Making Contact With L.B. Cole

Y'know - i left one of the big ones off the list of contractually obligated brooding - Old Geezer. 

Here's the kind of brood i get to enjoy - I'm now the oldest surviving member of my family line. This past Xmas brought confirmation the the rest don't care to hear from me. Not that we've had bad relations - just no relations in general. But they're republicans, so they may just assume i was chasing after Dad's money or something.

Fortunately for me, that whole Family Is Everything concept was something rather alien to my life experience, so not too big a deal. I'm far more concerned with my larger family of Humanity, and whether or not we'll survive early adolescence. (Obviously the species won't be maturing out of that phase any time soon)

So, let's drag the ol' brain out of the cave shadows and put it to work, eh? 

L.B. Cole is another of those old creators whom i thought we had looked at previously. Nope - just a bit over on the 1940s Funny Animalphabet, and not much of that. So let's start with Contact Comics. The only title published by Aviation Press, it ran for 12 issues in 1944 & '45, and Cole did some lovely work for the covers -

While i like the leap forward in Aviation for that final issue, it's kind of hard to picture someone yelling "Contact!" and a hard prop spin starting up a rocket engine, no?

Okay. I'm going to give the brain a break, and hopefully i'll drag it back later today with a peek at a lady under the covers.

cover art by L.B. Cole for Contact Comics #s 1-12 (1944, 1945)

Covers With Punch

Since modern comic publishers told me to go away, i've been spending a lot of time digging through old comics instead. Often i'm struck by the difference in covers on the old comics.

Sometimes they're nothing more than interior panels or pages with a little more text slapped on. 

Sometimes the cover seems to be an afterthought, stapled on at the last minute from whatever was laying around the office.

Sometimes they're Fun in a way we never see any more. Heroes know they're on the cover and break from the stories to just play and have a good time with the readers.

And sometimes, they just grab me. That's the case with Punch Comics -

(Tomb Cover of the Unknown Artist)

The covers for Punch started off solid. The first perhaps from George Tuska?
 

The second issue had an 'Anthology Cover' that worked well to advertise the contents from Charles Sultan...

...and then things got Odd.

Issues 3-8 don't seem to have actually existed. There's no reference to them, zero listings in databases - absolutely nothing i can find on them, nor any comment their absence. 

But, two and a half years later, #9 appeared with a terrific cover from Gus Ricca - 

Followed by another great Ricca cover, featuring Master Key -
 

Then we got the silohuette cover at the top of the page. Could Ricca be the unknown artist who created it? Not a whole lot of clues to work with on that cover, but i do like it very much.

After that, we got two more eye-catching covers from Gus Ricca. (Yes, the signature changes, but it's still him)
 

Ruben Moreira bent my reality a bit with his nice moody cover for #14 -

The stylized MK (for Master Key) and mood had me thinking for a moment that Mike Kaluta was considerably older than i had thought. Reality corrected itself fairly quickly. (but a look at the news tells me that reality is still broken)
 
As of issue 15 Paul Gattuso took over the covers for most of the rest of the run, with Master Key as the usual subject of the covers (perhaps by editorial edict after that sweet cover on #10) -

There were also a couple of cartoon/gag covers along the way before the title ended with #19 (above) as the final issue.

But, as with the beginning of Punch Comics, the end got weird. The next issue may or may not have a cover from Gattuso, featuring Rocketman (not pictured) for a change...

...but #21 did indeed feature his work up front, and back to the Master Key eye-beam pics...
 

...but they never, to my eye, reached the glory of the Ricca days again.

So, what the hells? Didn't it stop at #19?

Superior, a Canadian company, picked up the title and continued publishing it after the series was canceled by Chesler/Dynamic. It only last 4 issues, and it ended appropriately with this cover -
 

To make things more strangely confusing, there were apparently two more issues published after #23 - #30 later that year, and #31 about two years later.

