ADVENTURE COMICS #71, February 1942:



This installment is an important one (if any Hour Man story can be called "important"), as it introduces several new elements to the feature. 

Although not explicitly labeled, the introductory caption implies that this one is called “The Stars Look Down on Murder”, with art by Bernard Baily and with a script tentatively attributed to Hour Man’s original scripter, Ken Fitch, according to the GCD. Baily provides another stylish opening page, with a smaller logo, an Hour Man cameo, and a drawing of Hour Man facing this issue’s villain, beneath an arrow-pierced, blood-dripping skull and an astrology chart.



SYNOPSIS:

“Dr. Destiny”, host of an astrology radio program on WHON is fired by the board of directors for the diminishing perceived quality of his program, and he vows that “by the sacred sign of the zodiac, you and your board of directors will pay dearly for this!” The board collectively scoffs at the threat.

However, the very next day, one of the board members—who was born under Sagittarius the Archer--is shot in the heart by with an arrow, wielded by a mysterious masked man. The next day, another member opens a package that contains a deadly scorpion, and the Scorpio-born director dies, reading the note from Dr. Destiny left within the package.

Elsewhere, Hour Man is celebrating his birthday with the Minute-Men, who award him a fountain pen. The radio suddenly interrupts with the announcement that Dr. Destiny has struck again! The boys are blessedly ignorant of astrology, so Hour Man gives them a brief lecture on the pseudoscience that claims one’s fate is dictated by one’s date of birth.



Later, after the boys have left, Hour Man retreats to his quarters, where he unveils his new device, a ray emitter which enables him “to absorb Miraclo externally instead of internally!” A clock in the bottom right corner of the panel shows the time is 5:00 pm; the rays will give him “superior powers for sixty minutes!”



Our hero races on foot to the home of Darius Carter, the president of the Century Syndicate, owners of the radio station, and the clock, now at 5:07 pm, permits the reader to follow the countdown!

At Carter’s estate, the butler explains that an anonymous call summoned Carter to the city zoo, and Hour Man recognizes a trap—Carter was born under the sign of Leo the Lion! He arrives in time to see the masked man forcing Carter into the lions’ cage at the zoo. So Hour Man bends open the bars of the cage, allowing Carter to escape while the hero does what he does sixth or seventh best: beating up lions!



He bends the bars back into place and then carries Carter to a meeting of the surviving directors. They’re relieved to have Hour Man on their side. When one member pours a drink of water, Hour Man knocks the glass from his hand: this potential victim was born under Aquarius the Water Carrier, and the water pitcher was poisoned!



It’s now 5:35, and one board member reveals that he’s been ordered to hand over $10,000 to Dr. Destiny or face death as part of the villain’s star-guided schemes. Equipped with the knowledge that the extorted money was to be left at a particular tree stump in the woods, Hour Man is ready to set a trap.

But, with 18 minutes remaining on the clock, Hour Man calls on some assistance: Minute-Man Martin, wearing, for the first time, an Hour Man suit of his own! Jimmy’s happy to have the costume, but he’s not offered his own dose of Miraclo rays. Still, he does a pretty good job of keeping pace with Rex’s fleet feet, and both reach the tree stump in only three minutes! (I guess Hour Man carried Jimmy after he complained about not being able to keep up.)



The Dynamic Duo—no, uh, the “Chronological Couple?—lie in wait, assuming that Dr. Destiny has lost his nerve when he doesn’t show up, but then the tree stump itself opens, and a hand emerges to snatch the payoff!

Hour Man heroically allows Jimmy to lead the way with a plunge into the secret passage inside the stump, and both land in an underground cavern, held at gun point by Dr. Destiny, who hides his face with his cloak. With only two minutes of power remaining, Hour Man punches out his opponent, who recovers and makes a run for it.

In pursuit, Hour Man stumbles into a deposit of quicksand, and his hourglass shows that his time is up! Dr. Destiny clubs young Jimmy and fastens the boy into some nearby stocks, once used by highwaymen who used this cave as a hideout and a place to hold their enemies.

Destiny leaves the two behind; Hour Man slowly sinking into the oily quicksand while Jimmy can only watch! But Hour Man is a fast thinker, even without Miraclo powering him up: he hurls globs of the oily quicksand at Jimmy’s trapped hands, which greases him up enough to permit him to slip his bonds. After escaping, Jimmy rips up his new costume’s cape to form a makeshift rope, with which he rescues his hero.



