In the early 1970s, when DC Comics publisher Carmine Infantino surveyed the then-current comic book industry landscape, he saw traditional superheroes — long a mainstay for his company —  seemingly in decline, while other well-established genres, such as romance, war, and westerns, were managing to hold on at best.  About the only sector that could be said to be actually thriving was the mystery books — the label “mystery” in this case having next to nothing to do with conventional crime or detective fiction, but rather signifying supernatural horror — or, at least, what passed for it under a Comics Code Authority that didn’t allow the word “horror” to be used in the title of a comic or even an individual story, despite the 1971 revisions to the Code that allowed “literary” monsters such as vampires and werewolves to appear in the color comics of DC and most other publishers for the first time since 1954. 

One word that DC (and other publishers) could use, however, and one that arguably conveyed the idea of horror a good bit better than “mystery” ever could, was “weird”.  In June, 1971, DC released the first issue of a new ongoing giant-sized reprint series called DC 100-Page Super Spectacular.  This premiere installment (mysteriously numbered #4, for reasons now lost to time) consisted largely of old light fantasy and suspense tales, mostly from the late 1950s, wrapped up in an arrestingly spooky new cover by Bernie Wrightson, and given the umbrella title Weird Mystery Tales — emphasis on WEIRD.  The book evidently sold well — perhaps even better (though I’m only guessing here) than the issues of House of Mystery, Witching Hour, Unexpected, and their ilk published around the same time.  In any event, “weird” soon took off as DC’s go-to adjective for comic-book titles, used not only for new “straight” books in the existing mystery genre, like the ongoing Weird Mystery Tales launched in May, 1972, but also for series that mashed-up — or at least appeared to mash-up — mystery with other genres, like war (Weird War Tales, which debuted in July, 1971 — and thus, it must be acknowledged, had to have been in the works before sales reports on DC 100-Page Super Spectacular #4 were available), western (Weird Western Tales, which took over the numbering of All-Star Western with issue #12, published in April, 1972 — two issues following the first appearance of Jonah Hex), and even science-fantasy adventure (the originally all-Edgar Rice Burroughs title Weird Worlds, whose first issue came out in June, 1972).*

All of which is to say that a title like Weird Humor — one of the early names floated for what would eventually be christened Plop — would hardly have been out of place on the spinner rack in the summer of 1973; and even though that wasn’t the title under which “The (New) Magazine of Weird Humor!” ultimately entered the world, the concept of mashing-up mystery with the humor genre certainly fit in with DC’s publishing strategy at that time.

Having said that, however, it does appear from the record that during the early discussions at DC about launching a new humor comic, it wasn’t necessarily a given that the book would also be “weird” — i.e., a humor/horror mash-up — although the project seems to have been associated with Joe Orlando, the editor of Weird Mystery Tales, Weird War Tales, and Weird Western Tales (not to mention House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Phantom Stranger, Swamp Thing, and a couple of other mystery anthologies) virtually from the start.  Among the titles that was considered for the new series was Zany, which sounds suspiciously like a straight-up imitation of Mad (though no more so than Marvel Comics’ black-and-white humor magazine Crazy, the first issue of which would come out in July, 1973, just a month after Plop #1), and not especially “weird”.  (Zany was in fact the comic’s working title long enough for a number of the stories and gag cartoons that eventually appeared in it to have been coded with numbers beginning “ZA”.)  Also considered in the early days (according to Dewey Cassell’s very useful historical overview of Plop, published in Back Issue #21 {Mar., 2007]) was a format centered on “parodies of existing comic-book characters” — which, at least to your humble blogger, sounds awfully similar to Marvel’s 1960s humor title Not Brand Ecch, and, again, not really all that weird.

