ADVENTURE COMICS #62, May 1941



This is the first of Hourman’s ADVENTURE COMICS installments that is not attributed (by the experts contributing to the Grand Comics Database at to Ken Fitch, who wrote the previous episodes. They have not identified the writer, but I presume there must be some indicators to suggest that it wasn’t Fitch, so that’s worth staying alert to as we go through this one. Will this be a step up from the low standards thus far?

SYNOPSIS:

Hey, this looks very promising! A bizarre green skinned villain with an ear-ring has shrunken Thorndyke—and also Hour Man, who is now crashing through the window at tiny size to rescue one of his most faithful Minute-Men! I think this is going to be a good one, gang! Let’s see the intro caption set-up: “As we start our adventure, we find Rex Tyler making a delivery for his employer….” (There’s the first hint that we’ve got someone new at the typewriter: Ken Fitch has never started these stories in the first person plural.)



Rex is delivering his package, but his mind is on the need to “get home and dress as the Hour Man! The boys are meeting tonight!” Maybe he should have his mind on finding a new job where his skills as a chemist are respected and he’s not sent on assignments more suitable for a delivery boy. I hear Gilberton Chemicals is hiring…

Along the way, Rex rescues a boy who is nearly hit by a speeding car, but the lad expresses indifference to dying. Before Rex can get more information out of the troubled youth, a chauffeur shoves him out of the way and grabs the boy, who doesn’t want to “go back to Castle Manor!” Rex can’t stop the boy’s return to Castle Manor, but he puts a visit to the place on Hour Man’s agenda.

At Castle Manor, Tommy faces a cruel punishment for attempting to run away: his Uncle Perry, has him locked up in “the old house” with nothing to eat. Perry has to keep the boy alive, since “the executors are coming in a few days to check on [his] management of his [Tommy’s] estate!” I guess Tommy is the orphan heir to a great estate, and Uncle Perry, his only living relative, is the legal guardian.

As Tommy is escorted to confinement, his faithful dog Thunder attacks the chauffeur, and the lad and his hound run off to get help from the Minute-Men. Two hours later, Hour Man is on stage, with Captain Jimmy Martin presiding over the group meeting, but his mind is on the troubled boy. Suddenly, who should arrive but Thorndyke, along with Tommy! Hour Man doesn’t let on that they’ve already met, and when he hears that Tommy’s guardian beats him, he sends Tommy and Thunder to stay at Thorndyke’s house while he high-tails to find out what kind of guy Uncle Perry is.



Well, he’s a lot like The Boss at Bannerman Laboratories, because he’s berating the chauffeur for letting Tommy escape. Hour Man eavesdrops as Perry and his man discuss their plans: the chauffeur is to go find Tommy, to bandage up the bite marks from Thunder so that his testimony to the visiting executors will look good, and Uncle Perry will be destroying some incriminating papers he doesn’t want the board to see.

Hour Man has heard enough, and leaps into action—pretty dynamic action for the standards of this strip so far:



Since his hour of power is winding down, Hour Man knocks Uncle Perry out and takes the papers home, where he finds proof that Perry is looting Tommy’s funds. He’ll crash the board meeting at Castle Manor tonight, but for now, he wonders how Tommy’s getting along at Thorndyke’s place…

Well, they’re out for a stroll on the city streets, Tommy beaming at his induction into the Minute-Men, when, in what they acknowledge is pure luck, two of Perry’s henchmen spot Tommy and Thunder from their car.

The thugs kidnap Tommy, leaving Thorndyke and Thunder behind. But Thunder has snatched the wallet of one of the men—with his address, the Minute-Men can come to the rescue!

And the call goes out via shortwave, with the response revealing that the Minute Men are an integrated organization…unfortunately the Black member is a caricature:



Hour Man gets the message, too, and after a power-up, he races off to join his crew converging on the man’s house, where, presumably, they have taken Tommy. (One would think that with the urgency of the situation, the men would take Tommy right back to Castle Manor, but I guess there could be some other arrangement between Perry and his hired muscle. Fortunately, Rex makes the lucky decision to follow the boys rather than go back to Castle Manor, and, with his super powers, he easily chases the men from the scene.

