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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Reading Room: "COMICS" McCORMICK "Say KA-BANG!"

Say a magic word and become a superhero...
...it was an old trope in comics even during the Golden Age, as shown in this tale that combines several different heroes' shticks into one!
Is it just me or does this story from Holyoke's Terrific Comics #5 (1944) hint that the boy heroes of the Golden Age were less..."heroic" than their adult counterparts?
Written and illustrated by Ed Wheelan, who did over 300 stories during his career from 1938-1949, almost all of them as both writer and artist, it presents a number of typical cartoon stereotypes of the period including the "old maid" schoolteacher and the extremely-caricatured Black kid Ajax Johnson (though, to be fair, Ajax is shown as an equal to the other comic-loving boys in the story).
The main difference between "Comics" McCormick and it's rival series, SuperSnipe, is that "Comics" daydreams about interacting with comic characters, but SuperSnipe actually tries to do heroic deeds like capturing spies or rescuing kittens, but invariably screws up and ends up being grounded (or worse).
Written and illustrated by Ed Wheelan, who did over 300 stories during his career from 1938-1949, almost all of them as both writer and artist, it completes our run of Comics McCormack's adventures in Terrific Comics.
But it's not the final chapter in Comics' saga, as you shall soon see...

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Thanx for posting!