Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinThe reason cows are out of season since 1969

Epilogue.

§ August 24th, 2004 § Filed under harvey Comments Off on Epilogue.

Oh, dear…first pal Andy links me regarding my Seven Deadly Harveys post, then Boing Boing picks up on it…I’m sure my bandwidth is going to go through the roof.

Not that I’m complaining. If you’re new to my weblog…hi! How are you? Don’t worry, I don’t talk about Harvey Comics all the time. But I think I have a thing or two more to say before I put the subject to rest.

First, about the Seven Deadly Harveys themselves…that’s something I came up with a long time ago, and had been joking about with pal Sean and pal Dorian for quite some time now. In fact, I’m fairly certain one or the other came up with the idea of Spooky as “Wrath,” which I thought was just perfect.

My original intention was to have the Richie Rich antagonist Mayda Munny as “Lust,” assuming that she was in pursuit of Richie, but alas, I could come up with neither textual support for that idea, nor even a good image of her…and besides, having Richie’s cousin Reggie as “Envy” was probably as obscure as I wanted to get. Anyway, I decided to go with Wendy the Good Little Witch because 1) as we all know, red is the color o’ sinnin’, and 2) that panel I found was too good to pass up. (I was flipping through the issue with Dorian, and we both immediately spotted and pointed at that panel at the exact same time.)

My search turned up a revamped image of Wendy that I had forgotten about:

Wendy and The New Kids on The Block #2 (1990)

Looking marginally like Little Audrey, I don’t know if this new look Wendy was supposed to make her “cool” or “modern” or what, but the look clearly didn’t last very long. And, yes, I suppose I should mention that the New Kids on The Block turned up in Harvey Comics with alarming frequency at about this time.

Harvey still exists as a company, but not as a comic publisher (the last comics hurrah being, if memory serves, a newsstand magazine from a few years ago). Mostly they license their characters out for merchandise (if there’s a List of Top Merchandisable Characters, surely Hot Stuff would be in the top 5) or for direct-to-video movies (the most terrifying of which is the Baby Huey movie which pal Dorian had first brought to my attention some months back…you have to click on the “preview” link…and just look at that cast).

Of the various titles that make up our Harvey back issue stock, Hot Stuff remains the most requested…though about half the time it’s by people looking for tattoo ideas. There was a bump of interest when Alter Ego ran an article about Stumbo the Giant, which was a back-up in one of the Hot Stuff series.

It’s a shame Harvey is out of the comics business. The industry could always use more children’s titles, and half the battle in getting comics into the hands of kids is presenting parents with characters that they themselves might remember.

For more Harvey info, I recommend The Harveyville Fun Times.

THE SEVEN DEADLY HARVEYS

§ August 23rd, 2004 § Filed under harvey Comments Off on THE SEVEN DEADLY HARVEYS

More Harvey Hits.

§ August 16th, 2004 § Filed under harvey, watchmen Comments Off on More Harvey Hits.

I realize that I’ve been on some kind of weird Harvey Comics trip lately, but when you get right down to it, that’s really the only kind of Harvey Comics trip you can be on, given how downright peculiar Harvey strips can be. So, for today’s funnybook follies, I’m taking a brief look at some odd things in Harvey books that have caught my eye lately.

First off is this Richie Rich story, where a burglar fixes it that the Riches’ robot maid Irona appears “sick,” and while she’s away recuperating, the burglar will arrange to have his own robot maid accomplice take her place. Anyway, the robot is rushed off to a hospital, apparently owned by the Rich family (and not just intended for rich people, though that probably can be inferred):

However, it’s not just a hospital, mind you! It’s a towering hospital…just for robots!

Now here, in this Little Dot story, we have Dot being given a tour of a large department store by her aunt. At the beginning of the story, Dot spots a sign warning shoplifters that they will indeed be prosecuted. However, thoughout the tour, Dot’s aunt keeps taking items, eating snacks, etc etc without paying a cent. A sample:

It all turns out okay in the end, though, as Dot’s aunt is in fact the owner of the department store! Setting aside that Dot probably should have known that from the start, there is still the ethical question of the aunt’s behavior. Yes, she does own the store, but isn’t stealing from your own store still stealing? At the very least, isn’t it a bad example for the employees? It certainly must be confusing the issue for poor, impressionable Litte Dot.

Back to Richie Rich — the one thing that really bugged me about Richie Rich, aside from his obviously untreated case of macrocephaly, is how he lords his wealth over his poor country friends Freckles and Pee Wee:

Someday the proletariat will rise up and overthrow their capitalist oppressors.

Harvey has an important lesson for kids in this next Richie Rich story, in which Richie’s dad Mr. Rich is replaced by an evil duplicate. However, Richie has a cunning plan as to how to tell them apart:

Yes, only the morally just can handle smoking.

And lastly, the origin of Dr. Manhattan from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, as reenacted by Baby Huey in Harvey Hits Comics #3 (March 1987):

For comparison, selected panels from Watchmen #4 (December 1986):

§ August 14th, 2004 § Filed under harvey Comments Off on

from Friendly Ghost Casper #10 (June 1959)

§ June 26th, 2004 § Filed under harvey Comments Off on

Felix’s Nephews Inky & Dinky #1 (Sept. 1957)

Well, isn’t that cute? Inky is making Felix literally saw logs by holding up…um…hold on a second. What’s wrong with….

Oh, dear God! Inky is a thrice-pupilled freak! Aiieeee! Hide the children! Get the rakes and torches!

Actually, I wonder how that even happened…this isn’t a case of the previous owner of the comic drawing an extra eye on; it’s actually printed on the cover. Overstreet even notes it. I don’t know how it got by everyone at Harvey Comics…unless they purposely wanted to disturb America’s children.