Well, it took me a while but I finally got around to doing a post on Iron Vic, a comic strip I’ve wanted to see for decades, That was mostly due to the fact because it was a rare attempt to create a superhero for newspapers. But also it’s because it’s a particularly strange example of a superhero who decides to change careers — but more of that in Part Two.

Also of interest though is the fact it was created by Bernard Drabble, a.k.a. Dib, a cartoonist who had an extensive history in comic strips who also did humorous one and two pagers for Quality Comics (see Comic Book Compulsive — El Bombo). I love Dribble’s big foot cartoony style so I was more than a little disappointed by just his just barely adequate his ‘serious’ work was. Sadly, Iron Vic just isn’t very good — it actually looks like a feature from an early Golden Age comic book, and that’s not a compliment. It only briefly springs to life during a sequence set in a nightclub involving chorus girls, pretty girls being one of Dib’s specialities.

But it is kind of strange and interesting following the Superman like adventures of a character dressed in evening wear and a hat; Iron Vic may well be the only proper superhero to ever fight evil wearing a slouch hat.