Number 572


Are you afraid of clowns?


What is it about clowns, anyway? Was it Robert Bloch who creeped us out with the story of the clown at midnight? We laugh at the clown in the circus, but what if we were to open the door at midnight and there is the same clown, bathed in moonlight...booooohahaha.

OK, OK...stay on the subject, Pappy...the mind wanders. This story, "Hangman Special Case #2" is from Special Comics #1, from 1942, which is a one-shot, actually the first issue of Hangman Comics, a lurid MLJ title from the war years. In case you don't remember, the Hangman was the Comet's brother, and sought vengeance after his brother was killed.

Harry Lucey is credited with the artwork. Lucey had a long career in comics, with MLJ, and then when the company became Archie Comics. He worked up through the 1970s, and died in the 1980s.

Number 571


The doctor is in!


Sometime in the mid-1970s my friend, Del, drove over 40 miles from his home to show me something he had bought. "I've found an undiscovered Will Eisner story! He was drawing another character under a pen-name, Jerry Grandenetti!" he announced, showing me a copy of Fiction House's The Monster #1.

Poor Del. He wouldn't have bought the comic had he known the story was not by Eisner. Del was a bit of an art snob, only collecting artists he thought were the very top of the comics A-list: Raymond, Foster, Eisner, the EC comics artists, etc. I had to tell him it wasn't Eisner, and that Jerry Grandenetti was indeed a real person using his real name. It was worth it to break his heart, because he sold me that copy of The Monster for what he paid, $2.50.

Jerry Grandenetti had quite a comic book career, including a stint as one of Will Eisner's assistants on The Spirit. As far as I'm concerned he's on the comics A-list I keep in my head.

The story, reprinted in The Monster #1, 1953, originally appeared in Rangers Comics #48, 1949.

Number 570


The Basket


Picto-Fiction was an attempt by EC publisher, William M. Gaines, to save his comic book business and avoid the Comics Code by going upscale to the magazine market. Picto-Fiction, including Terror Illustrated, Crime Illustrated, Confessions Illustrated and Shock Illustrated, were a mixture of art and story, not comic books, but not traditional magazines either. Picto-Fiction failed because it didn't reach the readers of either the comic book or prose fiction market. On the other hand, Mad, his non-Picto-Fiction magazine, succeeded beyond anyone's dreams.

"The Basket" is from Terror Illustrated #1, December 1955. It's adapted from a story in the 10¢ comic book, Haunt of Fear #7. In its original form it was drawn by Jack Davis. Graham Ingels handles the assignment here.

Hairy Green Eyeball presented a whole issue of the Picto-Fiction Crime Illustrated here.

Number 569


Macfadden the villain


Bernarr Macfadden was a publisher in the first half of the Twentieth Century, made rich by a newspaper called The New York Graphic, and magazines like Physical Culture. Depending on whose version of the story you believe, Macfadden was also a rival of Amazing Stories publisher Hugo Gernsback, who forced Gernsback into bankruptcy. Online biographies of Gernsback say that the bankruptcy was orchestrated by Gernsback himself, who was quite a sharpy at business.

I was amused when I saw this strip, "Hip Knox, the Super Hypnotist" from Superworld Comics#3, 1940, published by Hugo Gernsback. It features a villain called Macfadden! Hip Knox is a hypnotist in the Mandrake-style, who apparently has a supernatural ability to hypnotize anything living. In this breathless adventure he's shot into space by Macfadden. Macfadden could have handled him gangster-style and had him shot, but in pulp magazines, comic books and movie serials the bad guy gives the good guy ample time to figure his way out of an elaborate death trap. It gives Hip Knox the chance for revenge by hypnotizing Macfadden into thinking he's a mermaid. Honest, guys, I couldn't make this stuff up.

Artwork is by Jack Alderman. He went on to draw crime comics for Charles Biro at Crime Does Not Pay, and supposedly late in his career drew Tweety and Sylvester for Dell Comics. And that is all I know about Jack Alderman. We've featured him before in a story of Burke and Hare, the infamous grave robbers and murderers.

Number 568


Not easy being green


Pity the poor little green guys in this Doll Man story. Not only are they threatened and terrorized by their master, but at the end of the story Doll Man, as his alter ego, Darrel Dane...

...well...

...it's not pretty, but I don't want to give away the ending.

This is from Doll Man Quarterly #6, Summer 1943. I've shown you one of the stories from this issue before, almost two years ago in Pappy's # 181. It's yet another mad scientist story. Whoever wrote this issue featured mad scientists as villains in two of the four Doll Man stories. The artwork is by Al Bryant.

My copy of Doll Man #6 is damaged. A rodent chewed the upper corner of the first half of the book. I wasn't going to scan and present this story until I looked at it and realized that nothing of importance is missing. Several years ago, because of the damage, a comic shop owner gave it to me for free. I was in on Free Comic Book Day long before it became official.