Stupid Comics

The iconic Miss Masque had a backup story in Fighting Yank #24 showing what a glamorous vigilante does during her winter break. In her secret identity as Diana Adams, she and her reporter boyfriend Russ Bowman head to the Suntop Lodge in the mountains where she meets an old jeweler friend Jolly that happens to be staying there. Jolly gets bumped off by the crooked ski instructors Helga and Herman that are working for the evil manager Munson. All three of them are trying to find a jewel belt Jolly was supposed to have, so they ditch his body on the slopes and ransack the dope's room for the jewelry. Diana decides to investigate as Miss Masque, which at this point in her career is sporting a crop top pointlessly revealing her navel, something you wouldn't normally wear in snowy weather. The masked maiden avoids getting impaled by a ski pole thrown from off panel that Munson tells her belongs to Herman who Helga claimed just committed suicide. Masque gets cornered by the remaining...

The Wilson Chemical Co. decided to recruit little kiddies into help selling their White Cloverine Salve by running ads in Golden and Silver Age comics books. Similar to the Grit Magazine debacle, the Cloverine comic ads tried to entice innocent youngsters into becoming freelance distributors of their ointment, even though all the profits really went to the children's parents as they willfully seemed to sign their offspring into child labor. Each of the advertisements truly caught kid's attention with a small comic strip story demonstrating how awesome it was to be a peddler for a major corporation. These strips regularly had children whose lives were more engaging if they had all the neat stuff they could earn from pitching Cloverine to their unsuspecting neighbors. You could earn standard swag like bibles, dolls, and footballs, but things got delusional when they offered big things like telescopes, air rifles, bicycles, and a full archery set. The most offbeat prize they had w...

Harvey had a line of comics that did exactly what it said on the tin titled All-New Short Story Comics in 1943 as it featured single solo adventures of various characters like Kayo Kane, Night Hawk, Tiger Shane, and Ma Jenkins. The second issue of this series featured the premiere of not one, but two superheroes with the same first name, one of which was the Scarlet Phantom by Joe Kubert. The other was a crossover of sorts where the Scarlet Nemesis meets up with the equally mysterious Black Orchid, no relation to the other Black Orchid superheroine who showed up in Tops Comics the next year. In this story by George Tuska, private detectives Rocky Ford and Judy Allen discover that the Baxter Building next door has exploded, although this wasn't the one from the Fantastic Four comics two decades later. They think the incident was caused by the retired millionaire Jim Crow. What neither of the partners know is that other is secretly a masked crimefighter as Rocky is Scarlet Nemesis an...

American Comics Group started out in 1939 and lasted all the way to 1967. They were well known for their anthology titles, even though they did have a small number of original superheroes including the awkwardly named Nemesis which sounds more he's a supervillain plotting revenge against some random good guy. Similar to Kid Eternity, Nemesis didn't become a hero until after he died. In life, Steve Flint was a detective with the Department of Justice who gets killed on assignment and is sent to the Unknown(aka: Heaven)where the Grim Reaper gives him a new lease on afterlife as becoming a ghostly agent dressed up in a boy wonder shorts, a cape, a red tunic with an hourglass emblem, and a pointless mask to cover his identity which is stupid because he's already dead. Now dubbed Nemesis, this avenging angel existed in the same comic book universe as other ACG superheroes, so he met up with Magicman and Herbie(aka: Fat Fury), but his weirdest crossover happened in Adventures Int...

Mysteries Of Unexplored Worlds was an accurate enough title for this unusual 5-page short story in their 44th Issue from 1964 drawn by Charlton's regular filler artist Bill Molno. The weirdly named space captain Gary Gray and his subordinate who was of course named Sparks find a planet that has been knocked away from its sun with everyone and everything in it frozen. You would think this would mean that the entire iced population were dead from being exposed to sub-zero temperatures for so long, but Gray decides to take three of the people-popsicles back to the ship and have them thawed out, one of which was of course a stunning redhead in a miniskirt. The horny captain bugs his medical officer to have the carrot top cutie regain consciousness until she finally wakes up and communicates to him telepathically that she's still cold, so Gary uses the randy excuse of using his own body to help warm her up. The girl tells her rescuers that her people of the planet turned off their ...

Just prior to the historic attack on Pearl Habor, the trigger-happy fanatics at Great Comics Publishing in late 1941 had a pair of tales running in the first two issues of their ironically named Great Comics. The story of the Devildogs Three was drawn by Rudy Palais who also graced other Golden Age comics like Blackhawk, Doll Man, and Phantom Lady. This trio of marines were made up of Tex Burton, Pete Perkins, and Windy Wyeth who are a team of specialists that get called in on suicide missions that no other soldier is man enough to even try. Their first chapter has them on a rescue mission in the Panama jungle to save some army engineers captured by a Nazi patrol. The Devildogs are infamous enough that random plainclothes troops in the field notice the plane they're using which gets called in on and shot at. Tex flies the plane while Pete and Windy parachute out as they use blitz tactics against the actual Nazis to free the prisoners, thus hoisting them with their own petard. Their...