Still, you have to figure that weird must have emerged as the most attractive angle on humor for DC to pursue fairly early on, both because of the overall influence that that word was exercising on the mind of Carmine Infantino during this period, and the fact that Orlando was already doing a small-scale version of the horror/humor mash-up thing in his books — especially in House of Mystery, which had featured macabre cartoons by Sergio Aragones and others practically since Orlando had come on board as the title’s editor back in 1968, and which also had, much more recently, presented “The Poster Plague” in issue #202 (May, 1972).  This was a full seven-page story, drawn by Aragones and written by Steve Skeates (who sadly left us earlier this year), which followed two college students as they tried to discover the secret behind a series of flyers posted around their campus that read “KLOP is coming” — a mystery that ended with a very unexpected — and, yes, weirdly humorous — resolution:

I’m sure there were readers of House of Mystery #202 back in the day who didn’t appreciate this story, but I loved it.  And I evidently wasn’t the only one, as it won the Shazam Award (given by the short-lived Academy of Comic Book Arts) for Best Humor Story that year — a fact that may have helped inspire the direction ultimately taken by DC in putting together its new humor comic… which was, of course, to put out a whole book of strips that looked and read a lot like “The Poster Plague”.

But however much influence that story’s success had or didn’t have on DC’s decision to publish Plop, there’s no doubt that it directly inspired the comic’s name.  As a text page (entitled “A Plop Is Born”, and allegedly written by the fictitious Cain the Caretaker — longtime host of House of Mystery, and brand new co-host of Plop) explained to Plop #1’s readers:

…Carmine Infantino, our very own publisher. took both Joe [Orlando] and Sergio [Aragones] to dinner; they discussed the idea for the new magazine.  During dinner, Carmine said that he was unhappy with all the suggested titles for the new magazine.  “I want something different — like that story you just did — Plop.”  “PLOP!!? You mean “The Poster Plague” don’t you,” said Joe.  “No! Dammit! I mean Plop!” screamed Carmine, “like that story.”  “..But, Carmine, that was just a sound effect that was used throughout the story, and it was Klop, not Plop!”  “That’s it! THAT’S IT!” screamed Sergio, “You’ve got it, Carmine — the title of the new book — PLOP!”  “That’s right. It’s what I’ve been suggesting all along!” said Carmine.  And so — PLOP was born!

Along with settling on a title, other decisions had to be made prior to the new series’ launch, such as those regarding format.  According to Cassell’s Back Issue article, Infantino considered publishing Plop in magazine format, but in the end decided not to — mostly because he thought William M. Gaines, the publisher of Mad, wouldn’t like it.  (Gaines, whose publishing operation had come under the same corporate umbrella as DC after both companies were bought by Kinney National in the 1960s, had recently been acting as a consultant to Infantino.)  On the other hand, Plop did end up emulating Mad in not carrying any paid advertising; while DC had some precedent for putting out ad-free books (e.g., the DC 100-Page Super Spectacular series), this particular instance suggests the influence of the new humor publication’s “big brother”.

Even in the standard comic book-sized format, Infantino, Orlando, and co. were able to ensure that Plop would stand out on the spinner racks by way of the absolutely unique cover illustrations of Basil Wolverton, who was 62 years of age at the time of Plop #1’s release.  I’m fairly certain that my only previous exposure to Wolverton’s work prior to Plop was a single illustration — his cover for Mad #11 (May, 1954), which had been reprinted a year before in Mad Super Special #9.  In later years, I’d learn that Wolverton’s talents extended far beyond the creation of the sort of grotesqueries that graced fifteen out of Plop‘s eventual twenty-four covers; but though I’d eventually come to appreciate the cartoonist’s efforts on older strips like “Spacehawk” and “Powerhouse Pepper”, the impact of these cover illustrations in 1973 and beyond meant that to me he would (and will) always be “the Plop guy”.

And while we’re talking about the cover: the version that my WordPress template requires me to use for this post’s “featured image” doesn’t allow for embiggening — so, if you’d like a better look at “Arms” Armstrong, or want to read the cover’s mini-bio of him without eyestrain, or if you’d simply enjoy getting a clearer view of the marginal cartoons (by Sergio Aragones, naturally) that frame them, you can get that here.

