HOGAN'S ALLEY MAGAZINE #24

A fascinating history of Tijuana bibles includes the original LIVE models posing! Why the iconic Barbie failed to hit in comics. The comics career of Laurel and Hardy and Bob Hope’s side gig in comic books. Emancipated female star Flyin' Jenny by Russell Keaton and Marc Swayze. A look at little-known aspects of “Peanuts” and Charles Schulz, an exploration of Thunderboy, the very first black superhero decades before The Black Panther. Who was the first superhero? It was Hugo Hercules by western painter W.H.D. Koerner! Gary Hallgren teams up with Rosanne Barr for a lost comics collaboration. Trust us, you don’t want to miss this issue! DC's very successful Adventures of Bob Hope ran for 109 issues from 1950 to 1968. It has always been a secret good-girl classic and today is quite collectible. Artist Owen Fitzgerald started things off, but it was Bob Oskner who provided the majority of the artwork for the series (as well as The Adventures of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. The young and handsome Bob Hope was essentially a womanizing dirty old man, and Oskner's covers were classics of good-girl art. Neal Adams actually drew the last four issues! The nefarious Tijuana Bibles took the most popular comic strips of the 1930s, including Blondie, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, all the big names, and did them as x-rated deviant 8-pagers with the characters doing every kind of kinky sex with one another. Several collections have appeared over the years, to the amazement of comic fans who can barely imagine how they got away with such shennanigans. Well, they were sold "under the counter" with no known publisher...and it was the wild 1930s, when films also featured very racy scenes, nudity and a lot of very sugggestive behavior. The Hays Office clamped down on the films, but couldn't reach these little mini-comics. But what is also unique here is they've located real-life photos of models posing for various Bible stories, which I for one have never before seen. Who would have thought these were actually done from live models, much less that the photos still exist? With the Diamond Comics bankruptcy, this issue will not see as wide a distribution as normal. We're pleased to offer it as usual; it's the annual on all things comics and articles on little-explored but fascinating subjects. And at $7.50, it's a steal for 144 pages of profusely illustrated features.