Number 501


Blue Tracer


Mad's Jerry De Fuccio paid Golden Age cartoonists to re-create past comic book stories. They were published in Cartoonist PROfiles magazine. This strip, redrawn by Fred Guardineer in 1975, was originally published in 1941.

My collection of Cartoonist PROfiles is spotty, and I have no other issues with these re-creations. Guardineer is gone now. De Fuccio was right to get him to do this work while he still could. It looks like in the years between 1941 and 1975 Guardineer's line lost none of its luster or precision. He may have been the most meticulous artist in all of comics until Charles Burns.

Number 500


Abbott and Costello Meet the Martians


I'm celebrating Pappy's #500 with an oddball comic to show you: Abbott and Costello #21, from 1953, published by St. John. It is reprinted from Abbott and Costello #3, 1948.

You won't find the familiar A and C vaudeville routine, "Who's On First" in here. What passes for jokes are puns. Lou gets all the laughs, too, as Bud plays straight man, just like he did in real life.

Lily Renée and her husband, Eric Peters, were the artists on this strip. The layouts and the pretty girl look a lot like the work she did for Fiction House. Peters did the caricatures of A and C, and Lily drew the rest, including those pretty girls. A few years later Renée divorced Peters, left comics and eventually re-married.

Number 499


Apache


The one-shot comic, Apache, was originally published by Fiction House in 1951. I found it as an IW reprint in 1958. IW was Israel Waldman. Waldman bought the printing plates of defunct comics from the publishers, and reprinted them with new ads, put them in a bag, and sold them three for 25¢.

Of the two covers, I prefer John Severin's really strong graphic composition. The Fiction House cover is a mess, and might have led to it being the only issue.

Somebody at Grand Comics Database thinks this story is by Lucas Orton, because that's the name on the splash panel. I hate to disillusion, but this is a Jerry Iger comic book shop job, with what I see as the strong presence of Robert Hayward Webb, who probably did most of the pencilling. Fiction House used a bunch of pen-names on their comics, and you can't take any of the bylines literally.

"Geronimo Red Wolf Of The Badlands" is a good story, mixing in historic characters with fiction, and the Native Americans are the main characters. In too many old comics, novels, movies, etc., if you had a story about Indians it would be told from a white perspective. The most sympathetic character in the story is a Navajo, Lance. Finally, someone should have told the colorist that U.S. Cavalry uniforms weren't scarlet red. We fought a war 100 years earlier with guys in red.

Number 498

The April Fools


To honor this day, April 1: Now this is a horror comic! In the space of six pages everyone in this story dies a horrible, gruesome death. It's also a cautionary tale. Never scoff at old legends so what happened to these fools won't happen to you.

From Terror Tales #7 (actually #1), March 1969.