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The Eye, Air Man & Other Wonders of Keen Detective Funnies, at Auction

Under the editorship of Lloyd Jacquet, Centaur's Keen Detective Funnies introduced a wild range of characters like The Eye and Air Man.

Published Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:47:06 -0500

by Mark Seifert

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Article Summary

Keen Detective Funnies launched by Centaur Publications in 1938, soon featured a range of new characters.
Title found its footing with original creations like The Masked Marvel, Air Man, and the wild character, The Eye.
Despite legal issues over The Clock, Keen Detective Funnies thrived under editor Lloyd Jacquet's direction.
The Eye, likely inspired by Pinkerton Agency's logo, became famous as a disembodied crime-solving eye in the Golden Age.

Centaur Publications Inc. launched its comic line with titles acquired by the short-lived publishers Ultem Publications and Harry A. Chesler in early 1938, but it soon launched its first new title, Keen Detective Funnies. This title initially survived off of reprints that Centaur thought it had acquired from Ultem, but a likely conflict with Quality Comics over George Brenner's The Clock sent them on the hunt for new adventure stars. The title found its footing with the likes of The Masked Marvel, Air Man, and one of the wildest characters of the Golden Age — The Eye. A rare, historically important, and highly sought-after series, there are copies of 20 issues of the 1938-1940 24-issue Keen Detective Funnies run in the 2024 August 1 – 2 Rarities of the Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40259 at Heritage Auctions.

Keen Detective Funnies #20, #23 (Centaur, 1940)

Keen Detective Funnies is something of an anomaly in the complicated Centaur timeline. It's clearly the continuation of Comics Magazine Company's Detective Picture Stories, and uses some material from that title, but neither Ultem nor Centaur Publications chose to use that title name. However, both of those companies continued Comics Magazine's Company's Funny Pages and Funny Picture Stories titles, perhaps suggesting some legal issues regarding the Detective Picture Stories name.

Despite the setback over the usage of The Clock, which we dove into in some detail recently, Keen Detective Funnies quickly began to find its footing with new characters under Lloyd Jacquet's editorship. The Masked Marvel was perhaps the title's first superhero-style cover star, followed by The Eye and Air Man.

Of these, The Eye is perhaps the most famous. A disembodied, all-knowing, all-seeing eye that causes crimes to be solved, the character eventually got a short-lived series called Detective Eye. It is likely that this was inspired by the omnipresent eye logo of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, with its tagline "we never sleep."

Keen Detective Funnies is a historic and difficult-to-get series with some fantastic early Golden Age covers. There are copies of 20 issues of the 1938-1940 24-issue Keen Detective Funnies run in the 2024 August 1 – 2 Rarities of the Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40259 at Heritage Auctions.