Number 1004





There's a Riot goin' on!





I'm showing you all of the comic content from Atlas Comics' Riot #6, from 1956, because it's great. It's got top artists: Severin, Maneely, Everett, De Carlo. It's got sharp, funny stories: "Quiet Burp," "Loona the Jungle Girl," "Pascal the Rascal."



Atlas Comics of this era can be, in my opinion, uneven. But with stories running to three, four or five pages if it isn't as well written or well drawn you're soon on to the next one, and hopefully it'll be better. With this issue it's all good.

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Number 738


Dandy Dan D's ditzy deb


Dan DeCarlo certainly could draw pretty girls. Over the period of several decades in the comic book business cute young women were his stock in trade. He made it look easy, this uncluttered cartoony style of his.

In the 1950s he teamed up with Stan Lee to do a comic book version of the radio/TV comedy hit, My Friend Irma. How funny it is depends on your tolerance for this style of humor. Irma begs the question: how dumb is a dumb blonde? Sometimes I skip the dumb jokes and just look at the cute girls. This story, and the single pagers that follow, are from My Friend Irma #12, from 1951.

I have posted some other My Friend Irma material by DeCarlo in Pappy's #138 and Pappy's #289.

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None betta than Jetta!

Craig Yoe has come out with yet another fantastic book, this time collecting the three obscure issues of Jetta in his deluxe Dan DeCarlo's Jetta. Jetta, this time a smart redhead rather than a dumb blonde, is a cute and perky teenager in a comical vision of the future..

Except for the futuristic accoutrements, Jetta's world in high school is like the 1952 world, when she was drawn. Boys still ask girls on dates, they still take girls to the drive-in, only the drive-in is in the sky, and the jalopies the boys drive are rocket ships.

The dialogue is loaded with what passes for future teenspeak. Jetta is a "space pigeon" to her boyfriend; another guy is a "stratojerk" to Jetta. Jetta tells her boyfriend, Arky, he's "cooking with super-atomic radiation!" You get the idea.

In the book the question is asked, did Jetta have something to do with the later Hanna-Barbera cartoon, The Jetsons? It's tempting to think so. Perhaps some of the designers of The Jetsons might have seen Jetta, but it's just as likely that The Jetsons was a logical and comical extension of that "future world" posited during the 1940s and '50s, when the 21st Century seemed so far away, and the air over cities would be full of personal commuter helicopters and flying cars, and we'd all be wearing anti-gravity belts.

Dan DeCarlo's artwork is perfect for the subject material, and Jetta herself is as cute as any of his pretty girl creations. Several current comic artists and cartoonists contributed their versions of Jetta to Yoe's book, and as skillful as many of these artists are, my attention is on DeCarlo's original material.

Dan DeCarlo's Jetta was a bright little shining moment in comic book history, and we all need to thank Craig Yoe for making it available to us. Highly recommended.

Dan DeCarlo's Jetta, "The Good Girl Art Library", edited and designed by Craig Yoe. IDW Publishing, 2010. Hardbound, 8 3/4" x 11 1/4", 113 pages on heavy book paper, full color comic reproductions from the original comic books. $21.99.

You can order from Amazon.com or Bud Plant's Art Books.

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Number 289

Dan D.'s dumb blonde

"Stan and Dan," Stan Lee and Dan De Carlo, do some funny stuff with the radio/TV dumb blonde, Irma Peterson, in this issue of Atlas' My Friend Irma. It's a coverless copy, so I don't know the number, but it's from the early 1950s. The vaudeville-style jokes come fast, and De Carlo's artwork is always excellent.

The My Friend Irma radio and television series lasted several years, and featured Marie Wilson as Irma. There were even a couple of movie versions. You can read more about the series here.

I posted another story from this issue in Pappy's #138.

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Number 177


Dan DeCarlo's Brain!


The late Dan DeCarlo is a much-admired and well-liked artist from the post-war to 1990s. His main body of work is for Archie Comics, specifically his Betty and Veronica, but including his own creations, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats.

The Brain, a funny comic by DeCarlo, was published after the Comics Code was instituted, and was one of ME's last comics before its demise. It ran for seven issues, and had a couple of reprint issues from IW Comics a couple of years later. There is a Rube Goldberg-element to the strips, included in some very funny gag pages, and the cover. (Click on cover picture for full-size image.)
 Benjamin Bang is The Brain, a smart kid full of inventive ideas. You know, like I wanted to be! The thing I didn't want to be was a pinhead, which unfortunately is how Benjamin looked. You wonder why his parents didn't notice. This particular fantasy story appeared in The Brain! #6, January 1958.

The usual bread-and-butter of DeCarlo's career is missing, the pretty girls. Benjamin's mom is pretty, but she hardly counts. I mean, who has fantasies about somebody's mom? If you do, I don't want to know. Click on the Dan DeCarlo link below to see a DeCarlo/Stan Lee story from an old My Friend Irma comic.

Back to The Brain, I like the outer space plot, I like Benjamin's friend, Dinky, who sports a fedora, large glasses, short pants and a bowtie. I didn't know any kids in the 1950s who fit that description, although Benjamin is built like I was, wears clothes like I did. All that is different is my head didn't come to a point, but if you talk to people who knew me fifty years ago they might disagree with that.

This issue appears to be entirely sponsored; only one advertiser, Compix, and the products available are all geared to a 9-year-old reader. I'm sure Compix was a company either owned by the publisher, or had some sort of business arrangement. I've included a page advertising the Electronic Man, "the latest brainstorm from The Brain!" I wonder if anyone ever sent away their $2.98 (plus 45¢ for postage!) and played in this weird-looking cardboard contraption.

The Brain is typical DeCarlo. It's well drawn, fast-paced and funny. It's just missing the pretty girls, and that might be the reason it went only seven issues. Maybe if Benjamin had a foxy older sister, and her girlfriends, and they were featured on the covers, it might have appealed to the older male readers DeCarlo's other books appealed to. Ah, but I can only review and show what was published, and not what I think should have been published.














I've posted some stories from pre-code ME Comics, all of the four issues of Jet by Bob Powell, and some Ghost Rider stories by Dick Ayers. Check on the link below for ME Comics to see what's been on Pappy's previously.

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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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