POLICE TRAP and the Human Side of Law Enforcement

After the senseless killing of five police officers in Dallas...

...it's important to realize that police officers/cops/the Five-0 or whatever you call them, are people like you and me, doing their jobs.

Yeah, there are a few scuzzballs, but every line of work has them.

Same with the police.

In that vein, have a look at our "brother" RetroBlog, Crime and Punishment.

In particular, the stories from a short-lived 1950s title called Police Trap, which gave us a look at cops as people, in the same vein as TV's Naked City, also from the 1950s, or the later Hill Street Blues.

And, if you see a cop on the street, smile and say "Hi!"

Let them know you appreciate them.

Reading Room FLIP FALCON IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION "One Million AD (Give or Take a Millennium)"

When Last We Left Flick Falcon...

...hmmm.

Just go with the synopsis above, and we'll fill you in on the name change later...

It's fascinating to see concepts that today's writers would use as the premise for an entire mini-series get tossed aside in only six pages!

But that's exactly what happened in this never-reprinted tale from Fox's Fantastic Comics #4 (1940)!

Writer/artist Don Rico was coming up with such weird ideas that this was, literally, just a distraction from the main plotline!

But on to more important matters...

Why did "Flick Falcon" become "Flip Falcon"?

Remember, comics' lettering for both titles and word balloons/captions was almost always UPPER CASE!

When you look at the word FLICK, if the "L" and "I" are too close together, it looks like...well, you get the idea.

So, more or less, in mid-story, "Flick" became "Flip".

In fact, if you look at the captions and word balloons, there's extra space between "Flip" and the other words because they didn't want to reletter the whole story after altering Falcon's first name!

Reading Room: FLASH GORDON "Chapter Four: Showdown in Syk"

With the repressed memory of their decades-earlier encounter with Queen Azura restored...

...Flash and Zarkov, along with Dale, spring into action!

Next Week:

It's the thrilling conclusion that we just had to call...

The Man Who Would be Ming!

Noel Neill (1920-2016)

She was a newspaperman's daughter in real life...

Kirk Alyn (Clark Kent/Superman) and Noel Neill (Lois Lane) in Superman (1948)

...and she ended up playing the most famous newspaperwoman in fiction on both the movie and TV screens!

Noel Neill (Lois Lane) and George Reeeves (Clark Kent/Superman) in The Adventures of Superman (1950s)

I had the pleasure of meeting Ms Neill in Cleveland, at the 1988 International Superman Expo (celebrating Superman's 50th Anniversary), and she was absolutely delightful and gracious, the very model of what we used to call, in the pre-PC days, a "classy lady".

Trivia: Noel and Phyllis Coates (who was the first TV Lois Lane, both appeared in in the B-movie Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1952), but had no scenes together.

Safety Tip from the Fighting Yank on the 4th of July...

Here's the word, kids, from the Fighting Yank himself...

Art by Mort Meskin

...from the final issue of his 1940s series, Standard's Fighting Yank #29 (1949)

Art by Alex Schomburg

And here's the patriotic cover from that issue!