Character Spotlight: Piston Puss

A character who's been around as long as Dick Tracy is bound to have some canon immigrants, so I don't know why it took me this long to learn about them. But I found a few that we'll talk about over the next several weeks.

This week: Piston Puss!

Piston Puss was one of a series of characters that appeared in ads for an auto parts store called Autolite. In the 60s and 70s, it was common for ads to feature comic book and comic strip characters and be done in the same style as the real stories featuring those characters. Although the ads were often made by the real comics creators - because ads had a higher pay rate - they were designed by the ad teams who often put no thought into the world these stories are taking place in, meaning they often used original villains. This phenomenon is no stranger to this blog. This particular ad is from 1966.

Much later, Piston Puss would appear in a Minit Mystery on November 20, 2017...

...and gets named the next day. Spoiler alert: he did it.