As you all well know by now, I’m overly fond of the idea behind these oversized Golden Age comics even though I’m frequently disappointed when I finally read the actual articles and this 196 page, 1944 entry from Standard pretty much meets those low expectations. There’s lots of abysmal humor features, and page upon page wasted on features like The Silver Knight, Zudio and Thunderhoof.

But if you keep digging there are a couple of features of interest to be found here, like three (!) stories featuring the Commando Cubs, an not altogether awful factory second version of Simon & Kirby’s Boy Commandos. Most of the big publishers had at least one of these and Commando Cubs did pretty well for Standard/Best/Nedor, appearing in America’s Best Comics #27, #28 and Thrilling Comics #36-52, #55-60, #63, #65

The Boy Commandos were just that, boy soldiers who were inexplicably given full sanction to fight on the battlefields of WWII. The Cubs tried to wave away the idea of kids in uniform by establishing they were a group of American kids sent to England as war was about to break out (boy, their parents must have loved them). Now stranded there they somehow acquired commando uniforms and secretly served as unofficial combatants while keeping their covert ops secret from the Professor, their stereotypical British guardian. The unit was composed of their leader Ace Browning, Irish-America Spud O’Shea, smart kid Horace Cosgrove II, Whizzer Malarkey a fat kid from Brooklyn and token African-American Pokey Jones. While Pokey could and often was depicted as your basic toxic racist stereotypes as the series progressed he was depicted more and more like an actual human being.

While nowhere near as good as the Boy Commandos, Commando Cubs weren’t half bad and I can the appeal the feature must have had for 40′s kids. America’s Biggest Comics Book features three Commando Cubs stories by Richard Hughes and Bob Oksner; here are two of them: