Number 157


Herbie Hallucinates In Hell


Herbie Popnecker might've been the most unlikely character ever to star in his own comic book, but in the 1960s he was not only a hit in several issues of Forbidden Worlds, he was spun off into his own series. His title ran for 23 issues until the issue dated February, 1967. By that time the American Comics Group was running on fumes and soon after shut down operations. I read Herbie and thought the stories were completely bizarre. In retrospect, perfect for the 1960s and the dawning of the psychedelic era.

This particular story was the last story to feature Herbie in the anthology comic, Forbidden Worlds. Herbie moved into his own book after this story.

A couple of things really worked in Herbie, the aforementioned bizarre storylines--unlike anything else being published--and the wonderful solid artwork of Ogden Whitney. Somewhere I read that Whitney, who is apparently now deceased, was an alcoholic, but I've been unable to trace that story. If he drank he didn't drink and draw, because studying Whitney's inking is a study in a rock-steady hand.

Most, if not all, of the articles about Herbie usually have looked at the book from a strictly literal viewpoint. In other words, they have just accepted the fact that Herbie could walk in the air, knew all sorts of famous people, could talk to animals, or as in this story, could descend to hell and beat Satan. Perhaps Herbie had a form of autism and was prone to hallucinations. I don't think Hughes wrote it that way, nor did Whitney (who reportedly based Herbie on himself as a boy) draw it that way. But that's what it looks like to me.

In this particular story, "Herbie Goes To The Devil," Herbie not only sells his soul to the devil, he acts in the movie Cleopatra* with Elizabeth Taylor, and more importantly knows everyone, knows how to handle every situation, and can walk on air. Not bad for a "fat little nothing," as his verbally abusive father calls him. But what if Herbie is hallucinating? The story is straightforward up to this panel, where Herbie is sitting in class, "thinking." To me it's almost the best panel in the story because Whitney has, with very subtle drawing, indicated that Herbie is spacing out. After that I consider the rest of the story to be pure hallucination. Trust me on this. I know what I'm talking about.**



From Forbidden Worlds #116, 1963:

On another matter, I'd be surprised if editor/writer Hughes didn't get some feedback from conservative Christian groups, if any of them were reading comics, that is. The storyline using the devil as a funny character seems almost sacrilegious to people who would have Satan, "the adversary," as part of their theology. He's handled in this story in a very flippant way. But then, since we know now that Herbie is hallucinating, even Satan can act any way that Herbie wants him to act. After all, it's Herbie's fantasy, and we're just looking in.

*In the early 1960s the movie, Cleopatra, was a scandal-plagued, costly production in the grand scale of that era's blockbuster movies. Elizabeth Taylor, married to singer Eddie Fisher (after "stealing him away" from Debbie Reynolds in another scandal), was having an affair with co-star Richard Burton, whom she later married. So the production was a natural to feature on the cover of a Herbie comic book. After all, it was on the cover of every other magazine of the time as well. It also might have gotten the interest of conservative groups who'd wonder why Taylor, considered an adulteress and condemned from the pulpit, was featured on the cover of a comic book sold to children.

**Update, May 14, 2014: When I wrote this post in 2007 I immediately got a couple of e-mails, now lost, that took me to task for the autism remark. It was not classy, I know. I was attempting a joke. At the time I was surprised people took it serious. Additionally, ne reader pointed out to me that Herbie was not hallucinating. I agree. But for some reason saying he was seemed like a good idea at the time, and still does. But take it as a joke. After all, I know that comic books are reality and autism and hallucinations are fantasy.

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Number 156


Getting Graphic


It Rhymes With Lust from 1950 is widely considered as the first of what we now call graphic novels. It was published by St. John, written by Arnold Drake and Lesley Waller under the pseudonym of Drake Waller, and drawn by one of the star artists of the golden age, Matt Baker.

Not so well known is the follow-up to this experiment in "Picture Novels," The Case Of The Winking Buddha by Manning Lee Stokes, illustrated by Charles Raab. I found a stack of these at my druggist. They sat near the magazines for a couple of months before I finally gave in and bought one. I wasn't all that impressed with it and it ended up in a box with other oddball items from my collection.

I should qualify it: It Rhymes With Lust would be the first American graphic novel. In December, 1969, I found the Tintin graphic novel, Explorers On The Moon, on a bargain table at a department store, and picked it up for under a dollar. It was the edition published by Western Publishing, also publishers of Gold Key Comics.


When I read it I wasn't all that impressed by the 1954 story, which is hackneyed, but I loved the format. When this was originally published in America in 1960 I don't think people were ready or willing to pay $1.95 for what looked like a comic book, even one in a more deluxe format. A few years later when Asterix found his way to America and Tintin was available again comics had gained more acceptance as acceptable literature for adults and even for children, and parents were more willing to pay the price for a more quality book.

In the early 1970s, thanks to the Graphic Story Bookshop in Culver City, California, I was able to pick up some really great graphic novels, Valerian, Lone Sloane, and this book by Greg and Hermann, part of their Bernard Prince series. I am still knocked out by the dynamic art, and wonder if it has ever been reprinted in English.

