The comic has one of those Prince and the Pauper plots, where two people who have never met are so alike they can pass for one another. I have always found this sort of thing even more unbelievable than grown men putting on costumes and masks to fight villains, unless they are identical twins separated at birth. It is because of my “comic book mind,” as Mrs. Pappy calls it. I can suspend disbelief when superheroes do their superheroics, while rejecting other plot devices in comic book stories I consider impossible in real life. In addition, Don Daring, when meeting his lookalike, acrobatic Fred Drake, proclaims, “I’m Don Daring the movie star and amateur detective!” Yeah, Don...sur-r-r-r-r-re you are. Only in this case it turns out to be true.
The dwarf character “Ian Spine” is repulsive. Simon and Kirby, like many other producers of popular culture years ago, used real-life physical defects to create a cruel stereotype of a character who is invariably ugly and abnormal.
I love the classic faux book cover. I also like the header on page one, “Save this first issue of STUNTMAN comics...it will be a valuable souvenir someday...” “Someday” is here, and yes it is valuable.
