Sunday Super-Catinee

We jump back six decades to 1958 for adventures of Super-Cat from issue #s 3 and 4 of his eponymous comic book. We do this because, rather damn oddly, Super-Cat did not appear inside of Super-Cat #s 1&2, only on the covers, and so made his first appearance in issue 3 of his own title.
 Only the four issues appeared, and the credits are lost to the ages. But the convergence of Odd and 3 make it a natural for this blog, no?

And, yes - I feel bad about that terrible pun title. But i'm weak, and could not resist the obvious, no matter how super-catastrophic it might be.

pages from Super-Cat #s 3 & 4 (1958)

Sunday Morning Funnies, Once Again

My brain is foggy, and i'm too knackered to go look, but it seems like it's been a fair bit since we had a nice, simple, Sunday Morning Funnies. Regular readers (and irregular readers perusing these pages on a persistent basis) know i've been holed up in my cave mentally of late. I feel like getting out and stretching, so let's get our funnies today from abroad - we'll ease in with a strip from England, then head on over to Poland, and down to India.
But - Fear Not! Comics pulled from non-English books are wordless, and one is even kind enough to have an English language title. Probably not just to make it easy for me, but that's what we'll be pretending here.

We begin in England with the first comic from the first issue of The Beano, published 80 years ago in 1938 and the artist seems lost to time, at least on this side of the Atlantic -

From Poland, we have bits by Marek Raczkowski from Komiks 97...

...and January Misiak from Komiks 99 -

And, from India, a few comics  from the back of Bruce Lee's Escapade In Kalahari courtesy of Shehab and Prakash -

We'll be back at midday with a couple short comic adventures for a 1958 Super Matinee.
You have no idea how hard i'm working to resist the soon-to-be-obvious pun.

The Beano #1, Komiks 97, Komiks 99, and Indrahal Comics v.21#31 (1938, 1997, 1998, 1984)

Jim Jams (not to be confused with Jim Jam Jr.)

Before we get back to Joe Guy, let us pause to look at our author, Jim Stenstrum.
Jim is an artist as well as a writer, and that's where you'd find much of his work these days. While you might not know his writing from his old comics, odds are you've seen some of his artwork. His character designs have graced such shows as the animated Superman from the 90s to the Scooby-Doo videos of recent years. His artwork appears in many other toons, ranging from Johnny Quest to Fish Police to Freakazoid! to Tom & Jerry.

I know him best from his old stories he did for Warren, and sometimes they stuck with me in the oddest ways. Back in the days before the WWWeb, hunting and collecting music was a much more difficult and time consuming endeavor. I maintained a constant watch list of things for which i was hunting, and the printed copy had a header reading Hard John's Nuclear Hit Parade. That title came from Jim Stenstrum.

Back in the 70s when my first son was gestating, Jim had a short series of stories in Eerie running under that title, starring Hard John Apple, illustrated by Richard Corben. This was right about the time that Den started running in Heavy Metal magazine, bringing a bit more attention to the work he was doing at Warren.

A snippet-

...some time later...

Where Joe Guy played a light-hearted but dark parody of the comics genre, Hard John gave Stenstrum license to turn that twisted lens on modern society of the 60s & 70s. As usual when Jim is spotted driving, i was standing by the road with my thumb out, eager to go along for the ride. Even the short jaunts were usually interesting, like his work with Neal Adams to produce Thrillkill - a story about a public mass shooter written way back in 1975.

In addition to his work in animation, Jim also has a new series of novels featuring Rex Havoc (just two so far - Asskickers Of The Fantastic and Horror Island.)
I've yet to read either, but Rex Havoc & The Asskickers Of The Fantastic was the title of a story he did for Warren's 1984 back in 1978, just to be confusing. I only discovered the existence of these books while writing this piece, but i quite enjoyed the original 10 page comic.
If you go hunting through old issues of Eerie, Creepy and 1984 looking for his work, you should know that Jim also wrote for them under the name of Alabaster Redzone.