At that time in the early 1970s I expected American comics to collapse at any moment; distribution channels were disappearing. Less stores were willing to sell comics because they were a nuisance. They cost 15¢ with low profitability, kids stood around and read them without buying, and they took up valuable display space.

Just before the independent comic book stores took up the slack it looked like comic books as we had known them since the 1930s would be gone. The French had anthology comics coming out every week with serial chapters, printed on slick paper with beautiful coloring, and were then collecting the serials into graphic novels. When I saw the French graphic novels I thought, wouldn't this be a great idea! Legitimize them, collect comics into these deluxe format books. But naw, this is America…readers expect a cheap product and won't pay more for a comic book. Another example of my lack of foresight.

I notice now that most bookstores devote a whole section to graphic novels, and especially manga. I see something I haven't seen in years: I see kids, usually teenagers, sitting in bookstores actually reading them. I hope some of them are buying them as well. Manga seems really popular with young people. I'm not a manga fan, but around the time I bought the books from Graphic Story Bookshop I also bought a couple of Japanese "graphic novels," reprints from their original comic books. This is my favorite. Isn't it the character we Americans know as Gigantor, who had a TV cartoons series a la Astro Boy and Speed Racer, in the mid-1960s?


I don't like all graphic novels, but there is enough variety to insure I can find something I like.

America's comic heritage is exceptionally rich, but it has been people from other countries who have paved the way and shown us that heritage shouldn't just be left to rot in cheap, disposable formats. Which reminds me: has anyone ever given the Pogo reprint books of the 1950s the credit they deserve as graphic novels? Yes, they were collections of daily comic strips, but edited and composed so as to make a "novel." They were sold for a dollar and even at that price were successful beyond anyone's expectations.

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X Marks the Spot

In 1963, Marvel really got hopping. For September of that year, they turned out not one, but two new superhero teams. The first, The Avengers, was made up of the heroes they had launched to that point, including Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, and the Hulk. The second group, therefore, had to be newly created. Rather than give them separate origins, Stan and Jack came up with a new concept for superheroes: They had all been born that way. They were mutants, members of "homo superior", as compared to homo sapiens.

Here's the cover:



The Flyboy is The Angel, originally Warren Worthington III. Although this issue does not reveal much more about him than that he can fly and wears a harness while in street clothes that hides his wings, the name is clearly intended to give us an image of a wealthy young preppie.

The big-footed gentleman on the trapeze is The Beast, real name Hank McCoy. He's something of a monkey-boy, capable of bouncing around at will and using his feet almost like hands. He's also a sesquipedalian, somebody who never uses a simple word when a six-syllable term will suffice.

The laser guy is Cyclops, introduced in this issue as "Slim" Summers although later stories use his given name of Scott. Although it is not apparent in the first issue, Summers is the leader of the team when away from their home base.

The gal in the background looking like she's riding a surfboard is Jean Grey, alias Marvel Girl. Her power is here described as "teleportation" although in fact it is more telekenesis as later stories will acknowledge. Jean is the source of some of the friction in the group, as everybody (except one) is attracted to her.

The lone holdout from the Jean Grey admiration society (at least in this first issue) is Iceman, shown throwing snowballs above. Bobby Drake is the youngest of the X-Men at only 16.

The villain is Magneto, certainly one of the most durable villains of the Marvel Silver Age. He too is a mutant, but an evil mutant determined to take over the Earth as its ruler.

Not shown is the regular leader of the X-Men, Professor Xavier. Although confined to a wheelchair, he possesses a superior mind, capable of telepathy at great distances.

The X-Men were destined to become one of the great teams in comic book history, although that may not have been obvious at first. In fact, they did not survive to the end of the Silver Age, being cancelled after issue #66, March 1970. But they would return in the mid-70s with different members and become extremely popular.

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Number 155


Jet Powers Fooled by Fleebs!


"The Interplanetary War" is the final story from Jet #3, published in 1951 by ME Comics. As with the rest of the Jet Powers series, it was written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Bob Powell.

Issue #3 started out with the near-destruction of our planet by a cosmic dust storm, but that fact isn't mentioned in the following three stories. When I post the stories from Jet #4 you'll see that both the first story and this story from issue #3 are continued. It's an odd way to continue something…you'd think they'd devote a book to each storyline individually, but apparently that wasn't the way they did it at ME Comics in 1951.

"Interplanetary War" begins with some Martians hunkering down against their Venusian enemies, the "white slugs," as the Martians call them, and "Fleebs," as the Venusians call themselves.

This is a screwy story and I won't ruin it for you by breaking it down into its composite pieces, but to me it looks like a whole lot of plot crammed into eight short pages. Su Shan, Jet's live-in lady-love, shows up in four panels, but Jet leaves her at home in his lab. He makes it to Mars--in two days, yet!--by himself, mistaking the Venusians for the Martians. Just for the record, the most jarring panel to me in the whole story is the one with Jet sitting with his Fleeb "host" at what looks like a coffee-shop table, eating lunch, with musical accompaniment. I'm not sure what author Fox could have said in his script to indicate the action in this panel: "Jet is having a sitdown lunch with the Fleebs. Waiter serves, and Fleeb with mandolin plays in background." This panel is oddball, even for this story. Jet seems to communicate very well with the good-guy Martians when he finally finds them. The Fleebs used a translation device. I don't see him using one with the Martians.

