Cracked #6, 3 of 3

The last installment of this issue of Cracked from December 1958.

Bill Ward

Richard Doxsee

This and the inside back cover afterwards are also Bill Ward.

MYSTERIOUS ADVENTURES 2 of 2

CONCLUDED FROM MONDAY
Notice how Mother Ghoul didn't always look the same in each strip.
From MYSTERIOUS ADVENTURES #23, December 1954





from MYSTERIOUS ADVENTURES #25, August 1955.

I printed the one from #24 here.

Richard Doxsee was another comic artist for lesser-known publishers, and many of the black-and-white humor magazines.
Sometimes they didn't even bother keeping the name consistent.

POW 2, 1 of 4

Here's another humor magazine a bit different because it didn't have a mascot. It reprinted a few things from CRACKED and later vice-versa. Some of the articles also came from ZANY. There was a reason for much of this: it was one of the many magazines published by the same company. They mostly did mens' adventure and girlie magazines with humor as one of their many branches. Before they had SUPER CRACKED and GIANT CRACKED and CRACKED MONSTERS, etc. they did several humor magazines under different titles, using the same artists. Much of this all will be indexed in the forthcoming HISTORY OF CRACKED.


Because of the BATMAN TV show, all media started using "campy" sound effect blurbs. This may have been what inspired the title POW!


For some reason, Bill Ward signed a lot of stuff for these early magazines "McCartney". It's not as if he had anything to hide, like most people who use pseudonyms. My theory is that he used his real name for the dolled up females he was best known for and the pen name for everything else. Usually it's the other way around. I guess we'll never know the real reason.




A lot of publishers filled space and saved money by using free stills they got for movies and from their press wires.

Chicken Little

I think they were trying to imitate 'Grim Fairy Tales' from TALES FROM THE CRYPT. This was originally in MYSTERIOUS ADVENTURES #25 in 1954, scanned from BEST IN HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION from 1988