If you wanted to buy a comic book in the Chicago of 1940, you couldn't go to your local comic shop.  In fact, Variety Comics,  the oldest comic shop in the city, wouldn't open until 1975, 35 years later!  When the premiere issue of The Green Hornet comic book came out, it was a chore to find it on already-overcrowded drugstore magazine racks and newsstands!

But once you found it, and gave the vendor ten cents, 64 full-color pages of action and mystery were yours to enjoy!  The tales weren't as simple and outlandish as most comics of the time, since the stories were adapted directly from the radio show's scripts, retaining the weekly broadcast's hard-edged, adult-oriented plots and realistic action.

If you had another dime, you could go over to The Biograph (where John Dillinger had been shot a few years earlier) or The Music Box and spend ten cents on an all-day marathon of entertainment, including a feature film, a b-movie, plus a newsreel, a couple of cartoons, and the latest cliffhanging chapter of a weekly movie serial starring The Green Hornet!

While his full-face disguise looked different from the comic version's surgeon-style mask, the characterization and plots were, again, based on the radio show.  And, when masked, the movie Hornet sounded like the hero on the airwaves...because radio Hornet Al Hodge's distinctive voice was dubbed whenever newspaper publisher Britt Reid was masked!

All the supporting characters from the radio show made it to the movie version. (Serials usually "trimmed" existing characters to keep the plots fast-paced.)  In fact, Kato received more time on screen than he usually got on the radio, as his scientific genius and other talents (including karate) were emphasized. Oddly, in this incarnation, Kato was now Korean, not Fillipino or Japanese!

The serial proved so popular that a second production, The Green Hornet Strikes Again, appeared less than a year later and also did "big box office".

Fast-forward to 2011, and a Chicago-based Green Hornet fan can not only see a brand-new 3-D film this Friday, but can go to one of over two dozen local comics shops like Chicago Comics or Challengers Comics to buy reprints of the 1940s comic book or DVDs of the two 1940s serials!

They say the 1940s were "The Golden Age of Comics". Perhaps 2011 will be "The Golden Age of the Green Hornet"!