Rather than head back for another treatment of Miraclo rays (“I’ve only a small amount of the Miraclo substance left! I’ll have to win out by my wits and fists!”), Hour Man and Minute Man instead don fresh costumes (!) and formulate a new plan…



The surviving board members are summoned to the Century Syndicate offices with a phone call from Hour Man. To their shock, Dr. Destiny suddenly arrives, bearing a bomb which will kill them all!

One board member (a Mr. Stone) blurts out: “So you escaped! Kill them, Dr. Destiny, and I’ll split the profits with you!” Hunh?

Well, “Dr. Destiny” is really Hour Man in disguise, and he has always suspected the true killer was one of the board members, since no one else could have poisoned the water pitcher. Stone has given himself away, since he has imprisoned the real Dr. Destiny in his home, intending to frame him for the murders. Stone wanted full control of the company, and his scheme was to kill them all off, but his cowardice, on seeing that Dr. Destiny had apparently escaped and had actually come for them, gave him away!

Hour Man knocks Stone out with the (phony) bomb before Stone can fire his gun at the hero, then joins the Minute-Men for another birthday party. Thorndyke is jealous at Jimmy getting the biggest slice of cake, unaware that Minute-Man Martin has been promoted to active costumed sidekick!



COMMENTARY:

The GCD suggests Ken Fitch as a possible scripter for this one. I don’t know what clues suggest that; it doesn’t feel like his previous stories, even if you ignore the new elements obviously intended to try to save a feature on the verge of cancellation. Fitch previously tended to be disorganized in the schemes and motivations he assigned to the villains, but here we have a menace who is consistent in committing murders based on the star signs.

Jimmy in an Hour Man costume is one of those new elements, and it is clearly an effort to turn the feature into an imitation Batman and Robin. His promotion to costumed crimefighter comes out of nowhere, and curiously, this tale never even mentions “Minute-Men” or “Minute-Man”. Jimmy’s just “Jimmy”, and he’s not given a dose of Miraclo, just brought along and sent first into unknown danger! Thorndyke’s complaint at the end of the story probably bothered some readers of the time as it did me: why does Jimmy Martin gets the special honor of a costume and full participation? No man can say. Sure, Jimmy is the Captain of the Minute-Men, but it’s not like he’s previously demonstrated particularly superior crimefighting abilities. Jimmy’s costume appears to be an exact duplicate, right down to the hourglass, and Rex apparently had multiple copies of the costume, which makes me wonder whether he anticipated letting the other boys, like Thorndyke, take a turn in the suit, or whether he anticipated having to make some replacements! It was a weird expenditure of a panel to have the pair suit back up after Hour Man soiled his with quicksand and Jimmy intentionally destroyed his own cape to make a rope, especially since it forced the scripter to explain away not charging up with another dose.

Speaking of the hourglass, we’ve also got the first mention of the hourglass being used to monitor his remaining time of super-powered boost. It makes more sense than it being an electromagnetic radiation detector, but anyone who’s ever held an hourglass would have to realize how unreliable it would be during exposure to Hour Man’s rough-and-tumble action.

The countdown clock is another innovation. On rare occasions, we’ve seen tiny text panels indicating the passage of time following the start of an hour of power, but this is more effective. However, it backfires when Jimmy complains that he can’t keep up with the super-powered hero, yet they still make it from Rex’s boarding house to the woods in less than five minutes. Maybe Rex’s pad is close to the woods?

Having a costumed villain is another new touch. We’ve had freaks, but never a costume. Pretty brutal to see a villain fire an arrow directly into a victim’s heart!


Thorndyke is now being drawn with a more cartoonish face, rather than the conventional-looking boy he’s been depicted as before. I don’t know why the writer is playing this character up at all if Jimmy is being groomed as the sidekick. Note that as a sidekick, Jimmy is now fully aware of how Hour Man’s hour of power is triggered, and is welcomed into his home. Although we don’t see Rex Tyler this time around, it’s apparent that he has revealed his secret identity to Jimmy Martin, at least.

It’s also worth noting that Hour Man pulls off the final scene without the benefit of Miraclo. It’s almost as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted him to even continue using Miraclo and instead make him a non-powered hero like Batman. The story overall certainly feels more like a Batman story, with the clear gimmick of the villain, the death trap sequence, and the surprise revelation of his true identity.

But when he does have his body charged up with Miraclo, we see one display of power we’ve never seen before: being able to bend steel bars with his bare hands.

