Last weekend I got to do one of my favorite things, and something I rarely get to indulge in anymore: comic book bargain bin diving. I’m a comic nerd, of course, and like any nerd I’ve got my favorites, both when it comes to modern comics and to the classics. I’m trying to fill a run of DC’s Star Trek comics (try to act surprised) and I’ll never turn up my nose at a Disney Duck comic or anything from Archie, pre-2010 or so. But in addition to those special things I’m searching for, I also like…weird stuff. I mean obscure comics, books that most people have probably never heard of before, things that remind me of my childhood, things that have a crazy title, movie adaptations for movies that you wouldn’t believe had ever been adapted, or even just anything that’s got a bizarre cover. If I can find it for under a buck, I’ll throw it into the cart.

This kind of bargain bin excavation is something I love, but it’s not something I get to do all the time, with a five-year-old son for whom “patience” is a foreign concept and a wife with a busy work schedule. But last weekend, with Erin’s blessing, I headed to a small local show in Slidell, Louisiana, where I spent a couple of hours bouncing from vendor to vendor, most of that time sifting through the dollar bins for some of this unexpected, bizarre gold. This week, I’ve decided to share with you some of the crazier finds that I made in this most recent hunt.

First off I’d like to turn your attention to Flintstones #5, published by Dell Comics way back in 1962. Comics based on cartoons are one of my go-to grabs in these bargain bin digs. I’ve always been a fan of the Flintstones, and these Dell comics were great – five full stories and a couple of one-pagers for twelve cents? Sign me up. Story #3 in this issue introduced me to “Perry Gunnite,” an old-fashioned detective comic strip set in the world of Bedrock. Perry appeared in a single episode of the cartoon but, evidently, spun off into his own series in the comics. That find enough would have made this book worth buying, but it was what I found in the fourth story that made this a comic I’ll never forget. 

In “The Champ Chowhound” we are introduced to Wilma Flintstone’s cousin Muncher, visiting from out of town and eating Fred and Wilma out of house and home. They want to get rid of him, but he can’t afford to go home and will not accept Fred’s “charity” offer to buy him a bus ticket. So the Flintstones embark upon a set of increasingly elaborate ruses to send him packing. First, Fred claims to have “found” a bus ticket back to Muncher’s home town, but rather than hopping on the bus Muncher sets out to find its rightful owner, turning it over to the first person to claim it. Next they try to guilt him into leaving, pretending that Fred has lost his job and they can’t afford to feed him, but Muncher’s general good nature won’t allow him to abandon them in their time of need. Finally, Muncher signs up for a hog-calling contest in the hopes of winning the money to get Fred back on his car-stopping feet and getting himself the cash to go home.

On the surface, admittedly, this doesn’t seem to be a particularly mind-blowing story…and it’s not. Except for one thing. Regular readers of Geek Punditry will recall a couple of months ago when I mentioned that my wife and I have been binging I Love Lucy on Pluto TV. Pluto shows the entire series in order over and over again, and with 180 half-hour episodes that means if you watch it a lot, there’s a good chance you’ll catch the same episodes every four days or so. Were it not for the fact that I’ve seen these episodes repeatedly and recently, this Flintstones comic would not stand out for me. But it does. Because I recognized that whoever wrote this comic completely ripped off a season three episode of I Love Lucy almost BEAT FOR BEAT. In the previous episode, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford came to visit the Ricardos. As this episode began, he was still crashing on their couch and tearing at their every last nerve. 

And from there, it is exactly the same story as the Flintstones comic. Ernie won’t take a bus ticket, so Ricky pretends to find one, but Ernie returns it to the “rightful” owner. Ricky pretends to be out of work, even going so far as to have the Mertzes pretend to be evicting them. (It’s a wonder that the writer of the comic book resisted the urge to have Barney and Betty fill this role, but as the comic was only five pages long I guess they couldn’t squeeze it in.) The biggest deviation is that, rather than have a contest to end the story, Ernie arranges for the crew to appear on the TV show Millikan’s Chicken-Mash Hour doing a hootenanny to get them out of the red. 

The Lucy episode is credited to the series’ prolific writing team of Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer. Most Dell comics at the time had no credits given, although the Grand Comic Book Database credits the artwork to Kay Wright. The writer may have been lost to history, but I wish I knew the name of the person who had the audacity to steal a plot wholesale from an 8-year-old TV show for a comic book based on a cartoon, which makes me wonder if anybody overseeing the current IDW My Little Pony comics has double-checked to make sure nobody is knocking off the final season of Parks and Recreation. 

The next bizarre book I pulled from a bargain bin last weekend was an oddity called Jesus, the Man With the Miracle Touch. I’d never heard of this book before, nor its publisher (“Cosmics”), although a little time on Google indicated this publisher released just four comics, all religious-themed one-shots in the late 80s. The story is a fairly straightforward retelling of the Biblical life of Jesus, albeit highly condensed into 32 comic book pages. The book also doesn’t have any credits, which is a shame, because I really quite like the art style. Whoever did this book easily could have been working on Harvey or Archie Comics, or maybe something from Marvel’s Star line of young readers comics at the time. (More about that later.) Mostly, though, I bring this up because when I was at the convention and handed the stack of books to the guy at the booth, as he counted them, he looked over at his co-worker and yelled, “Hey! Somebody is buying the Jesus book!”

