Daring Mystery Comics (1940 series) #3

Red Corker, a notorious gang lord, engineers a prison riot to break free and reunites with his crew at their new hideout on Dream Island — a desolate, deserted former resort in San Francisco Bay. Wasting no time, he sends his men to rob the Frisco National Bank, which they pull off with brutal efficiency. Word reaches FBI headquarters in Washington and ace G-man Dale is dispatched to San Francisco immediately. 

Corker's men spot Dale at the airport and tail him on orders to make his death look like an accident. Dale recognizes one of the gangsters and fights them off, sending their car off a cliff. He lets the papers report him dead and goes underground. When Corker's gang then kidnaps the young daughter Helen of oil magnate George Dean and demands $500,000 ransom, Dean brings the case to the FBI. Dale spots the gang's island hideout from a plane flown by crack mail pilot Frank Strong, hangs from the wing mid-flight to swoop the girl off the island while shooting Corker dead, and the surrounding G-men boats close in to mop up the rest of the gang.

In the Miracle City

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

It is 1945 and the world is at war. Breeze Barton, a US Air Force scout, is flying over South Africa when he spots a Japanese army marching on British territory. Racing to alert London, he's shot down by enemy fighters and crashes in the Sahara. Half-dead from the desert heat, he stumbles through a shimmering portal into Miracle City — a technologically advanced civilization existing in a separate dimension. It is a place out of time: no one ages, and every creature that ever crawled through the portal across all of history lives there, from Neanderthals to prehistoric dinosaurs. 

Barton meets Zanoba, the city's chief scientist, and Ann Barclay, a fellow American stranded there for a year. Barton quickly grasps that the dimension's reversed electron flow could be harnessed as a giant magnetizer to open the portal back to Earth. But before the machine can be built, Zanoba is captured by the Demon People — monstrous half-man, half-animal creatures led by Mubahn who inhabit a neighboring land of the mirage and covet the secret of the portal. Breeze commandeers Miracle City's aerial fleet, invades the Demon City, kills Mubahn, frees Zanoba, and liberates the demons' enslaved workers who turn on their masters. The Demon fleet is destroyed. Back in Miracle City, Zanoba begins work on the giant magnetizer — and Ann agrees to return to Earth with Breeze.

Mystery of the Swabert Mansion

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Dennis Burton, Assistant District Attorney, is the same character as DMC #2's Laughing Mask — here rechristened the Purple Mask. Commissioner Herrick is being threatened: someone has stolen the architectural plan book of the Swabert mansion, where Frederick Swabert's father hid a vast fortune in a secret underground vault decades earlier, and the thief is demanding that Swabert reveal the hiding place by midnight or die. Dennis swipes the duplicate plan book from Swabert's briefcase, retreats to his secret crime lab, and learns from his bank contact that a man named Renard had access to the original records. 

Becoming the Purple Mask, he raids Renard's apartment, recovers the plan book, and traces the rigged death trap — a telephone mouthpiece loaded with poison gas — to its source through the mansion's secret passageways, arriving just in time to shoot it out of Swabert's hand before he answers it. He then confronts crime boss Bellos, battles Renard's gang through the hidden cellar, and pursues the last two thugs into the secret vault chamber — surrounded by an acid-filled moat with a drawbridge. One gangster falls into the acid. The Purple Mask dangles over the moat to crash onto the others, forces a confession from Renard, and hands the lot over to the police as he slips away through a trapdoor.

Characters
Good (or All)

 

Purple Mask
(Dennis Burton)

Plus: Commissioner Herrick, Frederick Swabert.

Antagonists
Mr. Bellos, Renard.

The East Side Murders

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

A gang of thugs has been systematically terrorizing families and businesses on the East Side of the city — seven families beaten up, three dead — while the police do nothing and rival newspapers deliberately bury the story. Dick Jones, a cub reporter at the Daily Express who is also a former All-American fullback, ex-collegiate boxing and wrestling champion, and fencing champ, is put on the case by his editor. By day he investigates; by midnight he dons a red cape and mask to become the Phantom Reporter. 

