Number 820

Hooded Menace

I don't know whether the Hooded Menace (aka "the Fun Club"), told in this 1951 Avon one-shot comic* under their Realistic Comic imprint, was an actual gang, or strictly fictional. Various supremacist groups have been active in the West and Pacific Northwest, even recently. The Hooded Menace is set in the early 1900s.

As they spread their lawless terror these groups engendered a lot of popular fiction. Paperback books used to put these goofballs on the covers and it was probably good for a few sales. Just reaching onto my paperback shelves I've come up with at least one:

Louis Ravielli, a competent artist whose work shows up in comics of the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, did the art chores on The Hooded Menace, including the inside cover, and presumably the cover as well.

*I don't believe any other publisher did what Avon did. They would name a comic after the lead story, as in Phantom Witch Doctor, then use some inventory crime or horror stories to pad out the comic book. In the case of The Hooded Menace there's a true crime story about Mad Dog Coll and a private eye tale to back up the title feature.

Number 819

The Living Ghost!

Following up a Smokey Stover posting is a daunting task. What could be as crazy as Smokey? Well, this comes close.

"The Living Ghost" is from Adventures Into the Unknown #1, 1948. It was written in an apparent fit of delirium by Frank Belknap Long, Weird Tales writer, and one-time pal of H. P. Lovecraft. Long wrote all the stories in this issue, as well as #2. After that, and for the next few years there are a lot of screwball stories that read something like "The Living Ghost" in the ACG supernatural comics, but I don't know if they were by Long. As we've mentioned in this blog a time or two, many writers worked in the comic book field for extra $$$. It would seem a natural--or in Long's case, a supernatural, yuk-yuk--way to supplement his income.

It's drawn by Fred Guardineer, who lent his exacting drafting style to a most unlikely subject. His artwork, which seems so wrong for horror, produced one of the greatest horror comics pages ever, page 8. I'm not sure if Guardineer ever drew another horror story; this is the first of two Living Ghost stories (the second is found in issue #2), but the only one he drew. His precise drawing style worked better in crime comics, and even the Westerns he drew in the 1950s.

Guardineer quit comics in the mid-'50s and went to work for the Post Office. Long went on to a long and productive writing career.

Number 818

More of Bill Holman's inspired insanity

October already! The year just speeds by, doesn't it? Here we are in the tenth month and I still haven't done any of my New Year's resolutions! Oops, that's not true...a New Year's rez was to get back to the Bay Area and visit my buddy Dave Miller, he of Brit Rock By The Bay and David's Rock Scrapbook. It's been a few years since I visited one of my oldest friends, since we met 30 years ago this year. Mrs. Pappy and I are here now in California staying with Dave and his wife, Karen.

Like me, Dave is a big fan of Bill Holman's Smokey Stover. So these pages, from Dell Four Color #229, 1949, Smokey reprints from the mid-forties, are dedicated to Dave.

I did another posting of Smokey Stover pages in Pappy's #733.