Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Wednesday Worlds of Wonder CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Christmas in the Shoe"

Walt (Pogo) Kelly was Dell's go-to creator for light-hearted kids' stories...
...as this tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #201: Christmas with Mother Goose (1948) amply demonstrates!
Kelly was expert at doing sequels to classic fairy tales, often inserting them into situations never conceived of by the original storytellers, yet making them "feel" totally-natural, as if they were "lost" stories by the original creators!
Note: this was reprinted once, in a magazine, Western/Golden's Christmas Annual #8 (1975), 
This is the only issue which included comics.
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Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Holiday Reading Room RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER "Will a Stitch in Time Save Christmas?"

From the first Rudolph tale...
...we come to the last one, which almost didn't get published!
Scheduled for DC's 1978 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer tabloid, this Sheldon Mayer scripted/penciled & Tenny Henson-inked story seemed doomed to never see print due to the DC Implosion of 1978!
(In fact, the Rudolph stories weren't considered important enough to warrant inclusion in the HTF Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, created to establish copyright for the various cancelled books' material!)
As DC slowly recovered from the disaster, they instituted a revival of their digest-sized comics line, including a new book, The Best of DC, which was primarily reprint material.
But when a Rudolph-oriented issue, #4 (1980), was scheduled for Christmastime release, it was decided to include the unpublished stories to fill out the page-count!
Interestingly, the cover didn't promote the fact that new material was included in the previously-all-reprint title!
And, though the story was created for an oversized tabloid (10"x13.5"), it actually works in the tiny digest-sized (5"x6.75") format!
Please Support Atomic Kommie Comics this Christmas!
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Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
(a replica of the original 1939 book we re-presented on this blog!)

Monday, December 16, 2019

Monday Madness HUMBUG "A CHRISTMAS CAROL"

Here's one of the koolest adaptations of Dickens' classic story...
...and most people don't even know it exists!
Note: the interior pages were two-color instead of the usual comic book-style four color.
The next-to-last page of the story is from the one-color inside front cover, while the final page was the four-color back cover of the magazine!
Illustrated by Arnold Roth, it's never been established who wrote this tale from Humbug! #6 (1958)!
It could be Roth, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, or even all of them in a collaboration!

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Design of the Month "Bah, Humbug!"

Usually, each week, we post a limited-edition design, to be sold for exactly 7 days...
...however, we feel that this phrase is so concise, so important, that it should remain available to our audience for the entire month!
With Christmas approaching, let's celebrate with the most famous phrase of the man who personifies the Trumpian XMas Spirit ... Ebenezer Scrooge in a kool retro Victorian-era font!
 Available in either white/silver on dark items or red/green on white or light-colored items.

Saturday, December 14, 2019

HUMBUG!

Not just Scrooge's favorite phrase...
Art by Jack Davis
...for just over a year in 1957-58, it was a kool humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman after the cancellation of TRUMP, a magazine Kutzman intended to be a more adult version of MAD.
For their Christmastime issue, they, of course, adapted Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
See it here, on Monday...