Stupid Comics

Dell Publishing Co. had a heap of superhero comics trying to weed something out of the campy Batman phase of the mid-60s, one of which was aptly titled Superheroes from 1967 featuring their own team named the Fab 4, although not the boys from Britain. This Fab 4 were four teenagers who visited the Dell Hall Of Heroes which featured statues of various characters of Dell Comics including Nukla and Toka, as well as a set of shiny androids each with their own specific power labeled The Fab 4 who all look like rejected Mega Man characters. El can shoot lasers, Hy has hypersonic capabilities, Crispy can freeze anything, and Polymor Polly is the token girl character with the power of flight and stretchable arms. A power surge causes the four teens to be able to mentally take over the bodies of the androids, the downside of which is that their own bodies are in a coma while their brains are operating the robot superheroes. From this point on, the teens slip in and out of consciousness when the...

A few years after the Fantastic Four took their first steps, Charlton came out with their own superhero group as a backup feature in the pages of Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt for six issues. Gary Friedrich created the idea along with Roy Thomas who unfortunately couldn't take any credit for it because he was officially working for Marvel at the time, and it was drawn by Sam Grainger who also eventually went on to work for Marvel. First printed in '66, we open up on an offbeat and tone-deaf singing trio billed as the Protesters who share an apartment run by the sickly old Mr. Jones who's not just another cranky landlord but a former-Russian scientist that fled to America and leaves his self-made super suits with the three of them, each one containing its own particular power. Rick Strong's suit allows him to fly now going by the name Helios, token girl character Cindy Carson wears a tiara giving her telepathy and calls herself Mentalia, and the oblivious strong guy Crunch W...

None other than legendary Golden Age artist Mort Meskin was called into drawing this ad which was part-comic strip to sell the junior athletic belt branded Playking. The Ward Green Co. specialized in sports undergarments such as the Figure Slimmer for men or the Compreso Belt for women, but their Playking model was designed for boys and a particular advertisement that ran in some comics was intended to fat shame overweight youngsters into buying their stuff. The 5-panel strip stars a portly lad referred to as Tubby as he loses a game for his baseball team with a pair of girls in the audience laughingly compare him to a bowl of jelly as he runs. Afterwards, Tubby heads to the locker room where his teammates start remarking on his physique like they're salesmen landing you their latest pitch and tell him he should try on a pair of Playking because its "action-ized" construction make you look thinner whether you're playing ball or not. The last panel shows the boy formal...

Fiction House was seriously kicking bottom with their Big 6 lineup of which Planet Comics handled most of their sci-fi material. One story that might have been intended for their space anthology was Man O'Mars drawn by Maurice Gutwirth of Timely and Quality Comics. This 10-page story was the only original in the one-shot comic of the same name as the rest was old Planet Comics filler. Possibly inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury, Man O'Mars starts in the far off future of 2036 where the merciless Martian commander Gurtil holds the entire city of New York for hostage, but not if the daring John Hunter has anything to say about it. The story then flashes back to fifteen years earlier where were informed by an old know-it-all from Mars named Khandor about how the Martian military tried to conquer Earth before, so he and his people of the Azurians rebelled against their oppressive armies, and trained a hundred male Earthlings to be a fighting force known as the Marsmen. Although ...