It's Out of Character for Jimmy Olsen... He's Actually Being AWESOME for a Change!

Some random panel goodness, starting with Action Comics #253!

Action #253 had one of many stories where a friend of Superman's developed super-powers of his/her own and used them to cause mayhem.  This wasn't always the worst thing, though.

Exhibit "A":

See?  There's a lot to like about super-powered evil Jimmy Olsen!

Meanwhile, from Pep Comics #52, we have some... interesting word choices from an infuriated Reggie Mantle: 

I'm not sure how I'm going to work that into conversation, but I will find a way.

Meanwhile, as is my favorite part of perusing old comics looking for cheap chuckles, I found an interesting bit of trivia.  Do you know what Reggie Mantle's dad did for a living that made him so rich?

Government!

And for some reason, the highway commissioner wore a robe and handed out penalties that appeared to be enforceable by jail time.  That seems like a pretty clear violation of Separation of Powers, but maybe they have a different system of government in Riverdale.

Later... 

Oh, Fatty.  Must you live up to the stereotype?

See you tomorrow!

I Am a Glamor Boy!

And we're back!  Hope everyone had a great break!  Let's get right back into some Fun With Out of Context Dialogue (tm!) courtesy of Golden Age Green Lantern #23!

That tickled me.  I'm going to go around saying, "I am a glamor boy," until the novelty wears off.  That is, until the novelty wears off for me, not the people around me.

Let's keep going!

Well, that's fair.  Now let's do one that sounds dirty dirty dirty!:

We love Fun With Out of Context Dialogue (tm!) around here!  It makes us feel so alive!

Meanwhile, here's what passed for exciting back in the day:

What's interesting is that World War freakin' Two was going on, but a portfolio of movie stars riding bicycles was "exciting."

Good to be back!  See you tomorrow!

HOOTIN' ZOOTS!

I plowed through several issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and while they weren't great, they didn't give me anything to go on, so back to the All-Flash Quarterly.  By now, it has been 14 issues and I didn't even realize that the Three Dimwits, pictured here in a gag that I found pretty dang hilarious:

are actually a thinly-veiled Three Stooges.

You may be wondering how I missed that.  Well, I miss obvious things, but I'll catch some obscure reference that'll have me laughing and no one else.  It's the same reason I can cook almost anything from scratch better than you've had in many restaurants, yet I can't make frozen waffles without them being either soggy or burned.  That's just how I roll.

Check out this ad for Thom McCann shoes:

I don't think you can be "trim" and "husky" at the same time.  When I was growing up, I wore a lot of "husky" clothes, and no one has ever accused me of being "trim." 

Anyway, check out poor Bill's love interest: 

That seemed to be a common theme back in the day. Not that there's any shortage of women these days who have the same attitude.  Yeah, I said it.

Lose her, Bill.  You'll thank me later.

There was a Captain Tootsie ad on the back, which is always interesting because of the C.C. Beck artwork.  Here we see the good captain, who is looking more and more like a blonde Captain Marvel all the time, teaching Rollo how to flash gang signs:

Meanwhile, here's a phrase I think needs to make a comeback:

HOOTIN' ZOOTS!

And there's a little premium to help you burn off all that nervous energy a Tootsie Roll will give you:

The fact that learning how to use signal flags might "help me later in life" tells me that someone wasn't very optimistic that the war was going to end any time soon.  I note that there's no indication they would send you the actual code to learn, so I guess you just walked around waving your flags haphazardly like an idiot.  It's not like they had Internet access to look these things up.

That's actually a pretty sad image... just walking around, half your teeth pulled out of your head from sticky Tootsie Rolls, waving little flags hither and yon.  No wonder comic book nerdlingers have historically had a hard time getting women.

See you Monday!

"Secretions of the Glands" are ALWAYS a Great Plot Device!

Thanks for bearing with me, everyone.  Work had really gone crazy for a while, but I think that things are starting to level out.  I hope you enjoyed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog.  I watched it for the first time over the weekend, and since it was put out by Joss Whedon of The Avengers movie fame (which, I'm embarrassed to admit, I still haven't yet seen but I totally will) I thought it was worth passing along.

 So I'm reading All-Flash Quarterly #6 and apparently I missed out that the three idiot henchmen in the last issue were going to be recurring characters.  They're called Winky, Blinky and Noddy and between that and their rhyming last names, they pretty much had to hang out together.

Like most Liberal Arts majors, they didn't have any marketable skills, so they decide to start a "personality building" business:

... which sounds ridiculous, until you realize that "life coach" is actually a thing now.

