As I have previously and repeatedly noted airplane pilots (or “airplane drivers” in the tortured argot of Milton Caniff; he also liked to referring to Uncle Sam as “Uncle Sugar” which may very well be a piece of period slang I’m unfamiliar with, but seeing as how I’ve never encountered it anywhere else I’m going to go ahead and assume it was something of Caniff’s invention he was hoping would catch on) were a big deal during the war years. Lots of them were in some way “special”, they had special names, outfits, airplanes, etc., but Captain Aero was just a guy, named Aero, no first Christian name. According to the Public Domain Wikia he had a pal named Buster, a fan club known as the Sky Scouts, a sidekick named Chop Suey and a plane “that seemed to be able to use its propeller like a buzzsaw”.

I have to take their word for it, because as you’ll soon see none of those elements appear in the Captain’s very first, very pedestrian outing by Allen Ulmer and Ray Willner. It is, and I don’t believe that I am overstating this, dull, dull, dull. As well as confirming the existence of Captain Aero’s Sky Scouts the inner front cover suggests that at least publisher Holyoke thought highly of the guy and to be fair he had a pretty healthy career for a perfectly ordinary airplane driver, making it through 26 issues of his own title as well as making appearances in Blue Beetle #13 and the very strangely named Veri Best Sure Comics #1

A while ago I did a Comic Book Compulsive about Grit Grady #1, a comic that doesn’t actually exist; please to check it out:

http://superitch.com/?p=27566#

Which actually did exist was Holyoke One-Shot #1, the first in a series of ten oddball reprint comics published between 1944 and 1945 which reprinted material from Holyoke in a strange 36 page format with a semi-glossy cover. Holyoke actually had a couple of semi-well known characters, like Catman, Miss Victory and Strongman, but for some reason these one-shots focused mostly on back-up features of the two-fisted adventurer variety, like Sgt. Dick Carter of the U.S. Border Patrol, Diamond Jim. Corporal Rusty Dugan, and Alias X. What Holyoke One-Shot #1 doesn’t have is Grit Grady; the first page which did double duty as the cover was actually from Captain Fearless Comics #2.

This is the first actual Grit Grady story I’ve ever read which also appears to be the very first Grit Grady story and he appears to be just a guy named Grit Grady. He doesn’t even appear to be a standard issue two-fisted adventurer so much as just a regular guy who gets in way over his head, but does OK. More than OK, actually, seeing as he drives a knife into a shark’s eye, battles an honest to gosh supervillain (the not very cleverly named Captain Hood; I prefer to think of him as Mr. Red Cross Devil) with a proper secret super weapon, and launches himself out of a torpedo tube.

The comic did have a proper hero in the form of Flag Man by Allen Ulmer and Ray Willner, who was also pretty dull.

And a standard Golden Age magician, Solar, Master of Magic by Saul Rosen (apparently), who was also pretty dull. Though it does go to show you that the word “solar” wasn’t in common parlance in the 1940′s.

But the oddest, most original feature in this comic is Cap Stone, which is, well, instead of paraphrasing I’ll just go ahead and quote Public Domain Superhero Wikia; “Cap Stone was an adventurer who accidentally became a member of a vast undersea kingdom known as the city of Aquari. He battled the villainous Triton”. This was his first (and last) appearance so it’s kind of strange it opens with the plot already in progress. Even though the story seems suspiciously similar to the Crash Corrigan serial Undersea Kingdom (which of course was basically Flash Gordon underwater), it was definitely unusual enough to be interesting. Another point of interest, while King Zero and his Coral Men are dark skinned they speak more or less standard English and aren’t racist stereotypes.