It’s New Year’s Eve and your old pal D.J. David B. is phoning in this week’s blog post so he can take the afternoon off.

To make a long story short, enjoy this New Year’s-themed cover featuring Superman and this Superman-themed song featuring the Beatifics.

Click the link below to find out what’s happening.

Superman - The Beatifics

For reasons that even I don’t entirely understand one of my all-time favorite Golden Age characters has to be Basil Wolverton’s Powerhouse Pepper. Some consider him to be a Popeye knock off and while I can kind of see that, seeing as how both were good hearted, super strong and nearly indestructible comic grotesques, other than that there’s really not all that similar. He had no supporting cast, though at least one pretty girl would show up in a decorative capacity, and though he started his cartoon life as a boxer like the stars of the animated shorts of the era he wandered from one slapstick comic adventure to another doing all sorts of jobs. And while both comic strips and books had their share of comic strongmen the thing that puts Powerhouse Pepper heads and shoulders above all others was of course, Basil Wolverton. If Pepper wasn’t absolutely unique his creator sure was.

Although there have been reprints and collections…

…what I really want to see is a hardcover Marvel Masterworks archive edition; if they can do one for the 50′s jungle characters, they can certainly do one for Powerhouse Pepper.

Click on the above picture, to open a larger version.

By Lawson Wood, from the British publication, The Sketch, December 1920. Scanned here via its presentation in the January 1921 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Doug Wheeler

On Christmas morning of 1913, one hundred years ago today, those lucky enough comics enthusiasts — and followers of Buster Brown in particular — rushed to discover beneath their Christmas Tree, a copy of the latest collection of their favorite prankster, that they’d been drooling over since Summer (and hopefully not that drooled copy)! Buster Brown At Home, by artist/creator R.F. Outcault, reprinting Buster‘s Sunday Strip misadventures, was published in July 1913 by the Frederick A. Stokes Company.

Extracted beneath, are several of the stories from that collection.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the comic pages in detail, and read their balloons.

To view previously shown “Comic Book Christmas Gifts of One Hundred Years Ago”, click here.

Merry Christmas!

Doug Wheeler

Richard Felton Outcault Christmas Gift

It’s Christmas Eve and you’d think that we’d be doing a special, annual Christmas-themed blog. But this is the Digital Age, folks! Time means nothing. If this were a TV station we’d be showing “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” (by my old pal Tony Peters) for the umpteenth time. If this were a radio station we’d be playing “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas” every hour. On the Internet, however, time is irrelevant and everything exists at once. If you’re in the mood for holiday music simply go back and visit Christmas past and re-read the post from five Christmases ago. You can’t beat the combination of Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, so why bother? Just click here and here to relive the magic.

Instead, we’re going to turn our attention to Mad Magazine, perhaps the only “comic” (well, it was a comic book before it became a full-size magazine) to include records within its pages.

When you talk about the nexus of comics and music as we do here every Tuesday, nothing brings the two together like a Mad Super Special with a flexi-disc stapled inside.

This tune even ties-in with Christmas, in a way. What makes a better gift than a nose job? It’s the perfect stocking stuffer! Notice the lovely noses on these comics-oriented ladies of Hollywood.

Would Scarlett Johansson have become The Black Widow with her original nose?

Would Thor have looked twice at Jane Foster if Natalie Portman hadn’t gotten a nose job?

Click the link below and enjoy “She Got A Nose Job.”

(She_Got_A)_Nose_Job - Mad

We haven’t turned the Tuesday Comics Tunes spotlight on Dick Tracy since 2010 (and 2008 before that).

So I think it’s time to turn our attention to the world’s greatest detective. Yes, before Batman, before CSI, and before Forensic Files, good old Plainclothes Tracy was scouring crime scenes and studying exit wounds in graphic detail. You have to give credit to Chester Gould. He was way ahead of his time. It was only this year that Samsung introduced a real two-way wrist radio, the Galaxy Gear watch. Dick Tracy had that decades ago!

My favorite thing about Dick Tracy are the bizarre villains. Some of them are plum nuts! In fact, Plum Nuts was the name of one of Tracy’s toughest foes. (No, he wasn’t.)

So let’s take listen to this totally mental instrumental track by The Ventures entitled “Dick Tracy.” We featured The Ventures way back on Tuesday April 29, 2026 if you want more info about one of my favorite bands (and one that recorded songs about more comic characters than any I’ve been able to find).

Click the link below and make up your own bizarre lyrics!

Dick Tracy - The Ventures

Continuing our series of comic books that could have been given as Christmas Gifts 100 years ago, we have extracts from the remnants of one such gift — Mr. Twee-Deedle by Johnny Gruelle, published in 1913 by Cupples & Leon, and reprinting the Sunday newspaper strip by the same name.

(Guess which picture — the above or the below — was the work of artist Johnny Gruelle, and which was the work of the budding artist recipient of the book, drawn on the backsides of the pages! Let us hope that they made it in the art world. Or, some other career.)

