A very silly post. Or is it?

(This blog occasionally addresses non-political topics on the weekends.)

I just discovered one of the most addictive sites on the internet: The Stupid Comics archives. Even if you did not collect comics in decades past, even if you've always despised the medium, you'll find plenty of fascinating material here.

I've not yet gone through the entire library -- it's huge -- but I've found that the best methodology is to begin with a relatively recent entry and then keep hitting the "previous" button. Work your way back, skimming or savoring each new exercise in surrealism.

I recall seeing, and even purchasing, a few of these items as a tyke. In humiliating truth, I still harbor fond memories of this very silly issue of The Phantom Stranger, which sported a Neal Adams cover and interior art by Jim Aparo.

So far, my favorite gems from this treasure chest are these:

Strange Girl -- the Story They Dared Us to Print: From a mid-70s D.C. Romance comic comes the story of Liz, who seems to be...well, you know. Not normal. Fortunately, a hunk "cures" her, in a denouement that no-one would dare to reprint today. You must see this one.

The Golden Age. This page gifted us with our opening image, which boasts this sublime text:

HE BECOMES UNCONSCIOUS HE GETS A GLIMPSE OF A HIDEOUS CREATURE AND A MECHANICAL LOOKING HOUSE WITH LEGS...

I'm told that Philip Glass used these words as the basis for a discarded act of Einstein on the Beach.

Stupid British comics for girls: A Christmas tradition, it seems. Plus the sequel.

Love Among Europe's Creative Class: The single most pretentious piece of crap in the history of pretentious crap. Funded by taxpayer dollars.

Jimmy Olsen and the Viking Princess: In which Jimmy dates a robot. Jackie Kennedy, who knows a thing or two about robot sex, gives her an award.

Dave Letterman meets the Avengers. This page should have found room for the even-more-infamous meeting of Daredevil and Uri Geller. (Yes, there was once such a comic. I paid money for it.)

Spurt Hammond: The best name ever bestowed on a science fiction hero. (Incidentally, the artist swiped from Gustave Dore, not William Blake.) I think a "Spurt Hammond" animated film would be a hit.

Angel Pussy. Plus: Interspecies romance. An entire generation got the facts of life from these comics. The wrong facts.

Weighty issues: Probably the most vile comic book ever published. Designed to make girls consider suicide. This one is a little better, but only a little.

Dating Your Boss: She wins him over by turning into Ed Wood.

Children of God Comix: Nearly-nekkid girls and '50s science fiction combine to sell you on Jesus.

That last item brings us to what I consider the most fascinating discovery within these cyber-pages: The Al Hartley phenomenon. An imaginative person could come up with an entire conspiracy theory around this guy.

Hartley was the son of the Republican politician who helped to give us the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act, which keeps Americans poor to this very day. The younger Hartley became a competent cartoonist. (I presume that he did not hop aboard the bandwagon when Neal Adams tried to unionize comic book artists in the 1970s.)

Earlier, throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s, Hartley tried his hand at many genres -- everything from war comics to superheroes. In the late '60s, he found Jesus, quit the soft-core "adult" strip that was providing him with his bread and butter, and became one of the chief artists on the Archie comics line.

For a while, he subtly flavored the Archie yarns with 70s-style evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics. Then he hooked up with a Christian imprint called Spire, and somehow acquired permission to use all of the Archie characters, even though the Archie line was published by a devout Jew.

All of Riverdale suddenly converted. Strangely -- or perhaps not so strangely -- the town's chief spokesperson for Jesus was Betty, the blond Aryan goddess. (Archie Andrews, being not-really-blond, was always in danger of backsliding.) In the true spirit of "Christian" paranoia, Hartley tried to convince his readers that the Supreme Court was banning Bibles and burning churches.

Throughout his career, Hartley tended to under-size the irises within the eyes of his characters. As a result, his Christian converts always look like they're trying out for the Lawrence Harvey role in a high school production of The Manchurian Candidate. Case in point: Big Ethyl, as seen above.

Hartley's treatment of that character was particularly bizarre: "The sodas didn't make him sick -- I did!" (You have to see that line in context to understand how wrong it is.)

For the full details of the Hartley phenomenon, see this page. It's quite a story -- Hartley eventually teamed up with some of our unfavorite people, including billionaire Richard De Vos (of Amway ill-fame) and James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

Hartley also did the comic book version of Charles Colson's life story. In Hartley-vision, the convicted Watergate crook was always a peach of a fellow, utterly blameless, utterly ignorant of any wrongdoing which might have taken place within the Nixon White House. Colson goes to prison out of Christian charity, taking the fall for someone else. He was sort of like Jesus himself, accepting crucifixion on behalf of a sinful mankind.

Naturally, Hartley translated Hal Lindsey's "apocalypse soon" scenarios into comic book form. According to Hartley, the world would soon see the decline of America as a world power (as predicted in the Bible -- or didn't you know?), the establishment of a world gummint, the "revival of the dark occultic practices of ancient Babylon," and a final assault on Israel by the unstoppable forces of godless Communism.

How soon? Probably before the 1970s were out. Surely before the end of the 1980s.

As the Hartley-esque cutie puts it (in the image above and to the left): "It all fits together perfectly!"

Note her eyes.