Creature Commando

When last we left Dick Briefer's classic Frankenstein('s monster), he had been transformed into a new 'man' and rehabilitated from his evil ways. After a few fish-out-of-water tales while the creature was being re-educated for life in our society, they made another major decision.

It's all well and good to say he's not evil any longer, but for a while he'd been the ultimate evil of their world - even palling around with the Devil, as we saw last time. To make it work, a redemptive arc was needed. The year was 1944, so it wasn't too difficult to decide on the way to go...

The following issue, Nazi agents - pretending to be German citizens oppressed by the Nazis - approach Frankenstein at home and manage to get close enough to inject and incapacitate him. Smuggling him back to der fatherland for treatment, they manage to transform him into their agent of destruction. And so, the following issue...

And now he was positioned to do what nearly every comicbook hero was doing at the time - fight Hitler and the Nazis. And doing it decades before his imitation would lead the Creature Commandos in the same fight...

Ah, the joys of a demented and free-wandering mind.
I've got a very strange cross-over running in my head of this series with Hogan's Heroes. Sadly, i'm far too lazy these days to lay out the breakdowns.

page art by Dick Briefer for Prize Comics #s 38, 40, & 41 (1944)

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)

Sunday Morning Wolvertoons

Hey! I actually know what day of the week it is for a change, so i guess we should do some Sunday Morning Funnies, eh? I'm in the mood for some of Basil Wolverton's delightful oddities today, so it's all Wolverton this morning.

Most often we see his more famous creations like Spacehawk, Powerhouse Pepper, and Scoop Scuttle. Let's avoid them today and stick to the side-streets and back alleys of Wolvertown. His artwork appeared in all sorts of titles, sometimes making it easy to miss some of his work, even if one is a fan. Today's strips come from a variety of sources - Sub-Mariner (back when he was hyphenated), Human Torch (back when he wasn't Human), Tessie The Typist, Comic Comics, Joker Comics, Black Diamond Western, and Star Comics.

Some are one-shots, others, like Mystic Moot and his Magic Snoot (with over a dozen tales) were ongoing series that are often forgotten or overlooked today -

Just to be extra odd, Leanbean Green is a one-shot, even though there are three episodes. They appeared as consecutive pages in Joker Comics #17 -

Bingbang Buster, however, was another ongoing series, with over a dozen appearances -

 

This one is earlier than the rest, from back in 1938, and is not signed. The style is simpler than later works, but all indications (including Jerry Bail's note that he was working for the publisher at this time) are that this is Basil Wolverton in early days -

Dr. Dimwit was just slightly more than a one-shot, with just 3 appearances -

Inspector Hector brings us a two-page mystery for you to solve along with him -

We pause for spoiler space while you contemplate the mystery with some Funny Boners -

Okay - now we continue with page two of Inspector Hector and the solution to the Cartoon Crime Mystery -

page art by Basil Wolverton for Tessie The Typist #6, Star Comics #16, Sub-Mariner Comics #9, Joker Comics #s 17 & 18, Comic Comics #9, Human Torch #8, and Black Diamond Western #22 (1938, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1950)