Number 149


Jet Powers and The Devil's Machine!


What th--?! At the end of "The Dust Doom," the first story in Jet #3, (Pappy's #146) the human race was having to make a new beginning after near annihilation. Now here we are with story two and everything seems as it was before the first story. So what gives? Well, I don't know, but can tell you that the storyline begun with "The Dust Doom" is continued in Jet #4. It's an odd way of doing continuity, and the confusion it caused among readers might be the reason that Jet only lasted four issues. That and the fact that science fiction comics weren't very good sellers compared to other genres.

"The Devil's Machine" is from the same template as "House Of Horrors" in Jet #2. Another mad scientist. Another girl. More civilian victims. Another pseudo-scientific device from the mind of writer Gardner Fox. No Su Shan this time, though.

Professor Mikla has developed a machine, "the multipliciter,"* that duplicates animals. A herd of cloned elephants and lions escape his laboratory. Since this is a comic book, the authorities handle it in the least humane way possible. Instead of capturing or tranquilizing the marauding beasts they machine gun them to death from the air. PETA didn't have a chapter in that part of the country in 1951.

As is also usual for this type of story, the mad scientist comes up against his own equipment and it kills him. Actually, he kills himself...or himselves, as it were.

Once again the story has good art by Bob Powell, hurt by bad printing.

*Anticipating by four-and-a-half decades the movie, Multiplicity(1996), starring Michael Keaton.

Number 148


Pussycat, Pussycat, I love you…


Did anyone ever draw glamorous, sexy chicks as well as Bill Ward?

Pussycat was a feature Ward did in the 1960s for Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman's line of men's magazines, after having established himself as a cartoonist of excellence in drawing the female form. Ward had worked as a comic book artist for years. He created super-siren Torchy, as well as being an artist specializing in love comics and several other genres, including Blackhawk. It was the pin-up art that made him famous, though.

Pussycat was a satire on the spy craze started by the James Bond phenomenon, continued on with TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, et al.) The character she most resembled was Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Annie Fanny in Playboy. Like Annie, Pussycat was an innocent, without guile. She apparently didn't understand the effect she was having on the men around her, who acted like horny idiots.

This particular strip was originally published in 1966, then reprinted in 1968 in a compilation magazine, Pussycat #1, listed in the indicia as being published by Marvel Comics. It contains one story by Wally Wood and another by Jim Mooney. The cover is by Bill Everett. The rest of it is all Ward.


Several books have been published reprinting Ward's pin-up cartoons. For years he sold about 30 of them a month to Goodman's Humorama Publications. You couldn't open one of those digest magazines without seeing a new Ward.

Years ago I got lucky and found some of Ward's cartoons for sale at a San Diego Comicon. I even found a rough he submitted for approval, most likely to the aforementioned humor magazines he contributed to so regularly.
Even though it's a rough he lavished his time and attention on the girl. The guys in his cartoons, and even in his comic strips* were drawn as generic guys, with a lot less attention than he gave to his girls. The guys in his cartoons all went crazy at the sight of a pretty girl. If you were ever to see a living Ward girl walk down the street you might go crazy too.

*Ward was also a regular for years in Cracked Magazine, sometimes under the name McCartney.

Number 147


Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott's Witch In The Woods


When Stan Lee wrote "The Witch In The Woods" in 1953 for Menace #7, comics were under direct assault by parents and teacher groups, from the pulpit and even from investigators in the government. Considering the avalanche of criticism burying the comics industry Lee's satiric story seems tame, not so much a 'repel all boarders' defense as a gentle and funny rejoinder to the critics.

Lee is right that Brothers Grimm stories, gathered as they were from European folktales, are often cruel and nightmarish, especially for children. But comics were available on practically every newsstand, in every drugstore and mom-and-pop store in the country. In the early 1950s I could walk two blocks and find three stores that sold comic books. Almost every kid had access to comics and they sold in the millions every month. On the other hand, unless I went to the library or bookstore I'd have a hard time finding a copy of "Hansel and Gretel." Stories by the Brothers Grimm were considered literature. Comics weren't. It was the story material that bothered the do-gooders, and its marketing and availability to children.

"The Witch In The Woods" is a good story, anyway. Lee did a fine job with the familiar tale and its framing device. Joe Sinnott's artwork is, as usual, top-notch. He made his real fame with his inking of Jack Kirby in the 1960's, but he was an above average artist in his own right.

You can find other postings with Joe Sinnott artwork by clicking on his name in the links below.

Number 146


Jet Powers And The Dust Of Doom!


Forget all about global warming. There's a more immediate danger: The earth is going through a cloud of radioactive dust! Yikes! We've got three days, so live it up, folks. In this story as the doom approaches anarchy reigns with looting and murders. Then Jet Powers makes an appearance.

Speaking to the world over loudspeakers, and telling an involved and personal story, Jet tells how he went into space with sexy Su Shan and his spaceship conked out from the radioactive dust. Due to Jet's ingenuity they got back, but I'll let you read about it.

This is pretty heavy doomsday stuff for just a 9-page story, starting off this third issue of Jet, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Bob Powell.

Ever since Su Shan admitted to Jet that she liked him (second story, second issue), I've wondered what's going on. There's no indication there was any weightless whoopee going on in space, but I mean, still, you've gotta wonder where Jet's head is, traveling alone with a beautiful girl and not being more attracted or something. She blinded me with science, as the song goes…or Jet was blinded to her by science. Who knows? It's been a long time since 1951 when this appeared. Anyone who could tell us where the Jet Powers/Su Shan partnership was going had Jet continued its run past #4 is long since dead.

