Stupid Comics

What if a Scooby-Doo bad guy was really a good guy? Harry Chesler's Dynamic Comics took this that concept for their first issue of Major Victory in 1944 and created the original Spider-Woman. In the Ozarks, the wily Earl Parker(convenient!)robs a bank with his gang and takes young Jimmy as a hostage as they escape in their getaway car. For a hideout Earl decides to use the old farm of deceased insectologist Dr. Goddard which is occupied by his daughter Helen. This girl doesn't believe in using a gun to ward off trespassers but instead wears an immaculate costume as she refers to herself as Spider Woman. Jimmy briefly escapes from Earl's gang who are spooked off by the butt-ugly bug monster. The bandits zoom back to the Goddard house while being chased by the sheriff. Spider Woman ooga-boogas them out the house into a net she already had set up to catch them. Helen had the idea of a Scooby-Doo villain and combined it Fred Jones' obsession with traps. The really inconsist...

Over a year before the infamous V-J Day in Times Square picture of a sailor kissing a nurse was taken, Mason and Co. prematurely decided to come out with a line of victory-themed drinking glasses in mid-1944. The six different glasses each had picture of a member of the U.S. military officer making out with what they called a drinking companion. The idea of American women acting solely as an outlet for soldiers' sexual frustration is one thing, but taking the concept and advertising it in comics intended for younger readers is even worse. WWII was a trying enough time with international hostilities while simultaneously attempting to honor the acts of all Allied Forces committed during the savage aggression they faced against the Axis Powers. To glorify the whole affair in an attempt to ensnare children in their propaganda scheme is particularly sketchy. The ad ran in military anthology comics like Captain Aero which were normally escapist adventures for youngsters during a harsh pe...

Rocket Comics was an anthology printed by Maple Leaf Publishing in Canada during the 1940s that had its own Captain Marvel rip off. Little Bill(having nothing to do with the Bill Cosby prequal)was a lad that was rescued from being marooned on an island by a passing ship. His save is short lived as the lighthouse they were following in a storm goes out and their boat crashes into the cove. The lighthouse is run by the evil Grundy who smuggled military contraband and dowsed their light to loot the ship's cargo. Bill and his friends are imprisoned by the crooks, so he says the magic word Umbra which transforms him into an armored adult known as the Black Knight. This super-strong Round Table reject turns on his opponents but manages to spend a considerable amount of time out of frame. The title character is regularly seen outside the comic panels like he was the mysterious villain from a murder mystery,. How Little Bill gained this power doesn't seem to come up. The idea of a kid ...

The nexus of Golden Age weirdness that is Great Comics Publications was opportunistic enough to get the publishing rights to one of the earliest comic book adaptations of a motion picture. The Lost City was a sci-fi serial directed by Harry Revier who also created the controversial exploitation movie Child Bride. This 1935 serial took the idea of a secluded kingdom in the African jungle which adventurous engineer Bruce Gordon discovers as he is searching for the source for some natural disasters that he theorizes are caused by electricity. He and his comrades find the whole operation is run by the evil genius Zolok who used ancient technology inside a mountain in a bid for world domination. Zolok also kidnaps Dr. Manyus and his daughter to create an army of natives genetically altered into giants called walking dead men. The comics adaptation ran in Great Comics #3 and continued in Choice Comics #3 which were the final issues of each title, meaning the comics never completed the entire...

A recurring segment in various Golden Age comics was categorized as The Story Behind The Cover, meaning there was a gargantuan picture made up for the front cover, but instead of having it as an authentic comic spread out over several pages with panels and action scenes, the book derails it to a slipshod short prose story. Harvey Comics made serious money on this in aa majority of their publications with this feature where several of their characters like Black Cat, Speed Gibson, Captain Freedom, Spirit Of 76, and Young Defenders would be seen teaming up to battle various Axis powers. While this was one of the few times that showcased all these superheroes were part of the same fictional universe, the characters didn't regularly encounter each other within their own comic stories. It's a key selling point on the cover showing all the good guys in an anthology title working together in the same scene, even though they don't have a canonical assemblage of these characters in ...

Aside from Wonder Woman and some jungle girls, there weren't many archetypes of the female warrior during the Golden Age. An exception to this was the one-shot character, Dara Of The Vikings who was featured in Avon Periodicals' Strange Worlds #2. She is one of the last of a tribe of modern day vikings secluded away from the rest of the world. Two pilots, Ford Robbins and Gene Dorn, have their aircraft go down in a storm somewhere off the coast of Greenland. Escaping in an inflatable raft, they wind up on dry land and are shocked to find a horned helmeted hottie who was part of two warring tribes that first settled there in 1361. Dara is captured along with the aviators by a rival clan cleverly called The Hairy Ones lead by the brutal Cyngar who demands the viking vixen give up her family's enchanted Golden Bow they use to keep invaders at bay. The vivacious valkyrie uses her fighting skills to free them all, and they zip to her village of Tine where the pilots amaze them w...

