NOTES - JUNE 2026

Comics Crossovers:

In one of Golden Age comics' rare but casual crossovers, Judy Jackson, rival of reporter-hero Scoop Mason, is attending the same Governor's ball in the Bahamas as Newsreel cameraman Speed Martin. (The Funnies 051, 1941)

Then in the very next issue, Scoop Mason himself shows up to take in a football game! (The Funnies 052, 1941)

ADDENDUM: I just realized that the team that they're watching is Elmhurst College featuring star player Wally Williams, from his own feature in Popular Comics. Layers upon layers!

the Looming Spectre of Death:

Perhaps the most understated Looming Spectre of Death of all time, from the Philo Vance story "Murder Rings the Bell." (The Funnies 059, 1941)

Another, very cheeky Death, very appropriately wearing a mask. (The Funnies 062, 1941)

Presented Without Comment: 

(The Funnies 062, 1941)

Honours:

Both the Purple Zombie and Chico, creator of the Mechanized Skeleton(s) receive medals for defending an unspecified European nation from the death ray of an unspecified fascist nation, while Chico's skeleton troops get a hero's burial. (Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics 006, 1941)

NOTES - MAY 2026

Panel Fun:

Don't know how I could've skipped this the first time I read through these comics, but here we are: Amazing-Man suplexing an angry bull. (Amazing-Man Comics 012, 1940)

NOTES - AUGUST 2025

 

Big Head Futurites:

Just a fun illustration of the concept of future humans being big-headed weirdos, from the "Brick Bradford" Sunday strip for 5 December, 1937 

Honours - Thor, God of Thunder: 

Grant Farrel, aka Thor, God of Thunder, gets a medal in his role in defending the US from invasion by fascist Gratnia. Note that it is Grant and not Thor who gets the medal, because Grant does a lousy job of protecting his secret identity. (Weird Comics 003, 1940)

Honours - Typhon: 

Honoured at the Inter-Ocean Congress for stopping the dastardly Menar. (Weird Comics 006, 1940)

Panel Fun: 

Just good clean fun with bad spelling as Thor heads to Tibet to warn the Grand Llama about an impending bandit attack. (Weird Comics 004, 1940)

IT'S CALLED "NO, AND"

(Target Comics v1 007-008)

The of these two selections is from the end of the Bull's-Eye Bill story in Target Comics v1 007 and the second is from the beginning of the story in 008, and while the artist is clearly different it's a bit hard to tell if the writer has also changed. Anyhow, shout out to whichever member of the team looked at that absolute 100% lead-in to an adventure in an underground prehistoric enclave, said "I don't want to write and/or draw a bunch of cowboy vs dinosaur shit" and had them just walk back out of the cave into a story about Hollywood location scouts instead.

(I haven't read far enough to see if lone African American cast member Happy ever reappears after unceremoniously being left out of the second issue but if he doesn't I'm going to assume that he at least heeded the call to adventure and is off somewhere riding a quetzalcoatlus and having fun instead of punching cows all day)

NOTES - MAY 2025

Cops Shooting at Fleeing Suspects: 

The Raven, a nonviolent thief who crucial only steals ill-gotten gains from the wealthy and powerful, draws a lot of police fire over the course of his activities. (Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940)

Treasury agent blazes away at a fleeing diamond smuggler in the middle of NYC. (Target Comics v1 004, 1940)

A Good Line to Exit A Burning Building With:

Especially if you have no intention of being a waffle. (Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940)

Insufficiently Advanced: 

This "aging machine" has to be the most low-rent bit of alien tech ever featured in any bit of fiction. Just locking someone up for fifty years isn't a particularly impressive feat of extraterrestrial engineering, so-called King of the Brainmen. (Sure-Fire Comics 003b, 1940)

The March of Progress:

A fun exercise in just how recent the Satanic Panic and its preoccupations were: this puzzle, in which a goat-man demonstrates how to draw an inverted pentagram, is presented as a fun activity for kids, something that would have caused an American parent from c.1987 to spontaneously combust with the speed at which they would have been travelling to contact the authorities/the news media/the evangelical church. (Famous Funnies 054, 1939)

NOTES - NOVEMBER 2024

Honours: 

Wonder Boy is generically honoured by all of Europe for stopping a Mongol invasion. (National Comics 001, 1940)

Panel Fun:

I don't normally have enough time or inclination to read the text portions of old comics but I do often enjoy the illustrations accompanying them, especially including this cake man who menaces the Yankee Doodle Boy, whoever he is. (National Comics 006, 1940)

NOTES - APRIL 2024 PART II

Ran out of tags again.

Cops Shoot: 

The cops in whatever city Inferno lives in are trying to kill him because they think he did a robbery and is running away. (Blue Ribbon Comics 018, 1941)

The cops try to kill Captain Flag twice in this issue! This time he's breaking jail after being arrested for murder, but still. (Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941)

Panel Fun:

"Dixie Dugan" Comic, 1932

NOTES - NOVEMBER 2023

Fate of the Wreck of the Athenia

 

Showing tremendous respect for the dead, the Blue Tracer uses the wreck of the Athenia as armour while attacking a Nazi battleship. (Military Comics 005, 1941) 

Honours

Marine pilots "Loops" McCann and "Banks" Barrows are "decorated for valor" after a barroom brawl in a Shanghai nightclub leads to the destruction of a Japanese spy cell (Military Comics 005, 1941)

On Crypto-Fascism: 

As I've said before, the US was officially Not Involved in WWII until the December 1941 Pearl Harbor attack and so a lot of pre-1941 comics feature generically Germanish or Japaneseish spies operating on US soil. Military Comics actually features a fair number of actual Nazis (and even some rare comic book appearances by Italian fascists) by having most of its features take place outside of the US. With issue 5 as an example: the Blckhawks battle Nazis in Oslo; the Sniper does the same in Austria; Shot & Shell vex them in a generic Europe; the Death Patrol liberates Nazi POWs as part of the RAF and the Blue Tracer does the same in the Atlantic.

