ADVENTURE COMICS #78, September 1942


“The Man Who Played Death” is illustrated by Bernard Baily and/or his ghosts, and written by an unidentified scripter.

A rather ridiculous villain in the splash:



Well, that’s a clumsy start. A public announcement of murder from “Sir John Falstaff”, the announced victim awkwardly delivering expositionary dialog in panel 2 that pretty much gives the identity of the villain away right off the bat, and then an implausible welcoming of the killer into the victim’s home, courtesy of the policeman.

(This policeman, identified as a sergeant, is portrayed in plain clothes, sporting a fancy moustache and glasses. Not exactly the visual stereotype most artists would resort to…)

Falstaff announces that they will be witnessing lawyer John Ward’s death in five minutes, and is then interrupted by the arrival of the butler, serving up Mr. Ward’s nightly pills with a pitcher of water.

But wait! Our sergeant is no dummy! What if that water is poisoned? There’s only one way to find out:



Lest you be fooled by his sophisticated appearance, the tough-talking sarge is a tough cookie, willing to serve as the poison taste-tester for the man he’s guarding! All’s good, though…no poison here!

Except…

…John Ward immediately begins to stagger, his throat burning, and he dies from what the sarge recognizes is Prussic acid! It’s a mystery how he was poisoned, but Sir John Falstaff is confident that since he never touched the glass, he’ll be freed on lack of evidence!

And indeed he is released. We next see chemist Rex Tyler taking an interest in the case. From Rex’s analysis of the events, if Falstaff had a confederate, he knows how the murder took place. But, the reader might ask, who could have been the confederate? Ward’s trusted butler? The police sergeant?

Trusty Thorndyke arrives at Rex’s place, and Rex explains that Falstaff was “a rogue in some of Shakespeare’s plays! Someone has assumed his name for murder!”

When Rex and Thorndyke hear on the radio that Falstaff has been released, and was last seen driving down Hathaway Road, Rex reminds Thorndyke of “that odd house on a dirt road that branches from” Hathaway Road. But first, Thorndyke is instructed to get into his “uniform”—a cape like Hourman’s but with the colors reversed—and they both stand before the Miraclo rays…although, as usual, there’s no confirmation or denial that Thorndyke’s getting juiced up from the beams himself, although he’s clearly within the machine’s aura:



The corner clock starts ticking at 11:03 pm, and Hourman heads to the strange house off of Hathaway, confident that that is Falstaff’s place, while Thorndyke is ordered to Hollman’s place to fend off Falstaff, in the unlikely event that Sir John gets there before Hourman can stop him!

At 11:18, Falstaff is relaxing at home, discussing his murder plans when Hourman arrives to prevent Falstaff from proceeding. Falstaff orders his servant Quanto to bring refreshments, spoiling the surprise ending for those few dullards who forgot the first victim’s expository comments about actor Walter Cornell and his make-up man, Quanto. The scripter decides to get the motive out of the way, too, with Falstaff explaining that John Ward and Dr. Hollman had Falstaff placed in a mental hospital, inspiring this scheme of murderous revenge. And Hourman’s not going to stop him, thanks to a trap door:



Yes, it’s the requisite death trap, and once again, it’s a drowning trap: Hourman has fallen through a ceiling hatch to the floor of a small room with no other entrances, designed solely for murder…and for storing wooden beams, because come on, what castle doesn’t have a problem making space for the lumber inventory? Well, it’s a good thing for Hourman, since that beam will be the key to his pulling off the least plausible death trap escape I’ve ever seen, one that I just have to share in full:



OK, I’ll grant that if he had been floating at a level where he could punch at the ceiling hatch, the physics of the situation would result in the punches driving his body into the water rather then busting through the wood. But maybe during that 5 minutes from 11:31 to 11:36, he could have climbed that plank, using that as his support from which to hammer the hatch with his high-powered hands? Just an idea should this happen again, Rex…

And I can’t let that final panel of the page pass without comment, as Bernard Baily and/or his ghost fail to convey that Rex is emerging from the ceiling hatch into the room above, instead making it look like he is materializing from a puddle of water!

