Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Lance Hale in "The Temple of Death" (Lev Gleason;1941)


Here is an untitled tale starring Lance Hale supposedly from Silver Streak Comics #11 (Jun.1941); originally published by Lev Gleason and featuring the pencil work of the great Fred Guardineer. Lance Hale was a soldier of fortune who moved to Africa and then "adapted" himself to life in the wild by cross-dressing in green tights, yellow booties, red trunks and an off-the-shoulder animal skin. [Yes, I realize that a few of those visual elements aren't on display in this tale.] The peculiar thing about this story is that the issue listed in the GCD doesn't mention Lance Hale being present at all, so who am I to question the archivist who provided that documentation? However, the following issue (#12) does have a five page story called "The Forbidden Valley of Ka-Zor" that could possibly be this one; who knows. I'm dubbing this short golden age adventure "The Temple of Death", and that is the end of that. The Catacombs is grateful to Don "Zu-Gogo" Falkos for providing the scans for this story. Note: The copyright for this issue, its contents and artwork belongs to the original publisher and/or the creators and is reproduced here solely for entertainment purposes. Enjoy!

1 comment:

cash_gorman said...

Lance was an interesting character. If you read his stories out of order you'd get the impression it was several different heroes of the same name as he was a jungle adventurer given superpowers, had outer-space adventures and fought an alien invasion, a plain-clothes hero fighting an evil woman over a magical gem and then the jungle Tarzan-esque hero. However, in order, there are some sense of transitions from and to each stage of his career. Guess they were trying to find some niche for him to fit in while keeping in mind what he was in the previous issue.