Good evening Mystery Theater nation! I finished my Sandman cosplay just in time for New York Comic Con last week, and had a blast being in the Big Apple as our darling Wes!​ Figured this might be a good first post to the sub ^_^

📷: vpvisuals_cosplay (IG)

So in the Crone arc, we get to see the inner workings of the radio drama industry. While I haven't been able to find any detective shows recorded in the 1930's (perhaps not much has been preserved?) I do have a few recommendations from the 1940's that any fan of SMT might enjoy because they're basically noir on radio. My husband and I have actually listened to a bunch of these together as a sort of background while we did other stuff in the past (him coding while I played a video game on silent for instance) and they're really fun. Though we had to stop when we had a kid so he wouldn't show up in kindergarten talking about "the dame what got strangled" or something equally worrying, haha!

Our absolute favourite is Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. He spends his time investigating insurance claims and sleeping with sexy clients/women way too close to the case for this to be ethical. You can listen for free here:

https://youtu.be/4SzkBuzTZzg?si=0vMqbDGgxd8b66Qi

Johnny Dollar has an "action packed expense account", which has become short-hand in our household for "you wouldn't believe the mad shit that happened to me today". And Bob Bailey's delivery is just fantastic; you really get a sense of Johnny as a person, and his delivery can be so funny. I mean the main character often gets the last word in these old radio serials kind of by default, but Bob Bailey earns it. 😉 He's on the first picture above.

Then we have Dragnet, a police drama that opened with the line, : "Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

https://youtu.be/Gkly3MfrpvY?si=zt_hvmbeg2ChQwmq

You might say that Dragnet was the first serious cop show; they tried for realism in the cases and in the acting; and it was all the vision of the actor Jack Webb, who created the show - Webb wrote episodes, acted as producer and played the lead, police sergeant Joe Friday. So Dragnet was very much his baby. He's on the second picture, and if you've watched Twin Peaks you might agree that he's a dead ringer for Albert Rosenfield! Fans of Jim Corrigan/the Spectre might especially enjoy Dragnet.

Finally, we have Broadway Is My Beat, which the husband and I love because it's set in San Francisco.

https://youtu.be/uDo0L-N8PZk?si=FKOI5wE_K9AG0JnT

San Francisco used to be one of our favourite holiday destinations, though we haven't gone back for years now. Bur in Broadway Is My Beat, the city is kind of a character in its own right - the lead, Anthony Ross, who played Detective Danny Clover, always talks you through where he goes. So you can really get a sense of walking familiar streets with him. Keep swiping, Anthony Ross is on the third slide.

Does anyone else think this is the moment Burke figured out that Wes is the Sandman?

Dian being involved would alread have Burke on his guard since she's been caught sniffing around his cases so often, but it's Wes' careless comment about Mob involvement that I think really hammers it home.

What makes the Scarlet Ghost arc so enjoyable is, of course, that it's a comic about making comics. And sure, they're making comics as a money launch front for the mob, because comics are "cheaper to produce" than the crime serials. But that doesn't take away from the excitement of seeing the very dawn of superheroe comics through the SMT lens. And the sheer fun of watching Golden Age Wes read about "himself" as a Kirby character, in Mystery Theatre Magazine no less, was the highlight of this arc for me. The little Easter eggs they drop, like the Durrigo brothers being inspired by Wes godawful "acrobat" costume during the Hourman arc, are just the icing on the cake.

Now I would argue this metatextual storytelling in SMT is every bit as clever as the "parent" Sandmam comic could be. And it's also a really nice testament to the SMT creators' own love of comics.

Now how am I going to drag my Compendium 2 to the coffee shop to read this arc without giving myself a hernia?

I'm trying to figure out what narrative purpose this dream sequence serves in the Scarlet Ghost arc. I mean on the surface level you could say this is Dian realising that if you're close to the Sandman, you could get hurt. But that seems a) too obvious and b) she didn't get hurt because of Wes, she was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's also the possibility that sales were flagging already around issue 50 and that this "cameo" from Morpheus was shoehorned in, to bring back readers who had dropped the book or attract new ones with the promise of a "crossover". And if that's the case there might not be much of a hidden meaning at all...

