Nerding Day: Reglar Fellers Comics

Golden Age comics, show me a blue man on fire pouring a punch out of a canteen to kill a cattle rancher offering free roller skates and tropical fish, but make it for your average Joe:

There we go, exactly what I asked for. Reg'lar stuff. I'm excited to show you Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics, The Official Publication of REG'LAR FELLERS which bears the sacred Reg'lar Fellers crest. Whatever this is, whatever we're looking at, was someone in the '40s attempting to make something "regular." You'd think it wouldn't be so strange, but do you know who was named the official Typical American Boy in the '40s?

That's right, Popsicle Pete. It was a decade where a knife-eyed weredummy won a nationwide search for the most average and ordinary boy. "My son loves baseball, cigarettes, and is seven haunted dolls," an everyday 1940s parent might say. So trust me when I say Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics is fucked. And on this regular Nerding Day, I'm going to go through their incomprehensible roster of forgotten superheroes, starting with Pat Dempsey, Man O' Metal!

Man O' Metal was a foundry worker from a fictional South American country where broken English was the official language, and human life was worth nothing. After a freak accident covered him in molten metal, Pat became an invincible FBI agent or sometimes a private detective because after the world went to war, we did not send our brightest minds off to write comic books.

The thing about Man O' Metal is he couldn't turn into metal whenever he wanted. Most of the time he was an ordinary man minus the shirt. This is going to sound crazy, but Man O' Metal's powers only activated if he was burned alive. So if he lost a fight, which he always did, his enemies had to choose to execute him in a very specific way. I'm not explaining it very well. He was a superhero whose weakness was everything except lava, and as soon as he stops his perfect streak of dying only to lava, he will just be Man Dead O' Knife Wounds.

The drama of a Man O' Metal adventure was not whether or not he would get captured. He carried no weapons and his only move was sprinting into a headlock. He sucked so bad at fighting the artists usually skipped the action scenes entirely. He would meet villains and in the next panel they'd be carrying them to their execution furnace. The only real tension came from how loose the writers were going to be with the concept of "lava." Would hot cement count? A nearby campfire? A lot of electricity? It had to, or he would fucking die, so eventually he became a man wearing only pants who couldn't do anything until something, anything killed him. Which almost exactly describes the next Reg'lar Fellers hero, The Purple Zombie.

The origin story of The Purple Zombie is complicated. There were two scientists and one of them made a purple zombie while the other one had no idea they were working on a purple zombie project. In barely more than a page, The Purple Zombie killed the man who made him, pledged his life to the man disgusted by him, and got sentenced to the electric chair. It is an origin that sounds like it was being screamed by a passenger in a falling plane who didn't want to die without writing 4% of a zombie backstory.

The Purple Zombie is fine with his sentencing because a), he is very sad and actually wants to die; and b), he has rubbery skin so electric chairs won't kill him, Judge Dipshit. It's funny when you think about it. Not "ha-ha" funny, of course. Except The Purple Zombie does laugh and literally think "ha-ha!", so maybe a little "ha-ha" funny.

In a twist no one knew to expect, the doctor assigned to execute The Purple Zombie finds that the electrocution process didn't kill the purple zombie, but instead… turned him purple!? N-no. Dear God, by all that is sacred, is this murderous beast untouchable by death… staying the same color!? I'm not sure what happened here because, as you can see, he was already purple. Having the main character be purple before he turns purple in his origin story is sort of an embarrassing mistake for the colorist to make, but I guess less embarrassing than asking, "What color is The Purple Zombie supposed to be?"

Maybe something about turning purple was more amazing in the '40s because I find it so much less notable than the dead walking among us, or how our laws cannot govern them. But the headlines did not say "DEATH HAS BEEN CONQUERED, ALL WE KNOW IS A LIE." They said, "MURDER ZOMBIE FREED ON 'IMMUNE TO ELECTRIC CHAIR' TECHNICALITY, HE'S PURPLE HOLY FUCK I SAID HE'S PURPLE."

So the state gives custody of The Purple Zombie to the closest thing they have to a living zombie scientist, a guy the world's only zombie scientist tried to kill. So now they fight crime, right? A non-zombie scientist and his zombie saving those in need? No. No, it's nothing close to that. A Purple Zombie adventure is like watching eleven ideas get run over by a tractor.

They immediately get a time machine, break the time machine, and lead a skeleton army into war. Their main villain owns a mostly disguised robot and his costume is a little sign that says I AM BLIND. They look like the world's greatest Pictionary player had to draw "paralympics bookies."

