Number 870


The Dover Boys


Goodbye, 2010! Tomorrow morning we wake up, bleary-eyed and cotton-mouthed, to the second decade of the 21st Century. It's been an eventful first decade, that's for sure.

We wrap up the decade here at Pappy's with an obscure comic from the folks at Archie, Adventures of The Dover Boys #1, from 1950. The title is a knock-off of a popular series of boys' books from the early part of the 20th Century, The Rover Boys, who did their roving from 1899 to 1926 in thirty novels written by Edward E. Stratemeyer, using the pen-name Arthur M. Winfield.

I haven't read any of the original Rover Boys novels, but have read many books from Stratemeyer's syndicate, as a boy supplementing my comic book reading with the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Jr. books. I'm not sure the comic book Dover Boys lasted only two issues because it didn't sell, or was a little too close to the original title for the Stratemeyer syndicate. By 1950 with founder Edward Stratemeyer dead, his company was run by his daughters. It was still doing well, even with the competition for juvenile readers tipped toward comic books.

Adventures of the Dover Boys is drawn by Harry Lucey.

Happy New Year, and I hope we'll see each other in 2011.

Cover Quest

In Action #355, Mort Weisinger published this interesting list of cover collections:



Except, maddeningly, although he insisted that the writers include the title and issue numbers, he did not publish that information except for a few, such as Detective #40, 66 and 144. So I thought it might make an interesting contest to try to come up with lists for each of these categories, as shown in the column:

1. Five males over 10 years old (33)
2. Superheroes on foreign soil (28)
3. Unusual belts (30)
4. Means of transportation (33)
5. Numbers not issue numbers (25)
6. Stars (28)
7. Empty hands clenched (25)
8. Shadows (33)
9. Gloves, not worn by heroes who normally wear them (36)
10. Chains and shackles (28)
11. Stone (33)
12. Statues (25)
13. Clouds, gas, dust or smoke (26)
14. People with eyes closed (48)
15. Emblems with letters (32) Note: Only one per character.
16. Questions (31)
17. Bare legs (35)
18. Hero and secret identity (30)
19. No hero or heroine (27)
20. No villain (27)
21. Blond hair not feature character (25)
22. Yellow titles (25)
23. Headquarters (32)

I took a few out because they seemed too easy; almost every issue of Detective from about 1960-1963 featured Robin in profile as Mark Engblom documented a couple years ago.

Some ground rules: DC titles, as per Weisinger's requirement. Since Action #355 was the July 1967 issue, no comics after that date. And since you can use sources like the GCD for your covers, no comics published before 1955.

For the heck of it, here is my stab at #14, chains and shackles.
1. Superman #102
2. Superman #115
3. Superman #191
4. Action #235
5. Action #263
6. Action #286
7. Action #295
8. Action #318
9. Action #319
10. Superboy #109
11. Superboy #110
12. Superboy #120
13. Adventure #348
14. Batman #110
15. Batman #111
16. Batman #163
17. Wonder Woman #73
18. Wonder Woman #106
19. Jimmy Olsen #94
20. Lois Lane #73
21. Justice League of America #22
22. Blackhawk #118
23. Blackhawk #179
24. Blackhawk #184
25. Blackhawk #197
26. Hawkman #6
27. Hawkman #8
28. Hawkman #16

What struck me in compiling that list is how often the chains were used for some other purpose than restraining someone (other than Superman, who did indeed tend to get shackled a lot, usually with green K manacles). For example, Batman #111 featured the Caped Crusaders swinging with chains as ropes would not hold them in their new armored uniforms. And while Wonder Woman in the Golden Age often seemed like a B&D mag, in #73, she's pulling a ship by its anchor, which is attached to a chain. Hawkman's three covers with chains are similarly non-binding:


Some other cover types that were probably common in the DC Silver Age: Apes, duplicates of the heroes (many, many, Wonder Woman covers featured this theme), fat and/or excessively tall characters.

Good hunting!

Update: Commenter Jonathan L. Miller points out that one of the cover collectors, Paul Karasik, retained his affection for comics and has published several books:

I have not read any of them, but I have read many of the Fletcher Hanks stories in Fantastic Comics (the subject of the "I Shall Destroy" and "You Shall Die" books). Mark Engblom reviewed the former book here. I can certainly attest that the Stardust stories are every bit as demented as Mark indicates in his review. They are wildly entertaining and completely insane.

Number 869


Exquisite delirium


I love nonsense or I probably wouldn't be a comic book fan, where about 90% of everything is nonsense in one way or another. But George Carlson took nonsense to another level when he worked for Famous Funnies, doing pages for Jingle Jangle Comics.

No less a literary luminary than Harlan Ellison was the one who brought George Carlson to the attention of fans, with his essay in All In Color For A Dime. I posted another couple of stories by Carlson in Pappy's #740, where I explain more.

"Jingle Jangle Tales" and "The Pie-Face Prince of Pretzleburg" were Carlson's regular features, but he also did puzzle pages, as with the scrap paper page featuring the Pixies. There were other well-drawn strips in Jingle Jangle Comics, but you rarely see them, because no one can get past Carlson's wondrous, wacky work. These are from Jingle Jangle Comics #15, 1945.

Mykal Banta, in his Big Blog of Kids' Comics, has a couple of great Carlson Christmas stories here and here.

Trapped!

Somewhere in the THOIA Archives is another pre-code publisher rip-off of EC's Shock Suspenstories #9 classic "Carrion Death!" but I'll be damned if I can find it or remember what it's called (with well over 1300 untagged posts now, it's hard to keep up with stuff like this!) Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was good, but possibly not as great or as relentlessly grueling as this version from Fight Against Crime #17 (1954) which features endless cruelty, child murder, a word balloon without words (?!) and vultures cannibalizing the living and the dead in gorious four-color detail. Thanks again to Brian Hirsch for this one, as well as our previous heartless post too!