Number 792

Un-Super Heroes Week: Spy Smasher vs. America Smasher

This is day three of Pappy's Un-Super Heroes Week, with a story from Spy Smasher #2, a Fawcett comic from 1941. Spy Smasher, like innumerable other heroes, was a rich guy who turned to costumed heroics, unencumbered by the need to be at work five days a week. I'm retired and don't have to go to work. Maybe that's how I'll fill those empty hours...fighting crime, catching terrorists!

I can see the headlines: MASKED WHITE-BEARDED GEEZER BUSTS UP LOCAL AL QAEDA CELL!

"Just call me Papman," the costumed and masked sixty-something avenger said. He was holding a smoking machine pistol while standing over the bullet-riddled bodies of a half-dozen terrorists.

Hmmm. Or I can just continue to do what I'm doing.The most excitement I can stand nowadays is deciding whether to have oatmeal or a bagel for breakfast.

Spy Smasher was born in Whiz Comics #1, and was popular enough to get his own comic book, at least for a time. After the war he seemed superfluous. He became Crime Smasher, and even that career fizzled, so by 1948 he was gone. He's been around since, in some of those confusing multiple-earth opuses from DC, but I prefer to think that Crime Smasher, alias Spy Smasher, né millionaire Alan Armstrong, is in his early nineties, in a rest home somewhere. His children and grandkids by his late wife, Eve, make an occasional visit. They humor him by looking at his old scrapbooks of news clippings.

Charles Sultan is credited by GCD with the art. Sultan, yet another of the comic book veterans from the 1930s, worked up until the '50s in the comics, then went into other publishing ventures.

This story features Spy Smasher's Nazi counterpart, America Smasher, a dwarf with a "mailed fist." It's fairly typical of the other stories in this 64-page issue, although I've yet to figure out the symbolic splash panel with the cowled figure in green.