Kings of the Comic Books

Chapter One

THE INSPIRATION

FROM THE ALLEY SHADOWS he silently howled his rage at the passing crowds. His eyes blazed hypnotically, two blind white pools in a sickly gray face.

Saturday afternoon was giving way to crisp winter evening when two teen-aged boys burst from the Odeon Movie House at the corner. The short skinny one in the lead, Steve, threw punches at imaginary badmen. As the boys trotted past the alleyway, Brooklyn pedestrians swerved out of range of Steve’s windmilling arms.

Boy, Curly, how’d you like the way Gene Autry got the drop on those rustlers? It must’ve been a fifty-foot jump down that cliff! Steve’s head whipped from side to side as invisible opponents sneak-attacked.

Steve halted without warning. His big pal Curly escaped a pile-up by immediately skipping backward in an unusual way. He kicked along on his right foot, but the left seemed to glide without leaving the ground.

The distinctive move, together with his close-cropped hair, showed where he’d borrowed his nickname a few years earlier: from the wildest of the Three Stooges. Curly waited as Steve peered into the alley. The scowling man called out wordlessly.

Steve started in; the bigger boy followed like an ocean liner towed by a tug.

The gray-skinned man lurking in the Brooklyn shadows, his mustached face a mask of hatred, was a Chinese mandarin in robe and skullcap.

He stared out from a magazine cover. Inside the alley entry, the newsstand itself stood half-concealed by its paper wares. The afternoon newspapers headlined President Roosevelt’s latest speech, but the boys focused on the magazines.

The cover paintings of Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post paraded cute children pulling dogs on sleds, and college-student couples stealing kisses. Those respectable periodicals hung clipped by their corners along the edge of the stand’s roof. But down in the wire racks at knee level, the good stuff cried out for attention.

The Spider, Astounding Stories, Texas Rangers, Black Mask—every garish cover bellowed Buy me! in bright reds and greens and blues. Fists were flying, guns blazing, and women screaming. These pulp-paper magazines bulged with fast-moving, sensational prose stories. "There’s the latest Shadow," said Curly. Can we afford it this week? Whose turn to shell out?

Wait a sec . . . ahh, I thought this one here would be good, but look. Steve lifted out the half-seen magazine that had called him in. The cover art of the scowling mandarin—a line drawing, not a painting—should have tipped him off. "It’s only a comic magazine. Detective Comics. Since when do they waste space on ’em here?" He started to return it to the rack.

Heck, they’re getting better. Some aren’t half bad.

Steve and Curly avidly followed the newspaper strips: Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, and so on. Terry, Flash, and company set high standards—Steve had been badly disappointed a while ago when he riffled through some comic books.

The newborn magazines reprinted strips he’d already seen in the papers, reduced to nearly illegible size. A few strips were original, as far as the boys could tell. But those new features made for lackluster imitations of the great newspaper comics.

Curly grabbed the Detective from Steve and flipped through it. Yeah, see—this one looks like new stuff. Speed Saunders, Cosmo the Phantom of Disguise, Slam Bradley—I’ve never read these ones, have you? And they’re full stories, most of ’em, not just a couple of pages apiece like the reprints.

Steve fished a dime from a pocket. "Maybe I will get it, after all. He paid before the newsstand man could remind them that this ain’t no liberry."

Curly was right, Steve decided that night after he’d read Detective #1. It beat the earlier comic magazines all hollow.

He bought the second issue the next month. The month after that, when he bought the third, he picked up a New Adventure Comics as well. Soon Steve and Curly were dissecting comic books in conversation, as keenly as they analyzed movies, radio shows, and pulp magazines.

Then one day Steve launched their lives on a roller-coaster ride. You know something, Curly? He closed the comic he’d finished, and caught his pal’s eye. "I’ll bet we could do this."

Chapter Two

SAM STARK

IN EARLY 1938, fifteen-year-old Steve Hersh lived in two worlds. In one, Mandrake the Magician foiled the plots of super-criminals, and the Marx Brothers made a shambles of the opera and the races. Amos ’n’ Andy ran afoul of the Kingfish’s schemes, and John Carter, Warlord of Barsoom, rode an eight-legged Martian beast across the red planet’s dead sea-bottoms.

In the other world—the real one—war loomed over Europe and Asia, and gangsters ran rampant in the headlines at home.

Nearly a decade after the stock-market crash, the financial Depression still gripped every nation. Steve would be graduating high school in a year and a half, and looking for a job. His parents had hoped he’d be the first in the family to attend college, but that wasn’t in the cards. They couldn’t afford it.

The world of books and radio shows, of movies and newspaper strips, looked better and better by comparison. The most exciting outpost in that world was the latest one discovered—comic books.

And so came the pivotal moment when, in his family’s Brooklyn walk-up, Steve said, "You know something, Curly? I’ll bet we could do this."

Steve’s tiny room he’d once shared with the undiscovered young painter Nate Hersh—his big brother. Now it barely contained two boys sprawled out on bed and chair. A couple of orange-crate shelves held the books Steve had picked up over the years in second-hand stores: scattered entries in series like Tarzan of the Apes, the Saint, and Fu Manchu. Steve spent no hard-earned cash on the novels of Verne, Stevenson, or Dumas. He read them no less avidly, but borrowed them from the library on his part-time job there.

