ALL-STAR COMICS #2, Fall 1940



A more exciting splash, with Hour-Man and the boys confronting a spooky apparition arising from a grave, we get our wordiest banner yet: ‘Presenting: “Tick-Tock” Tyler (The Man of the Hour) as the Hour-Man with Minute Man Martin and the Minute Men of America by Bernard Baily”. Whew!

The caption summary skips explanations of Hour-Man’s power, only telling us that Rex’s true identity is that of “a meek and mild chemist”, but does explain the Minute Men of America and specifically not that the boys “do not know his true identity.”



SYNOPSIS:

This new adventure begins in the office of Dr. Morte, a sinister-looking psychic hypnotizing a man in preparation for transmitting a message from the victim’s late wife, Clara. As the man stares mesmerized into the crystal ball, Morte Googles his victim 1940-style, using Who’s Who to learn details about Clara, wife of Robert T. Davis, owner of the Golden Eagle mine. This is what those in the fake psychic business call a “hot reading”: they convince their victims of supernatural abilities by feigning psychic “hits” using information obtained in a mundane, natural manner.

The message Morte delivers is one intended to finance his skipping town: “Tonite there shall be no moon. I want you to bring your money and jewelry to Ever-Rest [Cemetery] so that I can see what you have left!” Davis eagerly promises to follow “Clara’s” instructions.

Back at Bannerman (formerly Bannermain) Laboratories, we see that Davis is the brother-in-law of The Boss, who rails against this obvious fraud to Rex Tyler. Tyler agrees it’s “silly”, but The Boss dares not go against the wishes of his late sister’s spouse. If The Boss won’t act, Hour-Man will, and Rex decides to call on the Minute Men to investigate Morte, while Rex stops Davis from going to Ever-Rest.
Meanwhile, Morte is explaining his practice of getting the gullible rich to part with their money to Longo, his henchman. Longo is a former circus act, a homely giant who’s been scaring Morte’s clients once they drop their loot.



Hour-Man has Jimmy Martin summon the Minute Men to headquarters via the group’s two-way shortwave radios. I suppose Rex realized that the boys weren’t the most qualified to perform last-minute background research on Morte and is moving ahead under the reasonable assumption that Morte’s a fraud and a con-man. The new plan is for the boys to prevent Davis from entering the graveyard, while Hour-Man cases Morte’s séance parlor.

From the branches of a tree in the yard, Hour-Man enters Morte’s home to discover packed bags, a sure sign that he’s about to make a getaway. Morte’s entry prevents Hour-Man from further investigation, and Hour-Man returns to the tree until Morte speeds off in his Bailymobile.



Captain Martin directs an unnamed Minute Man and the familiar turtleneck kid to block Davis at the gate. Davis is having none of this interference, even after the boys name-drop their hero Hour-Man. “The Hour Man? That creature! How dare he talk about Dr. Morte!” (Typical sucker’s response we see to this day; the devotion of victims to a talented con artist triggers disdain for the trustworthy if they contradict the delusion.)

Not only have the boys failed in their mission (maybe they should have brought their baseball bats?) but they get spooked, thinking they’ve spotted someone lurking behind the tombstones, and flee to a nearby house.

The house is locked, so Jimmy proposes to boost Thorndyke—the turtleneck-abusing kid, who apparently hates his real name—to an open 2nd-story window, so that he can open the door.



Uh-oh, this is where Longo the Giant is waiting for his role in this scam! Thorndyke runs in terror, bopping Longo on the snout before fleeing with Jimmy and the other boy.
Hour Man has found Morte in an unoccupied mausoleum (I’d think at this hour most of them would be unoccupied, except by the deceased, themselves), and has figured out Morte’s clever scheme. He is transmitting his own voice, imitating Clara’s, via radio to a hidden speaker at the grave, where Davis is listening.

The scam is spoiled when Hour-Man interrupts Morte, who breaks character (“Hey, who are you? You! The Hour-Man!”), and Davis finally recognizes he is being scammed.
Hour-Man’s confrontation with Morte comes to a halt when the boys call for help on their radio’s: a giant is chasing them! Hour-Man arrives in time to save Thorndyke from Longo’s hurled club, and Hour-Man lifts the giant overhead and tosses him into a pond.



