Number 2401: The Demon judge

Bill Draut went to work for Simon and Kirby when he was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps. He knew Joe Simon from their service days, and Joe invited him to do some comic book work for them. Among the jobs he did were four episodes of “His Honor and the Demon” (on today’s episode it’s “His Honor and the Red Demon”). Draut worked in comic books for years. His work was very slick and illustrative, and biographical information says he worked drawing love comics and also mystery comics for DC. I have never associated him before with any costumed heroes except the one I am showing today.

The Demon, or Red Demon, is actually a judge who goes out in costume to bring bad guys to justice, so he can preside over their trials and send them to prison. At least that is how I read it. A real conflict of interest, and even in the late 1940s would have been frowned on by his professional colleagues. He is Judge Straight, and he (mostly) lives up to his name. He is a hardass jurist...on page 4 he sentences Joe Monsi “to death by electrocution at midnight two days hence!” Does not give poor Joe much wiggle room for proving his innocence, does it?

This particular episode comes from Black Cat Comics #6 (1947), and while it is the third episode to appear, it is an origin story. I believe the Red Demon stories were probably inventory at Harvey Comics, and plugged into a number of pages of the comic book no matter whether they were sequential or not. At the point of his career that this was drawn Draut’s artwork looks to have been influenced by Terry and the Pirates creator/artist Milton Caniff.

Oh yeah, let me call the first page splash to your attention...the beautiful blonde is tied with rope in a bondage pose. That doesn’t happen in the story so the writer, or even Draut, took a little artistic license for the perverts readers who like to see females trussed up.

Draut, born in 1921, died in 1993.

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