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this is The only appearance of TNT. a year later and DC’s version appeared in Star Spangled Comics #7.

Link to the comment: Amazing Man Comics 21

Welcome Teaya.  Glad you found your way here.
Lots of old-timey comics and so much else to find and enjoy.
Please join in the conversations and let us know what particularly interests you in the world of comics.

Hi all

Sorry I'm a bit late getting to it this fortnight.

Smitty #2 1948

I always try to remember that comics were a product of their times and we can't expect the political correctedness we see today. As soon as I looked at the cover, though, I immediately wondered how first nations people would be represented. Having read the comic, I'm still not entirely sure. Trapper George was represented  fairly favourably (from my white Australian perspective). Little Moose was used more as comic relief. Nothing was terrible, though a few things made me cringe. For example, when Smitty tells his boss that the tracks are almost human. Then in the next frame, they see a tepee and the boss says, 'Almost human is correct. It's Little Moose!'

As others have pointed out, there was a lot of repetition, especially in the scenes where they were travelling to the mine. We heard over and over that Little Joe was afraid of the other Indians and had to be careful. Thanks Crashryan for the explanation of how continuity worked in comic strips. But as you've mentioned, this wasn't a great example.

The story has a lot of problems. For example, Ligttle Moose is doing everything he can to hide from his former tribe who want to kill him. But as long as he dresses like a little white boy, no one seems to notice his face looks like a much older man with a whopping great nose.

Also, it seems to just stop without much of a conclusion. As it's a strip, I though maybe it was continued in the next issue, but that one starts with a new story.

The humour is of course old-fashioned, though that's to be expected. Still, I'm not sure there would have been big belly laughs back in the day either.

The one-page gags weren't bad, but not great. Re the first one with the glass over a paper napkin, I had a similar one I did a couple of times. I must have seen it on TV or something. You fill two glasses with water (I used plastic cups because I'm nice). Then you tell someone you're going to do a magic trick and ask them to put both hands out with palms down. Then you carefully put one glass on the back of each hand. When it's all balanced and it looks like you're going to do your trick, you just leave the room. Gold! Though the last time I did it, I felt guilty and took the glasses off my friend's hands before disaster struck.

Always interesting to see comics from different eras and see how humour has changed, but I'm not a big fan of this one.

Cheers

QQ

"Fawcett's Funny Animals" was sold to Charlton Publishing (Comics), along with "Animal Fair Comics", and a large stock of not-yet-published drawn stories, which became "Funny Animals" published by Charlton, for another 8 issues. There were still many unused Fawcett-produced stories, that were subsequently used as fillers in other Charlton Funny Animal Comics, such as Atomic, Mouse and Atomic Rabbit, and Atomic Bunny.

Link to the comment: Fawcett's Funny Animals 83

Slinky Stinky says on page 8 that he's a cat!

Link to the comment: Fawcett's Funny Animals 83

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE:  The Killing
The Haunted Hitman   (8 of 10)

A man runs a murder-for-hire operation for organized crime, where the bodies are never found, but never does any of the killings himself.  Jim's mission is to provide evidence so he can be prosecuted, not just his hired hitmen.

Gerald S. O'Laughlin (THE ROOKIES) is "Bert Gordon", head of this show's equivalent of "Murder Inc." He's tough, smart, but his one weekness appears to be that he's also superstitious.  The team uses this against him to the max when they first convince him his neighbor's house is haunted, then has him involved in a killing, only to find the newly-dead man coming back from the grave to haunt HIM.

Roy Jenson (STAR TREK: The Omega Glory) is "Connie", Gordon's assassin, who not only bumps people off, but gets rid of the evidence by dumping their bodies into a furnace at a lumber yard.

While Jim and Rollin pose as brothers who are haunted by a dead sibling, and Cinnamon poses as an unhappy wife who wants her drunk of a husband dead, Barner & Willy knock out the hitman and spent an awful lot of time installing mysterious equipment in Gordon's house.  When we learn what it's all used for, that's when the episode becomes genuinely HILARIOUS.  Conning a hardened killer into believing in a haunting may not make much sense, but I don't recall any other episode of this show I had so much fun watching.

One of my favorite moments had to be when Jim, apparently shot dead in "self defense", is rescued from the furnace seconds before it really gets going.  Come to think of it, that was the 2nd time on this show I've seen that kind of thing happen (the previous time was at a mortuary crematorium).

Funny thing, it was checking the credits online just now that I suddenly realized all these years I was confusing 2 similar-looking actors:  McLauglin (who was on THE ROOKIES) and Tige Andrews (who played a similar role on THE MOD SQUAD).  It was Andrews, not McLaughlin, who once appeared on STAR TREK (as a Klingon).
   (3-27-2025)

Hi there! 

I'm Teaya and I'm new here. English is my second language so sorry in advance if I make a mistake.

I accidentally stumbled upon this site while I was searching for something (I don't remember now what was it) and I joined because I like old-timey comics and I like how the site is organized.

