Daring Mystery Comics

Daring Mystery Comics
Daring Mystery Comics #8 (Jan. 1942). Left to right: Captain Daring, the Fin, the Thunderer, Citizen V, the Blue Diamond, and (inset) the Silver Scorpion. Cover art by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon.
Publication information
Publisher	Timely Comics
Schedule	variable (nominally monthly or bimonthly)
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date	January 1940 - January 1942
Number of issues	8
Creative team
Writer(s)	Joe Simon, Bill Everett, Jack Kirby
Artist(s)	Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Alex Schomburg, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Editor(s)	Martin Goodman, Joe Simon

Daring Mystery Comics is an American comic-book series published by Timely Comics, a predecessor of Marvel Comics, during the 1930-1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Primarily a superhero anthology, it ran eight issues from 1940 to 1942, and is notable for work by Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Alex Schomburg, and the team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.

Daring Mystery Comics #8 (Jan. 1942) features the first appearance of the Golden Age superhero Citizen V, who decades later appears in flashback in the Marvel series Thunderbolts, where his family and the Citizen V identity play a major part. A small handful of other Daring Mystery superheroes have been revived or have made guest appearances in modern-day titles, such as the World War II-set flashback series The Invaders and the feature "Liberty Legion" in Marvel Premiere.

Daring Mystery Comics came from publisher Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, which by the early 1960s would evolve into Marvel Comics. The first five issues were nominally edited by Goodman, but were in fact mixtures of material bought from Funnies, Inc. or the Harry "A" Chesler studio, both prominent comic-book "packagers" who produced stories or even complete, outsourced comics on demand for publishers entering the fledgling medium. Timely's first in-house editor, Joe Simon, relaunched the series with issue #6 as his second project for Goodman and remained for the last few issues.