Post by MWGallaher on Apr 26, 2022 7:47:44 GMT -5
ADVENTURE COMICS #82, January 1943
SYNOPSIS:
Bernard Baily’s splash establishes the story’s premise: Two other men getting Miraclo powers from the machine. The lettering in the large all-caption panel, with its usage of lower case, was favored at Quality Comics; was Baily scoping out the competition?
Thorndyke arrives at Rex Tyler’s lab with an alert: he has spotted some thugs entering the apartment house where Rex lives, presumably to burgle the tenants’ rooms! That is in fact what “Doc” and his two hoodlum friends are doing, and hurrying to finish the heist in the last of five rooms--Rex Tyler’s room—one of the crooks absconds with a “swell-lookin’ radio”. Said “radio” is, as Rex and Thorny soon discover, is the Miraclo machine that endows Rex Tyler with the power of Hourman!
Even though he can’t power up, Rex suits up in his Hourman costume, and Thorndyke dons his own outfit. Their pursuit of the thieves is made easier by Thorndyke’s pals, who were asked to keep an eye on the men when they left Rex’s apartment. (These may be the remnants of the Minute Men of America, who were, last time we saw them, only a kid gang under Thorndyke’s leadership rather than Hourman’s).
At Doc’s hideout, we learn that Doc’s aides have been injected with a chemical of Doc’s creation that creates a compulsion to steal, which has turned the boys into “foist-rate crooks”. The apartment raid was a rehearsal for a hit on the Gotham Gem Store (I guess we’re back in Gotham City now?). Before they head off to the job, one of the men fiddles with the “radio”. When it activates, the light it emits makes them “feel funny”. It’s 6:00 pm and the corner clock begins its countdown—this time tracking not Hourman’s sixty minutes of super-strength, but that of the criminals who have now been imbued with super-powers, courtesy of Rex’s amazing machine!
The unpowered Hourman and Thorndyke make the scene, and the thugs are confused with the pistols with which they intend to defend themselves crumple in their hands, and the table they attempt to slam over Hourman’s head falls apart in their grip!
Frightened that they have been somehow “jinxed” by Hourman, the crooks are oblivious to their new enhanced abilities. They sidestep Thorny, who accidentally knocks out his non-powered mentor, and Doc figures things out as they flee the scene: this is Hourman’s Miraclo machine, the source of his powers! The thugs (Doc was apparently outside of the machines area of effect) are now not only possessed with unbeatable strength, but with the continuing compulsion to steal—even stealing a No Parking sign, ripping it out of the concrete as their car passes it! Since Hourman is not a threat worth dealing with at the moment, the gang heads to carry out their looting of the gem store…
Now you may be thinking, if Doc knows they’ve stolen Hourman’s machine, surely he can figure out Hourman’s secret identity, right? But given the sloppy story-telling we are accustomed to from this feature, the scripter (tentatively identified at the GCD as, again, Alfred Bester) will ignore this, right?
Wrong! Doc’s thought balloon shows that he has indeed deduced his enemy’s true identity!
While Doc looks forward to learning how to control the Miraclo machine from Rex Tyler, the thievery-obsessed thugs delight in smashing through the brick wall of the gem store to begin plundering!
Hourman and Thorny have overheard them speaking about their destination, so they soon arrive at the scene of the crime.
Hourman taunts the high-powered hoodlums into leaving the store to battle our heroes, trying to evade their blows, but stumbles over Thorndyke, and they soon find themselves is—you guessed it---another death trap!
The Miraclo-powered crooks have taken the heroes to the city powerhouse, and bound them to a dynamo with high voltage cables; when the city street lights come on automatically at 6:30 (about 7 minutes from now, according to the corner clock), Hourman and Thorny will be electrocuted as the current begins to flow!
Doc’s got a problem with that plan, though: killing Hourman will prevent him from learning how the Miraclo machine works! The boys don’t care about Doc’s plans—after all, they’ve got their powers, and they have the machine, and they’re ready to hit the Gambol Department Store next. What do they need Doc for?
They don’t, so they give Doc a slug that—get this—breaks his freakin’ back! Doc is a goner, but before he expires, he does the only thing he can to get a chance at vengeance on the double-crossers: he yanks the cables from Hourman and Thorny and takes the deadly jolt himself!
