Can Little Bobby Draw?

I ran into one of those old debates again - did Bob Kane draw Batman at all?

Kane fought so hard for so long to hide the work of great artists like Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson, not to mention Batman's Co-Creator Bill Finger. As more and more came to realize that their favorite parts of Batman came from other creators, speculation arose that Bob Kane never actually did any of the work on Batman. With all those Ghosts in the closet, perhaps he never needed to do more than sign a name and collect the checks.

But, let us remember that Bob did do more than just Batman.

For example, Jumbo Comics was running his Peter Pupp back in 1938. Oddly enough, those were reprints. The strip first ran in the UK in Wags the previous year. So here we have international proof that Bob could draw comics. (No, i don't know what was in his closet. Shut up!)

If the pages seem just a bit "off" to you, it may be because they were printed as Colour Comics. Which is to say, they were printed on orange paper, which looks rather garish and diminishes ease of reading. So i leeched that out and 'upgraded' to black & white -

Um...
I don't have issue #4. I can't tell you what happens next.

But i'm fairly sure no bats were involved...

page art by Bob Kane from Jumbo Comics #s 1-3 (1938)

Ad-Ventures, Not ADventures

As you may know, we occasionally run ADventures - comic strips made as advertisements like Volto, "Pepsi" the Pepsi-Cola Cop, and "RC" and Quickie.

A little over 80 years back, Rafael Astarita decided to reverse the formula and make comics with pre-existing advertising figures. He called these Ad-Ventures, and they ran in Star Comics for a bit starting in 1937. It didn't last too long - only 8 episodes total. We've got 7 of them here today...

Before we continue, let's answer the most obvious WTF? that may be on the minds of some readers...

...the Gold Dust Twins sold laundry detergent. Search hard, and you might find some images with one of them scrubbed so clean he turned white. 

Now you know, and we continue...

Oops.
I'm missing issue #8 - so we must skip one.
On to the final strip from Star Comics #9 -

 Of course, these days he'd be sued out of business over Intellectual Property rights.

page art by Rafael Astarita from Star Comics #s 2-7 & 9 (1937, 1938)

Getting Spanky With Mark

Hey! We do get a post today. I was going to give up again, but on the final attempt for the day Blogger finally deigned to allow all the images to upload to the server.
Damn nice of them, huh?

A few weeks back we took a first peek at LOC - Fandom's Forum, and i promised we'd be back that way. So, let's turn around. Today we'll check out Mark Marderosian's parody hero - Spanky, Space Cadet. Spanky first appeared in LOC #4 and ran in every issue following except #9 for a total of six episodes. After an epic struggle with another system crippled by a pointless 'upgrade', we've got all 6 here today.

I'm not going to try to set this up or describe the strip. I'll just say it embraces the Odd.  Let's see what you think...

J.B. never woke up...

page art by Mark Marderosian from LOC #s 4-8 & 10 (1981, 1982)