Number 1484: Swastika over New York!

The Boy Commandos spent the World War II years kicking Axis butt, and in the postwar era they spent at least part of their time kicking surviving Nazi butt. Nazis were a great subject for comics — and fiction in general — in those years directly after the war. In real life many top Nazis had escaped justice after the Allied victory, and there were always those persistent rumors that Hitler was still alive.

“Swastika Over New York” is from Boy Commandos #29 (1948). Art is by Curt Swan and Steve Brodie, according to the Grand Comics Database...which also makes a guess the story is by France Herron.

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Here is another postwar Boy Commando story, this time about Hitler. Click on the thumbnail.

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Number 848

The runner-up

Tomahawk #107, from 1966, is the runner-up to tomorrow's 2010 Thanksgiving Turkey Award, when I present the most oddball comic book story I've read all year. I immediately picked up on the cover, a giant purple gorilla with headband, feather, bow and arrow. I felt this was a good candidate for the award.

Tomahawk (Tom Hawk), raised by Indians, began appearing in Star-Spangled Comics in 1947, and in his own comic in 1950. As Don Markstein writes in Toonopedia.com:

. . . all through the late 1950s and early to mid '60s, Tomahawk fought gigantic tree men, miraculously-surviving dinosaurs, mutated salamanders, and other menaces that seem somehow to have escaped the history books. There was even a giant gorilla among them, and putting a gorilla on the cover was also a contemporary trend at DC.

At the time I just didn't find these contrivances very interesting. Until the last few years, that is, when I started reading some of the crazy DC comics I'd completely skipped over during my Marvel Comics phase of the early to mid-'60s.

Two DC veterans did the story, France "Eddie" Herron wrote it, and longtime Tomahawk artist, Fred Ray, drew it. The reason it isn't the 2010 Thanksgiving Turkey Award winner is because during this era of DC Comics you could point to many of their comic books and find something as goofy as this. Come back tomorrow to see the winner.

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