Hey, Kids! "Comics"!

Going to be working on the hardware today and tomorrow, so might not be around a great deal.

Meanwhile, a little more of Ed Wheelan's  "Comics" McCormick - The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan. As mentioned last time, he had just shy of a dozen adventures, but they were fairly unlimited in scope. Let's take a look at those splash panels -

McCormick's second story introduced his first recurring villain - The Octopus.

The Space Pirates would return as well. Both the Octopus and the Pirates return for the tales in his final issue.

Fat And Slat #4 featured the above two tales, and "Comics" McCormick's only cover. Sadly, the title folded and the promise of more next issue was never realized.

We didn't run the splash panels from yesterday's stories - nor to his first story to appear. Here's that first tale in its entirety -

art by Ed Wheelan from Terrific Comics #s 2-6, Cat-Man #28, and Fats And Slats #s 1-4 (1944, 1945, 1947, 1948)

McFad, Meet McCormick

Regular readers of this blog know that Supersnipe is a favorite around these parts. If you're not familiar, Koppy McFad was "The Boy With The Most Comic Books In America" and was prone to strange adventures based on his perceptions of the world.

As oddly unique as Supersnipe might have seemed as a character, he wasn't quite alone.
Koppy McFad,  meet "Comics" McCormick - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan"

"Comics" premiered a few years earlier in Terrific Comics #2, but we're starting our look here in Fat and Slat simply because this is where they first ran his introduction. It's interesting that back in the 1940s Ed Wheelan was trying to offer a bit of a mixed cast. Our hero's best friends are a fat kid and a black kid. Yeah, he's depicted in the rather off-putting style of the times, and they had to justify his existence by making him the son of the maid (considerably more cringe-worthy than Ajax himself as we'll see later), but he seemed to have been pushing things forward as far as he could get away with at the time.

So - How do his adventures stack up to Supersnipe?
Well, they've got a decidedly different flavour, happily enough. (Cheap imitation wouldn't be that much fun) While Koppy took his adventures out into the "real" world, "Comic"'s adventures were purely in his imagination.
Let's take a look at a couple tales -

McCormick didn't last as long as McFad. He only had about a dozen adventures, and never got his own title. I think he's worth coming back for another look, though - and so we shall...

page art written & drawn by Ed Wheelan from Fat and Slat #s 1-3 (1947)

Kicking The Doors Open

It's Here!

You may have noticed a new graphic in the column to the right, similar to the one above.
The number of entries in the 1940sFunny Animalphabet has reached 500, and i'm calling it Good-To-Go.
The big difference between the new site and the previous blog posts, aside from nearly twice as many entries, is information to accompany the characters. Where known, Writers and Artists are listed, as well as where the character's First Appearance occurred and listing of Other Appearances in the 40s, so you know where to go looking for them.
Some entries still need data, but a strong majority of them are now as complete as current information allows, and work proceeds apace on filling in the rest while also gathering and sorting new entries.

Since this is an ongoing database, i had originally created a set of permanent pages that were linked to blog. However, Blogger's search function only includes blog posts, not the pages. So, those were scrapped and replaced by a set of 28 blog posts - one for each letter, plus and Introduction and Index. Each post contains a Navigation Menu to link the others, and there is a similar menu embedded in the side column of the blog. They function like separate pages while being a part of the blog. I kept it a very basic, text-based menu to keep things simple. Hopefully it works well for everyone. While other posts will be treated as normal, the 28 database posts will be continually updated and re-edited.

Anyway - if you're into 'em, stop by and check it out. I found a nice little Cosmo Cat poster signed by Ellis Chambers and L.B. Cole to kick things off.

logo by -3-, but none of the art (2018)

Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 33

Gil Elvgren starts us off on another week with Daisies Are Telling (Love Me, Love Me Not) from 1955-

art by Gil Elvgren, of course (1955)

3-Day Weekend Matinee - Robot Revolution

Since we're running the same features all weekend, it's obviously no surprise that we've got another tale from Look-In magazine's Buck Rogers comic, based on the Gil Gerard/Erin Gray tv show. But first, of course, we have our ongoing serial - the classic newspaper strip Twin Earths by Oskar Lebeck and Alden McWilliams -


Previously on Twin Earths: Vana, a defector from Terra - Earth's twin planet opposite Sol - has allied herself with the FBI and has helped them to design a detection system for the space based operations of her observers from her homeworld. Meanwhile, her FBI liaison, Garry Verth, has led a team investigating a piece of Terran technology - the telvisphone - a portable teleconferencing unit. With it, they contacted the Terran agents and learned that they were based in Washington DC. In the process, they have revealed their knowledge to the operatives from another world and a bomb exploded in their headquarters soon after...

Twin Earths - Chapter 14:

To Be Continued...

As with the previous two Buck Rogers entries, this tale - Robot Revolution - is written by Angus P. Allan and illustrated by Martin Asbury, his last in this sequence, though he returned to the strip by year's end...

art from Twin Earths newspaper strips (1952) and Look-In v11 #s 5-11 (1981)