VEP's Frankie

While we're in the neighborhood(s), let's stop and look at a strip that Victor Pazmiño did for Famous Funnies shortly after Seaweed Sam. Shifting from the seven seas to the starry skies for his new direction, we got the short lived Frankie Future.

As far as i can determine, there were only these seven episodes. There may, however, have been one prior to what we have here. We start with issue #82 here. I've never seen #81, and nobody seems to even know what the issue contained. The Grand Comics Database has nothing more than the cover, and that they only have from when it was reprinted later. If somebody has a copy of the issue - they're not telling.

As for the story, it might have started with the short statement i the first panel, or there could have been a previous installment that left him in this predicament. Perhaps time will tell...

"Who is the 'Speaker', and What is in the chest?"

I don't think Unsolved Mysteries covered this one.

EDIT: Yes, i saw that they announced a revival of Unsolved Mysteries today. I put this in the queue yesterday and had no clue at the time.

page art by Victor Pazmiño for Famous Funnies #s 82-88 (1941)

Barnacle/Seaweed Bill/Sam - The Singing/Rhyming Sailor/Rover

Last week we got a glimpse at an odd little strip from Victor Pazmiño that first appeared way back in 1935, in Famous Funnies - "the first true American comic book" - starting in issue #9.*  Pazmiño, by the way, also drew a whole lot of the covers for the magazine in those early years, and some of those '40s Funny Animal comics i tend to go on about.

One might expect me to have mentioned the title of the series by this point, but they had a bit of trouble with that in the beginning. In the first episode, he was called Barnacle Bill, The Singing Sailor. (Note that Seaweed Sam appears as a very different character here in panel 3) -

Now that he's got his tub, he's working on his name. Second time out he's called Seaweed Bill, The Rhyming Rover -

As they say, the third time's the charm, and they found the name the series kept - Seaweed Sam, The Rhyming Rover -

84 Year Old Spoiler: He wasn't dreaming -

Okay - maybe fever dreaming. It didn't take long for Pazmiño to get strange and twisted. (And sometimes rather uncomfortable, such as traveling to the city of Honk Honk to meet the Mandarin Menace. So he kind of foreshadowed the Mandarin as well as the Red Skull? Um... Points?)

Reading the series can be a little tricky sometimes.
First - since it's only one page per episode, you need to have a bunch of consecutive issues.
Second - having consecutive issues may or may not provide continuing story.

For example, let's start reading along with #47 -

That's from issue #51 above. The story does continue, but not until #60, after a different story fragment -

...but then, the following issue, it's back to some point after we left off them beanstalk climbing in the other story fragment...

...and that brings us around to where things started when they met the Scarlet Skull.

page art by Victor Pazmiño for Famous Funnies #s 9-13, 47-51, and 60-72 (1935, 1938, 1939,1940)

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*(In this incarnation. Pazmiño had syndicated strip Seaweed Sam as far back as 1929.)

Scarlet Before Red

A year before Simon & Kirby unleashed the Red Skull upon the world, there was already a crimson cadaver headed villain on the scene - the Scarlet Skull!

Did Joe and Jack ever see him? Is Batman a transvestite?
Who knows?

But let's take a quick peek at these three (1-page) episodes of Seaweed Sam - The Rhyming Rover...

Hmm...  using Doctor  Doom  Danger's gravity nullification beam to send our heroes flying into orbit. That seems familiar somehow...

We'll come back to Victor Pazmiño's odd little series which ran for about 75 issues of Famous Funnies after i finish beating the week into submission.

page art by Victor Pazmiño for Famous Funnies #s 73-75 (1940-1941)