In fact, far from being a continuous feature from issue 33 to 101 as I was led to believe by sloppy Wikipedia information, Tomahawk appeared ‘sporadically’ until 1953 before settling into a regular slot. The surprise was that it was Tomahawk who made way for them.Īctually, the real shock was page 2 of the Boy Commandos story, which was signed, with a cheery greeting, by Jack Kirby! Even the digital image was a thrill. So it was not surprising that issue 37 featured two comic characters I’d never heard of before, Doc and Fatty, a smart guy/dumb guy pair created by Howard Sherman, whose gimmick was a ‘time-typer’, a miniature typewriter that took them into the future or the past, in this instance to become the inspiration for Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. House ads featured a mixture of titles derived from popular radio series, some serious, some comic, and superhero titles whose numbering indicating that their life was rapidly running out. The same line-up, with Tomahawk and The Boy Commandos pushed up front, ran through the next two issues, then on a bi-monthly schedule, but this was 1948, and the Golden Age was fading away. Pride of place was Tomahawk though, with an odd little tale of Red Deer’s hatchet that was cursed to bring disaster on all who possessed it, and which ended up causing the death of a gang of fleeing crooks who’d stolen it from the museum to which Tomahawk had donated it, nearly two hundred and fifty years before.Īfter the Marvel series I’d been ploughing through for weeks, primitive as these were, this was truly sunshine after the rain. In between, I was unsurprised to find The Green Arrow and Zatara but delighted to see The Boy Commandos, albeit the later version, post-War, with Tex in place of Alfie and Jan. You can tell at a glance why these two didn’t team up. Their solo stories book-ended the issue, Superman, still by Siegel and Shuster, giving rival press an equal chance to get the drop on Clark Kent and Lois Lane as reporters on the Man of Tomorrow’s next case up front, and the Dynamic Duo up against a museum boss and jewel fanatic, sacked for being conned out of $60,000 of the Museum’s money, taking revenge on the five man Board of Directors, one of them Bruce Wayne, by murdering them with appropriate giant-sized gems, but who ended up dying himself in a tragic yet deserved accident. Superman was on his back, juggling a tucked-up Batman and Robin like circus acrobats. So, what would I be reading when I started with issue 33? As expected, the only place where Superman and Batman met was on the cover, which had nothing to do with the interior. Having enjoyed his series so much, I have acquired that run of World’s Finest to complete my collection of what was an unpretentious, grounded, authentic and bloody good series.Īnd whatever else surrounded it for that 69 issue run. Amongst the other features, between issue 33 and 101, was DC’s Western Frontiersman, Tomahawk. Superman and Batman were far from the only attractions offered. I believe that the first time Superman and Batman ever jointly appeared in a story was their cameo at the end of All-Star 7, pulling Johnny Thunder’s fat out of the fire – but still having done so individually.īecause, back then, World’s Finest was not merely the standard Golden Age 64 page comic, it consisted of 96 pages, on a quarterly basis (though due to Wartime paper restrictions it was soon reduced to 72 pages). What I wasn’t aware of was that, though the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader did share World’s Finest, they had completely separate existences, not meeting, not teaming. Which was, indeed, the reason it was created, at Detective Comics Inc., in the Forties, to cash in on their two most popular characters, to exploit the two that had been the first to break the anthology mode of the Golden Age and carry series devoted solely to them.
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