Reading Room NORGE BENSON "Happy Boithday to Frosting"

As cold creeps once more over North America...

...let's be glad it's not as cold as Pluto, where stranded Earthman Norge Benson lives near turtlenecked penguins who sound and act like the Bowery Boys...

Illustrated by Al Walker, who spent his entire comics career at Fiction House, this tale from Planet Comics #14 (1941) takes the idea of "silly" up a notch as it presents a somewhat less snarky (though no less humorous) version of the "Earthman on Pluto" concept shown in the earlier Cosmo Corrigan strip, mixing alien versions of both Arctic and Antarctic animals with total disregard to anything even remotely resembling exobiology!

But it is fun, and that's all that matters!

RIP Gary Owens (1934-2015)

He was Space Ghost, Roger Ramjet, and the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In...

You may not know his face, but you cetatinly knew his booming voice!

Now he's gone...but his voice will live on...

Happy Valentines Day!

Love is Eternal!

It's Friday the 13th...Let's Have Some HORROR (and a little Sci-Fi)!

Here's a quartet of intro pages illustrated by Berni Wrightson...

...for DC 100-Page Super Spectacular #4 (1971)

Titled "Weird Mystery Tales", the reprint anthology featured brand-new art for the section headers with Berni himself as a "host" doing intros...

BTW, none of the headers has ever been reprinted!

So, unless you own this HTF issue, this will be the first time you've ever seen these pix!

And be here tomorrow when we present the book's text piece, a story with a large Wrightson illo!

Reading Room: LIFE STORIES OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS "Abraham Lincoln"

There's no better way to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday...

..than to read his life story.

Note: there are a few politically-incorrect panels referring to African-Americans as "Negro", which was the accepted term in the 1950s.

BTW, did you note that, at the top of the last page of the story, Grant and Lee have the wrong uniform colors?

Dell's never-reprinted Life Stories of American Presidents (1957) was both sold on newsstands and distributed to bookstores (where I found my copy in 1963), a rarity in those days.

Though the author is unknown, the artist who penciled and inked the entire 100-page cavalcade of Presidents from Washington to Eisenhower was John Buscema!