Davis has seen the light, after hearing Hour-Man’s report. Davis vows to “see to it that Dr. Morte is exposed.”

COMMENTARY

In TwoMorrows’ ALL-STAR COMPANION VOLUME FOUR, Craig Delich argues against Gardner Fox’s claim of writing every story in the first three issues of ALL-STAR COMICS. In #1 and #2, he says, "Fox wrote only the Flash, Hawkman, and Sandman tales." He and Martin O’Hearn, in this article, are focused primarily on the authorship of the stories in #3, the first JSA meeting, but Delich does state, in reference to Hour-Man and The Spectre that “[t]he writers, too, were probably the original writers.” That is, Ken Fitch on Hour-Man, specifically.

Both scholars are far more trustworthy than I am at identifying comics writers. I can’t claim to be able to spot “any recognizable quirk of Fox’s” like O’Hearn can.
But if this story was written by Ken Fitch, it’s far better work than anything he’s done so far for this feature. Was it written by someone else? Possibly Gardner Fox? Well, there are some characteristics on display here that often haven’t been seen in prior episodes:

Most of the primary characters are identified by name, including Thorndyke, Morte, Longo, Clara and Robert Davis. (The Boss is still not identified, but that may be because, if the writer was not Fitch, he presumed The Boss had been named—he had not--but couldn’t find it in the sample stories available to him.) Except in the logo, Rex is never referred to as "Tick-Tock".

The villain’s plot is clearly defined and consistently pursued throughout the story.

The Boss is not abusive to Rex Tyler.

The Lab is “Bannerman”, although it was previously identified as the much more unusual “Bannermain”.

Rex is never insinuated to be cowardly or timid, despite the routine description in the introductory caption. Rex takes on the challenge of exposing the hoax without any encouragement, even while The Boss dejectedly accepts his brother-in-law’s inevitable victimization.

Hour-Man never mentions or takes Miraclo. (We faithful readers can easily figure out when he popped his pill: right when he saw Morte’s car speeding off, you just know Rex had to chase it!)

On the other hand, there are a few Fitchian aspects:

Hour-Man spends time sitting in the branches of a tall tree, as we’ve seen a few times before.

Hour-Man’s plan changes abruptly: he says he’ll have the boys investigate Morte while he prevents Davis from entering the cemetery, but the assignments are reversed when the story proceeds.
The climax is rushed and unsatisfying, with Morte left to be “exposed” by his former victim rather than being brought to justice, and Longo ends up drenched in a pond.

Again, I’m far from qualified to call it, but this story seems to be very unlike anything we’ve gotten so far, and the plot, involving a scheme by a fake psychic, with spooky scenes in a graveyard and mausoleum, feel a lot more like the kinds of stories I’ve read from Gardner Fox, who had a fondness for Weird Tales types of stories as seen in his Dr. Fate and Spectre stories. Maybe a true Fox story would have those “recognizable quirks” I’m not conscious of, and Craig Delich’s GCD-cited attribution of the story to Fitch is on target. Fitch is listed on the GCD as writing this feature through issue 61 back in ADVENTURE COMICS, with Delich credited with identifying the scripter, so we’ll see if maybe Fitch has just gotten the hang of writing more consistent, entertaining Hour-Man stories. I hope so!

Whoever wrote it, we see some notable developments. Thorndyke, finally identified, will become, later, a prominent component of the feature. We don't even bother with Miraclo, which seems like an odd decision since ALL-STAR was presumably a sampler to appeal to those who might not be familiar with the characters' ongoing features in other series. A new reader would have no idea why he's called "Hour-Man", or what his powers are, if any--we don't even see him chase a car on-panel, and they aren't even mentioned in the splash caption. He can lift a giant and toss him into a pond, so enhanced strength is about all they could deduce. 

Where’s Flipper Dipper? Did Vince Colletta erase him?

ADVENTURE COMICS #56, November 1940:



Another untitled story from Ken Fitch and Bernard Baily, unrelated to the nicely colored cover.