And although “Rex Tyler” is, for the first time, I think, never mentioned or depicted in the story, he does rely a tiny bit on his chemistry knowledge, recognizing the white powder at the bottom of the water pitcher as poison.

And finally, we must now address it: the Miraclo Ray. There can be little doubt that this change in the trigger for Hourman’s power was motivated from the concern that pill-popping looked too much like illicit drug use, and if there were any kids pretending to be Hourman, it wouldn’t be good to have them raiding the medicine cabinet for props.

The change imposes significant limitations on Hourman’s heroic activities, most to the detriment of potential stories. The sole positive is that it answers the premise-damaging question: why not simply down pill after pill to turn into, essentially, 24-Hourman? Beyond that, it really complicates things:

First off, and of least concern, it waters down the whole “super-chemist” aspect. Radiation-generated powers is more the domain of a physicist. Admittedly, that hasn’t played much of a part in the stories, and he could still resort to concocting new chemical mixtures and compounds and solutions to use if they wanted him to, but without the key source of power coming from his particular professional skills, that kind of thing seems less likely to be something the scripter capitalizes on. (However, the story does imply that there is some use of the actual Miraclo chemical involved in the process, since he mentioned that he only has a small amount of the Miraclo substance remaining, not enough, apparently, to power himself up with when used through the ray machine. The 80’s retcon explained the rays were activating residual Miraclo in his body, but this shows that, whatever the case was, Rex still had to power the device with his invention.)

Second, unless he’s fighting crime in his own domicile, Hourman becomes, at best, 59-Minute Man, when you factor in the time required to get from his power-up apparatus to the scene of the crime. And hopefully, Hourman’s area has reliable electrical service.

Third, the restriction of having to power up at his lab means that Hourman can’t be the kind of hero who responds to events unfolding unexpectedly, unless he does so as an unpowered costumed hero. The next time a mad scientist activates dinosaur robots to rob the bank where Rex is depositing his paycheck, he can’t take a dose and go into battle; he’ll have to rush home to the lab—and not at Hourman speed, either—to bathe in the rays and hurry back, hoping they haven’t finished the heist. I guess we’ll be seeing him responding to a lot of radio calls from now on. It’s a good thing they’ve dropped “The Man of the Hour” from his logo, because Hourman will now always be late to the scene of a crisis.

With a little more creativity, they could have written around this. Here’s what I’d have proposed: Rex bathes in the Miraclo rays every morning, which charges him up like a battery, requiring a full hour’s exposure time. The power is dormant until it’s activated with, say, a burst of infrared rays from a device in his hourglass pendant. Problem solved: no pills, but still an hour of power on demand, with no convenient way to recharge. And it could provide a cool visual when Hourman fires off the burst of infrared (which would be visible to the reader, anyway!) that triggers his super-powers, something a lot more fun to look at than a man tossing a capsule into his mouth.

So where did the Miraclo ray come from? The story doesn’t tell, but remember back in ADVENTURE #65, with Dr. Darrk and his invisibility ray? My hypothesis, as I hinted then (as well as in my imagined therapy session), is that Rex kept the invisibility ray device, and rather than destroy it as promised, he experimented with it. Rex isn’t a physicist, but perhaps, starting with a working model of a device that projected rays that imparted invisibility for 20 minutes, he was able to convert Darrk’s device to do what Miraclo pills did, when passed through the Miraclo chemical.

By this point, Baily was using ghosts on some of his DC strips--Pierce Rice was ghosting Spectre around this time--so that could explain the cruder, more rushed art in this installment.

Cei-U!
I summon the idle speculation!

I remember enjoying what I read of Johnny Dynamite...maybe Fitch got the hang of comics writing, or was just better suited to imitating an established genre, rather than the nascent superhero genre he was trying to fit in with when Hourman debuted.

As for Baily's ghosts, I wonder whether the discrepancies in artistic quality that are becoming evident at this stage of the Hourman comics are because the ghosts are better than Baily or worse than him? I can't really get a sense of his evolution looking at his late 40's to mid 70's work, especially if those, too, utilized ghosts. Here in Hourman, there is at least a "Bailyness" to all of the installments, so it doesn't seem that he was turning the chores over entirely to other hands.

