As established in previous columns I love Golden Age comic books, but I also love old comic strips and happily for me a great deal of Golden Age comics contained reprints of old comic strips. While we’re currently living in the Golden Age of comic strip reprints there is still plenty of material which deserves to be collected. And until it is Golden Age comic books are a handy way to read the strips that publishers haven’t gotten around to yet. Like Moon Mullins, Mickey Finn, Joe Palooka…and Mandrake the Magician.

I love Mandrake. I know most comic fans swear by Lee Falk’s other major creation The Phantom and I understand why; The Phantom was your proto-masked mystery man and his strip contains all of the inherent elements of the genre that make guys like me go all squishy inside. He’s got an elaborate back story, a secret headquarters, props, weapons, pets, in short, stuff. But me I’m a contrarian son of a bitch; fandom can’t heap enough praise on Carl Barks Donald Duck, I love Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse. Everyone else deep dish digs The Phantom, I loves me Mandrake something fierce.

I’m also an over particular son of a bitch; the Mandrake I love is the one from the 1930′s and 40′s, drawn by Phil Davis in his signature clean, sharp, art deco style. His adventures varied, from continuities that dealt with more or less conventional crime fighting to those were he went to lost lands or other worlds. OK, sure, even by the rather generous standards of the times (back when nobody expected a hero to have ‘emotional arcs’) Mandrake wasn’t much of a character. Actually, when he wasn’t being a jerk using his hypnotic powers to make (sometimes innocent) people think they were losing their minds just for fun he could be cool to the point of being languid. But I suppose the fact that he wasn’t your standard two-fisted adventurer was as big a part of his appeal as his powers or the fact he was dressed for the opera twenty-four/seven.

Of course Mandrake fans do have to deal with the strips’s stereotypical depiction of Lothar, his servant. On the one hand he was an African prince and the strongest man in the world, given by his authors the license to beat the living hell out of white guys. Which must have been secretly satisfying to the strip’s black readers; given the fact that a black man wasn’t supposed to even touch a white one at this time I’m really surprised more wasn’t made of this.

But on the other hand he was also depicted as being fairly child-like mentally, afraid of ghosts and and having a strange speech pattern. It definitely wasn’t the traditional ‘Negro’ patois given to comedy servants or the pidgin English spoken by African natives in the movies. The closest thing I can compare it to is how Bizarro Superman spoke in DC comics (i.e. instead of ‘I’ Lothar regularly referred to himself as ‘me’).

Davis drew the strip until his death in 1964 but even before his passing the strip had begun to address the one thing Mandrake the Magician lacked; stuff. After decades of not having a base of operations and being a free agent Mandrake settled down on his estate Xanadu and began working for the police. At first he was answerable to “The Chief” (who had a proper name but as far as I can tell it was rarely used) and his “Silly Stuff Department” which investigated supposedly impossible crimes.

Eventually Mandrake also began working for the head of an international organization called Inter-Intel also called (imaginatively enough) “The Chief”, this one supposedly a cigar smoking robot. In reality the real head of Inter-Intel was Hojo, who by day played the role of Mandrake’s rotund Chinese personal chief at Xanadu. Well, Hojo really was Chinese and a fat guy, and a chief for that matter, but it was never fully explained (to my satisfaction anyway) what the need for this kind of elaborate subterfuge was.

I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that both these developments probably had more than a little to do with the success of both the Batman TV show and the James Bond movies. That theory was confirmed when I finally came across online the story from 1965 that introduced both Inter-Intel and Xanadu, “The Return of Cobra”.

Not that this version of the strip was all bad; when Mandrake wasn’t fighting conventional criminals there was still some pretty fantastic storylines. Like those involving Magnon, a godlike alien who in spite of being the emperor of a million planets invariably needed the help of a hypnotists. And after being a man of mystery for most of his career we finally discovered his origins, learned that he had family and picked up a regular opponent, The Cobra (who naturally turned out to be his brother).

And there was a definite upside; in 1965 Fred Fredericks took over the art which is when Lothar started being depicted and treated as an equal human being and Mandrake’s assistant/friend. Another important development from “The Return of Cobra”, in the second week Lothar’s signature fez vanished and was never seen again.

Which of course didn’t answer the question of what an African prince was doing wearing a fez in the first place when it wasn’t traditionally worn in Africa. But then, when it comes to that, why the hell did an African prince have a German name?

And although Mandrake and his great love Princess Narda didn’t actually marry until 1997 they (together with Lothar and his girlfriend Karma, an African princess/model) lived in Xanadu in what I always assumed had to have been spectacular sin. At least it always seemed that way to me. They definitely went unchaperoned (other than Hojo) and their adventures always seemed to begin and end in their swimsuits indolently lounging poolside.