His dying screams bring help to Hourman and Thorndyke, who race off to Gambol’s…
It’s 6:38 when they arrive, announcing to the thieves that “that jolt of current was just the thing I needed!” He tricks the men into dashing into the store’s revolving door, where the Miraclo strength, which they are unaware of how to control, leaves them running in circles, exhausting themselves.
Hourman, with Thorny by his side, activates the Miraclo machine and powers up again.
When he lets his enemies out, they are dizzy, and crash into a support pillar, cracking it apart. Uh-oh—now Hourman has to hold the pillar together and can’t fight the thugs!
But it’s now 7:00 pm, and the thugs’ hour of power is up. Thorndyke is able to knock out the bad guys. Hourman temporarily repairs the column with rope, and Thorny bind the thugs—now weakened—with thread!
As the story concludes, Rex puts his Miraclo machine inside a safe: “After that close call with those thugs, I’m taking no chances…nobody but Hourman will ever use Miraclo again!”
Thorndyke complains about not being able to power up for the afternoon’s football game, and artist Bernard Baily finishes up with a caption reminding the reader that Hourman is back in action next issue, followed by a one-panel plug featuring his other feature, Americommando and his arch enemy, the “Little One” (a half German, half Japanese villain).
COMMENTARY:
This story serves up a lot to speculate on regarding Hourman’s three years of experience with Miraclo.
If we are trying to tie this series together into a consistent, cohesive narrative, page 2 gives us an important piece of information. Thorndyke says “What are you going to do without the Miraclo machine? You can’t become Hourman!!!” Considering that we’ve previously seen Rex whip up a batch of the ingested form of Miraclo, and he doesn’t do so now, we must conclude that there is some unspoken reason that he has foresworn the pill (or potion) form of the substance. Either it no longer works (or works unreliably) or it does have deleterious effects that are riskier than going on a mission in costume but unpowered.
Page 3 confirms an obvious but unspoken fact: anyone standing close to the activated Miraclo ray gets superhuman strength for an hour. It may be the fact that the level of power is proportional to the recipient’s innate physical condition, but the consequence is inescapable: Thorndyke has been acting as Hourman’s aid with the boost of Miraclo on those occasions when he stood by Rex as Rex powered up. That makes it a bit more reasonable that Hourman would allow a teenage boy to accompany him into dangerous missions. And if Thorny’s resulting power is inferior to Rex’s, that would explain while he can sometimes keep up with Rex as they run along at higher-than-natural speed, he sometimes has difficulty keeping up, or needs to be carried. This page lends some small credence to this hypothesis, when Hourman comments that the crooks are “a hundred times stronger than ordinary men”; hasn’t the usual description, lately, anyway, been that Miraclo gives Rex “the strength of fifty men”? Perhaps these thugs have physiques twice as strong as Rex Tyler’s, and are therefore twice as strong under the effects of Miraclo?
Page 4 introduces a bit of a wrinkle, though: the fellow who turned the men into crooks with his mysterious injections does not gain Miraclo powers—only the two who stood directly in front of the machine did. So the ray is highly directional rather than dispersed. From previous depictions, it would certainly appear that Thorndyke was within range of the rays, standing as close to Hourman as these two opponents stood next to each other when they got a dose. Rex clearly never ordered Thorndyke to stay so far away from the rays that he couldn’t have leaned over a bit, and what boy wouldn’t have done that, at least?
The evil scientist, to our surprise, figures out that they have stolen the Miraclo machine that gives Hourman his powers. The story does acknowledge that this implies the bad guy can now determine Hourman’s secret identity, but it doesn’t explain how this knowledge of the origin of Hourman’s power got out in the first place. To my recollection, there has been no indication that any of his opponents were explicitly aware of the time limits to Hourman’s strength, but now it’s somehow common knowledge that it’s granted by a “Miraclo machine”? Did Hourman get too loose-lipped in a radio interview or something? He probably also revealed the sixty-minute limit, since the bad guys are confident that this guy in the Hourman suit is a “weakling” at the moment. No consideration that he may have a duplicate machine, or that he charged up earlier, so they must know that since the machine has been in their possession for more than an hour, they have no fear of a super-powered opponent.
