If I have a least favorite comic book publisher, and I’m not saying I do, it would probably be Charlton. Now, I know it’s a company which has it’s devoted fans, and I’ll willingly admit they had some memorable characters and produced some very strong material. But it doesn’t change the fact that for decades they consistently provided America with some of the dullest comics ever committed to paper. Even if I find myself partially paralyzed in a nursing home at age 80 and am reading comics on my iPad12 (which I’m going to assume will be a pair of glasses that allows me to turn the pages by shifting my eyes) and have read absolutely everything else…I still don’t think I’ll get around to reading issues of Beyond the Grave, Billy the Kid or Ghostly Haunts.

If they had a heyday, and most professional appreciators agree that they do, it was undoubtedly the 1960′s…but things seemed a lot more interesting in the 1950′s. That’s when they published absolutely anything from Nature Boy to Space Western to TV Teens. That last comic repackaged a bunch of material taken from a variety of defunct publishers under a title that falsely suggested it featured teens with their own TV shows. Or at the very least the kind of teens As Seen On TV. But what kids mostly got were anemic Fawcett leftovers like Ozzie and Babs, who admittedly were at least teens. Something that can’t be said for…Don Winslow of the Navy? What the hell..?

And Glady’s Parker Mopsy was no teen neither. But it was a really beautiful comic strip which ran for three decades and first made it into comic books at St. Johns.

Also appearing in this issue was a Kitty story. I’m thinking this was originally published by Standard, but I can’t be sure. Does anyone out there want to hazard a guess where it first appeared?