Number 2583: John Lee survived the gallows

Englishman John Lee, often called John “Babbacombe” Lee, was sentenced to death and met the hangman in 1885. The gallows trap door did not open, and after three attempts to hang the murderer, his sentence was changed to life imprisonment.

The version of John Lee, surviving execution as told in Crime Does Not Pay #26 (1943), has the basic story of Lee fairly straight, but the ending is fanciful. The problem is that Lee’s further fate, after prison is mostly unknown. Some say his fate brought him to the United States after deserting his family in England, the rotter! Lee is purported to have emigrated after deserting his wife and children. It makes for a good story, anyway, which makes it sound a lot like folklore.

Art by Dick Briefer.

Number 2512: Tomb it may concern...Frankenstein in love

In this tale of the meandering monster, Frankenstein is smitten with love for a woman who has a young son. Said son gets sick. Appendicitis, no less...oh woe. While the doctor takes the boy to a hospital, Frankenstein makes off with the mom to a nearby tomb, where he keeps her a prisoner...of love. The monster is apparently not up on a mother's love for her child, and of course not only would she rather be with her sick boy, she’d much rather be anywhere else than with the Frankenstein monster.

Dick Briefer, artist/writer, did the story, “Entranced!” for issue number 29 of the Prize Comics’ American Frankenstein comic book. As longtime readers know from lessons I have been pounding into their skulls (I have a big hammer), Dick Briefer had done three different versions of the monster until the title ended when the Comics Code came in.

This black line version is from the UK Frankenstein #4, published by Arnold Book Co. I have blown out the yellow color of the pages and enhanced the black lines. The only things I left alone were the the bottom tier of panels. Arnold Book Co. cut the bottom panel borders off. I guess the act of cutting had something to do with the proportions of the printed product. But really, who knows? Who cares? The comic book has 68 pages, and besides Frankenstein it has a non-Frankenstein story by Briefer, and what looks to be the contents of an issue of Airboy Comics. Also, an ad for their reprints of Black Magic, another Prize Comics title, is done by Mad artist Bill Elder. Elder, who had done it for the EC Mad or Panic comic books. I haven’t done the research (laziness) for which comic it originally appeared in. Maybe one of you know.

Number 2478: The last of Black Bull

I am presenting the last story of the Black Bull, secret identity of rich young man Dale Darcy, who appeared in Prize Comics Western issues #71-#85. Black Bull was created, with his first story in #71 and another in issue #77, by Dick Briefer, more in the cartoonish tradition of his Frankenstein stories, seen directly below. Nothing like what was seen later in artwork by John Severin and Will Elder.

 

The origin of Black Bull is straight out of Zorro; a masked hero who keeps up a facade of a wealthy, foppish and indolent son of a rich rancher. I like Black Bull, especially by Severin and Elder, and for good measure, I like Zorro, also. If you’ve got to steal an idea, steal a good one. Zorro creator, Johnston McCulley, was turning out Zorro stories for pulp magazines, like Argosy All-Story, at the same time Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing his Tarzan books. And you know from this blog how many derivative jungle heroes owe their careers to Tarzan. Zorro made his own impact, inspiring other writers.

From Prize Comics Western #85 (1948):

Number 2393: “You used to be so amused at Napoleon in rags...”

I don’t know when the cliché of mental illness in the form of a Napoleon delusion started, but I am using this Yankee Longago story published in Boy Comics #7 (1942) as an example of a simplistic and jokey view of mental illness in days past. Things we cannot understand or explain we sometimes turn into a joke, don’t we?

“Yankee Longago” was an entertaining series about a boy who seemed to be unstuck in time (to use Kurt Vonnegut’s expression); he was apt to end up anywhere at any point in history, meeting famous people. In this episode he is in France with Napoleon; the real Napoleon, not the delusional Napoleon he first encounters. Yankee even tried to intercede with the real Napoleon, warning him not to invade Russia. No luck.

At the end Yankee is back in his time — or did he just wake up from a dream? — to see orderlies from the “Bug House” picking up the ersatz Napoleon an orderly calls “this nut.” Sigh. We all had a lot to learn in that time, from then until now, and it has been a slow process.

Story and art by Dick Briefer.

Number 2367: The funny side of murder

In its early days Crime Does Not Pay could be funny. As funny as crime and murder can be, that is.

Here we have two stories and a page of “gag” cartoons. (“This’ll Kill You!”) The cartoons were drawn by Dick Briefer. In one panel he drew himself with editors Biro and Wood. “The Poison Dove,” also by Briefer, looks like slapstick on the first page, but loses its funny very fast. “The Corpse That Wouldn’t Stay Dead” has some dark comedy about a barkeep and cronies attempting to bump off a homeless person (in those days called a “bum”) for insurance money. The problem is the victim keeps coming back. It is drawn by Jack Alderman. In those days Alderman had a stiff (ho-ho) art style and he used lots of ink and shadows to add to the noir qualities of his stories. The laugh it invokes in me is that Alderman drew Tweety and Sylvester stories for Dell in the late '50s.

The stories are from Crime Does Not Pay #29 (1943).

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Today is the thirteenth anniversary of Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. I have been going through some old files I saved on CD, and I found some artifacts from 2006 of what I had originally intended for my blog. I was going to do a horror comics blog, and it was to be called The Grim Reader’s Horror Comics. I stole...errrr, appropriated some prospective headers from a Mexican comic book, and then had second thoughts. First, at that time I did not have enough material to scan for an all-horror comics blog. However, I had a couple of boxes full of golden age comics in varying degrees of bad shape, just right for scanning and presenting. A year later or so the idea of a horror comics blog, The Horrors Of It All, was brought to life by Steve “Karswell” Banes, and a very fine job he has done of it.

Here are the re-purposed and original images from a Mexican horror comic from 1987, Sensational de Terror. It’s a small comic book, 4 1/2 inches by 6 inches. It is missing now. I can never find it when I am looking for it. It hides from my sight by having larger comics put on top of it.