Number 236


Rat Fink Christmas


I was reminded of something the other day when I got my friend Dave Miller's annual Christmas CD. To compile his yearly CD, Dave takes some of the most obscure and oddball Christmas music he can find on record albums from thrift stores and yard sales.

Although there's nothing on the CD related to the cover artwork, the cover evokes Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his famous Rat Fink.

In the 1960s there was a magazine devoted to Big Daddy, published and edited by Pete Millar. Millar died in 2003, and has been forgotten by a lot of comic book fans, because his comic books weren't those normally sold to Marvel and DC readers. He published Drag Cartoons from 1963 to 1968, with the themes being cars and drag racing. That was a subject I wasn't interested in,* but I did like the cartoonists working in those early issues: Toth, Warren Tufts, Russ Manning, and even Millar himself. Millar got a license with Ed Roth to do four issues of a magazine that eventually failed on the newsstands. Pete overestimated how many kids who bought Rat Fink decals might be willing to pay 35¢ for a magazine based on Big Daddy. Number 2 is the only issue I bought, probably because of the Alex Toth story. But that's for later. For right now we've got Millar himself doing a Mad comics-styled "Night Before Christmas," featuring Big Daddy himself.

Pete's artstyle was developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he is still the only cartoonist I've ever seen work in that style. I've scanned the pages bigger than I normally do. If your eyes are anything like Pappy's eyes you need something bigger so you can see all the tiny details. Just click on the pages for full-size images.



*The only thing about cars that interested me was getting girls into the seat next to me.

Number 235


"H-He didn't even kill me!"

This raggedy looking "Bombshell, Son Of War," is from a box of golden age comic book stories given to me 25 years ago, collected by a man who liked certain artists. In the 1940s he bought the comics off the newsstands; he'd cut out a story and throw the rest of the book away. Some stories in the box were in fairly good condition, some were incomplete. Some pages were so brittle they could barely be handled. This is one of the most brittle. Every time I scanned a page and picked it off the scanner board I had to brush away a couple dozen flakes of brown paper.

I want to scan all of these loose stories to preserve them in a digital form, because they aren't gonna last much longer in their printed state. "Bombshell" is from the first issue of Lev Gleason's Boy Comics, April, 1942, numbered #3. Boy Comics was continued from the first two issues of Captain Battle.

The story was written by Dick Wood, brother of Bob Wood, co-editor with Charles Biro of Boy Comics. It's drawn by someone named "Michael," an artist unfamiliar to me. As near as I can tell from checking the Grand Comics Database, Bombshell was a short-lived hero, lasting only four issues. I think the concept had as much promise as any of the rest of the characters in the book. Except considering he comes from another planet Bombshell seems to be an all-American boy, and his sword can't kill anybody, even Hitler. C'mon…what fun is that?

Number 234


"'Twas the night before…"


Boody Rogers does a Christmas story that isn't a Christmas story. It's from Big Shot Comics #84, December 1947. "'Twas the night before Christmas…" features Slap Happy, the ex-boxer with the big feet (exposed to cosmic rays), and Asian caricature Little Yoo Hoo (sorry to my Asian friends for this one; I just scan 'em as they are, written and drawn 60 years ago). The story involves Mother Goose rhymes, and that's why even though it's set on Christmas Eve, it's not a Christmas story. But, as usual, Boody's wacky cartooning is great and the jokes come fast.

Number 233


The Terrible Trunk


From Atlas' Adventures Into Weird Worlds #5, April 1952, "The Terrible Trunk," drawn by Joe Sinnott, begs the question. Who would you throw into that trunk, if you had it, and could make someone--anyone-- disappear? Maybe a mother-in-law, ex-wife (or ex-husband), ex-girl or boyfriend. You could throw in presidents of certain countries, if you could get them away from their security guards, that is. The possibilities are endless. For sure, like Harry Deevers in the story, I'd toss in my boss.

All you'd just have to worry about is another trunk, somewhere else, where those people might reappear and come looking for you.

Number 232


It's not easy being green


Pity the Green Claw. He's green, he's really, really tall, and his breath is so bad he shoots flames out of his mouth. No wonder he's in such a bad mood all the time. If ever a guy needed a woman…

"The Green Claw" is scanned from Lev Gleason's Captain Battle Jr. #2, where it was reprinted from Silver Streak Comics #6. The cover of that 1940 issue of Silver Streak is scanned from my Flashback reprint, published by Alan Light in the mid-1970s.

As far as I know, this is the only time the arch villain from Silver Streak, created by Plastic Man's Jack Cole, ever appeared as the Green Claw. There's no explanation as to why the name and color change, and by the next appearance he was back to being yellow. The Claw was a hideous caricature of an Asian stereotype, the insidious "yellow peril" Fu Manchu-styled villain. Coloring him green was an interesting choice, if not consistent with the rest of the series. It must've confused the readers of the day.

In this breathless tale, Major Tarrant, the (Green) Claw's nemesis, chases him down. The Claw has television, he has a version of GPS, some radar with which to find the major. He also has a power I've never seen before in comics, the power to hypnotize and make someone physically smaller. In this case The Claw sticks Major Tarrant into a tiny box, and gloating, tells him because of the confines of the box, when he begins to grow he'll die. Bahahaha! In Lee Falk's classic comic strip, Mandrake the Magician, Mandrake was able to shrink people with hypnosis, but they only thought they were shrunk. "The Green Claw" is such an absurd and silly story that this bit of hokum-pocus is just one more screwball element to a story you don't want to have to think about too much.

Number 231



Santa 'shrooms



Santa meets Alice and goes down the rabbit hole in this story from Dell's Santa Claus Funnies #2, 1943. It's a clever reworking of the familiar Lewis Carroll story.The unknown artist also used Sir John Tenniel's classic illustrations as the basis for the Wonderland characters.

It's tempting to throw in a reference to Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit," magic mushrooms, Summer of Love, dancing naked in the park, psychedelics, hallucinogens…but that would be cheap and of course at Pappy's we don't go for the cheap, do we? No, we don't. Just because this story got me to pull out my old vinyl copy of Surrealistic Pillow doesn't mean anything, and don't infer anything from it.