Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

NOTE: The featured image is from an otherwise-unrelated 1983 Mad issue. I just wanted a color image for the banner.

Nowadays, when comic book fans think about E. Nelson Bridwell, they mostly think about his work for DC Comics, which he joined in the mid-1960s as Mort Weisinger's assistant editor after being a prolific letter writer to DC. He wrote a number of comic books for DC, as well, of course, including a lot of notable Legion of Super-Heroes stories (I wrote about a couple of them recently) and the Super Friends comic book for DC.

Bridwell is famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of comic book history/continuity. He's the sort of guy who had an explanation for every weird, seeming inconsistency in DC Comics history. They weren't always necessarily GOOD, but he had them!

Anyhow, before he got into comic book editing/writing, he was a notable gag writer for Mad Magazine. In fact, he might have been the person who coined the famous "What do you mean we?" joke involving the Lone Ranger and Tonto that was one of the most popular jokes of the early 1960s (it was from Mad #38 with artist Joe Orlando)...

Five years later, Bridwell used his encyclopedic knowledge for a feature in Mad #82 (co-written with the great Frank Jacobs and drawn by the legendary Wallace Wood) where he envisioned a gossip magazine...about the world of comics!

This was a period in time when comic books and comics were used interchangeably. When Stan Le wrote a book about working in comics in the 1940s, he saw no difference between a Superman comic book or a Dick Tracy comic strip and a lot of folks had that same position in the 1960s. Nowadays, they are a bit more cordoned off from each other, culturally.

The gags involve you to be familiar with a lot of comic strips, but the fact of the matter is that at this point in time, most people WERE familiar with all of these comic strips...

Here's a great bit by Wood, showing different outfits for comic characters, including Donald Duck finally wearing clothes...

These interviews with young comic characters is perhaps a bit too "inside baseball"...

Regular readers will know that Daddy Warbucks had some crazy stories over the years (including dying when FDR was re-elected and then coming back to life in celebration when FDR died in office), so this Warbucks bit is on point...

These little gossip notes are fun, as are the quizzes...

It's a fascinating look at the comic book world being roasted by one of its biggest devotees.

If anyone has any interesting comic book related story that you'd like to see me feature in a future Knowledge Waits, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!