The only comic book I was allowed to read as a young boy was The Adventures of The Purple Finger, which regularly disappointed its readers with unexciting tales of a masked avenger who irritated super-villains by poking them with his glowing magenta digit. The Purple Finger also had a girlfriend called Sandra, but she wouldn't let him touch her. That was one of the dreary sub-plots; that and the fact that he constantly bit his nails down to the cuticle. Nailing-biting was the The Purple-Finger's Achilles heel, and hangnails in particular were like Kryptonite to him. He would be tearfully prostate and out-of-action for many hours whenever he acquired one. Meanwhile,banks would be robbed and innocent citizens would be beaten to a bloody pulp while Police Commissioner Moran vainly called for help on the special Finger Phone.
In a futile attempt to reinvigorate the series, a Robin-type sidekick figure was introduced into later storylines. This was the Little Dutch Boy who famously stuck his finger in a dyke to stop it leaking. Unfortunately he proved to be even more ineffectual and limited than The Purple Finger himself. Sticking his finger into things seemed to be his solution to every crisis. I recall that in one episode The Little Dutch Boy stuck his finger into the exhaust pipe of a super-villains getaway car. I suppose he must have thought this would prevent the baddies car from moving, but he was severely burned instead. Eventually The Little Dutch Boy was entirely eviscerated by a robotic coffee-grinder controlled by the evil genius known as Le Mauvais Bean. He was no great loss, sad to say
In another plot twist, if you could call it that, Sandra left town for good. Her reasoning, rendered in a speech bubble with extremely jagged edges, was that she'd rather sit on her own finger than suffer the inept and potentially lethal romantic attentions of The Purple Finger. And who could blame her? Certainly not me, for it was at this point that I stopped reading the comic altogether, realizing with an adolescent pang that it was only Sandra's curvaceously black-inked silhouette that had retained my interest in the first place.
Many years later, while searching for back issues of Amateur Glamor Photographer in a New Hampshire antique store, I came across a pristine collection of The Adventures of The Purple Finger, ordered by number and packed carefully into clear plastic sleeves. The owner of the shop was giving them away for free. Even nostalgia was giving the finger to The Purple Finger.
