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[The Australian Panther]

For this fortnight,

I was reminded again of my man Charles Voight, due to an recent upload of an issue of Prize Comics.

So, welcome to the madness of Charles Voight and the crew of Prize comics.   

Prize Comics 52 (alt) - Version 2
[Origin of Sir Prize] and a Boom Boom Brannigan story]
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=28501

Prize Comics 39
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=33002

also, 

Worldbeater and Unghh
Flying Fist and Bingo
Airmale [and Stampy]
Oh, and among other weirdness,
Dick Briefer's Frankenstein.

Don't know about you but I need a smile on my face about now.

Enjoy! Love to hear your comments.

[SuperScrounge]

Prize Comics #52

Boom Boom Brannigan - Cute, although getting used to Voight's round-eyed characters amongst more realistic looking people is tough.

Frankenstein and the Beanstalk - Interesting. I was expecting a retelling of Jack and the beanstalk, not Frankenstein looking for a copy of the book. Amusing.

Mac - Art's a little stiff, but cute gag.

Wings Over France - Not too bad.

Ham & Eggs - Amusing, nothing laugh out loud, but some cute gags.

Fall In! - Okay as filler, but a far cry from the quality of magazine single panels.

The Mighty Midge McGuire - Not that good. Feels like a generic story with the three heroes plugged in to fulfill a generic role.

Herc - Uhhhh... yeah, it exists.

The Castle Booboo - That was fun.

[SuperScrounge]

Prize Comics #39

The Man Who Couldn't Remember To Forget! - Okay. This would seem to be shortly after the two features (Black Owl & Yank and Doodle) merged hence they don't know each other's identities yet. Loud Larry just seemed like a comically bad villain.

Who Zoo - Okay jokes, but nothing special.

Ted O'Neil of the Commandos - Overly simplistic ways of overcoming problems, to borrow a line from the Pitch Meeting YouTube channel, "Super easy, barely an inconvenience". Also the hopeful ending did not stand the test of time.

Frankenstein - That was a little darker than I expected. I wonder if Bill Blass personally made Frankenstein's uniform? 

Worldbeater and Unggh - What a title. Not as funny as the writer seemed to think it would be.

Santa Claus Has Wings - Okay, but it does strain credibility.

Flying Fist and Bingo - It had the elements for a good story (I can easily imagine it as a Batman & Robin type story), but it's just not told very well.

The Rich Man's Robin Hood - This was better than Flying Fist and Bingo, but still fell short.

The Krak-A-Jap machine gun. Wow. That's some name. I wonder why I never heard of it before. 

[Captain Audio]

Prize Comics #39


Frankenstein - That was a little darker than I expected. I wonder if Bill Blass personally made Frankenstein's uniform? 

Frankie in the SS uniform reminded me of a news reel showing Hitler accompanied by several of his top ranking officers. One was a Prussian infantry General who stood about 7'4" and looked like his could whup a mountain gorilla.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the Prussians had special companies of troops all standing around seven feet tall. They spent a lot of money recruiting these giants from all neighboring countries.
The French had similar companies of giant soldiers. I remember reading of a British officer reporting on huge French riflemen nearly wiping out his infantry company.

[gregjh]

Prize Comics: I read the first story - Boom Boom Brannigan - and was impressed. The storyline doesn't fit the mould of most comics I have read from this era. I felt the ending was a little cheesy compared to the plot development which was semi-serious. The drawing and colouring was very good.

Prize Comics 39: Yank and Doodle (and Owl). These are the type of characters that would be satirised by the more smug comic writers of today. I do like Owl's aircraft even if it does defy a whole bunch of laws of physics. Not so keen on the funnies that followed it.

[crashryan]

Prize Comics had a long if checkered career, but it sure got off to a rocky start.

Prize Comics #39 is kind of bottom-of-the-barrel as Golden Age superhero comics go. There are some promising ideas, but the scripts are poorly-written and the art is meh to meh-minus with lots of cop outs.

