Episode 14: The Ray Emerges

Simon Carver

[warmly] Welcome to the show. This is the 14th episode of Distinguished Comics Radio, airing Friday, February 7th, 1941. I’m Simon Carver, speaking to you from London tonight, where the blackout is not a metaphor, it’s the actual weather of the soul -- drawn curtains, dim lamps, and everybody listening for engines.

Robert Reed

[calm] And I’m Robert Reed in the New York studio, with the switchboard behaving itself so far. Simon, that phrase you just used -- the blackout is the weather of the soul -- that’s a humdinger. Because the book we’re covering tonight gives us a hero who doesn’t just step out of shadow... he cuts through it like a searchlight off Lake Michigan.

Simon Carver

[reflective] Exactly. Over here, darkness has become organized. It’s civil defense, habit, discipline. Streetlamps dulled, windows covered, people learning to move by memory. So when I opened Smash Comics number 14 and found a new feature called The Ray, it felt oddly timely. Not because he’s realistic -- Lord no -- but because he proposes something very direct: what if light itself fought back?

Robert Reed

[excited] And brother, they sell that promise right on the cover of Smash 14. Ten cents, September issue, and there he is in the little badge portrait -- bright yellow head, black eye-mask, clean as a whistle. Not a grim goblin, not a circus bruiser. He looks like somebody carved outta a flashlight beam and gave him fists.

Simon Carver

The yellow is the thing that sticks. Superman wears strong primary colors; Batman arrives as a silhouette; Sandman hides in that gas-mask dread. But The Ray is almost anti-shadow by design. Yellow body, dark accent running across the chest and down the sides, red cape in these early stories, and then that beam effect -- sometimes from his eyes, sometimes around his whole body, sometimes the entire panel seems to flare because he’s entered it.

Robert Reed

[questioning tone] Lemme ask you this, Simon. You’re sitting in London, where real searchlights and real air-raid wardens are part of the wallpaper now. Did this fella read as comforting to you, or too fanciful?

Simon Carver

[pauses] Comforting, actually. Not because he resembles anything outside my window. Because he’s so unapologetically symbolic. In a moment when people are peering upward into darkness, anxious about what may be descending, here comes a hero built on the opposite motion: he rises, he shines, he reveals. That’s a very old promise in a very new costume.

Robert Reed

And it’s a fresh promise for Quality, too. Smash Comics only started up in August of 1939 as an all-new-material book. Now in number 14 they’re planting a new flag. Not another fedora detective, not another generic masked rider. They say: here’s a bolt of light in long underwear -- well, almost long underwear -- and he’s gonna make this joint look different.

Simon Carver

[curious] “Look different” is exactly right. Before we even get to the story mechanics, The Ray announces a visual program. The pages want brightness, weird science, clean shapes, speed. He feels like a fresh visual promise before he fully feels like a settled character. And that’s what we’re tracing tonight through Smash Comics 14, 15, 16, and 17 -- the moment an odd idea becomes a workable hero.

Robert Reed

[excited] Alright, Smash 14. This first story is a pip. We begin with Professor Styne -- or Stine, the lettering leans a little one way then the other -- working on a “cosmic projector.” Right away, that name tells you the strip wants SCIENCE with fireworks. He’s trying to harness cosmic rays, and his helper Anton is itching to steal the formula. Cheap crook brain meets fancy laboratory hardware. That’s comics stew, pal.

Simon Carver

And the machine itself matters. The apparatus isn’t just a box with a label slapped on it. It’s all coils and chambers and bursting energy, the sort of thing Quality’s artists love to draw because it gives them circles, cables, diagonals, and a reason for light to explode across the page. Then a cosmic storm -- the captions call it that -- arrives, Anton tampers, and suddenly the professor is transformed.

Robert Reed

[leans in] That cosmic storm is the first sticky image for me. Not “there was an accident.” No. A STORM of cosmic force, the projector cracking open, and then this spooky beat where the professor’s body turns strange -- almost shadow-black in one panel, then half there, half not. He becomes “The Ray,” and the book treats that like both a miracle and a laboratory spill.

Simon Carver

Yes -- both scientific and uncanny. That’s the balance. He isn’t a wizard, at least not in the strip’s own explanation. But the effect on the page is eerie. He can project a beam from his eyes. He can move with impossible speed. He can appear like a shaft of light cutting through a room. In one early scene, a crook tries to make sense of what he’s seeing and can only bark that it must be some kind of “ray of light.” The strip practically names the hero through fear.

