One of my favorite all-time favorite Golden Age publishers was Quality, one which more than lived up to it’s name, and though I waiver I believe my favorite of their many high quality anthologies was Smash. Smash, now there was a name for a comic book.

And while Midnight was cover featured (and check out that cover; here professional Spirit imitator Midnight actually looks more like The Spirit than the Spirit often did at the hands of Eisner’s many WWII era ghosts) my favorite story in Smash #51 is this little gem featuring The Jester.

It’s a slight thing, I grant you, but it expertly plays out like a perfect little period B-movie.

You could make the argument that it has a fairly trivial take on the subject of suicide, but me, I prefer to think of it as a prime example of how back in their heyday all super-heroes were “street-level”. You could count on the local guy or gal in the domino mask to pause in their never-ending battle against the forces of evil to help out an average Joe with a problem or deliver a sack of toys to an orphanage on Christmas Eve.