Ah, but I wasn't going to break it down, was I? As is true with the rest of the contents of Jet #3, the printing is bad, blobbing up in spots and washing out in others. It's not my scanning, folks…it's some long ago printers who didn't care about what they printed or what it looked like.

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Silver Age Comic Book Advertisers

This is another post, like my Batman and Guns post, that will be regularly updated as I come across interesting stuff to add to it. To most of us comic readers, the ads were generally an annoyance, since it meant one less page of story and art. But some of the ads were well-designed or featured genuinely interesting products, and I am going to comment on those.

First up is Ideal's Motorofic Action Highway set. As you can see, the story (as found in Detective 381, November 1968) is told in comic book fashion, with lots of excitement:



Now that just sounds cool, and according to this website, it was (and is). The set shown above is the "Highway 97" version. I especially liked this discussion of the flagman:

This accessory will stop a vehicle, and allow a flagman to 'cross' in front, then allow the vehicle to proceed. Ingeniously done with a hidden turntable and magnets. The extra fun of the item comes from its own inherent lack of precision: Occasionally the vehicle runs over the obnoxious flagman.

Uniroyal had a brand of car tires called Tiger Paws. Here's a neat little animated commercial from around 1968:



The brand was successful enough that they decided to sell it to kids as well, for their bicycles:



I believe the art on that is by the famed EC artist, Jack Davis. An aside here: Bicycle tires can matter. I was out riding one time with a couple friend who were much better riders than I. But we started riding up this muddy hill and I passed them with ease. As I did, one of the other riders exclaimed "Holy smoke! Look at all that mud coming off that tire!" As it happened, I had a Mud Dawg tire on the back, and it was indeed shedding mud like water off a duck's back.

A ration of Grog for the kiddies?



Here's one of the odder products advertised. A dinosaur that grows its own tail, that you can then plant and watch grow into a beautiful shade tree? And it grows another and another?

Of course, the reality turned out a bit different:

My folks mounted Grog on an upright support of our backyard patio and I filled his teensy tail-hole with soil and planted the seed. I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Maybe I hadn't been watering Grog's tail enough; after all, didn't "succulent" plants need lots of water? So, instead of the eyedropper I was using, I used a small paper cup to water the plant. It immediately overflowed the miniscule receptacle, washing all the soil and seed right out of Grog's tail-indentation! I never did find that seed (it never grew out of the backyard lawn, that's for sure) and Grog soon became another of those items buried in the garage, never to be seen again. Grog was a disaster and a rip-off, but he taught me about mail-order toys from comics, and probably discouraged me from throwing away good comic-buying allowance for such things as those "giant dinosaur balloons" and other such junk available in comic book ads.

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Number 154


Hang 'em High


I heard recently that Captain America died. I don't buy new comics, and haven't for several years so I don't know anything about what direction the Captain America comics have taken. Actually, I haven't cared since the 1960s, but that's beside the point. The point is, Superman "died," Robin "died," and for all I know, Magilla Gorilla "died." They are imaginary characters in an imaginary world, so dry your tears, fanboys.

'Way back when, having a comic book character die was unheard of, which is why when The Comet, a second banana character in Pep Comics died, it was a real big deal. Second banana or not, comic book characters were invincible: they got out of impossible traps, bullets bounced off them, they foiled the most dastardly plots and fought (successfully) with the world's most insidious super villains. And back in World War II they had some real villains to fight.

After his death along came The Comet's brother, a vengeful character called The Hangman. He starred in his own comic book series in the early 1940s, and was quite successful. His brother, The Comet, didn't make it to his own title, but The Hangman did. Here's an introductory page from the inside front cover of Special Comics #1, Winter, 1941-42.



Some things I like about these early issues of comic books from the MLJ line, which morphed into Archie Comics a couple of years later, are the wild plots and the action. They cleaned up their comics after awhile, but in these earlier issues the exploitation of violence is prevalent. It was the kind of thing that started the early campaigns against comic books, but it also brought in a lot of readers.

In this story from Hangman #2, Spring, 1942, Hangman fights with a sinister Nazi villain, Captain Swastika. Nazi villains were often presented as comic opera characters, or old-time vaudeville foils with thick fake accents, big lips and bulbous noses. You can tell who Captain Swastika is because he wears a hood and shirt emblazoned with swastikas. The costume ended at the waist. The ensemble was continued with blue serge pants, white socks and blue shoes. In addition to his sartorial sins, Captain Swastika was also a real stone killer. As an addicted comic book reader you just know he'll get his ass kicked by The Hangman. After all, The Hangman had his own comic book, and this was story number one in issue number two. You could be assured that unlike his brother, The Comet, he'd live long enough to see Page 64.

The artwork is credited to Al Camy.

Click on the thumbnails for full-size images.

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