Cherish this perfect panel forever; let it stand as a monument to mankind's artistic legacy. Now, you might be wondering if The Purple Zombie has any powers other than never knowing the comfort of death. Yes! Only one, and it's pretty basic.

The first time The Purple Zombie crushed a throat with his neck-hungry hands he knew he'd never need a second move. His creator, Tarpé Mills, was famous for adding kink to her comics, so this might be a sex thing. I guess he is a relentless, shirtless man who follows his master's every command, so maybe it shouldn't have taken me 75 intense chokings to figure out his creator was horny. However we got here, it's kind of a fun twist to have the hero of a comic inhale his enemies' final, desperate breaths with a heaving boner and a soul abandoned by God. Now, you might be wondering if The Purple Zombie has any weaknesses other than submissive bad boys. Yes! Only one, and it's pretty basic.

The Purple Zombie is susceptible to bonks and conks. He can't die (ha-ha!), but his brain will turn off if you hit it. If you had to sum him up in 20 words, he's a corpse with the power of chokes who will know many concussions, but never death. That's only sixteen words, so go ahead and add "sexy" four times wherever you want.

So we've seen a couple real winners from Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics, but not all their characters are so fantastic. They have a guy named Chickering "Chick" Mann who they call Mann of India, whose super power is having a writing job in India, exactly as racistly as you'd imagine. They have some space pervert named Tad of the Tanbark and a man called Gordon Fife who I think is a tax attorney? There's Sgt. Stony Craig and his US Marines, and they mostly do chores, and Dinky Dinkerton: Secret Agent, who is like a Sherlock Holmes for assholes. But the one I hate the most is Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire.

It was pretty normal in the Golden Age era of comics to just steal someone's idea and let history decide which guy dressed as a flag it's going to remember. But even for the time, Don Dixon was an inconceivably brazen ripoff of Flash Gordon. Look at this bullshit:

I've never seen such a shameless knockoff, and I spent nine years getting sued by Shaquille O'Neal for having the same penis. Speaking of fun and awesome, let's get back to the good ones.

Flyin' Jenny was a beautiful lady race pilot, and she was cursed with the best possible weakness:

Her flight suit couldn't resist the babe-stripping power of wind shears! "A WIND AS HARD AS STEEL PRESSED HER BODY FIRMLY," says the text box above her as the wind snatches her clothes from her body. This plainly rules, and if you were lucky, a Flyin' Jenny story would start with her flight suit already gone:

"HER FLYING SUIT TORN FROM HER BODY," says the intro, catching you up completely. Her delicate, silky underpants are all that survived nature's ravaging!

"I was stripped nude by the sky!" Jenny screams to herself. "Shoes and everything, in case there are any foot guys reading!" Flyin' Jenny is perfect. A sky dame who wears a flight suit that disintegrates when you fly in it. Just fucking ten out of ten, Reg'lar Feller Heroic Comics. No weaknesses.

Well, she was only pretty good at plane racing. But other than that, no weaknesses.

Okay, Flyin' Jenny was a little bit weak to titty slap. But other than that, no weaknesses. Although she did run into standard 1940s lady problems like every man assuming she couldn't do anything but also trying to fuck her. It's a little silly looking back, but Flyin' Jenny reminds us of how far we've come. Ladies, tell us what you think. Get your boyfriend's help to e-mail us with a face and body shot. Up next is… The Music Master!

The Music Master was a famous music master who was really fucking serious about war bonds. You will not even come close to believing how serious he was about war bonds unless I show you.

In this adventure, Music Master sees a man who isn't buying war bonds because the line is too long. It's time to leap into action. Music Master's powers won't seem unusual at first. His body turns into music from the dick down, which is just what anyone's does if you play "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." But Music Master can do it with any music*, and then also fly. So he grabs this impatient, unpatriotic man and takes him to Hitler-occupied Europe.

* "I PLAY NICE MOOSIC!"

Five minutes ago this man was complaining about the line to buy war bonds, and now he's in Germany getting executed by Nazis. He has been pulled into Hell by a melody centaur and he is right to have no idea what lesson he is supposed to be learning. I'm not sure anything I say could explain the character better than this. Music Master flew a grouchy but innocent man across an ocean, gave him a concentration camp tour, and left him to die by firing squad. His heart is in the right place, but he is always wrong, and a goddamn maniac.