Which I suppose was perfectly innocent and everything but it sure seemed salacious to my fevered adolescent mind…

A couple of panels from the story I’ve posted this week are particularly noteworthy. The ones above contains one of my favorite tropes from old movies and comics, the “if you don’t pay your debt I’m going to have the sheriff throw you in jail!”. Modern audiences probably at least know this hoary plot device from the yearly showings of the 1954 movie White Christmas.

I know that the law varies from State to State and, especially in the past, it wasn’t always fairly implemented (to say the least), but I was unaware that America ever had debtor prisons. Plus, wouldn’t the Sheriff tell the complainant “this is a matter for a civil court and none of my business”?

And naturally the story has to have (in the words of the movie Sullivan’s Travels) “a little sex”, so the professor has a beautiful daughter who not only stows away (I couldn’t tell you the last time somebody used this trope in all seriousness) but has helpfully come equipped with her very own “space costume”.

Feature Book #46 published by David McKay in 1946 reprints the “Fire World” Sunday sequence, which is one of Mandrake’s wilder adventures from the 40′s. Of course I feel compelled to point out it doesn’t have much of a plot. Oh, every once in a while Falk tries to dredge up some contrivance to create a little drama but it’s mostly just a travelogue of a fantastic world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Oh, for the record several of the pages are in black and white because they weren’t included in this comic book and some helpful person put back scans of the missing pages in the version I downloaded. I’d give this person the credit they’re due…if I had any idea who they were.

One of my favorite early seventies publications was the oversized Kirby Unleashed, the first history/art collection of Jack King Kirby, just as he lighted at DC to create the 4th World.

http://waffyjon.blogspot.com/2011/02/fandom-library-kirby-unleashed.html

Let’s take a quick look at Dennis the Menace imitator (one of many!) Melvin the Monster…or is it Dexter the Demon…or even Peter the Little Pest?

http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2011/02/name-of-beast.html

Here’s Sequential Crush, managing to tie African-American history month and Valentine’s Day together with a post on the infrequent appearances of African-American couples on seventies DC covers.

http://sequentialcrush.blogspot.com/2011/02/african-american-couples-on-covers-of.html

Silver Age Comics walks us through the first and arguably best Bizarro tale in Superboy, a serious, emotionally charged classic of its time if ever there was one and a far cry from the silliness that followed.

http://sacomics.blogspot.com/2011/02/superboy-68.html

Once again we merge our Theatrical Cartoons and Valentine’s Day/Romance series into one post, with the 1882 fold-out booklet, The Romance of a Hammock. This short tale of love-gone-wrong, was recited in comic verse by actor & producer Gus Williams (pictured on the cover in his role of John Mishler, the lead character in the play One of the Finest, by Joseph Bradford). The fold-out booklet promoted the play, which began its run in the early 1870s under the title Law in New York, and which was a comedy about the New York City Police Department. (Some of the above information, plus more about Gus Williams, the play, and playwright Joseph Bradford, can be found by clicking on the following link to the July 1, 2025 publication of The Critic)

Click on the above & below pictures, to open larger versions.

Later, a second fold-out version of the story was published - with recipes placed inside the open space in each panel (except, notably, in the panel where the woman has collapsed in exhaustion from cooking!) — to advertise Yarnall’s Spoon in Can Baking Powder.

Doug Wheeler

TheatricalCartoons ValentinesDay AdvertisingStrips

Back when Kitchen Sink was lovingly reprinting Will Eisner’s Spirit on a regular basis, someone had the bright idea for a Spirit Jam and here it is-scores of different artists (including Eisner) trying their hands with panels and pages!

http://peur-evol.blogspot.com/2011/02/spirit-jam.html

Here we have Wallace Wood’s self-published 1968 portfolio, printed to be distributed to potential advertising clients in order to show the many diverse styles in which Wood had worked. Wood later sent copies free to his fan club members.

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/wallace-wood-1927-1981-wallace-wood.html

A year or so ago, I discovered Howie Post’s great Jimminy and the Magic Book series from DC’s More Fun Comics. Here’s another fun tale of this all-too brief series from the late 1940′s.

http://mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com/2011/02/post-post.html

Finally today, Al Bigley shares a fun but mostly forgotten page that I shared on my own blog a couple of years back-DC’s Spectre interviewing his artist at the time, Neal Adams.

http://bigglee.blogspot.com/2011/02/spectre-interviews-neal-adams-1967-dc.html?

