Stupid Comics

Key Publications founded by Stanley Morse started cranking out funny books in 1951 with several imprints, one of which was Gillmour Mazazines who's longest running title was Weird Mysteries, an anthology of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. One strange short was titled Reaching For The Moon which got retitled to Out Of Control in some reprints, and the opening narration is by your typical green-skinned ol' witch character who was probably between jobs while hosting this and working for EC Comics, although why the story is being told by a witch is perplexing as its more of a science-fiction tale instead of supernatural. Murray Wacasey is a biologist who has the exotic Ironwood tree from Texas to his laboratory in New Jersey to prove that it's possible to transplant them to a different environment. Wacasey's associate Theron Moore offers his special vitalizing formula, but Wacasey doesn't want to share the glory, so Moore just sneaks into the lab later and gives the Ironwo...

Not too many comic villains can claim that they are "The Most Evil Man In The Universe", but Satanas gave it his all in his two comic book appearances. Rural Home, also known as Croydon Publishing, had a peculiar anthology titled Red Band Comics in 1944 which was called that because the interior stories had a genuine red banner on each page and had nothing to do with audience ratings, but Red Band's weirdest feature is that out of the four issue run only two of them were original as Issues 2 and 4 were just reprints of the previous issues, including the covers. Satanas appears in the first issue, however he also appears on the cover of Issue 3 along with the hero Bogey Man on each one even though the two characters don't actually meet up, only briefly in the creation of the parodic superhero Captain Milksop, but that is another story. Satanas' origin story begins a few millennia ago on Pluto in a tale drawn by Hangman artist Sam Cooper. Among the other amoral Plut...

Bill Ward was considered one of the cornerstones of good girl art, and his character of Torchy was at the front of the line when it came to blonde bombshells. He did artwork for various superheroes like Bulletman and The Shadow, but Ward came up Torchy when he was serving in the army during WWII that eventually made its big debut in the pages of Quality Comics' Doll Man as its own segment. Torchy Todd was a ditzy dame that went from one madcap situation after the other in titles like Modern Comics before she eventually landed her own short-lived self-titled comic in 1949. Strange thing is that this glamour gal was mistaken for being an ancient Egyptian queen on two separate occasions. One time has our flighty female fretting over not having enough funds to get a new gown when she walks into a museum to see the well-preserved outfit of Queen Ishmar in their mummy display and tries the two-piece costume on but quickly retreats when the museum guard returns. A pair of Egyptian envoys ...

Kid Eternity was one of the few solo teenage superheroes of the Golden Age that wasn't a sidekick and gained the power to summon up anyone from history like they were his own personal Pokemon. Creators Otto Binder and Sheldon Moldoff had Kid fighting everybody from Nazis to regular hoods, but the only adversary that managed to stick around was the feisty but elderly con woman referred to as Her Highness. She and her gorgeous strongarm Silk crossed paths with Kid Eternity on two occasions and was popular enough to get her own segment starting in Hit Comics 28 where the two of them escape jail again after just being run back in. The diminutive deceiver hijacks a bus and beats it to California hoping to find bigger suckers than those in Kid Eternity's town and literally beat their way through some police once they hit the state line. Since it's 1943, the California city Highness and Silk get to are celebrating the survivors of a torpedo attack by the Japanese, so Highness gets...

Similar to Johnson And Smith Co., the inscrutable Regency Mail Order in Niagra Falls, NY offered a diverse selection of perplexingly pointless products. These aren't your obviously deceptive results that claimed you could hypnotize your parents into giving you money but were instead honest with the fact their products were intended mostly for novelty purposes. Some of their catalog advertised in various comic books did contain somewhat legit choices like working miniature radios and cameras, or a beginner's guide to jiu-jitsu and ventriloquism, even the bike speedometer seems genuine, although the offering of "1001 things for free" for only fifty cents does sound sublimely sketchy. Most of the joke offerings you could find in any old magic shop with the fly in an ice cube that wouldn't be funny if anyone was so thirsty that they actually attempted to swallow the plastic thing, while the rubber spider ring would seem fake. Speaking of rings, you could live your dre...