Monday, August 24, 2009

A Tale of Two Ravens

While researching names of public domain superheroes, I discovered there were two heroes called The Raven back in the 40's.

The first one I found appeared in the pages of Quality comics. He was sort of an aid to the Spider Widow, a character whose sole advantage when fighting crime was that she had a halloween mask, so I can see where she could use some backup.



The second Raven I found was the Danny Dartin character who appeared in the pages of Lightning Comics.



Neither of these characters ever had their own comic, so don't let the covers fool you, their stories are in todays featured comics. This first one also happens to contain a great Doll Man story. There is a Phantom Lady/Spider Widow team up story in this issue as well.



[ Feature Comics 71 ]

While you may not be able to tell from the small version of this cover, that IS a mummy cutting the tight rope on this issue of Lightning Comics. The cover character is a hero named Flash Lightning whose origin will be familiar to all you Captain Marvel fans.



[ Lightning Comics 01 ]

Enjoy!

3 comments:

cash_gorman said...

The Ace Raven also had two different costumes, the first having more of a birds head mask.

Their Raven is actually the comic-book version of their pulps' Moon Man by Frederick Davis: Police Lieutenant moonlights as a modern day Robin Hood, robbing from the crooks to give to the poor, aided in his endeavors by a tough guy who is in charge of giving away the money. Meanwhile his police partner has vowed to catch his heroic identity and his love interest is the police chief's daughter.

The Moon Man stories are one of pulps' great gems that have not been widely reprinted. I was lucky to find a hard-back collection some years ago.

Jim Shelley said...

Cash - Thank you for the awesome information! btw I love your site! You need a paypal donation link (or do you have one I'm missing somewhere?)

cash_gorman said...

Never thought of that. The site needs some fine-tuning design-wise that I've not had the time to devote to it. I'm too busy finding new characters, working on a Quality page (which will probably be two), the two blogs... But, I'd like to make the heroes pages of the Fawcett and MLJ be like the general GA one with micros of them. But, I've actually taken some classes in html, csss, web design, dreamweaver, php, since the site was created and can see how much of it could be streamlined, least on my end.

On top of that, next few weeks I'm working on a secret GA project that is to be published and looking for full-time gainful employment that will actually pay the bills.

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