So Quanto’s first reaction to Hourman’s escape is to light a stick of dynamite and throw it at his opponent. Gamers can tell you that’s not generally a wise melee fighting strategy, Quanto! Hourman simply dives back into the flooded room and allows Quanto to blow up the room above, and now Hourman has to deal with rescuing the idiot assistant from the wreckage before heading to Doctor Paul Hollman’s house.

When Falstaff arrives at the doctor’s home, the doctor is of course in the company of the sole officer assigned to this very public murder, whose hapless defense of his charge is the warning “You wouldn’t dare pull another fast one!” The officer then allows Falstaff to join his announced victim, since the doctor recognizes him.
When Sir John Falstaff extends his palm saying “Perhaps you aren’t very glad to see me again, but…shake, my friend!”, it’s the suddenly-arriving Thorndyke who interrupts Falstaff’s scheme. Thorndyke has spotted Falstaff’s ring with a poison needle! A poison ring? That’s the kind of hard evidence the sergeant needs to convince a jury that Sir John Falstaff is a killer!

But no, Falstaff demonstrates that the needle contains only harmless iodine, by injecting himself with it. Kind of a bizarre prank to pull, but technically harmless, one would think. I think a more competent police department could have handled this whole thing a bit differently, but okay, I guess Falstaff gets away with it after all, since Hollman wasn’t killed…

…but here comes Hourman, with Quanto in tow. Under duress, Quanto announces “I’m quitting, master! The game’s too much for me!” Enraged, Falstaff reminds Quanto: “[/i]You[/b][/i] put the ice cubes in the water…don’t forget that!”

It’s 11:59, and Thorndyke delivers the deciding blow by diving at Falstaff’s prominent belly before Falstaff can punish his turncoat assistant. Hourman’s hour of power (as well as Thorndyke’s?) is up. All that’s left is to explain things. As has become obvious, Sir John Falstaff is actor Walter Cornell, whose “mind snapped”, leaving Ward and Hollston to send him to the mental hospital, where he “became an incurable egomaniac”. His plan with Hollston was to stab him with the iodine and count on Hollston’s resultant panic to trigger a fatal heart attack, knowing that Hollston had a weak heart. No real poison necessary, just a good scare to send him into cardiac arrest!

But what about that first murder? The ice cubes were poisoned with Prussic acid. The cold melted ice water slowly rises to the top. On the sergeant’s first sip, the poisoned, cold liquid from the ice was still at the bottom. When Ward drank it, the acid had risen to the top, where he swallowed it and died. How did it get there? Well, “It was easy for Quanto to take the place of the real butler, who had been kidnapped or murdered!”

Their mission complete, Hourman and Thorndyke race off: “We’ve got an appointment with the readers of ADVENTURE COMICS next month in a sizzling, snappy, sixty-minute episode…and I don’t want any of them to miss it!”

COMMENTARY:

I'd feel pretty confident nominating "Walter Cornell told me Sir John Falstaff could have been a murderer! Remember Cornell, the greatest living actor, and his make-up man, Quanto, a genius in his field?" as the most awkward exposition ever scripted as comic book dialog. It's not just the lazy transparency--anyone reading this is going to know that the villain will be Cornell in disguise thanks to the second story panel--but the clumsy way it draws attention to the villain masquerading as a random character from the works of Shakespeare. I suppose I can barely imagine a conversation in which Cornell might have raised the unlikely topic of the fictional Falstaff being a murderer, and that John Ward, under threat from a "Sir John Falstaff", would recall that conversation as he worries, with the deadline approaching. (Sloppy scripting in giving the victim the same first name as the killer!)

Less plausible is the casual way in which Ward and the police sergeant casually invite "Sir John Falstaff" into Ward's home after having received the threat, treating him--as does everyone in this story!--as if he were an ordinary citizen named "Sir John Falstaff" rather than a man in a bizarre stage costume. Equally implausible: that the policeman would volunteer as a poison taster. Bernard Baily's depiction of the policeman with suit, glasses, and fashionable moustache clashes with the scripter's characterization through the cop's dialog, such as " And I ain't takin' advice from cheap punks!" The mysterious method behind the murder at least allows Rex Tyler to show off some of his chemistry skills, so that's something, I guess.

