Number 1617: Me love hate Bizarro!

“Tales of the Bizarro World” — featuring stories of the defective Superman clones and characters of the Superman universe — was a big favorite of mine when it appeared in Adventure Comics in 1961-62. The idea of an inverted world has passed from Superman comic books into pop culture, even showing up on an episode of Seinfeld.

This story, which originally appeared in Adventure #291, was reprinted with several others in Superman #202 (1968), an 80-Page Giant issue, which used as its theme the topsy-turvy Bizarro World stories. (It is also the only silver age comic book I bought in 2013, when I searched my collection and could not find it. Me hate it when that happens!) The Bizarro stories were also collected in a trade paperback a few years ago.

“The Bizarro Perfect Crimes” was written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by John Forte. At the time the series ended its 15 issue run I was extremely disappointed and stopped buying Adventure Comics, which means I missed out on the popular “Legion of Super Heroes” feature that took Bizarro’s spot. It went on to be a very collectible series. In that way it was a Bizarro thing for me to do.

This is the second of our three-part Spacey Stories theme week.

Number 510


2 x Forte


John Forte was an artist who worked in comics from 1941 until his death in 1965 at the young age of 47. I was familiar with his work in ACG Comics where he did a steady stream of supernatural stories for editor Richard E. Hughes. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he drew Tales of the Bizarro World strips in Adventure Comics. I enjoyed his work with writer Jerry Siegel on that feature.

Here are a couple of fifties Forte strips from Atlas. The pre-Code "Come In and Meet the Folks" is from Astonishing #26, August 1953. "The Darkroom" is from the Code-approved Mystery Tales #42, June 1956. Both of the strips feature pretty young wives, and husbands who have problems with them.