Welcome to our second annual Earth Day posting (to see last year’s posting involving a couple of Cady cartoons, click here).

Above is Page One from the 1878 British graphic novel, A Week at the Lakes and What Came of it; or, The Adventures of Mr. Dobbs and his friend Mr. Potts, by artist J. Priestman Atkinson. I’ve included it here due to the environmental commentary found in Page One’s bottom two panels (best appreciated by clicking on the above picture, to see in close-up). Dobbs & Potts are discussing where to go on vacation. In Panel Four, Dobbs holds a postcard up for Potts, telling him, “Behold what our lakes are coming to! — Let us see them once more before they are all turned into reservoirs.” Panel Five depicts the postcard itself, showing a lake hemmed in by industrial factories with spewing smokestacks.

As their dialogue takes place entirely via in-panel word balloons, this 1878-published page also serves as yet another example in our series of Pre-YK Talkies — sequential comic narratives told via in-panel dialogue; in this case, eighteen years prior to the October 25, 2025 date which comics historians long have cited as the “invention” of such format.

Next, left, from the 1904 Vanity Cartoon Book, Illinoisans As We See ‘Em, comes a smoking gun in the form of the self-paid caricature of Chicagoan W.T. Delihant, President of the Standard Washed Coal Company. Delihant, holding a piece of coal and a magician’s wand, with a goldfish bowl of water nearby, proudly fancied himself as a “Sleight of Hand Performer”, just like today’s coal companies distract the public from the dangers of Climate Destabilization, with their own sleight-of-hand promises involving uninvented & mythological Clean Coal Technology.

Click on the pictures above & left, to enlarge them.

Finally, last year’s BP Oil disaster inspired me to show the two New York Daily Graphic front page cartoons, depicting pollution, sickness, and death being caused by the Standard Oil Company (The Standard Oil Octopus, February 4, 1879, below left; and, July 19, 1880, A Horrible Monster, below right).

Click on either picture below, to be taken to the postings explaining them.

Doug Wheeler

AsWeSeeEm PreYK

CartoonSnap rightly describes this 1945 Super Rabbit story from Comedy Comics as “Some of the most appealing funny-animal superhero comics you’ll ever see…”

http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2011/04/super-rabbit-vs-super-squirt.html

Love him or hate him (and both sides have their proponents), gigantic Jim Shooter has played a major role in comics history at several different junctures…and now he’s blogging!

http://www.jimshooter.com/

Another major influence on comics and pop culture has been Buck Rogers, who first appeared by Phillip Nowlan in a now-iconic 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, scanned in its entirety here.

http://hairygreeneyeball3.blogspot.com/2011/04/armageddon-2419-d.html

Finally today, here’s good ol’ Pappy with yet another of Jerry Grandenetti’s brilliantly Eisneresque installments of the Secret Files of Dr. Drew.

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-933-ghost-pirates-of-skull.html

With all the focus on Popeye lately, Olive Oyl and Wimpy have been sadly neglected. Until now! Here’s a nice medley featuring these secondary characters with a guest appearance by Popeye hisself!

Click the link to listen.

Help Help! and I Had a Hamburger Dream

Honestly, sometimes the hardest thing about writing these columns is deciding which comic book I want to show and tell, but this week that isn’t the case. When it comes to sheer off the wall, outside the box Golden Age wonkiness you really can’t get much weirder than the first two issues of Great Comics. I covered them in a previous installment but when a digital download of #3 finally became available, well, how could I not?

Great Comics #3 is probably best known for ”Futuro Kidnaps Hitler and Takes Him to Hades!”, the first and last appearance of the supposedly superhero Futuro. which in 1992 was reprinted in New England Comics Anti-Hitler Comics #1.

Although the script insists he and his wolfhound Nimbus (who’s also sentient; he has thought balloons) “travel without scientific aid for they are masters of time and space” (yes, the dog is a master of time and space) besides the ability to “visualize the future” the only actual power he demonstrates is invisibility. And that’s only because he is “of the future” — like that’s an actual explanation. Futuro also has an absolutely unnecessary team of powerless assistants, the US Futurians composed of Faith, Freedom, Truth, Courage and Justice who fly thanks to their “aerogene” tanks full of “cosmic gas”.

“Futuro Kidnaps Hitler and Takes Him to Hades!” isn’t strictly a story, at least as I understand the concept, but it is weird. Really, really weird.

One of my favorite parts of Great Comics was The Great Zarro, a very strange superhero gifted with the power of flight that traveled the back roads of America with Rags, his kid partner and the cartoon grotesque little brother of his dead girlfriend. But in this issue like so many of his costumed brethren (Blue Bolt, Spy Smasher, Daredevil, etc.) Zarro decides to tap out of the whole costumed hero business to start a second career, becoming an ordinary U.S. Army Air Corps Intelligence Officer. Though of course he’s still referred to as “Zarro” after putting on his uniform he apparently puts his ability to fly behind him, a skill you’d think the military would be eager to exploit during wartime. Plus Zarro does this in 1942, supposedly the very height of the superhero boom, so as with many things about Great Comics I’d not entirely sure what the editors were thinking here.

