(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part interview.)

By JOESEPH SIMON – PM Library Associate Editor

Rik Offenberger is a dedicated comic book professional. He knows what he loves, and it shows in all of his projects and industry-related accomplishments.

What exactly are those other projects and accomplishments and what comics does Rik love? Rik was public relations coordinator for Archie Comics for a decade. He’s also the co-author of The MLJ Companion: The Complete History of the Archie Super-Heroes from the always excellent TwoMorrows Publishing with Paul Castiglia. This authoritative book tells of the heroes of The Mighty Crusaders. It’s got details on decades of super heroes supported by articles, interviews, art, and actual reprints of stories involving the heroes.

Rik runs www.mightycrusaders.net, a website devoted to The Mighty Crusaders as well as First Comic News, a web-based division of Super Hero News, covering comics, and related pop-culture fun while complementing his journalistic efforts at Newsrama and other comic industry websites. Rik has also engaged his passion of one Mighty Crusader known as The Shield by resurrecting the Shield G-Man Club of the 40’s.

Since 1940, these heroes have existed in one form or another. The heroes were originally published by MLJ (Archie Publishing’s founding company), Red Circle, and even DC Comics (under the Impact banner in the 90’s and later they were integrated into the DCU proper.) They’re currently back at Archie.

If you’ve heard of The Shield, the Comet, Fly, Fly Girl, Hangman, Jaguar, Mister Justice, Steel Sterling, Private Strong, Black Jack, Bob Phantom, Captain Flag, Darkling, and Web then you already know some of the team!

In many ways, these heroes when present in the 1940s made way for comics to come. The Shield, who predates Captain America, obviously inspired Simon and Kirby in the creation of the latter hero a few years later. Rumors continue to exist that The Fly inspired Spider-Man.

Alan Moore wanted to write a story with the Mighty Crusaders. That project never happened, but it did transform into changing out the Mighty Crusaders for Charlton Heroes. The specific use of the Mighty Crusaders or the Charlton Heroes did not happen, but the story did. That would be Watchmen!

This interview covers quite a lot of ground. Thank you to Rik for letting our readers know about the thrill of the Mighty Crusaders!

Interview with Rik Offenberger – Part I

JOESEPH SIMON

Which hero of The Mighty Crusaders did you become aware of first, and how did this happen? What was your impression of that hero and the team itself?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“It didn’t all happen at once. I first saw Mighty Comics in a used bookstore. Before comic specialty stores, the only place to get comics was used book stores. But I wasn’t a fan yet. I saw the Private Life of Private Strong cover in the Overstreet Price Guide, and was intrigued. When the Red Circle Mighty Crusaders #1 hit the comic shops I was all in. I had wanted to read Private Strong and remembered the Bill Higgins’ Shield from Mighty Comics, so I was excited to see them again. I saw the two Shields and understood one was the Golden Age Shield and one was the Silver Age Shield. I picked up All the Red Circle Comics when they came out. I even went to K-Mart and bought all the toys.”

JOESEPH SIMON

Over the years there have been a number of different versions of the Shield from MLJ and the companies after MLJ that have published the character. What is your favorite version of The Shield?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“I like them all. I really do. I like that he is a legacy character. Alan Light did a project called Flashback Reprints in which he reprinted Golden Age comics in black and white. My father worked in Hollywood at the time and would go to a sci-fi shop called Collectors Bookcase and buy the reprints, bring them home and read them to me and my brother. He would make funny voices for the bad guys. He was reliving his childhood and sharing the comics he remembered owning with us and it made Golden Age heroes really special to me. Joe Higgins is my favorite, but it stems from more than liking the comic, it is also wrapped up in really happy memories of my childhood.”

JOESEPH SIMON

The Shield holds a very interesting place in the history of comics. Many know Shield was created before Captain America, which in and of itself is incredible. Here is an interesting follow-up question: Who came first, Shield’s sidekick Dusty or Captain America’s sidekick Bucky? I always thought that it somewhat odd that the adults would be hide their real identities, and the sidekicks, while masked, would go by their real first names. Any ideas as to why sidekicks were not given super hero names?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“Dusty came first. The reader at the time was a younger child. Batman was a killer at the time, and Robin lightened him up and made him more relatable to the readers. After seeing the success Robin had, everyone else copied it. While Dusty came before Bucky, they are both copies of Robin. Both Captain Marvel and the Fly were kids that became Adult superheroes, they were their own sidekicks. Sidekicks fell out of favor in the 60s until they have all but disappeared. Of course, current comic book fans are older so maybe they can’t relate to being an 8-year-old sidekick. Why Dusty and Bucky used their real names while Robin and all the rest of them didn’t I don’t know.”

JOESEPH SIMON

Would Joe Higgins, as the Shield, be the first red-headed super hero? At this time, Archie Andrews was not around (Archie would appear first in 1941 and Pureheart the Powerful until the 60’s) Could Joe Higgins / Shield have been an influence on Archie?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“I am sure there were other red-headed superheroes, I don’t know who was first. Red hair is a big thing at Archie Comics. The Shield, Red Rube, Archie, Ginger, Josie, Cheryl all have red hair and all are or had been important characters at Archie Comics. Based on their original roles that would have been a John Goldwater call on approval of the final look of all the characters. If you watch Riverdale on the CW notice all the red in every episode.”

