Detective Comics #17
Detective Comics #17 (July 1938) marks the first comic book appearance of Fu Manchu — making it the debut of what CBR has called comics' first true supervillain — and represents one of the earliest licensed adaptations of an outside intellectual property in the medium's history. The issue appeared just weeks after Action Comics #1 launched Superman, situating it at the precise hinge point when DC was transitioning from a pure anthology of hardboiled detectives toward a publisher capable of bringing established pop-culture icons into the new medium. The Fu Manchu run it inaugurated would continue through Detective Comics #28, occupying the book right up to the issue before Batman's debut, making this issue a quiet but concrete link between the pre-superhero Golden Age anthology and the character-driven era that followed. It also preserves the full bench of DC's earliest recurring anthology features — Slam Bradley, Speed Saunders, Bart Regan (Spy), Cosmo, Bruce Nelson, Larry Steele, and Buck Marshall — in what was effectively the last generation of the book before its identity transformed.
In a lighthearted 1938 tale from Detective Comics #17, Oscar follows a note claiming to reveal the Black Hand Gang’s hideout—only to burst into a shack and find a group of mischievous kids laughing at the ruse. The gag lands with classic comic timing, turning a serious detective chase into a playful prank.
In "Von Ruyter's Explosive Gun," a brilliant inventor’s revolutionary weapon sparks a high-stakes mystery when its plans vanish—leaving his friend Cosmo to unravel a trail that leads from military tests to a cunning Russian Countess De Mornay. With a trail of red herrings and a baffling clue hidden in plain sight, Cosmo must outthink a mastermind before the real threat is unleashed.
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The Fu Manchu material introduced in this issue was not original comics content: it consisted of recolored and reformatted reprints of Leo O'Mealia's black-and-white daily newspaper strip, which had run from 1931 to 1933 for the Bell Syndicate as adaptations of Sax Rohmer's first novels. By 1938, Detective Comics, Inc. had the financial footing to license the Rohmer property and package those strips as a new back-up feature, though the creative work itself predated the comic book era entirely. The Speed Saunders lead story — 'The Snake Death' — was scripted by Gardner Fox (writing under the house pseudonym E.C. Stoner) and drawn by Fred Guardineer, while the Slam Bradley and Bart Regan (Spy) stories were produced by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were simultaneously helping to shepherd their own Superman character at Action Comics. The cover was by series regular Creig Flessel.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: July 1938; published by Detective Comics, Inc. (the precursor entity to DC Comics); cover art by Creig Flessel.
- First comic book appearance of Fu Manchu — the feature ran in Detective Comics from this issue (#17) through #28 (June 1939).
- The Fu Manchu content was a reprint of Leo O'Mealia's 1931–1933 Bell Syndicate newspaper strip, colored for comic book publication — making this one of the earliest newspaper-strip-to-comic-book reprints in American comics history.
- The Speed Saunders story 'The Snake Death' was scripted by Gardner Fox (as E.C. Stoner) with art by Fred Guardineer; Fox would later reveal he created Speed Saunders, and the character is retroactively a first cousin of Hawkgirl (Shiera Saunders Hall) per a 1999 JSA retcon.
- Slam Bradley ('Slam Bradley Gets the Air') and Bart Regan/Spy ('The Hooded Hordes') were both scripted by Jerry Siegel with art by Joe Shuster — the same team producing Superman for Action Comics simultaneously.
- After this issue, Buck Marshall by Homer Fleming drops out of the anthology until Detective Comics #20.
- The Bruce Nelson story begins a new two-part serial, 'The Coolie Smugglers (Part 1),' with art by Tom Hickey; the Larry Steele story was scripted and drawn by Will Ely, and the Cosmo story by Sven Elven.
- A Gardner Fox text story ('Disaster on the Diamond,' under the pseudonym Paul Dean) also appears, illustrating Fox's extraordinary output across multiple formats in a single issue.
Cast · 9 characters
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