September 1938: More Fun Comics #36

Cover by Creig Flessel

'The Masked Ranger' (by Jim Chambers):  This new strip features the eponymous hero, a masked cowboy who fights crime with the help of his horse Star and his Mexican sidekick Pedro. In this story he goes up against the Night Raiders, a gang who are trying to get both halves of a treasure map. It's really not that much better than the other cowboy serials, but the addition of various pulp hero trappings livens things up a bit. The story continues next issue.

'Three Musketeers' (by Sven Elven): This continues with D'artagnan and Athos still making their mad ride to London. It remains quite exciting.

'Wing Brady' (by Tom Hickey): Wing continues stalking his enemy Von Blarcom, and telling him about the horrors of El Brunda prison. He also finds time to survive an assassination attempt.  This is still really well done, and I actually want to find out how it ends, which is more than can be said for a lot of the other serials in this issue.

'Last of the Killers' (by Tex Horton): This is a prose story about a US State Marshall tracking down a murderer in Tombstone.  It manages to evoke the atmosphere of the old west quite effectively, and this authentic sense of place makes it better than most of the other DC prose stories.

'Johnnie Law' (by Will Ely): Johnny Law was last seen chasing arms smugglers into a thick sea fog. There's a bit of a battle on the ocean, and some of the smugglers are arrested, but the bulk of them are getting away in their ship as the strip ends.  To be continued!  This is fairly sedate for a story with a boat chase and tommy guns.

'The Magic Crystal of History' (by Homer Fleming): Bobby and Binks witness the rise of Queen Isabella of France, and the story of Christopher Columbus. It's hard to evaluate this series, because it's more of a history lesson than a story. But I'm usually interested to read them, so it must be doing something right.

'Red Logan' (by Ed Winiarski): Red was being attacked by a shark last issue.  He deals with it, while his friend and Russian stereotype Ivan captures the foreign agents who put him in the water in the first place.  The rest of the strip has them arriving in Boronia and looking around, with the cliffhanger being that the local dictator has been killed.  I honestly never thought a strip with a man knifing a shark could be boring, but I was wrong.

'Gary Hawkes' (by Bob Jenney): This is a new strip about a pilot who has been giving flying lessons to a millionaire's daughter. When she is kidnapped he flies to her rescue, and the usual bland shenanigans take place. This story has nothing new to offer, and I doubt that it's going to do anything interesting in the future.

'Detective Sergeant Carey of the Chinatown Squad' (by Joe Donohoe): Carey is on vacation, but while riding a train he stumbles across a man who has been murdered by a doctor who is really a terrorist leader. It's really not good, and the art features quite possibly the ugliest woman in the history of DC comics to this point.

'Buccaneer' (by Bernard Baily): The story continues, with Captain Dennis being captured by Klaugh, who is still angry that Dennis refused to carry slaves for him. It's not that exciting, but it does end with the promise of a final confrontation between Dennis and Klaugh. I don't expect much, but that might be the best way to approach it.

'Radio Squad' (by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster): Sandy and Larry deal with a pyromaniac fireman, with the aid of a dog that Sandy rescues from a burning house. I'll say one thing for Siegel and Shuster, they're probably better than anyone else at this time at getting drama from a situation. Any story that ends with the hero wrestling a pyromaniac in a burning building is okay in my book.

'Lieut. Bob Neal of Sub 662' (by R. Hirsch and Russ Lehmann):  New strip! Bob Neal stops foreign agents from destroying Sub 662, and so becomes its second-in-command.  The only remarkable thing about the story is that it features the first use of punctuation symbols to replace a swear word (in a DC comic, anyway).