Silver Age Trivia Video

Mark Waid versus some fans from a 2005 convention:



What strikes me is how many of these have been answered here.

Bob Hope's landlady?

Villain who escaped from Doiby Dickle's taxi?

Lois Lane's parents?

If in Battle I Fail? (Quizmaster misstates the title as If in Battle I Fall).

Little old gooey monster me wants Wonder Girl mine to be?  Can't find it now, but I know I highlighted this cover a long time ago.

There are six parts of the video quiz in total, you can see the rest of the show by clicking here.

Incidentally, at least one of the answers in one of the parts was completely wrong; when asked who the Green Lanterns were freeing in JLA #21, the quizmaster (Craig Shutt, thanks to commenter Jonathan L. Miller) said no, it was not the two Flashes, it was the two Atoms:

And the question about the villain the JSA helped the two Flashes to defeat which lead to the reforming of the Society is mistaken; in fact the two Flashes only freed the JSA members at the very end, when Vandal Savage had already been effectively beaten.

Still and all, a terrific bit of entertainment, and as I have made errors in my own quizzes, I'm in no position to criticize.

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Number 1042


A Heap of art styles


In the Wikipedia entry on artist Ernie Schroeder, it's said that Schroeder had several careers during his 90 years. His credits in comics run from 1945 to his last job at Harvey Comics in 1958, less than a decade-and-a-half out of a long and productive working life.

Schroeder might be best known to comic book fans for his work on Airboy Comics,, where for about four years he drew both the title feature and backup strip, the Heap. It's also stated in the article that he wrote much of what he drew in this period. I've chosen a Heap story from the fourth to last issue of Airboy Comics as an example of Schroeder's craggy inking style, and because I like the monster the Heap fights.

Schroeder's first job in comics is reportedly "The Black Lagoon" from Buster Brown Comic Book #23 in 1945. I believe it was inked by Ray Willner, who also had a distinctive and illustrative style of inking, with shorter pen lines than the usual longer brush strokes of most comic book art.

This page from the story shows that it might have been Schroeder's first comic book penciling job, but he already had his composition and comic art storytelling skills down.

From Airboy Comics Vol. 10 No. 1, 1953:







I got the scans for these originals of The Raven from Heritage Auctions. They are attributed to Schroeder, and show at the time he was closer to Will Eisner's style than his later work at Airboy Comics. I like this story, penciled and inked but left unlettered and unpublished. The look of the strip puts it somewhere around the mid-forties era at Harvey. There were various boom and bust cycles in comics, and it may have been intended for a book that was canceled before the strip went to the letterer.

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The Curious Case of the Time Trapper

Faithful readers of the Legion of Superheroes must have been confused at this sequence, which appeared in Adventure #317:

Why confused? Well, it turns out that this was the first mention of the Time Trapper in a Legion story. At the very end of that story (which mostly did not concern TT) came a semi-explanation:

In the next issue, we got our first glimpse of the villain:

Note in particular his physical appearance there. Over the next year or so, we'd see more futile efforts by the Legion to break through:

The Time Trapper turned out to be working behind the scenes in that story, trying to find out the secret of the Legion's super weapon, the concentrator:

But it turns out that he does not have the real secret of the concentrator and flees into the future again. Amazingly, the Time Trapper story would not be resolved until Adventure #338, almost two years after he was first mentioned:

In that story, the Time Trapper has recruited an evil female, Glorith of Baalour, to help him doom the Legion. We get a strong indication of the plot here:

However, when she tries the trick on several members of the Legion, they do not regress in age past babyhood:

Frustrated in his plot to turn the Legion into blobs of protoplasm, he joins Glorith, after first letting Superboy and Brainiac 5 through the Iron Curtain of Time. He leaves them trapped in the future and sets about training the baby Legionnaires to rob for him:

Then he brings them to a planet where elements in the atmosphere will resume their devolution. But this causes problems, too:

But one of the babies has spotted the Time Trapper's ring, which is responsible for keeping Superboy and Brainiac 5 in the future. He switches it off, allowing them to join the group. The Trapper makes a proposal:

Brainiac 5 agrees, but there is a trick:

