Stupid Comics

Columbia Comics lasted for a good nine years back in the 40's which mainly printed issues of syndicated characters such as Dixie Dugan and Joe Palooka. One of their original characters was a gruesome guy known as The Face whose whole thing as a superhero was wearing a creepy looking mask. He had no superpowers, special gadgets, ninja training, or annoying sidekicks, just the mask and sometimes a gun. The Face was in reality radio newscaster Tony Trent that witnessed injustice in the system, so he took a note from Green Hornet and made himself out to be a superhero that everyone thought was a supervillain. His only real defense against the forces of evil was his rubber mask which he had specially crafted to fit around his own head, the maker of which conveniently died immediately afterwards. The Face's debut in Big Shot #1 has him trying to prove that racketeer Grudge Grogan is pocketing money intended for children in an asylum and replaced their good food with tainted turkey. W...

Buck Johnson had a busy year in 1941 with two consecutive comic book premieres. He’s an explorer that first appeared in Speed Comics #13 from Harvey created by Frank Lawrence. He was another "great white" explorer who captured wild animals and used his skills to trap a tiger that he labels as a man-eater while saving his overzealous photographer girlfriend Helen when she was trying to snap a picture of the striped predator which chases the dizzy dame up a tree. A few months later, Buck jumped ship from his single trip with Harvey to Great Comics Publications in the first two issues of their appropriately titled Great Comics which only lasted three issues altogether. This time the creator is under the name Andre LeBlanc and has Buck still as a hunter working with a supposedly different camerawoman named Irene. They are hunting a mad elephant in the Mayal peninsula where they are attacked by a panther that Irene shoots dead simply for the crime of being hungry. She didn't m...

One of the first buddy cop team-ups in comics was when Fiction House took their futuristic heroes Flint Baker and Reef Ryan from Planet Comics making them the original Bad Boys, but in space. The two intergalactic adventurers both joined the Space Rangers organization, and in Issue #41 of the space anthology they got sent one of their weirder missions. Flint is asked by his viceroy to transport some girl robots to a king as a "good-will gift", which is something Buck Rogers never had to do was be a sex robot delivery service. Flint decided to pass the buck to Reef who after they became partners the former underwater agent had been rewritten into a horny pervert. Reef is pissed when he finds out the cargo are mechanical and not genuine space hookers. One of the robots is really the pirate queen Huldane in disguise who knocks Reef out and takes them all to her asteroid hideout. Huldane and her flunky with the typical name of Igor manage to capture Flint too when he tries to res...

Charlton had a good baseball team's worth of horror hosts, but one of few to get his own title was Dr. M.T. Graves. Before getting a regular gig as host of The Many Ghosts Of Doctor Graves, our mysterious medicine man had a career in various other horror comic shorts as a professional Ghost Fighter. In one of his first adventures from Ghostly Tales #55 which only lasted three pages, the Doctor makes a house call on the distressed Pamela Simms. The story opens up with Doc G already having an established career as a paranormal investigator and arriving at Pamela's old estate to bust a supposed ghost yelling at her to abandon her house. Graves somehow instinctively knows that the shadowy figure is not supernatural even though another entity appears claiming to be Pamela's great-grandpa who wants her to restore the place. The real ghost spooks away the fake one who breaks through a hidden doorway and revealed to be Pamela's greedy cousin Philip that was kicked out of his in...

With the Space Race at full steam in 1964, Charlton made quite a few stories of people from the stars stopping by our little planet for its Mysteries Of The Unexplored Worlds anthology. Joe Gill wrote the science fiction saga titled The Earth Conquerors for Issue 24 where one particular flying saucer heads for a farm in the Dakotas piloted by aliens wearing spacesuits. They get out of their ship to explore where they run across a young hayseed with a slingshot that busts through their fishbowl helmets, killing one of them even with their strange power to fly like Superman. The tall visitors capture the boy after stunning his dog when he is interrogated by them. He claims his papa could bust into their saucer to rescue him, and the boy pulls a Bugs Bunny by narrating what his dad could do while making his own escape by kicking an alien in the shin and trashing their advanced technology with a common stick. The dog comes to and attacks a chasing alien as the boy runs out of their ship. T...

One of Basil Wolverton's most celebrated comics was the strange short Robot Woman only 5-pages long that first appeared in Stanley Morse's Weird Mysteries #2 which showed why it's dangerous to become too attached to technology. Fozzmo is a typical Golden Age comic book scientist, whether good or mad isn't considered handsome. The suave pipe-smoking bachelor scientists wouldn't show up until the Silver Age, so Fozzmo was just unlucky to premiere during the days when all comic scientists looked like they were a victim of a lab accident. The butt-ugly brainiac was an expert in robotics who gathered fortune and fame for his work, which didn't translate to his status with the ladies. Realizing necessity is the mother of invention, Fozzmo decides to just create a robot lover. This gave him a step above several anime shows that would reuse the idea decades later. The fembot has synthetic skin making her one of the world's first Terminators, and a flip top skull whe...

G. Edgar Horner was possibly using a pen name when he decided to make a certain superhero trio rip off of Target And The Targeteers with his group of The Secret Circle for Choice Comics in 1941. Where the Target clan was a headliner with a pair of sidekicks, the Secret Circle was one of the first superhero families in comics as all of its members were actually related. The Storm Brothers were heavyweight boxer Jim, pole-vault champion Larry, and long-distance runner Mac that get called by their police commissioner father to his death bed after being shot by mob king Lou Pacone. When their old man passes away, the Storm brothers decide to avenge his death, but unlike most masked heroes who become vigilantes after their parents die, the Storms had already formed their active secret identities as the Secret Circle. They pull a raid on one of Pacone's branches and find the gang lord after he planned a fake arrest warrant for them. The Secret Circle spend half of their first story chasi...

Despite the fact that the book itself is still in print today even on Kindle, this 1940's ad that was featured in comics was trying to pull at the heartstrings of young ladies that were already dealing with body-type issues on top of having a second World War on the rise. Better Than Beauty was written in 1938 by Alice Thompson and Helen Valentine as a "guide to charm", but the comics ad was endorsed by well-known model Helen Fraser who was director of the Barbizon School Of Modeling. The other Helen acted as a speaker to the book for girls that were desperate to be a model, or at least look like one when she pushed it for the Herald Publishing Company which also sold it with a copy of their Handbook Of Figure Symmetry. All this could be yours for the price of a single dollar that was knocked down from two bucks in this special offer. The book itself was a guide to personal grooming and social interaction with obnoxious drunk men at parties, which is a strange thing to ad...