There have been a few hats flying off along the way in the Hourman stories, too, but I neglected to point those out. The misanthropy is a good call, it has indeed been a common characteristic; maybe that's why Slam found Fitch's Johnny Dynamite stories palatable, as that tone fits well in the hard-boiled genres. Even if it doesn't work as well here, I do appreciate the hard-boiled elements that have graced the occasional Hourman stories (in between the weird menaces and the social causes episodes). And now it occurs to me that, just like The Spectre in his Percival Popp era, this feature could have translated into an interesting Poverty Row feature series. They wouldn't even need the costume, just a simple mask would do just fine. And hey, lots of those pictures had around a 60-minute running time--a perfect match!

The sad thing is that Fatman looks like a far more imposing crimefighter than Hourman.

Thanks for the astronomical observation about the full moon, too, MWGallaher. That law is frequently violated in Batman comics, but I can't say it doesn't set the mood.

ADVENTURE COMICS #75, June 1942:


Sandman vs. Thor courtesy of Simon and Kirby looks pretty great, doesn’t it? It was…too bad this issue’s Hourman installment can’t compete.

This issue’s adventure has the intriguing title of the “Mystery of the Missing Link” but any hopes of another weird menace style installments should be abandoned, as the introductory caption previews a story which will be framed around the old—and long!—proverb, “For want of a nail…”

The splash shows that Hour-Man and Thorndyke, for the first time given the moniker “the Minute Man” will be taking on conventional thugs, with a giant shoe representing what shall be lost due to the absence of a nail. (it’s been a long, long time since I thought about how shoes used to actually have nails in them! I think I remember shoes from the days of my youth occasionally wearing out and exposing nails, and seeing cobblers set up in stations at the mall hammering nails to attach new soles…)



The first panel promises we’re about to see the “grimmest crime in the history of Gotham City”, implying that Hour-Man is operating in Batman’s territory! The story begins in Winter in Gotham’s suburbs, where Thorndyke Tompkins lives with his family. Thorndyke needs a nail to repair his sled, and wants to go next door to borrow one. Unfortunately, Mom has hidden his shoes (!?) to prevent him from leaving the house. So Thorndyke borrows his father’s shoes, leaving Ed, his father, to leave for his early evening job wearing only his house slippers in the freezing weather. And thusly, “for the want of a nail, a shoe is lost!”

Turns out Pop Thorndyke is a milkman, and since he was late, the boss sent a substitute on Pop’s rounds. That’s a problem, because Pop’s the only one who knew that Daisy, the horse that draws his milk wagon, is blind! No substitute milkman can drive Daisy properly! (And so for want of a shoe, a horse is lost.)

Pop pursues his replacement milkman on foot, finding him beating the poor blind equine. When he tries to stop the animal abuse, the “milkman” substitute pulls a pistol and fires on Thorndyke’s old man, spooking the horse, who dashes off with a driverless milk wagon and blind in a snowstorm.



Ed Tompkins drags himself home, showing “superhuman strength” considering that he is “bullet-ridden”! Impressive! While Mom calls for the doctor, Thorndyke calls for Hourman!



He arrives at Rex’s place, and Rex assures the sobbing lad that he’ll help. Both of them suit up in front of the Miraclo ray machine, Rex donning his Hourman duds and Thorndyke putting on his cape. It’s 11:00 p.m. on the dot when Rex races out on foot, with Thorndyke piggy-backing. Their first stop: the scene of the crime!




Meanwhile, the substitute “milkman” is reporting to his boss, Brick Barton. He explains that he “got all the stuff in the bottles from the boys”, but the accident resulted in the wagon getting away from him. Barton’s furious at that, so he belts his henchman and, at 11:10, he gathers his gang to search out that milkwagon: there’s a million dollars hidden in those bottles!

It’s 11:16 when Hourman and Thorndyke arrive at the scene of the shooting, and Barton and his boys show up at the same time. The crooks and the hero recognize each other, and the fight is on!

The fight’s going well for the heroes until 11:30, when Hourman tosses a thug into an awning which then dumps a load of snow on Hourman’s head, incapacitating him while the bad guys abscond with Thorndyke as their hostage. They intentionally leave a trail by cutting up Thorndyke’s cape, to make it look like the boy himself was marking the route!



And so when Hourman reaches Barton’s hideout at 11:37, he’s walking into a trap, where he’s pummeled and trussed up with metal wire along with his young aide. It’s a death trap! As Barton & Co. leave for the dairy, high voltage begins heating up the wires binding Hourman and Thorndyke.

The heat’s too much for Thorndyke to take, so it’s up to Hourman to demonstrate “the superhuman strength of Miraclo” by…well, scootching over a few feet to bring himself in contact with the boy, causing a short circuit that breaks both the current flow and the wires themselves. With less than 10 minutes of Miraclo power, the heroes head for the dairy!

