Number 859

Many happy returns of the spray

Here's story two from EC Comics' Land Of The Lost #1, 1946. For those of you who know EC only as the publisher of the best horror and science fiction comics ever, it was quite a different company when Maxwell Charles ("Charlie") Gaines founded it after selling out his All American Comics line to DC toward the end of World War II. Gaines had an idea that EC could stand for Educational Comics, and to this end he published several comics for young readers. Land Of The Lost was an adaptation of a popular radio show, written by the program's creator, Isabel Manning Hewson, and drawn by illustrator Olive Bailey.

I told more of the story in Pappy's # 706.

What pleased me most when reading this story was the wordplay. I also noticed that the character Triton looked familiar. I'm sure that when the artwork for this story was turned in, Charlie Gaines could not have guessed that his son and heir, future Mad publisher Bill Gaines, would one day look a lot like Triton.