Uncle Perry is in quite a fix, without Tommy on hand when the executors arrive, so he’s “hatched a daring scheme”: he’s simply hired another boy to put on a wig and stand in for Tommy, declaring himself to be happy, and this convinces the executors to hand over full reigns to Tommy’s fortune.

But of course, Hour Man shows up with the real Tommy and the evidence of Perry’s mishandling of funds. “Tommy, your troubles are over!” His guardian is going to jail, so now…well, let’s not worry with what’s next for this rich orphan about to go into foster care, let’s plug The Spectre, by Jerry Seigel and Bernard Baily!



COMMENTARY:

Um, hold on, what about the green guy that shrinks Hour Man and Thorndyke down to doll size? I was geared up for another weird mad scientist and I get an abused orphan story?! Hour Man never cheated us that way before! Curiously, the Starman story in this issue does have a mad scientist (called The Light) who shrinks the hero. He’s not green, but I’ll just chalk the differences up to artistic license, and assume that in an untold tale, Hour Man battled with The Light first. On, and to compound the oddness, the cover illustrating Starman vs The Light will run on next issue’s cover! Plenty of opportunities for disappointment if you wanted to see a promise of shrunken superheroes fulfilled! Anyway, it seems like a cruel tease uncharacteristic of what we’ve seen so far. It’s one thing for a cover to depict something not in the story, but I don’t think anybody wants that in a splash!

We were going to look out for signs that Ken Fitch wasn’t writing this one, and the most notable bit of evidence for that is that our hero is consistently referred to as Hour Man throughout this story, whereas the previous issues used Hour-Man or Hourman or Hour Man seemingly at random. Thorndyke isn’t used as comic relief at all, maybe because the central problem wasn’t one suitable for much levity, although there is a bit of it in the final panel.

That’s not to say that this story isn’t as full of infeasible premises as a typical Fitch story or lacking in lazy shortcuts such as the kidnappers happening on Tommy in the streets and then taking him to their house, not to Tommy’s own. And Perry’s plan takes a little work for the reader to piece together: under threat of further abuse, Tommy could be coerced to feign happiness at the interview, but if Perry had employed his ultimate plan of using an actor as his initial plan, he’d run the risk of the executors finding the real Tommy locked up in the old house. The story is not too confusing overall, but the threats don’t present much of a challenge to Hour Man—this is more about doing good for an innocent in distress, like the very earliest concept of the character was devoted to doing. He’s like a super Scout Master, not a super-chemist, here, interested more in working for the youth of America than against dangerous villains. Good intentions don’t excuse letting the two child abductors get away with simply fleeing, but then again, Hour Man knows where they live,

Bernard Baily’s art is shaping up, with more dynamic action, and he’s putting Hour Man in poses where he’s jumping away from the reader, exposing the soles of his boots, something I recall creeping up in The Spectre around this stage as well. Baily did use ghost artists, so maybe this idiosyncrasy is courtesy of a new hand on the team, but the final results are enjoyable. Baily’s own quirks still show through, even if there are art assistants contributing. For example, there are plenty of mostly barren cityscapes with huge sidewalks everywhere, and captions placed to the left of the panel or in bomb-burst balloons. Despite its crude qualities, I just love Bernard Baily’s work.

Gosh an' bgorrah, jist how minny soons oov Erin loik Clancey up dare wore able t'git a jub as a cup straight off the boot from Oireland in the Nointeen-tirties and farties?

 Toora-frikkin’- Loora...

Clancey's lad did well boi himself, did'n he? 

