The Last Bulletman Story

By 1949, the sun was setting for most of the great super heroes of the Golden Age of Comics. In the postwar period, public tastes had shifted to other genres and subject matter in terms of what was popular in the comic book medium. In particular, horror, crime, western, teen humor and romance comics had made strong inroads, pulling in dimes and attention, and even the best-selling super hero features were feeling the pinch. So it was that in this issue, MASTER COMICS #106, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, the Flying Detectives, sortied on their final flight of the era.

Bulletman had done relatively well for himself over the years. He’d survived the demise of his original anthology, the experimental NICKEL COMICS, jumping over to MASTER COMICS where he was the cover feature for around a year. During this time, he picked up a partner, his girlfriend Susan Kent was equipped with her own Gravity Helmet and red costume as Bulletgirl. While the arrival of Captain Marvel Jr. pushed Bulletman off of the cover of MASTER, he was continually popular and earned his own self-titled series shortly thereafter. The concept of a male-female crime-fighting team was unique enough that it helped to carry the strip, as did its rogues’ gallery of weird and horrifying villains.

The name of the writer of this final Bulletman story has been lost to the years, but it was drawn by Bill Ward, who is best remembered for his work on the good girl cheesecake strip Torchy for Quality Comics. There are hints of Quality’s open-for-color style in his work on this story. It’s an attractive look for the most part.

For whatever reason, Bulletgirl’s garb is colored yellow here rather than its typical red. This happened semi-regularly in the strip’s last years, possibly because somebody was worried that the two leads looked too similar in panels together.

A far cry from the more outre threats the duo would contend with in their earlier years, by this point the criminals and menaces the pair faced had been toned down considerably. Fawcett was especially attuned to complaints from parents’ groups about the content of comic books and so always attempted to produce material that was entertaining and non-threatening.

This story ends in a pretty truncated fashion. And then that was it for Bulletman and Bulletgirl. They vanished without a trace, their strip replaced by other fare in the very next issue. They’d eventually return from limbo almost thirty years later in the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #135.

BHOC: JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #135