Stupid Comics

The Eastern Color Printing Company began as one of the founding publishers of comic books including Famous Funnies. One of their few one-shots was Conquest in 1955 which did short bios of historical figures, one of which was the fabled Beowulf in a story drawn by Bill Ely, although here they stuck with the supposedly trendier name of Beowolf The Mighty. The opening narration mockingly states that Beowolf was even stronger than the superheroes of time, although Beowulf probably couldn't sneeze an entire galaxy to dust like Superman. The story gives him a short intro of being a brave warrior, and gets called to Denmark by King Hrothgar to tangle with a particularly nasty monster called Grendel, although for this adaptation of the legend Grendel is a freaking dinosaur. Whether its a T-Rex or an Allosaurus that managed to survive the Ice Age isn't told since there weren't any eggheads from Jurassic Park around at the time, Grendel is obviously a ravaging reptile instead of a lu...

Famed Sheena artist Bob Powell used the pseudonym Gregory Torey when he created the character of Landor, Maker Of Monsters. It was originally intended be just a filler in the first issue of Harvey Publications' Speed Comics but went on to have it be a regular feature in the first 11 issues, although each one was short around 4-pages long. Landor was one of the first genuine supervillains to get his own segment in a major comics anthology and not a regular foil for a reoccurring costumed hero. Landor is a generic mad scientist who creates a new monster for each issue, and lather, rinse, repeat. Some have seen him as a ripoff of Dr. Frankenstein, but he evolved into being a hideously deformed figure after surviving a fire and now sporting wearing a reaper robe. Most of Landor's experiments were foiled by the generic adventurer duo of Anthony Torrence and his perpetually single fiance Marcia, occasionally with Anthony's old school chum Kung Fu-Tse who was also a criminal exper...

As hypocritic as the Comics Code Authority was when it was first established in Oct. 1954, there was a series of comics that was actually titled Approved Comics. The strange thing is that it ceased publications just a few months before the Comics Code went into effect which was set up to cater to the panic that moral monarchs like Dr. Fredrick Wertham set up in the early 50s with his book Seduction Of The Innocent preaching that youth were being corrupted by horror and crime comics that went outside the accepted standards and would only allow approved comics to be circulated. Leading up to this was an imprint of Ziff-Davis Publishing called Approved Comics that started in 1950 which included titles like Crime Clinic, Weird Thrillers, Tops In Adventure, and the original Cloak And Dagger. Eventually, Ziff-Davis sold several of their titles to St. John Publications which were simply labeled Approved Comics, even though it wasn't titled that. Within the span of six months from Mar.-Aug...

Pickwick Books strikes again! After WWII they plastered dozens of issues with this 2-in-1 ad for two totally different lines. One of which was for self-taught language books including Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Polish with Pickwick claiming this would be the best way to plan a postwar campaign whether it would be for business or pleasure. Considering that they used a picture grab of a leggy samba dancer would indicate Pickwick intended this to sell more to lonely former soldiers, especially when it boasts that Spanish is only good for romance and opportunity, although you might want to dedicate more than just 10 minutes a day to it for a foreign language to sink in. The ad also boasts that it will offer a set of books to learn numerous fighting styles, one of which is plain old "scientific" boxing, while the others are for "police" wrestling and "police" jiu-jitsu. Now how police wrestling and jiu-jitsu are different from whatever type they were...

Supergirl creator Otto Binder got his inspiration for Superman's cousin from one of his earlier creations, Mary Marvel. Similar to She-Ra, she was the long-lost twin sister of an already established male hero, could transform into her super mode by saying the magic words, and had been considered to be the strongest mortal girl in each of their stories. Mary Marvel was Mary Bromfield after she was adopted by rich parents and was really Billy Batson's sister who she reunites with after revealing his secret identity as Captain Marvel. Mary says the word "Shazam" and becomes the first female member of the Marvel Family, and is revealed she could harness the powers of six mythical heroines whereas Capt. Marvel got his from six other heroes, the acronym for which spelled out Shazam. One of Mary's superpowers that were different from her brother was they replaced the courage of the Greek hero Achiles with the beauty of the Roman goddess of the dawn Aurora. Now, beauty is...

St. John Publications had plenty of original titles, but they did do reprints of existing characters from former comics publishers. Some of these were renamed like Lucky Coyne into Jinx Jordon, or Master Key into Rod Holmes, one however was extremely bizarre and that was the Blue Monk. Originally, the character was a short man conveniently named Shorty Wilson who was a former football player who led a crusade against crime fairly reminiscent of The Shadow but under the name of Black Dwarf in 1944 from Chesler Comics. Now how a person of his stature was able to get away with keeping a secret identity is a big question, especially since his outfit didn't cover his face at all, so unless there was a large population of short persons in his city then Black Dwarf didn't have a big crowd to hide in. Cut ahead to 1948, and St. John gave the Black Dwarf a fresh paint job and called him the Blue Monk, even though he was still a diminutive character. Originally, Black Dwarf had his own i...