A boy and his dog.

The January 1936 issue of "Popular Mechanics" magazine has this interesting photo which I entitle "A Boy and His Dog".

It is from an article called "Fighting Crime with Masks". From the title, it would have been a reasonable guess that it was about superheroes. But no, it was about how everyone would be wearing gas masks in the future.

This was really there era before superheroes. Before Superman and shortly after. Batman: the most famous mask-wearing superhero of all. But there were some masked heroes around prior to the arrival of the Last Son of Krypton in comic book pages, such as Zorro (himself a major forerunner of Batman) and the Sandman. The Sandman, seen to the left, actually wore a gas mask.