JOESEPH SIMON

Shield’s origin is similar to that of Captain America, including the taking of a formula that gives each hero their powers. Shield’s formula was his own name as an acronym (Sacrum, Heart, Innervation, Eyes, Lungs and Derma) which perhaps by coincidence is also the name of a certain Marvel organization called S.H.I.E.L.D (under Marvel the acronym has changed from Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate (in 1991) and finally due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Further, Captain America’s original shield was the same shape as the emblem on Shield’s chest – something so obvious that Marvel, upon request, changed Captain America’s shield to the more well-known rounded shield. It is likely that the rounded shield changed Captain America for the better. There are a wide number of stories that completely rely on the shield being rounded (and being thrown, bouncing off of objects, especially bad guys, and often saving the day). Do you know if the changing of the shield was a legally-enforced request?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“The Shield is unique in that he is a proactive hero like Batman, he made himself a hero. He finished his father’s formula to become a hero. It wasn’t a mutation of a happy accident, he isn’t an alien who has been given magical powers. He is a regular guy who was smart enough to carry on his father’s legacy to become a hero. Also, he was a hero when he wasn’t the Shield. He’s an FBI agent.

About Captain America : Joe Simon and Jack Kirby took MLJ’s best-selling character and made their own version, and they were caught. John Goldwater went to Martin Goodman and had Timely change the shield Captain America used. But there are a few things you have to understand about the comic business of the day. It was bad and low budget. The pay was poor and the profits small. All of the publishers knew each other and worked on different publishing ventures – together and apart – and comics were never a business by themselves. So, John Goldwater may have been mad, but he didn’t think the Shield would still be around 70 years later or that there was any real money in Captain America (also) they all stole ideas from one another anyway.

MLJ Comics was Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John L. Goldwater. Maurice Coyne was the money man, he paid for everything from the founding of the company until he was forced out. Any time the company was short on funds, Maurice lent money to the business until the cash crisis passed. Over at Timely, Martin Goodman only hired family because he didn’t trust outsiders. Maurice Coyne was the treasurer at Timely and therefore somehow a relative of Martin Goodman, who did not know he was one third owner of MLJ. After John Goldwater made peace with Martin Goodman over Joe and Jack stealing the Shield, Maurice told Joe and Jack that Martin wasn’t paying them all they were entitled to on Captain America and they quit. Later, they came to work for MLJ and created a new Shield for them and DC complained that Joe and Jack were steeling Superman with Private Strong. He was Superman with an American Flag instead of an “S” including being raised by an older farm couple.Neither the dispute between MLJ and Timely nor the dispute between DC and MLJ got to a legal battle. They were friendly enough to work through it themselves.”

JOESEPH SIMON

Beside these historical points in comic history, what makes the Shield an interesting character for you to read?

RIK OFFENBERGER

“I am and have always been a patriotic guy. Even as a kid. So, I have an attraction to patriotic heroes. I love Captain America too, as well as Fighting American and I liked the Awesome Comics version too. So, you might say I am predisposed to liking the Shield. There aren’t a ton of stories when compared to Captain America. But it was hard to find them. The difficulty in getting them before eBay made me appreciate them more. Joe Higgins is a true hero, not an anti-hero or a flawed hero with feet of clay. I like that he is and always has been one of the good guys because it’s the right thing to do.”

“The Shield G-Man Club started in 1941. For a 2¢ stamp, you got a membership card and a membership badge. I am way too young to have joined then. But in 2003, I started my own Shield G-Man Club with 11 members. I produced DIY projects and mailed them to 10 other members. I produced 8½ x 11 prints, an animation cell, switch plate covers, and a few other items. I did 12 mailings. I didn’t collect any money, it wasn’t a commercial venture, just a collection of super fans, most of whom had their own MLJ related websites and had joined my MLJ webring back when webrings were a thing.

There were a few who were very active members of the Mighty Crusader message board which was owned by Scott Martin at the time and I moderated. After a year I stopped producing DYI items for the club and stopped the mailings, but it was fun. Scott Martin gave me his Mighty Crusaders message board and I added it to my website www.mightycrusaders.net. I had avoided making a Facebook group because the message board was kind of the same thing. By the time I decided I wanted to migrate the message board to a Facebook group I was writing the Mighty Crusaders Companion and thought I should be devoting my time to the book rather than moderating a group of super fans.

After the book came out, I joined two of the Mighty Crusaders Facebook pages and I am still a member of both groups – but I really wanted a group for super fans. I started a closed group for the Shield G-Man Club. As a closed group, these aren’t casual Golden Age comic fans who might be interested in something about the MLJ heroes from time to time. This is a smaller group of fans that really love these heroes and interact about them daily. There has never been a day on the Facebook Shield G-Man Club without a post.”

You can find the Shield G-Man Club on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/shieldgmanclub/

(End Part 1 of Rik Offenberger’s Interview)

Check back soon for the second part of Rik’s interview here at Paint Monk’s Library!