Captain: The Clock presents you with the Screw Gang... put the screws on them and it'll make good reading for the public. 
- — The Clock (note at crime scene)
Crack Comics #9 is an issue of the series Crack Comics (Volume 1) with a cover date of January, 1941.
Synopsis for The Black Condor: "Monks Gallagher"
In the heavy mist of the waterfront in New York City, the Black Condor watches as a guy gets jumped on and stabbed. Condor intervenes, and punches the knife-man into the harbor, then grabs the stabbed man, and flies him to Municipal Hospital. According to the examining doctor, this guy will die in an hour, because the only doctor who could save him is the eminent surgeon and lung specialist Dr. Patche, who at this moment is in Chicago, giving a lecture. Black Condor flies from New York to Chicago, finds Patche, grabs him out of the hall in mid-lecture, and flies him back to New York, all in under an hour.
The Black Condor visits the slum tenement where the unnamed immigrant’s unnamed wife and their crippled son Jackie live. They’re being shaken down by gangsters, who threaten to have them deported; the gangsters are led by Monks Gallagher. The Condor assures them that everything is going to be all right, then he visits Gallagher’s magnificent office, and starts punching out Monks and his two bodyguards. He forces Gallagher to write out a nice check to little Jackie’s family, warns the crooks that they’re now out of business, and flies away. Well no sooner is he gone than Monks is on the phone to his man Slugs, wanting the crippled kid kidnapped and a cement trap set up in a particular warehouse.
Monks waits until dark then, figuring correctly that the Condor is probably still watching, he leaves his office, sprints to his car, peels out, and drives to a waterfront warehouse, then goes inside. Black Condor soon arrives and goes inside, and he’s much too quick to be taken out by having a big vat of wet cement dropped onto him. Monks and three hoods step into view with their pistols out, but the Black Condor pulls out his black ray pistol and uses it to shoot the conventional pistols out of their hands, then punches all four of them out. Then he finds little Jackie, and gives him a sky ride back home, and gives the big check to Jackie’s mother.
Appearing in The Black Condor: "Monks Gallagher"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Villains:
- Monks Gallagher
- Slugs
- two other hoods
Other Characters:
- Dr. Patche
- Jackie
- Jackie's mother
- Jackie's father
Locations:
Items:
- Condor's Black Ray Pistol
Vehicles:
Synopsis for Space Legion: "Blaster Meers and the Pirates of Ceres"
Appearing in Space Legion: "Blaster Meers and the Pirates of Ceres"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
- Space Legion
Villains:
- Blaster Meers (Dies)
Other Characters:
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
Synopsis for Madam Fatal: "The Tiger Woman"
Appearing in Madam Fatal: "The Tiger Woman"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Villains:
- Tiger Woman (Dies)
- Several Indians
Other Characters:
- Philip Taggart
- Mrs. Taggart
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
Synopsis for The Red Torpedo: "Smashing the Schrecklichkeit"
Imprisoned German opposition leader Doctor Freiheit escapes from a concentration camp and gets aboard a refugee ship, the SS Mercy, steaming away from Europe. Hitler personally orders his raider, the Schrecklichkite, to retrieve the fugitive.
Soon the battleship locates and overtakes the passenger ship, fires one warning shot across the Mercy’s bow, then sends a boarding party in a launch, to seek out Dr. Freiheit, whom they quickly find and drag away. Nearby, in his navigable torpedo, Jim Lockhart is watching all this through his Marinoscope. So he also sees the Schrecklichkite open fire on the Mercy, sinking it, and also sees the arrival of an amphibian airplane, into which Freiheit is very roughly loaded. The plane flies away, shadowed by the Red Torpedo, who soon encounters a Nazi submarine along their course. The sub is stationed there to refuel the airplane, which lands nearby. The Red Torpedo narwhals the U-boat, sending it to the bottom with all hands. Lockhart then snags the seaplane with the Red Torpedo’s pointy bow, boards it, and punches the two pilots into the ocean, where at least one of them gets chomped on by a big shark.
Lockhart then helps Dr. Freiheit into his Red Torpedo, anchors it, and flies away in the amphibious airplane, until he overtakes the Schrecklichkite. The familiar seaplane is allowed to approach, until Lockhart drops a bomb down the main smokestack, inflicting severe damage on the raider. He then lands the seaplane, leaves a time bomb in it, gets aboard the Red Torpedo, and zooms away to America with Dr. Freiheit.
Appearing in The Red Torpedo: "Smashing the Schrecklichkeit"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Villains:
Other Characters:
- Dr. Freiheit
Locations:
Items:
- "marinoscope", the Red Torpedo's advanced observation system
Vehicles:
- Red Torpedo (Submarine)
- KMS Schrecklichkite
- SS Mercy (Destroyed)
Synopsis for "Jane Arden // Lena Pry"
(newspaper strip reprints)
Appearing in "Jane Arden // Lena Pry"
Featured Characters:
- Jane Arden (across top halves of pages)
- Lena Pry (across bottom halves of pages)
Synopsis for Alias the Spider: "The Spider: Framed"
A mobster throws a bomb into a tailor shop but doesn’t quite escape before his jacket is pinned to a doorframe by an arrow shot by the Spider. Then the bomb goes off, smashing the shop’s interior and killing one man. The Spider is running away from the scene when a cop runs onto the scene to investigate, draws the wrong conclusion, and immediately shoots the Spider, who, as he falls, picks up a wallet lying in the wreckage, and slips it under his belt. The cops find him, and are amazed and puzzled, that their old pal the Spider would now be planting bombs.
