Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Most Unfortunate Name In Comics History

If you read enough Golden Age science-0fiction comic books, your brain will start to melt.

Specifically, 99% of them are exactly the same story, with exactly the same character, and it becomes 72 pages of mostly-indistinguishable sameness.

Indeed, the most homogeneous element is the hero of these tales, cookie cutter "explorers" or "space patrol" officers, bland bland bland bland bland.

They even go so far as to essentially have the same name. Borrowing from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, they all have the one syllable (exciting) nickname and two syllable last name.

Take, for example, Planet Comics #9 (1940), which features these fine fellows:

FLINT BAKER!

BUZZ CRANDALL!

CRASH PARKER!

Flint! Crash! Buzz!! Oh, if only the stories they appeared in were as exciting as the names.

Oh, wait, I forgot one:

Spurt? SPURT!?! Your hero is named SPURT?!?

Wow.

Considering that the lead story in this issue was "Invasion From Uranus" (no, it wasn't a Spurt story), this issue must have had the youth of 1940 giggling like Beavis and Butthead...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You failed to mention that the Flint Baker comic is by someone named Starr Gayza which follows the aforementioned one syllable - two syllable rule.

Smurfswacker said...

"Starr Gayza" is also part of the (sadly) long-gone tradition of punning house names, like B. Apiary, (to name just one).

Siskoid said...

Hahaha. Oh man. Spurt looks a lot like Felix Faust... WHAT ISN'T FAUST TELLING US?