Number 366


Dick Briefer's Yankee Longago


Right on the heels of my last post featuring off-the-wall back-up features, here comes yet another weird feature, Yankee Longago, by Dick Briefer, the Golden Age Frankenstein artist himself.

If you drop down to the labels on the bottom of this posting you'll find his name. Click on it and you will see I've posted 25 stories by Briefer. That's the record for any one artist on Pappy's.

This particular story episode reminds me of another feature that came later, "Danny Dreams" by Kubert and Maurer for Joe Kubert's Tor, a caveman comic from the early 1950s, published by St. John. The premise was much the same, although Briefer played his as a humor feature, unlike "Danny Dreams" which was played straight.

This is scanned from Boy Comics #13, December 1943.

Number 365


Bizarre back-ups


I've seen some off-the-wall comic book stories, but Pedro the Peril about takes the oddball prize for me. The round figures, the facial expressions, the phallic sheath for Pedro's sword, the Herbie-esque "looking for cinnamon candy" (Herbie on lollipops: "...and hard to find cinnamon")...it's just all too screwy. This story, as well as its accompanying tale of the Vagabond, are the back-ups from Young Allies #4, Summer 1942. I looked up Pedro's artist "M. Fred" on the Grand Comics Database and the only thing that shows up is this story. I haven't seen this artist's work anywhere else, so is it a pseudonym for someone like Fred Guardineer? The careful inking makes me think of Guardineer, although the penciling might be by someone else. "Don Rico" is the name of an artist/writer from the Golden Age, so his name is used as an inside joke.

"Vagabond" is another strange character. Interesting what went into comic books when they had 64 pages to fill and folks were desperate for ideas. According to GCD the art is by Ed Winiarski.

As with all of the old-time racist tales that find their way onto my blog I offer an apology to those they may offend. It is never my intention to do that; I'm doing this in an historical context as well as presenting Golden Age comic art. Racial prejudice was much more public in those days, and found its way into print.

I've also included a couple of house ads from this early Timely Comic.

Number 364


Venus' Box of Doom!


This is a story originally published in Atlas Comics' Venus #19, but reprinted and scanned from the reprint comic, Weird Wonder Tales #16, from 1976.

I was going to post a couple more of these classic Bill Everett Venus stories, but Hairy Green Eyeball beat me to them! Check them out here.

Number 363


Airboy and the battle of the magicians


A really fine Airboy story, from Airboy Vol. 5 #5, June 1948, drawn by Fred Kida.

This is yet another from the Pappy tearsheet box. For those new to Pappy's, about 30 years ago I was given a box with hundreds of pages cut from comic books of the 1940s.

The owner was a man who wanted to pursue a career in comics. As far as I can tell he never worked in comics, but he knew and liked various artists, bought the comics, and cut out their work. I took the hundreds of pages and assembled them into stories.

In the meantime, though, you can check out the only other complete Kida Airboy story I have to offer here.

Number 362


My favorite Ditko


As a Steve Ditko fan from way back, I thought some of his best work was on these fantasy stories for Atlas, later Marvel Comics. He did a lot of them, and at the time I looked for them. He also drew for Charlton Comics, and I bought a lot of otherwise crappy comic books to get his work. I felt they didn't seem to have the same flair as what he was doing in stories like "I Captured the Abominable Snowman."

You might have seen this story before, because it's been reprinted a couple of times in various Marvel comics. It comes from Strange Worlds #1, from 1958. It was the first comic book published under an agreement by publisher Martin Goodman with DC Comics to have them distribute his comic books, after the Atlas Comics implosion of 1957 which temporarily suspended the line.