The next day’s paper announces the bombing, the Spider’s arrest, and the fate of the shop’s owner, who was mutilated beyond recognition. The shop’s owner reads this news and is quite surprised by it, then picks up the phone to call the police about it. A gun-pointing gangster steps into the room and kidnaps the old guy (Webster) before he can make the call. Soon, in a run-down building in the waterfront section, Webster the tailor meets Baldy Riker, the boss of these gangsters. Baldy directs his henchmen to suspend their bombing campaign for however long the Spider stays in jail, which Baldy does not expect to be for very long. Then he shoots old Webster dead, and stuffs his body into a closet.
Meanwhile the Spider is sitting in a one-man jail cell, with his quiver full of arrows, and with the found wallet too, which turns out to belong to Bill French, a low-level henchman in Baldy Riker’s gang. Chuck shows up, pretending to be the Spider’s lawyer, and bluffs his way inside for a private conference, in which the Spider tells Chuck what he’s seen and what he’s figured out.
That night, Chuck returns, driving the Black Widow, and drives it up a flight of stairs, and crashes it right through the big front door of the police station, down the hall to the holding cell, and smashes the bars open, without injuring the Spider. They escape. While they’re fleeing the police in the Black Widow, the Spider, acting on a hunch, uses the vehicle’s Sound Detectors to figure out where Baldy’s gang is, and where it’s going. The gang meanwhile has got a police-band radio, so they know the Spider’s at large, so they immediately set off three more bombs in three more places. It’s a noisy process, and the Sound Detectors pick up on it, and the Spider calculates where the gang is likely to strike next. Meanwhile the Black Widow is racing through the city at crazy speeds, and endangers a crowd of pedestrians, which the Spider avoids by running the car up the side of a building and then back onto the street. Soon they overtake Riker’s car, and sideswipe it into a nearby building. Four hoods pile out of the car, and briefly rally for a fight, but the Spider quickly leaves three of them sprawled in the street, lets the fourth one run away, follows him, has Chuck follow himself, with the police following Chuck. The runner leads them directly to Baldy’s hideout, where a short fistfight ends with two more bad guys unconscious plus the door to Baldy’s closet is busted down, revealing the hastily-stashed body of Webster the Tailor.
Chuck catches up to the Spider, they leave the building and again flee in the Black Widow. Cops arrive, find the living and dead bodies in the hideout, and one of them recognizes Webster the supposedly-mutilated dead tailor, and this time they jump to the correct conclusion about what the Spider was up to.
Appearing in Alias the Spider: "The Spider: Framed"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
- Chuck the chauffeur
Villains:
- Bill French (Dies)
- Baldy Riker
- Nick
- Trigger
Other Characters:
- Webster the tailor (Dies)
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
- The Black Widow (the Spider's car)
Synopsis for "Ned Brant"
(newspaper strip reprints)
Appearing in "Ned Brant"
Featured Characters:
- Ned Brant
Synopsis for Lee Preston of the Red Cross: "The Hijacked Plane Peril"
Appearing in Lee Preston of the Red Cross: "The Hijacked Plane Peril"
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Supporting Characters:
Villains:
Other Characters:
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
Synopsis for Wizard Wells: "T.N.T. Trousers Trap"
Appearing in Wizard Wells: "T.N.T. Trousers Trap"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
- Tug
Villains:
- Natas
Other Characters:
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
Synopsis for The Clock: "The Screw Gang"
The President of the Chamber of Commerce, David Gratten, is also a mobster leader known only as "the Screw." He starts to terrorize small businesses with his "protection" racket, and the Clock strikes to put an end to it.
Appearing in The Clock: "The Screw Gang"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
- Pat "Pug" Brady
- Captain Kane
Villains:
- The Screw
- The Screw Gang
- Bull Richy
- Rip
Other Characters:
- Mr. Gratten
Locations:
Items:
Vehicles:
Notes
- Alias, the Spider: In "The Spider: Framed" Hallaway is shot by a policeman. The wound is not visible and is not mentioned for the remainder of the story. He has also survived multiple gunshots in Crack Comics #7. So Hallaway bullet wounds > 3.
- Black Condor
- "Monks Gallagher" is reprinted in The Quality Companion (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2011) under the title "Jackie Boy".
- According to this story, the Black Condor can fly at more than 1600 mph, and the elderly physician he’s carrying with him can survive this trip.
- Black Condor's Black Ray Pistol can paralyze humans Crack Comics Vol 1 2, can shut off internal combustion engines Crack Comics Vol 1 3, and can shoot guns out of gunmen's hands Crack Comics Vol 1 9.
- In this issue's Red Torpedo story, the Nazis are called "Nazis" and they're from "Berlin" and are actually "Germans". So the fake countries thing seems to be over, at least in this feature.
- No it's not. Starting in Crack Comics Vol 1 11, the Red Torpedo takes on some "Oriental Totalitarian" adversaries who are not called "Japanese".
- The Red Torpedo has been killing a lot of bad guys:
- Two submarine crews, in Crack Comics #1,
- Most if not all of the crew of a battleship, sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean in Crack Comics #2.
- All of the crew of a 3rd submarine, sunk in Crack Comics #3.
- One guy, punched off a cliff, also in Crack Comics #3.
- A 4th submarine crew, sunk in Crack Comics #9.
- Also featured in this issue of Crack Comics were:
- Molly The Model, by Bernard Dibble
- Rube Goldberg's Side Show, by Rube Goldberg
- Slap Happy Pappy, by Jack Cole, replacing Gill Fox
- Snappy, by Arthur Beeman
- Off The Record, by Ed Reed
See Also