SYNOPSIS:

Bernard Baily reuses the previous splash image, and as with last issue, the caption is an introduction to the story, not to the character. I guess Hour-Man’s fame has spread such that no introduction to this mighty legend is necessary…So, we are invited to witness some of the strange happenings taking place along the eastern seaboard:

Explosions in a Boston shipyard and Virginia Marine base and a sabotaged bomber in a top secret airfield! The FBI can find no proof of sabotage, but if not that, what invisible foe could be striking these military assets?
“In a far off city” (Is this Cosmos? Is it far from the east coast after all?) Rex Tyler is packing for a camping trip to Lonely Island with his Minute Men, when he gets a call from The Boss: Bannerman Laboratories customer Dr. Slight needs the assistance of a chemist at his Castle Doom (ominous estate name, isn’t it?). Castle Doom is clost to Lonely Island, so Rex tells the boys to go without him, hoping he can join them when he’s done with his tasks for Dr. Slight.

At Castle Doom, Rex is threatened by Slight’s ferocious guard dog and escapes the hound when he sees the castle’s moat bridge lowered: “The Hourman leaps…” (Curious that the script refers to him as “The Hourman” when out of costume and presumably un-Miraclo’d, as evidenced by his fear of the dog.)



Dr. Slight greets his new hire and demonstrates his control over the dog using “excellent hypnotic powers.” Slight’s eyes and hands are unsteady today, and he intends that Rex (again referred to in the captions as “Hourman”!) do the delicate work of preparing the chemicals.

It’s an unusual formulation, and as Rex waits to be escorted out, he peruses the newspaper clippings, which report on the mysterious bombings. The returning Dr. Slight is upset to see this, thinking that Rex is looking at his notes. When Rex explains he was just looking at the news clippings, Dr. Slight willingly relinquishes them to Rex and escorts him out.

Along the way through the castle gardens, Rex spots a statue of a winged horse, and Slight explains: “a hobby of mine since childhood!! I used to love circuses! This is just one of my statues. I have lots of other ones! I call them my frozen circus!” (I don’t recall Pegasus being part of any circus I ever went to, but maybe they were better in 1940.)



Suiting up as Hourman, Rex joins his Minute Men on Lonely Island, four miles away. (The ranks seem to have dwindled to a measly three: Jimmy Martin, Thorndyke, and an unidentified portly blond lad.
Suddenly, the group sees a massive explosion from the nearby town, and the radio reports the munitions plant has been bombed! “What makes this fantastic is that the watchman has gone crazy! He swears a flying horse bombed the place!”

This is a job for Hourman and the Minute Men. The boys’ task: to go to the nearby circus. Hourman has a hunch, see. This will all make perfect sense, boys, just go to the circus while Hourman investigates.
Demonstrating his talent for wasting valuable time, Rex decides the most valuable avenue of investigation will be the watchman. The poor guy is strapped to a chair in a straightjacket, but he continues to swear a flying horse from the east dropped the bomb.

The hospital attendants attempt to restrain the Hourman, taking him for “another nut” on the loose, so of course Hourman has to slug the orderlies and tie them up so that he can rush over…no, not to Dr. Slight’s Castle Doom, but to the circus!



There he follows the circus van, which is, curiously, departing the circus grounds in the middle of a show. Undected, he follows the van to its destination, the powerhouse. (We don’t see it, but we all know how he followed that van, right? On his Miraclo-powered fleet feet, that’s how!)

At the powerhouse, the ringmaster is on guard, and is directing Sandor the strongman to “wreck everything” under the watch of the circus’s resident little person, Midge, whose job is to “see that he does it!”. Sandor threatens to kill the intervening Hour-Man (I’m sharing the script’s inconsistency with the hyphen here!), but Hour-Man strikes a “terrific right to his adversary’s midriff, and….”

Sandow disintegrates, leaving a mechanical voice transmitter, from which issues the cry: “Fool! What has happened? Come, Sandor—come, Midge!”



Before they can escape, Hourman punches more freaks (we never actually see them) into fragments, and yanks Midge’s arm right off his little frame. It’s another mostly-fail for Hourman, as the powerplant explodes behind him, courtesy of a flying horse that soars off away from the conflagration.

Putting together all the clues, Hourman heads directly to…the circus, of course. All the acts have disappeared, but the ringmaster is still around, having fled into a tent. Hourman and the boys find only the ringmaster’s top hat and a pile of rubble. OK, now he’s put together the clues, and he orders the boys to follow him to Castle Doom.