Page 5 reveals that the villain needs help figuring out how to turn the machine on, forcing them to refrain from killing Hourman. OK, so the thugs accidentally activated the ray back on page 3 with the click of a switch, but this genius isn’t confident in his ability to do the same? I guess there’s some secret setting of the dials and switches, which sounds like an appropriate precaution, but if so, the script could have made that explicit.
Another noteworthy point: these reluctant criminals make far more use of the Miraclo powers than Hourman has in years! They smash down brick walls, twist pistols into scrap metal with their bare hands, pull traffic signs out of the concrete, and on page 6, one delivers a lethal blow to Doc by breaking his back with a fist to the head! Brutal!
When Hourman finally regains access to the machine on page 7, Thorny is again by his side (although neither of them appear to be at the proper position based on earlier evidence when only two of the three thieves received the power, so maybe the emitter is adjustable. In this panel, Baily draws lightning bolts emanating from Hourman’s body to convey the energizing effect of Miraclo, with none around Thorndyke, so maybe this indicates that, at least this time, Thorny was out of range? Who knows? I suspect this wasn’t meant to be anything other than a decorative flourish to enhance the static scene of two men standing in front of a doohickey. Previously, Baily indicated this with the tubes on the device lighting up, which he doesn’t bother with this time.
On the final page, the Miraclo-powered thugs are surprised to find themselves running out of power, so they aren’t aware of the 60-minute limit, after all. Maybe “Doc” was the only one capable of putting two and two together, but this does support that the public was not generally aware of the meaning behind the code-name “Hourman”. So maybe “Doc” learned about the Miraclo machine through one of Hourman’s previous villains, although I can’t think of any who were shown to have discovered that secret.
And yet another intriguing throwaway comment: after the Miraclo powers wear off of the crooks, Thorny jokes: “I’ve bound these thugs with thread! I know it’ll hold, they’re so weak!” Are they weak because of the (likely Miraclo-powered) double-fisted punches to the jaw that Thorndyke dealt them in a previous panel, or because the after-effects of Miraclo exposure leave one weakened? We haven’t had any indication of that before, but it would be a twist with some story-telling potential had it been considered earlier. We saw Rex revert to a coward early on, but we never saw him actually become physically weaker than usual after an hour of power.
In the final panel (not counting the Americommando plug), Rex’s act of locking up the machine in a safe may be interpreted as a far more significant moment in his career than readers realized. Knowing that Rex will have only one more exposure to the rays in his documented Golden Age career, we can postulate that Rex is rethinking the wisdom of continuing to use them. Allowing others to use the device appears to be entirely out of the question; mightn’t Miraclo have potential to provide short-term relief from the likes of, say, polio? Rex appears to be ruling out Thorndyke’s use of the rays, either. Thorny’s expression of disappointment that he won’t be allowed “the loan of a little jolt for this afternoon’s football game” may imply that he’s never gotten a turn to try, or it could imply that he and Rex have occasionally used it to their advantage in less consequential activities than crime-fighting. Is it finally dawning on Rex Tyler that Miraclo has some untold dark side as I’ve speculated before?
I must also remark on the curiously incidental inclusion of Doc’s injections. Doc’s two henchmen appear to be committed criminals already, so why does Bester waste a potentially good idea—a drug that compels people to steal—on this story, where it is overshadowed by the crooks getting Miraclo power? Evidently, this is included to justify the criminals’ looting of household items from a random apartment building, in a “rehearsal to see if the injections worked”, with their primary scheme being to rob the Gotham Gem Store.
One caveat to consider is that Bester is only tentatively credited with the script here at GCD--I noticed that there were no uses of "Thorny" this time around, so maybe this is Joe Greene writing again, or someone else. Whoever is responsible, it was interesting to see the idea of someone else gaining the Miraclo power, only the second time in this feature that the idea was employed. It was done better this time, with the bad guys aware of their abilities and using them impressively...that is, until the "comedy" bit with the revolving door at the conclusion, punctuated with Three Stooges-like cuckoo clocks chiming over their heads. The death trap escape took a novel twist rather than relying on an implausible effort, and I can buy that even with Miraclo powers, it might be difficult to burst through metal cable bonds. Death traps, bizarre science, and Hourman operating from an underdog position made for a top-tier story, at least on the standards established for this feature.