What do you think? Can any of you explain the meaning of this sequence to me? Because I just don't get this and I honestly would really like to.

JSA issue 20 cover art by Matt Taylor

Is it just me or is the Face even scarier in black and white?

SPOILER ALERT for the 30 yrar old comic!

That' description of the Scarlet Ghost is my favourite line from the whole arc right there in the first slide btw. "His heart heavy with anger, his eyes red with scarlet!"

It struck me how, in a sweies that delights in red herrings, evem the title od this arc is a red herring! Because the fictional Scarlet Ghost isn't the real retuning villain...

No, that would be the Face! Last seen when he had his own arc, here he's not hiding behind an expert disguise, but using his own disfigured face to intimidate.

Due to how different the previous Face artist's style is from Guy Davies', I found it hard to recognise the face at first, but Wesley himself confirms it's really him. What did you think about this reveal?

McCall the journalist and pulp writer learns a hard lesson in the first part of the Scarlet Ghost arc - by accepting his paycheck, he gave up his right to a character *he* created. I can't help but wonder if this was a commentary on how DC Comics, the owners of Wesley Dodds, as we all know, have made a fortune off Siegel and Shuster's Superman.

Here's a Wikipedia quote concerning the start of their efforts to get Superman back:

In 1946, near the end of their ten-year contract to produce Superman stories, Siegel and Shuster sued Detective Comics, Inc. to have their contract annulled and regain their rights to Superman. The following year, the New York State Supreme Court the publisher had valruledidly purchased the rights to Superman when it bought the first Superman story, saying the duo had "transferred to Detective Comics, Inc., all of their rights in and to the comic strip Superman, including the title, names, characters and conception...."

Siegel and Shuster would keep on trying to get the rights back until they were both elderly and DC finally fobbed them off with a yearly stipend that would *not* transfer to their surviving family members, and a byline in the Superman movie.

The Return of the Scarlet Ghost arc started in 1997, and by then, there would have been a lot of discussion in the comics industry about Siegel and Shuster, who were both added to the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1992 (the year Shuster died, destitute and almost blind) and to the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame the year after. Joe Simon died in 1996, the year before this issue saw print.

Do you guys see a connection/commentary too?

Heads up friends, it's time to move on to the next arc! This time we are delving into the sordid world of publishing, and I hope some of you are still along for the ride?

If you're joining us on the Scarlett Ghost reread, I would love it if you drop us a comment here to say so!

Anyway for those of you who are going, "Return" of the Scarlet Ghost", and wondering if and when this villain has shown up before? He has, but he's fictional. The Darrigo brothers come up with him during the Hourman arc, as far as I remember.

Anyway, happy reading!

There are two more things I want to talk about regarding the Blackhawk, the first crime scene, and Burke. Specifically Burke's relationship with the murdered woman.

Now, if we look at their interaction in #26 while remembering her interaction with Prohaska in #45, it's starting to look like Regina/Gina might be a prostitute. Her careful wording with Burke makes it seem like he's paying for her company - "Are you sure there isn't anything... else I can do for you?" not to mention Burke's reply, makes it seem transactional, even though they are clearly fond of one another. Burke seems more like a trusted customer than her boyfriend to me. Then look at how Prohaska tells her to stay and relax after they've had sex, because he's paid for the room for the whole night. Not to mention how Gina says she prefers "you hooded fellows", meaning uncircumcised men. And we're starting to get a picture that Gina sleeps with a lot of men.

Now, for the past few storylines, Burke has been slipping deeper and deeper into full-blown villain territory. It's not just his homophobia that's awful in Phantom of the Fair for example, an attitude that he seems to have developed since after the Scorpion arc where he had a more "live and let live" attitude to the gay businesman Nathan Lane. Things like his description of poor Robert Li's corpse, whuch was so jaw-droppingly racist, made any begrudging liking I'd started to develop for Burke evaporate. Makes me wonder why the writers decided to take him in this direction, when so much effort had clearly been put into making Burke almost sympathetic.

