As previously established (when I wrote about Green Giant Comics) there are still a lot of Golden Age comic books I never thought I’d ever get to read. Mad Hatter is on that list because, and I don’t believe I am exaggerating, the cover for #1 has haunted me for decades.

You’ve got to admit it’s a striking image; a superhero dressed in the extremely unlikely color scheme of purple and white happily presenting the reader with a pair of battered, unconscious crooks (at least we’re suppose to assume they’re crooks, the alternative being the guy in the weird outfit snapped and is smacking people around at random). We can get a good look at the purple top hat on his chest, perhaps the worst chest insignia in recorded superhero history. As well as sloppy, too tight white shorts that emphasize exactly what shorts over pants are suppose to be conceal on a superhero. I’m speak of course of, excuse me, his bulge.

And I have to admit I’ve always been interested in the historical context. Even when all I knew about comic book history came from books taken out from the Akron Public Library it seemed very odd that someone would try to launch a new superhero (especially one based on a Lewis Carroll character) in 1946 when the genre had just begun a deep decline.

The Mad Hatter is secretly Grant Richmond, who believing “the legal system made as much sense as the world of Lewis Carroll” becomes a masked crime fighter. He’s a non-powered, two-fisted laughing Robin Hood type who speaks in rhyme and supposedly strikes fear into the hearts of criminal by shining his top hat insignia onto convenient walls.

The cover of #2 trumpets “A new kind of comic book” and it kind of is, seeing as how it’s a superhero comic where most of the contents are (for some reason) funny animal stories. Oh, and it should be noted that inside the comic The Mad Hatter’s white cape (that must have been a pain to keep clean) at times seems to have the fuzzy texture of a bath towel. Which it may very well have been.

O.W. Comics published exactly two issues of Mad Hatter and the actual Mad Hatter story from #1 by Bill Woolfolk and nicely drawn by hands unknown actually isn’t half bad. It just isn’t, as the cover promises us, “the strange tale of a man who returned from death… as a gorilla”.

But first, one of my favorite Golden Age comic book ads for the American Ranger Glowlight and it’s “mystery glow: The text makes it sound like it’s powered by some strange energy (perhaps like Happy Fun Ball from that old SNL commercial parody, an “unknown green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space”). But the text also talks about the glow being “soft and faint” which suggests that the culprit is instead most likely our old “friend” radium.