Number 1185: Mooning the cyclops

Moon Girl, the Pre-Trend EC Comics' version of Wonder Woman, fights off the cyclops, who has escaped from the prison, "miles inland on the island of Sicily," where he has been since Ulysses put him there. Having been out of action for a couple of thousand years at least, ol' One-Eye needs to eat. He grabs a shipload of grub before rising up sometime later on an American beach.

The story is from Moon Girl and contains at least one major howler: When meeting Moon Girl's enemy, the Professor, the caption reads, "In archaic Latin, the one-eyed giant speaks . . ." Maybe to 1948 comic book readers archaic Latin and archaic Greek were the same. But I'm surprised it slipped by even the most lax editor. That editor would have been William M. Gaines, as the indicia credit reads. Gaines took over Moon Girl from his father, Maxwell Charles Gaines, who had started Educational Comics after DC bought out his share of their publishing empire, All American Comics. The elder Gaines* had died in the summer of 1947, leaving the publishing company to his wife and son.

From Moon Girl #4 (1948), drawn by Sheldon Moldoff:

*The elder Gaines had also been the original publisher of Wonder Woman. Moon Girl was never close to being as bizarre as Wonder Woman, a comic in a class all its own. On Sunday, July 8, I'll be featuring a wild story featuring our favorite Amazon.