Robert Reed

And I love that the crooks don’t react like sober scientists. They react like mugs who just saw a ghost crawl out of a radio cabinet. One fellow says the room’s full of sparks, another figures somebody’s using “an invisible army,” and suddenly The Ray’s punching, diving, bouncing off walls, and the whole gang’s business meeting goes straight into the ash can.

Simon Carver

[laughs softly] “Invisible army” is a good token, because it tells you what the feature is chasing. Multiplication through light. He can be one figure, one beam, or a whole disturbance in space. That makes him different from a plain strongman. His power is not merely force. It’s presence plus radiance plus bafflement.

Robert Reed

Wait -- “presence plus radiance plus bafflement.” I’m writing that on the wall over the mike. Because that’s the exact flavor. He doesn’t just sock a hood. He makes the hood feel like the laws of the room changed without warning.

Simon Carver

There’s also an odd moral atmosphere in 14. The professor is not introduced as a wise public crusader in the Superman manner. He becomes altered by his own invention and then moves into a criminal world that feels a little feverish -- betrayal, stolen formulae, experiments, double-crosses. The Ray enters the comics page as almost a living consequence of scientific ambition.

Robert Reed

[skeptical] See, here’s where I push just a hair. In number 14 I don’t think they’ve totally sorted whether he’s a protector or an avenging lab accident. And I LIKE that. It’s a little crooked around the edges. The book knows he’s exciting before it knows the exact shape of his Sunday manners.

Simon Carver

I agree, actually. That uncertainty is part of the appeal. The first installment is not polished in the way later star features become polished. But the hero’s emblem is there from the jump: yellow figure, black mask, beam of force, red cape, science-strangeness, and a page design that wants him to feel like illumination itself has grown muscles.

Robert Reed

And brother, that is a STRANGE sentence to say out loud: illumination itself has grown muscles. But that’s the whole enchilada. You hear “The Ray” and think maybe a gadget man, maybe a detective with a flashlight. Nope. He’s a human spotlight with a prizefighter’s build.

Simon Carver

[warmly] Which, I suspect, is why the feature lands. A hero who is essentially a weapon of light sounds absurd until you see him on the page. Then it becomes immediate. The emblem carries the idea. You don’t need three columns of explanation. You look once and understand the promise.

Simon Carver

Now numbers 15 and 16 are where the feature starts learning its own gait. Smash 15, October 1940, gives us a splash page that almost behaves like a poster: “The Ray,” by E. Lectron, with a large figure in front of whirring machinery and little inset scenes around him. Even the pseudonym is a joke with purpose -- E. Lectron. Electricity by way of a wink.

Robert Reed

[chuckles] E. Lectron. That’s cute enough to steal hubcaps. And the issue itself gets quicker. You can feel them figuring out, “Alright, this fella should not trudge through exposition. He should streak.” The panels get more vertical plunges, more sudden dives, more beam effects slashing across the room. He’s casing his beam on villains, like the cover says, but he’s also learning how to be a COMIC-BOOK body.

Simon Carver

That’s crucial. In 15, there’s a stronger sense of panel-to-panel momentum. A villain with a grotesque face and a red cloak -- again, very theatrical Quality villainy -- threatens women, boasts of strange influence, and the Ray enters not with solemn grandeur but with abrupt, kinetic interruption. He dives. He catches. He redirects bodies and danger. In one splendid panel he’s transformed into a mysterious light-path, almost a ribbon, as if the body has become trajectory.

Robert Reed

That light-path panel is the fact of the chapter for me. Not just “he moves fast.” They DRAW speed as if he’s not made of meat the way the rest of us are. He becomes a streak, a flare, a little road of brightness between point A and point B. That’s smarter than just giving him speed lines and calling it a day.

Simon Carver

And then there’s the way the art presses against the panel borders. Sometimes a limb juts beyond the frame, or the beam blasts across the gutter, or the whole composition leans so hard diagonally that the boxes feel temporary. Not fully shattered page design, not yet, but pushing. Testing. Asking whether a hero of light ought to be confined by tidy rectangles.

Robert Reed

[excited] Yeah! That’s the kind of stuff I eat up with a spoon. Comics started in these nice little fenced lawns -- panel, panel, panel -- and now the best strips keep hopping the fence. Batman’s doing it with vertical plunges, Superman does it with body momentum, and The Ray does it with GLARE. The light itself wants outta the panel. That ain’t an accident.

Simon Carver

Then Smash 16, November 1940, sharpens the feature again. The opening page puts a giant close-up of the Ray’s masked face beside a looming villain with long features and a great horn or bugle-like instrument. The story turns around news reports, sabotage, a waterfront or dockside scheme, and a criminal named Jennings moving goods and power through the dark. That opening is so much more confident than the tentative mystery atmosphere of 14.

