| Synopsis
| - 480.0
- Oil has been found in northeastern Oklahoma and Rod Reilly's father's friend Wilton had been preparing to make some poor farmers very wealthy by buying their land at a fair price, but instead he's gotten shot in the head, with his body left slumped across the wheel of his car, parked on a grade crossing of a railroad track, with a train coming. Rod and his fiancee Joan are zooming around the countryside in Rod's roadster looking for Wilton, and arrive just in time to see a train crash into Wilton's car. Rod inspects the debris and ascertains what really happened. Soon Rod and Joan find themselves pursued and shot at by another car. Rod drives onto a covered bridge and drops back beside the pursuing car then sideswipes it through the bridge wall and into the river below. The pursuing driver, still armed, leaps clear and continues shooting at Rod who, still unarmed, closes in and punches the gunman until he too falls into the river; Rod believes that this guy will drown and complains that he'd have rather turned him in to the police. Then without notifying the police, Rod drives home to the Reilly Estate and reports these events to "Emerald Ed" Reilly and Slugger Shea. Ed had gotten a tip from the FBI that Wilton's life was in danger, hence Rod's road trip.
Minutes after this conversation, Rod and Slugger roll out Rod's sleek fast plane from the Estate's backyard hangar, and fly to Oklahoma with Slugger at the controls; observing this, Joan also boards a plane and follows them, staying just out of sight. Slugger daringly lands the plane in an oil derrick field; Rod has changed into Firebrand and gets out; he's immediately challenged by a three-man posse of riflemen; Firebrand knocks down, and out, all three with a single punch, then goes on foot to snoop around while Slugger takes off to observe from above. Firebrand encounters a pitiful procession of displaced Okies, with overloaded jalopies and horses carrying their possessions, driven from their homes by the local political boss, Slane, who has manipulated the local tax laws to drive them off their land. Firebrand tells them to return to their homes and that he's going to settle matters with Mr. Slane; some of them buy this, some don't. At Slane's office , Firebrand punches out another rifle-toting guard then barges in on a meeting between Slane and Fritz Kritzar, who demands that Slane hurry up and start pumping oil because his country's U-boats need oil. Also there's a secret pipeline running from this part of Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast. Fritz pulls out a pistol but Firebrand is quicker and knocks him out with one punch. This amuses Slane, whose men have already started a large prairie fire, expected to burn the shacks of the local farmers. Firebrand leaps out the office window, dragging Slane along behind him by the collar, and leaving Kritzar behind on the floor, which turns out to be unwise. At the local firehouse, Slane's worthless grafting employees are laughing about the big fire, until Firebrand sweeps in and violently commandeers their antique firetruck, while also flinging Slane inside it and tying him up, then zooms off to get between the fire and the village. Suddenly at least two cars are pursuing it, with tommy guns blazing, then even more suddenly Slugger swoops down and strafes them with machine guns, killing at least one guy. That's when Joan's plane also flies onto the scene; Slugger recognizes her plane, then another thug manages to shoot it down with a submachine gun; it crashes. Slugger is engrossed in the action below and doesn't see this happening, not that there's really anything he could do about it. The bad guys try to run Firebrand's firetruck off the road with an armored car but this backfires on them and they crash .
Firebrand and his firetruck reaches the area where the farmers are trying to fight the prairie fire with shovels and hand tools, and they use chemical foam to get it under control, but then the remaining thugs attack them, with guns. Firebrand leads the countercharge, and the unarmed farmers seem to be winning. Kritzar shows up and unties Slane; they flee in a car, but Slugger flies by overhead, slow enough for Firebrand to grab a landing-gear wheel, then Slugger maneuvers over the getaway car allowing Firebrand to drop onto it and dish out some more punches. The car crashes; Slane is killed. State troopers show up and Kritzar is arrested. Outside the door of Slane's office, a flaming torch is placed: the mark of Firebrand.
Then Firebrand and Slugger reluctantly approach the wreckage of Joan's crashed airplane, afraid of what they'll find, but Joan scrambles out of some nearby trees, in which her parachute had gotten tangled.
- One evening, returning from a defense committee meeting, Sandra Knight and Don Borden take a shortcut through the park and get jumped by two spies; Sandra gets head-konked with a pistol butt and knocked out; Don puts up a fight but gets punched out and hits his head on a rock. Sandra rallies up as the bad guys' car pulls away, and she finds a key ring on the ground, then catches a cab home, and changes clothes. Her secret-identity costume does not include a mask.
