Criminals found Captain Flag a difficult man to intimidate.
For example, in Blue Ribbon 21 (Feb. 1942), Captain Flag’s archenemy, the Black Hand, is apparently drowned in an underwater battle with the flag-caped crusader.
But in Blue Ribbon 22 (March 1942), the Black Hand is saved by a passing yacht, and repays that kindness by strangling the yacht’s captain to death.
Black Hand recruits a gang of cutthroats to operate the yacht as a pirate vessel. When Flag intervenes and is captured, the Hand suggests that the shackled superhero walk the plank.
“Or perhaps you’d prefer me to shoot off your arms and legs — then feed you to the fishes,” the Hand says.
Coolly, Captain Flag dives into the sea and breaks his chains on a jagged rock, coming up on the other side of the boat.
“ ‘You’re going to hang, Black Hand,’ Flag informs him. “Since you wanted to live as a pirate, you shall die as one,” comics historian Ron Goulart recalled in The MLJ Companion. “Sure enough, in the last frame, we see the Hand, purple robe and all, dangling from a yardarm.
“What adventures await Captain Flag now?’ asks a caption. ‘None’ is the correct answer, since this turned out to be the last issue of Blue Ribbon.”
Flag would resurface for a couple of panels in 1966 as a member of the Ultra-Men, alongside the Web and the Fox. And “Black Hand,” being a richly villainous name, was reused for one of Green Lantern’s archenemies.
“Consistent with the times, one of (the superhero genre’s) most popular subsets consisted of superheroes wearing costumes based on the American flag,” observed comics historian Don Markstein. “MLJ Comics was the first to introduce such a character — The Shield appeared about two years before Pearl Harbor. But few comics publishers of the time were content with just one. By the time America entered the war, MLJ was also publishing the adventures of Captain Flag.”
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