Brand Ecch: The Fannish Adventures of Blooperman, Part Two

Continuing on in our survey of the four Blooperman stories published by Charlton Comics in the mid-1960s and how they intersected with certain elements of fandom, today we’re taking a look at the second adventure of the dimwitted character, published in GO-GO #4. The character’s visual creator Jon D’Agostino drew Blooperman on the cover, but the strip had been given over to other hands on the inside. GO-GO was a weird little comedy series that attempted to connect with the youth and counterculture movements of the period despite having only a limited understanding as to what those movements were all about.

The second Blooperman strip was again written by Gary Friedrich, who was likely the youngest and most plugged into the youth culture contributor to the issue. The artwork for these four pages was delivered by Bill Dubay, himself a fan who transitioned into the business. Dubay would make his mark primarily working for Warren Magazines in the 1970s, and less as an artist than as a writer. Editor Dick Giordano is also credited on the splash page here, which emulates the sorts of humorous credits that Stan Lee often used to do.

Friedrich’s Badman and Robber parodies lean into the current wave of Batmania still being felt as an outgrowth of the 1966 live action BATMAN television series. It’s kind of a weird choice to make them criminals rather than crime-fighters, but given the names, I suppose Friedrich figured he’d just go with it.

Here, on the final page of this second Blooperman adventure, we begin to see the fannish roots of the endeavor really begin to shape up. Because the story ends with the appearance of the Bestest League of America, parodies of the Justice League that had been created years before by Roy Thomas for the fanzine Alter Ego, well before Thomas entered the field. As Friedrich and Thomas were close friends, I’m sure that Gary appropriated the characters here with Thomas’ blessing. These are the exact same parody characters than had appeared years earlier in Thomas’ own fan parody strip.