Dr. John Thesson

A creature of the earliest Golden Age, Dr. John Thesson stepped onto the page in 1940's Exciting Comics #2, brought to life by creator Max Plaisted under the Pines banner. He shares those pulp-flavored pages with a wonderfully atmospheric roster — The Mask, The Sphinx, Sergeant Bill King, and others — the kind of colorful company that defined comics' most adventurous frontier era. With only four catalog appearances across a brief 1940–1941 window, Thesson is a genuine rarity, a glimpse into the wild, experimental dawn of the medium before the superhero genre fully took hold. For Golden Age devotees and Pines completists, he's exactly the sort of obscure discovery that makes digging through the early issues so rewarding.