Bomber Burns, Pants On Fire

Edd Ashe Jr. and Nathaniel Nitkin made up another superhero pilot for WWII in 1941 in the patriotic comic from Hillman Periodicals, Victory Comics. This series ran for four issues and each one featured a short adventure of Bomber Burns and his Firebrand, another of those mystery pilots like Captain Midnight who takes on a secret identity to instill fear by not letting his adversaries know his real name. American flyer Jack Burns is on a mission with his partner Dave in Newfoundland where their plane is shot down by German pilots and Dave dies in the wreck. Jack gets rescued by the British navy and later on steals a Lockheed XP-38, an American plane which is supposed to be the fastest in the world, but he has to shrug off some misplaced Australian soldier first. Jack flies it to Scotland where he retrofits it with a flamethrower he stole from the Aussies, a dozen machine guns, a rotating cannon, and supercharged engines, paints it red and calls his newly jacked ride the Firebrand. For the final touch, Jack "Bomber" Burns dresses up in a spiffy new all red costume with a fire emblem on his chest, but the crowning glory were the crimson-clad military jodhpurs which were a standard back then originally used for riding horses but retailored adding some stunning flares to an otherwise boring pair of pants. Bomber Burns would then fly around Europe and be a sky bound vigilante taking out the Luftwaffe, and to put icing on the cake he would then drop his giant calling cards dipped in phosphorous over German-occupied territories with the name of his plane on it so all goose steppers would fear the Firebrand. Although this makes you wonder if the Nazis thought Firebrand was the name of the pilot or the plane, which if that's the case then the Germans would also think that Airboy's codename was Birdie. The real shame of Bomber Burns is that his extravagant outfit didn't get much screentime outside of his plane except for one time he single-handedly invaded a Nazi castle, so those scorching trousers only got the occasional shot in the spotlight.