Anyway - Yes, we'll come back to Hard John after we wrap up on Joe Guy. In the meantime, here's another taste of Jim Stenstrum's slightly skewed sensibilities as he and John Severin bring us the Super-Abnormal Phenomena Survival Kit -

For younger readers left wondering about that last line, Irwin Allen (who brought us shows like Time Tunnel, Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants) had recently sparked the Disaster Movie genre and was making a new name for himself while altering the Hollywood landscape, influencing movies to this day. The Towering Inferno and Earthquake were huge box office back when this was written.

pages from Creepy #79 and Eerie #83 (1976, 1977)

Saturday Solutions Before HJ

Nope. Still no pictures.
Awful, ain't it?

But here're the answers to yesterday's quiz, tucked behind a page break to avoid spoilers for those from the future reading in reverse chronological order.

Friday Oopsing

Well, i managed to know when it was the beginning of the week and the beginning of the month, but seemed to have missed the end of the week. Only a few hours left now to squeeze in

So complete was my unawareness that there's nothing ready to go. So you get an off-the-top-of-the-head quizzy sort of Oddity.
Identify these popular stories, all of which have the subject of at least one film...   No, all have had at least 2 or 3 films, if not more.

1) After his wife is brutally murdered by a serial killer, a father must track his now disabled son thousands of miles to rescue him with the aid of a mentally disabled woman.

2) A 17 year old boy starts an illicit 3 day fling with a 13 year old girl, resulting in a half dozen deaths.

3) Two women try to kill each other over a pair of shoes.

4) Mary had a little Lamb.

5) A south-Pacific native finds himself unwillingly in New York City, but still manages to visit the Empire State Building like typical tourists.

what? You wanted pictures? (eep!)

Wotta Guy!

If you missed last week's post with the first three pages of today's feature, you might want to read that first.

The answer to our mystery hero's identity:

We already know that Joe Guy is the illegitimate love child of Superboy and Amelia Earhardt (ish), but what can our hero actually do?

Joe Guy is an old favorite character, not a recent discovery from one of my digs. That being the case, you might guess he runs more than a bit on the Odd side, even when hewing to standard formula. The puns may be bad at times, but much is forgiven, in my eyes, by his Wotta-gear. So much mockery built in to a simple pun label.

Rather than attempt to summarize Joe further, let us continue his first story - picking up right after the three page prologue that appear last week (link if you didn't look at the link above and have now changed your mind)
I'll tell you one thing though - if they were somehow to make a movie, i have not the vaguest clue who to cast as Joe. I clipped Jim Stenstrum and Abel Laxamana's names from the first page of the prologue to hide the hints, so they've been inserted into the two page spread below to compensate -

I was thinking that Joe had about 7-9 adventures, but digging back it seems that there were only 5.
This first one appeared in The Rook #7 -

The Rook is another distinctly interesting character, one that we'll look at later. Probably about the same time we finally get back to Aztec Ace.

After spending the focus on introduction in the first tale, we start to learn more of the world in which Joe lives and adventures, including some of the other occupants -

Apparently it's quite the oddly mixed world, eh? And one that likely could never exist again. So we'll be coming back to follow along on Joe's adventures. Including that long-awaited reunion...

...but that's not until his 4th adventure. We'll get there...

Joe Guy: America's Foremost Hero by Jim Stenstrum and Abel Laxamana for Rook #7 (1981)

2018 - Take Two

Well, January was a very disconnected month.
Yet somehow, i still seemed to have managed to average about a post and a half per day. Not quite sure how that worked out given how in-the-cave my mind has been lately, but hopefully we're ramping back up again. Might even start venturing out into the wwwilds again soon, eh?

Meanwhile, new month - new calendar pages.

Welcome to February!

NOTE: The Playboy calendar page has nudity, of course,
and has been moved to our back room for adult content.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive
of the original post to view the picture.