Stupid Comics

Will Eisner created not only The Spirit who was one of the first comic heroes to get his own separate newspaper release, but Eisner also made two other characters to help fill out The Spirit Section to a full 16-page segment, the magical Mr. Mystic and veiled vixen known as Lady Luck. This mysterious figure was yet another in a long line of Golden Age heroines who were a young rich debutante that secretly battled evil as a costumed crusader. Eisner along with artist Chuck Mazoujian made debutante Brenda Banks who would match her Irish luck in a green clad outfit with wide brimmed hat and a veil instead of a domino mask as the crimefighter Lady Luck. Klaus Nordling eventually took over the story and art for the weekly section that went from the newspapers to its own regular comic book run under Quality Publications. Issue #50 of their Smash Comics anthology reprints one such story from two years prior where Lady Luck is staking out a joint-Axis Powers hideout along with her bumbling sid...

Drew Murdoch was a regular in Fiction House's titles, primarily Jumbo Comics where he was billed as a ghost breaker that specialized in supernatural cases. His first few adventures had genuine monsters, while the next few issues had him exposing crooks posing as monsters, but then went back to dealing with real monsters again. One of these bonafide spooks was the ghost of Cleopatra in Jumbo Comics #65 who made quite a lot of appearances in other Fiction House comics in the 1940s. Murdoch gets a visit from archeologist Avery Mollison who claims he's being haunted by the spirit of the Egyptian queen after an expedition to a tomb went haywire. His collogues Professor Lord and Hulburt egg him on to open up Cleopatra's last resting place. Hulburt hands them a scroll he finds in the grave but gets crushed by the stone cover and his spirit is bonded to the scantily clad ghost. Mollison and Lord make it out of the tomb and a week later are on a ship at Alexandria where Lord falls o...

For the latter half of the 1940s, there was a novelty line of glow in the dark neckties that advertised their fashionably challenged attire in of all things kids comics. Their first couple of ties featured a bunch of letter "V"s on them to celebrate the victory of World War II. Later ties spelled out messages like "Will You Kiss Me In The Dark, Baby?" in an attempt to gain the favor of gullible females who would somehow be airheaded enough to be swept away in this question of romance. Some of the last few ties were specifically done for bachelors who had nothing to lose with a picture of a striptease girl wearing an evening dress in the light but showing just her underwear as it glows in the dark. Probably none of these ties were made with radium like the glowing Ghost Rider masks, otherwise there would have been more single men dying of radiation poisoning. The neckties were first advertised in superhero titles like Black Terror, Blue Beetle, and Silver Streak. Lat...

Not to be confused with Michael Myers, The Shape is the first of a trio of features that made their single appearance in the first issue of Charlton Premiere in 1967. Since the Bat-Mania was coming down, the idea of campy superheroes had been taken to the limit at this point. Originally written by Ms. Marvel co-creator Roy Thomas who would eventually become the head editor of Marvel Comics, The Shape's script got rewritten by underground artist Grass Green that most fans of hippie comics would know as the creator of bizarre characters of Xal-Kot the Human Cat and Wildman. Grass Green also provided the artwork for The Shape, and the completed work sat on Charlton's shelf for a while since they couldn't fit it into any of their other humor comics like Go-Go, but it worked perfectly for an anthology of original ideas like Premiere, so it's because of The Shape's off-the-wall sensibility that the series got launched in the first place. It opens up with eccentric scienti...