At one time, especially when I was a kid in the 80s, “public service announcement” comics were a fairly big thing. There’s an infamous Marvel comic where Spider-Man and Power Pack taught you about the dangers of child abuse and another where Spidey teamed up with Storm and Luke Cage because that’s the natural trio to warn you about ill effects of smoking. I, of course, have both of these in my collection. Meanwhile, DC farmed out the Teen Titans for three anti-drug specials. This weekend I picked up the second of the three, in which the Teen Titans and their pal “Protector” try to help Protector’s cousin, who has moved to Blue Valley, developed a crush on a friend of Wally West, and (gasp!) has fallen into the world of drugs. The Titans, of course, have to help get him out of it.

When I was a kid, I remember getting what turned out to be the third of the Teen Titans specials (although I didn’t know it at the time, as these books didn’t have traditional comic book numbering or anything), and I remember being baffled by it. I knew who the Teen Titans were, of course, but who was this guy in the blue costume and cape with no powers? He was…kinda like Robin, but he wasn’t. That same “Protector” is in this book, although here we find out he’s got an actual secret identity, Jason Hart…so my fifth-grade headcanon of Dick Grayson wearing a brown wig and using a different name for…reasons…I suppose has turned out to be inaccurate. Looking back as an adult, I wonder if Dick Grayson was tied up in some sort of licensing rights surrounding the Batman due to the movies or something. It might not be the case – after all, the first of these comics came out in 1983 and the first Tim Burton Batman movie wasn’t until 1989. Then again, some of these things have a long timeline. If there’s anyone with more information on this, I would be very anxious to hear it. 

(UPDATE: Reader Trey Ball has informed me that the licensing deal that prevented Robin being from used in the comics was actually due to the Superfriends, TV show, which for 1983 definitely makes more sense than the Batman movie. The anti-drug comic was produced in association with Keebler, but Nabisco had a licensing agreement with the Superfriends characters. Thanks, Trey!)

The last book I’m going to discuss today comes from Marvel Comics, specifically their Star Comics line from the 80s. (Have you ever noticed how many weird comic books have their roots in the 80s? Something in the air back then, I swear.) Star Comics was Marvel’s attempt to crack into comics specifically for young readers. The most famous alumnus of the line these days is Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, star of big screen movies, animated shorts, and my heart. But the line also included lots of licensed comics such as Heathcliff, Care Bears, Madballs, and ALF, as well as several original characters that were created and produced by writers and artists Marvel poached away from the likes of Harvey and Archie Comics. Royal Roy was a kind of Richie Rich knock-off, Top Dog was about a kid who found a talking dog who also happened to be a spy, and Planet Terry was an elementary school Flash Gordon with a clever pun in the title that I didn’t catch until some 20 years later. 

But the book I got this week was Wally the Wizard #3, written and drawn by Archie Comics superstar Bob Bolling. In this issue Wally, apprentice to the Wizard Marlin (Merlin had the power to know the future and thus trademarked his name in the 8th century specifically to avoid being portrayed in Star Comics), discovers that his parents are in the company of a pack of Vikings. He rounds up his buddy, the Viking orphan Vikk, and sets out to find them. Bolling did countless wonderful comics for Archie, especially lots of the Little Archie series, which is no doubt what Marvel had in mind when they picked him up to work on the Star line. This issue, though, makes it seem like he needed a nap. 

The truth is, none of the Star-original comics were all that great, although I do have a fondness for Top Dog. None of them lasted more than a couple of years, but some of the licensed books (Heathcliff and ALF, specifically) had long runs. But you know, that’s okay. In this day and age, when comic book publishers seem to think the solution to a dwindling readership is to publish 75 different covers of the same book to sell to the same readers they’ve had for decades, it’s nice to remember that there was at least a time when one of the major publishers was trying something to get kids reading comics again.

Some comic collectors are in it for investments. They spend all their time looking for flawless copies to slab and flip, speculating that a book is going to go up in price because someone announced a movie deal, treating it like a business. I do not understand these people. But I know I’m never going to encounter them sifting through a dollar bin, because the books in those boxes aren’t for them. They’re for people like me – people who see comics as fun, as a little escapist entertainment. And especially, people who like to uncover stuff that others have probably forgotten about. I may not get there often anymore, but the next time I get around to a convention or a used bookstore or anywhere I can sift for cheap, weird comics, I’ll come back with another installment of Bargain Bin Gold.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. To date, the greatest thing he’s ever pulled from a bargain bin was the four issue run of Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego, a great comic from the 80s (of course) that you should totally hunt down if you can.