League of Extraordinary Oddballs: THE FACE

They say Justice is blind. If so, that’s handy because the latest hero to join the League of Extraordinary Oddballs has a kisser you’re better off not seeing. He’s Tony Trent, a crusading radio broadcaster who manages a second career as a hard-hitting crimefighter known as The Face.  And if ever a face was made for radio, it’s this one.

Like that Bruce Wayne guy, Tony Trent understands that “criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot” and so he sets out to exploit that weakness by adopting a scary appearance.  But you know what, it takes serious sewing skills (or a talented butler) to fashion a fancy cape and cowl, so why not take the easy way out and just slap on a really good Halloween mask?

We’re not just talking any old mask from Party City, though. This a really really good mask, maybe the best-made mask ever, and there will never be another one like it because the maker obligingly died right after making it for Tony. What a convenient development.

Yep, thinks Tony, I sure am lucky. Only one guy on Earth could make a mask like this, and he made it for me. And wouldn’t you know it, by sheer coincidence — honest! — he then proceeded to drop dead, covering my tracks by pure happy happenstance. What are the odds? Also, that that guy who lent me $10,000 mysteriously fell in front of a moving train before I could pay him back.  And the original owner of this car coincidentally fell off a roof, so he won’t mind me using it. What a run of luck I’m having this week. Yeah, that’s it; luck.

But wait, if the world’s ugliest mask fits Tony’s features exactly, doesn’t that mean his real face is repulsive, too?

Well anyway, the idea is that with his fearsome new visage, Tony can stroll confidently into all sorts of dangerous situations and while the bad guys are panicking, screaming, puking or whatever, he can punch them out before they can pull themselves together enough to shoot. And since this is a comic book, this “clever plan” seems to work.

In fact it works really well, and for several years.  As a bonus, it cuts way down on laborious tasks like dangling suspects out of windows by their ankles or beating them with a rubber hose to extract confessions. Turns out if you’re repulsive enough, people will agree to anything just to get you to leave the room.

The downside is that you’re going to end up frightening ordinary folks as much as you do criminals, so a lot of time is wasted trying to revive fainted damsels and catch fleeing men just to ask them simple questions like “which way did the robbers go?”  It’s a mug so horrifying that the sight of it makes stereotyped railroad porters lose their pigmentation in terror.

Whether employed against one gangster or a roomful, it makes no difference…the mask is all powerful.

“He’s got a gun, too!”  With a gun he could shoot us all dead!  Yeah sure, okay, but the point is, get a load of that face!

Alas, the seductive power of that problem-solving mask eventually leads to over-reliance.  Since even crossing the street involves a certain amount of risk-taking, Tony figures why should he ever go out unprotected?

Whatever she just dropped looks too big for a purse. I really hope it’s not a baby.

A mere rubber mask may seem like an unimaginative “costume” for a superhero, but it’s pretty consistent with Tony’s overall lack of imagination. For instance, he never quite masters the standard superhero skill of snappy repartee.

Finally about 50 issues in, things really start to get interesting.  By this time Tony has become a war correspondent and is captured by the Japanese and placed in an internment camp, but not before passing the mask on to an American flyer named Soggans, who uses it to terrify enemy pilots.  

That’s assuming of course that the enemy planes get close enough for the pilots to see his face in the cockpit.  But hey, it seems to work.  The only problem is that another American officer, one Captain Biggs who used to be a New York City policeman, is on the trail of The Face in the belief that he killed the old man who made the mask back in the very first story (we had our suspicions, too).

Biggs suspects Soggans…who by now IS the Face but not the same “Face” who knew the mask-maker… and is ready to arrest him if he can only find the mask in Soggan’s barracks.  Luckily, a pygmy picks this moment to steal the mask and so for the next few issues everyone is out to capture the little guy as he uses the mask to rule the jungle.

Soggans eventually gets the mask back but later is injured in combat and shipped home.  Meanwhile the original wearer, Tony Trent has been rescued from the Japanese POW camp and enlists in the U.S. Army, but not before revealing that he’s alarmingly fond of his mother.

With Tony having long since lost track of the mask and Soggans now back in the States, the mask ends up in the possession another active duty pilot, Willyum Bailey, whose ambitions are pretty scaled back compared to the first two owners.

Willyum’s sister convinces him he’d best ditch the mask before Captain Biggs tries to pin that murder rap on him, so he tosses it from his plane.

“That’s the last of the face,” he declares. But nope, the saga of the world’s ugliest mask is NOT over, not yet. In the next issue, we meet Chin-Ling, a Chinese-American who used to be a hoodlum named “Chinatown Charlie” but who enlisted in the Chinese army to help free his countrymen from their Japanese oppressors.  As luck would have it, the mask lands right at his feet.

Calling himself “General Lee-Ahng,” he uses the mask to become the leader of the Chinese Resistance , launching many successful raids on the Japanese before being fatally injured.  His exploits land him in the newspapers, and a group of combat journalists come to interview him, having recognized “The Face” in photos.  The group includes former Faces Tony Trent and Willyum Bailey, as well as that implacable manhunter Captain Biggs.  They arrive to find “Lee-Ahng” already deceased, and Biggs decides to settle once and for all the identity of The Face.

And so the saga of The Face at last comes to an end.  By the wildest of coincidences, the mask has made its way around the globe to end up on the face of a man Captain Biggs can place in New York at the time of the original murder, and that’s good enough for him to close the case. Tony Trent is no longer under suspicion, countless criminals as well as the Japanese army have been dealt major blows and that horrible, one of kind mask has gone up in flames on Lee-Ahng’s funeral pyre. Starting with the next issue, Tony Trent’s adventures continue as an unmasked soldier.

I set out to mock this strip, but darned if that wasn’t a pretty amazing saga for the time, with an epic scope and — in a rare move for the era — an actual conclusion.  But all things considered, I think The Face still definitely qualifies as an extraordinary oddball. All four of him.

If you think your eyes can bear it, you can read the saga of The Face starting in Big Shot Comics #1.