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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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Joe Weider, The OTHER Charles Atlas

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Joe Weider was a bodybuilder from Canada who started the International Federation Of Body Builders with his brother Ben, and founded the Mr. Universe contest, not to mention he got hitched to Betty Brosmer who was a pinup girl with the nearly impossible proportions of 38-18-36. He also published several magazines like Flex, Shape, and Men's Fitness, although his major claim to fame was his infamous comic book ads that ran all the way from the Golden Age up into modern times. One of the latter ads got Weider into trouble because he roped a young Arnold Schwarzenegger into being the poster boy for his faulty Weider Formula supplements which didn't produce the results it boasted about. Another ad has a scrawny boy asking his muscular friend Rocky about how to attract bikini girls on the beach simply by getting the Weider training booklet. However, one of the most offensive ones boasted that anyone who followed his flag would turn into a raging psychopath wanting to pick fights wit...
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Wrong Time For A New Sidekick

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George Brenner created some loser superheroes like 711, Destiny, and Just'n'Right, not to mention the laughable villain Brick Bat, but he did make the original super mecha Bozo The Robot, plus the very first comic book costumed superhero known as The Clock, so you have to take the bad with the good. One such bad character was shafted into The Clock's adventures was the boyish Little Orphan Annie wannabe, Butch. The Clock himself was Brian O'Brien, your average rich socialite who fought crime in his secret identity which is just a fine gentlemen's outfit with a black mask draped over his face. This might sound like dozens of other superheroes like Batman, but The Clock was the original character to use this motif in comics, bridging the gap between pulp fiction and comic book heroes. The Clock did have a partner nicknamed Pug who oddly enough looked similar to O'Brien, which would've been helpful if The Clock ever needed a stand-in to publicly pose as his civ...
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Captain Truth And Nothing But Captain Truth

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For anyone who thought superheroes wore only flamboyant costumes that showed off way more skin than they should have, then they would have used Captain Truth as their poster child. Coming out in 1945, Cambridge House Publishers did about three one-shot mixed bag anthologies, one of which was Gold Medal Comics debuting the exuberant musketeer wannabe in his own single story. Ken Elliot is a teenage orphan who instead of becoming a millionaire's youthful ward lives in poverty, but at sometime in his life he gained the powers of flight, bullet immunity, and super senses, although how he got these extraordinary talents is a big mystery as there was no enchanted ring or magical lightning involved. Ken dawns an outfit with a cavalier hat complete with a feather, plus matching red trunks, boots, and gloves that fully exposes his chest and legs, while getting a little more comfort from a canary yellow cape. In his only ever tale calling himself Captain Truth, the boisterous boy hero flies ...
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