The Cover is notable for the face at the lower right. It's so professionally drawn and inked compared to the rest of the cover that I wouldn't be surprised if it was swiped from somewhere.

Yank, Doodle, and the Black Owl has an interesting premise--kid heroes who don't realize their adult comrade is their father--but doesn't go anywhere with it. I like the design of the Silent Swooper (!). Maurice del Bourgo or whoever drew this hits it on many panels, maybe the ones he had reference for, but he has many more misses. Take a gander at panels 2 and 5 of our page 13 for two truly bizarre layout choices.

Ted O'Neil of the Commandos celebrates that fleeting moment when the Soviets were our buddies. The plot is screwy. The Nazis stole food from the Reds but now the Nazis are starving because the Reds have stolen the food back? Even given the violence of WWII comics, the body count in these 8 pages is surprising. E. C. Stoner delivers the best art in the issue.

I've never managed to warm to Dick Briefer's Frankenstein, neither the comic nor the dramatic versions. His scripts are choppy and simplistic and his art looks sloppy rather than stylish. This episode is brutal. Frankie murders a "non-Aryan" by throwing him out  window. Then he goes on a spree killing Resistance fighters. Wow!

World-Beater and Unggh has the germ of a good idea. The notion of a caveman and a man from the future stranded in the present should provide a pile of story springboards. Unfortunately the writer isn't up to it. The plot is murky. Either the paint store job or the Shellac Homes vs. the Skeletons storylines would have been enough for 8 pages. Cramming both into one story brought nothing but confusion. The art is adequate.

The Flying Fist and Bingo left me scratching my head. Who are these guys anyway? They seem to be performers. Circus acrobats? A vaudeville act? We get no clue other than a reference to their agent ("ten-percenter"). This is one of those sloppy scripts I griped about above. We see the future murder victim Carl Rick in two panels. He's drawn with a huge, grotesque smile and doesn't say a word. He could have been a dummy, which in fact is what I thought he was at first. Without dialogue we never get a sense of Rick's relationship to Lunce or whether his pranks were intended to be funny or to antagonize Lunce. The art is similarly messy. The artist never heard of perspective and his heroes' bodies stretch like the Elongated Man.

Air Male and Stampy takes another promising idea, a reverse Robin Hood, and wastes it. I wanted to know why he took on his "mission" to redistribute wealth to the "righteous rich." I also wanted to know why the wealth he redistributed was in fact worthless junk. If the writer had sorted that out Robbing Hood might have been a fascinating character. The art is typical C+ Golden Age stuff.

All in all this was a disappointing read.

[gregjh]

Prize Comics had a long if checkered career, but it sure got off to a rocky start.



Yank, Doodle, and the Black Owl has an interesting premise--kid heroes who don't realize their adult comrade is their father--but doesn't go anywhere with it. I like the design of the Silent Swooper (!). Maurice del Bourgo or whoever drew this hits it on many panels, maybe the ones he had reference for, but he has many more misses. Take a gander at panels 2 and 5 of our page 13 for two truly bizarre layout choices.

In fairness, could it be that the "father" storyline was a seed for future plots?

[FraBig]

Actually, the Black Owl being the father of Yank & Doodle is a huge plot point in their stories. Yank & Doodle's father accepted the offer to become the new Black Owl (an offer made by the original Black Owl) to keep an eye on his sons (because he knew they were costumed crimefighters), you can check it in Prize Comics #34:
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=27935

I really like when Golden Age characters interact in a shared universe and with consistent continuity in the same way Silver Age and future characters will do. It really gives you the idea of how some comics predated their times.
A hero that gives up the Black Owl mantle and passes it to another person is such a modern concept in superhero comics, yet there are already examples of it in the Golden Age.

[crashryan]

Prize Comics #52 is much more to my taste than #39. This is largely due to a double dose of Charles Voight. He's become a favorite of mine.

Before jumping into the issue, I want to go back to #39 for a second. FraBig, thanks for pointing me toward the Black Owl / Yank & Doodle team origin story. Like you I enjoy the rare instances when different GA characters operate in a shared universe. Too bad this sort of thing didn't happen more often.

