All-American #20, opens with Ma Hunkle and Scribbly Jibbet (along with a bunch of other characters) in a police station, trying to the get the police to do something to rescue two kids (Dinky and Sisty) who were kidnapped (in the previous issue) by racketeers. The police can’t (or won’t) do anything as the head racketeer is too powerful and too well-connected.

Ma Hunkle, storms out of the police station. On the ride home, one of the characters says “I’ll betcha that if th’ Green Lantern wus on the job, we’d have those kids back in a minute.”

Ma Hunkle asks who Green Lantern is and is told “He’s this guy who waits for something like this to happen. Then he puts on his mysterious costume so nobody’ll recognize him and ZINGO!He comes to the rescue.”

Ma says “Hmmm…izzat so?”. The next page reiterates the previous dialogue stressing that since GL wears a costume, he can “go to town” and no one’ll know who he is. About 2 pages later (after much mayhem is inflicted on the bad-guys by Dinky and Sisty), Red Tornado makes her first appearance.

I dunno. I guess that’s something I should look into!

In name and comical tone only. JO’s version was a uniformed patrolman, a virtual dead ringer for one of Henry Boltinoff’s old DC cartoon filler characters, Casey the Cop, rather than the would–be independent sleuth–in–business–suit as seen in the old comics pages reproduced above. To be fair to John, at that point this longtime Spectre fan didn’t know it wasn’t consistent with the original depiction. On the other hand, I SHOULD have, as Popp was well–described in a text piece in the last issue of Spec’s first self–titled comic in the 1960s, a copy of which I had obtained in the 80s.

On Percival Popp, he is still a character in DC, or at least, was. He showed up in Ostrander’s Spectre run.

The urban legend Brian claims is untrue contains the proviso, “in the comic books,” and he then points out that it actually happened in the newspaper comic strip. Yeah, big difference! He has done that a few too many times, most significantly in suggesting that there was a belief that Dr. Henry Pym appeared in comics “before the Fantastic Four.” While there is no question that Hank appeared in a one-shot weird story before becoming the costumed Ant-Man, I had never heard a suggestion that it predated FF #1. Frankly, a number of his refutations are based on similarly dubious (deliberately inserted?) technicalities. Conversely, there are equally dubious confirmations. For one, the presence of “Percival Popp, the Super Cop” in, and his effect on, the 1940s Spectre series is so notorious that it is difficult to believe that anyone who had heard also harbored any doubts of its truth. Nevertheless, I do in general enjoy this feature. No offense intended, Brian. While I’ve got YOUR attention, Brian, how about doing a piece about one of those Hank Pym-like situations where in reality Marvel had altered the old weird story when they reprinted it to retroactively tie it to a subsequently created character?

An obscure book, but an interesting one.

I’m pretty sure that the “Superman dailies” collections of recent years have covered the sequence as well.