And now, without further preliminaries, we’re going to skip past the inside front cover’s “Table of Plop-tents” (no ads, remember?), and go straight to Plop #1’s first non-cover page…

As a Joe Orlando-edited comic with at least one foot in the mystery anthology camp, it made perfect sense for the book to feature one or more hosts — and so, here we have Cain from House of Mystery, Abel from House of Secrets, and Eve from Secrets of Sinister House** (accompanied, it should be noted, by Cain’s pet gargoyle Gregory, Eve’s raven companion Edgar Allen).

For anyone who hadn’t read “The Poster Plague”, and was having trouble figuring out why “Plop” had been chosen as the title for a “weird humor” comic, the preceding page of Aragones gags should have clued them in.

Immediately following comes the first “proper” story in Plop #1, “The Escape!”; while it’s only credited to Sergio Aragones within the issue, in Back Issue #21 Aragones stated that Joe Orlando actually provided the dialogue to accompany his plot and art.  (Presumably, “dialogue” in this case also includes the narrative captions.)

Are you ready for the punchline?  Or, with a nod to the “horror” side of our humor-horror mash-up, maybe we should say “twist ending”, instead…

I can’t say that I recall my fifteen-year-old self’s reaction to this page back in June, 1973 with any precision, but I’m pretty certain that I didn’t slap either of my knees in mirthful delight, let alone laugh out loud.  On the other hand, I’m just about as sure that I did find the story’s twist ending very effective, and, yes, humorous — if only very darkly so.  And how could anyone not appreciate Aragones’ lovingly detailed cartooning in this full-page splash panel, its grisly subject matter notwithstanding?

“The Escape!” is followed by three pages of gag cartoons, grouped under the general heading of “Plops”, by an assortment of cartoonists.  Unfortunately, none of these cartoonists are Aragones, and most of the supposedly macabre humor falls flat, at least for your humble blogger.  (Cain’s immediate repeating of the first gag at the bottom of the page, with a host of Aragones-drawn ghoulish types howling with laughter in the background — sort of the comics version of a TV show’s laugh track — doesn’t help.  At all.)  So, let’s move on to the next story:

“Kongzilla!” — whose title character doesn’t only represent the kaiju trope, but by way of his origin in a “malodorous quagmire”, checks the then-trendy “swamp monster” box as well — is the work of writer Frank Robbins and artist George Evans.  Both men were longtime comics industry veterans, though neither had worked much (if at all) in the humor genre.

If the preceding panel’s fifty-year-old pop culture reference leaves you scratching your head, lemme ‘splain:  the Johnny Mann Singers starred in a half-hour TV variety show called Stand Up and Cheer, which ran from 1971-74 and was famous for its flag-waving patriotism.  (Yes, the conservative Christian household in which I was raised watched it every week.)

Our newlywed couple, the Korns, is saved from Kongzilla only by the intervention of an assault by U.S. fighter planes.  The distraught honeymooners manage to flee their damaged hotel, but is anywhere truly safe from this monster?

Y’know, this is actually pretty racy stuff for a 1973 Code-approved comic book.. just sayin’…

“…or a gay male?  Or a nonbinary monster-person with a sexual preference for males?  Or a pansexual individual?  Or…?”  Yep, things have changed a lot in the last fifty years.  But, even setting aside the twist ending’s badly dated assumptions about gender and sexuality, there’s not a whole lot going on here (though it’s all nicely drawn by Evans).

“Kongzilla!” is followed by four more pages of “Plops” (i.e., gag cartoons) introduced by Abel, which I’m going to take the liberty of skipping, so that we can move on to the issue’s third (and shortest) story…

The writer of “The Message”, Sheldon Mayer, was one of DC’s most experienced veterans, with credits as both a writer and artist going all the way back to 1935’s New Comics #1; his bona fides in the humor category included Scribbly and Sugar and Spike.  The artist was Alfredo Alcala, one of the leading figures of the 1970s “Filipino invasion” of American comics — and an artist whose extensive, pre-invasion credits in the comics of his homeland naturally included humor work, as well as virtually every other genre.

