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A little bit of interesting comics trivia, via a copy of Yellowjacket #9 (Charlton Comics, 1946) provided by Customer Sean. Along with stories featuring the title character, and a story with the somewhat Wonder Woman-inspired “Diana the Huntress,” was an installment of “Tales of Terror.” Your host introducing said story: the Witch:
Not to be confused, of course, with the Old Witch introducing stories at EC Comics a few short years later:
The Overstreet Price Guide is on it, with describing the Witch and the “Tales of Terror” debut in Yellowjacket #7 in terms that make it fairly clear that the later EC Comics version was…inspired heavily by its Charlton Comics cousin:
“…Narrated by the Ancient Witch, wearing a red cloak, stirring her bubbling cauldron at beginning and end of the story, just like E.C.’s Old Witch 5 years later; tells story ‘The Avenging Hand’ similar to ‘The Maestros’s Hand’ in Crypt of Terror #18”
Sounds like this old Charlton may have introduced (or at least used previously) the story format that EC Comics would lean hard upon for their popular horror comics line. Overstreet credits the initial story to Alan Mandel, a person I don’t believe worked for EC later, so it’s not like he brought the concept to him. And perhaps the format and host character are broad enough to have been a wild coincidence, but however it happened, it remains a fun bit of comics history.
Found this panel while reading some Golden Age Superman books on the DC Universe Infinite app, and the casualness of the caption box made me laugh. Written by Jerry Siegel, art credited to Joe Shuster but actually drawn by Paul Cassidy, the story featured Superman taking on a hypnotist who, at one point, puts the whammy on the Man of Steel. Hence, his awkward charging through a tree…not on purpose, I promise you. (From Action Comics #25, June 1940.)
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Just an additional note letting you know that today is the 7th anniversary of the opening of my comic book store
Sterling Silver Comics. Since I’ve been in the comics retail business for 33 years, that means I’ve done around 21% of it on my own. Here’s to seeing that percentage grow. And thanks to all of you for your years of support. It’s much appreciated.
Here’s the post where I first announced my plans. And here’s the post where I reported on my opening day! (Boy, my store is a lot more full now than it was then.)
Sure, your superhero comic may be tough, but is it “showing kids how to throw a punch monthly” tough, like Lev Gleason’s Daredevil?
Oh ho, I say not, my friends. Anyway, I hope ol’ DD wins his match with grown-up Beast Boy.
Image courtesy a stack of some great beat-up Golden Age books customer Sean brought in to show me the other day. Sorry, forgot to note which Daredevil comic this was from. UPDATE: Sean informs me it’s from Daredevil Comics #5 (November 1941).
So I was just looking on the Grand Comics Database for sumthin’ or other when I came across this title that I’d never encountered before…The Cryin’ Lion from the mid-1940s:
Images all totally stolen from said GCD, and what you see there appears to comprise the entire run of the comic. Like I said, I’ve never seen a copy of this, but even unread this may now be a contender for Favorite Offbrand Golden Age Funny Animal Comics (neck-and-neck with Spunky the Monkey).
I looked to the eBay for a physical copy of an issue, and only found one that was overgraded and way overpriced, but I had a couple of folks point out various sites only where public domain (or at least “no one’s left to defend the copyright”) comics have been scanned and posted for perusal, which I may not be able to resist looking at. (Also, said sites might be of use researching other Spunky the Monkey appearances, if any, as I’ve had no luck in the eleven years since I posted that one story.)
Anyway…The Cryin’ Lion, Exciting New Character Find of 1944 and 2018!
So I had a couple of comic collections come into the shop over the weekend. One was a big ol’ pile of Dark Horse Star Wars comics, which, as it turned out, was about 99% different from the Dark Horse Star Wars comics I already had in the shop for sale (i.e. the ones I had bought for myself but gave up to the shop when I opened). The other was a big ol’ pile of comics from the late ’40s/early ’50s, mostly Disney (including lots of classic Carl Barks), Little Lulu, and other various humor books, all offered up by the original owner.
In the middle of that second pile was one of these, a repackaged comic with a new cover advertising the Blue Bird brand of shoes, offered by the Gallenkamp’s shoe store (who also may be the manufacturer of the shoes, I’m unclear on that).
The comic inside is
this issue of
Kid Colt, Outlaw from 1953:
Looking up some info on this on the Grand Comics Database, it appears that some years later the
Blue Bird repackaging moved on to printing
new covers that reflected the contents (just Charlton comics at that point, apparently) and more prominently featuring the shoe store name. The Blue Bird logo from the back cover above is still present on the newer front covers.