I mentioned already that Music Master needed music to transform, and you'd think it would have led to dramatic situations where he had to find a guitar, a flute, anything to activate his abilities. But no, his powers counted any nearby honk or peep as music. At the risk of writing a sentence too beautiful to look at, he could take to the skies on the toot of a peanut whistle. I'm sure the first thing Man O' Metal said to him was, "Oh, so your powers run on peanut whistle peeps? You don't have to… get killed by hot liquid for your powers to activate? Must be fuckin' nice." Oh, shit, I haven't mentioned Penrod "Downbeat" Hunter yet.

Music Master's sidekick was a little boy with an outfit any ventriloquist dummy would call "a bit much," a love of jazz music, and no abilities. He was there because they thought kids couldn't relate to a symphony conductor with songs for legs, but I'd argue a man being torn into music by peanut whistle peeps is 1000% more relatable than Penrod "Downbeat" Hunter.

This panel is all pretty standard for the time. Grown men in the '40s were often best friends with teen boys wearing two inches of inseam who found excuses to jump into their laps. We've seen it all before. But Penrod Hunter was different. He spoke only in hipster catchphrases, and while they might work in a jazz club, I'm not sure the author considered how they might sound coming from a magician's twink. Let me show you what I'm talking about:

Go ahead and call "BEAT ME, DADDY!" an unfortunate choice of words, but Penrod climbed onto Music Master's haunches and screamed "HITCH ME ON LIKE A TRAILER!" You don't say that to someone you're not fucking, under penalty of law.

I dare you to understand this. I'd never use the word "impenetrable" when speaking about Music Master and Downbeat, but the sexually charged jazz lingo does make things confusing. And I can't stress enough how useless Penrod is in any situation. Let me show you the kind of thing he does in something as simple as a standard werewolf fight.

Okay, so Music Master is battling the wolfman by wrapping his music around him. Whether he considers this "grappling" or "laying his eggs" we'll never know. The werewolf breaks a lamp, cloaking the room in darkness, and now Penrod has to decide which shadowy figure to bash. The growling, wolf-shaped one? Or the flopping torso of his daddy whose scent he will never forget tied to the obvious wolf by sheet music? Lock in your guess now.

You were right! Against all odds, Downbeat chose wrong. Penrod shattered the skull of his beloved so hard he slipped right out of his Sex Jazz dialect. He shouts, "JOHN, SPEAK TO ME!" and not, "SORRY ABOUT THE ROUGH LICK, DADDY! DIG THOSE LOINS, YUM!" And no one expects a sidekick to always be helpful in a werewolf fight, but to knock Music Master out AND forget to do the catchphrases is way too much worthless. So anyway, Music Master has no control over his impulses and there's a suspiciously pointless teen riding him. Now let's go over his only three weakness.

Besides werewolf and boy, Music Master is susceptible to cracks, waks, and whams. It's like a mediocre artist once said, "I only know how to draw maître d's falling asleep." And like the editor of Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics told him, "You're hired!" Let's do one last superhero: Hydroman!

Hydroman is a sack of soggy gunman, but the story of how he became that is a fascinating one. A young chemical engineer, Harry Thurston, turned his hand into water, so they called Bob Blake for help. Unfortunately, his girlfriend picked up…

"Honey, your friends at work were going on and on about some stupid missing hand, but you were all the way over there reading the paper, so I hung up on them."

"You'll never fully understand the ways of man, darling, but missing hands are bad!"

"You boys and your toys!"

When he arrives, Bob is not much of a help. All he does is scream "HOLY MACKEREL!" at Harry's missing hand before the other idiot throws a bucket of chemicals on him. It turns him into a puddle, but not a regular puddle. He becomes a puddle that can scream, that can curse Harry for what Tom has done. Comics are so great.

Tom throws a second bucket of chemicals on Bob, it's the least he can do, and Bob turns back into a man. It's madness. If I told this to my daughter as a bedtime story, her eyes would turn black and she'd whisper, "None of this is real, fool, you're drowning in a bathtub."

So now you know how Hydroman got his water powers. Want to watch him drown someone with his own body?

In his very first adventure, Hydroman pulls a gun on a meeting between a Mongol warrior and 1941's version of an overweight man, or as any 2025 retailer would call him, a medium. I didn't catch his name, but the narrator calls him "THE FAT ONE" and Hydroman calls him "FATTY."

