I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for I.W./Super Comics, partially because of the Golden Age comics they reprinted and partially because of how they reprinted them. Israel Waldman had a unique business model; obtain (I won’t go into how) original art and printing plates for Golden Age publishers such as Quality, Avon, Toby, Harry A Chessler, Fiction House and even Marvel (among many, many others). Then publish them with new titles and covers by people like Mike Espositio, Ross Andru, Joe Simon, Jack Abel, Vinnie Colletta, John Severin and Everett Raymond Kinstler.

Super Comics were largely the kind of hit or miss proposition you’d expect to find if you slapped together stories from a lot of different publishers more or less at random. Some were better than others while sometimes the new covers were the only good things about an issue. Daring Adventures #16 is interesting because it reprints three different stories from the same issue of Dynamic Comics.

There were two (well, three if you count the one from Timely who appeared in Mystic Comics #1) different Golden Age versions of Dynamic Man, neither of whom looked anything like the guy on the cover of Daring Adventures. This story is from the second version where he was Bert McQuade, a high school basketball coach (a solidly middle class profession for a field usually dominated by millionaire playboys and professionals) who gained super powers and turned his brother Ricky into his sidekick Dynamic Boy. His adventures were strictly ho-hum – I’d say that the most interesting thing about him was that he had a reoccurring villain, but The Clown just wasn’t that interesting either. One assumes that the great Mac Raboy drew this six page story for Harry A Chesler for the most obvious reason possible; he needed the money.

There’s not much to say about Yankee Boy, a.k.a. Victor Martin, who was yet another All-American Boy who decided to put on a patriotic costume (well, a star spangled shirt anyway) to fight crime on the home front during WWII. Other than (according to the Grand Comic Book Database, long may it wave) the fact that this story might have been drawn by George Tuska. This story is interesting for its villain, Reefer King, and the way it revolved around marijuana smoking among teens. Plus it’s unusually brutal for a Golden Age superhero story with a character getting shot full in the face.

No doubt about it; Mr. E was weird. This unnamed (for no apparent reason, beyond the strained pun, everyone just called him “Mr. E”) two-fisted adventurer didn’t have powers but didn’t need them; he worshipped (there really isn’t any other word for it) an ancient tribal god named King Kolah he found in a prehistoric city. From his subterranean temple under Washington DC E would get his marching orders from King Kolah then go off to fight evil, added by his helpers The Messengers of Justice. Who were eleven elves (yes, you read that correctly; elves) who could change shape and would bedevil the bad guys while Mr. E would smash them in the face. Lots of Golden Age heroes used ancient magic or invoked the names and powers of ancient gods and goddesses. But I can’t think of another main character from an era when everyone in popular culture was presumptively Christian (until proven otherwise) who demonstratively wasn’t (besides Ibis the Invincible),