As previously noted, Stormy Foster, The Great Defender, belonged to that select subgroup of heroes (Dyamic Man, Captain Future, Phantasmo, Master of the World, etc.) who fought evil like he was dressed for track. But I’ve been looking at this Reed Crandall cover off and on for almost forty years and only just noticed just how true that snide comment was; he’s wearing white socks! While a lot of mystery men ran around with bare legs as far as I know he was the only one to also do it in tube socks. Plus, along with being another handsomely drawn Crandall story it could have a nice little moral about spreading rumors during wartime when Stormy’s toxic racist Chinese stereotype sidekick is accused of being Japanese; there’s a nice little message about how he’s just as American as anyone else…which is unfortunately undercut by all of the racism.

Now, we tend to think of The Red Bee as being a fairly obscure Golden Age character, but he’s actually pretty well known for being one of the weirdest of the early superheroes.

Now somebody that’s really obscure is Ghost of Flanders, a WWI solider supposedly died at Flanders but fought WWII using the tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a base of operations. In spite of the fact he had no powers, dressed in gray and wore a WWI Brodie helmet he had a reasonably long running feature appearing in Hit Comics #18-25.

But even still more obscure was Swordfish by Fred Guardineer, about US Navy Ensign named Jack Smith who fought WWII with his one man sub.