Stupid Comics

Skywald was a fresh-faced publisher at the dawn of the Bronze Age who tried to make a break in the black 'n white horror magazine racket that Warren Publishing had proved to be profitable. Former Marvel editor Sol Brodsky formed a partnership with Israel Waldman in 1970 that went on to do a trinity of horror comics under the titles Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream. A number of these comics had a roster of different characters running through them such as a gritty version of the Golden Age creature, The Heap. Another one that got their own ongoing feature was Lady Satan who became at least the sixth character in the history of comics to use that name. This Lady Satan stands out from the rest as she's the first African American one, as well as being the first black anti-heroine in an American comic book. Written by Al Hewetson and drawn by Ricardo Villamonte plus Pablo Marcos, Lady Satan was part of a genre that was labeled by the publisher as the Horror-Mood, and even got a text in...

Former American Army Air Force pilot was a post-WWII flyer that operated under the handle Safari Cary who moved to Africa to give arial tours in his plane laughingly called Jungle Belle. Created by Edmond Good who also made jungle comic legends like Rulah: Jungle Goddess, his character would run into weekly activities that probably inspired the 80s show, Tales Of The Gold Monkey, which on its own was just an Indiana Jones wannabe. One of Cary's shorter adventures was in Fox Feature's Dagar Desert Hawk #20 as he vexes the venomous Nomad Queen, a bikini-clad temptress who was so sexy that she superseded her husband as chieftain of a tribe of thieves that accepted her as their leader simply because she was so hot. The chieftain silently escapes to Cary's place so he can warn him about his clan's plan to attack the local village. Cary revs up Jungle Belle to scout the nomads from the air and spooks them by buzzing them, but his plane conveniently gets motor trouble which fo...

The old saying, "Be careful what you wish for!" is an overused cliche for an infinite number of scary stories. Minoan Publishing Corp. had only a few horror titles nearing the end of the Golden Age, one of which was Tales Of Horror that lasted for over a year, and in Issue #6 we get the tale of The Treacherous Genie. Edgar Tilbert is a diminutive man in a dead-end job and had a dented outlook on life. He would nab people's laundry off the clothesline, take toys from kids, steal from the blind, and other acts of misery that further outcast him from being very acceptable. One night, Edgar walked into a random curio shop and strait up asks the owner if anything was there that could make him rich. Of course, if the shopkeeper had something like that lying around, he wouldn't have waisted his life in an antique store. The curio collector does have an impressive display of trapped genies just lying around, each in their own bottle on a shelf. One is a hot little Barbara Ede...

Usually, light-based superpowers are considered weak, but Rainbow Boy totally managed to make it his own thing! Eastern Color Printing began near the end of the Platinum Age of Comics as a publisher of collected newspaper comic strips in magazine form, but in the Golden Age started an original line titled Heroic Comics. The main hero featured in this was the tragically named Hydroman created by Bill Everett who ironically also made Namor, aka: The Original Aquaman. Hyrdroman is secretly Harry Thurston who was a chemist that gained the power to transform himself and parts of his body into water, so he could drip into any non-airtight situation, as well as some forms of elemental shapeshifting. One of his cases as a moist superhero in Issue #14 had him confronting a villain who in a previous issue had frozen the watery wonder where he frees himself and just happens to run across the new kid on the block, Rainbow Boy! He must have used his "rainbow-sense" because how he ended up...