Anyway, just an interesting artifact from the days of long ago. I think, maybe, when I was but a young Mikester, I vaguely remember getting a free comic book from the shoe store we frequented. This would have been the mid-1970s. It may have been branded with the store’s name, or a shoe manufacturer’s name, or both…it’s just on the edge of awareness, but I can’t say for sure, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t. I wonder how long shoe stores gave out free comics…or any stores. (I mean, beyond Free Comic Book Day, wise guys.) Radio Shack had their comics (apparently into the 1990s!), I remember grabbing one of these in a video store in the late 1980s. And, apparently, Big Boy made it into the 2000s? More as a magazine-with-comics than as a comic book, but close enough!
I’m sure there’s still the occasional funnybook promotion from stores or restaurants here and there, but I feel like it’s not quite the same, or as prevalent, or as amazing, as it had been.
Sure, this copy of Venus #10 (1950) has seen its share of hard times, but there’s a certain amount of character in a comic in “Poor” or “Fair” condition that a “Near Mint” copy can never quite achieve:
Found
this 1953 promotional comic while just sorta randomly going through the
Grand Comics Database, and now there is almost nothing I want to know more than how our friend Scotty MacTape, of the Clan MacTape, helps Woody defeat an invading fleet of alien spacecraft with rolls of Scotch Tape, new formula or no.
I’ll have to track down a copy of this for myself someday, though perhaps I can wait ’til a slightly less dear example happens along. In the meantime, I’ll just assume Scotty uses his taping powers to strap together a whole bunch of cabers into one giant uber-caber that Woody, using the immense strength borne of his nigh-infinite well of anger, tosses into the Martian forces, giving them what-for and all that.
So it turns out I was wrong, so very wrong, when I suggested that the story on the cover of Amazing Adventures #4 (the Ziff-Davis one from 1951, not one of the three that Marvel Comics did) could no way be matched by whatever story was within:
No, the story is just as crazypants as the cover promises:
Two aliens decide to use love robots to conquer the Earth, but their plans go awry when…well, you can probably guess. You can read it for yourself
here, starting on page 3. Special thanks to reader Paul, who has
kindly declined my offer of quatloos (as my mouth was writing space-checks that my United Federation of Planets Bank couldn’t cash), but I will happily direct you to
his website, to the
Inferior 4 Livejournal where he regularly contributes items of interest, or
to Amazon
where you can track down many of his fine works, in print or digital formats.
In other news…man, after that story, do you really want other news? How ’bout this, since Employee Timmy sent this link to me via the Twitter: Dynamite and Dark Horse teaming up for a three-part crossover between Grendel and the Shadow, written and drawn by Matt Wagner. Holy crow. I find this…acceptable. Very acceptable indeed.
So anyway, I read Afterlife with Archie #1, in which the zombie menace invades Riverdale, and now I think I’ve gone mad:
Also, the comic is fan
tastic. Beautifully illustrated by Francesco Francavilla, and written by Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa in such a way that the Riverdale zombie apocalypse actually makes sense within the Archie universe. Well, “makes sense” in that the entire comic is completely bonkers, but it’s a
good kind of bonkers and I totally recommend it. Now, I have (as I write this) about ten hours to decide if I’m going to rack with the rest of the Archie comics on the “Fun for All Ages” shelves because I’m an awful person, or keep it separate from them because this really is a dark and gruesome (and yet fascinating) book. Well…we’ll see.
In other news…in case you were wondering where my current sidebar pic came from, here you go, straight from the Grand Comics Database:
I will bet 20 quatloos that the story is nowhere as amazing as that cover. (Another 10 quatloos that the story in no way even
resembles that cover.)
Here are a couple of funny animals books picked up at a recent local flea market while finding some goodies for the shop…Goofy Comics #24 (February 1948):
…and
Krazy Krow #1 (1958, reprinting a comic from 1945):
I do so enjoy the off-brand (i.e. not Disney, Warner Bros., or DC Comics) funny animal comics from the Golden Age. So many oddball characters that only so briefly saw the light of day, and are now mostly gone and forgotten save for the occasional archaeological find like these.
The bags for these comics had, shall we say, optimistic pricing written upon them:
…which turned out to be Overstreet’s near mint pricing for the books. As it turned out, the comics were sold for
much cheaper than the marked prices, which is a good thing since the seller had marked the near mint price for the original 1940s
Krazy Krow comic, and not the decade-later reprint this was.
Anyway, I totally kept these for myself, which is one of the two perks I have at this job (the other being the cruel mistreatment of my employees). And I decided to just show them off in this post instead of writing out my usual overly-verbose Monday posts since I’m coming down with a cold, I think, and also I just watched the Breaking Bad finale and you seriously expect me to write anything after seeing that? C’mon.
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