Created by Kin Platt (?)
The Agatha Detective Agency was a part of the supporting cast of Nedor’s Captain Future, a costumed superhero very much in the Superman mode who appeared regularly in superhero anthology Startling Comics in the early nineteen forties, alongside such other characters as Pyroman and The Fighting Yank. The agency had just two members: young, attractive redhead GRACE ADAMS (whose boyfriend was the captain’s mild-mannered alter-ego Dr. Andrew Bryant)and her wealthy spinster aunt AGATHA, a slender, bespectacled and slightly eccentric older woman who’d supplied the seed money for the firm.
After Captain Future rescued Grace and Agatha from kidnappers in issue #7, the two women decided to set up a detective agency and continue to track down criminals. Which was all well and good, but their reliance on Captain Future to rescue them whenever they were invariably captured by the bad guys (often Nazis), and to assist them in bringing the villains to justice, wasn’t exactly a blow for the sisterhood.
Unfortunately, Grace seemed to spend a lot of time bored, sitting around her office, waiting for a case although, according to Public Domain Superheroes, “Grace and Agatha were both good detectives and scrappy fighters. Agatha often used her umbrella as a weapon.” Maybe, but mostly they were there to be rescued, and to provide an “in” for Captain Future to get involved.
Just to rub it in, Grace, much like Lois Lane, never quite caught on that her worry-wart, stick-in-the-mud boyfriend was actually Captain Future, although she frequently wished he had “just a bit of Captain Future’s recklessness.”
Uh-huh.
It’s all incredibly hokey, and the war-time plots provide plenty of excuses for some eyebrow-raising sexism and racism, but it’s about par for the course for the era.
COMICS
- STARTLING COMICS
(1940-48, Nedor Comics)
Captain Future’s first appearance: #1
Grace Adams’ first appearance: May 1941, #7
Artwork: Kin Platt, Alex Schomburg?, Jack Alderman, Ken Battefield, Edd Ashe, Hing Chu?- “Kidnappers and Quicksand” (May 1941, #7)
- “The Lady detectives and the Dope Smugglers” (July 1941, #8)
- “The Avenger Strikes” (August 1941, #9)
- “The Snatched Scientists” (September 1941, #10)
- “Judge Newton’s Fascist Front” (November 1941, #11)
- “Slick Davis’s Gambling Shakedown” (January 1942, #12)
- “Ranke’s Battleship Theft” (February 1942, #13)
- “The Attack of the Lemurians” (April 1942, #14)
- “untitled” (June 1942, #15)
- “untitled” (August 1942, #16)
- “The Return of Diablo” (October 1942, #17)
- “untitled” (December 1942, #18)
- “untitled” (February 1943, #19)
- “The Ionizer Murders” (March 1942, #20)
- “untitled” (May 1943, #21)
- “untitled” (July 1943, #22)
- “Skulduggery In Canada” (September 1943, #23)
- “untitled” (November 1943, #24)
- “The Magnet Menace” (November 1943, #25)
- “untitled” (July 1945, #34)
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
