I’m as dismayed as any big EL fan to discover that Mr. America issues #5 and #6 are missing, and that a lot apparently happened in those two issues. This is issue features a guest appearance by my cowboy superhero, Lance Larrow – I know he will pop up again later on – who starts out impersonating Mr. America and then does an astonishing between panel quick change into his own cowboy costume. Apparently in the previous issue – I’ve become pretty confident about multi-part stories at this point, I guess – he and Mr. America must have set up some ploy in order to trick The Skull … one that Lance is only too happy to give up at a moment’s notice. Strangely, The Skull has not appeared before, but he is obviously a rip-off of the Captain America villain, The Red Skull, who, at the time, was one of my favorite villains, so it’s no surprise that I would “borrow” him for my “tribute” to Captain America.

As we see in the end, Lance may fight villains, but he has a pretty air tight vision of what breaking the law is. In Mr. America’s case, it involves actually doing your job, though I guess he didn’t quite expect the shield to the airship ploy to end quite that way. “He’s gone. Because of murder.” That was actually a very confusing sequence. I think The Skull transported away, though. I think Mr. America and Lance Larrow didn’t quite notice his crafty plan of escape.

I’d say this was the most coherent action I’ve so far devised in the EL line – confusing as some of the minor details might be, I think the basic gist of it is fairly clear. Bravo! Watch out, Frank Miller!

Sadly, because of the missing issues, we didn’t get introduced to The Panther the first time around. I hope we didn’t miss anything important.