Stupid Comics

Long before the champion of Grayskull got the power, there was another to hold the mantle of He-Man. With only a single appearance in the one-shot Tally-Ho by the Bailey Publishing Company, this He-Man was really just another of those lovable lumbering lunkheads like Joe Palooka, Lil' Abner, or Ozark Ike who have the strength of an ox and a heart of gold. Drawn by veteran comic artist Charles Voight, the story opens in Snood, North Dakota as Sampson Hercules Muckles is a sheepherder who is lifting up his entire house just to get a better view, and he gets a letter from the granny he never knew he had. Gran'maw Nuckles tells Sampson that he is part of a lineage of circus strong men and his uncle Herman (nicknamed: He-Man) set up He-Man Inc., a school of physical education which she wants him to take over. Sampson has a phobia of metal, so Gran'maw gives him a special talisman his grandpa had in WWII that's supposed to make him impervious to metal. It turns out the talism...

Anyone who went to school in the 70s-80s might be familiar with McGraw Hill Inc. with all the stock educational short films they churned out, but one of their other branches has been running ads in comics for decades. The National Radio Institute started out in 1914 and was in business for 88 years teaching spry youngsters how to be a radiotician which advertised their thriving business in comic books, especially from the 40s-60s with ever-changing pitches for each generation. The founder James Ernest Smith appeared in nearly every ad where he would either be commanding you to join their institute like Uncle Sam for the US Army, others were a little more subtle where he says that "I will train you at home," like he was literally going to show up at your front door and give you a private lesson then hang around to sign autographs. One of the earlier NRI ads which ran in pulp magazines had James claiming that working in radio is "almost romance", although how romantic...

There were quite a few female aviators during the Golden Age, but one of the few to actually have their own semi-secret identity was Black Venus. Captain Midnight artist Charles Tomsey was the original creator of the pretty pilot who went through many redesigns in her short stint from Aviation Press' Contact Comics which ran for the first nine issues. Starting off in Burma in WWII, USO hostess Mary Roche dances with the pilots, but when its closing time she goes to her secret hangar and changes clothes to be the leg bearing Black Venus who sets off in her fighter plane to take down the nearby Japanese forces. Mary didn't wear a mask or anything in her alter ego but put a hot lady in a tight or revealing outfit and your average onlooker seems to block out their secret identity. Her second adventure had an even skimpier outfit more resembling a leather bar leader as she took down the cross-dressing Agent X. In her third story, Black Venus moved to Australia and began wearing the ...

Leader Enterprises, also known as Universal Phoenix Features, had a brief time as a comic book publisher starting in 1946. Since this was post WWII, most of their content was adventure and comedy titles. One anthology was Seven Seas Comics telling tales of pirates, sea voyages, and the compelling Tugboat Tessie, plus a character featured in each issue was South Sea Girl who was created by graphic novel progenitor Manning Lee Stokes and drawn by the groundbreaking black artist Matt Baker who most comics fans are familiar with his cheesecake style on characters like Phantom Lady and Tiger Girl. The title character of these tropical tales was Alani who was referred to as South Sea Girl because white tourists weren't very good at remembering the names of natives in the South Pacific. Taking place in the Vanishing Isles, Alani wasn't just some island princess who only knew how to do the hula, but was in fact the queen of her people and very knowledgeable of the outer world who had d...