TerryMcC

What’s this, Lois Lane muling for Tupperware? I guess plucky girl reporters in the 60s didn’t make as much as I thought they did.

The image above comes from a comic book called, as you can see on the cover, Tupperware Dating Party, which it seems features one Dorothy Dealer. (I can hardly wait for the Post Modern reboot on THAT character!)

A freebie produced something around 1968 that was given to woman thinking about joining the cult of… I mean becoming a Tupperware distributer.

It was published by Common Comics, which was a subsidy of American Comic Group, the comic company known mainly for a long string of mild “horror” comics and a fat little character known as Herbie, or sometimes the Fat Fury.

They got out of regular comics in the 60s, but still produced them for companies like Sears, Tupperware and others.

The art in this one was supplied by Kurt Schaffenberger, the artist who for over ten years was THE artist for Lois Lane, becoming so iconic that he was even brought in to draw her in comics being done by other artists so that she always looked the same.

It seems he also pulled her out for this item as well, despite being called “dealer” Ruby Robins and given a by the unknown colorist a somewhat different hair color, (not Lois’s natural blue from Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane,) that’s Lois Lane, down to the little Jackie Kennedy hat she sported in her adventures at DC at the same time.

Perhaps she needed the extra income to make up for all the time she spent being shrunk, trapped in the Phantom Zone, tossed around in time, being abducted by aliens and going though one weird transformation after another.    

Actually things have changed quite a bit since I asked that question, (rendering it moot now) use to be you could only tell were a few characters were ranked, now you can click and see how any of them are doing.

Long in the long ago comic books and newspaper comics were practically joined at the hip, which was logical enough what with comics having their origin starting out as just a bunch of daily and Sunday strips collected, colored if needed, and put into comic book formatting.

However even in the 50s and early 60s, after it had all become original content, Newspaper strips were seen in the spin racks with Beetle Bailey, Allie Oop, the Phantom, and even for a short while the Peanuts gang in comic books written and draw by other people.

Which was one of the problems with those things, the jobbers they hired to do the comic book versions of those well known characters just never got them quite right.

By the 70s, except for the Phantom, who still shows up today he being a superhero and all, that sort of thing was mostly over. I think Charlton did one with Blondie and Dagwood, but things had so changed that the newspaper comics and comic books were just too different, with more items such as Superman, Spider-Man and a short lived DC Universe strip, going from comics to the newspapers than coming from the newspaper's funny pages to Comics.

Such is life, or mass media anyway.

What if they were to do that sort of thing again today?

I mean bring out original Comics featuring some of the newspaper strip characters of today.

Frank Millers' Luann? (guess who’s a killer psycho prostitute now?)

Okay, maybe not.

But still, of the fairly new strips on the scene now which ones might you at least give a look if they had a comic book published doing longer sustained adventures of the characters?

Possibilities:

Cow and Boy

Rabbits Against Magic

Over the Hedge

Heart of the City

Lio (put that one on my pull list)

Cul de Sac

Non Sequitur with Danae and her family (this one as well, though I doubt anyone other than Wiley would get it right)

Pearls Before Swine

Drabble (Oh Glob the horror! If the artist got the art “right” a full 22 pages of a comic like that would probably cause retina scaring.)

Get Fuzzy (If for no other reason than to see those characters somewhere other than that damned bare, stark apartment he and those psychopathic talking animals live in. Say? Do you think that human in that strip might be crazy and in a mental hospital somewhere and imagining those critter? Nah! If he were crazy it might actually be funny from time to time.)

Or perhaps some sort of team-up comics, you know.... Garfield and Marmaduke together to see who can be the least original?

Any others you think might at least be worth a try?

Due to so many of the characters during that era of Brave & the Bold being slightly off kilter, and at times just unlike anything appearing anywhere else in the DC Universe general fan lore was that it made up of tales from an as yet unnumbered Earth.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

If you want a listing of what comic book character is a member o which religion (for instance did you know that Lois Lane is also Catholic, and J. Jonah Jameson's realigion is "hates Spider-man"?) then take a look at some of the lists they have at 
 
The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters

 
http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html

Everything has meaning, and everything means something else, or at least there is a pretty good chance that’s the case.  

If it’s not true then people sure have been wasting a lot of time with Rorschach tests, dream interpretation, handwriting analysis, and the 23 or more different speculations about the secret meaning of The Wizard of Oz. 

So let’s say there is something to it, taking that stance it stands to reason that an illustration heavy art form like Comic Books must be chockablock with hidden context, so hidden that even those who were doing didn’t know they were doing it. 

On the whole the 50s were a pretty repressed era, and during the era the comics almost got repressed right out of existence though efforts from a number of different groups taking as their champion Fredric Wertham and his Seduction of the Innocent. (This ironically was published by the company that published Crown Comics in the 40’s)  

One of the results was that comic book creators, a group already not very highly regarded, found themselves being put in an even more appalling light.

Yet still they soldered on, after all they were making money, just not as much as they use to. 

Considering all this, what might we conclude is the secret hidden message Marvel (at the time mostly calling itself Atlas) was sending out with these covers? 

These are just six examples from the future “house of ideas” which would not become totally Marvel for almost 10 years (though for some reason while there Western, Horror and War comics of the time were marked as being from Atlas, they had Millie the Model was marked as a Marvel comic.) 

That’s an awful lot of missing and / or melting naughty bits, I wonder where they all went? 
  

Ooooooh! 

They floated about in Comic Book Limbo for two or three years then came out over at DC Comics. 

Who would have guessed? 
 

Two similarly themed, but completely different takes on the idea of the last boy on Earth and his dog in a post Apocalypse landscape.

They being Kamandi & Dr. Canus vs Finn the Human & Jake the Dog.

Both boys are agile, determined and resourceful, but Kamandi appears to be around 18 while Jake is only 13, however he is remarkable resilient, once recovering from having both legs broken by a mutant deer in two places in just a little over 6 weeks.

Both are familiar with bladed weapons, Kamandi however is also versed in firearms, though Jake does seem to have limited access to magical ones.

Dr. Canus is smart

Jake could give Plastic-Man and Giant Man a run for their money.