TRULY GONE&FORGOTTEN : SCARLET SENTRY

It's nice to see Canada represented in the very American genre of the super-hero comic. Or, so I assume, because despite dressing up as a Canadian mounted police, The Scarlet Sentry is a straight-up American vigilante type. Heck, he's from Ohio! He's round on both ends and high in the middle!

Landed right in the "Comical German Expressions" boat.

(Just as an aside, you can spend an interesting afternoon reading up on the history of the RCMP, particularly when it gets to the part about how America (a) objected to them, fearing a buildup of Canadian military might on the border and (b) repeatedly were the very criminals the RCMP was sent out to reign in. We're trouble, we children of liberty. USA! USA!)

The Scarlet Sentry is former OSU college football star Don Lawson, a man dedicated to serving his country in any way imaginable. Specifically, he imagines dressing up like a mountie and slugging evil men who have unfortunate male pattern baldness. Theoretically, Don's motivation is that his father had died "a hero" in some ambiguous way. Normally, he would've been killed by Nazis or crooks and Don could revenge himself upon them, but he might've rescued a kitten from a fire and fallen into a manhole when he went back in for the family quilt, for all I know.

Still, it's good enough to warrant ordering a bullet-proof mountie costume through the mail. Surely that's illegal, right? At the very least, it'll get your name on a Homeland Security watchlist.

"...a nap!'

Sentry's opposite number is the leering, ghoulish Herr von Krane, whose plan involves blowing up a bridge while a bunch of American soldiers are crossing it. Damn that insidious man, and damn the fuel and tire shortage for making all of our soldiers walk all the way to war in Europe from the Midwest.

Scarlet Sentry doesn't boast much in the way of powers and, in fact, allegedly has none. Still, he's able to effortlessly climb to the top of a bridge and then jump into a rowboat below, chuck a tank of nitroglycerin a good forty feet into a nearby body of water, and jump high and fast enough to catch hold of a low-passing plane. That can't all have been side-properties of the bulletproof mountie costume, could it?

The Scarlet Sentry also leaves the worst kind of calling card in superherodom; the long, hand-written letter. "This is Herr von Krane," he writes in a letter pinned to the corpse of his enemy, "Late leader of a gang of would-be wreckers of Democracy. Just a taste of what his kind will always get." That literally sounds like a mocking letter from the Zodiac Killer. Oh, maybe we found him!