#captain x

this guy is „captain x“ - an old character of mine. He sails around the world to solve the impossiblest of math equations, accompanied by his cook „schuh“, who tries to poison him on the regular, and his 2nd mate „miss schlingel“, who is a trained assassin with pink boots.

This story still spooks around in my head from time to time, as i developed it with a few friends in high school and it‘s somehow based off of our math teacher lol.

STAR-SPANGLED COMICS #1 OCTOBER 1941 BY JERRY SIEGEL, JON L. BLUMMER, MORT WEISINGER, HAL SHERMAN AND HAROLD WILSON SHARP

Witness the character debuts of Star-Spangled kid (and Stripesy), Captain X (Firestorm’s grandfather) and a superhero that dresses as a spider-hero and uses web fluid and can climb walls and ceilings... yes, you guessed it... TARANTULA.

SCORE: 6

It’s really unfair to judge the art on these stories from modern day perspective. Siegel’s stories in this book were very creative and innovative... but Hal Sherman was probably way over his head. Perspective alone is a mess and sometimes it’s hard to follow the story.

But there is something unique in the first story of this book. First of all, the idea that the kid is not the sidekick. I am not sure how often that was done in the Golden Age up to that point, but it is unusual. This version of Sylvester Pemberton doesn’t have any super-powers or anything. He is just a gifted kid that knows how to box (he will get gadgets in the silver age).

The other unusual thing about the first story is how long it is. Twenty pages was A LOT for a Golden Age story.

Despite these things, I didn’t find Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy that special.

Captain X is another generic mystery man that helped the British in their WWII battles (in what seems to be Dunkirk). Not much to talk about there.

Tarantula was different though. He had a motif and it worked for him. As I mentioned earlier, he does many things Spider-Man later did, but he has no super-powers.

Tarantula came back in the eighties and then as many of you already know, became a regular in Chuck Dixon’s Nightwing (this is probably why his persona became associated with the Bat-Family).