Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: centaur, nikola tesla

The Nikola Tesla-Inspired Debut of The Masked Marvel, Up for Auction

Keen Detective Funnies V2#7 is the rare first appearance of Centaur's the Masked Marvel by Ben Thompson, in a saga inspired by Nikola Tesla.

In the summer of 1939, American newsstands were places of both fantasy and dread. Just over a year after Superman's debut, a legion of new heroes was inspiring wonder on the newsstands, but the newspapers and magazines beyond the comic section more often inspired dread. The world was on the brink of a war that felt both inevitable and terrifyingly new.  We've talked extensively here about the super-science speculation from real-world headlines that often made it into comic books. Sometimes such news was propaganda, sometimes not. Newspapers were full of talk about both German and American super-soldiers before Captain America Comics #1 hit the newsstands.  The dreaded German V-1 influenced several comic book robot planes.  A number of efforts and rumors surrounding stealth technology influenced Wonder Woman's invisible plane.  In the context of the times, it should come as no surprise that one of Nikola Tesla's most fabled technologies, which he called Teleforce but was more often referred to in newspaper headlines as a Death Ray, also came to influence comic stories.  One important such influence came with the debut of the Masked Marvel in Keen Detective Funnies V2#7 (Centaur, 1939), and there's a high grade CGC FN/VF 7.0 Off-white to white pages copy up for auction in the 2025 October 16 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction III at Heritage Auctions.

Throughout the 1930s, inventors like Tesla and others made astonishing claims in major newspapers and magazines about the invention of directed-energy weapons. Tesla had announced his Teleforce technology in a 1934 New York Times article, describing it as something we would now call a particle beam weapon that he claimed could "destroy anything approaching within 200 miles" and acts as an impregnable wall to make any country invulnerable to invasion.  Closer in time to this Masked Marvel story, Tesla had sent plans and diagrams of the technology to a number of Allied nations in 1937.  The "powerful electric ray," invention that could also render a nation "invulnerable to any attack." in this 1939 Masked Marvel story by Ben Thompson is clearly inspired by news of Tesla's proposed weapon.

In this debut Masked Marvel tale, the ray had been stolen by international thieves who planned to sell it to a foreign power.  As for the Masked Marvel himself, he's a pulp-inspired hero, the likes of which were common in the comics of 1939.  A pulp mystery man perhaps most closely inspired by Doc Savage, the Masked Marvel has a high-tech hidden headquarters and a team of loyal agents. He is described as "gifted with super-human strength and mind-reading," and has access to "inventions unknown to modern science."

There are only 23 total copies of Keen Detective Funnies V2#7 on the CGC census, and only three graded higher than this CGC 7.0. Heritage Auctions has not offered a copy of this issue since 2002.  It's been five years since a nicer copy of this historically important key has come to market anywhere, but there's a high grade CGC FN/VF 7.0 Off-white to white pages copy up for auction in the 2025 October 16 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction III at Heritage Auctions.

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