Stupid Comics

Dan Turner started out a private dick in mystery anthologies before he got his own title in 1942. The pulp magazine Hollwood Detective had Turner as the highlighted character with not only prose stories of his cases, but also short comics featuring himself along with fellow female investigator Sally The Sleuth. The publisher changed from Culture Publications to Trojan Magazines which lead to them switching to comics in 1950, including the new title Crime Smashers that had Dan and Ms. The Sleuth in full-length comic adventures. Dan Turner was your average gumshoe in Tinseltown who had his own particular dialogue as he would refer to a murder victim as being "defunct". One case in Crime Smashers #12 had him attending a private meeting of a group called The Midnight Men. They're not an illuminati, but a gentlemen's club that are being entertained by the leggy magician Charm Marlowe performing in just her underwear while making snakes appear out of her top hat. Charm prom...

Even though Mr. Bones hosted this tale from Charlton's Scary Tales #26, the main character of Seekers Of Evil sounds like a horror host on his own. Baron Wolfgang Von Brummer runs a satanic cult out of his German castle where his followers all wear pillowcases on their heads. Their latest meeting has them bring in an unwilling maiden to sacrifice for their big red daddy, but the Baron's elderly servant Anna stuns her master when she tells him to let the girl go. Baron tries to vex her with a fire trick, but Anna reveals that she's a full-fledged witch by turning into leopard and escorting the girl out. Aunt Anna as she's known transforms into bat to rally her neighborhood watch who claim to work for the devil, but the Baron's brand of evil is too much even for them. The real satanists go after the poser satanists by all morphing into monsters to flush the Baron and his helpers out of town. It's unusual that even those representing Hell would have their own set o...

Whoever did The Scrambler short for Adventures Into The Unknown #98 apparently compared modern art to alien abduction, or at least in 1958. Since the period of modern art goes from the mid-19th to late-20th Century, the clash of cultures might seem like something from another world since the opening narration claims it is comparable to a lunatic's pipe dream. John and Bess were a retired couple living in Nevada who are surprised to find the nearby mountain shifted nearer to their house overnight. They go near the base of the moved mountain, only to see a lion chasing a gazelle, neither of which are a naturally occurring members of Nevada's wildlife. The elderly pair decide to sleep on it, only to be abruptly awakened by the total absence of their house. A big-headed stranger called Dr. Ikobewati materializes stating he is a scientist from another dimension, and that his latest creation, the scrambler, has him hopping from one reality to another while trying to find his way back...

Having nothing to do with the store chain that would use the same name five years later, 711 had possibly the most imbecillic comics run out of any Golden Age superhero. Getting his own feature starting in Quality's Police Comics #1, young attorney Daniel Dyce ends up taking the rap for his best friend Jake Horn who he just happened to be the spitting image of. Daniel posing as Jake gets life imprisonment as Lifer 711 while Jake was free to watch over his newborn baby, even though the proud papa gets run over and dies a few days later. Daniel is now stuck in jail after reading about the accident. Why the police never figured out that the Jake Horn that died wasn't the same one they had in prison is never told, nor why Daniel just didn't come clean and tell them he wasn't the real Jake so he could go free. Instead of trying to clear his name, Daniel manages to somehow dig out of his cell, even though he rationalizes that he can't go back to his old life since he has ...

711 was a peculiar superhero who stayed in jail during the day and escaped his cell nightly as a cloaked crusader that used his prisoner number as an alias. It is possible that he was popular enough to inspire a particular chain of convenience stores years later to use the same name, but the confusing character regularly dealt with generic gangsters in his after-hours excursions. The only adversary he ran across that could be classified as a supervillain was the even more baffling bad guy that called himself Brick Bat. Taking place in Quality's Police Comics #5, he started out as an ugly thug wearing a regular outfit with a fake Batman cowl which barely fit him well, as you could imagine himself constantly fastening his mask from falling off. Brick Bat hired a scientist to make an inventory of brick-like objects that each contained poisonous gas when broken, for which the scientist was paid for with an assault of his own creation so Brick Bat could own the patent on exploding brick...

The word zoot was British slang for smoking weed. This created the iconic but ultimately fleeting men's fashion known as a zoot suit. In 1946, Fox Feature Syndicate thought it would be smart to use this term for getting high as the title of their funny animal anthology, Zoot Comics. Starting in Issue #7, the comic shifted gears with the first appearance of their new character, Rulah the Jungle Goddess. What set Rulah apart from the brunette jungle girls of the time is that her skimpy getup was made of giraffe skin, the same giraffe the female aviator killed when she crash-landed in Africa. Aside from being just another white girl in roadkill, a nearby tribe viewed her as their queen after freeing them from a swindling self-proclaimed moon goddess. From this point on, Zoot Comics primarily became a showcase of Rulah stories. The truly indifferent thing about this change of pace was the fact that there were two separate comics for Issue #14. In what was later labeled Issue #14(A). Th...

Referred to as the Wizard Of Science, Guy Gorham was a competent man stock character. Featured in the first two issues of Great Comics this Doc Savage doppelganger was created by Bud Webster. The "world's greatest chemist" took it upon himself to set up hidden cameras in the labs of rival scientists like the wicked Dr. Moluk, making it appear that Guy had the forethought to somehow sneak surveillance gear in possible future inventor threats that might make the next Frankenstein monster. Guy and his partner Zarita tune into Moluk's lair to find the mad genius making his own shake 'n bake sea monkeys that rapidly evolve into large dragons. After watching this, Guy rushes over to Moluk and lets his fists do the talking as he fights the evil doctor and his assistant Scorpo, only to have the dragons sicked on him, even though Guys is able to manhandle the ravenous reptiles single-handedly. The brawny but brainy hero tricks the dragons into eating some bad bacteria whic...

Going from Jimmy Allen to Jim Albright, the famed radio drama adventurer Captain Midnight started in 1938 who went on to star in a movie serial, comic strips, and his own comic title by Fawcett Publications. When his Ovaltine-pushing decoder wasn't helping real life American soldiers in the field during WWII, the soaring superhero was rewritten for comics sporting a flying squirrel glider suit that allowed him to glide when he wasn't flying a fighter plane. After the war, writer Otto Van Binder took what at the time was a rare thing and turned a terrestrial-based hero into a guardian of the galaxy. Starting around Issue #48, Midnight perfected his first space rocket to stop crooks from stealing an asteroid made of gold. From this point on, future issues would feature a single story of the title character in space. The Captain went on to have a saga on the moon after his ship gets escaped prisoner Killer Jordan for a stowaway. His main alien nemesis was Jagga the Space Raider, a...

Magazine Enterprises had several wild west comic characters, but none as famed as the original Ghost Rider. This was before creator Dirk Ayers rebranded the gunslinger as Phantom Rider for Marvel which was later reverted back to Ghost Rider. The vigilante cowboy was a gunslinger in the old west that Marvel remade as a hellspawn supernatural biker. Magazine Enterprise's original Ghost Rider was so popular that they offered a Ghost Rider mask in an ad that ran in their various titles, even influencing their character The Avenger to adopt a secret identity based on the fact that his assistant bought one of the masks for her nephew, making this one of the first crossover promotions set up by a comic book publisher. There were at least two different incarnations of the mask produced, each one had the bonus of glowing in the dark. This additional feature unfortunately had the mask created with radium paint that was later known to cause the terminal disease of cancer. A novelty scarf migh...