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COMIC BOOK REVIEW! MOON GIRL #3, Spring 1948 issue (available from Canton Street Press)

It's been around a year since I got hold of any MOON GIRL reprints, but given I had a little bit of cash left over from my last paycheck and rather than blow it on such non-essentials as down payments or food I thought I'd hand it over to the fine folk at Canton Street Press for this recent addition to the famed EC WONDER WOMAN ripoff series (but oh what a ripoff!).

As usual, a grand issue this is making all of those anti-MOON GIRL types who've been opening their evil traps these past few decades look like the total idjits they are and most surely will remain. There are four great stories cropping up here, the first dealing with Moon Girl's sworn enemy Satana threatening a hand-picked batch of millionaires with actual drones just like the kind that are knocking out certain undesirable elements as we even now speak! Talk about steampunk predictions of things that are now considered everyday ordinary!!! The second's got Moon Girl helping out a failing flying company whose every move is being sabotaged, most likely by some shady dealers who want to use the land the company's on for their own nefarious means.

The third one actually has our heroine (yes, I STILL used that word and will continue to for the rest of my life!) returning to her home kingdom of Samarkand to quell an uprising being led by the Royal Visier who obviously has no Pink Floyd-styled garden party on his mind, while the last one's got that old yet tried and true plot where a lookalike Moon Girl gets involved in a whole load of robbery and murder and guess who gets the blame!

Oh yeah, and keeping true to Canton Street Press form this mag reprints the original ads including one for the then-current EC roster featuring such titles as DANDY and THE HAPPY HOULIHANS, not to mention two pages of Ed Wheelan's FAT AND SLAT comic, one example of which can been seen at your very right. I always wondered why this particular MUTT AND JEFF swipe didn't lead to any lawsuits down the line considering just how close to the original intent this MINUTE MOVIES creator came, but since SHRIMPY and PETER THE LITTLE PEST lasted so long without any legal ramifications perhaps it was just soo small a target to go after. What's even stranger is that the series began at Max Gaines' "All American" DC line which was also home to MUTT AND JEFF in the forties, appearing in pages in between the likes of Green Lantern and Wonder Woman! I guess FAT AND SLAT was so under-the-radar that it could not only survive for a good six or so years in the comic book idiom, but make the smooth transition from DC to EC along with PICTURE STORIES FROM THE BIBLE!

After reading MOON GIRL #3 and a whole slew of new comic arrivals here in the dead and dank days of the late teens, all I gotta say is I can sure rest easily at night knowing that the spirit of good ol' timey kick up yer feet suburban slobdom still has some faint if effectual meaning. And that's even if we all have to get it from seventysome-year-old comics, moom pitchers and other lowbrow thrills such as these which never did date despite what your phony intellectual friends might have told you! If your "inner child" is more Peter the Pest than whatever John Bradshaw thought it should be, maybe you should pick up a copy of MOON GIRL in between mixing gunpowder with the chicken feed and watching those li'l beaks blast right off!