About 
Die Hard fans have long pondered the similarity between the name of Silent Night composer Franz Gruber and the name of Die Hard antagonist Hans Gruber.
Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Jack Binder, lev gleason, otto binder, silver streak
Harold Curtis's Copy of Silver Streak Comics #15, Up for Auction
Jack Binder evokes the Shudder Pulp era for the Captain Battle cover of Silver Streak Comics #15.
Article Summary
- Silver Streak Comics #15 captures pre-World War II tensions with stories of sabotage and looming conflict.
- Jack Binder's cover art channels Shudder Pulp influences, blending heroism and horror in a Golden Age classic.
- Features Captain Battle saving defense executives and Cloud Curtis predicting an invasion of Alaska.
- The Harold Curtis pedigree highlights this issue's rarity, with few high-grade copies on the CGC census.
Three months before Pearl Harbor, Silver Streak Comics #15 was already playing out the details of what the unfolding conflict might soon mean for America on the newsstand. Cover dated October 1941 but on sale September 5 of that year, it drops Captain Battle, Daredevil, and a supporting cast of heroes into a pre-war American landscape filled with industrial mobilization, sabotage scares, and speculation about where the enemy might strike. A lead Captain Battle story about "Dollar-a-Year" defense executives under attack and a Daredevil crime tale child kidnappings anchor the issue, but 13-year-old Harold Curtis might have been just as interested in the Cloud Curtis aviation saga about a Japanese strike on Alaska.
The Captain Battle cover feature by Jack and Otto Binder sets an eerie tone for Silver Streak Comics #15, in a "horror and heroes" way that had already become a Lev Gleason hallmark. The cover by Jack Binder feels like a nod to the Shudder Pulp era of the 1930s, where pulp mags like Terror Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine, and Horror Stories combined heroism and horror with a requisite damsel in distress in the mix. In the story, Captain Battle and his sidekick Hale are saving "Dollar-a-Year Men," the industrial magnates drafted into Washington's war production machinery and paid a token salary to oversee aircraft, munitions, and other defense output.
Cloud Curtis's "A Blitzkrieg Invasion from Asia" makes an eerie prediction, revolving around Japanese forces building a secret base in the Alaskan wilds as a staging ground for an attack on North America. For young Harold Curtis and other readers that September, this might have seemed like bold speculation, since much of the attention in mid-1941 was on Europe and the Atlantic. In hindsight, the Aleutian campaign was less than a year away.
The CGC census lists only 23 Universal entries, with a single 8.5 at the top, one 8.0, and then a drop into the 7.0s, and then a cluster in the Good to Fine range. The unusually thin population at the top makes the mid-grades all the more desireable, as does the Harold Curtis pedigree itself. A pedigree copy of an early issue of a foundational Golden Age superhero series, there's an Silver Streak Comics #15 (Lev Gleason, 1941) Harold Curtis Pedigree CGC VG- 3.5 Off-white pages up for auction at the Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction IV.
Affiliates of Bleeding Cool buy from and/or consign to Heritage Auctions.
Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!
Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!
