The Stainless Texan

For 15 years Chicago Cartoonist Russell Stamm, 40, drew his comic strip Scarlet O'Neil without attracting much attention. Then, two years ago, into the big-city adventures in the strip ambled Stainless Steel, a Texas sheriff far from home. He had flowing blond hair and the physique of a Michelangelo statue. "In general," drawled Stainless, "heroics is mah business." His business soon proved so successful that the number of papers taking the strip from the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate rose from 126 to 148 (including 39 in foreign countries). This week Stainless Steel was getting ready to perform a most unheroic act: he will take over the strip from Scarlet O'Neil. Customer papers will get a letter from the syndicate: "Stainless Steel has shoved the lady right out of the ink bottle . . . From now on, it's Stainless Steel"

Sense of Duty. The reason for Stainless' popularity, says Cartoonist Stamm, is that he is all comic-strip heroes "rolled into one bundle" and a full-fledged satire on many of them. For example, when the police commissioner begged Steel to give up his spectacularly successful amateur detective work so that the police would have a chance to catch some crooks themselves ("Heroism at its greatest! To suffer silently without reward"), Stainless reluctantly agreed, rented a room in a quiet boarding house to rest. Not till three weeks later did he realize that his fellow boarders were all crooks, finally went to work and bagged them.

To his horror Stainless has a devastating effect on the women who cross his path. "Ah don't scare easily," says Stainless, "but the word matrimony jest turns mah spine to jelly." His generosity often leads to trouble. For the past two months Stainless has been acting as the target for a knife-throwing TV star named Hazie Blur-Blur who cannot see without glasses but is too vain to wear them all the time. Stainless took the job after her other partner quit, because Hazie told him that she would lose a $1,000,000 inheritance she intended to use to build a playground, if she discontinued her act. For his good Samaritanism, this week Stainless has a knife thrown squarely into his chest (see cut). But he had the foresight to outfit himself with a wooden vest.

Cartoonist Stamm, who once worked as assistant to Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), brought Stainless into his Scarlet O'Neil strip because he was tired of straight adventure comics, now makes $40,000 a year. In the dead-serious world of comic-strip nerves, Cartoonist Stamm has a simple reason for Stainless' popularity: "His saving grace is that he isn't deadly serious like most heroes. He's got a sense of humor."

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