14 August 2018

McFad, Meet McCormick

Regular readers of this blog know that Supersnipe is a favorite around these parts. If you're not familiar, Koppy McFad was "The Boy With The Most Comic Books In America" and was prone to strange adventures based on his perceptions of the world.

As oddly unique as Supersnipe might have seemed as a character, he wasn't quite alone.
Koppy McFad,  meet "Comics" McCormick - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan"


"Comics" premiered a few years earlier in Terrific Comics #2, but we're starting our look here in Fat and Slat simply because this is where they first ran his introduction. It's interesting that back in the 1940s Ed Wheelan was trying to offer a bit of a mixed cast. Our hero's best friends are a fat kid and a black kid. Yeah, he's depicted in the rather off-putting style of the times, and they had to justify his existence by making him the son of the maid (considerably more cringe-worthy than Ajax himself as we'll see later), but he seemed to have been pushing things forward as far as he could get away with at the time.

So - How do his adventures stack up to Supersnipe?
Well, they've got a decidedly different flavour, happily enough. (Cheap imitation wouldn't be that much fun) While Koppy took his adventures out into the "real" world, "Comic"'s adventures were purely in his imagination.
Let's take a look at a couple tales -



McCormick didn't last as long as McFad. He only had about a dozen adventures, and never got his own title. I think he's worth coming back for another look, though - and so we shall...

page art written & drawn by Ed Wheelan from Fat and Slat #s 1-3 (1947)

2 comments:

  1. In the final story, "Comics" discovers Tijuana Bibles.

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    Replies
    1. Actually, the last issue he appeared in had two stories. The first went hentai with the tentacles, and the second, as you noted, had him reading comics in bed in a darkened room until the noises he was making disturbed his mother. I'd only have to change three words at the end to make your interpretation the obvious one. (I'm terribly tempted to modify that last story into a one-pager with your version of history)

      Alternate reply:
      Ah - that explains why there was never a fifth issue. His fantasies must have gotten the publisher shut down.

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