ADVENTURE COMICS #64, July 1941:



The splash brings back Rex’s nick-name, but phrases things a little differently by prefixing the intro: The Adventures of “Tick-Tock” Tyler (The Man of the Hour) as the Hour-Man”…and we get, for the first time, a story title: “Hour-Man and the Little Men Who Weren’t There”. It’s credited to Bernard Baily, the artist; the scripter is not identified according to the GCD. Note that the hyphen is back in the hero’s code name. Does this mean it’s a different scripter than the one who apparently took over from Ken Fitch, who consistently rendered it “Hour Man”? I wouldn’t count on it, since Bernard Baily has been lettering this as well as drawing it. Baily could be rendering however he felt like it, regardless of what the typed script said.

The good news is, we’re in for another weird one, rather than another Minute-Men story! The splash illustration sets the mood with a puzzled Hour-Man looking at a couple of miniature blue men…



SYNOPSIS:

A pair of little blue men, who speak in rhyme, are robbing a bank with a toy gun. When the cashier, unafraid of the prop pistol-wielding pint-size punks, calls for the guard, one of the little fellows flat out kills the cashier with what appears to be gas emitted from the “phoney” gun. He loots the till, then fires at the first guard to arrive. Everyone in the bank now witnesses a floating bubble appear above their heads, warning that the police are coming. Yes, characters in a comic book who can actually see a speech balloon!



The cops arrive with their guns blazing, but the little men evaporate into tiny clouds that float outside and are sucked into a pipe mounted on a waiting car. The car is driven by a regular human, who congratulates his “pretties” on a job well done, when they reconstitute, along with the stolen cash, in the back seat.



And the headline in the Daily Blast (rival to the Daily Star, whose headlines have previously appeared in this feature) says: “Little Men Rob Bank”, “Police Search but Little Men Just Aren’t There!!”

The Daily Blast must not be as credible as the Daily Star, because the veracity of this outlandish tale raises doubt all over town, but especially at the local Science Club. Its leader, Dr. Orr, declares this to be a hoax, that if any such little men existed, they could not have disappeared, and would be easy to destroy.

Rex Tyler stands to recommend that the Science Club form a committee to assist the police, a strategy that Dr. Orr objects to. Rex is supported by the newly arriving Dr. Iker, who is evidently quite the pariah in the Science Club. Dr. Orr ejects Iker, telling him he’s “not wanted here!” Iker storms out, warning the club: “You do not want my help—then, beware!”

Rex is the only one complaining about the treatment of Dr. Iker: “He only tried to help!” But Iker shows a sinister side as he returns alone to his car. Iker expected this treatment, and looks forward to giving Dr. Orr “a surprise” tonight!

After the meeting, Rex has a hunch that Orr is in danger, so he swallows a Miraclo pill, dons his Hour-Man garb, and runs behind Orr’s car. Orr stops when he sees a body lying prone in the road ahead. When he gets out to investigate, he finds it’s one of the little blue men! Soon Orr is being piled on by three of the little guys!

But Hour-Man has been watching from the side of the road, and goes to Orr’s aid. Also watching from the brush is Dr. Iker, who decides he “had better bring Normo into being!”

As Hour-Man begins to originate the highly objectionable “sport” of “dwarf-tossing”, Normo appears. Normo is a giant-sized blue man, who, after a tussle, gets a grip of his mighty hands around Hour-Man’s throat!



Note also the oddball detail that the little men feel like rubber in Hour-Man's grip!

Another floating word balloon comes from Iker (who the blue men refer to as “the Swami”?!). His orders are to bring Orr to him, and leave Hour-Man in Orr’s car, positioning it to block the road.

Hour-Man regains consciousness in time to see them all disappear, and the cops arrive, crashing into Dr. Orr’s car and sending Hour-Man for a tumble. Hour-Man claims to have seen the little men, but all the cops have seen was an old sedan turning off on Black Lane.

But Hour-Man is still wanted by the police, so he’s going to have to knock a few heads to escape from the boys in blue. He leaves them trussed up on their squad car and runs off to Black Lane…

…as his Miraclo wears off, right at the gate to Dr. Iker’s estate! Will Rex have to tackle this menace unpowered? No, of course not, he’ll just take a spare Miraclo and power up for another hour!



