Monday, July 2, 2012

Thrill-O-Rama Monday #5--Spyman!!

It's not every comic cover that cares enough to give you this kind of warning:

Electro-robot hand?!? Why, they must be talking about...

Oh, Harvey Thriller--what a crazy line of comics you were!!

Johnny Chance was a secret agent who lost his hand defusing an atomic bomb--hey, that happened all the time in the 60s!!--so our government was so kind as to give him an artificial hand!!

And what, exactly, does that hand do?

That's from the splash page of Spyman #1. That splash, BTW, was the first published work of Jim Steranko. That's it, though. Although Steranko did create the concept and script the first issue, the rest of the story was penciled by George Tuska.

So, anyway, Spyman worked for LIBERTY, and was functionally the Harvey good guy equivalent of The Mandarin--insterad of rings, though, he just had artificial fingers, each with its own power. Plus...

They were interchangeable, so they could give him new powers every issue, if they wanted, with replacement fingers!!

Man, they sure were obsessed with putting that hand schematic on every cover, weren't they? Perhaps it was a way to compensate for the terribly unimaginative title...

Spyman lasted one whole issue longer than most of Harvey's Thriller line, a whole 3 issues.

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