Meanwhile, in #52, we open with a funny Boom Boom Brannigan story. Voight draws handsome men, beautiful women, and bizarre comic sidekicks. I agree with SuperScrounge that Character's round, bugged-out eyes are jarring, especially as they are always drawn wide open. This makes it hard to read his expression. I presume "the croon of an undersized singer" in the opener is a pot shot at Frank Sinatra.

Frankenstein is at least not killing anyone this time around, but I still don't like Briefer's art and the story is vague and unfunny.

The art on Ham and Eggs appeals to me, especially the Ham character. The story is all over the place. I can't figure out the final panel. What is in the box Ham holds? I swear it looks like penguin guts! Did Ham pop his cork and dismantle the pesky penguin?

Yank and Doodle reminds me of Charles Biro's stories. "Redeeming the boy who almost goes wrong" was a common Crimebuster theme. The story moves a bit too fast thanks to being compressed into eight pages. Biro's stories were twice as long, giving him more room to develop the kid's character. Jack Alderman doesn't draw that well, but his moody lighting and noir touches appeal to me. On an unrelated matter, I always thought "Youse" refers only to two or more people--the plural of "you." Midge would use youse when addressing Yank and Doodle as a group, but he wouldn't use it when talking one-on-one with The Black Owl. Can one of youse guys clear this up?

Sir Prize is good fun. The deliberately anachronistic dialogue works well with the silly plot. Shame on Voight for wrapping up a story with the "woman terrified of a mouse" trope twice in the same issue! The story seems to be missing its final page. It comes to a screeching halt on page 7. Surely there was a payoff to Sir Prize's second meeting with the dragon. The scan seems to have all its pages. Did the publisher omit story page 8 by accident, or perhaps deliberately in order to fit in a last minute ad?

Altogether this was a pleasant time passer.

[FraBig]

You're welcome Ryan, I know this occurs rarely in Golden Age comics and that's why I enjoy it so much.
Human Torch VS Sub-Mariner, the Shield & Wizard, Roy & Dusty, Bucky & Toro team-ups and all the JSA adventures are some of the most interesting Golden Age stories, in my opinion. I always enjoy when modern world-building was already present in the past.

[paw broon]

"Youse" is still heard in Glasgow and some other parts of the country.  Considered slang and in some quarter's as a sign of bad education.  It means you plural but is often followed by a singular verb form.  "Youse is a' wrang"  You are all wrong.

[paw broon]

Showing my complete lack of taste and enjoyment of poorish work, I admit to liking The Flying fist and Bingo.  Their origin is in Prize #35.  They're poor, as in poverty stricken, theatre performers and skilled acrobats.  There are couple of amusing lines from bingo re. money.  Early on they also wore domino masks. 
As for the rest, I like Black Owl, Yank and Doodle and have since I first read one of their stories decades ago. Airmale is fine for me as he's another superhero, and I collect obscure ones.
Frankenstein is poor stuff and I've never like the comic one or the serious one. Although in The Quatermass Experiment the scene with the monster and the wee girl is played out again in dockside London.
I couldn't take to Brannigan or Sir Prize.

[Robb_K]

I Like Prize 52 much better than 39. And I've had a copy of it for some years, because of The Ham and Eggs, Boom Boom Brannigan and Sir Prize stories, the latter two of which I think are funny, and I also like the artwork in those, as well as that of the Ham & Eggs story.  I guess that's a shoe in the red box at the end of the Ham & Eggs story, with long shoe laces that Ham can use to strangle himself, because he lost them their gig.  Like most of the jokes in that story, it's very forced, and based on a cliche.

I've never liked Dick Briefer's artwork on Frankenstein, and didn't like this book's story at all.


Prize 39 had virtually nothing of interest to me.  I agree with Crash that those stories' plots are very weak, and poorly worked, and the artwork was also substandard.

