We received such nice response to our recent Rip Kirby piece, we decided to follow up with a look at some of the ballyhooing that accompanied another tough guy in the LOAC stable — Secret Agent X-9, Phil Corrigan.
X-9 debuted in 1934 as King Features Syndicate’s answer to hard-boiled Dick Tracy. K.F.S. hired Dashiell Hammett, the premier source of hard-boildedness (if that’s a word), to pen their nameless agent’s adventures. The author of The Maltese Falcon was widely read and a familiar name to newspaper readers; Hammett was teamed with a then-newcomer, artist Alex Raymond. We reprinted the earliest Secret Agent X-9 strips in 2011:
King Features gave its subscribing newspapers ways to give the new series a big push: there was a Secret Agent X-9 Club for kids to join and a text feature that offered a mystery to be solved, with some papers making cash prizes available to be divided amongst the winners. Here’s a look at one advertisement for the club, as well as the first three-part mini-mystery (click images throughout for isolated views):
Long after Hammett and Raymond departed the feature, X-9 continued cracking case after case; along the way the title of the strip was humanized after the previously-anonymous secret agent was given the name Phil Corrigan. LOAC picked up the trail of Secret Agent Corrigan in 1967, with the arrival of creative team Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson.
We compiled five volumes that took the Archie-&-Al Corrigan through the end of the 1960s, through the ’70s, and into the earliest weeks of 1980. As with Rip Kirby, K.F.S. offered client newspapers “house ads” related to each new Corrigan story in order to whet interest, or to help new clients promote the new arrival to their comics page. We’re showcasing four of these, spanning from 1967 to 1972:
George Evans took over Corrigan‘s creative reins in early February, 1980 and remained with the strip to its end: both Evans and Corrigan retired in 1996. We featured the first several months of Evans’s run in a sixth Corrigan volume:
We found this 1995 article about Evans fun and entertaining, and we hope you do, too!
