Punching Day: Punch Comics (Patreon)

Long ago, deranged artists reimagined the world in punch. They discarded storytelling and philosophy, replacing it all with drunk violence. Science and reason– punched! Many gorillas– punched! Historians and academics call it the Golden Age of Comics.

I often exhume relics of this lost civilization for a thing called Man Comics. This is not that, but it may add context to it. Today we're looking at the original, unaltered madness of the Golden Age. This is not a bit; it's a real comic from 1942:

You probably won't believe I'm not doing a bit when you find out Punch Comics was published by Harry Chesler, both great joke names for a bit. Punch Comics was, like most comics at the time, a massive collection of short stories. In the '40s you didn't usually get a "Your Favorite Guy" comic. You got something like Pep or Delight featuring District Attorney Sam Strangle, Mr. Gun, Gal Stampy: Lady Postal Carrier, a funny pirate name, a generic cowboy one, some fucking wizard, you get it. They were all the same and one out of every 15 versions of each were inexplicably chosen to survive 90 years and become billion dollar franchises. Punch Comics gave us none of those.

In fact, I'm not sure Punch Comics was even trying to create appealing characters. That guy on the cover? I have no idea who that is. He's 200 feet tall and killing a cruise ship, but he is not explained, named, or featured inside. In many ways, this makes him the perfect Punch Comics spokesperson– the vague idea of a big guy ripping a boat in half, maybe in space.

Real quick, let's go through the featured characters in Punch Comics:

"Carnival" is about a traveling circus where clowns might fall from the sky and cave in your pelvis. It's not about any specific adventurers or crime fighters traveling with a circus– only ordinary carnies dealing with frequent criminal and gorilla attacks. They were limited to six pages to introduce each murderer, then discover and foil his schemes, so most of each story is a clown torpedo hitting a guy in the dick and dislodging his full confession. "Curses, my penis! Fine, I'll tell you everything, especially the stuff I hadn't done yet." It usually takes awhile because in the world of Carnival, murder is the only way to get a trapeze promotion or break up a clown marriage.

Here's something weird about Carnival: during the confession stage, someone always mentioned a dead father. Sometimes it was central to the murder scheme and sometimes it was sudden and unrelated. I don't know what it means. Maybe it's nothing. Or maybe the author's dad was disappointed his son stayed home to draw funny papers when everyone else's boy was off fighting Hitler, and the author's side of that argument was killing his father with clowns, over and over in a circus comi– sorry, this description of "Carnival" is going in a strange direction and taking way too long. Let me try again.

"Carnival" was about very expected circus disasters.

"Mr. E" is harder to explain. He's an adventurer with the power of gnomes. Several gnomes! He can summon them and ask them to do things for him, but they are only gnomes so their powers are limited to small tasks like fixing parachutes or sawing through handcuffs. For instance, he can't say, "Gnomes, climb that racketeer and devour his eyes." But he can ask them to perm his hair while he waits for a racketeer to commit suicide, which is exactly what's happening in the clip I pulled (above), The End.

"Hale!... The Magician" is a pretty standard white sorcerer terrorizing South Asia with his overpowered magic. He has a little trowel that can hear him and seemingly do anything he tells it, but what makes him different is that he hates the damn thing. Hale! is not into this wizard shit. He rolled the wrong character class, and can't figure out how to respec. He wouldn't even know what that last sentence meant, you dork. And neither would readers of Punch Comics, whose wizard character left the nerdy power of a god in his pocket so he could punch and strangle with both hands.

Kitty Kelly has two jobs– flight attendant and punching cowards. If she's serving drinks on a plane being flown by a coward, she will go up to the cockpit and knock him the fuck out. As you can see from the clip I pulled, a Kitty Kelly story might end with her throwing a man out of a plane and going, "I will give his remains a sky burial and speak no more on the life of such a bitch. The End, hey, I said The End." It's a very, very confusing comic. I think the author may have been a gnome and gorilla specialist and he panicked when he found out he'd be writing a woman.

Captain Courage is a pirate who is good at punching people. As you can see, two thirds of a Captain Courage story is silent, bare-handed slaughter. And the rest is people going, "Jesus, Captain Courage is beating the shit out of that guy."

Captain Glory is precisely what he looks like in a way your brain will reject. That's him, the whole thing. You might think he has powers or skills or an interesting job, but no. He is that guy, running around and finding fist fights. They didn't even bother giving him a real name, and it doesn't matter because in a few minutes you won't remember his superhero one. Golden Age comics produced a character like this every 17 seconds. By the time you're finished reading past this drawing of his bowtie, ▶⚫◀ , you'll know this man as "Maybe Mr. Adventure?" or "Something Like Fist Fancy Unlicensed Private Eye, Probably."

"I've already forgotten it, you don't have to punch mOHHHHH!"

Sky Chief is a secret aerial agent with a kite he can use to paddleboard through the sky. If you find him in your office making calls, do not sneak up on him.

