Return To Comics

You folks remember "Comics" McCormick, - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan" - right?
If not, the link in his name above will take you to the previous posts on our reality warped hero from Ed Wheelan. 

Either way, while the mind is off wandering, i figured we could do with a bit of revisiting, so here's trio of tales from his short run in Terrific Comics -

That brings us to about half of his published adventures. I suspect we'll get to the other half eventually, eh?

page art by Ed McWheelan for Terrific Comics #s 3, 5, & 6 (1944)

Hey, Kids! "Comics"!

Going to be working on the hardware today and tomorrow, so might not be around a great deal.

Meanwhile, a little more of Ed Wheelan's  "Comics" McCormick - The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan. As mentioned last time, he had just shy of a dozen adventures, but they were fairly unlimited in scope. Let's take a look at those splash panels -

McCormick's second story introduced his first recurring villain - The Octopus.

The Space Pirates would return as well. Both the Octopus and the Pirates return for the tales in his final issue.

Fat And Slat #4 featured the above two tales, and "Comics" McCormick's only cover. Sadly, the title folded and the promise of more next issue was never realized.

We didn't run the splash panels from yesterday's stories - nor to his first story to appear. Here's that first tale in its entirety -

art by Ed Wheelan from Terrific Comics #s 2-6, Cat-Man #28, and Fats And Slats #s 1-4 (1944, 1945, 1947, 1948)

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)