Inside Iker’s house, Dr. Orr is about to get what’s coming to him for the offense of kicking Iker out of the Science club. A little blue man approaches Orr with a knife to the face and begins his poem: “A little slice- a little slash…” But the Hour-Man arrives! Iker summons Normo! (I got a big kick out of the scripter leaving the little man’s poem incomplete. We’ll never know what the sawed-off goon was going to do with the knife he had against Dr. Orr’s hairy upper lip, but we know the rhyme would have ended with ‘mustache’!)

And…we’re running out of pages, so Hour-Man lifts Normo and throws him into Dr. Orr, who is fleeing with a valise-sized machine. Normo disintegrates on contact with the machine, and Dr. Iker goes immediately insane. Fortunately, Dr. Orr has the whole thing figured out:



“His mad genius created a special composition in the Fifth Dimension! His ultra-sensory ray mad them of cloud-like spidery texture! Only thru infra-red glasses could they be seen! He might have controlled the world if you hadn’t stopped them!”

To which Hour-Man responds: “They could not continue! His mind would ultimately have snapped as it did now! Well, my work is over! Thanks for your help, sir!”

COMMENTARY:

Sometimes, you’ve got to just go with it, appreciating what you have and accepting the flaws. Given the choice, I’ll take a bonkers Hourman story like this one any time. Even if it takes some work to ferret out whatever the writer had in mind as the thread of the plot…

So as best as I can interpret this, Dr. Iker was ticked off at being ostracized for his crazy ideas, which turned out to be legitimate, so he sicced his fifth dimensional slaves on the city, murdering and robbing, intending to save the day and redeem his reputation by proving himself right about everything. That’s why Dr. Orr is able to summarize things at the end of the story. He’s familiar with the crazy claims Iker had been making, which were alluded to in Orr’s condemnation of Iker at the Science Club: that Iker had created these creatures out of fifth dimensional matter that only Iker could see, with the aid of his ultra-sensory ray and infrared glasses. Dr. Iker was right all along, which rather spoils Rex's expression of satisfaction at the end of the story, where he seems happy that Iker has snapped. Wasn't Rex the only one willing to entertain Dr. Iker's crazy ideas in the first place? What happened to your respect for science, man?

Anyway, this really is a downright Lovecraftian premise, the kind of thing I'd expect from Gardner Fox, who was well-versed in the Weird Tales kinds of pulp stories. But the botched presentation of it, and the fact that once again we have a villain creating and controlling artificial slaves are reminiscent enough of Ken Fitch’s animated wax gangsters and animated plaster circus performers to make me wonder if Fitch was back at the typewriter for this one.

Bernard Baily has gotten really fond of that boot-view dive angle we see in the third panel of the last page: it’s kind of the opposite to Gil Kane’s up-the-nostrils trademark! I’m not in the least tired of it; it’s a distinctive shot we don’t see other comics artists going for much. Baily’s got some interesting visuals in this tale, with the final scene of Normo exploding as he hits Iker’s ray machine at the climax, some nice figure overlaps between panels, a car crash that has a sense of threatening impact, and a good proportion of scenes of brawling that make Hour-Man seem much more a man of action than he’s often been depicted as. And I’m becoming quite fond of the wideness of Baily’s composition, stretching not just sidewalks, but car interiors, rooms, offices, and landscapes to make plenty of space for clear depictions of the action.

The floating speech bubbles (as the scripter calls them, just like the casual readers who don’t know the authentic comic book business terminology!) are a weird touch, as is the pipe into which the creatures are sucked. They're not exactly relevant to the story being told, which would have benefited from a clearer telling, but they do bring some much-appreciated flair to the feature. I don't know how many more Hourman stories will prove so evocative of The Spectre's, but I'm looking forward to those as we plow through. Hour-Man has about a year and a half remaining on the clock, and we'll see a good bit of variety as he attempts to buy more time in print...

