It's Monday in April, and that means it's time once again for an obscure, costume clad crime fighter (or crime fighter team) to take on the forces of supernatural evil! Yep, if you missed the first post last week HERE, this is just one of the themes we're showcasing all this month. And today it's Ace Magazine's Lash Lightning and Lightning Girl's turn to play the Nick and Nora-esque mystery tag team-up vs. a murderous, deathless witch! From the May 1945 issue of Four Favorites #18, and illustrated by Nina Albright, who had quite a heavy hittin' list of Golden Age studios on her pencil and inker resume: Iger Shop, Funnies Inc., Majestic, as well as Bernard Baily, and L.B. Cole Studios! That splash is especially wonderful...
5 comments:
Oh noooooo! Not book jackets being switched! Anything but that!
I am always fascinated with 40s comics. A lot of writers didn't quite know how to do panel transitions well and a lot of action and pacing gets lost. Granted, this is really hard. I've certainly taken a hand a writing comics and this is certainly something I've had a problem with. This is kind of why there's the "Marvel" method where you let the artists deal with the layout and panel to panel action.
The ending is a good example of this; the action is good but the witch reveal is in text later on. Lighting Girl's bolt could have illuminated Marcia's face in a panel. BTW, these two throw lighting bolts. That smash boulders. Who the hell would mess with them?!?!
The art is really good here, especially for the 40s. Page 5, panel one is a great image and the coloring is really good. The fight against the wheel is also good.
I love the old bickering superhero couple, and Lash is quite the a** in this one, and Isobel is impulsive. This was kind of table stakes for most superhero couples in the 40s.
I'll admit that the twist of who the witch was threw me off. I was expecting it to be Mr. Walker or even Bill until he got knocked off halfway through it. Speaking of off, seems Isobel's boss got her last name wrong. He calls her Drake, but her last name is Blake. Switching all the book jackets sounds more like the work of a bored librarian pulling a prank than a witch if you ask me.
For superheroes, they aren't very good at saving anyone in this story, are they? First the poor chauffeur goes down with the car and then they're too late to save the fiancé. Gotta love how Isobel is the one who figured out the whole mystery though. Loved that "Oho! Not this time you don't, sister!" and the snarky bit about witches hiding inside the station wagon.
The geese and the book jackets really got to me too. The spirits in a comedy like TOPPER do more malicious things!
And I'm glad "the poor chauffeur" at least got to be called "the poor chauffeur." In a given story, he might not even rate something like that.
I love this one. It's so incredibly realistic. A road crew releases the spirit of a centuries-old witch who immediately possesses the body of the young heir she has sworn to curse and then begins to kill off the rest of the family one by one. Of course, nobody believes one bit of this superstitious nonsense--except for one ace chauffeur who generally knows what's what. So the witch takes him out but good, clearing the only real obstacle in her path. Luckily for the rest of the people at the party, a couple of paranormal characters--ones they do believe in--happen across the plot, and they stumble into a solution to these crimes without ever really grasping the whole story. So the witch kills off the heir to her(?) curse and gets outta Dodge, and nobody is ever the wiser. The end.
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