Getting Coo Coo With The Strength Of 14,376 Men And A Boy

You probably already knew it was Saturday morning - though maybe not. It seems a lot of folks are getting rather detached from calendar time while isolating from trump flu. That's pretty much my normal, being a cave dwelling hermit and all. 

But, i did notice as i sat down to sort out today's post and decided i'm in a Saturday morning cartoon-y sort of mood, so let's go with it.

You might be a tad perplexed by the title on this post, so let's clear that up right away. "Getting Coo Coo..." might better be stated "Going Coo Coo..." as we're diving into the first few issues of Coo Coo Comics - "America's Funniest Magazine"...

As you may have noted above, the star of the book was Supermouse, whom we somehow have managed to overlook until now. How super is the mouse? He has "the strength of 14,376 men and a boy" of course - hence our title.

Kin Platt was the artist who launched Supermouse. Let's take a look and see how he started, eh?

Oops.
Maybe we better visit with someone else while our mousey hero languishes behind bars. Meet Mortimer Magic, who comes to us via Victor Pazmiño -

Well...  That was brutal.

Perhaps we should check back with Supermouse instead. Milt Stein has taken over the art chores on the second tale...

Well, the little perv did peep into over 16,000 homes on the previous page, so maybe he should be locked up.

Let's see who else was hanging out in Coo Coo. R.G. (Rube Grossman?) brought us S'no Use And The Seven Dopes...
 

All fairy tales have morals, right?
I'll let you sort that one out yourselves. Meanwhile, Art Gates gets educational with Bashful Brown of Nuthouse U -
 

...and Matt Curzon brings us another educated hero with Bookworm Billy -
 

...and another dead faint at the end. 
Hmm...

And now, i have a confession to make.
I lied. Mortimer Magic didn't just get thrown to the dragon as implied above.

Here's how his tale continued...
 

That's better, right?
Unless you came back next issue and found they left him buried in a hole and forgot him.

Okay -
He did finally return to get out of that hole... 

seven months later! 

Maybe that quick dragon ending wouldn't have been so bad, huh?

page art by Kin Platt, Victor Pazmiño, Milt Stein, R.G., Art Gates and Matt Curzon from Coo Coo Comics #s 1, 2 & 5 (1942, 1943)

Drawing Inkie

I've mentioned in the past my fondness for seeing artists putting themselves into the comics. There's one old character who made that gimmick a staple of the series - Inkie.

Let's take a look at a couple of his stories - one from Milt Stein and one from Jack Cole. Both names should be familiar to many readers. Jack Cole, of course, created Plastic Man - among his many works over the years. Milt Stein is perhaps more familiar to visitors of The 1940s Funny Animalphabet for his work on titles like Supermouse, though general audiences may know him better from his animation work - most prominently his work with Terrytoons.

Here they're working with someone else's creation (we'll get to that) and, as you'll see, the artist is by design a part of the strip. Here's Jack Cole's tale from #34 of Crack Comics -

Well - that could have been gruesome. Good thing Judge Doom hadn't introduced Dip yet, eh? But getting into trouble was one of Inkie's talents as we can see in Milt Stein's story from the following issue -

Inkie was indeed an odd little character. Even more-so in the beginning. The original conceit was that he wrote and drew his own tales. We'll get to that, and to his creator, next time.

page art by Jack Cole and Milt Stein for Crack Comics #s 34 & 35 (1944)