Can you identify this comic book?

Posted by: Scott Tags: comics Posted date: January 18, 2012 | 11 Comments

NBC aired a 90th birthday tribute to Betty White last night, and the telecast included a montage of her funniest appearances as Sue Ann Nivens on Mary Tyler Moore from 1973 through 1977. One moment stood out more than the others. (To me, at least.)

It involved a kid reading a comic book. And what makes it interesting is that it’s a comic book with a title I can’t make quite decipher and a logo I don’t recognize.

Take a look below and tell me if you can do better. (I wish the screen shot could have been sharper, but this is the best I could do.)

So … what comic book was that?

Fantastic Blob? Apparently not, since according to the Grand Comics Database, the only comic with the word Blob in the title was published in 1988 … in Sweden. Searching on the word Slob was no help. If there’s some other word that ends with “lob” that was used in a title, I have no idea what that could be. And a search on the word Fantastic alone doesn’t yield any possibilities either.

I considered that perhaps the word in the title wasn’t Fantastic, but Funtastic. However, there seems to have only been a single title that ever included the world Funtastic— The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera—and none of that book’s three issues matches the cover seen on screen.

Could it be that this is one of those fake covers assembled solely for the purposes of being seen on TV without the show needing to worry about getting permissions?

Any comics gurus out there have any better ideas?

Boy … it was a heck of a lot easier tracking down the comic that appeared on an episode of Law & Order: SVU back in 2010!

11 Comments for Can you identify this comic book?

Gary Dunaier

I thought it was a fake cover.

joecab

This was the final episode of MTM season 5 from 1975, “Anyone Who Hates Kids and Dogs”.

Doesn’t Mary or the kid actually say the title of the comic? IIRC Mary says she preferred to read Wonder Woman comics.

Anyway, never heard of any comic even remotely resembling a title like “Fantastic Blob”.

Scott

Thanks for that bit of detective work! I’ll have to get my hands on the episode and see if a title—which seems as if it’s going to be totally fake—is mentioned.

Jay Lynch

In the l960 CBS sitcom MY SISTER IRENE, a fake prop magazine was used with the title BON VIVANT. Back then I noticed that this same prop mag titled BON VIVANT was used in several other early ’60s sitcoms around this time as well. I specifically remember Richard Erdman holding a copy…possibly in the Tab Hunter 1960 sitcom BACHELOR AT LARGE, which was on NBC. So BON VIVANT must have come from some prop rental place. I bet there’s some prop rental place in LA that has what I suspect is that one handmade copy of FANTASTIC BLOB somewhere in a dusty old filing cabinet.

Scott

That reminds me of the cover mock-up I did for the Albert Brook’s movie Mother back in 1996 when I worked for Science Fiction Age magazine. I was contacted because the studio wanted a cover with Albert Brooks’ name on it, which was supposed to be visible when his wife tossed a box of mags out the window and it splits open on the sidewalk. Sadly, the scene was cut.

joecab

Ah! I just got a copy of this episode and watched the scene in question. I had forgotten the rest of the comic book goodness in it!

Setup: Mary is dating a guy she really likes, but no matter how much she tries, she just can’t stand his son Stevie (and vice versa). This scene starts around 14:25…

MARY: What are you reading there?
STEVIE: Comic book.
MARY: What’s it about?
STEVIE: (sarcastically) I don’t know, that’s why I’m reading it.
MARY: (reading the cover) “The Fantastic Blob.” Huh. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
STEVIE: They don’t give bad guys their own comic books.
MARY: Right, of course, they don’t. I should have realized that. I used to like comic books when I was your age. I used to love Wonder Woman. Do you know her?
STEVIE: Sure.
MARY: I used to love the way she’d ward off bullets with her golden bracelets. Gee, every month I couldn’t wait for the next issue to come out. Oh, I remember this one story when Egg Fu, her archenemy, had her trapped in this giant mustache of his. And he had her tied up in one end of the mustache, and in the other end of the mustache was her boyfriend, uh …
SUE ANN NIVENS: (excitedly) Steve Trevor.
MARY: Right. Right. Well anyway just before Egg Fu was about to crush them both, Wonder Woman worked her arm free and twirled her magic lasso around his head and she cracked it into a thousand pieces, and the world was safe for democracy once again. I just thought it was wonderful. Do you like Wonder Woman?
STEVIE: Naw, she’s too butch.

END SCENE

Scott

Thanks for solving the mystery! You win a No Prize!

Jonathan Green

These things drove me nuts in the days when you’d see maybe 2 comics on TV in a year. How far we’ve come.

Devlin Thompson

Speaking of well-traveled props… if I recall correctly, the “Bat Lady” prop comics from Artists and Models (the Martin & Lewis one, not the Jack Benny film of that title) show up on Get Smart.

Michael Canfield

Oh, yeah, I remember that episode, and the scene, vividly. Mary was dating a man with an obnoxious kid that she was trying to bond with. Comics rarely came up on TV when I was a kid, so I perked right up. Especially when the kid said, “they don’t give bad guys their own books.” This destroyed any shred of credibility the kid had with me; as any credible comics kid should have known, the Joker had just gotten his own title at the time: http://www.newkadia.com/?Joker_Comic-Books=2010 . Not to mention the multitude of Marvel titles featuring lead characters whose relationship with heroism was ambivalent at best: Hulk, Sub-Mariner, *Dracula*. Oh how I hated that stupid kid!

I was never so perturbed. Not even when Colonel Potter took a bunch of comics out of Radar O’Reilly’s desk, and right on top of the stack was an early Avengers from sixties. Maybe that explains why Radar could hear the casualty choppers before anyone else (hence his nickname). He was actually from the future, having traveled back to the Korean war from the Viet Nam era, bringing his beloved comics with him.

Scott

Your Radar O’Reilly anecdote suddenly explains away many of the mysteries of M.A.S.H.! The whole series makes sense now that I realize it’s science fiction!