Mort Weisinger's Idea of Funny

What the? From Superboy #72 (April 1959):

Why would he put that postscript in there?  He had to know that there were plenty of Superboy readers who were still at the age where they believed in Santa.  It's hard to come up with a reason other than the obvious; that Weisinger was a first class jerk.

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Number 426


Santa Claus in trouble!


Ever have one of those nightmares? You're trying to go to work but you can't find your car, and while you're looking you're getting later and later, and things get more and more hopeless...I've had a few of those dreams. Santa Claus, at least in this story from Santa Claus Funnies #1, 1942, isn't having a nightmare; he can't find his sled and reindeer for real! On Christmas Eve, yet. Tsk. I guess he needs to get a better sled alarm system or something.


This is the first of four consecutive Thursdays featuring Christmas stories, finishing up on Thursday, December 25.

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Check out the classic "Santa in Wonderland" story featured in Pappy's #231 from 2007. It's a great story that got a lot of play around the Internet.

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Number 238

How Santa Got His Red Suit

It's Christmas Eve! Hope you boys and girls have been good this year, so Santa will give you what you want.

What Pappy wants is to give you are some good comics for Christmas, and here's a Walt Kelly strip from Santa Claus Funnies, Dell Comics Four-Color #61, December 1944. Santa, who doesn't wear his familiar red suit at the time, but dresses in his "gay costumes," goes on his yearly run, only to get sleighjacked by Jack Frost. Santa ends up with a bunch of naked little guys, who eventually get some clothes made from Santa's suit, and then make Santa the red suit we all know.

"How Santa Got His Red Suit" was reprinted two years later as the second of the March Of Comics giveaway series. The first three March Of Comics were by Kelly, which showed his popularity, even before his fame exploded into the mainstream with the Pogo comic strip five years later.

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Ho-ho-ho! As a bonus, here are a couple of Santa Claus covers from vintage issues of Galaxy Science Fiction I picked up a couple of years ago. Santa has an extra set of appendages in these gorgeous Ed Emshwiller illustrations. This unearthly Santa embodies the old saying, "Forewarned is four-armed."

Merry Christmas, everybody!

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Number 231



Santa 'shrooms



Santa meets Alice and goes down the rabbit hole in this story from Dell's Santa Claus Funnies #2, 1943. It's a clever reworking of the familiar Lewis Carroll story.The unknown artist also used Sir John Tenniel's classic illustrations as the basis for the Wonderland characters.

It's tempting to throw in a reference to Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit," magic mushrooms, Summer of Love, dancing naked in the park, psychedelics, hallucinogens…but that would be cheap and of course at Pappy's we don't go for the cheap, do we? No, we don't. Just because this story got me to pull out my old vinyl copy of Surrealistic Pillow doesn't mean anything, and don't infer anything from it.

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Number 227

Christmas with Ma and Pa Hubbard

Uh-oh. It's gonna be Christmas soon and me, the eternal procrastinator, tapping away on my keyboard writing this blog instead of shopping. ¢hri$tma$ ¢o$t$ big money, so I defer it as long as possible. Nowadays in order to spare the hassles of fighting crowds in stores I shop online. As I age it's almost as exhausting using my weakening eyeballs to read my credit card numbers as it is to walk through a shopping mall.

My eyes probably wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't spent my childhood reading comic books in the dark. I ruined my eyes on those damn funnybooks, just like Mom said.

But we were speaking of Christmas, and what's Christmas at Pappy's without the Christmas stories. This year we're starting out the season with wonderfully whimsical, and yet sentimental Walt Kelly and "Santa's Elves Meet Father and Mother Hubbard." It's from the all-Kelly Christmas With Mother Goose, published in 1945 as Dell Comics Four Color #90. Another story from this issue was posted in Pappy's #66.

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Number 72

Walt Kelly's Santa's Christmas Gift

…sniffle…sniffle…

...sob….

Oh, sorry. …sniff… You caught me boohooing and blubbering over this sentimental little Christmas story by the master cartoonist, Walt Kelly, from Santa Claus Funnies #2, 1943. This is a real tearjerker, folks. It even begins with a jerk! Jerk Frost, errrr, I mean Jack Frost, is a nasty twit who freezes up the forest, putting all of the critters and even the forest's human dwellers in a real bad way. Animals are starving; two kids and their sick mother shiver with cold and hunger in a little cabin.

I'll tell you before you start reading, you won't get through this without going through a box of tissues.

Well, it has a good ending. I mean, you didn't really think the kids were going to starve to death along with all of the forest animals, while Mom withered away with her indeterminate illness, did you? This is a Christmas comic book, after all.

There's a heroic pigeon in the story, too. Santa comes to the rescue...say, am I giving away too much, here?