Nutty Fagin is… I guess he's a street lunatic who turned his shirt into a Captain Crunch hat that says "NAP"? Maybe it doesn't matter because I think we just saw him die. The most important thing to look out for when reading a Nutty Fagin story is the voice you hear asking if you can see now how thin the membrane is between our worlds.

This brings me to my favorite characters from Punch Comics, and who I really wanted to talk about: The Unholy 3. Why unholy? I don't know! All it says is they're cheerful and they are hoping to get rid of crime with their "skillful use of make up". It's possible they were called Disguise Buddies before these pages got printed too close to a Nutty Fagin story. I get this is nobody's best effort, but this is a bizarre way for a comic to introduce characters.

Okay, Dale.

Hi, Pearl.

Thanks! But can you slow down with all the backstory?

If this was your first comic book, none of this would seem strange. You might think, "Oh, this is the part where the heroes say hello and not a little something about themselves." But usually, the first page of old comics always had a big drawing that spoiled the story's climax and then gave a desperate description of the entire plot. You remember Captain Glory from earlier? No? See, I told you! Well, let's look at the first page of his story from the very same book:

Look at all that. We learn how the economy of a mining town is about to be destroyed by two skeletons and some guy whose name I forget plans to run up and punch them. Fuck anyone who has followup questions to that. It's a movie trailer and a book cover all in one, and yes, it's weird how 14% of Golden Age comic stories were advertisements for the comic you already bought. But it's weirder how the Unholy 3 spent their entire opening page telling us the first names of three aspiring makeup fighters and nothing else.

The Unholy 3 are not part of any kind of agency or authority. They have no investigative skills, clients, or even a police scanner. What they have are the powers of three people who engage in intensive regular makeup, so all they can do is brainstorm on ways to eliminate crime. They read about a dinner party in the newspaper and figure maybe criminals would target it? In a way they're right, because Flash and Pearl disguise themselves as service workers and break into the private home. Their plan, in its entirety, is to get in there and kind of hope a crime happens where their makeup abilities will be useful. Oh, I should have mentioned, since Dale is a little person they decide he wouldn't make a believable waiter. So he is going undercover as a baby. Not a random baby, but a specific woman's specific child. Where she will see him.

I cannot stress enough how their disguises are hat, nothing, and children's clothes. I can't wait to show you how it plays out.

There's no crime, because why would there be, so Flash and Pearl spend a lot of the night as an unpaid caterer for a woman who has no idea her toddler was replaced with a chain smoking little person. They are as terrible as anyone can be at this. They forget to stay in character, know nothing about the people they are replacing, and have no cover story for how a woman's chauffeur, housekeeper, and son are stopping by when it was literal front page news they wouldn't be coming on this trip. So maybe out of boredom, but definitely not by accident, Flash throws a goddamn bowl of soup on a guy.

This is Pearl's cue to jump into action!

She falls down in the kitchen, and it's not part of some plan. Flash asks her what happened and she says, "NOTHING… I SLIPPED!" The subject is never brought up again. Our heroes have broken into a home, replaced a woman's child like a cuckoo bird, thrown soup, and fallen down. For nothing. And it gets worse!

After getting his dinner thrown on him, the baron goes into the guest room to check on his son Percy. Psst! Reader!! It's not really his son! Young Percy is several states away, and this is secretly Dale, a full grown man smoking a cigarette. Golly, reader! Dale's smoking sure came close to blowing his cover here! See if you can spot the other tiny mistake he made…

You're right! It was when he punched the guy in the fucking face!

No matter how detailed your plan is, or how cunning your disguises are, every mission eventually turns into a pottery fight. I don't think you'd believe me if I told you I'm not leaving out any important context. The main characters of this comic really are three luna– oh. Pearl used her special Fall Down move again.

I don't know how the Unholy 3 is going to get out of this one. Unless… a child-sized man had a garden hose?

YIPPEEE ! IT'S DALE!

Again, it's going to seem like I doctored these panels. All I can do is tell you I didn't edit this in any way and hope you trust me.

It's gone from madness to fuck madness. Pearl is still trying to beat this criminal cell of attempted soup eaters with pottery, and one of her co-workers is screaming "LOOK AT 'EM BOUNCE!" at her tits. And the other one is asking her "WHO'S THE MAN?" while he hoses her asshole down. I truly don't know what to say. Nothing in my life has prepared me to describe this. Which is to say, it would take a much different kind of man to lick these babies.

The baroness comes down to see her husband and their host in a heap of seemingly dead bodies being watered by her son. "THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS I ABSOLUTELY BELIEVE THIS MAN IS MY BABY," she explains twice before a cigar gives Dale away. It is, once again, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect disguise.

And with that problem solved, the Unholy 3 leave in their signature formation. What did we see? What the fuck could it have meant? Every event of their adventure skitters away from my understanding like a fading dream. Is it real, and my new favorite fictional work of all time, or am I at the bottom of a lake watching the last of my brain cells pop?

I had to know more, so I opened Punch Comics #2, the only other appearance of The Unholy Three. And a wave of insanity crashed; here is the first page, in its entirety.

