Here’s part two of my post on Books of All Comics. Although I have a natural preference for adventure strips over humor strips I believe it’s not prejudice that leads me to say (for the most part) the humor features in Victor Fox comics really, really sucked. Bad, unfunny and remarkably amateurish. But that isn’t always the case, a seen here in , The Joy Family, a not terrible rip-off of Blondie drawn by Hal George in an attractive style that’s all his own.

And here’s a story featuring the second incarnation of The Green Mask. I’ve always felt a strange affection for the first version of the character, Michael Selby, a wealthy private eye who was exposed to vita-rays which gave him 1939 Superman level powers . It’s especially strange seeing as how he’s essentially just a mashup of Superman and Batman (with, admittedly, a jaunty pirate looking outfit), a creation that almost certainly sprang from the desperate cynicism of an editor in his 50′s looking for the next big thing.

For reasons I won’t go into here after some time off The Green Mask returned, but this time he was teenager Johnny Green, who it was established had somehow taken over for the original Green Mask. In the Roy Thomas version it would have undoubtedly turned out that Michael Selby had been killed in action and that “Johnny Green” was an alias taken by Don Tracy, the secret identity of The Green Mask’s sidekick Domino the Miracle Boy. But sadly that wasn’t the case here; Johnny Green was just some kid who, for reasons unknown, when outraged by justice turned into The Green Mask, costume and all. This gave him the less than impressive battle cry/magic word “e-e-e-eow”.