Showing posts with label Bill Bossert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Bossert. Show all posts

18 June 2019

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)

17 June 2019

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)