Sol Brodsky ditched Marvel at the dawn of the Bronze Age to ally himself with Israel Waldman, former head of I.W. Publications which reprinted defunct comics in the Silver Age under the label of Super Comics. The two of them founded Skywald Publications with a trio of horror magazines which they labeled the Horror-Mood similar to Warren's 60's anthologies. One of their comics was titled Psycho, having nothing to do with the Hitchcock movie, even though it attempted to shove out their own horror heroine in Issue #9, the dynamic Demona, created by Gardner Fox who also made the magical superheroine Zatanna. This sexy siren was the product of Elvira, a space witch who came from planet Elfwhon where magic is common, which coincidently was also the name of a horror hostess who came out around the same time. This alien woman mated with a man in the Canadian wilderness to produce the half-human Desdemona who shortened her name to Demona. Now an adult, Demona sets herself up as a fighte...

A real deal from 1957 was advertised in a tiny number of comics that would have only set you back by $2.98, which by today's finances would be about $32. That must seem like a mere pittance for a robot suit which is in reality a couple of repainted cereal boxes tied together. Compix Inc. decided to break into the robo-mania that Forbidden Planet helped start by making this take cardboard cosplay something that would wet the mouths of young sci-fi fans. "You Be The Electronic Man" is the logo for this crappy outfit about a character that never had any appearances outside of this ad. Called the latest brainstorm of The Brain, which is also the name of the robot as Mr. Brain, so basically The Brain is a creation of Mr. Brain who may or may not be a separate entity, unless this robot can reproduce itself asexually. It's a mystery as to which is the chicken and which is the egg in this exchange. Some dopey cartoon lad in the corner of the ad claims you can use this cheap e...

Young's Merchandising Company was an Australian comics publisher whose material largely consisted of reprints of American titles like Felix or Mandrake. One of their original characters was Konga the Jungle Lord whose adventures were shown as a backup feature in the title of a completely different jungle lord, the oddly named Yarmak. Konga was another one of those standard white guys that somehow became a lord of the jungle simply by being the only white guy hanging around the jungle at the time while the locals were finding something new to worship that week, which seriously takes away from any kind of sensibility they would have, at least from the point of view by white comics writers. Aside from the Yarmak comic, Konga did get a single issue with his name on it which might have been a collected edition of the Yarmak stories. One story had Konga being called by the resident British commissioner to rescue a messenger deep in the heart of cannibal country, and he only trusts anothe...

In 1952, an ad ran through numerous publishers' comics, including Ziff/Davis, Harvey, Fiction House, Quality, and Comic Media. A company called Fighting Force was offering 50 Combat Plastic Action Toys for a single buck, along with a free six-inch long die-cut shooting cannon. The toys were all flat molded styrene silhouettes of soldiers, sailors, tanks, jeeps, jets, battleships, and cannons. The ad proclaims the buyer could have "your own task force", but unless you were sending the troops out battle two-dimensional stationary enemies that were about an inch tall, then you would really need to overdo your imagination to relive any thrilling real battle moments. The working deluxe cannon claims to shoot harmless bombs, but given the tiny scale of all these pieces, its more than likely that it would be a major choking hazard as buyers of the old Boba Fett action figures could attest to.

Bettie Page's legacy left a huge imprint on modern comics as well as pop culture, largely due to Dave Stevens modeling his character Bettie from The Rocketeer on the pin-up princess. The odd thing is that she was never actually featured in any comics during her career, even though she was in various adult magazines that featured good girl comic strips. One single issue has caused much confusion due to its photographic cover. The first issue of Darling Romance in 1949 was published by Close-Up Publishing Inc. that was owned by MLJ Magazines which eventually changed its name to Archie Comics Publications after their hit carrot-top teenager. This particular issue has a photo of a beautiful brunette with bangs baring a strong resemblance to Bettie Page, but it is really a different model known as Kevin Daley. Despite the slightly masculine name, Kevin began her model career before Bettie did by a few years in the 40's who aside from appearing on the cover of numerous girly magazine...

Great Comics Publications' secondary series Choice Comics had yet another circus-based superhero, the flamboyant Fire-Eater. Running in only the first two issues, Mike O'Malley is described as being "a lusty yankee whose amazing conquest of flames keeps audiences gasping, and criminals cringing", which is a fancy way of saying he's a masked circus performer who doubles as a crimefighter that uses his fire eating gimmick as a superpower by consuming a special capsule. This was created by an artist using the alias Wood Byrns which shows how far they wanted to separate themselves from the character. Mike's girlfriend is Louise Peters, a nurse who runs to tell him about an arson ring that is planning on springing their boss Dr. Nagel from the state hospital. The gang is so determined that they send their firebug Smoky Karsh to sabotage Fire-Eaters pills. Mr. Eater takes a good pill to confront Smoky and his boys in a chase to the hospital while breathing fire on t...