And in the end…wait. Maybe you'd better read this whole story and then come back and I'll talk about the end. I'll wait for you.

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"Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla Wash, and Kalamazoo…" Oops. Caught me singing. After all, it is Christmas Eve. I've got Christmas presents wrapped and under the tree. I'm also rubbing my greedy little hands together in anticipation of getting some great comics goodies himself. I know I am because I picked 'em out!

As I was saying, in the end Santa takes off in his sleigh, with the hero pigeon by his side. He tells the pigeon he's going to Africa, Europe and America. Since this was a very dark era of World War II, one wonders if Santa had some knowledge the rest of us did not. Especially how to get around anti-aircraft guns and the Luftwaffe. But, we assume this story, although written and drawn during the war, did not take place during the war, but during a more placid time for Santa and the rest of the world.

It's a good story, just a little bit…sniff, sniff...sad. Be warned.

Oh, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all of you Pappy's readers. I hope you all got what you wanted.

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Number 69

COVERING UP: Great Covers Of Golden Age Comics: Santa Covers

One week until Christmas, gang! This is your reminder from Pappy that if you don't have that Christmas shopping done by now you'd better watch out, you'd better not pout, you'd better just get out! Spend the mon' and get it done, son.

That said, get back to the reason we're here. We want to show some of my favorite covers featuring Santa Claus. Since these comics were produced exclusively for younger children it's difficult to find any of them in really great shape, but all of these covers seem to have survived (mostly) the ravages of little fingers.

Walt Kelly was not only one of the greatest cartoonists of the Golden Age--or any age--he did some of the best covers. This is a cover that is somewhat atypical because Santa is drawn in a more realistic manner. It evokes Thomas Nast to me. But the rest of the cover, the toys and such, are purely Kelly. A really great cover from 1946. Click on the pictures for full-size images.In a similar vein is 1947's cover of Tiny Tot Comics by an artist named Burton Geller. I'm not familiar with this artist at all, and despite the subject similarities, compared to Kelly his art is crude. As all true EC Comics fans know, Tiny Tot Comics was produced by legendary comics publisher M. C. Gaines, who died and passed the company on to his son, Bill, who turned it into one of the best remembered and most loved comic book companies of all time. Also most notorious. Just a few years later, any pictures of Santa Claus produced by EC Comics would be of jolly ol' St. Nick carrying an axe.Everybody knows the song, "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," which is one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. Lots of merchandising was done, including his own comic book series from DC Comics, which ran for 13 annual issues from 1950 to 1962. The series was revived for a time in the 1970s using some reprints and new stories. I loved this comic book when I was a kid and it was because of the great artwork by a very underrated artist, Rube Grossman. This is Rudolph #1, from 1950, which features a book-length story of 48 pages.L. B. Cole was a great, and very collectable, cover artist of the 1940s and '50s, but his funny animal stuff is lacking something. Cole was much better at his more dramatic artwork, but he could really produce covers that sold comic books. I like this particular 1952 cover of Holiday Comics, not so much for his Santa Claus, but for its poster-like qualities, including the snow. It gives it, as my old college art teacher would've said, "thump."
By the late 1950s the Santa Claus we know best today was done by Haddon Sundblom, an illustrator who did yearly paintings of Santa holding Coca-Cola bottles. Those ads were so influential that they defined the costume and vision of Santa Claus. This cover from 1960, Dell's Four-Color #1154, is by an artist whose name I don't know, but who captured the Sundblom look. It's a great whimsical cover and I probably bought it off the stands because of the cover. When I look at the interior art I know I didn't buy it for that.

Next week, break out the Kleenex for a sentimental Walt Kelly Christmas tale.

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Number 66


Walt Kelly's Search For Santa


This is the third of five Sunday Pappy's leading up to Christmas Eve.

Even before the fantastic success of his comic strip, Pogo, Walt Kelly was a celebrated cartoonist. At least he was celebrated amongst those who paid attention to such things as funny animal and children's comic books, that is. There are a lot of adults who were buying comics like Dell's Four Color #90, Christmas With Mother Goose, in 1945, not just for their kids, but for themselves.

Kelly did his artwork on this book quickly, but skillfully. I think hardly anyone ever rose to Kelly's artistic heights of composition, penciling, lettering and inking, even when he hurried. He's in almost every Golden Age comic book fan's Top 5 of all-time greats for good reason.

The story, "Search For Santa," is a 5-page Christmas story using the Mother Goose characters, Little Miss Muffet and Peter Pumpkineater on a quest to find Santa. They encounter other Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme characters along the way, but also some fairy tale characters in The Three Bears. Throw in Santa Claus and some of Kelly's whimsy and even though the story is quite slight, it is all Kelly and well worth reading.

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