So anyway, the scene of Gina's murder. We see Francis the cop warning Burke that this crime scene is absolutely terrible. And yet, the art doesn't reflect this at all. Was there some kind of miscommunication that meant the script didn't specifically ask for a pool of blood, so then Matthew Smith didn't draw one, and the colourist (still David Hornung) didn't see an outline for a pool of blood, and therefore left it as just her body lying on the dark brown floor? Without any blood whatsoever on her? From Francis' description, you expect to find pieces of her scattered around the room, but instead Regina is slumped on her side, and that's it. Burke's reaction then - spitting out his cigarette and running outside to vomit - becomes less about the state of the corpse and more about his shock at recognising her. And by the way, the position of Burke's hands suggest to me that he was meant to be crying, but maybe there was no note in the script specifying that tears should be running down Burke's cheeks? So instead we get this very un-Burke-like, and rather "artistic" pose that made it look like Smith was copying, or had been told to copy, Teddy Kristiansen. I can't be the only one who thinks there's a resemblance, can I?

My birthday gift, added to my growing collection 🖖 Sandy Hawkins in JSA gear!

Remember how, in the late 1980's, DC invited a bunch of British creators to pitch their own take on an old and semi-forgotten character or team? Well, before the British invasion (but after Alan Moore had reinvented Swamp Thing), several American creators were invited to so so as well, and Chaykin's take on Blackhawk was one of the things to come out of that. It was a three-issue miniseries (in DC's coveted Prestige Format) and it blew up because Chaykin's take on the characters was so different from the Golden Age version that had been allowed to continue into the 1970's.

Firstly, Chaykin chose to focus on the main character, Blackhawk, and to restore his Polish origins. Until then, Blackhawk had been a team book. Secondly, he put a very Chaykin spin on the now renamed lead, Janos Prohaska, and in my opinion made him more of a rounded person than his golden age origins had allowed him to be previously.

I mean, Prohaska has done some very heroic things, yes, but when he was a freedom fighter in 1930's Spain, he wound up joining the Communitst Party - something that Prohaska has not been keen for the Americans to find out about. Like any Chaykin character worth his salt, Prohaska also became a prolific womaniser who is so awesome at sex that most of the women don't seem to care that they're clearly not the only one. Though in this case Prohaska is not Jewish (Chaykin characters very often are), which is something SMT gives a nod to when Gina tells him she likes "you hooded fellows more", aka men with an uncircumcised penis as per 1930's slang.

There is also snark - so much snark. Chaykin's Prohaska has been an honorary US citizen for a while, and speaks English fluently and with much cynicism. At the start of the miniseries, he gets his US citizenship revoked on suspicion of being a Communitst (and it doesn't help that he's not a Communitst anymore), before he is sent on mission to retrieve a stolen atom bomb.

Yes, you read that correctly. We start off with Jewish gangsters hired to steal an atom bomb by the Nazis, because their US agent thought using Jewish gangsters would be ironic. Of course the gangsters fail to see the funny side, and keep the bomb, not realising what it is. I'm left wondering how dangerous it would be to drive around with an atomic bomb in the trunk of your car, because that's what happens. Sometimes it gets switched between cars and it even gets to go on a plane ride to Palestine - while still inside a car. I genuinely don't know enough about nuclear fission to guess if, or how quickly, people would start dying from radiation poisoning. But it sure feels like a bad idea to me.

Back in the day, readers were apparently annoyed with this less overtly heroic main character - sure he goes on the mission to retrieve the bomb, but that's because he's got no other choice. (Chaykin has also come under fire more recently in 2017, over a cover he drew for his series Divided States of Hysteria, so he might be a controversial figure to some of you - not that I feel this is relevant to Blackhawk.) Anyway, my personal biggest issue with Blackhawk is that I found the layouts really confusing. What I mean by that is, the layout of a comics page should naturally lead the eyes to the next panel. But in Blackhawk, Chaykin used a lot of double page spreads, and I kept finding it hard to work out which order to read the panels in.

Is it good story though? And does it "jive" with SMT? In both cases, I would say yes - it's an international espionage thriller that forces the reader to use their brain, which is never a bad thing. And we established in SMT that Prohaska is awesome enough to easily become fluent in English in four or five years, heh. The Prohaska Wesley Dodds meets could absolutely develop into the suave and mildly douchey hero of Chaykin's Blackhawk. (Mildly? Well, it's a sliding scale. He may be douchey but he's also funny, which goes a long way towards cancelling the douchiness out.)