I am wholly ignorant of those two anomalous issues, so we'll stop here. For now. There's some fun stuff inside, too.

cover art by indicated artists for the indicated issues of Punch Comics (1944-48)

Sorry, John & Marsha - They Got The Names Wrong (+FF&G)

One of the (many) great things about Stan Freberg is that i can run across a comic from 65 years ago and still hear Stan's recordings in my head when i read it...

Some odd fun for us old folks, and perhaps younger listeners of good ol' Doctor D. If you were wondering, the comic came out just 3 years after the release of John And Marsha.

But, it sure doesn't make a lot of post, does it?

Hey! We just saw Frank Borth again this past week. How about we let him show us how to draw Benjamin Franklin?
 

Yes, i've been digging into the old blog piles. Maybe we'll finally get back to one of those dangling threads around here and follow up on one of the first gender swaps which are so fashionable these days.

Meanwhile, you know what else i've been missing?

Friday Fun & Games.
Think we can get that ball rolling again?
Let's find out...
 

It's possible that the puzzle page above was drawn by the same guy who did the one below from later in the same issue: our old fave, Ellis Chambers - 

Okay, that'll do for a restart. Maybe it'll even continue. Either way, we'll have what answers there be on the morrow...

page art by Ed Haas from Get Lost #1 and Frank Borth from Treasure Chest Of Fun And Fact v.21#18 (1954, 1966)

plus puzzles (not telling yet)

Choose Your Own Introduction #01

Introduction 01:

When i was a child, my parents decided to put the family on a diet. We were in the first batch of adopters of the zero-carb diet - the horrors of no bread or pizza! (They tried a meatloaf crusted 'meatza', but it wasn't the same)

At any rate, during that time they switched over to Shasta diet sodas - a nasty little chemical concoction in a can. By the time we lived through that phase, something had changed. I thought that those nasty little sodas had destroyed my taste buds, but actually the soda manufacturers had dropped sugar for high fructose corn syrup during the interim. It wasn't until decades later drinking 'Real' Pepsi in Mexico that i figured out what had happened.

That formula change made Coca Cola undrinkable for me, giving it a cigarette ash aftertaste mixed with the chemical bite. We were living in the state of Georgia at the time - Coke Was It. Pepsi existed, but one had to forage independently for it. Eateries served Coke.

Not too many years later, we moved cross country to California. Not only was Pepsi aplenty, but there was a Royal Crown bottling plant in our new home town! To my taste buds, Pepsi and RC were fairly equivalent and both superior to all competitors i had sampled.

Now i had two favorite sodas with my preference leaning back and forth between them. RC was the outsider, so closer to my heart - but Pepsi had that nice tooled leather holster for my can.

How is one supposed to decide between the two?

Well, i know what the stars say...

...but with whom are they agreeing?

***

Introduction 02:

There is an odd category tucked into Un-Comics.

As regular readers know, Un-Comics is what we call comics that appear outside of comics, usually in magazines or books. Sometimes in boxes of breakfast pastries or cereal or packaged with a toy. Et cetera.

Today we're looking at Un-Comics that appeared in comic books. A contradiction? Well, yeah, but... there is a reasonable rationale here.
They're comics, but they were advertisements and so, in a sense, not part of the 'comic' itself. Some of them featured regular characters with ongoing adventures that lasted for years. There was a trend toward using comics to advertise in comics, and many followed the fad.

Let's look at the Adventures of "R.C." and Quickie for an example. I've spent the last couple days digging through comics during the time period these adverts ran - from 1944 to 1951 - and i've found most, if not all, of them. Two dozen one page ADventures -

 They must have really liked that one...

Now i suppose i'm going to have to start collecting "Pepsi" the Pepsi-Cola Cop, Volto, Tootsie, "U.S." Royal, Thom McAn, and some of those other ADventures...

ads from various issues of Sensation Comics, Flash Comics, Action, Adventure, Captain Midnight, Boy Commandos, Mary Marvel, Funny Stuff, Real Fact Comics, Hopalong Cassidy, Ozzie and Babs, Strange Adventures and Fawcett's Funny Animals (but they were lots of other places, too) (1944-1951)