Almost immediately he is reunited with Rags who (as you can see previously dressed like a depression street urchin and had only one tooth) between issues has not only grown several feet and aged roughly eight years but seems to have gotten a total body transplant.

Madame Strange also appeared in the first two issues of Great Comics. She had a name like a ghost breaker and the costume of a Wonder Woman wannabe but was unfortunately just a fairly generic spy hunter without an actual name, let alone a secret identity.

But as you can see between issues not only had she changed outfits for one that’s a whole lot less revealing and superheroic (those I’ve got to admit those are some fierce shoulder pads you’re sporting, girl) but become a fairly conventional girl reporter with a double life. Not only that but she’s now has a signature weapon unique in the annals of Golden Age comic books; a riding crop (kinky). On the other hand in this story she fights her first actual super-villain, The Octopus, a horrific Japanese stereotype with buck teeth and fangs and a claw.

The Grand Comic Book Database credits the script to Jean Press and the art is signed Silang Isip, meaning it was almost certianly drawn by the Filipino artist, photographer and musician Pagsilang Rey Isip who for Choice Comics drew Princes of Pirates, Jean Lafitte and Rex the Seeing-Eye Dog.

Finally there’s The Lost City. I’ve often looked at the cover for Great Comics #3 and wondered what The Lost City could have been — I naturally assumed it was just a generic adventure series about somebody, you know, looking for a lost city. But it’s actually an adaptation of the 1935 movie serial The Lost City which our friend Wikipeida tells us also had a feature version which was in release in the 1940′s. The next part of the adaptation was set to run in Choice Comics #3, another comic that’s currently unavailable for digital download. But hopefully that will change and soon.

And there was also another comic book titled Great Comics…but I haven’t been able to track down this one. Yet.

Image via Wikipedia

Congrats to the Groovy Agent, whose site we link to often here-to celebrate 1000 posts, he has up the one and only, completely unstorable, Wham-O Giant Comics!

http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2011/04/wham-o-its-our-1000th-giant-comics-post.html

Visually, this early issue of Cracked is not all that different from an early issue of Mad, featuring, as it does, Jack Davis. Will Elder, John Severin…and then upping the ante with Bill Ward.

http://hairygreeneyeball3.blogspot.com/2011/04/cracked-5-1958.html

One of Wally Wood’s earliest EC tales with Harry Harrison and Gardner Fox is up in its original art form in the long overdue update from Black n White and Red All Over.

http://blacknwhiteandredallover.blogspot.com/2011/04/post-40-werewolf-legend-original.html

Finally today, Sheldon Moldoff, an artist with more than seven decades in the comics business, has set up his own website and it s definitely worth a visit!

http://www.sheldon-moldoff.com/

Start day with Fat Fury. Either that or you want he should hit you with that there lollipop? The unique, odd, eclectic and downright goofy ACG hero is on view here along with links to even more.

http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2011/04/fat-fury.html

Here’s the first issue of the fifties Atlas title, Matt Slade Gunfighter-like many Atlas westerns, not much to write home about except the art but oh, what art! Williamson, Maneely and the great John Severin!

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-931-matt-slade-gunfighter-atlas.html

Here’s a fun comparison of Marvel’s 1968 Spectacular Spider-Man story and its refried color version using much of the same Romita/Mooney art but a partly rewritten storyline in 1973.

http://sacomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/marvel-swipe-1.html

Finally, here’s a 1950′s 3-D story from St John! A perfect reminder that Craig has his 3-D comics history/collection just about ready to drop from the YoeBooks pipeline! Order your copy now!

http://comicbookcatacombs.blogspot.com/2011/04/anaglyph-theatre-presents-wizard-of.html

Apparently I wasn’t quite finished writing about DC Thomson comics. As a special request for John I present from Warlord #24 “The Monsters of No-Man’s-Land”.

And I realize I just spent my last two columns talking about how much I didn’t like the output of DC Thomson as previously established I am not made of stone people. On just a purely technical level you have to admire the skillful cartooning on features like Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan.

And there’s just something compellingly weird about Tomtin and Buster Brass. For one thing, it’s incredibly old fashioned looking for something that was published in the 70′s (unless these are reprints from earlier issues) — note that Freddy is wearing short pants. Not shorts, short pants; I realize it’s a little hard to accept but once upon a time one of the signs that a boy was becoming a man was when he received his first pair of ‘long trousers’. In America the practice pretty much stopped by the beginning of the second World War — I couldn’t tell you when it happened in Britain.

The art style also seems to be something from a couple decades previous and manages somehow to be simultaneously attractive and disturbing (it kind of reminds me of the style used to approximate old fashioned comics in The National Lampoon). There’s definitely a nightmarish quality to the world that Freddy inhabits, like the way the innocent fun of Freddy and Tomtim seems to act as a trigger for the obviously psychotic Horace. And there’s something about the way that Buster Brass is drawn (especially his head) that makes my stomach hurt.

And Jack Silver…what else can I say about Jack Silver besides the obvious…it’s just so weird.

From The Beezer there’s Mr. Flippy. He’s yet another one of those wacky space aliens that have traveled through the vast distances of space to visit not just Earth but Great Britain for the express purpose of palling around with a schoolboy, getting him in and out of scrapes with his space alien powers and wacky gadgets.