The Phantom Lady goes driving in search of Don in her convertible; soon the cops are chasing her, and she deduces that she's been framed for Don's abduction. She careens around a series of corners and shakes the cops, then drives for an hour until she reaches a remote peninsula on Chesapeake Bay. She's suspected for a long time that there was a spy nest around here, so therefore this is probably where Don is. Finding a gloomy old stone mansion that she recognizes as the Jackson Place, Phantom Lady vaults over the stone wall into the yard, but large vicious dogs run out to attack her. She shines the black flashlight on them and they run away, yelping and cringing, but making enough noise to alert the spies inside. One guy at a window points a submachine gun at her but she blinds him with the black light, then uses the keys from the park to get in the front door. Inside one room Don is getting worked over by the spies, trying to get some diplomatic codes from him. P.L. shines her black light on them, which scares them into fleeing, and she unties Don, but they've only fled into the next room and now ambush the couple, swatting the black light out of Sandra's hand. She gets knocked down and he gets tied up again, but there's the black light just laying on the floor, so she picks it back up and turns it on the plotters, while Don bursts out of his ropes by sheer strength and punches out the spies. He looks around and the Phantom Lady is gone and suddenly the police burst in, acting on a telephone tip from "some dame," which makes Don think of Sandra.
- Penitentiary lifer Fatso Dowd jumps a prison guard, steals his pistol, and breaks his skull with it, then escapes via a tunnel that he'd been working on for some time before that. He goes on a one-man crime wave of muggings and robberies, and shoots at least one more cop along the way, and hides out in the mountains upstate. District Attorney Bill Perkins disguises himself in a blue business suit with a fedora and a domino mask, and calls himself "the Mouthpiece," then he drives out into the country to search for Dowd. By what seems to be absolutely pure luck he pulls up at one lonely old house to ask if any suspicious characters are in the area, and Fatso Dowd answers the door wearing a fake beard. Casually lighting a cigarette, the Mouthpiece sets fire to the fake beard, exposing Dowd's identity and instigating a fistfight, which he loses. Dowd tosses the unconscious Mouthpiece into a back room, where the house's real owners are held, then drives to town in the Mouthpiece's car to do some crimes, and promising to kill them all when he gets back. So while he's gone they escape, by prying loose some boards in the roof. They chop down a tree, to land in a curvy place in the winding road that leads to the house, and on his way back Dowd crashes into it. The unarmed Mouthpiece jumps onto the armed Dowd as he's crawling from the wreckage, and beats him up pretty good, then the Wagners tie him up and the Mouthpiece calls in the cops.
[Perkins' wrecked car is apparently abandoned in the woods or at least is not mentioned again, but it's mentioned early on the D.A. has an "official car" that he uses at work, so apparently this doesn't raise any questions at his office.]
- Undercover lawman Eel O'Brian chats with his old pal Baldy Bushwhack about the pinball machine racket. [Pinball machines apparently are illegal in this town at this time. Every character acts as if that's normal.] Baldy boasts that he has got some microphones planted somewhere in Police HQ and now receives advance warning of upcoming raids, so his henchies can hide the machines before the cops arrive at any given establishment. Later at Police HQ Captain Murphy is extremely frustrated; he's had his men raid 60 stores and found zero pinball machines, plus he's extremely annoyed that he has to rely on the very annoying Plastic Man to solve his precinct's toughest cases; just then Plas shows up and gives him some jazz about that last point. Murphy's pride gets the better of him and he gives P.M. an ultimatum: Plastic man must solve at least one big case per month or lose his badge. Plas boasts that he'll have the pinball racket wrapped up in one hour, or Murphy can fire him, and Murphy happily takes that bet, then starts regretting this the minute Plastic man leaves the room, because truly he can ill afford to lose Plastic Man's talent. Meanwhile Baldy Bushwhack has been alerted that Plastic Man is on his way, and this really shakes him up; there's no other lawman he even takes seriously. Baldy sets some traps. When P.M. enters Baldy's hideout through an upstairs window, B.B. throws a switch and Plas is knocked out by an electrified plate in the floor. Baldy tries to finish him off with a sledgehammer but this bounces back on him quite painfully, so the and two of his henchmen drag Plas out to a road construction site and Baldy runs over him with a steam roller. This wakes him up, and after playing possum for a minute, Plastic Man quickly lassos the whole gang and carries them away to the police station, then has some fun taunting Captain Murphy about winning their bet.