Tailing a mysterious playboy, Van Ergen, who leaves his Park Avenue apartment nightly at midnight, Jones catches the gang in the middle of a home invasion and fights them off. The next morning, abducted and taken to a nightclub back room, he uses truth serum on a captured thug to learn that the entire operation is a real-estate racket: the Park Commissioner and the publishers of two rival newspapers have been hiring the thugs to terrorize East Side tenants into moving out so they can buy up the land cheaply and split the profits. The Phantom Reporter makes the rounds — the newspaper publishers, the police chief, and finally the Park Commissioner — confronting each with the evidence, dosing one henchman with Nembutal to extract a full confession, and delivering everything to Dick Jones's editor the next morning.

The Devil Beast and the Nazis

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Trojak is out on a hunting trip when terrified warriors from his adopted tribe track him down: every morning at dawn a monstrous creature has been creeping into their village and making off with one of their number. The beast turns out to be a prehistoric throwback — a mammoth, heavily armored dinosaur-like creature whose hide is impenetrable to knives, spear, and even tiger claws. Trojak leaps on its back bare-handed but can do no more than annoy it; the beast retreats, but it will return hungrier than ever. 

Trojak rallies the frightened tribesmen, leads them to the creature's lair while it sleeps, rouses it with a jungle yell, then lures it into the open — where the warriors topple a massive tree they have weakened with weeks of carving, crushing the monster beneath its weight. The village erupts in celebration. But the peace is short-lived: Trojak's trained hawk Sator returns from the coast with strange news of giant armored fish spraying death, and pale-faced warriors with weapons — and of a beautiful white girl held prisoner among them. Trojak thinks of the girl who once taught him to speak the language of distant peoples, beats out a message on the drums, and prepares to seek out his faraway brethren.

Characters
Good (or All)

 

Trojak
(from 1940)

Plus: Balu (tiger), Edith Alton, Sator (bird).

Antagonists
Nazis.

The Origin of Marvex the Super-Robot

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

In the Fifth Dimension, a strange creature named Bolo creates Marvex — a super-robot with an indestructible metal body and a super-intelligent brain — intending to use him to enslave humans on Earth. Upon learning his purpose, Marvex rebels, kills his creators, and destroys the laboratory. A massive explosion blows him out of the Fifth Dimension and onto Earth.

Landing in a rural road, Marvex helps a stranded motorist push his car to a gas station and earns $20. In the city, he buys civilian clothes to stop drawing stares. When a bomb destroys an office building, he rescues Clara Crandall and her dying father. Clara explains that foreign spies stole her father's secret battleship armor formula and bombed the office to silence him. Marvex shields Clara from a machine gun attack with his metal body, pursues the spies' car, and forces them to reveal the formula's location. He tracks down the spy chief Von Crabb, tears open his safe, recovers the plans, and flings Von Crabb through a wall. He returns the formula to Clara, but gently reminds her they can never be more than friends — because he is not human.

Characters
Good (or All)

 

Marvex
(The Super-Robot)

Plus: Clara Crandall.

Antagonists
Bolo (from the 5th dimension), Von Crabb.

Ali Hassan and His Desert Pirates

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Somewhere in Algeria, Ali Hassan and his band of desert pirates raid and plunder a merchant caravan. At the French Foreign Legion post, Major Renald briefs Captain Bob Strong on the ongoing attacks — the pirate camp is too far out to patrol, so they decide to build an outpost deeper in the desert. Strong leads the detachment out, but Ali Hassan's spies report the Legion's movements and he orders an ambush, driving the legionnaires back with a mounted charge. Strong orders machine guns set up to repel the attack, then slips away alone to infiltrate the enemy camp in disguise, taking the robes and horse of a downed Arab fighter.

Inside Ali Hassan's tent, Strong overhears the chief's plan: a nighttime raid to wipe out the sleeping legionnaires, motivated by the fear that the new outpost would end their caravan plundering. Strong moves to escape, but an Arab grows suspicious and attacks him. Strong disarms the man and rides hard back to his own lines — nearly shot by his own men before revealing himself. He briefs Lieutenant Dupuy: the pirates plan to attack that night, and he has a plan.

That night, Ali Hassan's band sneaks over the sand dunes to find the legionnaires' camp apparently asleep — guards and all. They charge in, only to discover the sleeping figures are empty uniforms stuffed as dummies. The legionnaires emerge from all sides, surrounding the pirates. Hassan refuses to surrender, the Legion opens fire with machine guns, and after a short but bloody battle the remaining Arabs yield. Ali Hassan attempts to flee but Strong runs him down and takes him prisoner. The legionnaires return to headquarters with their captives, and Major Renald tells Strong the outpost no longer needs to be built — the plunderers are captured.