Dagar The Desert White Meat

Edmond Good was an artist with a respective amount of work in Golden Age comics like Bruce Gentry, Scorchy Smith, and Tomahawk, but one of the more notable titles he drew was Dagar The Desert Hawk. There was a Columbia movie serial from 1944 titled Desert Hawk about another hero who used the same title, but was who spent the whole time fighting his evil twin. Beginning in 1947, Dagar premiered in Fox Feature Syndicate's All Great Comics #13 and went on to become its own title in 1948 of which Issues #17 and 18 of #14-23 were never actually printed, even though no one seemed to notice at the time as the comic eventually changed its title to Captain Kidd. Dagar was your run of the mill adventurer dwelling in the Arabian desert seeming to be a rich native Bedouin, even though he's really just another poser white boy named Bart Benson blending into the locals. He regularly rode around the dunes looking for something good to do, that and hunting for hot harem girls to sweep off their slippers. Dagar had a steady flow of busty brunettes who all looked like the same girl on the front cover, though they were separate love interests, the most standard of which was called Ayesha possibly named after the Allan Quartermain bad girl. The Desert Hawk would regularly tangle with alluring amazons, reckless raiders, pesky pirates, bloodthirsty bandits, ravenous reptiles, femme fatales, and mad mummies. The weirdest enemy Dagar ran across was a sinister scientist who made a formula that could not only shrink anyone he injected with, but could also make their clothes shrink too, which is a strange effect for a genetic-mutation serum, and the corrupt chemist gets a taste of his own medicine as he meets his end in the snout of a hungry anteater. Dagar's chronicles got the ire of one Dr. Frederic Wertham in his infamous Seduction Of The Innocent book that scrutinized comic books as being a bad influence on children. Despite Wertham's intentions, he believed the Dagar comics showed non-white characters as being inferior beings, even though it's obvious that the title character is just a white guy masquerading as a fellow Arabian. This kind of thing was common in Hollywood pictures of the time, but to have another pampered white guy doing his Batman schtick in some far corner of the world was seriously wearing thin at this latter half of the Golden Age.