Frazetta Covers Buck

Not getting along with language right now, so let's just do a quick look this morning.

We've poked around a bit in early years of Famous Funnies - let's jump to the end. Nine of the final ten issues of the first true American style comic book featured a strip that had run since #3 back in 1934 - Buck Rogers. Always nice to see, but what made these special is they were all done by Frank Frazetta -

To my knowledge, these were the only Buck Rogers drawings done by Frazetta, along with an unused 10th cover that was later reworked and used for the covers of EC Portfolio #2 back in the early '70s.

cover art by Frank Frazetta for Famous Funnies #s 209-217 (1943-1945)

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)

===
*(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)

Epic Connie Kurridge

Buckle up, gang - we're going on an epic adventure with Frank Godwin's fly girl Connie. How epic, one might ask?

Fighting Dragons On The Moon 1000 Years In The Future Epic!

Note the cover illustration is by Bill Everett, of Submariner fame.

At 30 pages, this is probably the largest single story we've presented here. Just one more record for the girl who went from flapper Blondie in 1927 to first female aviator comic hero in 1929 to  Buck Rogers in 1936.

Before we get started, note that this is a comic book reprint of a Sunday comic strip. Different page aspect ratios necessitate reworking the original layouts to the new format, and so these can look substantially different than the original newspaper strips. More than that, some dialogue can be dropped to make space. To illustrate the difference, here is the ink layouts for the Sunday version of the first page. Also note that she travels to 2936 here as opposed to 2941 in the modified comic book version.

Connie just does not slow down! The remainder of that final page was spent setting up the next tale - before they can even change clothes.

Connie by Frank Godwin from Famous Funnies #s 84-92 (1941, 1942)

reprinted from Connie Sunday strips (Ledger Syndicate)(1936)