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Nelson, Jack. Jack Nelson was created by the German author Joe Morris (Will Morton) and appeared in Jack Nelson vom Tric-Trac-Tric #1-30 (1925-1926).

Jack Nelson is a Costumed Avenger. In the future world of 1999, there are new men and new technology, but crime and evil remain. To fight this crime, the Tric-Trac-Tric have formed. They are a secret organization of ninety-nine black-helmeted vigilantes who are the terror of criminals everywhere. Leading the fight is Jack Nelson, the best agent of the Tric-Trac-Tric and a master of fighting, guns, boxing, football, motorcycles, automobiles, flying and swimming. The arch-enemy of Nelson and the Tric-Trac-Tric is the World Crime League, which is led by the Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Yellow Peril Ta Clo, an Indian with Superhuman mental powers. Nelson takes on “the Living Death,” the King of New York’s Beggars, the Phantom of Ditmoore House, and a Texas train robber.

Nelson appears in stories with titles like "The Cowboy of Death," "The Blackfoot Profiteer," and "The Flaming Auto."

* I'm including Jack Nelson vom Tric-Trac-Tric in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of the imaginative content in the heftroman. There wasn't anything like Jack Nelson on the stands of German news kiosks in the mid-1920s. A dystopian future? Crime-hunting secret organizations? A Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Yellow Peril with mental powers? No, Joe Morris mined some new creative veins in the writing of Jack Nelson--to the heftroman's benefit. While Jack Nelson only lasted thirty issues--not long as far as heftromane went--it was thirty issues of something new set in a dystopic future, which is always a hard sell to audiences more at ease with simplistic and comforting fare. 

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