Master Comics #30
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMaster Comics #30 (cover-dated September 1942) is a well-rounded showcase of Fawcett's wartime anthology at the height of its creative powers, pairing two of the publisher's most distinctive features in a single package. The lead story pits Captain Marvel Jr. — Fawcett's grimmer, more morally serious answer to the cheerful Captain Marvel — against Captain Nazi, the arch-villain whose brutal origin act had literally created young Freddy Freeman as a hero just nine issues earlier, making their recurring confrontations among the most emotionally charged in Golden Age comics. The Bulletman backup holds its own significance as the second appearance of the Weeper (Mortimer Gloom), the peculiarly melancholy villain who would become Bulletman and Bulletgirl's defining antagonist across the 1940s and later earn a strange kind of pop-cultural immortality as the character claimed, in animated form, to have inspired the Joker's own gimmick-driven crime style. Both stories unfold within Mac Raboy's visually austere, realistically rendered art for the Captain Marvel Jr. strip — a deliberate departure from C. C. Beck's cartoonier main-title work that gave the Marvel Family's youngest member a tonal identity entirely his own.
In "Capt. Marvel Jr. Saves the Doomed Army," the Weeper unleashes his sinister "pills of pity" and laughing gas, turning laughter into sorrow—until a surprising ally emerges from within his own gang, driven by concern for his wife’s well-being. This 1942 adventure, written by Henry Perkins and illustrated by the Binder Studio, features the dynamic duo of Captain Marvel Jr. and the Flying Detectives in a high-stakes mission, with Mac Raboy’s striking cover capturing the eerie, dramatic tone of the story.
In "Capt. Marvel Jr. Saves the Doomed Army," Captain Marvel Jr. races to stop Captain Nazi, who has infiltrated an Army camp posing as a doctor and is using a deadly new poison to turn soldiers into the undead. With time running out and thousands at risk, the young hero must uncover the deception and halt the villain’s sinister plan before the entire camp is lost to the dead.
In "The Return of the Weeper," the sinister villain resurfaces with his deadly mix of "pills of pity" and laughing gas—laughter that twists into sorrow. The Flying Detectives face this new threat, but find an unexpected ally in a member of the Weeper's own gang, driven by worry for his wife’s well-being if he doesn’t act.
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Master Comics had been Fawcett's flagship anthology since March 1940, but its editorial identity shifted dramatically in late 1941 when an unprecedented three-part crossover between Master Comics and Whiz Comics introduced Captain Marvel Jr. — designed by Fawcett staff artist Mac Raboy and written by France Herron, with the deliberate choice to keep the new hero perpetually a teenager to differentiate him from the adult Captain Marvel. Raboy, whose pre-comics background included WPA etchings and Federal Arts Project work during the Depression, brought a realistic, almost painterly figure style to the feature that stood apart from virtually every other superhero strip on the stands. By the time issue #30 hit newsstands in August 1942, Raboy's workload had grown so demanding — he was also supplying covers for America's Greatest Comics, Bulletman, Captain Midnight, and Spy Smasher — that Fawcett assigned him an assistant, Rubin Zubofsky (later Bob Rogers), to handle backgrounds. The credited creative team for #30 includes writer Joseph J. Millard and artist Clem Weisbecker on supporting features alongside Raboy's Captain Marvel Jr. work.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: September 1942; on-sale date recorded in the Catalog of Copyright Entries as August 5, 1942; published by Fawcett Publications Inc. as part of the monthly Master Comics anthology (133-issue run, March 1940–April 1953).
- Lead story: 'Captain Marvel, Jr. Saves the Doomed Army' — Captain Marvel Jr. (Freddy Freeman) battles Captain Nazi (Baron Albrecht Krieger), who disguises himself as 'Dr. Blaine' to infiltrate a U.S. Army camp and inject soldiers with a lethal serum.
- Backup story: 'The Return of the Weeper' — the 2nd appearance of The Weeper (Mortimer Gloom), Bulletman and Bulletgirl's arch-foe, who deploys 'pills of pity' and laughing gas; his first appearance was in Master Comics #23 (February 1942).
- Captain Marvel Jr.'s ongoing antagonist Captain Nazi had his own origin tied to this same run: he first appeared in Master Comics #21 (December 1941), where his attack on an innocent fisherman and his grandson Freddy Freeman — and Captain Marvel's subsequent bestowing of power on Freddy — created Captain Marvel Jr.
- Art on the Captain Marvel Jr. feature by Mac Raboy, whose deliberately realistic and dramatic figure style was a stark contrast to C. C. Beck's cartoony Captain Marvel work; Roy Thomas and other historians have compared Raboy's approach to the 'romantic realism' of Hal Foster and Alex Raymond.
- Bulletman and Bulletgirl (Jim Barr and Susan Kent) appear in the backup alongside an image-only cameo of Captain Marvel — consistent with the cross-title promotional practice Fawcett used throughout this era.
- The Captain Marvel Jr. story from this issue was reprinted in DC's hardcover The Shazam! Family Archives Vol. 1 (November 2006, ISBN 978-1401207793), which collected Master Comics #23–32, Captain Marvel Jr. #1, and Captain Marvel Adventures #18.
- Bulletman and Bulletgirl were Fawcett's second most popular characters after the Captain Marvel family, and their appearances in Master Comics anchored the anthology's backup slot throughout the early 1940s.
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Reprinted in The Shazam! Family Archives #1 (2006), Men of Mystery Comics #80 (2009), Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War #[nn] (2017), Master Comics #30 (2023)
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