Hi Jerry and welcome to CB+. The new Image title in the Universal Monsters line, The Mummy, looks good.  But then, I am a fan of The Mummy films. As Fra says, "Lots of fun horror and forgotten stuff here"
Join in the conversations and, even though we can't host them here, let us now what '60's DC titles tickled your fancy.

Looking at it I can see some similarities to Beck's style, or maybe a member of his studio.

Link to the comment: Vic Verity Magazine 2

‘Crash, I’m thinking just turning out a strip is harder than it looks to a lot of people. There is a certain genius to making that deadline day after day, year after year. In that regard alone, Charles Schultz is a genius. You get that level of craftsmanship for decades? Amazing.
We had SMITTY in our paper right up to the end. (1) I cannot remember a single comic from it. Doesn’t seem to be any current hardcover or paperback collections of the strip. Wikipedia mentions a tin toy worth a grand, and that’s about it.
But that last page, with the dad and the kid heading home impressed me. I read it as the two of them heading home in the winter when I first saw it. You know, low red sunset light, lots of white. Changed my mind with the trees in later panels. But the supper time conclusion reminded me of Robert Crumbs’ endings when it wasn’t exactly funny but just sort of suddenly ends without a real punch line like life sometimes does.

BILL BUMLIN Now, (2) my initial theory about the wings and the tutu’s on the psychiatrists was that it was a way of saying they were ‘fairies'...homosexuals. Expressing your emotions or taking your problems to someone was seen as weakness back then for most people. Men kept it inside. It would not be manly to not be able to handle them yourself.  The popular media knew about Freud and that most psychiatrists were German and probably heard rumours about ‘repression’. Take it from there.
But then I looked back and saw the wings on Bumblin and other people before and after the doctors caught up with him, so I don’t know what the artist meant.
Oh, the first doctor to see him makes a joke about 'Dementia Peacox', a play on the old time diagnosis of ‘dementia praecox'. You know it today as schizophrenia . That’s a phrenology map to the right, a discredited German science at the time that thought you could judge intelligence and personality by the size and bumps on a head. By ’47, it was seen as quackery, so it’s probably a dig to psychiatry in general again.

Thanks for the books, Robb, they were interesting and a fun read.

Thanks, Morgus.
(1) There are probably no hardbound collections of "Smitty" because its humour was always very old-fashioned, and its very hard for people today to relate to it, and it's just not funny enough, even by 1920s standards, to have been "timeless humour). Almost no one alive today was around during its heyday of the 1920s-1930s.  Berndt conceived it in 1922, based on his own experiences as an "office Boy" during the first decade of The 1900s. I find it hard to believe it lasted in some newspapers until Berndt retired  in 1973.  I can't imagine how he kept it relevant past the early 1950s or so.

But, we DO have a fair amount (14) of "Smitty" comic books here on CB+ including:

Dell/Western Publishing:

Four Color 1939 Series # 11

Large Feature Comics # 26 (1939)

Four Color 1942 Series #s:  6, 32, 65, 99, 138

Own Numbered Series #s: 1 - 7

(2)  As you surmise, The little wings on the shoulders are NOT related at all, to the psychiatrists wearing ballerina's tutus.  As I stated above, the wings are not related to people behaving like Angels, but seem to always being connected to the characters being inspired with a great idea, or being VERY determined to get action done related to such inspiration.  That' very confusing, because, during the same general period of the 1940s, a few different comic book series (like MLJ's "Gloomy Gus" - who died without having a home, and travels The Earth as a Ghost, looking for a Human body to be his "new home").  He wears his Angel's wings on his shoulders ALL the time, probably to enhance his appearance with more differentiation from the living characters.  His colouring is much lighter,- a faint light blue-grayish across his skin and clothing).

Also, as I stated above, the Psychiatrists wearing ballerina's tutu's is a cliche of making fun of that profession, especially the Psychoanalysts, who have their patients (AND themselves) wading too much in their mental baggage, instead of facing life head on.  It seems to be partly related to the 19th Century view that Homosexuality was a mental disease (against nature) and a form of insanity (thus the denigratory term  "Fruits", meaning "Nutty as a Fruitcake", and many psychologists and psychiatrist took up those careers in an attempt to find out what is wrong with themselves and to cure it.  But, I also am well aware that the image of  Psychiatrists wearing ballerinas' tutus, dancing ballets is not only making fun of them, but also became a cliche for falling into madness, which likely came from when World Renowned archaeologist, Sir William Flinders-Petrie, unexpectedly, danced madly while wearing a ballerina's tutu after making a great new discovery in Egypt during the early 1900s.  I suspect that his unexpected "fall into madness" spurred on that cliche.  I've seen hundreds of examples from the 1910s through 1950s of a group of Psychiatrists (usually Psychoanalysts - Thanks to Freud) wearing ballerina tutus, dancing madly with ballet moves, in newspaper or magazine cartoons, silent and talkie films and other forms of media as a cliche for a funny way to express insanity.  Even Carl Barks used that cliche, and also Phrenology "head Maps" , several times when Scrooge  or Donald went to a Psychiatrist's office.