Coming up next, the end of Hourman's Golden Age run! Will he go out on a high note? I've learned not to get my hopes up...
SYNOPSIS:
Bernard Baily’s splash establishes the story’s premise: Two other men getting Miraclo powers from the machine. The lettering in the large all-caption panel, with its usage of lower case, was favored at Quality Comics; was Baily scoping out the competition?
Thorndyke arrives at Rex Tyler’s lab with an alert: he has spotted some thugs entering the apartment house where Rex lives, presumably to burgle the tenants’ rooms! That is in fact what “Doc” and his two hoodlum friends are doing, and hurrying to finish the heist in the last of five rooms--Rex Tyler’s room—one of the crooks absconds with a “swell-lookin’ radio”. Said “radio” is, as Rex and Thorny soon discover, is the Miraclo machine that endows Rex Tyler with the power of Hourman!
Even though he can’t power up, Rex suits up in his Hourman costume, and Thorndyke dons his own outfit. Their pursuit of the thieves is made easier by Thorndyke’s pals, who were asked to keep an eye on the men when they left Rex’s apartment. (These may be the remnants of the Minute Men of America, who were, last time we saw them, only a kid gang under Thorndyke’s leadership rather than Hourman’s).
At Doc’s hideout, we learn that Doc’s aides have been injected with a chemical of Doc’s creation that creates a compulsion to steal, which has turned the boys into “foist-rate crooks”. The apartment raid was a rehearsal for a hit on the Gotham Gem Store (I guess we’re back in Gotham City now?). Before they head off to the job, one of the men fiddles with the “radio”. When it activates, the light it emits makes them “feel funny”. It’s 6:00 pm and the corner clock begins its countdown—this time tracking not Hourman’s sixty minutes of super-strength, but that of the criminals who have now been imbued with super-powers, courtesy of Rex’s amazing machine!
The unpowered Hourman and Thorndyke make the scene, and the thugs are confused with the pistols with which they intend to defend themselves crumple in their hands, and the table they attempt to slam over Hourman’s head falls apart in their grip!
Frightened that they have been somehow “jinxed” by Hourman, the crooks are oblivious to their new enhanced abilities. They sidestep Thorny, who accidentally knocks out his non-powered mentor, and Doc figures things out as they flee the scene: this is Hourman’s Miraclo machine, the source of his powers! The thugs (Doc was apparently outside of the machines area of effect) are now not only possessed with unbeatable strength, but with the continuing compulsion to steal—even stealing a No Parking sign, ripping it out of the concrete as their car passes it! Since Hourman is not a threat worth dealing with at the moment, the gang heads to carry out their looting of the gem store…
Now you may be thinking, if Doc knows they’ve stolen Hourman’s machine, surely he can figure out Hourman’s secret identity, right? But given the sloppy story-telling we are accustomed to from this feature, the scripter (tentatively identified at the GCD as, again, Alfred Bester) will ignore this, right?
Wrong! Doc’s thought balloon shows that he has indeed deduced his enemy’s true identity!
While Doc looks forward to learning how to control the Miraclo machine from Rex Tyler, the thievery-obsessed thugs delight in smashing through the brick wall of the gem store to begin plundering!
Hourman and Thorny have overheard them speaking about their destination, so they soon arrive at the scene of the crime.
Hourman taunts the high-powered hoodlums into leaving the store to battle our heroes, trying to evade their blows, but stumbles over Thorndyke, and they soon find themselves is—you guessed it---another death trap!
The Miraclo-powered crooks have taken the heroes to the city powerhouse, and bound them to a dynamo with high voltage cables; when the city street lights come on automatically at 6:30 (about 7 minutes from now, according to the corner clock), Hourman and Thorny will be electrocuted as the current begins to flow!
Doc’s got a problem with that plan, though: killing Hourman will prevent him from learning how the Miraclo machine works! The boys don’t care about Doc’s plans—after all, they’ve got their powers, and they have the machine, and they’re ready to hit the Gambol Department Store next. What do they need Doc for?
They don’t, so they give Doc a slug that—get this—breaks his freakin’ back! Doc is a goner, but before he expires, he does the only thing he can to get a chance at vengeance on the double-crossers: he yanks the cables from Hourman and Thorny and takes the deadly jolt himself!
