FACTOID #560,274: Big Boy’s Checkered Past
For the past 10 years YOE! Studio has had the great honor of producing the Big Boy comic book. It’s one of our favorite projects. There’s some weird factoids about the comic. To start off, did you know The Adventures of Big Boy was originally produced by the Timely comic book company, the forerunner of Marvel? It was written by the brilliant genius Stan Lee and illustrated by his great artist associates starting with Bill “Sub-Mariner” Everett, then followed by Dan “Betty and Veronica” DeCarlo (who did the art below for the 11th issue).
There’s some additional strangeness about the above comic. A few of the Ohio restaurants in the Big Boy chain wanted to assert their own identity. For the copies of their issues of the comic only they had the Timely artists draw stripped pants on Big Boy. And in these rare Ohio versions Big Boy sported a “canoe” type hat rather than his usual hat-free pompadour.
Believe it or not, Big Boy is one of those comic characters without a name-just a title. The Little King is another. Can you think of more?
There’s been over 500 issues of Big Boy making it one of the longest running comic titles. Below is the cover of one of the Big Boys we produced by YOE! Studio’s fantastic staff cartoonist Luke McDonnell. Big Boy is complete with pompadour and checkered pants.
— C. Yoe (in the funny papers)
