Captain Action Issue 5 July 1969 Page 23 Gil Kane

Captain Action Issue 5 "A Mind Divided" Page 23 July 1969 Original Gil Kane Pencils with story also by Gil Kane and inks by Wally Wood, final issue in the short lived series. Interesting to me the creative process re how Gil's loose pencils are true to Wally Wood's finished inks as depicted in the additional photos of the published comic attached herein.

Always a personal Captain Action fan from the days of the original 1960's iconic toy line, with clear memories of this particular issue and in appreciation of Gil Kane's pencil works, these original Kane pencil pages fit the bill for me................

Summary: Haunting tale, amid a splash page depicting “lives snuffed out in seconds” by a steel mill explosion, the narrator asks how such a travesty could happen: “Is it the caprice of the gods?... Or the work of Satan?”

Valiant Captain Action storms to the rescue, pulling fatalities and survivors from the wreckage, blaming this catastrophe on “a power-mad fanatic—a poisonous hate-monger...” ...Matthew Blackwell, who, at that moment, is delivering a speech at Central Park, persuasively rallying the support of the crowd with his claim that the mill attack was the result of “decent Americans” who opposed the company’s contracts with the U.S. government. Blackwell, actually Eugene Johnson, publisher of Tempo Magazine, is a man suffering from two radically different personalities.

As Blackwell he enlists the susceptive to his fascist cause, using his silvery tongue to instigate riots against businesses and policemen in a quest to “wrest power from our corrupt leaders!” Caught in the thick of this chaos is his son Johnny Johnson, who stumbles across his father’s dual identity—and his divided mind—and demolishes Blackwell’s military installation, perishing in the ensuing blast.

When Blackwell discovers his dead son, his fragile psyche snaps and he vacillates wildly between laughter and tears. Following the explosion to Blackwell’s lab, Captain Action plows through the terrorist’s Gestapo, dismantling what’s left of the headquarters. Yet Blackwell/Johnson pays no heed, “cradling his dead son, humming a tuneless melody to the boy who knows a peace his father cannot know."