ALL-STAR COMICS #6, August-September 1941



The boys in the Justice Society of America are initiating their first new recruit, Johnny Thunder. They’ve sent him out on what was intended to be a wild goose chase, but he’s finding trouble every step of the way. With the help of his magic thunderbolt, he’s called on the assistance of, consecutively, The Flash, Dr. Fate, and The Sandman. Kicking their heels back at the JSA brownstone, Hour Man, The Spectre, and the Atom are worrying about Johnny, and Hour Man volunteers to seek out their new member:



Is Johnny taking in a triple feature at the Center Cinema? Rex considers the possibility, and admires the promotional display of two African spearmen hunting a gorilla, but since the theatre is closing, he moves along. Too bad he didn’t stick around, because things are getting exciting, as the gorilla comes to life!

It’s not only the gorilla who’s become animate and snatched the box office take, but the spearmen from the display are joining in as well! The screams of the cashier bring Hour Man back to the scene, where he takes the trademark Bernard Baily boot-sole dive into the terrorizing trio. They’re not too hard to pick off, but when Hour Man checks to see if they have any reinforcements, they flee. Rex is able to yank off a tuft of gorilla hair, but then the police arrive.

The police assume that Hour Man is behind the hold-up, so Hour Man is forced, once again, to beat up the cops. I think I understand why Hour Man is getting a bad reputation with law enforcement…

The true culprits have escaped, and all Hour Man has for a clue is the patch of gorilla hair. But he recognizes something special about the hair: “Why, I know this stuff! It’s treated with my own chemicals! Now let me see—I’ve got it! The skin must have been stolen from the Natural History Museum!”

Uh, that’s not exactly the easiest line of reasoning to follow, Mr. Fox. I guess he’s saying that Rex had previously been hired to chemically treat a preserved gorilla specimen at the museum, and was able to spot his own handiwork. So he pops another Miraclo to get a 60-minute boost and heads to the museum, where he leaps to the second floor and enters the closed facility unauthorized.

The gorilla specimen is right there where it belongs, though! Was his theory incorrect? Nope, he sees the bare patch where he yanked the fur off—it’s the same gorilla! Not only that, but it’s still alive, and it strangles our hero!

The “savages”, now dressed in American business suits, also arrive, and the “gorilla” removes the preserved head he’s been using as a mask. These are all ordinary humans, who had disguised themselves as spearmen and ape to rob the theatre. The leader, a white guy who had been playing the gorilla, “had an idea maybe this guy would show up”, so they fled from the theatre to the museum to await the Hour Man. Their plan is to kill the mystery man and leave him in the museum to receive the blame for robbing it.

I guess that even though this normal human in a gorilla suit was able to take out the super-powered Hour Man, he doesn’t want to leave any evidence that Hour Man was murdered, so he ties him up and…

…wait, that can’t be right. If Hour Man is tied up, the police will know someone else was involved. So why doesn’t the gorilla guy just kill Hour Man outright? Hey, I’m not the scripter, though. Gardner Fox wants thrills, not logic, so gorilla guy leaves the trussed-up Man of the Hour by the glass tank containing a live tarantula, breaks it from a safe distance with a spear, and counts on the “deadly” spider to do his dirty work and kill the hero. The criminals head downstairs, not sticking around to see Hour Man avoid certain death at the bite of “the deadly black widow spider”:



Time to wrap this adventure up! The crooks are still downstairs, so Hour Man makes another Baily dive to save the museum director from the gorilla guy. Turns out the gorilla guy is Wade, a former night watchman at the museum who had been fired two years ago for being drunk on the job. The museum director is Karl Esso, an explorer who had borrowed the exhibits to promote the movie about his African exploits, and Wade wanted to take all the movie profits to get revenge for his dismissal.



All eventually ends well, and Johnny is initiated into the JSA.

COMMENTARY:

It’s pretty cool to see Bernard Baily drawing two of his most famous characters, Hour Man and The Spectre, face to face, probably for the one and only time, in print, anyway. This is probably his only drawing of The Atom, ever.

