Crossover of the Week

Winter 1967

A THING OF BEAUTY

            Sanford Biggs accepts a contract to kill the Green Hornet and Kato, and steals the Black Beauty for his museum, housed aboard his cargo carrier, the Bigg Dipper. The items in Biggs’ museum include a glowing green meteorite; the remains of a crashed experimental airplane that had been shot down over Switzerland in 1939; the mask, hat, and pistols of a famous lawman in the old west; and a bat-shaped metal throwing weapon. The Hornet recognizes the lawman’s equipment. In the aftermath of the Hornet’s battle with Biggs, everything in the museum is tagged, labeled, and accounted for, except for one empty case. The Hornet (aka Britt Reid) tells his ally, D.A. Frank Scanlon, that the case contained an heirloom stolen from his family many years ago, which belonged to his grandfather.

            Short story by Bobby Nash in The Green Hornet Casefiles, Joe Gentile and Win Scott Eckert, eds., Moonstone Books, 2011. The glowing green meteorite is a piece of kryptonite, one of the few substances that can kill Superman. The experimental airplane belonged to the Canadian pulp hero Lance Star; its destruction at the hands of Star’s foe Baron Otto Von Blood is depicted in Nash’s upcoming novel Lance Star: Sky Ranger – Cold Snap. The lawman of the old west is John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger. The Green Hornet radio series revealed that Britt Reid was the Lone Ranger’s great-nephew. NOW Comics’ Green Hornet comic established in turn that the Green Hornet from the 1960s television series was Britt Reid II, the original Hornet’s nephew. Therefore, Britt Reid II is actually John Reid’s great-grandnephew, not his grandson. The bat-shaped metal throwing weapon is one of Batman’s batarangs.