Number 900


Watts this? Sparky Watts hits the hay with Hitler!


Part 2 of Sparky Watts #1 from 1942 finds Sparky deep in Germany and deep in trouble. You know you're in trouble when you wake up in the morning and the face you see next to you on the pillow is Adolf Hitler.

See yesterday's posting for the first part of the story, and more about Sparky Watts.

On Wednesday I'll show you the Skyman strip by Ogden Whitney from this comic book, and on Friday we'll wrap it up with The Face by Mart Bailey. Columbia Comics, which published Big Shot Comics, Sparky Watts, The Face and Skyman, had a trio of winners with those characters, at least for the better part of the 1940s, because they were all gone by 1950.

Number 899


Sparky Watts #1: Dot Dash sparks Sparky, Sparky heads for Hitler!


I've featured several Sparky Watts stories by Boody Rogers, and you can find them by clicking on "Sparky Watts" in the labels section at the bottom of this posting. As a kid comic book fan I read in a fanzine about Sparky Watts--a superhero wearing glasses, without costume--and thought, ugh, boring. It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I actually saw a Sparky Watts comic and instantly fell in love with Rogers' cartoon style and funny characters.

Sparky Watts began his career in newspapers after Boody Rogers went on his own. He had been an assistant to artist Zack Mosley on Smilin' Jack, which is probably why Boody's girls look a lot like Mosley's sexy female "de-icers." The Sparky Watts comic strip only lasted two years, until Rogers was drafted, and then continued as a comic book feature in Big Shot Comics. When Rogers returned from service he drew the comic book stories until they ended in 1949. This the first part of the 39-page Sparky Watts story in Sparky Watts #1, 1942, a compilation of the newspaper continuity.

The comic has Sparky Watts regulars Doc Static, sister Sue, Dot Dash and Chinese refugee (and Asian stereotype, sorry, readers), Yoo Hoo. But no Slap Happy, the boxer who gave meaning to "big foot cartooning."





















Second part tomorrow: Sparky Watts in bed with Hitler! And following that, we have the Skyman story from Sparky Watts #1 on Wednesday, followed on Friday by The Face.

Number 898


Boss Tweed


The story--to me, anyway--isn't that with his drawings cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring down the New York Tweed political ring in the 1870s, but that 140 years later the kind of corruption practiced by Tweed and his Tammany Hall gangsters is still going on in places around the country.

This story doesn't show Nast, but mentions him. Here are a couple of his Tweed cartoons, which helped people of the time recognize the “boss”. Do you think Tweed really had that remorse filled soliloquy in his cell as shown in that last panel? In a perfect world, maybe.


“Boss Tweed”, attributed to Dan Barry-with-a-question-mark by the Grand Comics Database, is from the 1948 Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 3 No. 2.