Number 818

More of Bill Holman's inspired insanity

October already! The year just speeds by, doesn't it? Here we are in the tenth month and I still haven't done any of my New Year's resolutions! Oops, that's not true...a New Year's rez was to get back to the Bay Area and visit my buddy Dave Miller, he of Brit Rock By The Bay and David's Rock Scrapbook. It's been a few years since I visited one of my oldest friends, since we met 30 years ago this year. Mrs. Pappy and I are here now in California staying with Dave and his wife, Karen.

Like me, Dave is a big fan of Bill Holman's Smokey Stover. So these pages, from Dell Four Color #229, 1949, Smokey reprints from the mid-forties, are dedicated to Dave.

I did another posting of Smokey Stover pages in Pappy's #733.

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Before They Were Marvels

Reader Jeff Daugherty of Princeton, Kentucky, notes that many of the famed Silver Age characters from the House of Ideas debuted on the covers of Atlas Comics (Marvel's forerunner):







Jeff writes that he's been collecting comics since the mid-1960s. Great post!

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Number 817

City At the Center Of the Earth

*Glub* *Glub* ...here's yet another waterlogged tale from the Pappy files...in recent months we've gone to the Land Of the Lost and seen the origin of Maurine Maurine. Today we're going down under the ocean to an underground kingdom with the Boy Commandos from their comic, #29, from 1948.

The Boy Commandos, born with World War II, created by the super hot team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, faded by the end of the 1940s. Their comic book lasted only another seven issues after this, and they had lost their features in Detective Comics and World's Finest Comics. In 1972 reprints were made available in various DC Comics, as well as two issues of their own comic. This story is drawn by Kirby and Simon, and seems a rarity. At the time most of the stories were handled by other artists.

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