Stupid Comics

Namor creator Bill Everett started his comics career when he dreamed up the strange space hero known as Skyrocket Steele for Centaur Publication's Amazing Mystery Funnies. He also came up with an even stranger space hero in Issue #3, Dirk the Demon. The young lad dresses more like a cheeky young lass instead of a boy with an unbuttoned tunic showing off his chest and a very short pair of short shorts that makes a certain Boy Wonder's wardrobe look less questionable. Billed as being an archeologist from the 24th Century, Dirk lives in a castle way in the future with his father Baron Cay, so he's already of noble blood, but why he's called The Demon is never brought up, other than it just sounded cooler than Hon Dirk. The story opens up in Dirk's castle with his trio of shirtless pals who act as his tight team planning an excavation by stealing his papa's hydroplane, which is probably just a trendy future term for an airplane. The team jacks the airship and heads ...

From the same issue that gave us The Slave Pits Of Uranus, Issue #3 of Weird Tales Of The Future from 1952 not only had one of Basil Wolverton's wilder pieces of cover art, but also one if his most hallucinatory stories. Nightmare World is a tight tale lasting only 4-pages long whose prime message appears to be "science bad!". Herman Lasher is a chemist trying to probe into the secrets of the subconscious mind which would later on be known as dropping acid. His newest formula looks promising and like all comic book scientists he tests it on himself. It whisks him to a dreamscape right out of Super Mario Bros. Herman's vision starts out like an M.C. Esher base drawing, only to be interrupted by a grotesque humanoid that comes gliding in on a large skin membrane that makes it look like a zombie fused with a flying squirrel. The bat-like creature captures Herman and flies him up to the top of a mountain where there is a similar looking abomination with its skull pulled o...

Stanley Morse, or Key Publishing, or Gillmor Magazines had a broad selection of titles in the Golden Age that ranged from action, military, romance, teen humor, and even talking animals, including a Peter Cottontail comic that has nothing to do with the song it was based on. One of the best of these was Weird Tales Of The Future which was largely sci-fi tales mixed with horror. Issue #3 of this anthology series featured an amazing cover by the legendary Basil Wolverton of a gigantic zombie rising from his grave to spook a sexy blonde who just stopped by the cemetery to grieve for a loved one. This same issue also has one of the most unintentionally hilarious titles for a story, The Slave Pits Of Uranus. Written by an unknown author and drawn by Bulletman artist Ed Smalle, this sprawling space saga was condensed to a mere six pages with a plot more rushed than the speed of light. Set in a time yet to come, the Solar System has been largely colonized by humans and patrolled by space mars...

George Jowett who after an accident he was in as a teenager went through years of training to become a professional weightlifter from Ontario, Canada. He later became the editor of Strength magazine and an author. In 1927,was billed as the "world's strongest man" as he founded the Jowett Institute Of Physical Culture. The institute would run ads in various comics throughout the 1940s trying to get dupable new recruits by claiming that their system could help someone not merely get tough, but commando tough. George Jowett now labeled himself as the "world's greatest body builder", and that he had developed something he called the Progressive Power Method which would not only make you stronger but also claimed to make you handsomer. It's more than likely any fitness program will help make its subjects stronger, but the insistence that Jowett's system would make you more beautiful is desperately subjective. Beauty is obviously in the eye of the beholder...

Green Publishing was an abnormal line of comics during the Golden Age. They reprinted stories that previously ran in books by other publishers like Fox Feature Syndicate, Novelty, Star, and even early DC Comics. A good portion of their material came from MLJ, otherwise known as Archie Comics, which included some of their superhero characters. A one-shot they released in 1945 was titled Miss Liberty with a picture of a girl on the front near the logo that you would think would be somewhere in the actual comic. The comic instead had MLJ characters in it with Steel Sterling on the cover, plus Shield and Wizard stories making up the interior along with their sidekicks Dusty the Boy Detective and Roy the Super Boy(who occasionally teamed up to form the Boy Buddies). Miss Liberty was nothing more than a headliner on her own title which featured no female superheroes in it at all, even though later that same year Green Publishing would use the same logo for their ongoing anthology of Liberty ...