I’ve always had extremely mixed feelings about the MLJ characters and titles; they got off to a fairly strange, strong start with distinctive heroes and nice pulpy stories full of wild ideas and energy. But after a couple of years a combination of lethargy and lesser hands started dragging the entire line down. I place into evidence this one-shot featuring reprints of MLJ material titled for absolutely no reason Miss Liberty Comic Book. I stress this because other than her head shot which appears ahead of the ‘L’, Miss Liberty appears nowhere in this comic. As far as I can tell there is no “Miss Liberty” which raises the question, what the hell?

Then there’s the incredibly amateurish cover featuring a butt shot of MLJ hero Steel Sterling, who also does not appear anywhere in this issue.

Featured inside are stories featuring some of the least interesting of the MLJ characters. First up, a solo adventure of Roy the Super Boy, sidekick to The Wizard. He had at least some claim to his title since he had somehow been trained to be as strong as ten men, but wore the cheapest, cheesiest, tightest outfit of all of the amazing daredevil boy detectives. I mean, seriously, those shorts are short. Here, we have the character facing an all too common human Delima for kids working in the superhero field; what does an unemployed bootblack get his superhero adult millionaire mentor for Christmas? If nothing else it’s an excuse to allow the character to run amuck in a department store, a prospect that no doubt must have appealed to the pre-teen readership.

And,finally, here’s an adventure of The Wizard, MLJ’s least interesting major character. He was initially very much a pulp type hero, one of those mental and physical supermen types that was also a genius inventor on the side who’s “costume” consisted of a cape, a domino mask and top hat. At this point he had made the jump to a thoroughly generic blue body stocking and red shorts, and none of his amazing abilities or inventions was much in evidence. Here, he encounters a sentient if crazy/stupid robot named Jonathon who mops up the floor with him.