Dial E For Eternity--Truth Or Fiction?!?

It looks like someone forgot to give cover artist Ruben Moreira the memo on what Kid Eternity is all about!

AIEEE!!! The Kid is packing heat!!

Fortunately, the splash panel has a convenient recap to reassure the gentle Golden Age reader that they haven't stumbled upon an issue of The Punisher by mistake:

The villain this issue is the rather forgettable...

Well, he's carrying a cat, so of course he's evil!!

Anyway, Doctor Pain wants to be a Dr. Frankenstein, but he discovers that Mary Shelley was totally wrong: you can't use parts from dead people! No, to create your own homunculus, you need to take parts from living people!!

Which results in scenes like this:

Ewwww!!

Anyway, one again it takes Kid and Keeper an...eternity...to get involved in the case. They don't even show up until the end of page 6. A few more pages, and we finally get around to the Kid showing off the power we already knew about...

Hey, guys...invisibility doesn't work to well when you leave tracks in the snow!! Sheesh!!

But we get another new power unveiled here:

Somehow, and it's never really explained what's happening, he can "visualize" the last hour or so of Pain's latest victim. Can he do this for anyone? Only the recently deceased? We'll have to keep an eye out to see if this ever shows up again.

This does lead him to Pain's lair, and after more invisibility (and intangibility!!), Kid at last confronts Pain! But Pain stabs him!!

Again, we're in mysterious unexplained powers territory. Kid is supposedly alive, but just shrugs off a knife in the chest!

Rapid healing? Can't be killed because his time isn't up (75 years, remember?) ? Dull knife?!?

And although Kid Eternity isn't supposed to have any powers of his own...

...he takes a full swing of a mace to the head without flinching?!? It breaks against him? Is this invulnerability? Super-strength?

I mean, really, if Kid can do all of this, why would he even need to summon dead heroes?!?

Any, finally...

...more than 2/3 of the way through his second story, in the 26th page of his comics career, Kid Eternity at long last uses the power he's famous for!

So...wait. Dr. Pain knows what Achilles looked like? Doesn't look anything like Brad Pitt to me...

We should note that, at this early phase, Kid is still physically becoming the heroes, not just summoning them.

And Kid is definitely just showing off here--Achilles does literally nothing except stand there.

The next guy is more useful:

Woo hoo!! Arrows and everything.

Now, things are going to get really weird.

From Mr. Keeper's description in the first story, Kid can call upon "all the great men of the past," which he later clarifies as "you shall be able to call upon any person in mythology or history."

Well, that's pretty broad. And the "mythology" allows for calling persons whose historical provenance may not exactly be 100% airtight, like Robin Hood.

But, as Dr. Pain tries to escape, Kid really may be bending the rules by summoning...

Blackhawk?!?!

BLACKHAWK????

OK, let's see if we can dope this out.

Is Kid summoning an actual living person (from his perspective)? I think not. There was little "crossover" in Quality titles, little indication of a "shared universe." Most of the came later, via DC absorption/retcons. Also note that Kid specifies "the hero of Military Comics" and not, say "famous real-life Nazi fighter Blackhawk." The implication, then, is that in Kid's world, Blackhawk exists only in comic books. Note: some more recent versions of Dial H For Hero have posited that the Dial "borrowed" actual powers/identities from actual heroes of other dimensions. Could that be the case with Kid Eternity's shtick? Did people somewhere die because Kid took Blackhawk away from some battle?!?

Still, this opens a whole kettle of fish, doesn't it? Copyright concerns aside, why couldn't Kid just summon Superman every time out? Or Luke Skywalker? Or Harry Potter? Summoning a contemporary fictional character strains the definition of "mythology," and breaks the hell out of "heroes of the past."

Or is worrying about the thin line between "mythology" and "modern day fiction" just being too anal, in a way that would cause Golden Age creators to laugh at us?

Anyway, back to comic book fighting...

YOW!! Great product placement, Quality!!

This would not be the last time that Kid summons another Quality hero to aid him...

So, after finally getting to use his much-ballyhooed powers, the roster after 2 stories looks like this:

Achilles 1
Blackhawk 1
Nobody 1
Robin Hood 1

What's next? New powers, the egregious misuse of them, new recurring villains...and don't piss off Mr. Keeper!!

From Hit Comics #26 (1943)