Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine

Number 235


"H-He didn't even kill me!"

This raggedy looking "Bombshell, Son Of War," is from a box of golden age comic book stories given to me 25 years ago, collected by a man who liked certain artists. In the 1940s he bought the comics off the newsstands; he'd cut out a story and throw the rest of the book away. Some stories in the box were in fairly good condition, some were incomplete. Some pages were so brittle they could barely be handled. This is one of the most brittle. Every time I scanned a page and picked it off the scanner board I had to brush away a couple dozen flakes of brown paper.

I want to scan all of these loose stories to preserve them in a digital form, because they aren't gonna last much longer in their printed state. "Bombshell" is from the first issue of Lev Gleason's Boy Comics, April, 1942, numbered #3. Boy Comics was continued from the first two issues of Captain Battle.

The story was written by Dick Wood, brother of Bob Wood, co-editor with Charles Biro of Boy Comics. It's drawn by someone named "Michael," an artist unfamiliar to me. As near as I can tell from checking the Grand Comics Database, Bombshell was a short-lived hero, lasting only four issues. I think the concept had as much promise as any of the rest of the characters in the book. Except considering he comes from another planet Bombshell seems to be an all-American boy, and his sword can't kill anybody, even Hitler. C'mon…what fun is that?