Stupid Comics

Hawk Of The Seas started out as a 1937 newspaper strip by the incomparable Will Eisner. The swashbuckling saga was reformatted for Fiction House's Jumbo Comics in 1938 into full length installments. Whether the comic book version of this retitled The Hawk was done by Eisner himself is a slight mystery because they only had the credit of Willis Rensie who was a member of the Iger Shop of artists. The particular chapter we're talking about from Issue #64 was reportedly drawn by Robert Webb where the titular character is a seen as a pirate despite his attempts to clean the seas free of slavers. Hawk is captain of a ship named the Lady Scarlett with a loyal crew of freedom fighters, and he is called to the deathbed of his friend Jose who survived an encounter with a sexy siren which led to his experience of getting lethally injured from an explosion. Hawk decides to hunt for the source of his buddy's demise, and after weeks of searching he finds a scantily clad blonde pretendin...

Spark Publications had a minimal run when it started out in 1945 that had some success continuing the adventures of The Green Lama, even though they had original characters like Golden Lad. Getting his own title, Tommy Preston can turn into the Superboy clone Golden Boy when he says "Heart of Gold" while holding an ancient Aztec artifact of the same name. The Heart of Gold itself is enchanted by the blood of a thousand martyred Aztecs, but why they chose a random white American boy to be shoved into the Shazam mold instead of someone of more Mexican heritage remains unexplained. An anomalous spinoff to this character was the hackneyed female counterpart to the male superhero, which you think would be named Golden Lass. The one known as Golden Girl had no relation to the iconic sitcom quartet that would appear decades later had only a tangential connection to Golden Lad as she was just his classmate. Peggy Shane went to the same school as Tommy who followed him home one day to...

"The Greatest Comic A Dime Can Buy" was weirdly true when Great Comics Publications released the second issue of their flagship title as financially a 68-page book from 1941 would be about $2.10 nowadays is a pretty good deal as your average modern day 32-page comic would be at least $2.99. The peculiar publishing company decided to add a holiday theme to this cover featuring the majority of its stars in one big sleigh powered by eight canines instead of your regular reindeer. Inside the sleigh are The Great Zarro whose single superpower is flying, plus his junior sidekick Rags. Also included are jungle explorer Buck Johnson in his premiere issue along with a miniature elephant that just happened along in the snowy weather. The rest of the riders are from Great Comics' Barrel Of Fun Section which are more cartoonish including the ape Snarzan that for some reason wears an animal skin to cover his privates, the silent Montmorency Twerp, Clambake the Magician who always has ...

Honor House Products strikes again with the hugest swindle in comics history, the sure-fired X-Ray Specs. They advertised this for years in comic books, but only rarely did they admit that the whole thing was a ruse. This ad states that the glasses create an optical illusion, hilarious or otherwise, however still fake. At least for a novelty item Honor House had the guts to come out and say it was a racket. Harold von Braunhut first created this in the 1960s along with the infamous Sea-Monkeys, even though he was also an active member of the KKK, so he had developed a track record of whitewashing the truth. The racist inventor was tricky enough to come up with his owned patented version of the old X-Ray peepers which had exploded into pop culture in the early 20th Century as Harold's version had an extra layer of plastic on the lenses. X-Ray Specs allowed people to see a silhouette around whatever they were looking at, giving the wearer the impression that they were seeing through ...

Referred to as the Robin Hood of the Spaceways, Star Pirate was a regular in the pages of Fiction House's Planet Comics. First created by Al Gabriele, the unnamed space buccaneer did a minimal amount of actual pirating but went on to have big time artists like George Tsuka, Joe Kubert, and Maurice Whitman during his run which went on for several years. Len Dodson and Murphy Anderson collaborated on one of the hero's more mirthful adventures after he had teamed up with an actual space pirate serendipitously called Blackbeard who was a burly man that sometimes used an invisibility helmet. In Issue #37, Star and Blackie wander into an auction house selling a new crop of slaves. A slender robot interrupts to bid twice the amount of the entire lot for its owner. The loud droid pays for them with hard space cash and tells the auctioneer where to drop the merchandise off, after which it explodes to cover its tracks. Star Pirate and Blackbeard decide to find out who the mystery buyer i...

Starting off in Charlton Comics' Ghostly Tales, the specter specialist Dr. Graves got his own series in 1967. The Many Ghosts Of Doctor Graves won that year's Alley Award for Best Fantasy/SF/Supernatural Title, even though Issue #1 gives an explosion of exposition right on its front cover. Peacemaker creator Pat Boyette did the artwork for this shot of the Doctor giving out an elocuted quick shot of his resume. "Graves...Dr. M.T. Graves," is how he introduces himself, as if he was a certain MI6 secret agent, showing front and center how much of an ego this guy has. He claims that you might have seen him on TV, even though he never did, and that you might have read his books despite the fact that this is the first issue of his own comic. Graves stated that he has a reputation as a ghost buster which is over a decade before the popular Saturday Morning tv series of the same name, and two decades before the first Ghostbusters movie came out. It's unknown if the term ...