detective fiction authors, especially Mickey Spillane, who I, The Jury, had come out just 3 years before, causing a sensation (and a lot of controversy). That novel debuted Mike Hammer, Spillane's tough-as-nails detective, with purple prose, terse dialogue, vivid violence, and hints, if not open displays of sex. Spillane did not originate this, as Caroll John Daley, with his Race Williams stories, as well as other detectives, originated what became known as the "hard-boiled detective). He was soon followed by ex-Pinkerton's detective Dashiell Hammett and his Continental Op (and Sam Spade) and Raymond Chandler and his Phillip Marlowe. Spillane just upped the ante and the violence. Kanigher wasn't one to miss a trend and he adopted the style.

The opening story finds King Faraday leaving a theater, after viewing the noir classic, Sorry, Wrong Number, with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster (there is a chot of Stanwyck, in the background, as King leaves the theater).



Faraday hits on an usherette, then heads over to Grand Central Station and the restaurant there and overhears a murder plot. He races to save the victim, who turns out to be a woman, named Julie Stevesn. Faraday tackles her before the killers can shoot her and then they run into the subway tunnel to escape and a train slams into the hoods. Julie is wealthy and beautiful and very appreciative of Faraday and invites him to her house, for a party, the next evening. While there, he flips through a scrapbook she has and then finds someone pointing a gun at his head, from behind him. He is order over towards a large window and is shoved out of it. Faraday was a paratrooper in the war and he is able to twist so that he hits the pool, rather than the pavement. Others think he is having fun and Julie sugegsts they move the party to the pool and they all change into bathing suits. Faraday tries to talk to Julie to find out why someone might be trying to kill her, but gets few answers. She goes for a swim and makes a beautiful swan dive, off the high diving board and hits the water, but does not come up. King dives in and rescues her and it is clear that someone slipped her a mickey. Faraday goes back to the library and finds a snapshot missing from the scrapbook. It featured Julie and a handsome German man, danicing, in Berlin, before the war. King finally remembers why the man looked familiar; he was Martin Vormann, Hitler's #1 hatchet man and a wanted war criminal. Guess who turns up? Vormann forces the pair to drive him to n airfield then tries to shoot faraday, but only grazes him. Faraday recovers and drives the car in a chicken run at the plane and crashes into it, killing Vormann.

Strictly noirish hard-boiled stuff. The Nazi war criminal, very thinly disguised from Martin Borman, who was the Nazi Party Secretary and Hitler's second in command, before escaping the Allies. It is believed that he was killed by the Russians, near a rail bridge, according to an eyewitness account by Hitler Youth leader Arthur Axmann. However, rumor's persisted that Bormann had escaped Germany to South America. The West German government offered a reward for his capture and everyone from the MOSSAD to Simon Wiesenthal hunted for him, with all kinds of sightings and rumors, leading to jokes like his photo being used for the perpetrator of a phony Golden Ticket, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Also in that first issue is a story, "Appointment in Paris," by Ed Herron and Alex Toth. it features Treasury Agent Vern Hastings, who is in Paris, hunting a counterfeiting ring. A woman on a train appears to him and puts a gun in his side and tells him she was sent to kill him, under duress, then fires two rounds into the ceiling....



The woman turns out to be the foreign correspondent for the Paris Sun, who has info about the ring. They escape the train, but the crooks are on their trail. She has a wire recording of the gang planning their activities and she was discovered and they chased after her, to try to recover it, but were interrupted. her office contacted Washington, leading to Hastings being sent to Paris and her abduction and use as an assassin. The crooks come after them, in a marshy area, firing tommy guns to smoke them out, but end up stepping on a leftover land mine. They return to Paris, where the rest of the gang try to get the reporter, but Hastings arrives with the police and they die in a shoot out and Hastings is wounded. The reporter visits him in the hospital, with the wire spool, only to discover she accidentally erased the evidence, when her fingers handled the wire, rubbing off the recording.

Issue #2 gets more into spy territory, as Faraday is contacted by an old paratrooper buddy, who works for the government. They want his help to locate and rescue a captured scientist from the Iron Curtain. The man is considered the equivalent of Einstein and his use by the Communists could tip the balance. Faraday's friend is killed and he calls the contact name he gave him and agrees to take on the mission, to parachute into the enemy country and infiltrate The Hangman's House, where the scientist is being held.