I agree with Crash that the artwork in the Yank & Doodle story wasn't up to its earlier standard, and wasn't very good.  And I also agree that 8 pages is way too few to tell a decent story with a story of this one's scope.

World Beater and Ungh has a premise with great possibilities, but they weren't used.  It wasn't interesting to me.  Same with The Flying Fist and Bingo, and Air Male and Stampy, although the latter had an intriguing but sick premise.

[The Australian Panther]

Prize Comics 52 (alt) - Version 2
One thing I will be forever grateful to CB+ for is introducing me to Charles Voight.
Bio Article on Voight here.
https://gone-and-forgotten.blogspot.com/2021/08/truly-gone-charles-voights-atomic-man.html

I can't say it any better than this guy.

As far as superheroes went, Voight observed the maturing medium of comics and their precocious paladins of power -- and found them silly.

Voight?s efforts to indulge the need for a superhero-or-two in Prize?s assorted titles were beautifully illustrated and breezily written, but they didn?t approach the subject matter with tongue fully absent from cheek.

Masculine monikers may have lent an air of superheroic gravitas to Voight creations like He-Man and Impossible Man, yet still-superheroic but less lantern-jawed inventions like Jeep & Peep or Captain Milksop sort-of give the game away.

My belief is that Voight's attitude was, if I have to do this stuff, I am at least going to amuse myself doing it.
The cover:- Both the Dragon and the knight look stunned, neither looks like they want to be fighting each other.
Boom Boom Branigan
Voight is without argument an excellent draftsman. His facetious attitude is also evident in his scripts which are full of verbal nonsense.
Story, Character Coglin gets taken by a girl and her nasty mother who is a thief, The mother gets hers and 'Character' gets the girl. That's the structure of the story, but Voight keeps the narrative on track but amuses himself by playing around while he does it.
Dick Briefers Frankenstein and the Beanstalk.
It seems I am not alone in not having a high opinion of this.
Actually, this story isn't too bad. A reasonable piece of Comic book slapstick.
Ham and Eggs
Cartoon Slapstick and Animal verbal gags and puns. I've seen much worse.
Yank and Doodle and the Black Owl
I found this story corny and dull and badly written.
Sir Prize.
This is a bit 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' A quest, A Damsel in distress, a Dragon, A Giant, and a Villain who says 'Curses' !  Gentle Mockery!
Quoting 'Gone but Forgotten' blog again, [the editor says of himself, '{this blog} Is written by Your Humble Editor, who is actually a blowhard of some note.'  I can see why he likes Charles Voight.
He states,

  he produced material for Bernard Baily on behalf of the incredibly-fake-sounding publisher R.B.Leffingwell & Co. I challenge you to picture one Mister R.B.Leffingwell and not fundamentally include a ridiculous mustache. Try it. Can?t be done.
Sir Prize (This was a bit of a play on the name of the publisher imprint - Prize - which was very likely chosen to avoid the mouth-filling R.B.Leffingwell & Co. Comics! ? PRESENTS!). 

All of the contributors to Prize comics seem to have in common an inability to be serious about the narrative content of the work, although they are very serious about the artistry. Does this reflect their attitude to the publisher? I don't know.
Prize Comics 39
Yank and Doodle and Black Owl. 
In the story we see Yank and Doodle do all the work, but on page 9, Black Owl takes the credit.
And he does this again at the end of the story.
I found this story messy and not engaging my attention.   
Food Fighters of Russia
A factitious War story complete with gratuitous violence. Pass.
Frankenstein
One part of a continued story. You probably need the previous story to make sense of this.
Worldbeater and Unghh
Interesting concept - terrible names.
I like the reverse 'Striped paint' gag.
Why Ungg would work with worldbeater is hard to understand.
They aren't heroes,but rather something of a comic book Laurel and Hardy team.
Flying Fist and Bingo 
Didn't grab me.
Airmale and Stampy
How many beers did it take to come up with that?
Another satirical variation on Superheroes but this one falls flat.

Last comment. I would really like to see a collection of Charles Voight's

  long-running newspaper strip, Betty 

Cheers!