#JSApril has been a blast, and if you’ve been following long, you’ve heard people talk about 85 years’ worth of comics, including my own episode about the Justice Society’s battles against the villain Extant. I hadn’t scheduled anything else for this month, but then I fell down a Crimson Avenger rabbit hole.

Now, if you want to be pedantic about it, The Crimson Avenger was technically a member of The Seven Soldiers of ictory and I believe showed up in All-Star Squadron (but don’t quote me on that), but I figure that makes him a JSA-er once remoed or something. What’s most important is that he was DC Comics’ first masked hero. Debuting in Detective Comics #20, he predates Batman by roughtly half a year (although he is not the first super hero because thats still Superman, who debuted a few months prior). And he’s not the most original character, either, borrowing a concept from The Green Hornet and a costume from The Shadow.

By the way, I’m saying that more or les to get it out of the way because I don’t feel to harp on it.

Anyway, I came by the hero via Secret Origins and then the four-issue miniseries that spun out of that Secret Origins issue, both of which were written by Roy Thomas. THese were both part of Thomas’ post-Crisi efforts to make sure that the Golden Age heroes had a firm place in DC continuity and their stories could continue to be told. In fact, many of the first year or so of issues featured Golden Age characters, something I believe that was back-door piloted in the last couple of issues of All-Star Squadron.

But unlike, say, the Golden Age Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman, the Crimson Avenger didn’t seem to have deeply planted roots in DCU. Yes, he was part of a super hero team and eventually adopted a super hero costume when fighting alongside the Seven Soldiers, but I would venture to say that by the time the Crisis rolled around, he’d been largely forgotten. In fact, he’d so seldom been seen that in DC Comics Presents #34, Len Wein wrote a backup story titled, “Whatever Happened to the Crimson Avenger?”

If you know me, you know I love a random, even obscure character (I mean, I did an episode on Extant). I was fortunate enough to find scans of the first 26 issues of ‘Tec on the Internet Archve and persued a few of the original Crimson Avenger stories. They were more or less what I expected from that era and that type of character–solid cases that held my attention for the pages and decent art (although the scans weren’t of the best quality). And while I am not going to be snarky about the similarities with other cahracters, they aren’t hard to miss.

Then again, that was so much–and really, still is–comics of the time. Characters upon characters are permutations of one another, either because tey are working off of an archetype or hpping onto a trend. Remember, the comics of the Golden Age were ephemeral and not written to be collectible. If a hero like The Green Hornet sold well, another company was going to try it with their own version of that character.

This, then, is where Roy Thomas comes in to give the Crimson Avenger something other than random adventures from a long time ago. He, of course, had fostered DCs Golden Age throughout the late Bronze Age and what he does here is give the man a solid origin story.

Okay, the first issue is Secret Origins. So, obviously.

But between that issue and the miniseries, there’s a complete story about how the “first” hero in DC’s post-Crisis continuity came to be. Thomas sets the origin on Halloween night in 1938, the same night as Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Lee Travis attends a Halloween party, captures some thieves in alien costumes who kill a journalist he’d made a connection with. That seems to be it, but the Crimson Avenger would return to foil a espionage plot in 1938, one that involves potential enemies and allies of the United States as World War II looms on the horizon.

It’s the type of story that Roy Thomas has excelled at and tales of saboteurs in our midst was a common story of heroes of the day. Reading it, I could tell that he definitely put some love into the story. I’ve been hot and cold on his writing throughout the years because he tends to be a dense writer. But this is well paced and exxciting with solid art (and yes, I’m aware that penciller Greg Brooks was put in prison for murdering his wife).

While I don’t know what sales figures were like in 1988, I’m assuming that this miniseries didn’t sell much because there was no longer commitment to the characters. Perhaps the Crimson Avenger was … uh, overshadowed by The Shadow, who had two successful series in the late 1980s–a miniseries by Howard Chaykin and an ongoing by Andrew Helfer and Kyle Baker. The “Whatever Happened to …” story from earlier in the decade had him dying a fiery death after coming out of retirement to save some people who swore they would never forget him. I like the idea that he died as he lived–a mystery–and that made him a legend.