Stahling For Fun

Yesterday we saw some early comics from two of MAD Magazine's famous Usual Gang Of Idiots, Al Jaffee's Inferior Man and Dave Berg's Death Patrol. I ended the posts teasing another connection between the two strips.

That connection? Al Stahl.

After Jaffee and Berg moved on from those comics, Stahl went MAD on them and added a new level of insanity to both comics. If you recall Inkie, you know he was qualified for crazy.

Inferior Man moved from Military Comics over to Feature Comics with Al Stahl at the helm -

As mentioned yesterday, Death Patrol ended with Berg's final strip in Military Comics #12. It returned nine issues later with Gill Fox doing the first of the new strips, and Al Stahl taking over immediately after. It's still war time for the Death Patrol, but things keep getting stranger...

Death Patrol's creator returned for a stint in the middle of Stahl's run. That's worth returning for, eh?

page art by Al Stahl from Military Comics #s 26 & 34 and Feature Comics #s 65-67, 70, & 71 (1943, 1944)

Captain Thunder, I Presume?

As i mentioned yesterday, Captain (Terry) Thunder started out as an action/adventure strip. Although we have a vulture in the first panel, it's not Vincent, just local colour. Art Peters, and later Buck Johnson and Pierre LaRue, were pen names so we have no idea who was writing. But we do know it was originally drawn by Arthur Peddy whom we've already seen drawing the Red Panther (also for Jungle Comics).

On that first episode, he's listed as only Captain Thunder. They changed it to Captain Terry Thunder for the second issue of Jungle Comics and that stuck until his final appearance in that incarnation of the title in #151. As we saw yesterday, however, other things did change. A half dozen issues into the run Gloria hit camp...

...and they even got fireworks when they kissed. Gloria stuck around for another issue, just long enough to leave Terry with Kismet the Camel. Kismet found Anderson, and Vincent soon joined in the madness. Terry Thunder's once 'normal' life was warped and soon his adventures had transformed into this sort of affair...

Slowly, it seemed, Terry Thunder got over the trauma of Gloria Frazier. The presence of Kismet, Anderson, and Vincent diminished, and by issue #40 they no longer shared billing on the strip, and soon vanished entirely. Anderson lingered the longest, what with being human and all.

Perhaps he went crazy again later in the series. I'll have to keep reading and see...

page art from Jungle Comics #s 1, 6, & 29 (1940, 1942)

Somebody's Stuck And Even We Don't Know Who...

Captain Marvel is now available for watching at home, and the "other" Captain Marvel is due for home video release in a couple of weeks. How amazing is it that we not only got movies for both, but that they were in theatres at the same time?

It's just so tragicly lame that somebody decided to tag him with the name Shazam. After a half century of people laughing at Freddy Freeman because he can't say his own superhero name one might think they'd avoid looking so stupid. Guess not.

And it's not like they didn't have another name they could easily use. Before he was called Captain Marvel, he was originally Captain Thunder. They even used this name for the Kingdom Come stories. And it's not like they couldn't splash SHAZAM! on all the promotional material to keep the branding prominently displayed. It makes so much more sense than the inherent stupidity of speaking his own name causes him to lose his powers (and reveal his identity to whomever he was talking).

So why not use the name Captain Thunder?

It couldn't have anything to do with this guy, right?

One odd thing here is that Captain Terry Thunder was a fairly straightforward adventure strip - Captain Terry Thunder And The Congo Lancers. Then a dame came through the camp and he had to spank her and he had to kiss her and she gave him a camel and left. After that, he went a little crazy for a year or two before settling back down to normal.

Odder yet, after settling back down, Richard Case took over the art chores. You may recall that name from yesterday's post on the Doom Patrol. Very strange, since that was 1943 and Case wasn't born until 1964.

Who knew there was another Richard Case drawing comics? Yeah, we'll be circling back this way. We already had a bunch to look at in Jungle Comics anyway. (Kind of thought that we'd get to Fantomah or Wambi or the White Panther or one of the others first. But here we are.)

panel art by Bill Bossert and Al Stahl from Jungle Comics #s 17, 18, 23, 26-31, & 36 (1941, 1942)

Inkie, The Self-Drawn Character

It might be somewhat difficult to grasp in an age of profound corporate and personal narcissism, but once upon a time someone tried to pretend he wasn't the creator. (And it wasn't a politician talking about a disaster or anything like that.)

A couple weeks back we started to look at Inkie, an odd little comic character that interacted with his artists. When the strip started out, the concept was slightly more off the wall - Inkie wrote and drew his own adventures. In fact, he even named himself -

As mentioned several times previously, i enjoy seeing creators inserted into the comics. The editor of Crack Comics at this time was John Beardsley. How much of his own boss went into Al Stahl's editor in the strip...? Hard to say. How self-deprecating was Beardsley? Stahl is portraying himself as talentless and essentially useless, so Beardsley may have gone along with it and allowed himself to be the model for the character. He only worked in comics for a few years at the dawn of the '40s, primarily at Quality Comics, and very little is known about him these days. Certainly not enough known by me to make any sort of educated guess.

Were the other artists based on folks at Quality at the time? Was the janitor based on a real person? How did he feel about that portrayal? Was having everyone completely ignore his presence - turn the page, move along - a social commentary? So many questions for my rambling mind.

We'd best move along to the next issue before i get bogged down in mental morass -

So - Eat That! Ant Man and Atom. You guys might ride arrows and T-spheres, but Inkie rides (and guides) bullets!

As noted in the final caption of the tale above, in the third tale Inkie and Al join forces -

page art by Al Stahl (and Inkie) for Crack Comics #s 28-30 (1943)