Appearing in the comics spin racks 50 years ago this November we find that

1. Batman is a menace (we have to assume he was in the garment / fashion district when Robin made that statement.

2. Everyone who knows fear burns as Man-Things touch… with this early version of the `giant size man thing’ even those who don’t know fear burn.

3. Forget leaping over tall building in a single bound, Superman’s real impressive skill is leaping to conclusions. She has on a Batwoman therefore it can’t something outrageous like a costume party, or maybe even Lois has a kink, no it’s that she’s diddling around behind his back with that manic depressive from Gotham City, and I suppose if it had been a pill box hat he would prove she was fooling around with Kennedy… okay they probably were, but it would be kind of silly to come to that conclusion on just that evidence.

4. The Fly has been around longer than Spider-Man? Yow!

 

And below this issue of Adventure came out 70 years ago this November.

70 years

That’s a long time, and yet it’s could still work. The character is still around.

70’s years before this comic came out would have been 1869, just four years after the end of the Civil War, vast changes between the two periods.

As there have been between 39 and now…. But still in a way perhaps not as vast or different as the first two periods.  
 

 

Ahh Harvey Comics, the home of weird innocents, they’re no longer publishing, but for a long time their characters were ubiquitous, hell at one time Richie Rich had over 50 titles devoted to him and his entourage!

The thought of trying to come up with 1 comics worth of original stories for that pint-sized uber-capitalist, must less 50 to 60, makes my frontal lobe pucker, “We’re starting a new comic called Richie Riches’ Right Shoe, get to work on it chop chop!”

They of course also had Stumbo the Giant, Baby Huey, Hot Stuff the original Hell-Boy, Casper the Dead Baby, obsessive compulsive Little Dot and so many other warped but cute characters.

They don’t companies devoted to making totally innocent comics like that anymore.

Actually they didn’t back then either.

Harvey Comics published their share of steamy romance, bloody war, and bloodier horror comics too, starting out in 1940 as just another purveyor of superheroes, Black Cat, Green Hornet, the Zebra (Yes the Zebra.) the cute stuff would not really become their main thing until the 50’s.

These are some of the less innocent fair that Harvey produced.

War Battles was noted for the carnage on the cover such as the above, along with flame-thrower attacks, and one showing a jeep blasting along at a bunch of enemy soldiers half out of a foxhole.

Flip was one of the dozes of Mad Magazine rip-offs that sprang up in the early 50’s, this one livened things up by mixing it with horror and good girl art.

Tomb of Terror. Don’t worry lady, they just want to be friends.

And even in the cute era they still went off the regular path from time to time, in 1994, as the end was swiftly coming, they produced Frank (though they didn’t call it a Harvey Comic on the cover, it was still theirs) which told the tale of a still living, motorcycle riding Frankenstein monster (who with knowing irony called himself Frank) and who’s mostly adjusted to being the ultimate outsider, and finding he can’t help continuing to get involved in humanity.

It was actually pretty good.

Okay, it was no Richie Riches’ Left Shoe (the follow up to the one above) but what can you do?

 

When they were invented in the mid 1930’s comic books were an experiment to garner the dimes from the public and at the time it looked like they would not really last long, the numbers were just not there.  

Then Action # 1 with Superman came along and the sales went from 200,000 or less an issue to over 2 million and the media was saved, and it’s days of merely reprinting newspaper strips were soon at an end and original content was the order of the day.
And oh my has some of that original content taken an odd twist here and there over the years!

1. Bondage Fairies Gracie?  Yes, but just a few anomalies like this come out now and then and quickly vanish… right?

Nope, the one pictured here is BF # 16, and it goes on from there, along with dozens of other series from “Eros Comix” an adult imprint of the more main stream Fantagraphics Books. They have been publishing them for the last 19 years and the one here is one of the more innocuous covers, there are others that if I reproduced them here I would probably get in trouble with Yahoo, and feel the need to blush heavily.

2. Before Wolverine, before Lobo, Deadpool and the Punisher there was Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman, which recounted the adventures of an ill tempered, violent, chain smoking, gin swilling (he kept a case by him in his milk truck) sociopath who during his carrier destroyed at least 9 milk trucks and a large chunk of the city he worked in, and he did it all without the copout of some sissy mutant healing ability to get him out of every jam, or enough ordnance to equip a medium sized army.  The creator is still trying to get a movie made about him, which in the 80’s would have been a lot more original than now I guess.
 
3. Sometimes to find justice a man just has to pick up a sword, and put on a dress. Or at least that seems to be the premise the manga Le Chevalier D'eon which has been translated into a 7 volume comic. The manga was an attempt by the writer artist to turn an historic oddity, the cross-dressing French spy, adventurer and Freemason D’eon de Beaumont, into a superhero. He did this by having him possessed from time to time by the spirit of his dead sister as they go after a cult of revolutionaries, alchemists, and mercury filled zombies controlled by Saint Germain. It’s also been turned into a swashbuckling anime series.

4. Ahhh, Jack Chick Publications, the producer of all those over the top little religious pamphlets for so many years also produced some full sized comics too. Increasing not only in size but loonyness and vitriol as well.  

The Alberto on the cover was the author of a series that purported to blow the lid off of a vast Catholic / Jewish / Communist / Satanic conspiracy that he claimed to have been a former member of and that was out to…. Well think of something awful and amp it up by a factor of 110 and you have what they were doing.  

Chick Publications and Alberto, before he was shown to be a con-artist, who was making it all up, swore it was all true.

Hey, and check it out, both Four Horsemen and Bondage Fairies are “recommended for adult reading.” If you had a comic shop would you put them on the same shelf?     
 

 

Some of the comics appearing this month 50 years ago with, as close as they let them get away with back then, a horror theme.

Oddly the Detective Comic seems to come the closest, forgoing as they did that month another visit from more aliens, or Batman being turned into salt-water taffy or whatnot as Robin looks on in shock and horror from the lower left or right corner.

 

If you had looked at the magazine stands 50 years ago this September these are 4 of the ladies you might have seen.

Things have definitely changed, but at least if any of these characters were translated into real life they wouldn’t fall on their face due to being out of proportion, or taken in for on suspicion of solicitation of prostitution because of the costume they’re in.

Okay…. Daisy is not exactly human norm but… hay wait a minute! Hold the phone….

She and Millie now work for the same company!

Hmmm, I wonder if they’re going to discover that Millie is a long lost princess?