This is just the first part of the long and fascinating history of Sniffer, which encompasses a lot of other characters and genres along the way! Part One - How the gang got together!
Actually, Marvel Comics almost certainly didn't steal the "Deadly Dozen" name from the Deadly Dozen who first appeared in Lev Gleason Comics in 1941; they were stealing the concept from the 1967 Dirty Dozen movie and just picked the most obvious D-word for their version. But Marvel definitely did steal another famous comics D-word from Lev Gleason, and our story starts in the very popular forties comic, "Daredevil"!
The bichromatic boomerang-wielding superhero had first appeared as a backup strip in Silver Streak Comics #6, cover date September 1940 (published in July) and was if not actually "the greatest name in comics" as that cover claims, certainly popular enough to quickly be promoted to his own title, the first issue cover-dated July 1941. In his own comic, Daredevil was written and drawn by Charles Biro, a very big name in comics history, and the comic kept running all the way to 1956, when Lev Gleason went out of business - although by that time superheroes were all but gone and forgotten, and Daredevil had long since disappeared from his own comic, which now starred the Little Wise Guys. Marvel Comics remembered the hero, though, and quite deliberately swiped the now-available name for their own latest hero when he launched in 1964. That Daredevil is still being published in his own comic today.
But back in 1941, the fifth issue of "Daredevil" was a standard 64-page comic (not counting the covers) with a host of different features. Adventure! War! Intrigue! Sports! Patriotism! Mystery! The contents page on the inside front cover lists them in a rather strange order, , but the only one we're interested in here is the main event, Daredevil himself. His 13-page story starts with a notice that "The Case of the Mysterious Trunk", advertised last month, won't be appearing until next issue. Instead, we get a story that starts out as a tale about a machine that can predict whether or not a person is capable of murder, and turns into a story about a nationwide convention of criminals getting together to kill Daredevil.
It's not until page 9 that we see they've assembled a team of twelve deadly killers!
The Deadly Dozen - Crusher, Egghead, Snake Eyes, Skully, Benito, Butcher, Giant Killer, Owl, Satan, Sniffer, Turk and Lady Killer all line up for inspection. Sniffer clearly stands out from the crowd, by virtue of being the only one who does anything other than just standing there. He displays his unusual sniffing abilities, and it's immediately obvious that Charles Biro likes him and wants us all to like him too!
Daredevil spends the first half of page 10 beating up the generic crooks, then escapes, with the Deadly Dozen sent out to find and kill him. Daredevil beats them all up, one or two at a time, over the next couple of pages. Not one of them gets any kind of personality beyond a namecheck. Sniffer, still sniffing, is the last of them, and after the whole Dozen have been handed over to the cops, Daredevil speaks to the readers, asking them "Which of the twelve would you like to see me tangle with again?"
This isn't much of a contest. Eleven of the twelve have done nothing, and only Sniffer is at all noticeable in the story we've just read. It really looks like Charles Biro wants to tell Sniffer stories, and wants to get some reader feedback to convince Lev Gleason that that's what the kids want to see. Rigging the results of a popularity contest is very much the kind of thing Sniffer would do in the future, so it's very appropriate.
Sure enough, three months later (Daredevil spent #6 battling a wolfman and #7 finally exploring the much-delayed case of the mysterious trunk), it's the return of Sniffer! By popular request!
Daredevil #8 was cover-dated March 1942, and went on sale in January. So America is already at war, but this issue was prepared before Pearl Harbor. The battle between Daredevil and the Nazis is just the standard pre-war theme that has been appearing in Lev Gleason comics for years, urging the USA to do something about Germany. The first issue of the comic was actually titled "Daredevil Battles Hitler", complete with photo of der Führer's face on the cover.
It's an interesting story. It revolves around an evil insidious German Bund, planning to spread propaganda and ultimately take over the entire USA. And working for them is Sniffer - clearly doing it for the money and resenting being given anything to do that isn't killing people.
But when the evil Herr Herring and his evil Bundists actually give Sniffer the job of killing the young American boy who tried to betray them (I love that he's only resisting the Nazis because he's been to college and been corrupted by free-thinking notions), he contemptuously refuses to do it. Sniffer is a killer, but only of people who deserve killing. And he has nothing to do with the subsequent spread of Lies! Propaganda! Hatred! That's really quite the opposite of what our loveable rogue murderer is all about!
The Nazis confine Sniffer to their dungeon, Daredevil rescues him, and the two join forces to smash the Bund. Sniffer displays some impressive fighting skills along the way!
