Single Issue Review: Bob Hope #85

The Adventures of Bob Hope is in many ways the oddest comic in DC's lineup during the Silver Age. In the middle of this basically sexless universe, you have the most hormone-drenched guy who ever lived trying his darnedest to get next to a lot of lovely young women.

Now of course some will point out that at the time this comic was published (February-March 1964), Hope was 60 years old, and those gals he's bartering for don't seem north of 25. But this ignores the character that Hope had built up during the 1940s in the "Road" pictures, which was a funny, entertaining ne'er-do-well charmer.

The cover itself is tentatively credited to Mort Drucker at GCD; sure looks like his work to me. The concept is mildly disturbing; is Hope really buying his weight in young women as it appears? But we know it's harmless and the gag is that he's going to try to eat a bunch of bananas to get a third gal. Aside from that problem, it's a terrific cover.

The story starts, as many Bob Hope stories do, with Bob trying to dodge his landlady, Mrs Peabody, who's knocking at the door. However, he learns that she's not trying to collect the rent but to drag him along on a tour of Egypt that she won for a prize recipe. One of the things I particularly like about the Hope books is that they throw in a gag almost every panel; it's simple but effective:



Pop cultural aside: When Bob notes that Cleopatra is coming to his local theater; he is referring to the 1963 Liz Taylor epic.

So Bob and his landlady land in Egypt, where they travel by camel (this is a kid's comic, remember) to some tents in the desert (ditto). Of course, there is the love interest (definitely Drucker here):



But the male guest stars seem a trifle edgy:



It turns out that Sha's uncle is trying to use Mrs Peabody's cooking to unite the tribes to start a war for oil, but she's not interested in a polygamous household:



Drucker used that type of gag frequently in his brilliant Mad Magazine movie parodies around the same time.

Mrs Peabody does initially agree to prepare dinner for the heads of all the tribes, until Bob explains the situation to her. When they decline, the other heads are amused:



But Sha's uncle decides to go ahead with the invasion anyway, until Hope gets the idea of using Mrs Peabody's recipe as a weapon. It explodes and scares away the invaders.

Comments: Beautiful art by Drucker and an entertaining story, although the ending is a bit predictable.

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Number 202


Supermouse gets hot under the collar!


"The Good Old Wintertime" is from Supermouse #2 (1948. Supermouse, created by Kin Platt in 1942, first appeared in Coo Coo Comics.

I've seen quite a few Supermouse stories, and it was my opinion this was drawn by Gene Fawcette. However, after initially posting this entry I got a note from cartoonist Jim Engel with the following information:

For some reason, I can't post this under "comments"...if you CAN, please DO... The 2 Supermouse stories you've posted are not by Gene Fawcette---they're actually drawn by Milton Stein. Fawcette DID draw SM stories and covers, but later in the series. Fawcette's SM has weird "chopped" or "squared off" feet, as an identifying tip...and he did a lot of SM cover where SM is drawn pretty huge, catching Terrible Tom in nets, etc... Many people DO seem to regard Stein as "THE" SM artist, but the strip was drawn by a veritable WHO'S WHO of funny animal greats, including Al Hubbard, Jack Bradbury, Dan Gordon, and Don Arr... best, Jim Engel

Thanks for your input, Jim! You're quite the great cartoonist, yourself.

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Number 194

Al Hartley Throws The Bull

I haven't ever read much about cartoonist Al Hartley, except when he started drawing Christian comic books for the Fleming Revel Company in the 1970s. I read an article in a Guideposts magazine about the series.

All-in-all he drew about 60 Spire Christian Comics; some even starred the Archie characters, used with permission, of course.His main body (yuk-yuk) of work was in drawing pretty girls and his résumé is full of romance comics, teen comics, etc., mostly for Stan Lee at Atlas and Marvel. He later drew Archie comics.

This particular strip, "The Bull Thrower," is from Atlas Comics' Crazy #3, 1954. Crazy was yet another Mad imitator. Just about every panel shows how Hartley could draw females…and how. The torero in this story makes me bullish, that's for sure.

Hartley, according to what I've read about him, was very fervent about his faith, and it came through in his Christian comics, but he hadn't forgotten his bread-and-butter, pretty girls.

I say, religious or not, once a boob man, always a boob man.

Hartley died in 2003.

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Number 153


Son of Frankenstein Friday…again


Yet another in our on-again-off-again series featuring our favorite monster.

