Cover by Vin Sullivan
'Sir Loin of Beef' has been renamed to 'Don Coyote', for reasons I cannot fathom. The strip remains almost exactly the same, except for the main character getting a name change, and his sidekick Cowhide being renamed Hamburger.
On a similar note, 'Sagebrush 'n' Cactus' (a cowboy humour strip) is now called 'Cal 'n' Alec', which is a vastly inferior name. Again the strip is pretty much unchanged. Both renamed strips are by Bill Patrick, which can't be a coincidence.
An adaptation of the novel 'She' by H. Rider Haggard begins in this issue. It's illustrated by Sven Elven, who seems to be the go-to guy for novel adaptations. This one has a lot of the tropes of adventure fiction of the time - jungles, hidden tribes - but I gather that Haggard's work was massively influential in this genre.
'The Golden Dragon' is a new strip by Tom Hickey. It's set around Mongolia, and as such it's loaded with the casual racism of the time.
There's very little of Steve Carson in 'Federal Men' (by Siegel and Shuster), but the one panel he's in shows him belting someone across the mouth with a gun. Even without Steve this is the most insane strip yet, as a bunch of criminals in jumpsuits and gas masks drive a gigantic tank through Washington, blow up the Capitol Building and hold the president at gunpoint. All of these events happen in just two pages; suck on that Bendis! This is by far my favourite serial at the moment, and proof that Siegel and Shuster had more to offer than Superman.
Just found your site now, and I know commenting a few years after the fact is weird, but I thought I'd explain the random name changes. At around this time two former employees of National went to form their own comics company, which produced "The Comics Magazine #1" using unpublished back-stock from National. To this day it is a mystery how they got the comics and the right to publish them, though it has been suggested that they took the intellectual property in lieu of pay owed them. At any rate, they continued publishing these comics (including Sir Loin, et al) often with the original artists on board. National, meanwhile, also continued publishing the strips with new names and artists. What makes this even more bizarre is the case of Dr. Occult. A finished story was printed in Comics Magazine but was renamed "Dr. Mystic" (clever)- and then the second and subsequent chapters wound up back in More Fun where they belonged. So, any kid who regularly read More Fun would have found himself very confused to find a story that apparently started with Chapter Two- and no explanation of where chapter one went!
ReplyDeleteLoving this site- at one point I considered doing the same thing, but I realized that 77 years worth of comics would take over three years at the rate of a month's comics each day-and a month of even just DC Comics in recent years would be over 50 comics a day. I'm trying to figure out how you're working this out while still having time to earn a living, have a social life, and occasionally read something other than comics.