He goes into a club and concocts a disturbance to get himself arrested and taken to the prison. There, he strongarms a guard to take him to the scientist and they then fight their way to a boat and escape...



Issue 3 finds Faraday called in again by the government to aid in locating a spy who has plans for an upgraded nuclear weapon (King gets to view a bomb test), stolen from a test site. This leads him to India and Thaland, before the adventure is over. Also, this issue features a French Foreign Legion story, from Kanigher and Alex Toth, which sounds like Kanigher had viewed Beau Geste or read the novel, recently. Toth does a great job with it.

Issue 4 takes King to Madagascar, where a friend is killed and King connects it with a native rebellion, in a rather racist and colonial story, as the natives are superstitious and not just people fed up with French colonialism and oppression.

The middle two stories are the closest to being espionage tales, while Faraday is pretty much treated like a pulp detective, rather than a secret agent. No Graham Greene intrigue or Ian Fleming knights sent to slay forein wizards and dragons.

King next turns up in World's Finest #64, in a story called "Spy Train." King is given a ticket for the Orient Express, by his boss, and a mission to locate a former agent, who has turned traitor...



He boards the train and runs into a beautiful blond woman and a photographer, who befriends him. After several attempts on his life, he discovers that the photographer is the man he is hunting. There is a climactic battle on top of the train.

This story and those from issues 1-3 of Danger Trail are later reprinted in Showcase #50-51, as I-Spy, a year before the tv show debuted. he also appears in Showcase #100, which includes everyone featured in previous issues.

Len Wein brings the character back, in Batman #313-314, in a Two-Face story. Batman is called in about a murder of someone who stole a binary code, related to national defense. His investigation determines that Two-Face is behind the killing, which brings him into contact with King Faraday, who is after the code. Faraday wants Two-Face stopped, regardless of the cost, but Batman is bent on saving Harvey Dent from himself.

He turns up again in Flash #290, in a story by Cary Bates & Don Heck and in Batman #333-335, in the hands of Marv Wolfman. At this point, Faraday is pretty much to go-to for a government agent and more of a counter-intelligence agent than in his original stories. He pops up again in Adventure Comics #483, in a Dial H For Hero story(!), the New Teen Titans #10 and issues 18-21, all from Marv Wolfman.

Marv Wolfman brings King Faraday into the post-Crisis DC, in New Teen Titans Annual #3 and issue 44. He next turns up in Secret Origins #28, in the origin story for Nightshade, as she becomes an agent for the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Faraday becomes her mentor and he takes over the role that Captain Atom had played, in her Charlton stories, especially their battle against Punch & Jewelee. Those adventures became part of the cover story for Captain Atom, after he was introduced into DC continuity. the story is drawn by Rob Liefeld...



Wow; noses and feet!

Rob was kept under a tighter leash, at DC and Bob Lewis inks him. I actually had a much higher opinion of his work, until Marvel let him get wild and lazy.

King is brought back into Nightshade's world, in Suicide Squad #28-29, as part of the Janus Directive. She brings Faraday to help recruit Captain Atom back into the fold, to help stop Kobra, who has set the US security world against itself. He has a cameo in New Titans #58, remotely watching Danny Chase, then appears in Suicide Squad #38, detailing the back story of Ben Turner, aka Bronze Tiger, who now is a CBI agent, recruited, along with Richard Dragon, to work for the CBI (instead of GOOD, in the original series).

King isn't done with active operations, yet and he turns up in, of all places, Ms. Tree Quartley #8, when DC was the home for the character. King is in Venice, with a female agent, named Carol, who has worked a desk. She has moved into field ops and King wanted to make sure she had an easy assignment, for her first field job. It was supposed to just be a mail drop and they take some time to sight-see, on a gondola. While opening champaign, they are rammed by a motorboat, piloted by a man wearing a carnival mask. He tries to snatch Carol and King fights back. After exposing a chest tattoo of a phoenix, rising from the ashes, they crash into a pier and are dumped into the canal. The man makes off with Carol and King pursues, but loses sight of the abductor, because of multiple people wearing the same carnival mask...



