Undercover Girl Vs. Giant Monsters

Ogden Whitney is responsible for a cavalcade of colorful characters including the lollipop-licking Herbie(aka: Fat Fury), but one of his earlier creations was your everyday female spy, Starr Flagg. Labeled as Undercover Girl in her own segments in anthology comics by Magazine Enterprizes, Starr would handle everything from communist spies to rogue gorillas. In Issue #9 of Manhunt, the occasional CIA agent was on one of her crazier cases which opens up at least halfway through its own story with Starr already engaging her enemy, meaning that there is a whole opening to the adventure that we're not given any context for. The reader is just supposed to accept the fact that Starr has already gone through the hassle of locating her target and uncovering their plot at a temple in India. The enemy is a supposed sorcerers named Siva Dey who dresses like she's right out of an Arabian Nights play and has the power to bring statues to life to do her bidding. The villainess reanimated a giant statue to do away with her pesky intruder, but Undercover Girl manages to free herself and make a hasty retreat. Siva Dey begins to round up local tribes to her cause convincing them that she's the Second Coming with her powers of anti-petrification by making boulders roll with her mind. Starr goes to her colleague Dave to help stop Siva's schemes who in turn needs certain chemicals and metals to work her mojo. Starr gets the drop on Siva as she sent her newfound followers to get her magical ingredients, even though Siva's giant flunky literally gets her in the palm of his stoney hand. Instead of just murdering Undercover Girl and getting it over with, Siva Dey makes the classic supervillain mistake of leaving their nemesis chained up to be killed later. Starr wiggles out of her restraints and the rest of the 7-page story is wrapped up unexpectedly quick with our heroine yelling to Siva Dey and her forces that the police are going to use dynamite to blow up the living rock army. For some reason, Starr allows the evil enchantress to get away, meaning that there's still a magic-using bad girl out there with the knowledge to make up her own arsenal of stone warriors whenever she wants to. This is like just giving Leatherface a chainsaw and expecting him to use it only for lumberjacking. Undercover Girl fails as a secret agent if arbitrary criminals just happen to know her reputation as a spy complete with her own codename being a well-established fact. The bigger mystery is how Star Flagg got wind of Siva Dey's sinister stratagem and what lead up to where the story opens up making like this is the second part of a cliffhanger you completely missed out on.

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