And our two heroes save the day, and the nation, without any real trouble. Daredevil makes it clear that Sniffer is a great guy, and is more or less going straight, maybe!
It's a strange way to launch a new comedy backup strip, but a later page in the same comic confirms that that's what we're doing here. Sniffer has been granted his own comic strip, starting next month!
And so, as promised, the next month's Daredevil #9 gives Sniffer his own strip, unrelated to the Daredevil adventures, and telling us once again that it's the result of popular demand!
Thousands of letters have poured in after his second appearance, apparently - although this story clearly must have been produced long before the previous story saw print - and it sees Sniffer setting up in business himself, with his Brush 'Em Off Syndicate! Almost certainly written by Charles Biro, but now he's being drawn by Carl "Hub" Hubbell.
He tries to go about it in an unusually honourable way, but ends up killing off a rival mob in the course of his misadventures, showing himself in the process to be an expert hitman. But it's all done in a very light-hearted kind of way, and ends with another panel urging readers to write in and ask for more Sniffer! It seems to have worked, one way or another - Sniffer becomes a fixture in the Daredevil comic from now on.
Daredevil #10, cover dated May 1942, is obviously the first issue produced after Pearl Harbor. Like all the other American comics, it temporarily drops the Germans from its rogues' gallery and focuses on the Japanese. The cover tells us that Daredevil "vows that one hundred Japs will fall for every drop of American blood spilled by their treachery" and his own story in this issue has him join the air force and spill a heck of a lot of Japanese blood.
But the contents page tells us it's Sniffer who's "slated to be America's number one comic character", and he stars in a story clearly written before the war.
Contracted to kill a bookie who absconded with a crook's money, Sniffer sympathises with the bookie when he finds out he's got a wife in hospital and a baby to take care of, and he resolves the issue without killing anyone, even winning a beautiful baby contest along the way (by threatening the judges with his gatling gun). And he talks to the readers again, thanking them for their letters of support!
Sniffer's skin, incidentally, fluctuates from pink to yellow to orange from one page to the next. I'm really not sure what it's supposed to be.
Anyway, in Daredevil #11, the Second World War has caught up to Sniffer at last - business for a hired killer is slack because of the war, so he figures he might as well join the army for something to do. We also get a caption on the first page of his story telling us that "Since he first appeared as a minor character in a Daredevil story," Sniffer has become enormously popular! Charles Biro is still really pushing that 'by popular demand' legend about him!
So Sniffer joins up, and proves an unconventional kind of soldier - he doesn't like the uniform, saying "Even Crimebuster's monkey wouldn't look good in dis!" and picks out a scruffy, ill-fitting outfit for himself instead. More of C.B. and his monkey later; he's the star of Boy Comics, and Sniffer will be meeting him eventually! Sniffer is kept on by the army because of his expert marksmanship, and when assigned to the traditional army potato-peeling, who should be meet but Satan himself!
Yes, it's the return of the Deadly Dozen! Incidentally, "Satan" was a very common name for unexceptional bad guys in American comics of the time. It wasn't until later years that Americans really seemed to associate the name with evil and power.
And so Sniffer and Satan decide to round up the old gang, and get the whole Dozen into the army with them!
I just love that when we see the Dozen going about their everyday lives, Lady Killer is casually killing a lady, and is annoyed when Sniffer interrupts him. And Daredevil takes the final panel to tell us how great this latest development is!
So that's how the gang got together (and split up, and got together again) - from now on the Dozen are a team, although eleven of them will be nothing more than occasionally-seen background characters behind Sniffer. It's a strange setup, made even stranger by being hammered into a war-propaganda context!
And also in this issue of Daredevil, there's an interesting announcement about the future of comic magazines...
Lev Gleason had three titles at this time - Daredevil, Boy Comics and Silver Streak Comics. But now three of the characters from Silver Streak are moving into Daredevil, because Silver Streak Comics is being replaced by an all-new title, Crime Does Not Pay. No superheroes there (the Silver Streak, a very unexceptional kind of hero, was just axed altogether), this new comic was the all-new genre of gritty tales of crime. It took a few years to really become controversial, but crime comics - dwelling gruesomely on the nasty details of crime, with a perfunctory 'crime is bad' moral at the end - upset a lot of people. And it all starts here, but maybe Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen could be seen as paving the way!
Stay tuned for part two of the chronicle - what did Sniffer do in the war?
