Today's offering is a curious pair of characters: Captain Red Blazer and his kid side-kick Spark/Sparky - the latest in my lame side-kick name blog arc. Published by Harvey Publishing, a character named Red Blazer first appeared in Pocket Comics in 1941 for a short run with a kid side-kick named Sparky. Then in 1943 a second character named Captain Red Blazer started appearing in All-New Comics. In the latter stories scientist Dr. Morgan develops something called "Astro-Pyro Rays," which he uses on a cowboy named Ted, endowing him with the ability to fly and the power to generate and control heat and flames. He eventually gained a kid side-kick variously named Sparky, or Sparkie or Spark, who gains similar powers and a similar costume, except he only gets one star on his cowl. These were actually text stories (most comic books contained text stories), but Captain Red Blazer and/or his side-kick made it onto the covers of at least seven issues of All-New Comics. I've never actually read any of their adventures but I really liked the costumes so I decided to make action figures of them. For the Sparky figure I used a sort of generic superhero riding a pumped up motorcycle that I found in a discount toy store. It was very similar to the Mattel Secret Wars type figures. For Captain Red Blazer I seemed to have cleaned out my parts box - I used a Toy Biz Captain America head, joined to a Toy Biz Daredevil body and arms and the legs from a Gideon figure. Overall I think they make rather striking figures.
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