Apparently, this involves either being a compounding pharmacist, alchemy, or just the desire to drink whatever you can get your hands on:

That exchange reminded me of the last line of the opener to David Lee Roth's Yankee Rose video.  Is everyone old enough to remember that?

Oh, what the heck.  Here it is:

They played music videos on MTV when I was a kid.  Scarred me for life.

Anyway, the boys invent some kind of personality machine, that Gardner Fox explains in typical Gardner Fox detail:

And, as usual, I don't understand nary a word.  But I am going to work in the phrase "my emotions are rioting inside of me" at the next available opportunity.

And I'm not sure how this fit in, but the Flash  encounters a social worker who likes to take her work home with her:

I was a social worker once and I never actually took a child home with me.  I'm just saying.  That's a little odd.  As in "does Social Services know this woman is helping herself to a little orphan boy?" kind of odd.

Of course, things go wrong, but the fast-talking Winky, Blinky and Noddy are too clever not to buy themselves some time:

I would be the portly guy in the middle.  What do you mean we went to have ice cream?  I don't remember having any ice cream!

Hey!  It's time for some Fun with Out of Context Dialogue! (tm!)

Yes, the child said "gollywobbles."  And he says it a lot.  Nearly every panel in which he appears has that phrase, and I'm skeptical I can make that phrase popular.

But you know I'll try.

I looked it up, by the way.  This guy has a blog by that name, so someone else must have said it somewhere.  I saw that it may be a bastardization of the nonsense word "collywobbles" which is "a state of intestinal disorder, usually accompanied by a rumbling stomach."  Which, of course, makes it awesome.

That's not very American of you, Flash.  We're all about interfering with the life choices of others if we don't happen to agree with them.  That's as American as spray-tanning.

More on this story tomorrow.  Oh, did I mention that the machine started switching people's personalities with one another?  Like in Freaky Friday?  Yeah, that's happening.  That's probably important.  Sorry I didn't mention it before.

See you tomorrow!

Go A-Pirating Wednesday!

It's hard to believe that we're not going to talk about Roy Revenge, but we must move on!  On to All-Flash Quarterly #3!  But before we can read the comic, we have to get past some well-meaning attempt to get us to read "real" books:

I googled Josette Frank, and apparently she was quite the busy little bee when it came to figuring out what kids would read besides these funnybooks.  She passed away in 1989 at a respectable 96 years of age.

Anyway, I dutifully read her recommendations, ever mindful that the presence of this list in a comic book indicated someone other than my father felt that there were better things I could be reading, and I came upon this:

Ok, first?  "Go a-pirating" is going to be re-introduced to our modern vernacular.  I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it.

But what I really like about this review is how it just kind of wanes in enthusiasm by the end: Exciting!  Amusing!  .... eh, satisfactory.

Still, you've got to give the woman props on a life well-led.

Anyhoo, getting back to the comics: Since we apparently can't change the name of the comic to Flash Fights Roy Revenge Quarterly, which I think would have made gobs of money, we have a new bad guy in the form of Adam Addams.  He's basically a master of disguise, and I'm pretty sure he runs his own HMO:

Wow... don't just kill people, but mangle them as well?  I didn't know the Golden Age Flash attracted such hardcore badguys.

See? See?  This is why we need a single-payer universal healthcare system in the United States.  Crappy medical coverage leads to crimes against humanity.

Anyway, doctors go around hoping to pick off people who are on Medicaid, but the Flash gets there first:

Tsk.  Are you sure that was pre-approved, doctor?  Poison costs money.  I'm pretty sure you were only authorized by insurance to suffocate her with that pillow.

Now, here's an interesting bit of logic:

You just know that's a trick question, but what are you gonna do?  Anyway, here's the payoff:

Ah HA! You KNOW me!  THAT means you're no doctor!

What?  

Seriously, what?

I don't follow that line of logic at all.  Maybe the Flash is such a B-lister that real doctors don't have the kind of time or extra mental energy it would take to know who he was? I don't know, but I give you Exhibit "A", Mr. Smarty-Flash:

See?  Adam Addams is the worst bad guy of the bunch, and he doesn't know who you are!  So, it can't be that only bad people know who the Flash is, only that doctors can't know.

Hmmmmm... that's an interesting test to pull on your own physician.  Whip out a picture of the Golden Age Flash.  If your so-called "doctor" can identify him, s/he is clearly a fraud and you should immediately notify the appropriate authorities.

See you tomorrow!