Number 2044: The Devil made her do it

Tanya is a young woman who is blessed with beauty, but cursed by Satan to use it to make men of her village fight over her. What the story, “Satan’s Woman Prize,” calls a curse I call immature teenage behavior, but that’s just me. When a writer needs a good villain, Satan is always a good choice.

The story is scanned from Super Comics’ Mystery Tales #17 (1964), which is a reprint of Avon’s Eerie #14 (1951). The Grand Comics Database mistakenly credits Martin Nodel for the pencils, when they mean Norman Nodel (identified correctly in their listing for Eerie #14.) Vince Alascia inked it.

Number 744


No foo like an old foo


Smokey Stover and Spooky were creations of screwball cartoonist Bill Holman, who kept up the Smokey Stover comic strip for nearly 40 years before retiring in 1973, surely a record for creating crazy cartoons and outrageous puns. Read through these sample Sunday pages from 1943; every panel is packed with silliness.

Holman used the word "foo" a lot. In turn it was borrowed from Smokey Stover and used to describe the mysterious fiery balls in the sky over Germany, spotted by American airmen flying bombing missions during World War II ("Foo Fighters", and that's where the name of the band originated, rock fans).

Holman is shown here in 1950 having fun with one of the perks of the job. If you can draw funny pictures you too can have groupies! Look at Bill, and tell me it isn't true.

These pages are scanned from Dell's Super Comics #116, 1948:

Number 433

Fantastic Plastic


This Jack Cole Plastic Man story is amazing. Every panel is funny, every character is in motion, doing something ridiculous. Check out the elevator gag in the next-to-last panel of page 5. It feels animated.

Jack Cole was at the very top of his comic book career when he did this story for Police Comics #95 in 1949.

My scans come from a Super Comics reprint, Plastic Man #18, from 1963. To recap the story about Super Comics, publisher Israel Waldman bought the rights and printing plates to various comic books from their publishers, or in this case, former publisher, "Busy" Arnold of Quality Comics. Waldman avoided the Comic Code by not putting his magazines on the newsstand, but sold them three to a package. *

The cover to this issue is by Andru and Esposito, and while OK, fails to show how completely zany the Plastic Man contents are. (That's also the worst portrait of The Spirit I've ever seen.)

Jack Cole was one of the true masters of the comic book arts, and this story is a fine example of why.












*There weren't 18 issues of Plastic Man from this publisher. There were also issues #11 and #16, but all of them were probably part of some sort of numbering system they had for their line of reprints.

A story went the rounds of comic book fans of the '60s. Some fan went to the address listed in Super Comics, and found an anonymous building. They rang an intercom buzzer, and when someone asked their business, the fan asked for "Super Comics." The person on the other end didn't respond. I'm not sure what we are to make of that story...maybe it shows that Super Comics was a shoestring operation, or fly-by-nighters. Maybe the person inside the building was busy reading comic books. Maybe they didn't know what the caller was asking for because the address was a mail drop. What I know is that Super Comics, and predecessor IW Comics, made available in the Code-strangled comic book world of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a glimpse into the wild-and-wooly comic books of the pre-Code era.

 Number 195

Air Ace Jet Powers


If you're a new Pappy's reader then you don't know that all four issues of the M.E. Comics series, Jet Comics have been posted on this blog in chronological order. Just click on the link for "Jet Powers" at the bottom of this page.

Jet was a science-fiction series, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Bob Powell. After the four-issue run it was replaced by American Air Forces, which also starred Jet Powers, not as a scientist, but as a fighter pilot in action during the Korean conflict. That's a big switch. You have to wonder why they kept the same character to confuse the reader. It would have been smarter to just rename him something like Ace Powers, and tell us he was Jet Powers' twin brother.

This story, the last in my personal inventory of Jet Powers stories, is from Battle #15, a reprint circa 1964, of American Air Forces #7. The publisher was Super Comics, which took old comics, reprinted them, packed them three to a bag, and sold them for a quarter.

"Whom The Gods Destroy" is the kind of war story that Harvey Kurtzman hated, which motivated him to create Frontline Combat over at EC Comics. It's typically violent in that guts-and-glory, jingoistic war comics way. The Chinese femme fatale looks a lot like Su Shan, Jet's female "friend" in the science fiction series. Maybe Bob Powell just had one stock Asian woman character in his portfolio, and she happened to be sexy and beautiful.