Number 2313: Dickie Dean and the hallucination lamp

Dickie Dean was a boy genius inspired by the fictional Tom Swift, who was patterned after the real-life Thomas Edison. In this example of Dickie’s inventiveness, he created a lamp that causes hallucinations. No forcing an enemy to ingest a substance to make him see things that weren’t there...Dickie just turned it on by flipping a switch, which in turn turned the enemy on.

Dickie should have warned his buddy, Zip, who has a really bad trip thanks to Dickie’s lamp.

Dickie Dean was created by Jack Cole and first appeared in Silver Streak Comics #7 (1940). Bob Montana also drew Dickie Dean. He did this episode close to the time he drew the first story featuring Archie for Pep Comics. Charles Biro, editor of Silver Streak Comics, had also worked for MLJ, publisher of Pep Comics before the MLJ line began its transition from wild blood-and-thunder superhero adventures to a line devoted to teenage hijinks.

This episode is from Silver Streak Comics #20 (1941), drawn by Bob Montana.

Number 2138: Montana and Wolverton, comic book/comic strips

Bob Montana had a career drawing the Archie characters for a successful newspaper comic strip. I read it every day in my daily newspaper, and liked it more than the comic books, which were aimed at a younger audience. Before his comic strip work, Montana worked in comic books, both for MLJ (later Archie Comics) and Comic House, where this Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor feature appeared. Montana died young, at age 54, of a heart attack. It was a loss I still feel when I remember reading about his death in 1975.

On the other hand, despite having a national audience in 1948 when he won Al Capp’s Lena the Hyena contest for the Li'l Abner comic strip, Basil Wolverton just never achieved his dream of a daily newspaper feature. In the early days of comic books many of the early artists for that genre worked toward achieving the success of someone like Al Capp. These episodes of Wolverton’s character, Scoop Scuttle, are done in the daily strip format, and were likely prepared originally to sell to a newspaper syndicate. Many are called, but few are chosen, as the cliché goes. It was a tough field to enter, whereas early comic books allowed artists great latitude, and during the height of their early popularity, a lot easier to get a job with them than a newspaper.

Both the Dickie and Scoop episodes I am showing today were published in Silver Streak Comics #20 (1942).