OK, so maybe this one’s not a knee-slapper, either.  But it’s at least amusing, and the art is nice to look at.  Plus, at just two pages, it hardly hangs around long enough to overstay its welcome.

Speaking of overstaying one’s welcome… “The Message” is followed by four more pages of “Plops” — the last such assortment of the issue, I’m happy to say.  (If you’ve been keeping count, that makes eleven pages of gag cartoons in all — roughly about the same number of interior ad pages you were likely to find in any other 20-cent DC comic book mid-1973.  Frankly, I’m not sure the loss of ad revenue incurred by DC was worth it, in the long run.)

Actually, I’m going to share one of these last “Plops” pages before we continue on to Plop #1’s final story — partly because I worry that by not including them, I’m not providing a real sense of what it was like to read Plop back in the day — and partly because I think two out of the three gags on this page are actually kind of funny.  (I’ll leave it up to you to guess which ones.)  The last of the group is signed by John Albano, who was one of Joe Orlando’s most prolific writers; he probably drew all three (a supposition I base mostly on the fact that only the middle cartoon has a job number), but don’t quote me on that.

Humor is subjective, of course; and it occurs to me that some of you out there might find many of this comic’s “Plops” funnier than I do.  We’ll probably never know, but just in case my theory happens to be true, please accept my theoretical forgiveness.

And now, we come at last to what is, in my thoroughly subjective opinion, the highlight of the issue:

“The Gourmet” was written by Steve Skeates, whose script for “The Poster Plague” had of course provided the template for the kind of stories that would run in Plop, and drawn by Bernie Wrightson, whose art had been appearing in Joe Orlando’s titles ever since he went pro, back in 1969.

If you’ve never read “The Gourmet”, but the above scene still feels somehow familiar, you may be thinking about Sam Gross‘ famous “Frog’s Legs” cartoon, which originally appeared in the December, 1970 issue of National Lampoon.  Bernie Wrightson copped to the gag’s having provided inspiration for his and Skeates’ story in a 1998 interview for Comic Book Artist #5:

I remember that Joe [Orlando], Steve Skeates and I were hanging around in the DC offices and somebody had a copy of National Lampoon with a cartoon by Sam Gross which had a frog on this skateboard-thing with no legs, wheeling himself out of the kitchen into a restaurant dining room sadly looking at the diners. There was a sign up that read “Tonight’s Special: Frog’s Legs.” We were laughing at this sick joke and that’s where the story got started.

So, no, Skeates and Wrightson didn’t come up with the amputee-frog-on-wheels bit on their own; you may thus take off a couple of points for lack of originality, if you’re so inclined.  Still, did Sam Gross conceive of a whole mob of amputee frogs seeking sweet, sweet revenge on their mutilators?  I think not.  And, besides, the story’s not over yet…

The final fate of Vernon Glute is simultaneously both so horrifying and yet so absurdly funny that it fulfills the promise of Plop better than anything else in this first issue.  “The Gourmet” is a keeper, as indicated by its following in the footsteps of “The Poster Plague” to win the 1973 Shazam Award for Best Humor Story — as well as its frequent reprintings (including in the 1998 Vertigo-branded anthology Welcome to the House of Mystery #1, from which it presumably bounced a legitimate HoM classic).

(UPDATE, 6/24/23:  Several days ago, your humble blogger discovered the following quote from Steve Skeates while perusing Back issue #81 (Jul., 2015), and can’t resist sharing it with you here:

In the first panel of the last page of “The Gourmet,” Berni threw himself and me into the story!  I’m behind the counter, impersonating a cook and complaining about the flies!  Berni’s on the other side of the counter, watching his girlfriend comb her hair!

And now you know.)

Plop #1 concludes with an inside-back-cover (and thus, black-and-white) wrap-up of the issue’s framing sequence…

…and then, on the back cover proper, a re-presentation of Wolverton’s “Arms” Armstrong illustration, minus the trade dress and copy — and with bonus Aragones background cartoons!

