Slam Bradley
Slam Bradley is the title of a comic series that has been published intermittently by the US publisher DC since 1937.
The series is about the adventures of the private detective Slam Bradley, who in his demeanor and character resembles the “ hardboiled detectives ” of the so-called “ Black Series ”, such as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade ( “ The Maltese Falcon ” ) or Raymond Chandler's detective character of Philip Marlowe ( " The Big Sleep " ) is extremely similar. The great majority of the stories that have appeared so far under the "Slam Bradley" title can be assigned to the genre of "Crime Comics".
Publications on Slam Bradley
The first "Slam Bradley" story appeared in Detective Comics # 1 in March 1937. This story was designed by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster , who are thus the creators of the character and the series "Slam Bradley". Less than a year later, both became world famous through the cartoon character Superman they created .
Slam Bradley's Adventures appeared as a permanent feature in Detective Comics from 1937 to October 1949 . After a total of 152 issues of the series "Bradley Stories" had included "Slam Bradley" in Detective Comics # 153 in favor of the new feature "Roy Raymond, TV Detective" . While Siegel wrote most of the "Slam Bradley" stories, only a few early stories by Shuster visualized: The majority of the stories in the series were created by artists such as Jack Farr or Martin Naydel, with Howard Sherman, who stood out as a writer in the later years alongside Siegel.
In the 1990s Bradley was temporarily used as a supporting character in the series "Superman" - where he was a freelance investigator in the police force of Superman's hometown - before he played a leading role in the series " Catwoman " from 2001 as a partner and lover of the heroine, a shrewd burglar, played.
Most recently, in the fifth edition of the “Solo” series in 2006, for the first time in more than fifty years, a solo adventure on Slam Bradley - designed by Darwyn Cooke - was published. Before that, a miniseries entitled “The New Frontier” had already appeared in 2003/2004 in Bradley and the detective John Jones - behind whom the disguised Martian J'onn J'onzz hides - solve a tricky case together.
Title character and plot
The title character of Slam Bradley is a private detective whose full name is Samuel Emerson Bradley. He has the the type of private detective of "hard boiled novels" by default to its own characteristics: it is a "tough cookie" who knows how to fist fights and bar brawls, a passion for beautiful women and high-proof beverages has and with representatives of the police , a has a strained relationship.
Bradley runs a reasonably successful private law firm, in whose dingy premises clients keep coming to entrust him with cases. In the stories of the 1930s and 1940s, Bradley was supported in solving his cases by his junior partner “Shorty” Morgan, a plump, pancake-faced young man who primarily acted as a “comic relief character”. A recurring element in the investigation of cases is the donning of sophisticated disguises in order to be able to determine "undercover". Bradley's own clothing consists of the typical detective attributes of a suit and fedora hat. One of the most prominent villains in the series was Fui Onyui, a Chinese who resembled the famous Fu Manchu and personified the fear of the yellow threat that was rampant in the United States in the 1930s .
While the earliest Slam Bradley stories are set in Cleveland , later stories are mostly set in New York City . Even later in the fictional cities of Metropolis and Gotham City , the hometowns of Superman and Batman, the two most successful characters from Bradley's publisher DC-Comics.
The early 2000s Catwoman series, written by Ed Brubaker, reveals that Bradley has a son, Sam Bradley Jr., who has a daughter, Helena Kyle, along with Catwoman, a thief with whom Bradley was also ironically romance and gave old Bradley a granddaughter.