Number 385

"You're big...and ugly...and crude...but I love you!"


...and speaking of love, I really love the breathless Mickey Spillane-styled prose in these Johnny Dynamite stories. You just don't read this stuff anymore, like the caption of the panel above, or the panel on page two: "He moaned as the flesh was laid open to the bone and fell in a stupor as his teeth crumpled under the impact."

How about, "What was left of his face slobbered and drooled as I pumped a bullet into his guts."

Has a certain poetic quality to it, don't you think? There's probably a pretty good reason you don't read stuff like that anymore.

The story is from Dynamite #4, November, 1953; patterned by writer William Waugh after Spillane's popular Mike Hammer series of paperback best-sellers, and drawn by Pete Morisi. Waugh's violent and turgid descriptions and dialogue are more interesting than Morisi's workmanlike drawing. I posted the first story from this issue in Pappy's #264.

Number 264


Never trust a dame


Poor Johnny D. The lady with the camera shot his eye out. It must've been a pretty fancy camera if it could do that! Now he's looking for payback. He gets it in the next to last panel when he returns the favor. I guess gut-shooting and then eye-shooting the dame who de-lamped him is justice, even though she's got a crippled kid in the next room!

Such was the violent world of this Mike Hammer-styled private dick, from Dynamite #4, published by Comics Media in November, 1953. The artwork is by Pete Morisi, later known as PAM in the Peter Cannon Thunderbolt comics from Charlton. The story, likely written by William Waugh, bylined as the writer of another story in the issue, is a document of its time, an attempt to take adult paperback sleaze and turn it into comic book sleaze.


Oh yeah…despite the similar names, there's no truth to the rumor that Johnny married his secretary, Judy, and had a son.