Hourman is heading for the drawbridge when he notes the absence of Dr. Slight’s “Frozen Circus” before falling into a secret passage underground. The passage leads to a trap: a transparent steel coffin!
Dr. Slight explains his plan: that chemical gives life to plaster casts, which he directs with a special machine. His traveling circus establishes a reign of terror across the country, through which he…rules the earth. I think there might be a few steps missing in his plan, but we can’t expect him to go every little detail, right?



Dr. Slight is alerted to the arrival of the Minute Men, and dispatches some of his “pets”—which look like musclebound microcephaly patients—to throw acid on the boys!

Hourman’s sometimes-trusty chemical-filled ring has acid in it as well, and Hourman burns a hole through the transparent coffin. A blow from Hourman’s fist sends Dr. Slight head-first into the cavern wall: “That’ll hold you for a while!” Hold that thought.

The boys are bravely climbing the castle walls, not realizing the little freaks looming above them are about to rain down some liquid death, when the Hour Man arrives to smash the freaks into rubble!
The flying horse now shatters on its own. As Hour Man explains around the campfire, “Dr. Slight’s plan to control the world failed! Only he could rule those freaks, and with his death, they died, too!”



COMMENTARY:

So, then, Hour Man’s punch just straight-up killed Dr. Slight. Yeah, that will hold him for a while, a long, long while.

The plot, as usual, is too ludicrous to try to make sense of, and shows of Ken Fitch’s typical incongruence. Is Dr. Slight sabotaging the US military, as it appears at first? No, he’s establishing a circus of terror using animated plaster statues, based on the estate of his castle but intended to roam across the land to spread chaos, with the goal of…well, what does it matter, really, let’s just say ruling the world. With plaster statues that would crumble even without the enhanced Hourman punch.

Is Dr. Slight a master hypnotist? No, that’s just an incidental side talent, his main gig is bringing statues to life, and indulging his circus fetish by staging travelling shows with an entire plaster menagerie, while also blowing stuff up everywhere he goes. Also, he creates remote controls for his plaster slaves, so I guess the whole circus is just him at the control board? Even the ticket-sellers and concession stand operators? Oh, and he’s also an explosives expert, making the bombs for Pegasus to drop like TNT-laden horse apples.

And note, once again there is no mention of Miraclo. Is “Tick-Tock” on Miraclo throughout this adventure? If so, why the apparently genuine fear of the dog?

I’d love to be able to hear the reaction of a reader in 1940. Would a boy reading this issue of ADVENTURE take notice of Rex’s clear incompetence at almost every stage of the story? As a professional chemist, he had no grasp of what he had just cooked up for Dr. Slight. As an investigator, he couldn’t grasp the obvious connection between the horse statue and Dr. Slight’s garden decorations, but he did have an interest in the nearby circus after Slight confessed to being a circus-lover. He took unproductive avenues of research that nearly got him locked up as a loon, forcing him to assault and wrongfully imprison innocent working men. He botched the protection of the power plant. And of course, he killed his enemy when he could have easily captured him. How could he possibly explain any of this to the authorities? Well, he doesn’t have to, he just leaves the devastation, the abandoned castle, and the…wait, wait, another inconsistency! If the freaks died only after Dr. Slight died, why did all of the circus performers disintegrate, long before Hourman dispatched the evil genius Dr. Slight? The final panel seems to be trying to explain that, forgetting that it violates the sequence of events that the story established. Maybe those animated statues were intentionally deactivated when Slight’s plan went awry…but wait, his plan went off just fine, the power plant was bombed, it’s just that Midge and Sandor were lost…and they’d be easy enough to recreate, right?

The feature is clearly struggling. If there’s one good thing I can say about this, it’s that between the Baily art and the weird nature of the menace, it’s kind of like getting another Golden Age Spectre story. A lousy one, but with the same vibe of mass destruction, strange threats, and creepy scenes of opponents shattering to pieces at a single blow. Fortunately, it's not the last time they'll take this approach to the feature. The Minute Men are still around, and we'll see if it's still putatively a nation-wide organization of radio-equipped boys are a local kid's gang. One thing to note is that while "Captain Martin" is not identified by name, the script does specifically name-drop Thorndyke, even though he does nothing to distinguish himself (nor do any of the other boys) in this adventure. It's evident that Rex would much rather be playing scoutmaster on the camping trip than engaging in superheroics, but somehow the boys find this an adventure they'll never forget, anyway. I'll buy that: disintegrating circuses are memorable, indeed. 

