Number 1651: Trick and Treat: two terrors!

No need to rot your teeth by eating candy stolen from your kids’ trick or treat bags. Rot your mind instead with a fifties horror comic. In this case it is Dark Mysteries #18 (1954), and stories with similar titles but completely different plots.

Happy Halloween!

Number 1650: Whiz Wilson’s future past

As a youngster I was besotted by thoughts of the future: spaceflight to other planets, robot servants, and personal aircraft with which we would zip around the skies just as easily as driving a car. I once said to my father, Big Pappy, “I would love to have a time machine and go into the future!" Big Pappy, never one to go off into tangents of fantasy, brought me swiftly back to reality: “Oh yeah? What if you found out when you were going to die?”

Ulp! I had not considered that. Okay, then, cancel that trip into the future.

Whiz Wilson, featured in Ace Comics’ Lightning Comics, didn’t let such things bother him. He made regular trips into the future and got himself involved in adventures. He even found ways to fight the enemies of 1941 with help from the people of year 6000, as in this tale from Lightning #6 (1941).

Number 1649: Dennis the Montage Menace

Dennis the Menace Fun Book came out in 1960, a 100-page squareback one-shot issue. I have chosen these two stories because they are montages of gags, drawn by Al Wiseman. Combined with writer Fred Toole’s jokes, Wiseman’s drawings work well in this format.

Below the pages I have links to two more of my favorite posts featuring Dennis.

More classic Wiseman/Toole Dennis. Just click on the thumbnails.

Number 1648: Sea Devils, alien abductees!

Sea Devils, written by editor Robert Kanigher and drawn by Russ Heath, was popular in the early sixties. Maybe it was that combination of the exotic, the deep sea diving and giant aliens and monsters they came up against that made them stand out.

Besides giants, DC Comics never shied away from big concepts, either. In this case a fleet of flying saucers steal our planet’s water. Of course our heroes, despite being no bigger than the aliens’ fingers, are able to return the seas and their contents. It amazes me what Kanigher could accomplish in so few pages. And of course, Russ Heath’s dramatic drawings are superb.

From Sea Devils #5 (1961):

I showed another Sea Devil saga just over a year ago. (Correction: two years. See the comments below.) Click on the thumbnail.