This post-war story features a wacky female reporter who gets tied up in front of a nuclear device spraying radiation on her just before the screwball comedy ending. GCD says the art seems to have some Jack Kamen but also shows evidence of other hands.
In the late sixties, just before editor Dick Giordano defected from Charlton to National/DC, the former company was trying some fascinating experiments. For one thing their revived STRANGE SUSPENSE STORIES served as a kind of SHOWCASE for new concepts and characters. Here, for instance, fifties artist Don Perlin (later to be known for his work at Marvel on WEREWOLF BY NIGHT) is given his head and comes up with FOCUS:DANGER, a sort of I SPY idea with a black and a white adventurer. Whether this was wholly original or was, in fact, "inspired" by the newspaper comic strip DATELINE:DANGER with similar black and white protagonists and which premiered in the comics pages that same year is not known. Still, it's some of the best work by Perlin I've seen.
Throughout the 1950's there existed an entire sub-genre of comics that consisted of DENNIS THE MENACE rip-offs. Many of these, although hardly original, were quite good. Some copied the concept of the cute kid who means well but is constantly getting in trouble. Others copied the art style or the often unique layouts used in the long-form comic book Dennis stories. Quite a few just lifted the whole deal. Such was the case with CUTIE PIE, a mid-fifties Lev Gleason female version of Dennis lovingly drawn by Gene Fawcette, a prolific comics artist who had started in the Eisner-Iger shop but who had also actually at one point done...you guessed it...DENNIS THE MENACE!
Artist Jayson "Monkeyman" Disbrow is perhaps an acquired taste. His figures are stiff but his page design is never boring and his backgrounds often quite detailed. He worked regularly in comics and advertising beginning in the fifties, was discovered by fandom in the seventies and managed to exploit his own fame quite well. I actually met him at a Con in Philadelphia in 1977. In the 21st Century, he began and eventually completed a long-running sci-fi web comic entitled AROC OF ZENITH, arguably his best work ever!
THE TRAP is a short, out of the ordinary war story from the first issue of Harvey Comics' WAR BATTLES in late 1951. Even though this was around the time when war was in the air again in Korea, this particular tale is set in the Philippines during WorldWar II. The art isn't credited here or on GCD but it's quite good and a cut above a lot of the other war comics art of the day! Clearly one of the Caniff school of artists--my money would be on Lee Elias. The coloring adds to the atmosphere, also.