I am a little disappointed that the Hour Man story is one of the episodes that has absolutely nothing to do with the framing story. He just heads off, ostensibly to look for Johnny Thunder, and stumbles on an adventure. The story is what we’ve come to expect from a typical Hour Man installment: a modestly interesting hook forced awkwardly into a narrative that tries and fails to justify it. Hour Man fights a tableau of African adventure come to life, so how to work that into a coherent tale? Well, I wouldn’t have gone for a drunken night watchman seeking revenge by robbing a theatre of one night’s box office because the museum manager happens to be an explorer who also makes movies.

Like too many of these stories, it’s ludicrous when you think it through: these guys posed like statues in front of the theatre all night long so they could rob it after closing hour? Then high-tailed it to the museum to wait for Hour Man, even though the display was officially on loan to the theatre and would have been highly conspicuous back in its rightful location? A preserved gorilla specimen is actually an empty skin that one can don like a costume?

I’ll forgive Gardner Fox’s ignorance on the tarantula—lots of people were under the impression that they are deadly, and maybe that they are aggressive enough to be confident they would attack a human rather than hide away if they escaped containment—but didn’t he know that a black widow was not a generic term for a dangerous spider, but a completely different kind of arachnid?

And I can’t forgive Fox for apparently forgetting that the lead character had super powers: he explicitly takes Miraclo and then is subdued by an ordinary man in a gorilla suit? Maybe this was where he discovered that a second dose of Miraclo doesn’t work as well as the first, leading to the Silver/Bronze Age restriction of one Miraclo per day.

While the Black characters have to suffer the indignity of playing “savages”, I like that they later show up as ordinary guys in suits. We never see it, but it’s implied that the display borrowed from the museum included life-sized figures of African spearmen; presumably these guys just borrowed the spears, shields and costumes off the dummies, and didn’t try to wear the dummies themselves like a costume, unlike Wade the gorilla guy.

There are a couple of bad omens worth noting in this issue. Now that Johnny is an active member, he’s getting story panels, where he had previously been relegated to the unloved but requisite two-page text stories in ALL-STAR. This time, Dr. Mid-nite gets the text pages, a proven stepping-stone to JSA membership…

And an editorial page notes that Dr. Mid-nite, Sargon, The Whip, Starman, The King, and “others” were eager to follow Johnny into the group! But the JSA Constitution limits membership to eight, and any hero with a quarterly or bi-monthly comic of his own can only be an honorary member. Johnny’s joined up because The Flash has just earned his own title, ALL-FLASH.

The JSA themselves have encouraged the editors to ask the readers who they want to receive their own solo comic, and who they want added to the JSA in their place! Send in two choices for characters to receive their own comics, and rank four nominees for membership:



Maybe it’s not so ominous, after all. The deal here is, one guy gets his own comic and then he gets replaced in the JSA, becoming an honorary member. So either the readers finally get that HOUR MAN QUARTERLY they’ve all been clamoring for, or someone else gets it and Hour Man gets a new colleague in the JSA.

That’s the deal, right? A win/draw for Hour Man, right?

Right?

Have to say that other than the ease with which Hour Man deals with his Miraclo endowed adversary, this was a fun tale.  Like you remarked, very fast pacing - jumping from one idea to another so rapidly that if there are any plot holes the brain doesn't have much of a chance to recognize them.


I have to say that The Minute-Men don't do anything for me and I'm glad to see that they're nowhere to be found here or in the next issue. 


I'm kind of surprised that Hour Man's abilities haven't increased as the series has continued - no enhanced vision, no overturning cars, etc.  Just as Superman become more powerful as his feature went on, I'd think that whoever's scripting these tales would be tempted to do the same.  As a matter of fact, announcing that he's only stronger than a guy who can be trapped inside a fishing net so long as the guy doesn't try to get out seems to considerably downplay his strength.