A fight ensues, and just when a thug kicks Thorndyke into Hourman, the Miraclo wears off! (According to the caption, it’s 1:00 a.m., but the corner clock shows midnight. Maybe Bernard Baily’s just returned from a trip in the Central Time Zone, and forgot to change his pocket watch back!

Just when things look dire, Daisy the blind milkwagon horse returns to the barn, forcing her way through the door, which knocks over the thug. This allows Hourman to deliver a finishing blow, even without the benefit of Miraclo, with Thorndyke sealing the victory with an avalanche of metal milk jugs.

And finally, Hourman reveals the solution to the mystery I didn’t realize we were supposed to be wondering about: “Brick Barton” is actually the owner of the milk company, wearing a mask! He had hired his thugs out as butlers, who stole jewels from their employers and left them in the empty milk bottles. Ed Thorndyke’s substitute milkman had picked up those jewel-laden empties and was transporting them back to the milk company when Daisy foiled the plan by running away.



COMMENTARY:

I’m very interested in how experts identify Golden Age comic book writers by their particular quirks. One that I’ve noticed in the past installments that may point to a common scripters is costume damage. We’ve seen Jimmy rip his cape to make a rope to save Hourman from quicksand, now we see the bad guys rip up Thorndyke’s cape to bait Hour-Man. You’ve got to wonder how much effort Hourman put into Thorndyke’s “costume” if gangsters in the back of a speeding car can rip it up so quickly and scatter the pieces in their wake.

Whoever the writer is—again, the GCD experts haven’t made a call on him—he seems to have dropped the ball shortly into this story. After just a couple of steps into “For want of a nail” he just gives up, and doesn’t bother to string together any more cause-and-effect. For the life of me I can’t figure out why this is called the “Mystery of the Missing Link”.

Ed Tompkins shows the same bizarre red hair pattern that his son sports. It’s a little shocking that he actually does get shot up. Thorndyke must have plenty of confidence in the doctors of Gotham City, since once he gets on mission, nothing further is said about his grievously injured dad.

Ed’s crawl home with a belly full of bullets is more impressive than anything Hourman does. It really bugs me how often the writers seem to forget the central premise of this feature. Miraclo doesn’t do much to protect Hourman from getting knocked out, but I guess it really doesn’t follow that gaining enhanced strength and speed would reduce one’s vulnerability to concussion.

Once again the writer refuses to answer whether or not Thorndyke gets any Miraclo powers, even though he is this time equally close to the machine. We’ll see in a later installment that the rays do affect people other than Hourman, so by all rights, Thorndyke should get some boost from the radiation, but he still has to be carried on Rex’s back as they race to the scene of the crime.

And again we have a cockamamie plan. The story implies that Pa Tompkins catches up with his replacement shortly after he heads out, but the conclusion tells us that he’s already collected all of the milk bottles with jewels in them. Why not have them all just carry the stolen gems back to their boss? I suppose the idea is that they would look innocent since they wouldn’t have the gems on them when the loss was discovered, with no one thinking to check the milk bottles. And I wonder how a milk company executive becomes a successful crime boss, placing hoodlums as “butlers”, wearing a mask to disguise his identity, and capable of taking on a superhero.

For a scientist, Rex doesn’t seem to have the best grasp of electricity. My undergrad is in Electrical Engineering, and I don’t see how contact would cause a short circuit that would wreck the death trap. But somehow it works, so maybe he’s smarter than I am…

I guess Jimmy really is gone for good, moving out of town with his mom. Rex must live in the same suburbs as Thorndyke, if the boy can hike to his hero’s flat in a winter snowstorm, in his father’s shoes. Yes, it’s inconsistent with his one-time residency in a boarding house, so presumably he’s moved around, but the suburbs wouldn’t seem to be the best area from which to operate for a hero that gets one hour of power from a home-based machine.

MWGallaher wrote: "Where we find Hourman, in his secret identity of Rex Tyler, using his knowledge of chemistry to entertain the young boys at the city orphanage. Most of the kids are impressed at seeing Rex make sulphuric acid (whoever wrote this didn’t learn much about lab safety in Chemistry class, because the way Rex is handling a test tube of what is one of the most corrosive compounds known is a gross violation of proper procedure."

This reminded me of the handy rhyme that expresses most of what I know about chemstry:

"Ah, say farewell to Smithers;
Alas, he is no more!
What he misread as H2O
Was H2SO4."