There are some Golden Age comic books that are beyond even my ken. For instance, the idea that anyone would publish a comic devoted to all of the humorous fillers kids had to wade through to get to another adventure of their favorite hero seems completely counter intuitive to me. It’s as if someone decided to publish a comic devoted to those two page text stories that because of arcane postal regulations were always included in Golden Age comics.

But Fawcett Comics did; between April 1946 and February 1947 they published ten issues of Comics Comic which collected a bunch of the publisher’s filler features that helped break up the wall to wall monotony of issues of Ibis the Invincible, Don Winslow and The Adventures of Captain Marvel.

I can’t tell you whether the stories were reprints or original material or who wrote or drew most of them. Most of them weren’t very good or even weird, let alone so-weird-they’re-good. They’re just odd, and oddly humorless for supposedly humorous material, and basically kind of annoying. So I’m presenting Comic Comics (what a title) as what it is; a historical curiosity.

Captain Kid appeared in 34 issues of Captain Marvel Adventures. For most of his long run the strip was about a gawky, non-powered red- headed kid who wore perhaps the most unlikely and unappealing costume in comic book history. I realize Captain Kid is (technically) a ‘humorous’ superhero but that doesn’t excuse or explain green shorts, a green micro cape and connecting the two a swatch of green material that ran up the center of his bony chest. We’re never told who the Kid is or why the hell he’s wearing that thing; all evidence indicates he was just a normal kid pretending to be a superhero who somehow managed to convince the rest of the world to play along. Maybe the original intent of the strip was to spoof Fawcett’s superheroes but all the stories I’ve read have been fairly conventional kid strip stuff. In his later appearances he ditched the humiliating outfit and started dressing like a regular kid.

But this comic has at least one redeeming feature. Like I have to tell any of you Mystic Moot and his Magic Snoot was written and drawn by the one, the only Basil Wolverton.

And, finally Freshman Freddy, a character who’s name is undoubtedly a reference to the once popular song “Freddy the Freshman, The Freshest Kid In Town” written by Cliff Friend and Dave Oppenheim (there’s also a 1932 Warner Bros. cartoon with that name). It was also probably supposed to be ironic since according to the lyrics “Freddy the Freshman” was a party animal and babe magnet and Freshman Freddy was a hapless, gormless not particularly sympathetic idiot. These sort of strips usually revolve around girls, dates, parties, etc. but every installment of Freshman Freddy was exclusively concerned with him being abused for no discernible reason by psychotic upper class men. The feature was usually drawn in a more realistic style; I have no idea who drew it this time but I kind of like the art.