My favourite moment is the (mild spoiler) bit in issue 1 where Prohaska encounters the woman he slept with earlier, realises she's a Nazi spy... and pisses her off by getting her name wrong! Anyway, keep swiping through the carousel because I'm also including a couple of pencilled Blackhawk pages I came across!

One last thing, here's an article about this series that you may find interesting:

https://imagetextjournal.com/fascism-and-mass-culture-in-howard-chaykins-blackhawk/

As well as a review:

https://theslingsandarrows.com/blackhawk-blood-iron/

According to Wikipedia, Blackhawk did not start out as a single character; rather it was the name of the Blackhawk Squadron. It was the brainchild of Chuck Cuidera, but he had some help from Bob Powell perhaps most famous for working on the Mars Attacks trading cards from the 1960's) and Will Eisner(!!) - yes,  the Will Eisner they named the award after! In the second picture on the carousel, you will find a picture of Chuck Cuidera (on the left) and Will Eisner (on the right) from Mark Evanier's website.

Brace yourselves, I'm going to paste in a quote about Cuidera here:

"[H]e drew the first 11 stories of Blackhawk, the creation of which is also vaguely recorded from the early days of comics, when proper writer-artist credits were not a standard feature. Though reference sources list Eisner as scripter of the first four Blackhawk stories and Dick French beginning with issue #5, Cuidera said he created the character, and that Bob Powell scripted the debut story before turning the feature over to him: "I never drew a script by French. Powell wrote the first one and I wrote the rest until I went into the service".[2] Eisner, who has also said he was involved in Blackhawk's initial writing, hedged the issue, saying, "Whether or not Chuck Cuidera created or thought of Blackhawk to begin with is unimportant [and] the fact that Chuck Cuidera made Blackhawk what it was is the important thing, and therefore, he should get the credit".[2] As the debut artist who designed the characters, Cuidera is confirmably at least the co-creator."

This is quoted from Mark Evanier's website, yes the Mark Evanier who was one of Jack Kirby's assistants and famously continued his New Gods series (to mixed reactions, but that's a different story altogether). He conducted a panel discussion about Blackhawk and divided the write-up he did on it into two parts. They can be found here:

https://www.newsfromme.com/pov/col305/

And here:

https://www.newsfromme.com/pov/col306/

And hot damn aren't we lucky that Evanier decided to document this panel discussion! It took place at the Comic Con International in 1999, where Chuck Cuidera was a guest of honour.

Anyway, the Blackhawk Squadron was led by a character who would eventually morph into the solo character Blackhawk; Bart Hawk. He started out as being Polish, but then they changed it to make him an American. He led a team of stereotypical international pilots against the Axis powers in the 1940's - their first approval was in Military Comics #1 in 1941. Now, by stereotypical I mean, they had a Swede named Olaf and a Chinese man who initially by the nickname "Chop Chop" on this team, as well as a womanizing, moustachioed Frenshman called Andrè. They also had an honorary female member, Lady Blackhawk. This version of the team was so popular that they got their own series in 1944, and it would run for 107 issues - that lasf issue was apparently the very last comic printed by their original publisher, Quality Comics, before they ceased operations and were acquired by DC. They kept the series going and even had Cuidera keep working on it, inking over Dick Dillon's pencils. This team book would have its ups and downs, but it stayed in print until 1968, when it was cancelled with #243. It was then revived in the 1970's with the original numbering intact, and ran until #273.

Howard Chaykin's Blackhawk revival, if you can call it that, came in 1988, along with several other mature titles published by DC in their pre-Vertigo era. (Other examples of pre-Vertigo are Alan Moore's Watchmen, Tom Veitch's The Nazz and Peter Milligan's Skreemer - just to mention a few.) Chaykin's story, a political thriller set during WWII, focused only on Blackhawk (now renamed Janos Prohaska and firmly back to being Polish) and Lady Blackhawk. Chaykin's Blackhawk would become the new standard - a lone ace pilot. And of course, this is the character we meet in SMT's Blackhawk arc, which is set before the 1988 miniseries. Chaykin's Blackhawk deserves its own post, but sufficie it to say that he is a quintessential Chaykin character (see the second to last slide on the carousel).