Steve kept The Shadow and his other pulp magazines under the bed. There, they wouldn’t constantly remind his parents that they were turning his brain to sludge, as his father put it. The pulps made an ever-changing collection, since Steve and Curly and other neighborhood kids swapped them back and forth. Nobody alone could afford a fraction of the weekly flood of cheap paper excitement.

Projects from The Boy Mechanic littered the room in differing stages of completion or abandonment: a crystal radio, a model ship, a dragon kite. A few pen-and-ink movie monster sketches—Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula, the Werewolf of London—hung tacked to the window frame.

Outside, streetlights blazed behind softly falling snow. Curly Goldman had arrived a half hour ago, after ten hours working in his family’s hardware store.

I’ll bet we could do comics, Steve repeated in the face of Curly’s skeptical frown.

We’ve already been through this, Algernon. You think we’ve turned into artistic geniuses in a few short years?

Steve rummaged in a drawer and retrieved some sheets of brown wrapping paper covered in pencil drawings. Some time ago, the friends had hit on the route to fame and fortune—creating and selling a comic strip. But Sam Stark, Super Sleuth, set alongside Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy, looked like . . . well, like the work of two thirteen-year-olds. And, begun in one of Steve’s typical bursts of enthusiasm, it had never been finished.

But now, as they compared the resurrected Super Sleuth with the comic books, Curly’s frown softened. Say—you could have something there. Some of these artists aren’t any better than we are. Not by much, anyhow.

"And we’ve gotten better since then! Well, you sure have. Anyway, the comic books can’t be half as choosy as the strips. I mean, I like ’em fine, but come on—some of this stuff looks like it was done by thirteen-year-olds!"

With critical detachment, Curly inspected their old pages.

Steve sensed a win and plunged ahead. It’s like the serial chapters. Nobody’s ever gonna mistake one for a big-time movie like the ones that win Oscars, but they make up for it in punch. Or like the Three Stooges and Our Gang compared to ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’—

It wasn’t hard for Steve to argue Curly into anything. On this, the big guy was probably itching to be convinced. Yeah. Crude but enthusiastic.

Exactly! Steve waved the More Fun Comics he’d finished reading. Some of these artists would be lucky if the newspapers even looked cross-eyed at their strips, but the comic books take ’em on.

I’ll bet they work cheap. Curly studied the Sam Stark pages on his lap and then a Detective in his hand.

Doesn’t most everybody nowadays?

Curly closed the Detective. All right, Albert Einstein, how should we tackle this?

Well, admitted Steve, we have to redo Sam Stark. I guess we have to finish him up. They’d only done six days’ rough strips—six episodes in a fist-fight between Stark and the minions of the unseen Crooked Claw.

And then we have to keep going, Curly said. ‘I’ll bet we can do this’ means we do it over and over—story after story.

Okay, sure, but first things first. Right now we just want to see if the comic books will take us at all.

They must be pretty particular about how they get this art, in order to print it. I can see it has to be done in ink, but aside from that I can’t guess what they’d want. What kind of good paper? How do you color it in? And so on, and so on.

Steve’s face fell. Maybe we should forget it. It was a dumb idea anyway.

Maybe we should, Curly agreed as he studied Sam Stark. And then he tore the sheets of paper in two.

Hey!

You said it was a dumb idea, didn’t you?

No, it wasn’t—I mean I didn’t say it was—I mean I didn’t really mean it!

We’ve gotta start from scratch anyway, Amos. And we have to finish what we start.

Steve stole a look at the model ship on his desk. He’d worked on it by himself, off and on, for months. Even now it stood mastless and unrigged. Nearby sat a completed crystal radio set, receptive to stations across the country. On that project he’d had Curly’s help. Maybe, together, they could finish up this spur-of-the-moment idea.

All right, then! Steve said. Let’s start at the very beginning. What’s so special about Sam Stark? What’s gonna make a comic book company want to buy him?

Well, answered Curly, eyeing the first attempt’s torn halves, he’s got a secret punch. As soon as his knuckles touch a guy, the fella drops like a stone. That was your idea.

Okay. It’s not a bad gimmick. How he got the punch might give us a good first story.

Curly’s gaze took in a pulp magazine and a book on the bed. The latest in each series, they reminded him of the characters’ beginnings. Yeah, like Doc Savage—his first issue told how he started fighting crime when his father died after training him from childhood. Or Tarzan—the first book explained all that stuff, how he was raised by the apes.

Steve nodded. Why not have it involve the Crooked Claw? That way there’s some reason for their fighting all the time. It’s not just ’cause Sam is the good guy and the Claw is the baddie.

How about this? Curly asked. The Claw is Sam’s father! Same as with Doc, or like the Phantom in the comic strips. But he trained Junior from childhood to commit crimes, not fight them. Now Sam’s seen the error of his ways and is battling his own dad—

Try this! Steve jumped in as if he hadn’t heard a word. "The Crooked Claw always wears a mask and robes, like in the serials, so we don’t see his face at first. Then we find out, when he unmasks, he’s Sam Stark himself!

"Later on, the Claw will see the error of his ways—like you said for Sam, Curly—and invent a time machine and travel back from the future, where everybody knows the secret punch, and here in the present as our Sam he fights himself—and I guess he’d invent a rejuvenating machine, too, so he isn’t fifty or sixty