Loops & Banks, above, are US Marines and as such do not actually battle the Japanese in Shanghai. The most interesting contrast is between Miss America and Yankee Eagle, who both battle Nazi submarines that are preying on US shipping but since the Miss America Nazis are operating out of a New England base and the Yankee Eagle Nazis are based at sea only the latter are actually called Nazis.

Comics in Comics:

Inza Cramer meets a fan (More Fun Comics 063, 1941)

Drawn Without Reference:

I know that paleontology wasn't quite as advanced in 1941 as it is today but that is a wild take on what a pterodactyl looked like (More Fun 067, 1941)

Dynamic Action:

Check out the dynamic action on adventurer Clip Carson! (More Fun Comics 068, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-HERO 035: THE HUMAN TOP

(Red Raven 001, 1940)

The Human Top is a guy who gets spinning powers after a science accident. The only really noteworthy things about him are that cool collar on his costume and the fact that he's one of the very few Golden Age Marvel characters to have never had any sort of modern appearance. Spinning powers aren't cool, I suppose.

It's kind of a shame that this is the first of only two appearance of the Human Top and the only one written by Dick Briefer - I really like the weird hyperbole and turns of phrase. Ah well, there's always Frankenstein to look forward to.

NOTES - MAY 2023

Folk:

Luther Robinson and Lynne Harris! These folks are hard to categorize! They're not villains, despite being antagonists to Namor the Sub-Mariner, because Namor is very much a villain at least half of the time. They're not heroes, despite eventually allying with Namor to fight Nazis, because they definitely attempt to commit at least one genocide against the people of Atlantis. 

They're adventurers, they've both been surgically modified by Atlantean scientists to be amphibious, and Lynne is one of a long line of women to be abducted by Namor with romantic ill-intent (and she's, like, third one, in a mere handful of stories). They're interesting artifacts of the way comic book universes come together, and that's great.

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 010-026 (sporadically), 1940-1941) 

Vision foe Rhamu Rondi is your bog standard crooked mystic character and will make no further appearances here, but the Buddha Signal is objectively great - even early Jack Kirby knew what was up with regard to villainous décor.(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941)

Names:

Fella name of Barney Bailey here, which is a pretty great moniker for an exhibiter of curiosities to have. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)

Panel fun:

Sub-Mariner x Human Torch (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 017, 1941)

Whether this is Namor's personal flag/ crest or a more general Atlantean symbol, this bit of regalia must be noted. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 018, 1941)

Biographical Details: Namor the Sub-Mariner weighs 198 pounds, according to the ring announcer during his foray into the world of boxing (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 020, 1941)

PANEL FUN

(Funnies 001, 1936)

Top notch dinosaur illustration. 

PANEL FUN

(Funnies 001, 1946)

Really great scared hair on the kid with the braids.

CELEBRATION

(Hit Comics 006, 1940)

Just a couple of cool bank robbing bad boy brothers living high on the hog. 

Just a fun panel from the same adventure. Jimmy darling indeed.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 240: PROFESSOR KITZOFF

(Flash Comics v1 008)

Professor Kitzoff makes me sad because he is categorically not the Sunspot Wizard. Oh sure, someone at DC or in the fan community went back and assigned titles to all the untitled Golden Age stories and they called this one "the Sunspot Wizard", but that's nothing. I love an unofficial name as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but they have to a) come from the text of the story itself and b) can't just be replacing the actual name by which the character is actually referred!

So, yes, sad. Professor "Boring Name" Kitzoff has followed the popular criminal scientist path of making an astonishing breakthrough based on junk science - in this case the idea that sunspots affect world events. He has a cool ray that supposedly allows him to affect these sunspots and thus the fate of humanity, but luckily for humanity, Hawkman and his pal Doctor French are on the case and Kitzoff is hounded from New York to the Andes until being accidentally shot by one of his own henchmen. Ho hum.

My depression is only lifted by the fact that this is the adventure in which Hawkman is seemingly killed and his seeming corpse is nailed up in a coffin with lots of gaps between the boards for some reason, leading to one of the best images of the Golden Age:

NOTES - FEBRUARY 2023

The Whip is an okay character aside from the brownface bit but one thing I absolutely love about him is that although he does a credible job at the Ineffectual Secret Identity act he also just travels from town to town with an enormous black horse.

(Flash Comics v1 005, 1940) 

Names:

This old dude shares his name with Kurt Busiek's Astro City character Samaritan! The tally of comics characters named Asa Martin stands at 2! (Flash Comics v1 010, 1940)

Same issue's Hawkman story features a (bad) guy named John Denver!

I'm usually pretty good at catching allusions and so forth in these old comics but I have no idea why Joe Magee = "always bungling something" (Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

Places: It's a bit hard to make out but the flash on this armoured car seems to place Seguro in "New Texirona" rather than New Mexico, which might just be the most egregious example of 40s comics writers avoiding real place names that I've ever encountered. (Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

This is how I order in restaurants, too. (Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

Number of references to "the Third Degree" aka the cops torturing someone as a positive thing this month: 3