Again and again in this feature, the writer has introduced incidental details that are critical to making sense of the stories, but leaving it up to the reader to piece those parts together. Usually, I appreciate it when the reader isn't spoon-fed every aspect of the story, but in this series, I don't get the sense that the writer is doing this in service to respect for the readers' intelligence, but rather that he's trying to patch over plot holes that he doesn't want to correct with a full rewrite. A minor example in this story is the radio report that "Sir John Falstaff was last seen driving down Hathaway Road!", and Rex's discussion with Thorndyke of an "odd house" on that road; this presumably explains how Hourman can run directly over to Falstaff's house, after powering up with Miraclo.--which is an example of Hourman's routinely bad choices in where to pursue his investigations--while he sends Thorndyke to the better location, the home of the announced victim. (Also of incidental interest is Rex telling Thorndyke to "get into your uniform", which is a bit of a glorification of the spare Hourman cape and neck-clasp that comprises said "uniform". Thorndyke will get a very minor costume upgrade later.)

A more significant example of a critical aside that isn't clarified where it counts is the page one description of assistant Quanto as a genius make-up man. It's up to the reader to deduce that this is why the police treat "Sir John Falstaff" as if he's not an actor in disguise (although one would think that making death threats would justify restraining him, or at least not inviting him in...twice!). We also have to deduce that skilled make-up was what permitted Quanto to disguise himself as John Ward's butler (who "had been kidnapped or murdered!").

We do have the corner clock countdown back for this issue, and of course, there is a death trap, this time with the most ludicrous resolution yet. Maybe someone who had never had any experience with "wood" might buy that a few splinters between planks could expand quickly enough and greatly enough to break open a wooden door, but I would wager that not a single reader, ever, bought into that absurd explanation.

The clock is, without question, running out on this feature. There are only five more Golden Age installments remaining, all of which, thankfully, are better than this. 

I appreciate you being able to spot the potential in so many of these, chadwilliam ! So often the pieces are there from which to craft an entertaining story but the execution is too sloppy or the constraints of 8 pages too restrictive. I didn't bother trying to think of a more plausible escape alternative, but given that we see Hourman using his Miraclo powers to shred the beam, maybe he could have waited until the water was high enough for him to reach the hatch door, then have to shred the wood at the hinges in a similar manner, with only minutes to complete the task before he drowned. That would have been a more impressive use of his Miraclo powers than creating splinters out of a piece of lumber (which I think I could probably accomplish without Miraclo!). But the one constant at this stage of the feature's life is the resistance to doing anything impressive with his super-powers. It's long since passed the point of "Why bother?" I don't know if it was the effort to make Hourman into a Batman clone or some lingering discomfort from the pill-popping days that made them want to play down the physical augmentation, but the countdown clock is almost always irrelevant to what's happening. Hourman doesn't make impressive leaps, he can't withstand a blow to the head, he can't burst out of ropes around his chest, and he'd make better time if he just took a car.
Interestingly enough, it does seem like the writer is finally making some attempts to play up the "chemist superhero" angle I supposed could be a good hook back at the start, with the admittedly somewhat clever ice cube murder, but the writer even bungles that a bit by over-explaining to the detriment of clarity. Yes, colder melt-off from the ice may accumulate first on the bottom of the glass before rising, but does the reader need to know those details when the real point is that the poison was in the ice, not the water. Speaking of which, does anybody really take their pills with ice water?

I haven’t commented much because I don’t have anything to say about Hour-man. But I have been enjoying this thread immensely!

I currently have the Simon/Kirby Sandman collection from the library and it’s a heckuva lot better than Hour-Man! It’s kind of fun to see what else was going on in Adventure Comics at the same time.

That the noted actor would have chosen Falstaff as his villainous alter-ego is quite a hoot, as Sir John is all helmet, no charger in the three plays in which he appears.

Better the actor should have gone with a truly evil Shakespeare character, as Robert Kanigher did in "Clay Pigeon for a Killer" in Batman 179, in which the murderous villain was Victor Iago.