It's as if they found out what an opening page is supposed to look like in 1942, and then got every single thing wrong. What is it? This image can't be anything's plot. This is a cop spanking a little person with the wrong side of a hair bru— "It's important you know that man's name is Dale!" interrupts Dale.

No, it's not! I need to know why it's happeni– "Someone here is also named Pearl!" adds Pearl.

Yippeee, but why are the stakes of this spanking so high the spanker needs an armed gua– "Flash is in this comic!" also adds Flash.

This is a mystery story where the mystery is what the story is. The only thing they're willing to tell us is everyone's name. There are only three characters and nine of the first forty-eight words are their names. I know it's weird that I counted, but Punch Comics went from a relentless karate pirate to a wizard strangling every last man in Bangladesh to this brick wall of a non-story where they call roll three times before they start.

After an agonizing second page, we finally get details of the plot. Flash and Pearl want Dale to impersonate a boy named Percival Scratchbottom in a baby contest. Which means… they only had two adventures and the plot of both of them is Dale disguises himself as a baby named Percy? That's not possible, no. An author this obsessed with names could never do this, oh no, this isn't real I am trapped in some kind of mind prison.

Punch Comics readers, see if you can guess what the baby contest is called! Seriously, you might get it.

I hope you weren't close!

Dale gets in line for the World's Most Beautiful Child Contest and he's immediately attacked by one of the contestants. Not because she recognized him as a grown man, but because this comic can't be real and she is some ancient instinct inside me still fighting.

Anyway, the three men lurking backstage at a beautiful child contest do the one thing you'd never expect and kidnap the children.

Believe it or not, this was all part of Dale's plan. He waited for the kidnappers to offer him candy then unloaded on them with his tiny hands and feet, indistinguishable from those of a toddler.

The second part of Dale's plan was leaving alone, only that can't be right. That would mean The Unholy 3 dressed Dale up like a baby named Percy (again) in order to honeypot these men into kidnapping Dale so Dale could rescue zero children and let the criminals escape. No. My mind refuses this madness.

In a way no Earth author would write, the girl taunts Dale as Dale is taken away to be tortured. "You're not real," I tell Punch Comics #2. This wasn't part of the plan, so the rest of The Unholy 3 set out to rescue Dale. I think their names are Flash and Pearl. Unfortunately, the best plan Flash and Pearl could come up with was, "Flash is what they call me," and "Pearl's the name!" I'm going to show you Flash and Pearl's rescue attempt, from start to finish, and you will never believe it was a sincere attempt at writing. "I know it's all fake, you fucks," I whisper to the worbling sphere forming around Punch Comics #2.

It starts here, with Pearl getting an idea. Okay, stop for a second and imagine how two masters of disguise might foil a ransom exchange. I know you're sure of yourself after guessing the World's Most Beautiful Child Contest earlier, but I promise you won't predict what happens next. No fucking chance.

Pearl makes a ghost sound, and no second thing, that's the whole plan! Out of sheer impulse, a confused and uninformed Flash jumps into someone, but that's not enough tackles for three gunmen. And it's important to note Pearl never really disguises herself as a ghost; Pearl only made the noise. And once they looked in Pearl's direction, Pearl's enemies saw it was a normal, living woman. "GHOSTS, BAH!" sounds the victory cry of Kidnapper #3. After accidentally grabbing a grown man from a beautiful baby contest and abducting the one kid who wanted to be there, he really needed this win.

Dale sees his abductors have captured his friends, whose names are Flash and Pearl. No problem. Dale can get Flash and Pearl out of this. All Dale needs is for the little girl to scream as if Dale was killing her. The only hiccup in the plan is when she refuses to cooperate. Now, I am positive you'll never guess what Dale doe–

Holy shit, you were exactly right.

The kidnappers rush in, excited to see an abductee fight, but are greeted instead with flying books. Something about it has a really profound effect on Kidnapper #2 who announces, "I DIDN'T WANT TO HURT HIM ANYWAY." A book hit him so hard in the heart he no longer wants to steal beautiful children. Or at least wants to do it more gently. For today, at least, they are done with this shit. But how are they going to get away with it? They committed so many crimes. Four people have seen their faces, their car, and their home. It would take a genius idea to get out of this jam, and their leader has one– a plan rivaling even "I'M A GHOOOOST!"

His plan is "LET'S LEAVE– NO ONE'S GOING TO REMEMBER THIS!" Motherfucker, you are cross-dressing kidnappers who robbed a little person from a child beauty contest! On the same day you got into fights with kids, books, and a ghost, and the ghost is the only one you beat! You're not like… like that guy from earlier? I want to say his name was Dr. Majesty, the two-fisted crime fighter with the signature necktie? No, this is special. People are going to remember you.

Each of you is carrying a gun, and you let Pearl beat you. Pearl's only character trait is knowing she's named Pearl, and she took you out with a… pipe wrench? A slide rule? Computer, enhance:

Oh no. Is she smiling at m-me? Can Pearl see me? It doesn't matter. None of this is real. Did you hear me, Punch Comics? I know what you've done!

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