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The Scorpion Turns Tail

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Atlas/Seaboard founder Martin Goodman built his company to get back at his former company of Marvel Comics to create his own line of comics. Some of these were slightly original like The Cougar, Planet Of The Vampires, and Ironjaw. Other Atlas titles were blatant knockoffs of Marvel characters such as The Brute who was the Atlas version of Hulk, Wulf The Barbarian borrowing from Conan, and Hands Of The Dragon copied Master Of Kung Fu. Two other Atlas comics began as their own creation, but both of them eventually caved into the Marvel formula despite their limited run. One was John Targitt who was a secret agent that already had a mask and spandex duds and in the last issue of his run decides to go with the moniker of Man-Stalker after dealing with the villainous Prof. Death. The other Atlas character who got Marvelized was The Scorpion whose first two issues were written and drawn by Howard Chaykin and took place in the early 20th Century where a daring pilot named Moro Frost used the...
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Fantomah Is OPAF

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Sometimes thought of as the first comics superheroine, Fantomah was beaten out by the Magician From Mars by a few months when she premiered in the second issue of Fiction House's Jungle Comics in 1940. Fantomah was created by Fletcher Hanks, although he used the pen name Barclay Flagg while making her, and she was not your common jungle girl stereotype, or at least in the beginning. One of Hanks' other creations was Stardust the Space Wizard who could pretty much do anything the plot needed for him to do. Fantomah was equally overpowered as she was referred to as "Mystery Woman Of The Jungle", and not in a female Tarzan kind of way but more of a modern-day living goddess which the opening narration for nearly every episode claimed she was the most remarkable woman ever known. Fantomah appears to be a hot blonde in a revealing black negligee which is unusual as far as jungle girl attire is usually just a roadkill bikini, but when she needs to get aggressive Fantomah tu...
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Save Your Hair!

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One comic book ad that struck fear in the hearts of male readers everywhere was by Ward Laboratories, Inc. During the 1950s, they ran a series of advertisements that told you to "save your hair" with one of them looking like something right out of horror movie. Ward had done ads before that did a close-up hair-destroying germs, but this particular one had a huge monstrous hand reaching through the several microscopic shots and reaching for a poor middle-aged man's head who appears to be scared out of his skull. The real sting here is the lightning bolts striking the man's top saying that the mere touch of this germ-infested zombie hand would cause head odors, dandruff, and scalp itch, as if this would happen in real life. The chances of you coming across an undead appendage in the wild with the sole purpose of giving you fallen hair are pretty thin. The fact that these ads were made up for a kid's publication but were aimed at older men is confounding as if the ad...
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Pat Patriot: From Riveter To Rescuer

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Most everyone has seen the We Can Do It poster of Rosie the Riveter, but two years before J. Howard Miller did that famous painting, the comic book character Pat Patriot probably served as the idea prototype. Lev Gleason Publications started the story in the pages of Issue #2 of the original Daredevil comics in 1941 created by the combined talents of Charles Biro and Bob Wood who both popularized the genre of crime comics. Unlike most superheroines of the time, Patricia Patrios wasn't a bored debutante who fought crime but a genuine working girl starting off on a military assembly line that moonlighted as an actress playing a female Uncle Sam (or Aunt Sam) wearing an American flag outfit. One night after a performance while she was still in costume, she stops a plot by her factory boss who was selling airplane parts to the Axis powers. From this point on, she was given the professional name of Pat Patriot and gets into one scrape after the other as both a government mascot and spok...
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Play Piano Or Die Alone!

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Dean Ross Piano Studios had been printing their advance course booklets for a while in the 40s, but when the 50s crawled along they really amped up their game by using comics to brainwash youngsters into thinking that learning to play piano is the only thing that can save you from a life of social exile. These comic ads promoted their ever so special patented Automatic Chord Selector which was really just a cut-out piece of paper that acts as a finger guide for anyone wanting to tickle the ivories. For some reason, nearly every other middle-class home had a piano taking up an immense amount of space during the mid-20th Century, probably because there wasn't much on TV at the time, so pianos were the nexus of all get-togethers. Dean Ross devised a deceptive ploy in their ad's short comic about a girl named Mary fretting herself into near catatonic state just because her friend Betty is now an irresistible man-magnet only due to the meager skills she learned from Dean Ross. At lu...
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The 3D Adventures Of Captain 3D

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In 1953, the craze of 3D comics had publishers thinking that this was going to be the next evolution in comics, but it turned out to be just a passing fad. However, Harvey Comics decided to create the first stereoscopic superhero, Captain 3D, and they called in comic book royalty to work on it. Captain America creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon handled the story, with Kirby doing all the art along with Mort Meskin and Steve Ditko in his first ever professional superhero comic. The comic came with two pairs of 3D glasses, but this trend didn't pan out so Harvey only did a single issue. Captain 3D had one of the gaudiest superhero uniforms ever made outside of Canada's Polka-Dot Pirate with his striped leggings, red buccaneer boots, dorky helmet and with a big "3D" emblem over the chest, he seemed more like a corporate mascot than a legit hero. The idea behind the character was to have a superhero who could literally leap off the page into the real world, although only i...
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That's How You Get WW3 With Ants

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Do you want to get World War 3 with ants? Because this is how you get it! Youthful Magazines' Captain Science had a few stand-alone sci-fi tales during its 7-issue run, one of which is more of an alien invasion than an actual world war. Starting out in 1952, an explosion in Earth's atmosphere has ants raining down onto the planet who all grew to giant size after eating. Soon the entire globe is infested with colossal creepy crawlers, and entomologist Prof. Tom Leigh realizes the imminent danger, so he gathers a co-ed group of scientists to seal themselves in a university lab and try to find a solution to the ant-mageddon. The his/hers crew realize they don't have enough supplies to last before they can find a resolution to the big bugs, so one of them creates a plastic formula that embalms anyone into suspended animation, so they spend the next several decades sealed away with only two scientists at a time working on the ultimate ant eliminator. Cut ahead to 2052 and Tom is...
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