Number 1235: “Release the kraken!” The last Whiz

This is the final posting of our Fawcett week.

Captain Marvel's last adventure in Whiz Comics came in issue #155, cover dated June 1953. There would be more of Captain Marvel Adventures (the last issue, #150, had a cover date of November, 1953), but Whiz Comics, the Old Number One, the first comic book in a long string of comics under the “A Fawcett Publication” colophon, was finally cancelled. I'd like to know if the Captain Marvel comics were making money up until the Superman verdict. I assume they were.

By that time in 1953 horror was big in comics, and Fawcett's titles and covers reflected that. Whether the stories were genuinely horrible isn't the point, they were aiming at the monster crowd.

In his final Whiz, Captain Marvel faces the kraken, a monster out of classical mythology.

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Number 889


Ibis and Taia into the maelstrom


Despite sharing its title with the famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe, this is an Ibis the Invincible story, and Ibis has a couple of things the protagonist of Poe's story didn't have: a babe like Princess Taia and a vibrating Ibistick.

It's also illustrated by the remarkable Kurt Schaffenberger, who does his usual fabulous job, even considering the bad guys are cartoon turtles.

From Whiz Comics #99, 1948:

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Number 621


The Last Whiz


Whiz Comics, which had been a top seller for Fawcett Comics from its first appearance in 1940, went out with a whimper, not a bang--not even a Whizbang*--in 1953. After more than a decade, a protracted lawsuit from DC Comics claiming Captain Marvel was a copy of Superman, and low sales in the comic book industry in general, Fawcett got out of the comic book business. Whiz Comics #155, with its lead Captain Marvel story drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger, was the last issue.

I thought back to how many comics I followed that suddenly just didn't appear anymore. There was no way a kid had knowledge of what was canceled, so I would check the stands, hoping there would be another issue. Back in 1953 there were many Captain Marvel/Marvel Family/Fawcett Comics fans who wondered what happened. They had to wait until DC Comics licensed the Fawcett characters and started republishing them in 1974. Unlike the quiet, unannounced way the Marvel Family of comics went out, they were revived with a lot of advance publicity from DC. Shazam! #1 was a collector event, ensuring a sell out.

*Captain Billy's Whizbang, a jokebook started after World War I by William "Captain Billy" Fawcett, was the foundation of the Fawcett Publishing Company.

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Number 472


The Talking Gorilla


The often told story is that someone at DC Comics noticed that they sold more copies every time a cover of theirs featured a gorilla.

I think this is a subject for psychologists to figure out, but apparently a lot of comic book readers are hot for gorillas. Well, gorilla-lovers, try to control yourselves because I have a talking gorilla story for you. It's from Fawcett's Whiz Comics #103, 1949.

The artwork is uncredited, but looks like a very young Kurt Schaffenberger did it, or at least had a hand in it. Lo-Kar the gorilla knows, but at least for now he ain't talkin'...

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Number 377


The Ibistick vibrates!


Ibis was a popular character from Fawcett's Whiz Comics, even earning his own comic book. Ibis was a prince of Egypt who had a magic wand called the Ibistick, fighting evil with white magic.

This particular Ibis story comes from Whiz Comics #54, from 1944. That's two Whiz Comics stories I've posted in a week or so and both of them are crazy! You have to read this one to believe it: sorcery, a flying head, animating dead bodies. And the ending would've done fine in a horror comic just a few years later. You also get classic dialogue from writer Otto Binder like, "Hold my wand, Taia! there are times when plain manhood is called for!" "O Prince! He is so big and powerful!" I don't know about you, but when I read hot stuff like that my Ibistick vibrates.

This is also from one of the worst condition comics I own, and that's saying a lot, since the Pappy Crappy Comics Collection has a lot of bad condition books and loose pages. This particular comic was part of a bunch of 1943-44 comics I bought some years ago, rescued from an old house, stored for years by a coal furnace. The comics had gotten brittle, brown and the outer wraps were inundated with particles of coal. The scanning is a story in itself because as I put each page on the scanner board it tore away at the fold from the page it was attached to. It was all I could do to keep the whole thing from falling into jigsaw puzzle-size pieces, as happened to the upper corner of page 9. After scanning I was able to carefully put the whole thing back into its bag, but I'm afraid to ever take it out again for fear that what I'll have in my hands is a pile of coal-dusted confetti.

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Number 372


Lance O'Casey's magic lamp


According to the Grand Comics Database, this Lance O'Casey story from Whiz Comics #103, November 1948, reintroduced the character after being missing in action for 50 issues. Maybe the public hue and cry: "Bring back Lance! We want Lance!" was so loud that the publishers and editors at Fawcett Comics put out an edict to reinsert Lance into Whiz Comics. Probably not. More likely it had to do with paper shortages during the war, or maybe in 1948 they needed some filler...who knows? Whatever happened, this story doesn't present any backstory for the character, it just charges headlong into an adventure regarding a magic lamp.

This is also one of those screwball stories that makes paleontologists go wild. The time dating...dinosaurs 10,000 years ago? makes it appear the writer didn't do much research. Or any research. Of course, the professor, the character who guesses they are 10,000 years in the past also says he can understand the "pre-men" spoken language because it's "similar to the language on the lamp." Somebody check that "professor's" credentials. What university did he graduate from?

Carbon dating aside it's an entertaining story, well drawn by an anonymous artist.

*******

Here's some other fun stuff from this issue of Whiz. The Captain Tootsie is a crossover advertisement, the only time I've seen that in this series by C. C. Beck.

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