 In the last episode of I'd Comics, I talked about an issue of Super Duck, golden age comic book I found by chance at a local comic store. At the same time, I also found this Super Comics featuring Dick Tracy, this time a Dell magazine. I've never seen this particular series before. Of course I'm familiar with Dick Tracy though, and if you're not you should look him up. In the 1930s and 40s, the Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip was one of the most popular bits of entertainment in the world. I'd never had something like this from this era before, so by the nature of the strips in it, I've already pointed out Dick Tracy and orphan Annie, which I know were newspaper strips. I knew this had to be reprints of newspaper comics. Turns out no, this is a reprint of stuff that was old even at the time. The date on this, it's issue number 113 from 1947, and the individual comics in here being syndicated and copyrighted on their own, of course have their own copyrights on them. This Dick Tracy serial has a copyright date of 1943 on it. This is the first time in my life that I've read Dick Tracy comics, and this is actually very entertaining. He starts off here in a real fix. How's he gonna get out of it? He's chained to the floor. See, his neck is chained to the floor, and there's a metal spike on the bottom of a wooden plank here with a refrigerator on top of it, and there are two cakes of ice holding up the table, and they're melting, and as they melt, the spike is lowering, and it's gonna slowly push through his chest. This is gruesome. This is pretty gruesome. But he notices that the floor of this old tenement is tilted slightly downward to one side, so he starts flopping his body up and down as much as he can to bump the floor so that the ice, as it melts, will start to slide to one side, and it works. Ultimately, the spike pokes through his shirt. The person, the villain who did it to him is this character named Mrs. Prune Face, which is a character I've never heard of. Of course, anyone who's heard of Dick Tracy has heard of the villain Prune Face. Dick Tracy was known for having villains with crazy names and crazy ugly faces, and apparently this is Mrs. Prune Face. And also, apparently she was a new character because the cops haven't heard of her, but she and her assistant Emile, they read in the newspaper that Dick Tracy has escaped, so they need to go into hiding. She gets some makeup and a wig, fixes herself up to go out and get a job, which, this is all making me think, what were they going to do if Dick Tracy was found dead? Was this the plan in that instance, too? I don't know. But anyway, she goes out to find a job, she gets a job as a cook, and she comes back to their hiding place here and finds that Emile has been poking around in her private stuff. So she beats him to death with a lamp stand. She just beats him to death, bashing his head in. Like I was saying, this is gruesome stuff. When the cops find Emile's body, his head is bashed in. So meanwhile, Mrs. Prune Face, in her disguise, has gotten a job as a cook for the mayor in his home, and that's how things are left. Wow, what a predicament. Most of these other comics I didn't read, Smitty and Sweeney and Son, they have similar copyright dates from years before, and Winnie Winkle, that's a name I've heard before, I don't know anything about it. The artwork for some of these comics was really, really competent, really good stuff. Look at the mysteriously detailed panel here with the artist has drawn every bit of grain in the wood on the walls. I mean, what in the world? Anyway, I didn't read the story here, so... But then I read the Little Orphan Annie serials here, and again, this is a comic I've never read. Of course, I've heard of Little Orphan Annie, and this was quite entertaining. I liked the art, and these panels here, Annie's hair stands on end when the guy says that this kid should be skin to life. She's gotten a job as a maid. The orphanage has hired her out as a maid in this woman's house. This woman has pretended to adopt Annie to get some free maid service. The woman's son, who has come back from school because he's been kicked out of the school, he's a serious jerk. He puts a dead cricket in Annie's pudding. She decides she's going to get even. She gets a local druggist to whip up some hot foot powder for her, and she puts it in his shoes, and she gives herself away here. She says, man, you're jumping like a cricket. He's like, say... This was cute. I kind of liked it. I have to think that if I had been alive during this time, I would have been reading the newspaper comics avidly. There were tons of them back then. Moon Mullens, that's a title I've heard of, never read. I'm not particularly interested in this, though. Harold Teen, not interested in Harold Teen either. Here's a Dick Tracy short story. I was going to skip over all the rest of these, but then the last one here, Tiny Tim, which is a comic I'd never heard of, I was going to just thumb right past it, but then I noticed Tim is literally tiny. He's literally been shrunk, and the guy who did it to him, apparently he got shrunk too, and there's a couple of pages of this guy trying to survive and get out of this cellar, and he narrowly escapes being shoveled into the incinerator. I'm like, wow, that's intense. Tim thinks that this mysterious amulet that was used to shrink him, he thinks that it's been destroyed, but he finds that it hasn't, and the last panel here, he grows back to full size, and we're left to wonder, with the spell broken, the villain restored to full size, just as he's about to be eaten by a fish? We don't know. And then there's this little Joe comic. You'll notice that there are no ads in the book. There aren't any. Every space, even the back cover and the inside covers are given over fully to the comics. This awful cover drawing, this is a terrible art on the cover, which has nothing to do with the contents of the book. Dell obviously just made the arrangements to reproduce the comics, and got somebody on staff to whip up this crappy drawing. But I like this, I enjoyed reading this. Read something I've never read before, a couple of things, Dick Tracy or Fnanny. Maybe I'll pay more attention to these titles in the future. Okay, thanks for watching. Please press the thumbs up button and please subscribe. That's how videos get seen on YouTube. And you can support my work here on the ThinkBolt channel by going to the 50th Street website that's 50th.ST and clicking on the 30 second sci-fi link and becoming a subscriber or making a one time donation.