The printing on this story is pretty bad. The ink blobs up, fills in delicate lines, drops out in other places. Whoever printed this comic book must've been sleeping on the job. I did the best I could with what I had to scan.

In the 1980s Ray Zone used his wizardry to transform this issue into a 3-D comic book. You collectors will want to look for that. Zone had some of the same problems I had making the blobby printing acceptable.

Number 145


Kurtzman Cuts To The Core


When I look back on Harvey Kurtzman's career, and especially his satiric comic book stories, I think of two things: He was lucky to have good friends who were such great cartoonists, and he saw through to the core of what he was satirizing.

These two 3-pagers are from Humbug #3, October 1957. Kurtzman satirizes a current popular movie and a current television show, getting maximum laughs with minimum space.

The "A.P.B. On The M.O. At The O.K. Corral" takes on the Burt Lancaster movie, "Gunfight At The O.K. Corral." My friend, Eddie,* who sent me the scans I used for these stories, asked me one time, "Is the O.K. Corral [shootout] the most important event in American history or what?" He was referring sarcastically to the then popular movie Tombstone, and the surge of interest in an event that in real life wasn't as dramatic as the movies made it seem.

The splash panel to "A.P.B." is Davis being inspired. I don't know how much of Kurtzman is in the secondary figures, like the little Indian wearing a hat with eyeholes, the drunk passed out under the table, or even the hound dog flopped over on the floor. But the gag is pure Kurtzman, as is the rest of the strip, which, in three pages, basically takes the movie apart.

"You Are There" was a once-popular CBS television show. It ended its run in October, 1957, about the same time this issue of Humbug was going off sale. What Kurtzman got right about the show was its premise, the odd idea of a modern reporter walking around an historic event with a television camera and microphone asking questions. The assassination of Caesar is hilarious for the principals explaining the events.

Kurtzman did something obvious for the time, which was use the instantly recognizable TV star Sid Caesar as Julius Caesar. He's even got Sid Caesar's sidekick, Imogene Coca, on the sidelines sticking her tongue out. (Following behind Caesar is Howard Morris, one of his sidekicks from the show. Morris went on to play Ernest T. Bass in the Andy Griffith show.) Caesar's humor, as well as that of song parodist Stan Freberg and radio stars Bob and Ray, were elements that Kurtzman folded into his comic book stories. He also used the cartooning and caricature skills of best buddy Will Elder. Elder shared Kurtzman's vision of parody: Make it look like the original. Of the cartoonists Kurtzman worked with, I don't think anyone understood Harvey as well as Elder.

*See Eddie's blog, Chicken Fat. It's not a Mad or Kurtzman blog, but Eddie is a big Kurtzman fan and uses elements from him in his blog.

Number 144


COVERING UP: Xela Xes: Wonder Comics by Alex Schomburg

In the war years Alex Schomburg was in demand by comics publishers for his covers. The eye-popping, continually inventive scenes of superheroes clobbering nasty Nazis and Japanese made the books fly off the racks. Several publishers used him. After the war he toned down his approach somewhat; there were still covers of superheroes clobbering gangsters or crooks, but the covers weren't as cluttered with men and machines.

These five covers he did for Nedor in 1947 and 1948 are some of his best. He used airbrush as his medium. I don't know whether that was his idea or the publishers, but whatever, these covers worked. He must've felt his airbrush artwork was different enough to sign a pseudonym, so he became Xela.

Three of the covers shown here have the typical damsel in distress (D-I-D) covers. Those are the ones featuring the character Wonderman. The blonde on the other covers is Tara, a Fiction House-styled babe with boyfriend trailing as she adventured on various planets. It's interesting that when women are the titular (no pun intended) characters, they can be shown kicking butt. Otherwise it's the tried and true D-I-D cover: muscular hero coming to the rescue of voluptuous babe.

And voluptuous they are…I'm not sure who did this sort of thing better, but the girls on these covers are pin-up lovers' dreams. I also like the fact that each of the covers could be a poster, and that there are no cover blurbs or speech balloons to deface the artwork. No words were needed. Schomburg's — Xela's — artwork speaks for itself.

Number 143


Walt Kelly's The Brownies and the Ooglies!


I've spent the past 50 years with and admiring Walt Kelly's work. This is the sort of heresy that will call out Kelly's Pogo fans to scream profanities, toss a noose over a tree limb and wave torches under my window: as much as I love Pogo, I most love his comics written and drawn for kids.

Pogo went from being a kids' comic book feature to adult topical satire in newspapers. It is more grounded in its time. It was in his comics for kids that he didn't need to refer to current events, to aim his humor at hip adults. All kids care about is that it's fun to read. He gave them that. Not only kids in a chronological sense, but those of us who are still kids in an emotionally arrested sense.

"The Ooglies," from The Brownies, Dell Four-Color #244, September 1949, appears to have been turned out quickly, but that gives it a special quality of spontaneity. My memory of reading about how Kelly worked on his comic book stories is that he took sheets of drawing paper and started to draw. He made it up as he went along. It takes a great artist to be able to do that and have it come out in some sort of cogent fashion. And, as we Kelly fans--even the torch-wavers--knew, Kelly was a really great artist.

If you want to see the past Kelly postings, go to the labels below and click on Walt Kelly.