This is a diverse group: a Garbage Pail Kids card, a Marvel "Classic," a Joe Maneely satire strip from Cracked, an indy comic with a famous cover artist and two covers by Dick Briefer. There's even a snack to nibble on while you look at all of this. The Kellogg's Monster Fruit Flavored Snacks I bought last Halloween. Hurry and eat them, though…the expiration date is tomorrow, June 30, 2007.

For a time in the 1970's Marvel Comics had their own line of Classics Comics, with art usually done by the Filipino artists that took over comics for a time during that era. This was a rush job by Dino Castrillo, an artist I'm not familiar with. Despite the visualization of an ugly monster on the cover by artists Gene Colan and Ernie Chua (Chan), Castrillo's monster is actually--gasp--handsome.

Not so handsome is John Pound's Garbage Pail Kid Frankenstein. Jeez, is that a cat he's stomping? Don't tell PETA, please. I don't need any trouble, and it's all Pound's fault, anyway.

Tomb Tales was a black and white homage to horror comics published in the late '90s. This is issue #7, from 1999, with a cover by none other than the great Jack Davis! I don't know how the guy swung it, or how much he paid the artists, but he used other EC artists for other covers. Check out his website for all of the covers. Not only does Davis do a great job on the Frankenstein monster, he includes Dracula, the Wolfman and even the Gillman. A regular Universal Monsters gang.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

From an old 1950's Cracked magazine comes Frankenstein by Joe Maneely. Joe did a much better version in an old issue of Atlas Comics' Menace.* I scanned the story from a reprint in Cracked Monster Party #2, from 1989. If you're getting eyestrain from trying to read the small type, don't feel bad. I've read it and it's not worth the trouble.

Finally, two great covers by the master of the funny Frankenstein, Dick Briefer. These issues of Prize Comics are from 1947.

*You can see that story if you click on Joe's name in the labels under this posting.

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Number 148


Pussycat, Pussycat, I love you…


Did anyone ever draw glamorous, sexy chicks as well as Bill Ward?

Pussycat was a feature Ward did in the 1960s for Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman's line of men's magazines, after having established himself as a cartoonist of excellence in drawing the female form. Ward had worked as a comic book artist for years. He created super-siren Torchy, as well as being an artist specializing in love comics and several other genres, including Blackhawk. It was the pin-up art that made him famous, though.

Pussycat was a satire on the spy craze started by the James Bond phenomenon, continued on with TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, et al.) The character she most resembled was Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Annie Fanny in Playboy. Like Annie, Pussycat was an innocent, without guile. She apparently didn't understand the effect she was having on the men around her, who acted like horny idiots.

This particular strip was originally published in 1966, then reprinted in 1968 in a compilation magazine, Pussycat #1, listed in the indicia as being published by Marvel Comics. It contains one story by Wally Wood and another by Jim Mooney. The cover is by Bill Everett. The rest of it is all Ward.
Click on pictures for full-size images.

Several books have been published reprinting Ward's pin-up cartoons. For years he sold about 30 of them a month to Goodman's Humorama Publications. You couldn't open one of those digest magazines without seeing a new Ward.

Years ago I got lucky and found some of Ward's cartoons for sale at a San Diego Comicon. I even found a rough he submitted for approval, most likely to the aforementioned humor magazines he contributed to so regularly.
Even though it's a rough he lavished his time and attention on the girl. The guys in his cartoons, and even in his comic strips* were drawn as generic guys, with a lot less attention than he gave to his girls. The guys in his cartoons all went crazy at the sight of a pretty girl. If you were ever to see a living Ward girl walk down the street you might go crazy too.

*Ward was also a regular for years in Cracked Magazine, sometimes under the name McCartney.

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Number 138


Dandy Dan D!


Dan DeCarlo was a great cartoonist. He specialized in pretty girls, and the pretty girls he drew were prettier--and sexier--than most other cartoonists could draw them. He influenced several artists, including Jaime Hernandez of Love And Rockets fame.

DeCarlo died in 2001 at age 82. Over the 50+ years he put in at his board he did some really fine work. He did pin-up cartoons for Chip Goodman at Humorama (which was part of the company owned by Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman). In the fifties he did work for Stan Lee. The strip I'm showing you here is from a coverless issue of My Friend Irma, which was a spin-off of a radio and TV show about a really ditzy blonde.

DeCarlo was a born storyteller. He could draw a pretty girl with so few lines and give her such nice curves and dress her so well. Sigh. Many a young comic book reader probably had his first crush on a DeCarlo doll.

Here is a cheesecake Millie The Model cover, which pretty much typifies the sex appeal his artwork had.

The Irma strip is a lot like the later work he did for Archie. He was remarkably consistent over the years, which gives us such a great body (heh-heh…I said "body") of comic art to go back to and study.

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