Number 2025: “...to pop a copper”: Bulletman, Bulletgirl battle Black Spider

Here we go again: another story of a face-blind parent, who doesn’t recognize his own daughter while she is in her super heroine identity. And she doesn’t wear a mask, just a metal bullet-head helmet. Truly, it is easier to believe someone has super powers than they are unrecognizable to a parent or loved one.

Enough about that. At least the stories in Bulletman #1 (1941) were well drawn by Charles Sultan, a former pulp magazine artist, who went into comics in the late thirties. He continued in comics for years after the war, but eventually became a publisher of men's magazines. As David Saunders notes in his biography of Sultan, he may have been a front man for an organization needing someone with a clean record to go on record as being the publisher of magazines with sexual content.

Whatever. He had art talent. Sultan had excellent training from some top illustrators of the era, and for its time his comic art captures the sophisticated styling of artists such as Lou Fine and Reed Crandall.

Posted in: Pappy Comics