Fitch has been in a blind spot for me; I'd heard the name but never before paid specific attention to his style until you alerted me that he was the man typing out these Hourman stories at the beginning. I'm kind of fascinated with his flawed approach, so much so that I'm going to have to take a look at his other DC feature with Baily, Mr. America. Not here, probably...to the relief of those still following this trainwreck of a headliner...

ADVENTURE COMICS #57, December 1940



SYNOPSIS:

This time we open with the villain, Dr. Togg, on remote Wide Island, where he is spouting the long-standing mantra of the mad scientist: “Laugh at me, will they? Soon they shall know! Heh! Heh! They won’t laugh at Dr. Togg anymore! The world and all its goods will be mine with my little pets! Police? Bah!”

Togg’s devilish creation? “Pets” created by attaching buzzard heads to wolf bodies! Good boys!



Elsewhere, tonight’s meeting of the Minute Men of America is underway, and all five members, including Thorndyke, await the arrival of their hero, who enters and leads them in the Pledge of Loyalty…or, as I like to call it, the Pledge of Plagiarism:



An S.O.S. comes through on the shortwave: an ailing member (so there are still at least 6 boys in the club) has spotted a bank holdup from the window of his bedroom. Hour-Man, having taken a Miraclo pill before the club meeting, dashes to the scene, ordering some of the boys to follow and others to stay behind.

Hour-Man’s car-chasing abilities guide the escaping thieves smack dab into a fire hydrant, but the second car-full of criminals is about to plow over Minute Man Thorndyke! Saving him has to be Hour-Man’s top priority, but the Minute Men take up the slack, gathering pushcarts full of vegetables to block the street, halting the fleeing bank robbers.

Mission accomplished!

Hour Man and Thorndyke are the first back at headquarters, and when the other four boys arrive, Hour Man expresses pride in the upcoming newspaper headlines, which will let “criminals know that crime is thru!” (Maybe it’s just me, but when I see ‘through’ abbreviated as ‘thru’, it always conveys ‘through’ as in ‘penetrated’, not ‘through’ as in ‘finished’. This is a new awareness for me, and I’m curious if others feel the same!)

Meanwhile, Dr. Togg is creating another hybrid, I guess using the leftover parts from his previous experiments, because this one has the head and torso of a wolf and the talons and wings of a buzzard. He dubs this terror--get this--

“The Gombezi”.



The Gombezi cannot be held without special gloves (super slippery skin, you see), and Dr. Togg proceeds to make duplicates of it with his mold.

Before long, the somewhat intelligent Gombezi are causing train crashes, and robbing banks, delivering the stolen loot and mail by air to their master, who controls them by “radiophoto.”

Unsurprisingly, these attacks are big news, generating headlines like “Police and G-Men Baffled by Aero-Midgets!!” Rex Tyler is keeping up with all this news, and he also notes that the S.S. Cambra, carrying $350,000 worth of radium, is docking in town at midnight. Time for a dose of Miraclo and a call to the Minute Men! Don’t worry that it’s a school night, Hour Man wants all his boys at the docks at midnight to capture these deadly monsters!
When Minute-Man Martin compares the slippery Gombezi to butterflies, Hour Man gets an inspiration! Trap them in butterfly nets! Fifteen minutes later, Hour Man and the boys are on a speedboat to the S.S. Cambra, where they capture several of the monsters, except the one carrying radium, which escapes with some other Gombezi. As Rex races back to shore, he radios the boys waiting there to capture all but one of the fleeing Gombezi.

With his super powers, Hour-Man keeps pace with the final Gombezi, netting it just before it enters Dr. Togg’s place. Not content with simply restraining the creature, The Man of the Hour gives it a squirt of tear gas from his ring, just for kicks, and retrieves the stolen radium.



