It's been too long since we've inflicted
Golden Age Idol upon you, dear audience--our ongoing quest to find obscure
Golden Age heroes worthy of reviving (and, if they're public domain, claiming a
juicy finders fee as a result).
So, since
DC is reviving
National Comics as a title, let's dive back into
Quality's archive to find a mystery man worth resurrecting.
Say, how about
The Whistler??
No relation to the
radio and film noir series, our Whistler was
Mallory Drake, who had a serious jones to be a police reporter:
Well, he finally gets his job, so of course he has to rush over and tell his big brother...
I don't know that "
world's greatest whistler" is actually
Guinness certified...but it turns out that Mallory himself is quite the whistler:
Yeah, he made that annoying "
EEEEEEOWIE" noise whenever he got excited. Sorry about that.
Well, there was no decompression in those days, so of course that's the
exact moment when some mob goons decide to bust up the club for defying them, and of course...
The scary thing is..
.it worked!!
Now, over the few months of his existence, Drake learned a couple of new wrinkles, like
ventriloquism whistling:
And he learned to make his whistle
really loud:
And once, when a crook had a clever way to kill a concert violinist...
...well, obviously The Whistler could use that
same principle to escape the death trap left for him:
And we found out that his amazing whistle worked on snakes, too!
Throughout the series we got a lot of up close lip shots...
...followed by Drake pummeling paralyzed
nogoodniks:
The Whistler wasn't around for very long. He appeared in
National Comics #48 (1945) through
#54 (1946). All of those stories, except for the very last, were written, drawn and inked by
Vernon Henkel.
Yes, the Whistler was a one-gimmick mystery man, but the series itself was pretty good for the era, with the stories a lot more sophisticated than the usual fare.
So, yeah, I think he's a keeper. What do you think,
Steven Tyler?
Hey, stop trying to sneak in here,
Donald!!
Yup, a mere week after Marvel honcho Joe Quesada opined that Marvel had no female heroes capable of opening a "tent pole" summer movie, and that there were no actresses who could carry such a movie, we're shown that in at least one universe, he's pretty wrong, and there obviously is a market for such fare.