He notices a church door open, when it should be locked for the night and goes inside. A robed man turns out to be the abductor, not the padre and they battle and King decks the man with a candlabra. he finds the tattoo and knows that Carol is nearby and is soon proven right...



Carol decides to stick with desk work; but, we are told that this is not the end for King.

The story was from Joey Cavalieri and Carmine Infantino, with Frank McLaughlin inking, bringing back the original artist on the feature. This is the only story in Ms Tree Quarterly, but King returns for one more go around.



Sadly, Paul Gulacy only handles the covers. However, the interior story is by Len Wein, with Infantino and McLaughlin back on the art. The Ms Tree story was a set up for this mini.

The story begins with King Faraday using an expandable pole to vault over the perimeter wall of a jungle hacienda, in a fictional Latin America country. We are led to believe he is there to assassinate the president of this country; but, fascist dictators are friends of Uncle Sam, and he is actually there to stop the assassin and send a message to the opposition, before the election. However, the killer set off alarms and King must escape them, since they think he was the assassin. He blows a hole through the wall and runs to a cliff, where he escapes via hang glider, which Infantino draws backward....



He reports in to Sarge Steel and then gets a new assignment, to meet a woman, named Natasha Sokoloff, assistant to a Prof Medekov, who disappeared. several experts in nuclear energy and radiation have gone missing and she claims knowledge of who is responsible, but will only talk after she is safely brought to Washington. Faraday goes to Istanbul to meet his contact. He tells him the woman is hidden in a tailoring shop, under a cover identity and he goes to meet her. After a quick exchange of passwords, she refuses to divulge any more info. King isn't able to press the point as two stereotypical goons turn up, with guns, but they get kayoed and tied up. King and Natasha make the Orient Express, disguised as an elderly couple and leave Istanbul, for Paris. The contact man turns up on the train, in a porter's uniform and a gun, appearing to be a double agent. A fight ensues and he goes over the rail of the observation car...



He isn't the only threat and King runs into more goons and battles them on top of the train. Unlike Gene Wilder, he stays on the train and they go over the side...



King returns to Natasha and starts to lazily draw on the window condensation. He draws a symbol tattooed on one of the hodds and natasha gets hysterical, saying they have found her. She pulls the emergency cord and the train brakes to a halt and she jumps off the train, with King racing after her. he catches up and finally gets her to tell him who has found her and she says the men trying to kill her. The train leaves without them and they are forced to hike through wilderness, but are soon attacked by men in helicopters....



King steers them towards the rail lines and the helicopter becomes entangled in the power lines and crashes. king and Natasha come to a city, but decide they can't chance the phone lines, to Washington. They head for the riverside, to take a boat and are attacked by men in a van. That leads to a river chase, where they are pursued by boat, on the water and the van on the land beside the river. King cuts loose some cargo, strapped to the boat and it creates an obstacle for the pursuer, launching them into the air and into the van....



After, we see some hooded guy report to his master and we learn that Kobra is behind everything.

They make it to Venice and meet up with an old contact of King's, a man named Pietro. They rest and get a change of clothes, while Pietro calls the enemy to betray them. Some grunts turn up, in combat gear and weaponry and take them prisoner. They escape, after Faraday floods Pietro's restaurant and electrocutes the goons. they go on the run and Faraday makes a pitstop at a phone booth to call Sage Steel. He tells Faraday to get to Paris and meet a man called Dupree, atop the Eiffel Tower.

A Kobra cultist reports to the head snake and is told to get faraday and the girl or KRRRRRRRkkkkkkkkkttttttttttt (throat cutting noise). King and Natasha hop into the back of a cargo truck and, this being the 90s and not the 50s, get down to some sweet lovin, in the back of a truck.

Sounds like high school!

They make it to Paris, meet the contact on the Eiffel Tower and find him dead. Kobra goons turn up, King kills a half dozen or so (makes Race Bannon look effeminate!); but, some goons grab Natasha and lift off dangling from a Chinook...



King grabs the belt of a goon, but it tears away and the issue ends with him taking a header towards le ground!

Issue 4 opens with King falling and he goes into a freefall braking and steers to a nearby hot air balloon and lands on the envelope



King makes it to the ground safely and has to answer to Jean Law and I don't think Carmine has seen what modern gendarmes wear on the beat, in the 1990s, as he has them looking like the 1920s. sarge Steel turns up to rescue him (like the French are going to take orders from an American!)