Robert Reed

Jennings is the token. The moment the strip gives us a named crook with a racket -- not just “weird menace in a lab,” but a guy with shipments, notes, a dock commissioner, and a scheme -- the whole thing sits up straighter. Our shiny fellow finally has a proper target. He can race boats, smash apparatus, zip through trap-doors, and there’s a social shape to the villainy.

Simon Carver

And in 16 the mechanics of movement become wonderfully legible. The Ray springs from a car in a flash, follows a ship off course, drops as a shaft of light to the deck, bursts through walls, and hurls himself down corridors “like a bullet.” The captions keep trying to translate velocity into whatever comparison they can seize: bullet, shaft, flash, glare. You can feel the strip straining happily for the right vocabulary.

Robert Reed

[laughs] “Straining happily” is right. It’s like the feature’s dictionary got into a fistfight with a light socket. And I mean that kindly. There’s an eagerness in 16. One panel shows him swinging with an unconscious thug on his shoulder; another has him smashing a searchlight station; another has the apparatus explode in a blinding glare. That issue moves like a brass band on roller skates.

Simon Carver

Let me try to explain it back. The first story, number 14, establishes The Ray as a weird scientific phenomenon. Number 15 turns him into a better visual performer. Number 16 gives him the broader comic-book grammar -- crooks, chase, vehicles, docks, public stakes, and those layouts that no longer look cautious. Is that fair?

Robert Reed

[responds quickly] That’s fair with one little tune-up. Number 16 also makes him feel less lonely. Not in the friendship sense -- he’s still a pretty solitary beam of business -- but in the sense that the WORLD around him is finally built to receive him. Boats, towers, machines, city roofs, goons with guns. He’s got furniture to break now.

Simon Carver

[laughs] “Furniture to break” may be the plainest and best way to put it. A superhero needs an environment that can dramatize his powers. The Ray needs darkness, machinery, long sight-lines, and men who think concealment will save them. Once the feature gives him those, it begins to hum.

Robert Reed

[warmly] Then we hit Smash 17, December 1940, and to my eye this is where the feature clicks into place. The cover already tells you the package is settled enough to sell. “Featuring The Ray.” He’s in bright yellow, swinging into a gang around a barred searchlight globe. No apology, no maybe. He belongs on the cover line now.

Simon Carver

The story itself is a lovely mixture of dockside crime and impossible intervention. There’s a waterfront front, missing ships, a reward offered for information, and once again Jennings skulking around with his trumpet-like instrument and his sneering certainty. The Ray is no longer merely a strange by-product of science; he’s become the answer to a criminal pattern.

Robert Reed

That $5 reward notice on the opening page is such a funny little concrete touch. Five dollars! Not five thousand. Five. It makes the whole affair feel like a city notice pinned in a hallway, while the hero stalking around it is pure moonshine fantasy.

Simon Carver

And notice how the morality sharpens. In 17, light is not just spectacle. It is rescue. He moves to protect, to expose, to interrupt. A captain at the docks, a commissioner, innocent people in the line of danger -- the stakes are civic now. Darkness is where the racket hides; light is how the hero refuses concealment.

Robert Reed

There’s a panel sequence I can’t shake: the Ray streaking out over the water as a WIDE yellow beam, then dropping onto the ship, then later bursting through rooms again when Jennings thinks he’s gotten clear. That’s the feature’s identity in one run. Men plot in corners, and this fella answers by turning the whole horizon into a flashlight.

Simon Carver

Yes, and the strip has settled the balance between mystery and reassurance. Earlier he was nearly unsettling in his own right. By 17, he remains uncanny to the crooks, but not to us. We know his side. The menace belongs to the villains now; the strangeness belongs to the method of rescue.

Robert Reed

[reflective] I had a real personal reaction to that, I gotta admit. First time through 14, I thought, “This is a neat gimmick, maybe too odd to stick.” By 17? I’m sold. Fast. That’s the thing that surprised me. Four issues. September to December. He goes from a science-lab oddball to a full workable hero in one season. That’s quicker than a kid learning to ride a Schwinn downhill.

Simon Carver

The “four issues” is the number that sticks with me too. September, October, November, December. In that short run the creators teach themselves what the feature wants. They define his silhouette, his motion, his enemies, and his moral stance. That’s not accidental growth; that’s workshop craft under pressure.

Robert Reed

And the moral stance is clean enough for me to salute it. I like my heroes straight. The Ray may arrive by crooked science, but by 17 he’s using that light to protect the decent folks and monkey-wrench the rats. Black and white -- or in his case, black and YELLOW.