I've pondered it, and I can't come up with any reason to use Falstaff as the disguise, unless they figured the buffoonish look would seem to better mask the supposedly famous actor beneath the make-up...which reminds me, they never even showed the undisguised actor on-panel, so even that justification doesn't really work (that is, if the real Walter Cornell looked like, say, John Carradine, we'd understand that Quanto's make-up skills really were impressive!).

The smallest 39-digit number is 1 followed by 38 zeroes, the square of which would be 1 followed by 76 zeroes. The largest square would be (10^39 - 1)x(10^39 - 1) = 10^78 - 2 x 10^39 +1, which would have 78 digits.

ADVENTURE COMICS #81, December 1942: “Time Out for Hitler”



SYNOPSIS:

The full page splash doesn’t kick off the story this time, it just gives us a symbolic image of Hourman fighting (presumed) bad guys while kicking back in Rex Tyler’s office chair during lunch hour. The “office memo” blowing toward the reader has a little rumination on the “hours” in our lives, and explains that in this issue, Hourman’s lunch hour will become “Time Out for Hitler!”



The actual story begins on page 2, as Thorndyke’s diving practice at the Lavalier Swimming Pool is interrupted by armed men who force the swimmers out so that they can send a man in a diving suit into the deep end to search for…something… Unfortunately for them, that something is not in this pools, so they agree to search instead at the Oasis Pool. This operation is suspicious enough to send Thorndyke to the office of his pal Rex Tyler, chemist, and secretly the Hourman.



The mystery piques Rex’s interest, and he agrees to look into it, when none other than good old Mr. Bannerman, long absent from this strip, pops his head in to berate his employee Rex for taking off work. Can’t be goofing off with a war going on, can we? But even a defense-supporting chemist gets a lunch hour, but not without a warning that any minute over an hour will be sabotaging the war effort!



The clock starts at 1:00 p.m. as Rex, suited up as Hourman, absorbs a dose of Miraclo glow (with Thorndyke alongside, getting or not getting a dose himself, who can say?). The pair reach the Oasis Pool and find the strange men up to the same strange business. Hourman politely inquires, but the men overreact by pulling their firearms.

As Hourman batters the bum, Thorndyke overinflates the diver’s suit, bringing him to the surface. The thugs attempt to use Thorndyke as a human shield but Hourman (“light as a bird”?) launches himself from a diving board to tackle the men. Thorndyke escapes them, but the effort has knocked Hourman out just long enough for the thugs to escape, too!

This time, the men didn’t announce where they’d head next, so Hourman instead visits the local Ship’s Chandler. Since Thorndyke wasn’t along last time Hourman paid a visit to a chandler, Hourman explains that this chandler, who deals in ship supplies, is the only place in town where thugs could get a diving suit. (I guess we’re not in New York City this issue?)

Well, it’s not Dr. Glisten behind the counter this time, but a German-speaking man who panics and calls for his buddies Adolph and Hans. Half the lunch hour’s gone already while Hourman’s slugging it out with these “Natzy men”.

Thorny douses two of the men in tar, which I guess chandlers have to keep on hand, when the police arrive. Our heroes turn the enemy agents over to the boys in blue, but the cops are phonies! More Nazi agents masquerading as the law, and they know Hourman’s vulnerability: a blackjack to the ol’noggin!



With Hourman and Thorndyke out for the count, they bring the Trussed Crusaders in back where the monocle-wearing Baron Glantz receives his men’s report: they haven’t found the object of their search yet. The Baron radios the German U-boat for more information: secret orders for the group were dropped by plane and landed in a small body of water surrounded by trees.

Oh, it seems they forgot to mention “trees” the first time! With that extra bit of information Baron Glantz knows that searching swimming pools is futile: the orders must have fallen into Central Park Lake! (So wait, we are in New York City after all?)

The first order of business, though, is to take care of the pesky masked heroes, so the Baron has his men tie weights to Hourman and Thorny’s feet and dump them in the bay.



Hourman finds some clams with razor-sharp shell edges, saws his bound hands against them until he is freed, then grabs Thorny and heads to the surface. They’re like hunting hounds hot on the heels of Hitler’s henchmen!