His dying screams bring help to Hourman and Thorndyke, who race off to Gambol’s…
It’s 6:38 when they arrive, announcing to the thieves that “that jolt of current was just the thing I needed!” He tricks the men into dashing into the store’s revolving door, where the Miraclo strength, which they are unaware of how to control, leaves them running in circles, exhausting themselves.
Hourman, with Thorny by his side, activates the Miraclo machine and powers up again.
When he lets his enemies out, they are dizzy, and crash into a support pillar, cracking it apart. Uh-oh—now Hourman has to hold the pillar together and can’t fight the thugs!
But it’s now 7:00 pm, and the thugs’ hour of power is up. Thorndyke is able to knock out the bad guys. Hourman temporarily repairs the column with rope, and Thorny bind the thugs—now weakened—with thread!
As the story concludes, Rex puts his Miraclo machine inside a safe: “After that close call with those thugs, I’m taking no chances…nobody but Hourman will ever use Miraclo again!”
Thorndyke complains about not being able to power up for the afternoon’s football game, and artist Bernard Baily finishes up with a caption reminding the reader that Hourman is back in action next issue, followed by a one-panel plug featuring his other feature, Americommando and his arch enemy, the “Little One” (a half German, half Japanese villain).
COMMENTARY:
This story serves up a lot to speculate on regarding Hourman’s three years of experience with Miraclo.
If we are trying to tie this series together into a consistent, cohesive narrative, page 2 gives us an important piece of information. Thorndyke says “What are you going to do without the Miraclo machine? You can’t become Hourman!!!” Considering that we’ve previously seen Rex whip up a batch of the ingested form of Miraclo, and he doesn’t do so now, we must conclude that there is some unspoken reason that he has foresworn the pill (or potion) form of the substance. Either it no longer works (or works unreliably) or it does have deleterious effects that are riskier than going on a mission in costume but unpowered.
Page 3 confirms an obvious but unspoken fact: anyone standing close to the activated Miraclo ray gets superhuman strength for an hour. It may be the fact that the level of power is proportional to the recipient’s innate physical condition, but the consequence is inescapable: Thorndyke has been acting as Hourman’s aid with the boost of Miraclo on those occasions when he stood by Rex as Rex powered up. That makes it a bit more reasonable that Hourman would allow a teenage boy to accompany him into dangerous missions. And if Thorny’s resulting power is inferior to Rex’s, that would explain while he can sometimes keep up with Rex as they run along at higher-than-natural speed, he sometimes has difficulty keeping up, or needs to be carried. This page lends some small credence to this hypothesis, when Hourman comments that the crooks are “a hundred times stronger than ordinary men”; hasn’t the usual description, lately, anyway, been that Miraclo gives Rex “the strength of fifty men”? Perhaps these thugs have physiques twice as strong as Rex Tyler’s, and are therefore twice as strong under the effects of Miraclo?
Page 4 introduces a bit of a wrinkle, though: the fellow who turned the men into crooks with his mysterious injections does not gain Miraclo powers—only the two who stood directly in front of the machine did. So the ray is highly directional rather than dispersed. From previous depictions, it would certainly appear that Thorndyke was within range of the rays, standing as close to Hourman as these two opponents stood next to each other when they got a dose. Rex clearly never ordered Thorndyke to stay so far away from the rays that he couldn’t have leaned over a bit, and what boy wouldn’t have done that, at least?
The evil scientist, to our surprise, figures out that they have stolen the Miraclo machine that gives Hourman his powers. The story does acknowledge that this implies the bad guy can now determine Hourman’s secret identity, but it doesn’t explain how this knowledge of the origin of Hourman’s power got out in the first place. To my recollection, there has been no indication that any of his opponents were explicitly aware of the time limits to Hourman’s strength, but now it’s somehow common knowledge that it’s granted by a “Miraclo machine”? Did Hourman get too loose-lipped in a radio interview or something? He probably also revealed the sixty-minute limit, since the bad guys are confident that this guy in the Hourman suit is a “weakling” at the moment. No consideration that he may have a duplicate machine, or that he charged up earlier, so they must know that since the machine has been in their possession for more than an hour, they have no fear of a super-powered opponent.