Natasha is brought before Lord Naga. He tells her she is there to aid Medekov in creating a nuclear device with no radiation yield, to set off the Kali Yuga.

You know, this sounds like the conspiracy jibberish that a nutcase spouted to me at Barnes & Noble, while trying to find some book he saw at a gun show, that claimed the Germans had a working nuclear reactor in WW2, which created no waste heat. I studied basic nuclear engineering in my Naval ROTC courses and had to fight laughing in his face.

Steel takes Faraday to their Paris HQ (right out of James Bond, like everything else) and briefs him about Kobra. Meanwhile, they get a report on the autopsy of one of the Kobra goons and they found traces of radioactive material, that originated in Chernobyl.

Oh, f@#$!

They set up a joint operation with the Russian FSB (successors to the KGB) and Sarge Steel joins Faraday on the mission.



Kobra's base is in the Ukraine, at the Chernobyl plant, inside the exclusion zone. The Russkies turn up (um, Ukraine was an independent nation, in 1993), but Carmine has either never seen an Mi-24 Hind gunship or just can't be bothered and draws something that looks like the Sikorsky H-34 Choctaw, from 1954. He also doesn't know anything about rappelling/abseiling from a helicopter...



However, it is pure James Bond and looks pretty cool, if you have no military or aviation background.

Faster than you can say "ninja commando attack on a volcano fortress," Kobra and the Russians are engaged in a firefight that would make Cubby Broccoli proud. There is much death and destruction and things get blowed up (that's for Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok....May the Good Lord take a liking to you and blow you up real soon!) and Lord Naga has Natsha dragged before him. Faraday crashes in and it's guns vs energy weapons, until the cavalry arrive and Lord Naga makes like Zoltar and flies away in an escape craft.



However, Faraday got a magnetic grenade attached to it and it destroyed it. They all head home for some vodka and some sex (King and Natasha, though...who knows, Sarge Steel and Col Gorky might have joined them....)

The whole thing is swiped, liberally, from half the James Bond canon and touches of the Spy Train story from World's Finest #64. The Janus Directive is mentioned in the course of the briefing, where Kobra was the big baddie. Despite the plagiarism, this is pretty darn entertaining and harkens back to old school James Bond cinema, back when it was fun and not endless product placement and 9/11 metaphor. Carmine and McLaughlin look pretty good here, as Carmine's pencils seem tighter than they had through the 80s and that might be down to McLaughlin inking them better than others or doing tighter finishes to the loose pencils. Wahtever the case, it looks great...nice and dynamic, fun loving, tense, and just damn good comics. Somehow, I missed this, in the 90s, when it is right up my alley. I put it down to the likelihood it wasn't promoted for s@#$ by DC, since it didn't have trading cards, foil covers, nihilistic superheroes, or excessive sketchy line art.

Or maybe I am too bitter.

Whatever the case, this is classic spy-fi, when everyone seemed to forget how to do it. Made up for the bad taste in my mouth from Nick Fury vs SHIELD or the subsequent SHIELD comic and drivel like Checkmate. Just two-fisted adventure, male fantasy romance, ridiculous battle pieces and a body count that would give a Vietnam-era US Army general an ere......uh, very pleased.

The 1950s Danger Trail is a worthy read for some great adventure stuff, even if the dialogue is kind crap. The plots are good and the art is great, even though King Faraday, text heavy as it is, looks more like a Bryon Preiss 1970s graphic experiment, like Chandler: Red Tide. How can you beat a series with Infantino, Giacoia, Elias and Toth?

The 1993 mini-series is pure fun and a real throwback to the awesomeness that was Sean Connery James Bond (and George Lazenby and a little Roger Moore). In between, King Faraday became more of a guest government agent stereotype, basically there to move the plot along, not be a major figure.

The character ends up with a fairly large role in Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier and got an appearance in the Tangent project, as well as the Smallville season 11 comic. He appeared in Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice, as well as the dvd adaptation of New Frontier.

Not bad for a guy saddled with a joke name by a father with a poor sense of humor.

Next up, a little Black Widow action, with an explanation why, despite her being a superhero.