How Weird was Weird Comics? Part 2

For twenty issues, between April 1940 and January 1942, Fox Publications released an anthology series titled Weird Comics. The stories inside those pages were light on internal continuity, represented a wide variety of genres — including westerns, sci-fi and jungle action — and were produced almost exclusively under pen names (although creators Don Rico, Louis Cazeneuve and Joe Simon, to name a few, have their fingerprints over broad swaths of the titles).

There were seventeen features across the lifespan of Weird, some better than the others — but the real question is “How weird were they?” If Weird Comics is going to promise weird comics, then they better deliver!

In Part Two, it’s the futuristic Blast Bennet, the insidious Doctor Mortal, the explosive Dynamite Thor, the undersea adventurer Navy Jones and barnstormer Swoop Curtiss …

And they seem to be doing a great job.

BLAST BENNET by Spencer Allan
Appears in issues 1-9, 11-17

The “When” of Blast Bennett’s futuristic adventures is a little vague, but it’s clearly some time after the distant year of 1970 AD (A space pirate treasure map discovered in one adventure claims to have been buried around that time). Whenever it is, space travel is common and the celestial spheres of the solar system are open to exploration – and exploitation!

Give ‘im another one, he’s earned it.

The “Why” of Blast Bennett’s futuristic adventures is even more vague. Assisted by his nearly-incompetent kid sidekick Red, Blast travels the breadth of the width of the solar system for no particularly good reason except to get into fights.

Despite being armed with an “Explosion Gun,” and having all manner of futuristic weaponry available to him, Blast prefers his fists. Besides battering a plethora of creeps, crooks and cretins, Blast also takes time to knock out several monstrously large aliens, many large alien-y monsters, and robots of assorted sizes. It’s all for the greater good.

Blast’s adventures rarely rise above the standard science fiction adventure story of the day – an alien princess requiring rescue, some crooks hiding out on an asteroid, a monster menacing a meteor. Lest the remedial threats prove too easy for Blast, Red was always there to complicate matters with his baffling inability to do much right.

Despite the standard-issue sci-fi threats that monopolized his feature, Blast knows a few foes by name – a Zom here, a Karnak there. The most interesting villain is almost Ann Harper, a debutante turned space pirate, whose momentum is abbreviated when Blast locks her in a box.

Me at the self checkout lane.

While the strip was credited to “Spencer Allen,” it was – like many Weird Comics features – at least penciled by Don Rico. 

Despite being independent operators, Red and Blast eagerly join the Space Patrol in Weird Comics #13. “Gee! Now we’re cops!” exclaims Red. Keep it to yourself, kid.

How weird was Blast Bennet? An entertaining feature of Blast Bennet was the multiple attempts for the letterer to correctly spell “immensities” in the opening blurb of each story. Both “immenseties” and “emensities” make their presence known in different stories. This is probably why most science fiction writers opt for “vastness.”

Opening panel from “Dr.Mortal and the Manicure of Terror.”

DOCTOR MORTAL by Godfrey Clarke

Appears in issues 1-16

One of two long-running features in Weird Comics to feature a villain (see also Sorceress of Zoom), Dr.Mortal tells the tale of a mad scientist bent on world domination, and the stone-cold headaches that his niece Marlene and her fiancée Gary Brent cause him.

Mortal’s modus operandi is kidnapping innocent men off the street and turning them into monsters, for his own purposes. It’s made pretty clear that these kinds of antics led to Mortal being “kicked out of the medical profession,” according to more than one introductory caption. You don’t usually find out how mad scientists earned their PhDs…

When next-door neighbors don’t get along…

For the most part, Mortal is content to assemble lumbering, fanged brutes for his own purposes, but he often busts out a specialty model. 

For example, he jams a corpse filled with lion entrails into a steam bath and creates a ferocious Lion Man. On another occasion, he makes a “super-automaton,” which turns on him before being destroyed. 

He can shrink his foes to the size of insects, or enlarge insects to the size of men, and gives recaptured youth to old wealthy clients by transferring their minds into the bodies of young healthy victims, just to name a few of his proclivities. He’s like the Amazon.com of body horror.

His niece Marlene (who does, once or twice, refer to him as “Father”) frequently intuits that her uncle is up to no good, which is the cue for Gary and the police to scupper the old man’s fearsome fiddle-di-dees. This usually results in the apparent death of the Doctor. 

