Before Mike Hammer, before Mike Danger, there was... that grim-faced, gun-slinging private detective, Mike Lancer!

“He backs up the law with his two fists and a .45 slung under his left armpit, ready to slug or shoot it out anyplace, anytime!”

After Mike Lancer, and before turning to novels, Mickey Spillane wrote two comics short stories featuring another P.I., Mike Danger. These stories would only be published years later, in 1954, at the beginning of the 10 years hiatus in the Mike Hammer series (1952-1962).

A Hammer by any other name or, the benefits of perseverance.

By the time he wrote his third comics P.I. story in 1946 (see the two other ones here and here), Mickey Spillane had essentially perfected the Mike Hammer formula that would bring him fame and fortune two years later.

(So much so, in fact, that when Tekno Comics/Big Entertainment would adapt Mike Danger into comics in the ‘90s, Max Allan Collins would have to come up with a unique sci-fi twist to differentiate Danger from Hammer).

Like I said, pure Hammer. Spillane only had to change the last name to get the hero of I, the Jury.

I wonder how those two Mike Danger stories (here and here) ended up being published 8 years after they’d been written (and, presumably, drawn - but who knows for sure?). Did the publisher realize that those two P.I. stories where by the same guy who’d taken the publishing world by storm with six bestselling novels between 1948 and 1952, from I, the Jury to Kiss Me, Deadly and had just started writing a short-lived Mike Hammer comic strip? Probably not, or he’d have tried to cash in on Spillane’s name.