Way back in 1914, a little mail order business called Johnson And Smith Company opened up leading to a plethora of outlandish advertisements that would adorn comic books for decades. In 1935, they started their nationwide campaign to dominate the geek market with full page ads of absurd novelties, including having one as the back cover to the infamous Action Comics #1. The Chicago-based giant peddled everything from monster masks to joy buzzers, and as the years went on, they gathered licenses like Star Trek and Planet Of The Apes. Johnson And Smith had a foothold in the minds of young readers with their tagline, "Things You Never Knew Existed", or at least things you wouldn't bother looking up outside of funny books. Regular items in their catalog included counterfeit money makers, martial arts kits with fake medals, x-ray specs, 7 ft. tall ghosts, hypnosis kits, finger-feeding penny banks, two-headed coins, spooky sound effects records, flesh-eating plants, artificial v...

Mick Anglo was one of the earliest creators of British comic books, mostly known for making the character Marvelman which was later rebooted in the 80s by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. The idea behind Marvelman was after DC Comics had shut down Fawcett's production of Captain Marvel comics blaming it for being a copycat of Superman. That ceased European reprints that Miller's publishing company of L. Miller And Sons was doing, so they created their own version as a young blonde titled Marvelman. This included an entire superhero family with supporting heroes Young and Kid Marvelman making it available to a wide range of readers. Mick Anglo decided to come out with a copy of his own copy of a copycat superhero for Spanish readers billed as Superhombre, that was also the name eventually used for Spanish reprints of Superman. Anglo's Superhomrbe was written by Juan Llarch and drawn by Emilio Giralt Ferrando with black and white interiors in 1958, and was later reprinted for Engl...

In 1940, Fiction House decided to extend their popular science-fiction magazine Planet Stories into a new comic with Planet Comics that was part of their Big 6 lineup. Their first issue saw the debut of outer space heroes such as Captain Nelson Cole, Buzz Crandall, and The Red Comet whose adventures vary from generic Flash Gordon planetary romance plots to full on superhero adventures with a size-changing savior. One character that endured for the first twelve issues was the inexplicably named Spurt Hammond. It never gets addressed if his name is a common one in the year of 25,000(sometimes in the year 40,000}that he comes from, or if Spurt is a nickname he earned after an amusing night on the town. The original writer was possibly Henry C. Kiefer(aka: Orson Herr, Wm. S. Mott, Trace R. Bullet), or an unknown author who somehow arrived at the decision that Spurt was an acceptable enough name for his eager young space captain. Spurt is a Lieutenant in the American Interspace Lines where ...

Archie Goodwin got fed up with Stan Lee's showboating at Marvel and left them for the Bronze Age company made up of former Marvel artists, Atlas/Seaboard Publishing. The comics writer created what was one of their more successful titles lasting a full four issues, The Destructor, where most Atlas titles barely lasted three. Goodwin teamed up with original Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko and the legendary Wally Wood to make Destructor, a street-level hero similar to Daredevil but with a multitude of enhanced abilities. Possibly ripping off the name from Marvel's Golden Age hero, The Destroyer, Destructor is one of the first heroes based out of New Jersey instead of New York. Jay Hunter works for Max Raven's mafia who accidently sees them putting out a hit on someone. Not wanting any witnesses, a mob gunman follows Jay to his father Simon's laboratory where the idealistic scientist was working on his on knockoff of the Captain America formula. Simon wants to make Jay his gu...

American Comics Group's estranged series of Adventures Into The Unknown endured from the late 40s through 60s, so when they got to Issue #158 you could see they were running a little low on fresh ideas. The opening narration states the story doesn't have a hero, villain, plot, or even a decent title with What Are You Going To Do With Your Future, Joe?, but an emerging menace that was supposed to make it all worthwhile. Joe Foster is an average joe in the army just as a flying saucer emerges from space that America's military manages to shoot down and sends him on a mission to find the downed ship. Joe's unit locates the UFO where they find it being manned by a winged dinosaur monster that they kill with a bazooka. The army fails to notice some strange fungus spreading out all over the place that spawns off more of the same kind of monsters. These beasts begin to grow to full kaiju-size which threaten to completely dominate the Earth. It concludes with the cryptic line, ...