End of story? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it quite literally is the end of the Time Trapper in the Silver Age; he did not appear again outside of a hallucination sequence in Adventure 363. Which, if you think about it, is very odd. Here's this villain whose confrontation with the Legion had been built up over the course of two years, and yet they dispose of him in a single 16-page story? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I began digging for clues and speculating a bit. The first clue is that initial mention of the Time Trapper in Adventure #317. It appears obvious that there was supposed to be a Time Trapper story which appeared before that, but which was bumped for some reason. And if we look at the cover to Adventure #317, we get a pretty good second clue:

Speculation: Perhaps the Time Trapper story which appeared in Adventure #338 was intended to appear just before #317, but editor Mort Weisinger belatedly realized that this would give him two consecutive stories featuring Legionnaires turning into babies? This fits, especially when you consider that Adventure #338 was written by Jerry Siegel, while #317 was written by Edmund Hamilton. Weisinger could have instructed Hamilton (or artist John Forte) to include a couple panels mentioning the Time Trapper.

There are certainly still some problems with this speculation. For example, the story does not end with the Time Trapper in the future, creating the Iron Curtain of Time. But this objection is easily overcome; Weisinger simply had the ending of the story rewritten because now it took place after the events in #317, instead of before. Note as well that the story in Adventure #338 did not explain what secret the Time Trapper was supposedly concealing from the Legion in the future.

So my best guess is that the Time Trapper story that was supposed to be published before Adventure #317 was in fact the story that ended up being published in Adventure #338, with some changes. Incidentally, the Time Trapper himself may have been based on the Time Master, a similar character that appeared in Wonder Woman #101:

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Adventures into Witchcraft

I told you we'd be delving into the witchcraft this week, in fact, we're going to make an eerie adventure out of it! And here's a freaky fun one from Harry Lazarus and the Oct-Nov. 1952 issue of Out of the Night #5, highlighted by a menacing redheaded spirit and a cool, creepy twist on the voodoo doll.

And for those of you lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, Friday night, Oct. 28th, the Captured Aural Phantasy Theater are resurrecting another rousing night of pre-code horrors brought to screaming life on the stage. Witness jolting tales of terror from such great titles as Shock Suspenstories, Astonishing, Strange Mysteries, and many more surprises! Click HERE for more info!

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Number 1041


Al Fago's Atomic Rodent


Alfred "Al" Fago was a comic book editor, writer and cartoonist. The earliest strip I have attributed to him is from EC Comics Animated Comics from 1946, when EC was about kiddie comics and not walking corpses. I showed it in Pappy's #824. A little over a decade later, after spending much of his time at Charlton, Fago founded his own comic book line, which was comprised of ten issues of five different comics. Easy come, easy go...I showed you stories by Dick Ayers from one of Fago's comic books, Tense Suspense, in Pappy's #972.

Fago's most famous creation (for me, anyway) was Atomic Mouse.* Fago created the character in 1953 for Charlton. Atomic Mouse joined the ranks of other superhero cartoon mice: Supermouse and Mighty Mouse. Supermouse ate super cheese, and Atomic Mouse popped Uranium-235 pills. (The inset panel of A.M., with crazed expression, on the final page of this posting exclaiming "Gosh! I'll have to take a couple more pills!" should have disturbed Dr. Wertham.)

I wonder why mice became the good guys in animated cartoons and comics and cats were the bad guys? I depend on my cats to keep mice away, since I don't want them in my house. It saves me the humiliation of standing on a chair shrieking like a girl while a mouse does figure eights on my kitchen floor. I guess maybe it's the David and Goliath thing, the little guy prevailing over the big guy? I'm all for that, but mice? Vermin. Ugh.

Atomic Mouse's nemesis was Count Gatto, a cat of course. These two stories are from Atomic Mouse #4, 1953:














*He also created Atomic Rabbit.

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In 2007 I showed the first issue of Dell's Yak-Yak, illustrated completely by Jack Davis. Yak-Yak is a very oddball comic which is numbered as part of the Four Color series, at #1186. You can find it in Pappy's #200.

There were at least two editions of this issue, one with an ad on the back cover, and one without. Jim Gray has found the non-ad edition and has kindly shared a scan of the back cover. For you completists out there, and for all of us Jack Davis lovers, it's really nice of him to go to the trouble. Thanks, Jim!

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