Monday, March 28, 2011

It's Hard to Believe, But...

I mentioned in my post on Henry Boltinoff that the exceptions to the DC mags that carried his gags included the comics edited by Julius Schwartz. Schwartz preferred educational fillers like this one:


Does anybody really believe that a steel ball would bounce higher than a rubber ball of the same size? Maybe if you dropped them both on a rubber surface, but not on a sidewalk as shown in that panel.

These features appeared regularly in Green Lantern. Flash, of course, had Amazing Speeds:

When Schwartz took over the editor's desk on Batman he emphasized detective-oriented fillers like this one:

While the Atom, no surprise, featured tiny factoids:
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6 comments:

  1. Andrew May11:29 AM

    The first really bouncy rubber ball was the Super Ball invented in 1964. If the comic predates that, they would be thinking of a ball made of solid rubber like a pencil eraser, which hardly bounces at all.

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  2. Anonymous3:27 PM

    Actually, a steel ball WILL bounce higher than a rubber ball--but only if it's dropped on a surface hard enough to deform it. Dropped on a sidewalk, a steel ball of the size shown in the drawing would probably just crack the concrete and lie there. --Jim

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  3. Anonymous3:31 PM

    And WONDER WOMAN had fillers about courtship and wedding customs from around the world. --Jim

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  4. Pat9:05 PM

    Oh, yeah, Jim, I remember those: Marriage a la Mode.

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  5. MichaelRbn7:02 AM

    The ones I really liked were the Superman Family/Weisinger edited comics where there would be items like Meet the Legionnaires or lists of Superman's Kryptonian relatives or the various types of Kryptonite. In those days before comics shops selling back issues, those were how I learned about the back stories of the characters I was just beginning to know.

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  6. Anonymous6:42 AM

    I loved the educational fillers. Particularly the Metal Men's pieces on the properties of different metals (drawn by Ross Andru a lot of the time, IIRC)

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