Stupid Comics

Countess Von Bludd hosted her share of Charlton Comics' chillers, usually in the pages of Scary Tales, and in Issue 7 she narrated one of her most baffling stories, Trespassers. Joe Gill wrote this cross-genre of sci-fi and horror with intriguing art by Enrique Nieto about a pair of aliens hiding out in an old mansion as observers of humanity while disguising themselves as ghosts. It's a pretty good scheme as far as alien infiltration is concerned because you at least don't have a bunch of hayseeds claiming to have seen flying saucers after one of their cows gets dissected. Belinda Pearce and her husband inherit her grandfather's estate which includes the Rudleigh house, a spooky pad that the Munsters would probably use for their summer place. Upon first arriving at the messy mansion, the resident aliens take on the forms of Rudleigh couple who first owned the place so their Earth assignment won't be detected by the Men in Black. Even after encountering what they th...

Edd Ashe Jr. and Nathaniel Nitkin made up another superhero pilot for WWII in 1941 in the patriotic comic from Hillman Periodicals, Victory Comics. This series ran for four issues and each one featured a short adventure of Bomber Burns and his Firebrand, another of those mystery pilots like Captain Midnight who takes on a secret identity to instill fear by not letting his adversaries know his real name. American flyer Jack Burns is on a mission with his partner Dave in Newfoundland where their plane is shot down by German pilots and Dave dies in the wreck. Jack gets rescued by the British navy and later on steals a Lockheed XP-38, an American plane which is supposed to be the fastest in the world, but he has to shrug off some misplaced Australian soldier first. Jack flies it to Scotland where he retrofits it with a flamethrower he stole from the Aussies, a dozen machine guns, a rotating cannon, and supercharged engines, paints it red and calls his newly jacked ride the Firebrand. For t...

Jeep Comics had an insane publication as its 3-issue run was split up over two separate publishers. The first two issues were printed by the R. B. Leffingwell and Co. from 1944-1945, whereas the final issue was done by Palace Promotions as a one-shot in 1948. R. B. Leffingwell only had the two issues of Jeep Comics, while Palace had a number of one-shot specials and was apparently connected to the equally brief publishers named The Spotlight, plus featured artwork by Charles Voight and Jack Alderman. The titular character of the series was Jeep who had been discharged from U.S. army at the height of WWII and was given a former military jeep as compensation instead of money even though he managed to kill a hundred Nazis during the Battle of France. So, "Jeep" takes his used jeep and strapped a rocket attachment he invented which instantly gives the vehicle the power of flight. Exactly how aerodynamic a jeep is with a fancy booster welded to its tail is like something Wile E. C...

Charlton Comics' Unusual Tales had a habit of mixing genres, like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror similar to Twilight Zone. Their title of Unusual Tales was their own Twilight Zone, and Issue 41 had one of the biggest mixings of these genres in a single 7-page story titled The Primitive Parallel which had an entire road map of speculative fiction borrowing elements from all over. Drawn by former Marvel artists Charles Nicholas and Vince Alascia, this planetary romance is basically the store brand diet soda version of a space opera. As this came out in 1963, we open up on rocket jockey Captain Mark Ellis as he buzzes by Earth which he believes is still in the middle of the Cold War. He then gets caught in a meteor shower and warped to an alien planet where he stops by for repairs. Ellis gets arrested by the less-than-Secret Police of a viking-like society who throw him in jail when they don't believe him about not being a spy, which immediately convinces him that the entire primitiv...

Charlton Comics had an ample amount of horror hosts for their various scary comics. Probably the most product of their time characters from out of the entire list was Winnie the Witch, a blue-skinned, green-haired mod mama who regularly wore giant sunglasses and a fashionable cape. Aside from Ghost Manor and Ghostly Haunts, Winnie would regularly be seen in Charlton's horror anthology Ghostly Tales, frequently drawn by Spider-Man creator Steve Ditko. One particular story had Winnie being pinned all over the pages as she narrated the tale "Kiss Of The Serpent" written by Joe Gill in Ghostly Tales #154 from 1966. Roger Swann was a pompous upper class twit living in London who went to great lengths to discover the lost temple of a Central American snake goddess of the made-up Mixtec tribe, even sleeping with the resident expert in ancient linguistics Miss Primm, a silver-haired fox that was swayed by his playboy tactics into giving him the data he needed for his expedition t...

The idea of The Big 3 is something numerous comic book companies have used as a headliner for their main heroes. DC started out with their All-American Publications had Green Lantern, Flash, and Wonder Woman, but eventually it became the Trinity consisting of Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman when merged with National Periodical Publications. Marvel's Big 3 would change over the decades depending on the character's popularity, for instance if you asked someone in the 90s who their Big 3 was back then they'd probably pick Punisher, Venom, and Wolverine, although their mainstay troika is Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor. Subsequently, Malibu's Ultraverse would have their own versions of Marvel's Big 3 with Hardcase, Prototype, and Prime. Wildstorm even had their own team actually called The Big 3 made of Mr. Majestic, Maximum Man, and The High. But the kickoff point for the concept started in the titular comic book from Fox Features Syndicate in 1940. This was bra...

There is a lengthy catalog of Golden Age debutantes who secretly fought crime in their spare time. Purple Tigress, Miss Fury, Phantom Lady, Black Cat, Yankee Girl, Wildfire, Spider Widow, Miss Masque, and Black Angel were all super socialites, most of which didn't have any actual superpowers. One of the more well-known heroine heiresses was Lady Luck who despite her name didn't have luck-altering powers like some Marvel Comics characters. Beginning as a back-up feature in The Spirit section of various newspapers., it was dreamed up by Spirit creator Will Eisner and artist Chuck Mazoujian for part of Eisner's special 16-page segment that got its own insert with the Sunday papers which included the magical superhero Mr. Mystic who along with Lady Luck got their own 4-page story in each issue. Lady Luck started out in June of 1940 in The Spirit's first package and was in reality rich girl Brenda Banks that billed her secret identity as a "modern day Robin Hood", ...