You all know much I love me Golden Age masked mystery men something fierce, but even I have trouble understanding what the hell the appeal was of Spy Smasher. Colorful patriotic who smashed spies were sometimes (quite literally) a dime a dozen back in the 1940′s so it’s a more than a little odd that an aviator in a drab outfit ranked just behind Captain Marvel in popularity at Fawcett Comics. Sure, he had one sweet ride in the form of the Gyrosub, a combination air/land/sea vehicle, but that was about as imaginative as his adventures got. Case in point, his principal opponent was The Mask, so named because he craftily hid his face behind a white hankie.

After the war Spy Smasher became Crime Smasher. I had known about the name change but had always assumed that he just switched from spies to crime, but otherwise it was pretty much busy as usual. Then I read the first Crime Smasher in Whiz Comics #77. He was one of the few era’s masked heroes who had a very public retirement celebration; gone were the suit and his Gyrosub, he was just plain Alan Armstrong, millionaire playboy/inventor, just another returning WWII era vet trying to figure the next stage of his life.

Now me, I would have stuck with what worked; it’s not like there weren’t plenty of Commie spies to smash. But no, thinking to hop on the crime comic bandwagon Alan Armstrong was an (apparently) unlicensed, most often unpaid private detective. Crime Smasher only got through a handful of adventures before Alan Armstrong retired permanently, though he did get a one-shot comic in 1946, a title that I didn’t know existed up until a couple of weeks ago.