While the world anxiously awaits the new book of Popeye comics by Bud Sagendorf (brought to you by our gracious hosts at Yoe Books, click here to order now) I thought I’d share this early version of “I’m Popeye The Sailor Man” by Billy Costello. Enjoy!

Click the link below to listen.

I’m Popeye the Sailor Man - Billy Costello

Let’s start today with some very early Frank Miller, probably unseen by most fans as it was buried anonymously in a 1979 issue of Gold Key’s long-running Twilight Zone title.

http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2011/02/random-reads-frank-millers-endless.html

Stanley Stories provides double the fun by combining two popular cult obsessions and presenting more comic book stories of Nancy and Sluggo as done by the great John Stanley.

http://stanleystories.blogspot.com/2011/02/lumpy-beds-midget-magicians-and-nose.html

The Day Superboy Became Superman is explored at Random Longbox--a seventies look at a seminal moment in the Boy of Steel’s life as chronicled by veterans Leo Dorfman (pseudonymously as Geoff Brown), Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.

http://www.randomlongbox.com/2011/02/very-special-action-comics-story.html

Finally today, here’s a nifty selection of stylish Al Hirschfeld caricature cartoons from the fabulous fifties…appropriately enough on display over at The Fabuleous (sic) Fifties.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2011/02/face-is-thing-monday-cartoon-day.html

Valiant was a British boys weekly with an anthology format featuring several two to three page stories in black and white that continued from week to week which ran from 1962 to 1976. It’s also one of my favorites but it’s serial nature kind of makes it hard to present a large enough chunk of any of the strips so you can see for yourselves just what makes these comics so wonderful.

Thankfully British comics also had Annuals, large hardcover books that ran over 100 pages and came with color pages, that were published at Christmas. And during the summer there was also the occasional Special, which was pretty much a soft cover version of an Annual. Each featured longer, self-contained adventures of the title’s most popular characters.

The 1969 Valiant Summer Special runs 96 pages and I wish I could post every page, but I know I’m pushing things presenting as much of it is as I am. So I’m only going to post stories featuring my favorite characters, and being an American comic book guy raised on a steady diet of superhero comics I must confess I have just about zero interest in either war and football comics. So you’ll just have to imagine what long-running serials such as Raven on the Wing (about a shoe-less gypsy soccer phenom, drawn by Solano Lopez) was like, which is kind of a shame because like just about everything Solano Lopez drew it was remarkably idiosyncratic…

…and The Wild Wonders (the athletic adventures of a pair of super-strong wild boys).

But I do have a few words to say about Captain Hurricane.

It was the WWII adventures of a super strong, nearly indestructible Royal Marine Captain that played his psychotic rages and abusive treatment of his long suffering ‘batsman’ (a soldier assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant) ‘Maggots’ Malone for laughs. He was in no way a ‘superhero’, no ‘origin’ is ever given for his super powers and his fellow British soldiers didn’t find his ability to twist the barrel of tank into a pretzel to be at all unusual. The series got even sillier as it went along and demonstrated an amazing amount of racism and xenophobia towards both Britain’s enemies and allies (in one strip he meets a braggart American marine who dares consider himself physically Hurricane’s equal who eventually proves himself a coward).

While in South America to claim his fortune Tim Kelly acquired the Eye of Zoltec, which made him invulnerable. Being the protagonist of a boys adventure strip he promptly dedicated himself to fighting evil all over the world, apparently just for the sheer fun of it. Drawn by the always amazing Solano Lopez the strip was frequently weird and dark and got even weirder when Tim started palling around with the eccentric scientist Dr. Diamond and together they traveled through time in his invention the Time Clock (which looked like, you guessed it, a giant clock; any similarity between Dr. Diamond and the Time Clock and Dr. Who and the Tardis was absolutely intentional).

The House of Dolmann concerned an inventor who used his troupe of remote controlled puppets, each with their own powers, to (naturally) fight crime. It’s hard not to see a little bit of Will Magnus and his Metal Men in Dolmann, except for course for the fact he supposedly used ventriloquism to make his puppets speak. The fact Dolmann that worked alone and his puppets used to fight amongst themselves (even sometimes questioning their creator) has led some to assume the guy was nuts. Me, I prefer thinking his little robots (and let’s face it, that’s what they were) were sentient and Dolmann kept this to himself so the British government he sometimes worked for wouldn’t get handsy with his tech.

Just to prove I care about more than just adventure strips I present a story of Billy Bunter, The Fattest Schoolboy In The World. As a great big fat guy myself I tend to be over-interested in the fat guys who appear in American comic books. I’ve made quite a study of the subject over the years and one of the interesting things I’ve found is, Wimpy types excluded, most comic book fat guys were fairly heroic sidekicks who weren’t all that interested in food. At least they’re almost never shown eating, talking about food, trying to get food, etc.