Simon Carver

[smiles in voice] That’s your Chicago civics coming through. But yes, there’s something satisfyingly direct about him. In a period full of disguised motives, secret agents, sabotage scares, and newspaper stories about hidden forces moving behind events, here is a hero who makes revelation itself into action. He doesn’t merely find the truth. He shines it.

Simon Carver

That brings us to the makers and the house style around them. Quality Comics is still a comparatively young concern -- Everett M. “Busy” Arnold building this line after seeing there was room for all-new comic-book material, not just reprints. Smash Comics number 1 arrived in August 1939, and this whole outfit has the energy of a company trying things on quickly, seeing what catches, and backing strong visuals hard.

Robert Reed

Busy Arnold is a great name for a comic-book publisher, by the way. Sounds like a fellow who’d sell you four new features and a printing press before lunch. And one of the reasons Quality pops is that early connection to Eisner & Iger -- that packaging shop turning out material for publishers who wanted the new stuff fast and lively.

Simon Carver

Will Eisner matters here, and so does the studio atmosphere around him. He’s a New York man, young still, but already central to the business of making these pages brisk, dramatic, and saleable. Eisner & Iger supplies not just characters but a way of thinking: dynamic openings, strong silhouettes, urban and mechanical texture, and an impatience with static storytelling.

Robert Reed

And then there’s Lou Fine. Folks, if you haven’t yet learned that name, tuck it in your hatband. Lou Fine is very much with us in 1941, and he’s one of the surest hands in comics. Born in New York in 1914, trained at Grand Central Art School and Pratt, worked through Eisner & Iger, and when he draws a body in motion it looks honest. Not fake fancy stuff. Honest draftsmanship, like a machine part that also knows how to dance.

Simon Carver

“1914” is the anchor there. He is not some elder statesman looking down from Olympus. He’s a young artist in the thick of the medium while it’s being invented. And what strikes me in Fine’s work -- whether on Doll Man, the Ray material around this house style, or covers -- is elegance under pressure. The page can become chaotic with machines, beams, capes, fists, yet his drawing usually keeps the action readable.

Robert Reed

Readable! That’s the whole ballgame. Anybody can throw spaghetti at a page and call it excitement. Fine gives you SPEED without losing the road map. A guy dives here, a beam cuts there, a hood goes through a door, and you always know what hit what. That’s worth its weight in Wrigley gum.

Simon Carver

And his confidence changes how a feature feels. Even when the script is still experimenting -- and the Ray absolutely is in these four issues -- the drawing can make the experiment feel persuasive. Fine and the better hands in this orbit know how to turn a wild premise into something inevitable for eight pages.

Robert Reed

I also like that the pages sometimes half-break their own borders, like we were talking about earlier. That isn’t sloppiness. That’s confidence. It says, “This action is too lively to sit politely in its little boxes.” Quality seems real good at that right now -- fast adventure, bold silhouettes, machines humming, heroes leaping like they’ve got somewhere urgent to be.

Simon Carver

And that, perhaps, is the future of quality adventure -- if I may borrow the company’s own promise. Not merely stronger men or stranger costumes, but pages that move better. Pages that know how to sell force, mystery, and civic excitement all at once. The Ray is not yet the most fully developed hero on the stands, but these four issues show how quickly a good visual premise can become a real asset in the hands of capable craftsmen.

Robert Reed

[warmly] Next standard broadcast, folks, we’re back to Sandman 1940 -- Adventure Comics 46 through 57, All-Star, and the World’s Fair material. So if you wanna read ahead, start digging those up now before Simon starts haunting your dreams in a gas mask about continuity.

Simon Carver

[laughs softly] That is a grotesque but not wholly inaccurate image. And if you’ve got letters, favorite Ray panels, disagreements about whether Smash 16 or 17 is the true turning point, or any thoughts at all, write to us at distinguishedcomicsradio@gmail.com.

Robert Reed

That’s distinguishedcomicsradio@gmail.com -- a modern little contraption Mr. Moore from the future keeps insisting is perfectly normal. I still say it sounds like a telegraph office got hit by lightning.

Simon Carver

[softly] From London, where the streets go dark early and a hero made of light feels like a rather decent companion, I’m Simon Carver.

Robert Reed

And from New York, where the studio lamp is bright and the Cubs still ain’t in season, I’m Robert Reed.

Simon Carver

This has been Distinguished Comics Radio on KDCR. Keep your courage up, keep your eyes on the funny pages, and good night.

Robert Reed

Good night, folks -- and if the world looks dim, don’t be surprised if the comics hand you a beam.