Like superheroes, fictional private detectives generally find themselves in the freelance justice business.
Popular culture critic Russel Nye might have been describing either a superhero or a private eye when he noted that such a character “…offers a simple, direct answer to some of society’s more frustrating problems — the Mafia, crooked cops, big graft, foreign spies, gangsters and the like. In other words, he gets results.”
And yet unlike superheroes, private eyes have rarely thrived in comic books. Perhaps they just aren’t colorful enough for four colors.
My favorite of the lot was Charlton’s Sarge Steel, a private detective created by Pat Masulli, scripted by Joe Gill and drawn by Dick Giordano. Steel appeared in 10 issues of his own title from December 1964 through October 1967, finally resurfacing much later in DC Comics.
The character updated the 40-year-old image of the heroic private investigator by setting it against the background of a contemporary war. Max Allan Collins has noted that Steel was the first fictional private eye to be a Vietnam veteran. And like a superhero, that experience provided him an “origin.”
Steel was on furlough, dancing with a pretty girl in Saigon, when a Viet Cong hand grenade was lobbed into the room at him. Seizing it in his left hand, the stoic, grimacing hero held the grenade out as window as it exploded.
“Sarge was lucky that grenade only took off his hand,” Bob Doncaster wrote. “I really did enjoy his short run along with the other action heroes.”
So it was that Steel found himself sent home sporting a relatively “realistic” superhero attribute — a shiny steel fist that could be used to batter down doors or even a deflect a stray bullet. He hit people only with his right, however, because his left would have killed them.
His case files were numbered — i.e., File No. 101, Case of the Pearls of Death — and were filled with kind of ruthless, colorful enemies a superhero might acquire. He’d lost his hand thanks to the machinations of his archenemy, the “half Chinese Tong and half Russian saboteur” Ivan Chung. The beautiful, Catwoman-like Lynx was a recurring opponent. Steel fought the Nazi Werner Von Hess and the Third’s Reich’s answer to The Man Who Laughs, a Joker/Red Skull type called the Smiling Skull (who also having battled the superhero Judomaster during World War II).
As the title of his title shifted from Sarge Steel Private Eye to Sarge Steel Special Agent to Secret Agent, Steel escaped the death traps of the Bond-inspired POW (Prosecutors of the World) and was imperiled by the high-tech visor of Mr. Ize, which could project hypnotic beams and heat rays.
“Big fan of Sarge Steel when drawn solo by Giordano (swipes and all),” wrote Joseph Lenius.
At the time Sarge Steel was published, Charlton Comics was on the way to establishing a brand featuring marginally more realistic heroes than DC or Marvel, to be billed in ads as “Action Heroes” rather than superheroes. They included an unauthorized Jungle Tales of Tarzan title to rival Gold Key’s authorized version of the ape man, a commando unit called The Fightin’ Five, the masked western hero Gunmaster and one out-and-out superhero, Blue Beetle, who was powered by ancient Egyptian magic. But in June 1967, even he’d be replaced by Steve Ditko’s acrobatic, Batman-like Blue Beetle.
“I really liked the Charltons of this era,” Ron Thomas recalled. “For me, Fightin’ Five was right up there with Blackhawk and MARS Patrol. And I especially liked the Dan Garrett Blue Beetle (of course, I was about 8 at the time). When the Ditko era kicked in with new Blue Beetle and the Question, I thought that was pretty exciting.”
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