The first thing that you need to know about Grit Grady Comics is there is no Grit Grady Comics. It doesn’t exist. What does exist is Holyoke One-Shot#1, the first in a ‘series’ of ten oddball reprint comics published in 1944-45. These One-Shots featured reprints of material originally published by Holyoke (and their various affiliated comic book companies), a publisher based in, naturally enough, Holyoke, Massachusetts. They were best known, in usual suspect comic book circles anyway, for characters like Cat-Man, Strongman and Captain Aero.

I say ‘oddball’ because they were 36 pages, roughly half the length of a comic book at that time, and instead of a glossy cover they had a semi-glossy one. Making them look for all the world like the coverless comic books I used to buy at a disreputable used book store back in Akron, Ohio back when I was a kid.

The other thing decidedly oddball about these comics is their contents were a jumbled mess; the interiors most often had absolutely nothing to do with the covers. For instance Holyoke One-Shot #1 features stories of Sgt. Dick Carter of the U.S. Border Patrol, Miss Victory, Diamond Jim. Corporal Rusty Dugan, Alias X (and assorted text pieces), but, alas, no Grit Grady. There’s just, inexplicably serving as its cover, the first page of the Grit Grady story originally published in (bless you, Grand Comic Book Database, and all those who sail upon you) Captain Fearless Comics #2.

Which is a damn shame because I really, really want there to have been a Grit Grady comic. I’m not entirely sure why, maybe because the name Grit Grady sounds so much like a 30′s adventure comic strip that ran in small town newspapers who couldn’t afford Terry and the Pirates or Captain Easy. And there’s something wonderfully, horribly primitive about the art — that cover especially looks to me like something cranked out of Andy Warhol’s Factory

So I took the cover to Holyoke One-Shot #1 and a story from #5 and created Grit Grady #1, a previously imaginary title. I have done this because, as so many authority figures have inferred over the decades, I am not entirely ‘right’. And, full disclosure, I can’t promise this won’t be the only imaginary comic that will ever appear in Comic Book Compulsive.