Little was set down of the lariat-thief who styled himself the Rope beyond his own boast — a criminal of ten years' standing, two of them spent behind bars — and the conceit that he could outsmart the Star-Spangled Kid seven days a week, needing only to give his enemy enough rope. He first announced himself by night against the “burglar-proof” First Federal Insurance building, swinging in on a lariat only to find the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy lying in wait; he escaped them with a trick rope built to bear a single man, so that when Stripesy swung after him the line parted and the heavy partner plunged to a marquee below, breaking his leg,

With the team thus broken and Stripesy laid up in a hospital, the Rope promised himself a crime holiday, and the Star-Spangled Kid took to prowling Crime Row alone — though the Kid's sister Merry, unwilling to be left behind, trailed him by infra-red field glasses of her own making. The thief's next stroke was an armored car carrying a million dollars in gold, which he wrecked by stringing ropes wired with thin conducting cables across its path to draw a killing current from an overhead line; the crew he left stunned but living, and he had already roped and floored the interfering Star-Spangled Kid when Merry arrived, routing his escape with a wind-siren, a spring-loaded boxing glove, and a gun that blew stinging chemical “crook-tamer” bubbles. Fleeing across the rooftops on a tight-strung line, the Rope was at last taken by a turn of his own trade — Merry's version of the Indian rope trick and a vanishing cloud of smoke — and led away by the police (Star-Spangled Comics #83).

Imprisoned only briefly, he fashioned a lariat from a rope he had stolen and hidden away in the prison packing room, lassoed and knocked cold a guard at his cell door, relieved the man of his keys, and slipped over the walls amid searchlights and escape sirens while his pursuers searched the yard below (Star-Spangled Comics #84).

With Sylvester Pemberton away at sea on a fishing voyage, it fell to Merry alone to answer the Rope's return. Reading of a charity costume contest in which society women would pose as famous figures of history and fiction, adorned with genuine museum treasures, he pulled a string of themed robberies, each garnished with one of his rope tricks. From a panel in a stage Sphinx his hoodlums fell upon a costumed “Cleopatra” and carried off the ruby she wore, the thief escaping after tripping Merry's pursuing chariot with a new plastic rope nearly invisible to the eye. At the court of a costumed Louis XVI he had a giant rope spool wheeled in after the fashion of the Trojan Horse, spilling out his men, dropped a great rope net over the king's “swordsmen” as though casting for fish, and swung down to snatch a half-million-dollar necklace.

For the third scene — a tableau of Snow White staged with real gold as bait, at Merry's urging and with the police's leave — the Rope's gang came disguised as the Seven Dwarfs to reclaim “their” gold, only to find the bag packed with exploding fireworks; Merry, herself costumed as Snow White, drove them off with soap-flake “snow” and a great prop apple, and the rope renegade was hauled in and returned to State Prison (Star-Spangled Comics #84).. 

The later career of the Rope on Earth-Two, if any, is unrecorded.