Consistently, in these moments, Gary will manfully clutch Marlene around the shoulders and say “we’ve surely seen the last of him,” only for Marlene to ponder “Or have we?” Some strips never get a finale, but this one’s got nothing but!

Oh, what makes you say that?

Mortal possesses remarkable flair, even for a mad scientist. On one occasion, in order to warn his niece and her fiance to stay out of his way, Mortal orders that Gary be attacked with a strong swat to the face by a monster henchman wielding a rubber stamp, resulting in the message “Keep out of my way … or die!” rising in red welts on Gary’s cheek, complete with Dr.Mortal’s signature.

“Now I can wreak my revenge on society” serves as Mortal’s colorful catchphrase, a triumphant exclamation which caps off his more successful experiments. When, in one adventure, he proves that his monster henchmen can breathe under water, for instance, he celebrates by declaring that it’s time to start his revenge against society. When he perfects a monster who can dig through the ground like a cartoon mole, same deal.

How weird was Doctor Mortal? While not exactly an exceptional piece of Golden Age storytelling, it's got inklings of a formula that works -- a little funny and a little terrifying. A story in which he injects a corpse’s memory into a gorilla is both absurd on the face of it and surprisingly creepy, as a for instance.

DYNAMITE THOR by Wright Lincoln

Appears in issues 6-7

Dedicated to “blasting the rackets to atoms,” demolitions expert Peter Thor uses his almost-supernatural skills with dynamite to fight crime as – Dynamite Thor, The Explosion Man!

You know what would fix that? Dynamite.

Bare-legged and maskless, Dynamite is sometimes portrayed with a golden cape, and the starburst emblem on his chest is sometimes enhanced with a signature “T.” What Dynamite Thor always counts among his most flamboyant accessories, however, is the belt full of dynamite from which he produces his crimefighting je ne sais quoi. In many ways, it’s similar to Batman’s utility belt, if everything in Batman’s utility belt exploded.

Although his stories fail to delve into the technical details, Dynamite’s combustible craftiness puts him in command of a wide array of creatively volatile bombs.

Most of his arsenal is capable only of crude destruction. In the course of his adventures, Dynamite Thor puts an explosive end to planes, bombs, torpedos, buildings, guns and ships. 

With more specific explosive concoctions, he’s capable of generating shaped blasts which will cleanly knock a thick oak door from its hinges, and more subtle ones which will harmlessly knock the gun out of a crook’s hand, claiming nary a finger. 

The upper limit of his inflammable armory can only be guessed at – at one point, he douses a raging fuel depot inferno with a single shot!

What could he be planning?

Other charges are capable of practically-surgical strikes. At one point, Dynamite Thor uses explosives to silently remove the roof from a crooks’ hideout. His bombs were also capable of quietly and invisibly melting metal, targeting other bombs and missiles, and – in some unexplained fashion – “counteracting acid.”

Peter also demonstrates, on more than one occasion, the ability to tightrope walk across power lines. In fact, it seems to be his second favorite form of locomotion.

Because Dynamite Thor’s most audacious use of bombs is – flight!

“Immune to the effects of explosives,” explains one caption, “He can propel himself through the air with dynamite.” Technically speaking, anyone can propel themselves through the air with dynamite. It’s landing in one piece which is the real trick, and which Peter carries out by somehow having inoculated himself against the destructive effects of dynamite.

(The visual effect which denotes Peter’s passage through the air is, typically, little clouds emerging at equal distances behind him at waist-height. There is not a soul on Earth mature enough to look at a drawing of Dynamite Thor launching himself across the sky and to not think it looks like he’s tooting out little guffs.

See?

Despite laughing off bomb bursts, Thor remains vulnerable to all other sorts of non-explosive physical injury, including gunfire or a conk on the head. 

If, for even a moment, you thought he might be vulnerable to Atom Rays, well, one story takes pains to point out that Dynamite Thor has a Neutron Shield just for that very complication. I don’t know what any of that means

“He uses his expert knowledge of high explosives to rid the world of crime” explains one caption, which might account for the unusually high rate of property damage in a Dynamite Thor feature. Besides knocking out Nazi war machines, Thor also has a habit of catching crooks by blowing good ol’ American bridges out from under them, or causing municipal chaos by dropping a water tower on a fleeing foe.

How weird was Dynamite Thor? Dynamite Thor runs in two issues of Weird before finishing up in Blue Beetle Comics. In Weird, he follows the run of an unrelated hero with a similar name (see Thor, God of Thunder). Both men, in their secret identities, have a girlfriend named Glenda. I like to think she’s the same girl in both series, and she’s got a type – Thors.

