I’ll happily admit the only reason I’m writing about Spotlight Comics #1 is because it’s cover, drawn by a young George Tuska who even signed his work, is one of my favorites. A lot of Golden Age comic book covers are unnecessarily busy but this one is simple, elegant and effective. It gets the job done — it made me want to read the comic.

It’s certainly a lot better than than the covers of the next two issues drawn by Paul Gattuso.

But of course, as is so often the case with Golden Age comics once you get past the cover disappointment sets in. Spotlight Comics ran three issues and is the very model of a mediocre, generic comic from Dynamic Publications a.k.a. Harry “A” Chesler. It featured some of Chesler’s ‘C’ list costumed characters who had a tendency to migrate from title to title.

Like The Black Dwarf, a.k.a. Shorty Wilson, an undersized football player who for no good reason decided to fight crime dressed like a road company version of The Shadow. He somehow managed to maintain a secret identity without making any attempt to disguise himself and most likely wasn’t even a legitimate little person. As others have noted the character’s size tends to change through out his stories but whether it was a matter of the artist just forgetting what height he was supposed to be or a matter of poor perspective at work I couldn’t tell you.

Image via Wikipedia

“Globe” Trotter is a perfectly ordinary big white hunter strip, though one with perhaps the worst nickname in Golden Age comic book history. “Globe” is so awful and unlikely it really should be the nickname for the guy’s fat sidekick. If he had one.

Appearances aside Barry Kuda was more of an underwater two-fisted adventurer type than an actual water themed superhero, though one who could breathe underwater.

And finally there was The Veiled Avenger, a pretty standard non-powered female crime fighter, though you don’t often see one of those wielding a whip as a weapon.