Meeting with the Nazis at Central Park, Hourman K.O.’s the Krauts, tossing the Baron into the rowboat of two swabbies on shore leave, who toss him right back out: “This is a private party, bud, so don’t horn in!”

The genuine police arrive to take over, as Hourman’s powers wear off, and he rushes back to the office, in time to hear what may be the last of Mr. Bannerman’s beratements the boys will bear: “Five minutes late, Tyler! You’re practically helping our enemies win this war!”

In the closing caption, Bernard Baily again plugs his other feature, Americommando, over in Action Comics. Americommando, a.k.a. Mr. America, a.k.a. Tex Thompson, would outlive Hourman by well over a year, running through July 1944. Although Baily’s The Spectre would continue to appear for a few month’s after Tex’s final bow, Tex debuted in ACTION COMICS #1, so his was Baily’s longest-lasting feature for DC!

COMMENTARY:

This issue illustrates one of the more easily-spotted indicators of a change in writer: for the first time in the history of the feature, Thorndyke is referred to as “Thorny”, and he in turn refers to Hourman as “H.M.” Evidently Alfred Bester, whom the esteemed Martin O’Hearn identifies as the scripter of this issue, took advantage of any chance to save his keystrokes for the more substantial writing. As someone who has gotten very tired of typing “Thorndyke”, I appreciate finally being granted leave to abbreviate it, if only for the character’s final three appearances.

I find, though, that “H.M.” for “Hourman” doesn’t sit well with me. It’s an interesting psychological self-observation that it feels wrong to use “H” as an abbreviation for a word in which the h is silent. As I pondered this, I realized that, as an engineer, I use hr as an abbreviation for “hour” routinely, but that’s not the same thing: in speaking, I would pronounce hr as “hour”. The abbreviation is only for written convenience, not spoken. When we do use “H” as a spoken abbreviation, as in “George H. W. Bush” or “HVAC”, it’s always—in every instance I can think of—abbreviating a word that is both longer than one syllable and begins with a voiced “h” sound. A common exception would be in the use of initials, where we may not even know what we were abbreviating, such as “H. R. Haldeman” or “John H. Smith”, where those names might be one syllable, or begin with a silent “H” (although I can’t think of any names that do begin with a silent “H”). Common acronyms are another exception: we might say “MPH” even though it doesn’t shorten the number of syllables from “miles per hour” and it does also represent a word, the same word, in fact, that begins with a silent “h”.

Last issue, Hourman’s hour of power coincided with the duration of a radio program; this time, it’s a lunch hour. I like these creative ways to frame Hourman’s activities against a common real-world period of fixed duration more than the more contrived idea of a villain announcing a scheduled crime forcing Hourman to race the clock. Bester and Baily continue the use of the corner clock, a device I’ve enjoyed seeing in this latter portion of Hourman’s Golden Age career. Bester also continues the policy of having Hourman and Thorny escape from a death trap, although it’s not an elaborate set-up this time, it’s just dumping the pair into the lake, tied up and weighted down. It’s a more believable ad hoc murder attempt, although Hourman’s means of escape is as implausible as ever. He’s tied with ropes around his chest, and bound at the wrist, underwater, but has time to saw his way through the wrist bindings against clamshells sitting on the sandy floor of the bay, then deal with the rest of the ropes, then rescue Thorny? Not buying it, and I doubt anyone else did. Why not just have him struggle a little and finally Miraclo his way out of the ropes?

While Bester, who would become an acclaimed science fiction writer in the 1950’s, demonstrates a way with words exceeding the standards of previous writers, the plot here is flimsy and far-fetched. If you’re going to tease the readers with an outlandish scheme requiring a diving suit in a swimming pool, you’re going to need to provide a good reason. A good swimmer in a pair of trunks could locate the package more efficiently and discreetly. When Hourman decides to seek out the source of the diving suit by going to the only chandler’s shop in NYC, we’re expecting the shopkeeper to point him in the direction of the purchaser, not for the chandler’s shop itself to, for some reason, be the cover for the Nazi gang! Oh, and they have counterfeit cops as well. I’m thinking this organization is far more substantial than the handful of members Hourman hands over to the police at the end of the story. But lunch hour’s over, what’s a working man gonna do?