And then we have Billy Bunter. He’s completely unknown in America and sadly seems to be mostly forgotten in the UK which is a shame since he appeared in novels, had his own television show and stage plays and even George Orwell was a fan. With his perfectly round gut and grotesque checkered trousers he looked a bit like Tweedledum (and/or Tweedledee) and was, well, I’ll just be lazy and quote Wikipedia; ”he was dishonest, greedy, pathologically self-centered, snobbish, conceited, lazy, cowardly, mean-spirited and stupid”.

He lived to pilfer food from the school kitchen or the younger boys, believing by dint of the magnificence of his appetite he was legitimately entitled to all the food in the world, and became quite put out when anyone dared to thwart him. He almost always failed in his attempts and faced his comeuppance with a cry of “Yarooh” (which his “horray” spelled backwards; how genius is that?).

Even today with it’s Situation’s and Housewives of Beverly Hills American popular culture is still fairly obsessed with ‘likability’. So there’s something almost admirable about such a meticulously detailed monster who is completely immune from outside opinion. And of course the fact that he’s frequently very funny doesn’t hurt.

One of the most memorable characters of British boys comics was The Steel Claw. Dismemberment didn’t happen all that often in American comics but it was the origin of poor Louis Randall, who had lost a hand and after a lab accident gained the power of invisibility. Drawn by Jesus Blasco it was also a very weird and dark strip and during his lengthy run Randall was a villain, a good guy, secret agent, costumed superhero (briefly; hey, it was the 60′s — everybody was doing it) and detective.

In an in-depth, illustrated essay, Dr. Michael J Vassalo ruminates at length on Dr. Wertham and the censorship battles of the late 1940′s as they related to Timely comics in particular.

http://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.com/2011/02/frederic-wertham-censorship-anti.html

Ed Wheelan’s Comics McCormick character is on display at Pappy’s with a typically old-fashioned tale of the youthful comics-collecting hero who was, believe it or not, an early EC character!

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2011/02/number-892-comics-mccormick-and-super.html

Gorilla Daze takes a fun look at the legendarily bad mid-sixties debut of B’wana Beast in DC’s Showcase with panels from Mike Sekowsky.

http://www.thefifthbranch.com/gorilladaze/?p=1491

Finally today, one can’t go wrong with Wally Wood sci-fi and horror art, even if it’s rom Mad Magazine-seen side by side with the original art in some cases here.

http://hairygreeneyeball2.blogspot.com/2011/02/hooray-for-horror-wood.html

The very first appearance of Steve Ditko and Joe Gill’s Captain Atom-complete with his original blue costume and numerous revival covers-can be found on display over at Rip’s dojo today.

http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-captain-atom.html

Here’s another of Bob Kanigher’s social commentary war comics, this one an anti-racist Sgt Rock classic from 1967, wonderfully interpreted as always by the great Joe Kubert.

http://kb-outofthisworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/social-history-in-comics-our-army-at.html

Here’s the whole pilot episode of Captain Nice, the mid-sixties superhero TV spoof. Jack Kirby did some promo art for NBC and Wally Wood did some work on the tie-in Topps trading cards but it’s star William Daniels who makes the series work.

http://mailittoteamup.blogspot.com/2011/02/captain-nice-episode.html

Finally today, here’s a look at the fifth issue of Marvel’s in-house fan mag, FOOM, from 1974, this issue featuring some early Byrne art as well as “the Ringo Thing” by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott.

http://bronzeagebabies.blogspot.com/2011/02/foom-fridays-foom-5.html

We start today with a Gorilla Daze look at the beginnings of the ant-war movement in DC’s war comics beginning with the appointment of Joe Kubert as editor in the late sixties.

http://www.thefifthbranch.com/gorilladaze/?p=1483

The Groovy Agent meanwhile takes a long and well-illustrated look at the early seventies DC debuts of the venerable Iron Mike Grell on Aquaman and the Legion of Super-Heroes.

http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2011/02/famous-first-fridays-iron-mike-grells.html

John Spranger was an Eisner assistant who went on to be the regular artist on the newspaper comic strip version of the Leslie Charteris character, the Saint, and here’s a long selection from his debut story.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2011/02/roger-bravo-thursday-story-strip-day.html

Finally today, here’s Mr Door Tree with the original art for not one but all of the stories intended for the legendary unpublished EC 3-D issue-Wood, Crandall, Krigstein. Evans and Williamson.

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/storiesart-for-unpublished-ec-3-d-3.html