I like to say that Golden Age comic books were at their best when the people producing them had no idea what they were doing. When it was all new and nothing was set in stone and the people behind the scenes were desperately flailing about trying to figure things out on the fly. Whiz Comics #11 is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about.

The lead Captain Marvel story is infamous among funny book scholars such as myself because of Pg. 2, panel 6 where needing the answers to an examination Billy called upon Captain Marvel’s wisdom of Solomon by whispering the magic word “Shazam!” and a ghostly (and strangely capeless) Marvel manifests himself hovering over Billy’s shoulder to help him cheat.

This was of course during the early days of the strip when the creators weren’t sure what the exact relationship between Billy and Marvel and while certainly odd, I’d prefer to focus on the fact Mr. Morris sends Billy, a twelve year old, to enroll in a college to get a scoop and no one thinks this is in any way strange. And once rerolled Billy is hazed literally within an inch of his life by the captain of the football team/psychopath Ben Strang for the crime of being, you know, smart. Not to mention this story really has nothing to do with Captain Marvel’s supposed mission statement (i.e. fighting evil) and in the end the villain, corrupt Coach Slug Samson isn’t arrested and is allowed to just resign. To which I can only say What The Hell?!?

Here’s Dr. Voodoo a sadly forgotten, fairly original take on the jungle man trope even if he was an actual licensed medical doctor. In later installments he discovered lost civilizations in his jungle including a group of European knights who sent him on a quest through time to recover an artifact called the Golden Flask. It was also a surprisingly violent strip for Fawcett, as we can see from this panel.

And finally, here’s an adventure of Ibis the Invincible during his early days when his adventures were frequently continued and more often than not actually interesting. Here’s a humdinger which starts with a convict stealing Ibis’s all-powerful Ibistick and includes unwanted sexual advances, the Sphinx coming to life and the beautiful Princes Talia stabbing the convict in the heart. That’s hardcore, Talia.

After Ibis sidesteps the question of why he just doesn’t take over modern Egypt, seeing as show he’s an ancient Egyptian prince and all, Ibis magically checks in on Tommy. He’s the boy he and Talia “adopted” back in America (though one assumes not legally, seeing as how they’re not married and aren’t US citizens, Christian and by the racist standards of 1940′s America, non-white) on a whim then tossed into a military academy when they got bored with him. Tommy is involved in a pedestrian plot about cheating and the story ends with one wayward cigarette causeing the entire academy to explode. This is wild stuff.