Story title: "Loot of the Bengal Sea, Part I"
Cover Date: October 1937
By: Norman Daniels and Fred Guardineer
Alright, here it is! The start of the CMRO! And who's the first to debut? Spider-man? The Avengers? An X-man, perhaps? No, silly! It's Dave Dean! What's that? You don't know who Dave Dean is? Well, me neither!
Right off the bat, there are two big surprises. First, this isn't really a comic book. It's a text story. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you (Personally, I'm not too big on it. I do read regular books, but in this case, it ends up taking a lot more time to finish for not too much extra quality or depth.) The second one, though, objectively sucks: The first page of the story is missing. Not even from the scan, it's basically lost media. Unless you have another original copy, there's no way to read it. It's not a huge deal, but it kinda sucks, especially because it's the very first page of the (expanded) order. Anyway, it's not all bad, the CMRO notes for the entry contain a summary of the page in the comments. No idea where they got it, but here it is if you're interested:
'Dave Dean, accompanied by his friend Shorty, is captaining a freighter that carries (in addition to the crew, scientists and a Hindu priest), a million and a half dollars worth of uncut diamonds for the Maharajah of Nechal. Dave's ship gets an S.O.S. from the Mandora, a ship that had disappeared mysteriously with a like shipment of gems. They find the Mandora drifting aimlessly and Dave, Shorty and a few men head out in a small launch for the helpless vessel...'
The few illustrations that this thing does have are admittedly pretty good.
So there you go, Dave is a sort of sea captain kind of person. That's cool, the sea is a good setting, but I'm kind of worried about how many "Pirate Attack" stories they can come up with before the whole thing gets stale.
Anyway, after that, they get on the abandoned ship and find a somber atmosphere awaiting them. Dave leaves his allies behind (for safety reasons) and heads to the radio room alone, like the macho man he is. He finds it in complete shambles (like most of the ship) and figures the operator must be dead, given the blood splattered on the floor. I gotta say, the atmosphere throughout all this is pretty decent. It almost feels like horror. And I love horror!
Now, if the missing page wasn't bad enough, there's some incorrectly ordered text here. The first paragraph of the first column of page 2 should go after the rest of the column, but it's at the top. Anyway, again, the CMRO notes save the day.
Anyway, continuing his exploration of the ship, resident skipper Dave Dean finds the whole place covered with some kind of acid. His partner Shorty arrives and they discuss the situation.
Shorty wants to bring more people in to investigate, but Dave has a "bad feeling" (dude, just say you don't know what's going on) and doesn't want to put them in danger.
Alone again, Dave goes below deck and finds more destruction and two rotten bodies, so he figures the slaughter can't be recent.
Also, what's with the rats? And the big-ass spider?
Did it swim to the ship? Are we close to Australia?
Heading to the engine room, Dave hears (and sees!) the prelude to an explosion in the form of a hissing sound and a flickering light, so he runs upstairs and commands everyone to jump into the water.
How long was that wick? It gave time for everyone to be safe on the water by the time the explosion happened, including the people who were inside the ship, and not just standing on deck! Anyway, back on the launch, Shorty reckons the person who triggered the explosion must've gone down with the ship. Not quite tho. Apparently, the bomb was already planted and was set off by an already-lit candle. I guess they knew exactly when Dave and the others would be there. Or maybe they just wanted to destroy evidence. At any rate, we finish the story with a nice mystery and a list of suspects: The passengers of the ship. Apparently, one of them wants to steal the diamonds and kill everyone in the process.
In case you haven't caught on by now, this is a two-parter, and you can read it here. Part two is on the next issue.
Let's move on to the ratings:
Quality/Enjoyment: 3/5
I was going to give it a lower rating for the sin of not being even a comic book, but this was actually pretty good! I enjoyed the mystery and the atmosphere throughout, and it wasn't even that long a read.
Still, I would've preferred this in comic-book format, and the missing page and poorly arranged text lowers the overall quality of the whole thing.
Historical/Cultural/Narrative Significance: 2/5
Dave Dean couldn't be farther away from being a relevant character: He has like six appearances with no crossovers and only one of them was even published by Marvel (On a reprint!). However, as small as his significance is, I do believe that being the oldest 616 character deserves some merit.
And that's it! Boy was this long. Probably my longest entry yet. Next time, part two of this story. That one's also text so the next entry might take a little while too (bear with me, this blog is the "on-the-side" of my already on-the-side stuff). So thanks for reading and have a nice rest of your day!
