Moonday Morning With Genius Jones

Running late today, and i could use the help of Genius Jones. I've spent most of the morning trying to figure out where the few dozen issues of comics i had set aside for this feature have gone. Quite disappeared, they have.

While there were quite a few boy inventors in old comics, most familiarly around these parts, Ulysses Q. Wacky, Genius Jones was a different sort. Rather than inventor, he was a boy problem solver. Jones ran for over 50 episodes starting in Adventure Comics #77, later switching over to More Fun Comics by way of All Funny Comics. While i'm trying to find where those earlier issues are hiding, let's look at a couple of later tales to introduce our young hero -

Jones also owned the covers of these two issues. Stan Kaye is the presumed artist of the tales above, and definitely the delineator of the covers below -

When i can find the material, we'll go back to his beginnings - and the creators of Genius Jones. The boy's got him some pedigree.

page art by Stan Kaye(?) from More Fun Comics #s 115 &120 (1946, 1947)

Everybody Loves Jimminy

Everybody...

...and not just for answering the age old question: "Who would win in a fight between a goat and a lion?" -

Now we know.

But - Damn. I was wrong, again.
There are five Jimminy and the Magic Book tales in the final issue of More Fun Comics, not four. That means either my story count (and that of the Grand Comics Database) is off by one, or an earlier issue only had one story. But i thought i saw two in each? Was one of the five in the final a reprint? (Nope)
I'll have to go looking for the answer.

At any rate, all three of today's stories come from that final issue - #127.
We go off into three different directions with these tales - Prehistory, Outer Space and the Spirit World. (The other two stories were tall tales & treasure hunting with Captain Burly and an adventure with The Lonesome Wizard, if you was one of  them curious types.) As always, Jimminy was written by Jack Mendelsohn with art from Howie Post.

I found the answer to the question posed above: There was only one Jimminy tale in issue #123. So the total story count still stands at 16 Jimminy And The Magic Book adventures.

Here's the cover to #125, from which the Superman/Jimminy pic topping this post was pulled:

The cover on the issue for these stories is an ugly mess. I'll try to clean it up for a later post. (...but it'll take a lot of time with the currently available machine and tools.)

stories by Jack Mendelsohn and art by Howie Post for More Fun Comics #127 (1947)

More Friday Night Fun With Jimminy

Let's have some More Fun tonight with a return to Jack Mendelsohn and Howie Post's quirky little series, Jimminy and the Magic Book.
Oh - one minor correction from yesterday: I remembered incorrectly when i stated that they included three Jimminy stories per issue for the last couple issues of More Fun. They actually ran four in the final issue, not three in each of the last two. A small thing, but i noticed i had been wrong when reading through last night.

First up, Jimminy meets King Arthur in "Sir Jimminy!" -

Next, Jimminy and "the headless horseman" give us a demonstration on how humour changes and evolves over the decades...

Remember - that ending was kid's humour, not adult dark humour or anything of that nature, though not entirely atypical for the time. However, we saw it more often with cartoon cats.

Here are the covers from today's tales. Despite any impression my phrasing may have conveyed yesterday, that first cover was not his only cover. Jimminy owned the cover of every issue in which he appeared.

stories by Jack Mendelsohn and Howie Post for More Fun Comics #s 122 & 124 (1947)