Page 5 reveals that the villain needs help figuring out how to turn the machine on, forcing them to refrain from killing Hourman. OK, so the thugs accidentally activated the ray back on page 3 with the click of a switch, but this genius isn’t confident in his ability to do the same? I guess there’s some secret setting of the dials and switches, which sounds like an appropriate precaution, but if so, the script could have made that explicit.
Another noteworthy point: these reluctant criminals make far more use of the Miraclo powers than Hourman has in years! They smash down brick walls, twist pistols into scrap metal with their bare hands, pull traffic signs out of the concrete, and on page 6, one delivers a lethal blow to Doc by breaking his back with a fist to the head! Brutal!
When Hourman finally regains access to the machine on page 7, Thorny is again by his side (although neither of them appear to be at the proper position based on earlier evidence when only two of the three thieves received the power, so maybe the emitter is adjustable. In this panel, Baily draws lightning bolts emanating from Hourman’s body to convey the energizing effect of Miraclo, with none around Thorndyke, so maybe this indicates that, at least this time, Thorny was out of range? Who knows? I suspect this wasn’t meant to be anything other than a decorative flourish to enhance the static scene of two men standing in front of a doohickey. Previously, Baily indicated this with the tubes on the device lighting up, which he doesn’t bother with this time.
On the final page, the Miraclo-powered thugs are surprised to find themselves running out of power, so they aren’t aware of the 60-minute limit, after all. Maybe “Doc” was the only one capable of putting two and two together, but this does support that the public was not generally aware of the meaning behind the code-name “Hourman”. So maybe “Doc” learned about the Miraclo machine through one of Hourman’s previous villains, although I can’t think of any who were shown to have discovered that secret.
And yet another intriguing throwaway comment: after the Miraclo powers wear off of the crooks, Thorny jokes: “I’ve bound these thugs with thread! I know it’ll hold, they’re so weak!” Are they weak because of the (likely Miraclo-powered) double-fisted punches to the jaw that Thorndyke dealt them in a previous panel, or because the after-effects of Miraclo exposure leave one weakened? We haven’t had any indication of that before, but it would be a twist with some story-telling potential had it been considered earlier. We saw Rex revert to a coward early on, but we never saw him actually become physically weaker than usual after an hour of power.
In the final panel (not counting the Americommando plug), Rex’s act of locking up the machine in a safe may be interpreted as a far more significant moment in his career than readers realized. Knowing that Rex will have only one more exposure to the rays in his documented Golden Age career, we can postulate that Rex is rethinking the wisdom of continuing to use them. Allowing others to use the device appears to be entirely out of the question; mightn’t Miraclo have potential to provide short-term relief from the likes of, say, polio? Rex appears to be ruling out Thorndyke’s use of the rays, either. Thorny’s expression of disappointment that he won’t be allowed “the loan of a little jolt for this afternoon’s football game” may imply that he’s never gotten a turn to try, or it could imply that he and Rex have occasionally used it to their advantage in less consequential activities than crime-fighting. Is it finally dawning on Rex Tyler that Miraclo has some untold dark side as I’ve speculated before?
I must also remark on the curiously incidental inclusion of Doc’s injections. Doc’s two henchmen appear to be committed criminals already, so why does Bester waste a potentially good idea—a drug that compels people to steal—on this story, where it is overshadowed by the crooks getting Miraclo power? Evidently, this is included to justify the criminals’ looting of household items from a random apartment building, in a “rehearsal to see if the injections worked”, with their primary scheme being to rob the Gotham Gem Store.
One caveat to consider is that Bester is only tentatively credited with the script here at GCD--I noticed that there were no uses of "Thorny" this time around, so maybe this is Joe Greene writing again, or someone else. Whoever is responsible, it was interesting to see the idea of someone else gaining the Miraclo power, only the second time in this feature that the idea was employed. It was done better this time, with the bad guys aware of their abilities and using them impressively...that is, until the "comedy" bit with the revolving door at the conclusion, punctuated with Three Stooges-like cuckoo clocks chiming over their heads. The death trap escape took a novel twist rather than relying on an implausible effort, and I can buy that even with Miraclo powers, it might be difficult to burst through metal cable bonds. Death traps, bizarre science, and Hourman operating from an underdog position made for a top-tier story, at least on the standards established for this feature.
Coming up next, the end of Hourman's Golden Age run! Will he go out on a high note? I've learned not to get my hopes up...