We start today with a fun share from our friend Ger,offering up a long continuity from George Wunder’s version of Terry and the Pirates from the 1950′s.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2011/04/when-papers-still-had-space-thursday.html

Over at Silver Age Comics, there’s a nice, long, illustrated review of issue # 9 of The Fly from Radio (Archie) Comics, this one guest-starring Joe Simon’s version of The Shield.

http://sacomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/adventures-of-fly-9.html

The great Bill Everett’s notoriously scratchy inks over Ross Andru’s bare layouts can’t dampen the fun of Roy Thomas’s very first Defenders story from the early seventies.

http://mailittoteamup.blogspot.com/2011/04/marvel-feature1-day-of-defenders.html

Finally today, we have Stan the Man and Jack the King in excerpted transcripts from vintage sixties radio interviews back during the peak of the Marvel Age of Comics!

http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2011/04/marvel-worldwide-inc-et-al-v-kirby-et_14.html

Let’s start today with Will Eisner’s then-new political cartoon Spirit one-pagers from Denis Kitchen’s 1973 first issue of the so-called Underground Spirit.

http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2011/04/black-and-white-wednesday-will-eisners.html

Speaking of Eisner, here’s the Master’s former sidekick, assistant, Spirit writer and layout artist and pioneering comics historian, Jules Feiffer and he’s Sick, Sick, Sick.

http://hairygreeneyeball3.blogspot.com/2011/04/sick-sick-sick.html

George Roussos is an artist generally remembered as either an inker or a colorist but here we have an Air Wave story featuring his own wonderful and notable artwork.

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2011/04/air-wave-george-roussos-1943.html

Finally today, for an intimate look at your humble servant, provider of these occasionally daily links, check out this interview posted today at Random Acts of Geekery.

http://waffyjon.blogspot.com/2011/04/way-of-geek-14-steven-thompson-aka.html#more

Starting up from where I left off last time on my journey through the output of the British publisher DC Thomson, here’s The Topper, another primarily humor weekly which ran from 1953 to 1990 when it merged with The Beezer.

The Topper‘s long-time headliner was Mickey the Monkey, who was essentially a monkey version of The Dandy’s Biffo the Bear who was basically a fun house mirror version of Mickey Mouse.

But amongst all of the theoretical hilarity were a handful of adventure strips, like The Sky Shark, about the heroic pilot of a super vehicle who used it to fight crime.

And Iron Hand, a secret agent with a prosthetic hand who battled baddies such as this evil scientist holed up in a giant robot gorilla inexplicably named Chang (funny, he doesn’t look Chinese). I’m not qualified to present expert evidence on this but Iron Hand sure seems like a blatant rip-off of Fleetway’s The Steel Claw and “Chang” a copy of Mytek the Mighty.

But because I’m only human I’ve got to present a page of Danny’s Tranny. I’ll allow you make up your own jokes, me, I’ll just marvel at a time when a transistor radio was considered a cutting edge, coveted piece of technology.

These kind of “kids with a magical object” strips were pence a pound in the British boys weeklies but one thing that makes Danny’s Tranny fairly unusual was Danny’s magical transistor radio wasn’t a closely guarded secret. Not only was his magical transistor radio known to the general public but sometimes his antics backfired for him, as seen here.

The Hornet ran from 1963 to 1976 and for a while it had it’s own sort of superhero with the same name called Captain Hornet. He was yet another pilot of yet another super vehicle who used it fight crime.

But The Hornet also had some fairly unique features, like this profile of John Cleese…

And a comic strip biography of singer Paul Simon.

The Hotspur, which ran from 1959 to 1981, had a couple of superheroes like The Scarlet Hawk, yet another heroic pilot of a super vehicle used it to fight evil.

And, far after the superhero boom of the 60′s and a little before the superhero boom of the 80′s, came The Cobra, a pretty much straight up superhero. Snakes are usually the totem animals of villains, not heroes, accept of course for India’s Nagraj (‘Snake-King’) — but that’s a subject for another column.

And then there were the titles that were pretty much wall to wall straight ahead adventure stuff which tended to mean plucky schoolboys, WWII soldiers and men who played proper football. They included The Victor…

…and The Wizard.

And for those who just wanted war stories there was Warlord.

I’ve told this story before but, on one of her Church trips overseas during the late 1960′s my grandmother (God Rest Her Soul) brought me home a British boys comic. It’s became lost over the years and I’ve completely forgotten its title and I couldn’t tell you the names of any of the characters in it but I can still clearly remember two of the serials. One involved a trio of schoolboys who protected their little seaside village against the Nazi’s with their souped up BMX bikes (thirty years before their invention). The other concerned an orphan boy on the run from his evil uncle who coveted his inheritance. Coincidentally in this episode he was currently in America and was rescued from bad guys by a hippy porter who even at the tender age of ten struck me as being remarkably unauthentic. And my only exposure to hippies was from their occasional appearances in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Hawaii Five-0.

So I know almost nothing about that long long comic from my Grandmother, except I’m now pretty sure it was a DC Thompson.