- Chic Carter, Police Reporter, knocks off work for the day and takes out his girlfriend Gay Nolan to a concert, but unfortunately along the way she gets a headache, but fortunately along the way is Chic's friend Dr. Dave Blair's private hospital, so they stop in there for a headache cure. Inside the hospital one patient, Dr. Grimes, is exhibiting some pretty advanced dementia; he's trying to run medical experiments on his fellow patients, seeking the elixer of youth, believing himself to be guided by "the hand of Biro," a medieval spirit. Grimes shoots a guard, locks Blair and a nurse in one room, and takes over the hospital, assisted by a very insane hunchbacked orderly named Torg. As Chic and Gay arrive at the place, an overly excited man in a tuxedo runs out and tries to flee the hospital, claiming to be Sigmund Arno, famous pianist, but Torg subdues him and takes him back to a treatment room, while Dr. Grimes guides Gay into an examination room. Chic just happens to turn on a radio right then, and there's a news report about the disappearance of Sigmund Arno; Chic jumps to the obvious and correct conclusion, and promptly changes clothes. He's now "The Sword," and he's got a sword that up until now he's kept concealed in his belt. He bursts through a door, knocking it off its hinges, and is shot at by a pistol-packing orderly, whom he knocks out with the pommel of his sword, then bursts through a second door and rescues Gay from being shot up with who-knows-what kind of formula, by flinging his sword through the shoulder of Dr. Grimes's doctor-shirt, pinning him to a wall. Grimes yells for Torg, who lurches menacingly into the room, but gets knocked out with one punch, just before Dr. Grimes triggers a trap door under Carter's feet, dropping him into a pit. Meanwhile Dr. Blair has called the police, and a carful of them now arrives and charges into the hospital. They knock down a 3rd door, into the room where Dr. Blair is kept, tied up, and free him. Meanwhile Dr. Grimes has got Gay strapped down to an examining table and is again preparing to shoot her up with some madscience juice. Meanwhile in the pit, The Sword mixes some powders that he carries with him, producing a big smoky explosion, and also gets himself out of the pit, and also turns his cape into a cowly-looking hood, and pretends to be "Biro," in which guise he confronts and denounces Grimes. This shakes up Grimes so badly that he tries to flee the hospital, only Torg is standing in a doorway between him and the exit, so he yanks out a pistol and shoots Torg, twice, which upsets Torg so much that he pulls out a big knife and seemingly kills Grimes. The viewer's angle is ambiguous, but when Detective Monahan crashes into the room, knocking a 4th door off its hinges, he believes that Grimes and Torg are both dead. The Sword is wanted by the police, so he eludes them by climbing, with Gay, out a window down a makeshift rope made of bedsheets, but not before The Sword leaves behind a mocking note, in rhyme, for Detective Monahan. In their getaway taxi, The Sword pretends to not be Chic Carter, but Gay is absolutely not fooled by this and says so.
Chic Carter appears as The Sword for the last time in this issue.
- Rock Gatty, big time hoodlum, arrives for a 5-year stretch in Westmoor prison, and the very next day a new guard, Spike, starts work there. Spike secretly lets Gatty out of the prison that night; Gatty motorboats into town and murders one of the two witnesses whose testimony put him in stir, then returns and sneaks back into the prison. The next day, Dan Dyce, prisoner #711 eavesdrops on a conversation between Spike and Rock, and figures out what's going on, and that night #711, dressed in his distinctive outfit, escapes from the prison, and tails Gatty into town. At the second witness's apartment house, #711 climbs the fire escape and breaks in to the target's apartment, and when Gatty shows up to do the murder, he photographs him, with a calendar in the shot, showing that day's date. Then he beats up Rock until Rock runs away, which #711 lets him do. The next day the Warden has some questions for Gatty, and while Gatty's lying his way around them, an envelope is tossed in through the open window, containing a photograph that exposes Gatty's story for the fiction it is. Then #711 walks into the office, suggesting that the new guard Spike should be answering some questions too. The warden doesn't seem to have any questions for #711.
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