Hydroman engulfs the man, who never gets a name and will pass away being called "THE FAT GUNMAN." Over the course of three panels we watch the fat fatty die confused, his lungs filled with water that is also a man, his clothes, and his gun. I've seen a lot of comic book heroes use all kinds of remarkable powers to defeat their enemies, but I'm not sure I've ever seen such a deliberate attempt to show us what it's like to take a life as a human wave. The illustrator drew all kinds of swirling shapes around the man – planets, stars… I don't know what they mean, but certainly something. Here, during an otherwise normal comic adventure, is an artist inadequate to the task trying to communicate how it feels to die… all you are and all you will ever be… torn from you. Better luck next time, Fatty. Hydroman's powers also let him do fun pranks!

Something about Hydroman having a gun when he comes out of a drinking glass seems broken. Like, fine, he fits in a glass. Super powers are crazy. But if that is a real gun that shoots real bullets, no, I need to know the rules with this guy. I need Tom to read us the fine print on that bucket of chemicals. By the way, other than a slow, indulgent asphyxiation, there is nothing Hydroman loved more than splooshing out of somebody's drinking glass.

Hydroman is immune to all harm and to touch him is to know certain death. He can go where he wants and no one can stop him. There is absolutely no need for drinking glass stealth missions. For fifty gallons of man, it must be agony to squeeze yourself into a cup and wait there for your enemy to get thirsty. But it was all worth it for that look on their face when they go to take a drink and find a punch. Hey, speaking of faces, Hydroman had a sidekick named Fish-Face.

There's no real story here. He didn't stick around for very long, but he was a guy with a fucked up face and Hydroman called him Fish-Face. And he was a dick to Fish-Face. Now that I think about it, Hydroman might not have been the good guy. Let's take a look at another one of his adventures.

Yeah, from a certain point of view, this is a madman dressed like an arm on its way to a cow insemination who jumped out of a drinking glass, pulled a gun, and started screaming racial slurs. Let me see if I can find one where he's doing something heroic.

Getting partially eaten by a gorilla is the best I can do.

So I mentioned earlier how Hydroman is immune to all harm, and that's sort of true because water is effectively punch proof and his suit can't be penetrated by gorilla, but Hydroman does have one weakness:

He's susceptible to chair, crack, sock, and konk! But when that happens, all you have to do is pour a little water on him and he's back. I'll show you what that looks like and then we'll wrap up this article about the famous, enduring characters of Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics. Thanks for reading! Bye!

Hold on, don't go. I think we should look into this wet rainbow boy Hydroman is hallucinating – this lad too fabulous to be true, lubricating him with lightning speed. Rainbow Boy can't be real, can he?

Not only is Rainbow Boy real, he is clearly the author's most precious, treasured idea. Look at all this text. He's a high school quarterback with one hobby and rainbow powers, yet his backstory has five times more thought put into it than how someone could go from man to puddle to something in between.

Rainbow Boy, the rough and tumble beautiful teen, spun off from Hydroman to have his own adventures, and you will obviously love him. But keep your thrill expectations in check. You read about the Wizard Kids and his outstanding high school athletics. His hobbies kept him pretty busy, and crime sometimes had to work around his quiz team schedule:

Am I reading this right? Rainbow Boy abandoned Hydroman in the middle of a mission to spend three hours getting ready for a radio show where they asked high schoolers to name the colors of the rainbow? You have to be so confused about so many things to write something like that down. I was kidding when I said Hydroman was hallucinating Rainbow Boy, but this is something a sack of liquid man would think after a dozen wrench clobberings.

Golden Age comics sometimes started with shots of the hero doing something having nothing to do with the story, but generically heroic like bonking Hirohito and Hitler's heads together or kicking an ape in the neck while it's trying to escape a volcano. Yeah, exactly like that, Rainbow Boy!

From looking at him, you might assume Rainbow Boy is simply a glorious flying lad, but his rainbow is not some artistic representation of speed. The rainbow is a kind of physical slime trail he's leaving, and I think it hurts.

He seems to have learned a lot of his crime fighting techniques from Hydroman because Rainbow Boy really takes his time and lets the reader experience what it would be like to have your world destroyed by his nightmare powers. He will torture the dignity from a man over the course of several pages, but like the strangulations of The Purple Zombie and the artisinal, intimate drownings of Hydroman, it's worth considering how much of Rainbow Boy is a sex thing for the author. I took some clips.

Whether a scene is framed around the foreground of his panties or he's untying you with a smoldering sexual intensity, these things happen too often to be a coincidence. I am pretty confident you won't think it's a me thing when I say there's only one reason anyone would draw his buns so lusciously. There's no tailor in the 1940s who assumes you want a sexy French cut on your wrestling trunks. And look at the fabulous little swoop in Rainbow Boy's flight paths. Those are the swoops of a boy looking to party. This is going in a weird direction. Let me start over.

