Arsenic Lullaby - Care package from a fan and chance to own a nuclear submarine?!

My crusade to do work for Casper hasn't gotten me too far with the publisher but it did net me a cool package of stuff from one of my readers!

Erik emailed and told me that his comic book store had a bunch of old Harvey Comics and they were too beat up to have much value and thought I might like them. he was correct!

He also threw in some old bottles of ink that his Grandpa had.

What a great guy! Thanks Erik!!!

I'm not sure if I'll actually use any of this ink...on account of my brushes cost 20.00 a piece and I'm not sure if ink this old will damage them, for all I know they have asbestos , DDT, and every other chemical we've banned since the 60's mixed in there. Plus it's blue. Maybe I'll test some out with an older brush.

But the real score here is these awesome old comics. They are from the mid to early 60's. There's two in particular that I've been skeptical even exist... Little Dot-which is a character who's stories revolve around liking polka dots, and Nightmare- a ghost horse. Even as a kid I would ask myself "how in the love of F+CK can you make an entire book about those things?!...I mean, for F8ck's sake, that isn't a lot to work with. I'm glad I'm not the poor c+cksucker who has to come up with 22 pages of that sh+t...F+++++ck THAT!"

(...I had a real mouth on me for a 5 year old.)

BUT they did in fact exist because they where in that stack of books

Not only is there a copy of Nightmare but get a load of this

This is number 45?! They made 45 f+cking issues of a comic book about a ghost horse?!!

As I suspected though, both Little Dot and Nightmare only had a short solo story or two in each of the books. Harvey would basically just fill every comic book with a few pages of each of their characters, no matter what the title said. Richie Rich would have a story in Dot, Casper would have stories in Hot Stuff, Stumbo the giant would have stories in Spooky. Each issue was really a grab bag of whatever bunch of 6 page stories were within arms reach of the editor. Not that its a bad thing or a bad way of publishing, as long as you put 24 quality pages in there...kids won't GAF.

We did notice stuff like this though, the guy who drew the cover obviously didn't draw the inside...that horse barely looks like a horse....weird

The newest comic in this stack is 1970 and the oldest is 1961 that's pretty big gap and a pretty transitional period for their bullpen of illustrators and it's interesting to see how Casper and some of the other characters evolved and the detail and effort went up over the course of time

I'm guessing things got better for two reasons.

1st, Casper started out as a real crappy cartoon and the comic book publisher kinda decided that they could stray away from his original look for the sake of quality.

and 2nd, towards the end of the 1950's the "comics code authority" was created to regulate comic books. Up until then anything went and comics were filled with horror and violence and sleaze, and where basically R rated in most cases (awesome stuff back then!). This was the era when book like Takes from the Crypt where popular.

But, after the code was installed, publishers had to tone down their stuff or risk not being distributed. So books aimed at younger kids took center stage and so more people where competing for readers from that age group... and when there is competition, you either get better or lose sales to someone else. Thus the illustrations in Harvey Comics got more sophisticated.

You wanna talk about a change in the culture? Check out this page from story in "Little Dotti" a book for girls, about a little girl who likes Dots

That's a full on fist fight and one guy even has a gun! WTF does that have to do with polka dots?? I guess I'll have to read it to find out. But speaking of guns...here's an ad from the back of a comic

how about that? Order a bb gun kids, shot out the windows of your dad's car and get a beating! Or if that's to low brow for you try this...

'merica!!!!

I'm guessing that was some cardboard fold out with rubber bands that launch cardboard torpedoes and was really disappointing for whoever ordered it.

Here's the worst ad though...

Learn how to draw? No thanks!!

That's all for now...I have a commission to finish and then I'm reading some comics. I'll let you know if I find anything worth showing off in these issues!

the tags list on Steemit is generated by code...which puts tags up there based on ONLY popularity of use. You will notice that #comics does not exist there...yet. So I ASK THAT YOU USE #comics ON EVERY COMMENT YOU LEAVE ON MY BLOGS