Hiram "Stretch" Skinner
Residence: New York City, New York
Occupation: Office Clerk
First Appearance (Golden Age):Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942)
History
Hiram “Stretch” Skinner hailed from Corn Corners, a farming
hamlet in Cowshed County, where he grew up in the early decades of the century
as the self-appointed rival of one Homer Heifer and, for a time, the suitor of
a girl named Tulip Trance. Like many a country boy he made his way at last to
New York City, carrying with him an unshakable faith in his own cleverness and
a country plainness of speech that would mark him ever after (Sensation Comics
#31).
By 1942 he had attached himself to the heavyweight champion Ted Grant, having obtained a private detective’s badge from a mail-order school of dubious standing and called himself a professional investigator on that strength alone. His first venture went badly — a pair of swindlers, Gile and Hogg, relieved him of two thousand dollars for a worthless share in their agency, a front for a jewel-theft racket — but he blundered into the case Wildcat was untangling, helped bring the swindlers down, and set himself up as a one-man concern, the Stretch Skinner Detective Agency. From the first he counted both Grant and the masked Wildcat among his closest friends, never suspecting that the two were one man (Sensation Comics #4).
Grant arranged for his sweetheart, Joan Fortune, to serve as
Skinner’s secretary (Sensation Comics #5), and by the start of 1943 Skinner had
taken on the further office of Grant’s boxing manager (Sensation Comics #13).
His detective work was distinguished more by enthusiasm than by competence;
time and again he stumbled into the very cases Wildcat was quietly working,
serving by turns as comic foil, as the man in need of rescue, and — often by
sheer accident — as a genuine help, yet he never once doubted that he was a
detective of the first rank.
So it went in the spring of 1943, when a robber in the guise of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow terrorized Central Park. Fresh from a book on the old legend and talked into a riding lesson he had no taste for, Skinner blundered through the affair and was pressed into service as a jewel-draped decoy to lure the criminal — a part he spoiled by sitting up to protest at the insult to his looks, and that left him swearing off live horses for the carousel (Sensation Comics #16).
Stranger foes crossed his path as well. When the Yellow Wasp
— a hissing robber who loosed swarms of trained, paralyzing wasps — first
menaced the city in 1943, Skinner was caught with Wildcat in the villain’s
insect-filled deathtrap, and unwittingly supplied their escape: Wildcat set the
captive’s clothes alight, and the smoke stupefied the swarm (Sensation Comics
#20). When the Wasp later stung his way out of jail, Skinner caught the news on
his office radio and itched to take up the chase — a hunt he left, as ever, to
Wildcat (Sensation Comics #25).
His hunger for recognition found fuller scope in 1944. At
loose ends, he set down his memoirs as a true-crime column, “Whodunit and How,”
only to find that his one devoted reader was a crook who mined it for fresh
methods and loosed a crime wave upon the city. Chastened, Skinner helped run
the gang down, then cheerfully kept on writing (Sensation Comics #29).
That summer brought his proudest hour. He returned to Corn
Corners expecting a hero’s welcome, only to find the town had scarcely marked
his absence: Tulip Trance greeted him as a bad penny and was engaged to his
rival, Homer Heifer, now the local sheriff. When a prize bull was found
murdered and Skinner was framed and jailed, he broke loose, tracked the
captured Wildcat by the claw-marks his friend had left, and freed him from a flooded
well; and it was Skinner who furnished the clue — a smear of paint passed to
his eye from Heifer’s own fist — that unmasked the sheriff as the thief behind
a jewel-smuggling racket. Vindicated at last, he had his dream: Corn Corners
renamed itself Skinnerville in his honor, and Tulip returned to his side
(Sensation Comics #31).
His family ran to eccentrics, and a visit to one was seldom
restful. A trip to his uncle Epicure Skinner’s seaside place,
Skinner-by-the-Sea, in pursuit of a famous home-cooked meal drew Grant and
Skinner into a tangle with a waterfront gang and the theft of a gold shipment
(Sensation Comics #32); and an errand to fetch a balky robot “mechanical
second” built by his inventor uncle, Gadget Skinner, coincided with a string of
subway robberies by an armed thief disguised as a sweet old lady — a thief
Skinner, for once, felled himself with a well-flung bag of nickels (Sensation
Comics #36).
The years that followed gave him further chances to play the lead, and to be quietly outshone. He guarded a South American diamond with such devotion that he clung to its case even when knocked senseless, never grasping that the true stone rode the whole while in the peanut bag of his visiting cousin, Jose Maria Miguel Skinner (Sensation Comics #39). Engaged to escort three spoiled children to Africa after a cached fortune in gems, he claimed a familiarity with the continent he plainly lacked, slept through a leopard’s attack, and all but cost the party their lives with an ill-chosen native word, leaving Wildcat once again to do the rescuing (Sensation Comics #48). .
And once, stung
by Wildcat’s renown and certain its secret lay merely in a fearsome costume, he
bought a tiger’s outfit and prowled the rooftops as “the Tomcat” — a masquerade
that ended with Wildcat himself mistaking him for a confederate of the very
crooks he had hoped to catch (Sensation Comics #49).
His later doings ran to the ambitious and the ill-starred
alike. He sank his savings into a quiet mountain hotel, the Greenlake Inn, only
to draw a pair of escaped thugs who took the lonely place for a hideout — a
peril Wildcat, who had trailed them there, settled with his fists (Sensation
Comics #62). And it was Skinner’s own matchmaking that delivered Wildcat to the
Huntress: hired to arrange a bout with a masked challenger who would fight no
one but Wildcat — in truth the Huntress in disguise — he proudly seconded his
friend at the ringside, never dreaming the contest was a snare to cage him in
the villainess’s private zoo (Sensation Comics #66).
The activities of Stretch Skinner after
the close of the 1940s have not been recorded and whether he survived into the 21st century is unknown.
Prior Earth-0
Stretch Skinner exists in the post-Crisis but is a mechanic that idolizes heroes and fixes Wildcat's Cat-cycle. Whether he ever acted as a sidekick to Wildcat seems unlikely (JSA Classified #36)
Appearances
Big All-American Comic Book #1
Comic Cavalcade #1,2
Sensation #4-34,#36-89