As the police continue their manhunt for the vigilante The Whistler, I discover yet another career option my guidance counselor never informed me was available:


It's never made clear which major metropolis The Whistler stories take place in. But apparently they had SEVERAL whistling teachers. All of whom were able to earn a living by teaching whistling, it would seem.

Which is just another reason to revive this strip...

From National Comics #52 (1946).

It's been too long since we've inflicted Golden Age Idol upon you, dear audience--our ongoing quest to find obscure Golden Age heroes worthy of reviving (and, if they're public domain, claiming a juicy finders fee as a result).

So, since DC is reviving National Comics as a title, let's dive back into Quality's archive to find a mystery man worth resurrecting.

Say, how about The Whistler??

No relation to the radio and film noir series, our Whistler was Mallory Drake, who had a serious jones to be a police reporter:

Well, he finally gets his job, so of course he has to rush over and tell his big brother...

I don't know that "world's greatest whistler" is actually Guinness certified...but it turns out that Mallory himself is quite the whistler:

Yeah, he made that annoying "EEEEEEOWIE" noise whenever he got excited. Sorry about that.

Well, there was no decompression in those days, so of course that's the exact moment when some mob goons decide to bust up the club for defying them, and of course...



The scary thing is...it worked!!


Now, over the few months of his existence, Drake learned a couple of new wrinkles, like ventriloquism whistling:

And he learned to make his whistle really loud:


And once, when a crook had a clever way to kill a concert violinist...

...well, obviously The Whistler could use that same principle to escape the death trap left for him:


And we found out that his amazing whistle worked on snakes, too!


Throughout the series we got a lot of up close lip shots...

...followed by Drake pummeling paralyzed nogoodniks:

The Whistler wasn't around for very long. He appeared in National Comics #48 (1945) through #54 (1946). All of those stories, except for the very last, were written, drawn and inked by Vernon Henkel.

Yes, the Whistler was a one-gimmick mystery man, but the series itself was pretty good for the era, with the stories a lot more sophisticated than the usual fare.

So, yeah, I think he's a keeper. What do you think, Steven Tyler?

Hey, stop trying to sneak in here, Donald!!