Miracle Comics
Entry updated 16 February 2026. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1940-1941). Hillman Periodicals. 4 issues. Artists include Jack Alderman and Ed Kressy. Script writers include Emile Schurmacher. 68 pages, each issue with 7-8 long strips and a short text story, plus short non-fiction strips as filler.
Sky Wizard is the world's greatest Scientist; he dresses a little like Buck Rogers and has a Muslim bodyguard named Kee-Shan. #1-#3's strips are a serial in which he has designed the Stratosphere Plane, which can make the journey from the USA to China in 8 hours, only for its pilot to be kidnapped by the Unholy One, with Sky Wizard working to rescue him. He uses many Inventions: in #1 we see a futuristic car; a gun that shoots a paralysing Ray; a "Directional Telray Machine" which shows images around the world (see Spy-Rays); and a "Power Strength Formula" using an "ant virus" to give our hero super strength (see Superpowers). He travels on his "Sky Island", the ground beneath his laboratory and its surrounds being made of "rubberiam", a "metallic rubber" that can be inflated to float in the air. As the adventure continues, further creations are revealed. Our hero is accompanied by teenagers Pat and Jerry, the test pilot's children: in #2 Sky Wizard gives a Weapon to Jerry (a boy), but not to Pat (a girl) (see Women in SF). The Unholy One proves to be a stereotyped Asian (see Yellow Peril) with an army of winged men. #4's story involves Robots robbing banks, sent by a Mad Scientist who plans to rule the world.
Dash Dixon, Man of Might, agrees to be a scientist's guinea-pig for his Immortality formula: "to keep the perpetual life rays in Dash's body ... [he] makes a special uniform for him out of a special pliable metal". In #1 he is told "Your physical powers have been tripled", in #2 becoming "more than tripled"; since we have seen him leap hundreds of feet into the air and he is called a "super man" (#1), this seems understated. There is something of a reset in #3, where an injection of the formula immunizes him against death for 24 hours and give him the strength of 50 men. In #1 the setting seems to be the future, but this is not apparent in later stories. Blanda the Jungle Queen is a female Tarzan (see Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), but less typical as she rules a tribe of animal worshippers who sacrifice people to lions. She falls for white hunter Greg Martin; not wanting to lose her, a group of Gorillas forcibly escort him out of the territory, but when there is an attempt to usurp Blanda they allow his return to rescue her (#1 and #2) (last appearance #3). K-7, "the famous radio character", is an American secret agent whose strips sometimes include genre elements, such as a new type of bomb and Hypnotism.
#4 has Bullet Bob (a one-off strip) using a professor's new type of submarine (resembling a spaceship) to seek Atlantis. After entering an undersea cave he finds it: "a dream-like City inside the sea mountain", where his vessel floats in "semi-liquid air" created by Atlantean Technology. Their King informs Bob that "for centuries we have been enslaved by an unseen master intellect"; Bob, accompanied by the King's smitten daughter, enters the "Hall of Aeons" where the tyrant resides. There they awaken an old man in a trance who announces he is ready to conquer the surface with his "occult powers" (see Psi Powers). Fortunately Bob's submarine has a Death Ray and the Hall is destroyed.
Miracle Comics' strips were a mixed bag of genres, including circus, Western, desert and crime fighting. Sky Wizard and Dash Dixon were part of the boom in comic book Superheroes who debuted 1939-1942. Each makes use of a "Yellow Peril" plot, whilst the portrayal of Africans in Blanda is also very much of its time (see Race in SF). The storytelling is fairly primitive (that for Dash Dixon is particularly inept); Sky Wizard and Bullet Bob are the best strips. Blanda is of some interest through having an unsympathetic protagonist and being an early example of the female Tarzan trope, though by #3 Greg is virtually the lead character and the Feminist elements are weak. [SP]
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