The Clock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the fictional character. For the film, see The Clock (film).
The Clock is a fictional masked crime-fighter published during the Golden Age of Comic Books. According to the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, the Clock was the first masked hero to appear in American comic books.
Created by cartoonist George Brenner, the character first appeared in either Funny Pages #6 or Funny Picture Stories #1, each cover-dated November 1936 and published by the Comics Magazine Company, the primary forerunner of Centaur Publications. The Clock premiered the same year as the better known characters, The Phantom and The Green Hornet.
The character's initial appearances were two-page features that left little space for character development, but the Clock's secret identity was eventually revealed to be society man and former district attorney Brian O'Brien, whose background in college sports helped prepare him for heroism. As the Clock, he wore a three-piece suit, a fedora, and a black full-face mask (which was replaced by a domino mask years later). He usually left a calling card that bore an image of a clock and the words "The Clock Has Struck."
The Clock appeared in Funny Pages #6-11, as well as other titles by the Comics Magazine Company, such as Detective Picture Stories and Keen Detective Funnies. In 1937, the Comics Magazine Company was bought by a company Ultem, which then encountered financial difficulty and sold the Clock and other characters to Quality Comics. Ultem was itself subsequently purchased and renamed Centaur Publications. Despite the sale to Quality, the company continued to reprint old Clock stories.
Under Quality, the Clock continued to be written and drawn in new stories by Brenner in Feature Funnies (later retitled Feature Comics) beginning with #3 (Dec., 1937) and running through #31 (April 1940). It is believed that Quality editor Will Eisner was in part inspired by this run of the Clock to create the Spirit. The Clock's feature was moved to the new Crack Comics #1 (May 1940). That issue introduced his sidekick, a man named Pug Brady who was O'Brien's physical double; Crack Comics #21 (Feb. 1942) replaced Pug with an orphaned teenage girl named Butch.
The Clock alternated appearances on the cover of Crack Comics with the Black Condor until #19, continuing as only a backup feature of that title until his final appearance in Crack Comics #35 (Autumn 1944).
After Quality Comics went out of business in 1956, DC Comics presumably acquired the rights to its characters but has never made use of the Clock beyond a few mere mentions. In the DC Universe, the Clock was initially said to have been killed in 1944, the last year his character was actually published. The journal of the character the Shade revealed, in Starman Vol. 2, #19, that "Brian O'Brien told me the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated". Starman #20 then stated O'Brien was active in Chicago.
In 1992, Malibu Comics published 20 issues of The Protectors, a superhero team that included several other characters from the Centaur line. In this universe, Brian O'Brien was the first costumed hero. With the advent of super-powered heroes, he decided to give up crime-fighting, choosing instead to join the army. He rose through the ranks until eventually, he became the president of the United States.
