Stupid Comics

We've already seen this kind of pitch before with other instruments, this time it's a harmonica. The Hopkinson Harmonica Co. first alludes to some guy named Hoppy who can teach you how to use the harmonica. Hoppy himself the unseen creator of a method for quickly learning this groundbreaking new technique which is really just boring as heck as you'd think someone who hadn't master the metal thing within 15 minutes that you'll get your money back, although they don't say how you'll get your 15 minutes back. So, if Hoppy was the person mentioned in the headline, why are we given this little comic with young Jean and her unnamed boyfriend talking about how great Hoppy's method could radically change your life? It's bad enough that the guy dresses like Fred Rogers, but to have his girlfriend con you out of a decent $1.69 just to appease her harmonica overlords and bringing another mindless sheep into their flock is just plain pernicious.

Another chiller from Charlton was their Scary Tales comic anthology, and a weird one for the season of the witch is Halloween Scene drawn by Steve Ditko. In Issue 7, we get an intro by the vivacious vampire, Countess Von Bludd, although they only show a head bust of her on a table at the beginning and an overused piece of art of her at the very end, so the horror hostess is barely in it. A blonde woman wakes up on Halloween night in a department store after it closes and hears something in the next room only to find a large hairy white demon squatting on some sweaters. The beast chases after her yelling that he wants to kill her, all while the lady is running for her life. She makes it to a display window with some cheap Halloween doodads, and she bangs on the glass begging for help, but all the people outside think it's just a timely store promotion. The demon finally catches up to the girl in the window, and she screams which gets the attention of two security guards. Once they a...

Having no relation with the nursery rhyme character with the same name, Mother Hubbard was a modern-day witch that ran for the first three issues of Dynamic Publications' Scoop Comics. Drawn by Bill Madden, Hubbard looked like the typical witch who would dupe kids into getting into her gingerbread house, but she was in fact of all things a comics Good Girl who used her wiccan ways to fight crime, so imagine if Witch Hazel was part of the Justice League. Her premiere adventure reveals that she was a good witch for at least a while as a Nazi agent operating out of America recognizes her as she rode her broom towards his hideout. Hubbard looked in her crystal ball and saw that a scientist working on a new flame gun was kidnapped along with his son by a nasty Nazi to get the specs back for the "Fatherland". Once at the Nazi's pad, they try trapping her in an iron maiden, but she just turns into smoke and escapes, and the local hoods that he'd employed ran off figuring...

Few characters have flipped back and forth from antagonist to protagonist as much as the Sorceress of Zoom. Created by Sandra Swift, this malevolent magic user ran through all 20 issues of Fox Feature's Weird Comics starting in 1940. The unnamed Sorceress rules the flying city of Zoom which can appear wherever she wants it to, and regularly she would take it to different parts of the world causing whatever kind of trouble whether she intended to or not. Sometimes she's a villain, sometimes she's an anti-hero, and even the inexplicable anti-villain which is just a term writers came up with so they could add a little more depth to their flat main character. The Sorceress learned magic along with an unknown stranger and then turned the citizens of Zoom into her own twisted creations. The Sorceress Of Zoom is one of the first super villainesses who got their own reoccurring self-titled segment in a Golden Age comic, but as it was with several villains back then they weren't...

Invention Company isn't a really original name for a company, but one of their offerings got its own comic ad around 1943., Just as everyone was enthralled with WWII, what better time is there to get people into the obscure pastime of signal flags? The ad itself is for a pair of telescopes labeled Wonderscope, but the headline is you get a pair of wigwags and an Authentic Code Instruction. The whole set would be around $75 in today's economy, but even with a five-day free trial it's still pretty steep. Now, these items might be helpful if you're regularly involved in planes or boats, but the ad takes a crooked approach by stating the Wonderscope could be used for using it as secret code with your neighborhood buddies. Were things that boring back then that people had to waste hard cash so a pair of dorks could gab about each other in their own hidden little dialogue? They could've just shared notes in class instead of plunking out a huge wad for their juvenile subur...

Wally Wood was one of the quintessential Good Girl artists, but he was equally good with doing Bad Girls, even before they became popular decades later in the 90s. So, imagine an entire army of Bad Girls in space and you get one kinky caper. Kenton Of The Space Patrol was originally created by John Michel and designed by Joe Kubert who first premiered in the pages of Avon Periodicals' Strange Worlds sci-fi anthology comic, and Issue 5 had Wally Wood draw one of his wackiest tales. Set in the mid-38th Century, Dave Kenton was part of the venerated Star Patrol which despite the name are not traffic cops on rocket cycles, and one damsel he frequently had to rescue was the part-time bellydancer/part-time news reporter Maeve Malloy who he had given a special jewel to so she could signal him like she was Jimmy Olsen calling Superman with his stupid watch. Maeve just happened to be on the space luxury liner President which is attacked by half-naked women in big bubbles that use a sonic de...