Justin Wright

 

Real-life History

 

You can read Justin Wright’s one and only appearance on Comicbookplus.com.

 

What does a character need to be a superhero? Superpowers? Sci-fi gadgets? Skills too good for reality? Back in the 1940’s all a character needed was two fists and a mask. I call these characters two-fisters, as in “two-fisted heroes.” They were everywhere in the golden age, easily several times as common as superheroes with actual superpowers. Rarely did this characters have anything more than a mask and their mitts. Sometimes, they might make use a handgun, rarely to shoot people, usually just to stick them up, and sometimes they might use a rope to travel up the side of a building or to tie up bad guys, but if they routinely used weapons and tools, they wouldn’t be two-fisters, they’d be what I like to call gadgeteers. See, for example, Sandman and his gas gun, Dr. Mid-nite and his blackout bombs, Batman and his various bat-tools, etc, etc.

 

Gradually, the two-fister became an extinct archetype. They just weren’t super enough to hang with superheroes, especially when comics started to enter into the silver age during the 1950’s and superheroes were expected to fight foes more fantastical and powerful than 5th Columnists and gangsters, foes like space aliens and mad scientists and supervillains. As an example of two-fister extinction, look no further than the JSA’s own Atom, who went from a short man with a good right hook to a man with atomically augmented strength.

 

Justin Wright, appearing once, and only once, in Doll Man Quarterly 1 back in 1941, shows that even in the early golden age two-fisters were struggling to get off the ground. There were just so many, and they had so much competition. If they weren’t the Spirit, the grand king of the two-fisters who artfully straddled the genre line between detective comic and superhero comic, they weren’t going to last long.

 

If you read Justin Wright’s public domain superhero wiki page, you don’t really need to read his comic. Lumberjack Justin Wright is called to a law office one day to learn that he’s rich. The parents he never knew he had were filthy rich, and they were just killed by mobsters, leaving their fortune to him. Upset that his parents were killed and caring nothing for the money, he vows to do something about crime in the city. Discovering a cloth that belonged to his mother that was see-through on one side but not the other, he tied it around his face as a mask and went out in to the night to bust crime. He then cornered boss Skizone (what a name! Is it even possible for there to be a faker Italian name?) and his minions, punched them out, and left them for the police with a little calling card that said JUST N RIGHT.

 

 

Get it? Because he’s Justin Wright?

 

You know, there’s not much to talk about concerning Justin Wright, but there is one thing–adhesive paper seals were probably easier on his budget than the Spider’ fancy pronged metal emblems attached to combustible arrows.

 

The creator of Justin Wright remains unknown. The strip was signed “Wayne Reid,” but it wasn’t uncommon for artists and writers to use aliases back in the golden age due to various rights issues (comics have always rear ended comic creators). The folks at Comicbookplus.com think that Justin Wright’s creator might have been John Cassone, and if you know John Cassone at all, you probably know him for creating the Web, MLJ’s crime novelist turned crime fighter.

 

And so ends the tell of Justin Wright. I’m sure in some universe, somewhere, there’s a version of him called Horton Sweet.

 

Eternal Universe History

 

A quiet man, Justin Wright grew up never knowing his parents. Blessed with incredible strength, he made a living as a lumberjack. He liked that the work took him around the forests of the northeast United States, far from where people lived. He like being alone.

 

One day, a law office in the big city sent him a message. His parents had been discovered–through their will.

The parents he had always wanted to know were dead, killed by racketeers. The fact that Justin was now independently wealthy meant nothing to him. He had always hoped that one day, his parents would find him, and now that hope was gone, crushed, as dead as they were.

 

Taking a handkerchief that belonged to his mother as a makeshift mask, Justin copied various vigilantes of the time like the Clock and Mouthpiece and became a two-fisted crime fighter. He busted up the Skizone gang, which brought him to the attention of the FBI, who recruited him for their superteam program.

During WW2, the Allied military structure united all available superhumans under their banner and divided them into teams. Justin was placed on a team codenamed Police, which was filled with low-powered, low-skilled superhumans such as himself  The purpose of the Police team was to remain on the homefront and ferret out 5th Columnists while the real superhumans were sent overseas to break military formations with their bare hands. The superhumans that made up the Police team were not viewed with the same awe and admiration as the superhumans of other teams. The military saw them as eccentric brawlers, modern gladiators whose true value was in being able to take a few bullets before expiring.

While on the Police, Justin befriended Chic Carter, alias the Sword, a private detective who adopted the persona of the Sword to live out his Errol Flynn fantasies. Chic liked Justin. He could see the young man had a pure heart, something he didn’t see often in his line of work.

 

Justin would not live to see the end of the war. He was killed in 1943 after being sent to investigate a gang of German connected racketeers in Chicago. He was sent alone, and the Sword suspected that he was sacrificed to expediently lure out the racketeers for the FBI. Justin’s death would lead Chic Carter to hang up his sword and quit the Police, returning to being a full-time private detective.

Following the defeat of the Axis in 1945, the FBI and CIA would merge into the corrupt NBI and instigate an atomic war with the USSR in 1955 through the false flag assassination of various superhumans, several of which were members of the Police team. The atomic war would last until Russia’s defeat in 1957. With Russia defeated, the NBI proceeded to hunt down various superhumans deemed national security risks. They would have killed most of America’s superhumans and consolidated their hold over the rest, but “Project Silence,” an imprisoned necromancer named Zero used as a living window into the Mists of Eternity that surrounded physical reality, was freed by the superhero Plastic Man, who pretended to be a loyal agent of the NBI while secretly undermining them and gathering evidence of their corruption.

Zero was able to summon the ghosts of the various superheroes of the Police team killed by the NBI, including Justin Wright, with their old friend Chic Carter as a focus. Though at first Chic Carter wanted nothing to do with a young man and a small army of ghosts poised to take on the federal government, he was quickly convinced to take up his blade and return to being the Sword for one last mission. Together with the superhero spy G-2, Chic Carter and his ghostly friends were able to expose the NBI which was dissolved and reformed from the ground-up under the management of Plastic Man.

 

While bonded with Chic Carter, Justin was able to manifest spiritual power through the handkerchief he once wore as mask. By wearing it as Justin once did, Chic was able to open his third eye and see for miles in all direction. He could see thoughts, though he couldn’t hear them, and he could see through walls. The experience was overwhelming, and Chic had to rely on Justin to guide his sight.

 

In 1958, Zero formed the Eternals, a superteam in which members were assisted by the ghosts of previous superheroes. Chic joined as the Sword, and would remain a member bonded to all his Police team friends until his death in 2006. Justin would then bind himself to Sam Shannon, the third Manhunter.

 

Heroclix

Close combat expert: Something’s got to be done to stamp out crime…

Willpower:…Something will be done!

Charge: Police sirens–I’ve got to work fast!

VS Battle Information

You’re kidding, right? The dude has a single story to his name and no powers.

I suppose, if you really wanted to, you could put him in a big battle royal with various other