Let me start over again.

One of the things I love most about Rainbow Boy, and I love everything, is how he isn't operating in secret, and yet nobody knows who he is. Somehow a boy coming out of the sky trailing loops and wonderful loops of rainbow is not a thing anyone in his world cares about. No matter where he goes, the first thing people say to Rainbow Boy is, "Who are you?"

He is a boy dressed as a rainbow. The second you saw this guy you'd say, "Who the fuck are you, rainbow boy?" He's a walking comedy routine trap.

Sorry. The point is, there has never been anyone so obviously named Rainbow Boy. Rainbow Boy is the nickname he couldn't shake if he called himself Spectrum Enforcer. If your name was Steve Steveson Junior and he was called The Steve Strangler, Slayer of Steve Steveson Senior, you would say, "What's that rainbow boy's name again? You know, the one who slayed my father, Steve Steveson?"

But despite him being a mysterious teen boy dressed as a rainbow, everyone decides he's a sane adult, capable of anything. The people of his era should assume they're meeting an imbecile who lost his mind while inventing the gay superhero porn parody, and yet look! That guy bets Rainbow Boy could lick a whole bunch of men! Stop, you know what he means. And here's what a cop says when Rainbow Boy, an untrained teen civilian, tells him he's going after a gang of murderers:

"Ha ha, have fun, kid! If my boss asks, I was drunk in my patrol car, not authorizing you to hunt down those men!"

Now, you might be asking, did Rainbow Boy have any weaknesses? And yes, I'm about to show him getting hit in the head with a stick and say he was susceptible to conk and bonk.

He very much was.

But his creators knew they had to give him a real weakness, so in addition to his soft head and ineffective helmet, Rainbow Boy was also weak to darkness. It makes sense because, as he thinks to himself while being burned at the stake by natives, rainbows are never seen at nigh– hey, these natives wear the same cut of briefs!

Like every aspect of Rainbow Boy, they really overdid it with his weakness. Once night fell, Rainbow Boy had no chance, and everyone knew it. There was no need to draw it or tell you about it. If it was night, the comic would skip right to Rainbow Boy, an impotent nuisance, getting thrown into a trunk or already tied up. These panels all happened within two pages:

But Rainbow Boy, Man O' Metal, Hydroman, Music Master, and poor nude Flyin' Jenny were too good for this world. Soon Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics became only Heroic Comics and they abandoned superheroes for "real" tales of war "heroes." Sometimes this meant Apache massacres, sometimes it meant RPG character sheets for ethnics. Did you know the Japanese can grow to over 64 inches in length and their soldiers train by getting beaten unconscious?

It wasn't all bad. Some stories were rad, like "Cookin' With TNT" where this guy blew his dick off with dynamite…

… but that didn't happen often enough, and it didn't take long for the editors to run out of fun eugenics facts. Before long, they started publishing shit like this:

This issue promised "the exciting true adventure of a ferocious giant panda," but it is none of those things. It is, at best, a very, very one-sided story about a panda / human misunderstanding. It's an unmotivated panda murder they called "FACING DEATH IN A PANDA'S MOUTH."

I wasn't kidding. It's really called "FACING DEATH IN A PANDA'S MOUTH." But no one, especially death, was anywhere close to the panda's mouth. It is deranged that anyone would tell this story to another person, much less draw it and print it, especially if you didn't know how to draw a goddamn panda. It's not a long story, and I can tell it in one sentence. Some lawyer was in China, saw a distant panda…

… and shot it. It might be the exact opposite of an exciting adventure. He screamed "IT WORKS!" as if there was some kind of bullet-resistant panda theory he was disproving. Consider it one more detail of this event he should have never shared with anyone. There is nothing more to it. He was some asshole shooting a panda, the end.

I promise there were no twists! He died. The gentle, endangered panda died. The final text box explained how he joined a tiny but growing community of white men who have murdered a panda, the end. In only twelve issues, Heroic Comics went from a magnificent boy twirling on the end of a rainbow to watching the light leave a panda's eyes. Alright, that's it! I'll say goodbye the same way Heroic Comics would, a dying panda, suffering in his final moments, taunted by a lawyer.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ObsoL33T, who will be fine so long as nobody cracks him in the back of the skull. Water yell!

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