And there you have it, DC Comics’ first issue of Plop.  Not an unmitigated triumph by any measure, but still a lot of fun… and certainly unlike anything else you’d find on the spinner rack in June, 1973.

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Plop would run for 24 issues, with its final edition shipping in August, 1976.  For most of that time it was a bi-monthly, though it came out monthly for an eight-issue span (#10-17) in 1975.  Along the line, the format was tweaked, first with the inclusion of advertising beginning with issue #11, and later with the expansion of the title as of #21 into a 48-page “DC Giant”, which sold for 50 cents.  Ultimately, however, no change could stave off cancellation… though a three-year run is really nothing to sneeze at, especially during this particular era of DC history.

Carmine Infantino appears to have been extremely fond of Plop.  Beginning with the second issue, he took the unusual step of placing his own name at the very top of the “Table of Plop-tents”…

…just like he thought he was, I dunno, Stan Lee or something.

Perhaps the publisher’s enthusiasm is largely responsible for Plop‘s relative longevity when compared to any number of other innovative titles which were birthed, but then rather quickly died, on Infantino’s watch.  For it must be said that while Plop was almost always worth the time and money, especially in the early days, it was a fairly rare thing for it to hit the target so perfectly as Skeates and Wrightson did with “The Gourmet”

On the other hand, you have to give it to Plop for carrying the flag for a very special kind of weirdness for over three years.  While it lasted, it really was like nothing else on the stands… and that’s no plop.

 

*Perhaps the apex of DC’s enthusiasm for using “Weird” in series titles came about eight months after the debut of Plop, when the cover (though not the indicia) of the 433rd issue of one of DC’s oldest titles, Adventure Comics, announced that it was now to be known as Weird Adventure Comics.  This change, coming as it did in the middle of the Spectre’s ten-issue tenure as the book’s headliner, certainly made a kind of sense at the time; however, the new name/logo lasted for only four issues, giving up the ghost well before the Spectre himself made his exit from Adventure.

**We’ve spent time with both Cain and Abel in several previous posts, but since this is Eve’s first appearance on the blog, an introduction may be in order.  And what better introduction could there be than the first two pages of Secrets of Sinister House #6 (Aug,-Sep., 1972), the very comic in which she’d made her debut one year earlier?

As you can see, Sergio Aragones’ version of Eve for Plop adds quite a few pounds to the original depiction of the character by Michael W. Kaluta, presumably because the former artist thought she’d be funnier that way.  (Aragones’ version of Cain is a bit stockier than most other artists’ as well, although the difference in body mass isn’t nearly as dramatic as with Eve.  Abel, on the other hand, undergoes hardly any remodeling under Aragones’ pen; one must suppose the cartoonist thought he was fat enough already.)

Eve would go on to have one of the more varied careers among DC’s mystery hosts; after appearing in Secrets of Sinister House for ten issues, she found herself homeless when the title passed from Joe Orlando to another DC editor, Murray Boltinoff, with issue #16.  (For whatever reason, Boltinoff appears to have disdained host characters virtually in inverse proportion to how much Orlando liked them.)  Orlando promptly put her into Weird Mystery Tales beginning with issue #9 (Dec.-Jan., 1974), despite the fact that that book already had a host, Destiny.  Over the next several issues, Eve slowly squeezed out her predecessor, ultimately taking over as WMT‘s one and only host in issue #15, and continuing in that capacity through issue #24.  (Meanwhile, Orlando ported Destiny over to a brand new anthology title, Secrets of Haunted House… in which Eve, Cain, and Abel would also sometimes appear.  Is your head hurting yet?)  Ultimately, of course, Eve would find herself drafted by writer Neil Gaiman to become a supporting character in his 1989-96 Sandman series… along with Cain, Abel, Destiny, and almost everybody else who ever spun a yarn in a DC mystery anthology comic.