Toppers: Four Aces

 

Tailspin Tommy indulged the fantasies of kids who wanted to be fliers, and after Lindbergh's flight that was the dream floating around the heads of a LOT of kids. Kids ate, breathed and slept flying. If you went into the average middle school classroom in the late 1920s and asked for the top speed of a Curtiss CR-3 or which plane won the Thompson Trophy last year, you'd get a sea of hands shooting up in response.

The original topper to Tailspin Tommy was a sober affair, a one-panel history lesson titled Progress of Flight. However, when writer Glenn Chaffin left the strip at the end of 1933, artist Hal Forrest took on those chores and he evidently had no interest in writing scholarly features. Progress of Flight flew off into the sunset, replaced by a new slambang aerial adventure strip titled Four Aces on January 7 1934*. 

For what was just a single tier strip, Four Aces took on a ludicrously ambitious story of four fliers, one from each of the major allied nations of World War I. Larry Gale, the American, Ronald Newton the Brit, Anthony Garbilla the Italian and Maurice Dupont, the Frenchman. The story of the comrades-in-arms plays out like molasses at the rate of one quasi-daily strip per week, but manages to shoehorn plenty of action into each strip, if the story itself makes little headway. Eventually only the American flier is seen regularly, with the others functioning as the occasional deus ex machinae to get him out of tight jams as needed. The strip ran until June 16 1935* (episode #106), to be replaced by an instructional feature How To Fly. 

A bizarre footnote to this first run of the topper is that on two occasions it was signed by a different name than Hal Forrest -- the name signed to it on April 8 1934 and January 27 1935 was Harry Paul. Who is Harry Paul, you ask? Well, we don't really have to look far, because Hal Forrest was otherwise known by the full name Harry Paul Forrest.  Okay, so it's weird that the creator of the strip would occasionally use a pseudonym for himself, but what's even weirder is that in this period the last panel of the strip often has an empty box in the final panel, evidently for an artist signature, and it is blanked out. My pet theory? I think that blanked out box was originally enclosing the signature of a ghost, and Forrest generally just blanked it out, but in a few cases substituted his own name, albeit not in its familiar form. Why? Gee, I dunno. Anyone have a theory?

Four Aces returned on March 22 1936* once the How To Fly instructional feature had run its course. This time the strip was allowed a little elbow room, appearing as a two-tier strip. The strip also looks  a lot better now that Reynold Brown was assisting Forrest. Strip numbering was restarted at #1.

In the revived strip the war is now over and our four heroes are running a flying circus, touring the American midwest showing off their aerial prowess to the rubes. Of course they rarely have time for that once they become involved in busting up aerial criminal rings, chasing foreign saboteurs, and other high-flying adventures. In 1940 the aces were in a South American jungle when they picked up two new characters, gorgeous gal Nadine and her jungle boy pal Pogodanda. Forrest seemed so taken with this pair that they eventually evicted the aces from their own strip. 

The revived strip ran until the Tailspin Tommy Sunday itself was cancelled as of March 15 1942**, right in mid-story.

* Source: Casper Tribune-Herald.

** Source: McAllen Daily Press, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.