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)

FF&G - Return To The Great Game

Ah... missing those days when i was working and the home studio had several networked machines on the render farm. There was never a time without primary system - not like today. It's likely to be a couple weeks yet before access to data is restored and machines are back to fully functional. However, while most of the puzzle/quiz/game archives are out of reach, i did find an old friend of Friday Fun & Games to help us out today.

Let's return to The Great Comics Game for another batch of quiz pages. This set includes some characters and comics that were in the To-Blog pile - from Jungle Comics to Smitty, The ... Office Boy - so we'll be seeing some again after access is restored.

puzzle fun from The Great Comics Game by John Stanley & Mal Whyte (1966)

No Jumping, No Crickets

This morning was fun, wasn't it? How about some More Fun?

In the last days of More Fun Comics back in 1947, they debuted an odd bit of fun from Jack Mendelsohn and Howie Post (whose Sooper Hippie we've seen before) entitled Jimminy And The Magic Book:

Jimminy premiered in issue 121 of More Fun and had 16 adventures in the final 7 issues of the comic.
Besides the cover promotion on his first appearance, Jimminy got a pretty decent advertising push, with inside back cover adverts and house ads appearing in Action, Detective, Adventure and a host of others ranging from Buzzy to Animal Antics to Star Spangled Comics -

I'm sure you'd rather see the comics than the advertisements. I just wanted to note that it seemed like they thought they had something pretty good here, and it's easy to wonder how the series might have fared if introduced earlier, before the title was on the decline. Once they realized the book was going to stop, they started using three stories per issue, seemingly to make sure they were seen rather than lost to inventory.

From issue #121, here are the first two Jimminy and the Magic Book stories -

There were 14 more tales...

story by Jack Mendelsohn, art by Howie Post from More Fun Comics #121 (1947)

Lightening The Mood

We've been brooding a bit over the recent losses. Let's pick things up a bit and switch to some light comedy. Jumping back 70 years (+2, for one of the tales), here's some quirky old humour from the late 1940s.

Artist and writer unknown, here's the final appearance of Walrus Whopper -

 this Tommy Tot and the Heir Corps tale is one of those rare beasts from the period that has both writer and artist credits - and both are the same man - Tim Howe. (However, i can't be certain that's not a nom de plume)

Two-Gun Percy is drawn by Jimmy Thompson ; as too often usual, writer unknown -

All three had more episodes. Tommy Tot and the Heir Corps had the fewest, with only 4, while Walrus Whopper had 9 tales to tell. Two-Gun Percy was the longest lasting, with two dozen appearances (if one includes the Daisy Handbook from 1948).

page art from Leading Comics #30 (1948), Nutty Life #2 (1946), and All Funny Comics #21 (1948)