All that’s left is to enter the villain’s lair where he encounters his opponent, who appears only on a video screen. “Why, this is a lab! Say—who are you?”
Rather than introduce himself, Dr. Togg sics a pack of wolf-buzzards on the hero, but Rex’s chemistry expertise allows him to identify a “powerful explosive” left on the lab table. Hour-Man detonates the chemicals, blowing up the place real good and riding the shock wave to safety, courtesy of his Miraclo boost.

As Hour-Man and the boys bask in the glow of the burning building, he attributes their success to the Minute Men of America, and declares “another victory against a law breaker!”



This time, the story closes with a new bit: a caption teasing the next issue, posing the question: “Is the terrible Dr. Togg really dead? Or has he escaped to unleash new terrors on society?”

COMMENTARY:

See, I told you there’d be another Spectre-style story! This time, it’s Dr. Togg and his hybrids. Typical of Ken Fitch’s disconnected scripting, we never see the first versions of the hybrids do anything, and the bank-robbing segment is unrelated to the main plot.

There’s one significant bit of information provided in this issue’s splash caption, which once again fills us in on the nature of Rex’s power: “No one, not even Jimmy Martin, captain of the Minute-Men of America, knows his real identity, nor that ‘Miraclo’ gives him extra-human powers for only one hour…”

So, despite his name, it’s explicitly established that no one knows his powers only last for an hour. So the old complaints about his name giving away his weakness, at least for now, are invalid. I find myself wondering just why it is that “Hour Man” just kind of sounds cool, whatever it really means. There’s something elusively appealing about the sound of it and hitting upon that name was possibly the best part of the conception of this character. Eleven years later, a variation on the moniker would be an evolutionary link on the path to rock and roll:



Once again, Hour-Man seems more interested in pleasing his dwindling fanbase than with superheroics, taking a pill—presumably to demonstrate his powers—prior to a club meeting. I’ll forgive the unlikelihood of a sick kid spotting a bank robbery from his bedroom window, but it is worth noting that this sequence goes out of its way to have Thorndyke stumble into a situation from which he must be rescued. Thus far, Thorndyke has just been a weird-looking kid, but—spoiler alert!—he’ll evolve into the feature’s obligatory comic relief, and this may be the first steps toward that.

Another of Ken Fitch’s misfires is his decision to have the gang capture the Gombezi—who are supposed to be a creepy, sinister thread—with something as silly as butterfly nets. This really undercuts the sense of menace, if the ridiculous name hadn’t already done that.

The climax is rushed, but I do give the creative team some credit for teasing the promise of Dr. Togg being a recurring nemesis, which is something that would benefit the series. Mad scientists would be a good pool of villains for a chemistry-focused superhero, but Hour-Man hasn’t really fulfilled that promise after all.

For the past couple of installments, Bernard Baily, who lettered his own work, has been employing a new technique, putting captions in blank areas to the left of the art panels (often punctuated with a diamond symbol), rather than above them. I find this to be an appealing choice, and something I’ve always considered a trademark of Baily’s style. While it’s still pretty crude, Baily’s art is a huge part of whatever limited appeal the Hour-Man strip has. Yeah, his monsters are hard to take seriously, but that’s a big part of the charm.

Next up is what may be Hour-Man’s finest hour, as he joins the first great comics superhero team as one of the founders of the Justice Society of America!

I like that hypothesis of Fitch looking at Baily's other big feature for inspiration. I was surprised to see the strip taking this Spectre-ish turn, but I didn't think to speculate on what might have triggered this approach. The Spectre feature had an advantage in incorporating threats like these, since it could resort to supernatural menaces. Hourman doesn't seem to want to go there, so this stretch of weird villains look to be mad scientists one and all, with very vague explanations ("molds", "special machines", "mechanical contraptions", "mysterious chemicals"). But at least they're more fun than necklace heists and racetrack extortion.

I'm a bit late with this, but - I can't find anything linking the A.C. Gilbert Company (founded 1909, maker of chemistry sets, Erector sets, and model trains) with the Gilberton Company (founded 1942, publisher of Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated). A.C. Gilbert did publish two promotional comic books produced by the Custom Comics division of ACG, Adventures in Science with Kurt Schaffenberger art in 1958, and Science Leads the Way with John Rosenberger art in 1959. But the Classics people seem to be unrelated.