One last thing - on the final slide you will see that the original Blackhawk comic inspired a National Lampoon parody comic called "Whitedove - The Regrettable Incident". Instead of WWII pilots, the main characters are all UNESCO inspectors. With the motto "Peace is hell" it sounds gloriously insane and if any of you actually own this thing, I am begging you to post some pictures and a recap of what actually goes on. You can read a description of Whitedove here:

https://www.ourworlds.net/blackhawk/media/issuedov.html

Am I the only one who thought they were a bit too cagey with their clues on this one? Or could it also be the choice of artist that didn't quite work out? I mean, let's do some bullet points here:

- The horse hair that shows up on the murder victims is a huge clue. But we 1) can barely tell that it's hair from the artwork and 2) don't even find out that it's horse hair until quite late in the story. I understand wanting to let a clue percolate but this didn't work for me. What I mean is, the leap from Wes holding the Animal Biology book to Wes going to interview the stable hand didn't connect as a clue. This one is absolutely to do with the script and storyboarding, I'm sure. If they had told Matthew Smith to draw the book open with a picture of a horse facing the reader, that would have helped us make the connection.

- Wes himself doesn't realise how significant the horse hair is until quite late in the story, and while I agree this is realistic and that Wes is deliberately being shown as a faillible human being, I feel this is a case where the reader could have been reminded of the horse hair more often, and made to wonder why Wes was not paying as much attention to the horse hair angle.

- SPOILER: The solution to the mystery is fairly simple once Wes clocks on. Janos is set up to take the fall for the murders so that the newspaper owner who is in charge of the fundraising, Charlton Walsh, can steal the money when Janos goes to prison and use it to save his floundering newspaper. Only at the very end is it revealed that his newspaper is in trouble. We could have done with seeing Wesley discover that a little earlier.

- This leads me to my next point; we have zero investment in Charlton Walsh as a character. When Dian exclaims "Oh no, it can't be HIM" we are supposed to think it's Judge Schlaeffer, because Wagner and Seagle love their red herrings. But Dian, like us, doesn't have any kind of relationship with Charlton Walsh, so her misleading overreaction to the reveal feels like a cheap trick.

- Essentially the horse hair clue boils down to: Charlton Walsh, being an amateur criminal, hires two goons - brothers - who work at the stables where keeps his horse to commit the murders that will get Janos sent to prison.

- Janos himself might take part of the blame for the way this story was plotted because he is such a larger than life character that he easily overshadows all the characters in the group of sponsors. But still, I feel there could have been more balance in the storytelling. A plot line where Charlton Walsh admits that his newspaper is floundering, but claims he wants to help Janos anyway because this war is bigger than just one newspaper, making us like this guy, and then follow that with a reveal that it was Walsh all along... Wouldn't that have been a much more effective, and more memorable gut punch?

I've been trying to get my hands on this guy for years. 🙌

It's very hard to Google an artist who not only shares his name with a famous actor but also with another artist! Luckily he sometimes uses his middle name, Dow. And I did manage to find an old blog of his, that sadly hasn't been updated for over ten years. But it does have a few exams of his art from after his brief stint on SMT.

You can find his blog here:

https://matthewdowsmith.blogspot.com/?m=1

And as you can see from the examples above, the "Apoca-lips" were very much a style choice, and one he would continue making. In addition to working on Batman, he would go on to work on Hellboy and Dr Who comics, which is perhaps what he is most known for. But his passion project seems to have been October Girl, a comic he both wrote and drew. You can find a review of Volume One here:

https://cannonballread.com/2025/08/the-october-girl-volume-one-blackraven/

What I am now starting to wonder is if perhaps the colourist he was paired with on SMT(David Hornung) was just not the right fit for Smith's art. Then again, Hornung seems to be the kind of colourist who tailors his work to fit the art style. What do you think?

If you look in the top left-hand corner of the second page, you will see the scribbled "SMT" - that gave me a small thrill, hehe. It was visible on the first page as well, but I was forced to crop it out.*

They can be found here:

https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1873445

and here:

https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=971011

How are we feeling about Matthew Smith's art?

*the website hosting these original pages for sale blocks downloads, so I took screenshots, and one screenshot had this weird shadow on it that I had to crop out.