First draft of Yellow Submarine

NAVY JONES by Bert Whitman

Appears in issues 8, 10

Navy Jones had been a journeyman feature elsewhere in Fox’s line, mostly – and originally – from Science Comics. This, of course, not only raises the question of whether Navy Jones was weird enough for Weird Comics, but also whether he was scientific enough for Science Comics.

“We’ll get there when we damn well please.”

Judge for yourself. Replacing Weird Comics’ previous undersea strip – the often-confusing Typhon – Navy Jones told the tale of the former commander of the deep-sea submarine Z-81 turned champion of the kingdom of Princess Coral. Sounds like nice work.

Rescued from his sinking sub -- which had collided with a mine “from a long-forgotten war” -- Navy is taken before the human ruler of a nation of fearsome-looking fish-men. 

Jones has the bad luck of showing up during the Prime Minister’s power grab, which gets him pelted with chunks of reef by a vicious mob of mackerel. I think the Prime Minister is a crab, by the way. In any case, the King hooks Navy Jones up with some life-saving surgery that makes the former surface-dweller into a 24-7 water-breather, and also his daughter’s number.

In the pages of Weird, Navy Jones only takes the boat out twice:

Have they been drinking?

First, the Princess and Jones help rout an invasion of the good ol’ USA by “the dictator of Europe,” with the help of longtime pal and frequent ally Captain Nemo. The trio handily scuppers the foreign tyrant’s phalanx of underwater tanks, which is a sentence I bet you didn’t expect to read today.

In his second Weird Comics appearance, Navy puts a definitive end to a deep-sea bunker full of pirates by burning a hole in their protective dome and letting the ocean pressure finish the job. Well, what do you know – It’s scientific enough for Science Comics after all!

How weird was Navy Jones? While they don't make a big deal about it, Jones is a direct descendant of Davy Jones, understood in sailor lingo to be the devil. You think that would come up more often.  

He’s gettin’ it right between the F and the Z!

SWOOP CURTISS by Robert Keen

Appears in issues 17-20

American flyboys “Swoop” Curtiss (sometimes “Curtis”) and his brobdingnagian buddy, the burly “Banana-Boat,” find themselves “fighting side by side with the gallant flyers of the R.A.F.” after a slight navigational error drops them in England in the middle of The Blitz. They were trying to get to Maine.

The 3,000-mile mistake is the responsibility of Banana-Boat (sometimes only “Bananaboat”), a well-meaning but titanic idiot who ends up hindering Swoop’s heroics as often as he’s helpful. BB’s not much of a bombardier (he’s too big), or a gunner (too big), or even a co-pilot (he overshoots their destination by a whole ocean), and he has a habit of falling out of airplanes (twice). 

To his credit, he sometimes stumbles into heroics of his own. On one occasion, he successfully infiltrates a Nazi airdome in a stolen uniform two sizes too small, then casually ignites the fuel supply, destroying countless enemy aircraft. They’re gonna give him a medal for being this big and dumb.

Banana-Boat is why we lost the war.

Swoop, by contrast, can’t do much wrong. A dashing and daring pilot of Squadron FZ (That would be “F-Zed”), the impulsive Curtiss is as often an annoyance to his superiors as he is to the Luftwaffe. Regardless, he’s able to pull off astonishing aerobatic maneuvers like landing a stolen Fokker on the back of a British bomber in mid-flight, or intercepting plummeting parachutists with an outstretched hand.

Despite his brief run, Swoop is around long enough to pick up a Nazi nemesis. Both on the ground and in the air, he is drawn into conflict with a notorious Deutsche dogfighter named Gorrit. The vicious Gorrit frequently targets civilians, which makes him an extra-nasty Nazi. He’s still at large when the strip ends with Weird Comics #20.

How weird is Swoop Curtiss? Entertainingly drawn by a pseudonymous Robert Keen, Swoop Curtiss shouldn’t be confused with other aerial adventurers Swoop Smith (boy pilot), or Cloud Curtis (man pilot), or even Swoop Storm (World’s Youngest Flyer), all from rival Lev Gleason Comics.

Coming up in Part 3: The propulsive Dart, the dynamic Dynamo, the patriotic Eagle, Marga the ferocious Panther Woman and the dire jungle saga of Voodooman …