In the early 1930s, newspaper syndicates rejected Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman. But by the early 194os, well aware of their mistake, they got busy trying to create their own supermen and superwomen.
“Holed up ‘in his secret laboratory, secluded deep in a wood,’ Dr. Van Lear develops ‘Plus Power,’ a chemical which turns his nameless subject into someone ‘all-powerful in body and mind,’” wrote comics historian Jeff Rovin.
Thus was born the armored superhero Red Knight, a June 1940 addition to the roster of Register and Tribune Syndicate newspaper comic strips.
“Possessing super strength and invisibility, the Red Knight was nonetheless susceptible to a knock on the head,” Rovin noted. “He also lost his super powers if he did not return to the lab for periodic recharges.”
Created by writer John Welch and artist Jack McGuire, The Red Knight ran three years.
“By the early 1940s, the superhero trend was pretty well established in comic books, but they were rare in newspaper comics,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Superman, Batman and a handful of others made it in both venues; and Lady Luck, Miss Fury and Invisible Scarlet O’Neill started in newspapers and later established a presence in comic books. But only The Red Knight started in daily papers and never got into comic books at all.”
“In addition to the usual super strength and super speed, Red could turn invisible and control people’s minds. The one thing he couldn’t do was fly — in fact, he didn’t even have the equivalent of a Batmobile. Frequently, he reached the super-deed site in a mere taxicab.”
“After about three years of superheroing, Red got shot down on a flying mission to Japan, and thus cut off from recharging his Power Plus,” Markstein wrote. “He got de-powered, thus becoming non-super adventurer Alan Knight (no relation to Sandra or Ted), giving him a mortal-style name for the first time.”
“The Knight’s adventures, a pale echo of the Superman exploits, were not quite suspenseful or gripping enough to hold the reader,” wrote comics historian Maurice Horn. “McGuire’s excellent (if hurried) artwork could not save the feature, which folded in 1943.
“The Red Knight was not a very remarkable strip — albeit pleasant in a mindless way — but it featured the first superhero especially created for the newspaper page and, as such, deserves mention.”
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