The Gruelle page — if you’ve guessed which one it is — has lost its companion second half (each Sunday strip presented over two pages), but it still enough of a story to stand on its own. All of the other examples beneath, are (surviving) paired pages.

Enjoy!

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read the balloons.

Doug Wheeler

— Doug

Here’s an early issue of Wow Comics from the days when it’s publisher Fawcett was apparently of the opinion that Batman and Robin analogs Mr. Scarlet and Pinky were going to be the comics break out stars, as evidenced by the fact the first couple of issues had three stories featuring the characters.

Unlike some other second tier Fawcett heroes I’ve never had a problem with Mr. Scarlet; he was a perfectly adequate Batman clone, During the early part of his career he fought an assortment of memorable villains, and in the later half (when his hood turned blue and his cape two-toned) he became one of the few Golden Age characters to have serious money problems. But I actually prefer the original version of his costume, the all red number with the yellow cape and whatever the hell you call that cock’s comb thing on the top of his food. Seriously, what is that supposed to be? A plume, a reservoir tip, what?

Although there were three stories I chose this one, “Mr Scarlet and the Moon Torchman” drawn (maybe) by Jack Binder which had a particularly WTF “supervillain” who uses a diabolical flashlight that uses concentrated moon rays to make people (and animals) wacky. For no particular reason it mentally reduces Mr. Scarlet to a baby.

Then we have an understandably little known Fawcett hero, The Hunchback, secretly wealthy playboy Alan Lanier who (somehow) was inspired to fight crime dressed in what he apparently thinks Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame dressed like; a green jumpsuit with a yellow belt. Below is what he looked like in Wow Comics #2.

When it comes to inexplicably choosing a literary character to base a crime fighting career around the only one who had The Hunchback beat was The Mad Hatter. Happily later The Hunchback ditched the hat with the yellow feather and the totally unnecessary and inexplicable chest insignia and was, as you can read in this nicely drawn story, a fairly effective crime fighter. It’s just a pity he’s really a handsome rich guy playing dress up instead of, you know, an actual hunchback; as a chunky ugly guy with bad posture there was something about him that I could really relate to.

Though I wish he had a better crimefighting name. I mean, he doesn’t even got the definitive article; he’s not even The Hunchback, just a hunchback.

While not actually interesting enough to post here I do have mention this issue featured an adventure of Jim Dolan, which may well be the first and only comic book detective who’s day job was that of an magazine editor.

And finally here’s another oddball character that I’ve always been curious about, Atom Blake the Boy Wizard. But he’s not actually a teen-ager magician; ‘wizard’ is meant in the ‘mechanical wizard’ sense of the word, i.e., an genius inventor. But he wasn’t just a standard Golden Age comic book boy inventor either, he was more of a mental and physical marvel type who had incredible, ill-defined abilities which he initially used to fight crime on earth. Until he decided to literally take a walk across the universe to try and find his missing parents which he did in the previous issue. Along with being fairly original this story is also plenty of odd.

This being the last Friday the 13th in a year ending 13 that we’ll see for a century (or in other words, that no one reading this right now, will see), we present artist W.A. Ireland‘s cartoon on the subject, from one hundred years ago. Found in the August 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Doug Wheeler

Billy Ireland

Next in our run of 1913-published cartoon books that could have been received as Christmas gifts by comics fans one hundred years ago, is a rather scarce collection of which we know every copy was given away as Christmas presents. Cartoonist Robert Satterfield’s self-published 50 Cartoons by Satterfield, collecting a selection of Satterfield’s editorial cartoons from 1913, was limited to a run of 150 signed and numbered copies, the entire run of which he distributed for Christmas. As far as I’ve been able to determine, 1913 was the only year Satterfield did this, but the possibility that Satterfield printed such collections in other years, can’t be ruled out. The low print run from the start, means few enough surviving copies have surfaced (plus did so when I was looking), for me to definitively state that only the 1913 edition exists.

Who the gift recipients were, is unknown. But as a purely speculative guess, I would think that Satterfield would have kept numbered edition #1 for himself (I would), plus given a few copies to family and friends, after which the majority of the run was likely distributed to editors of newspapers that published Satterfield’s cartoons.

Some of the cartoons found in the book are also found within the 1913 run of Cartoons Magazine. Nearly all of them involve topics which have been the focus of postings here on Super I.T.C.H. Beneath are a few extracted examples.

Enjoy!

Click on the below pictures, to enlarge them.

Above, Satterfield on British Suffragette Emeline Pankhurst, about whose visit to the U.S. we just recently posted (click here to see).

Beneath, Satterfield’s view on then traditional Women’s work.

Above & below, a pair of cartoons that would fit into our annual Back-to-School and College Graduation themes.

Above, Teddy Roosevelt during his hunting trip in South America.

Below, a baseball-themed cartoon from Satterfield, on the 1913 World Series between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Finally, we close our extracts, with the Christmas-themed cartoon that Satterfield used to conclude his book.

Doug Wheeler

Women’s History T.R. Christmas Comics CollegeComics

— Doug