In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

This is the second of two suggestions that my pal, Keith Alan Morgan, suggested involving obscure appearances by Batman in the 1940s. The other one was in Real Fact Comics and it was a gross attempt to spin the creation of Batman in such a way to paint Bob Kane as the sole creator of Batman, so that did not even make it into this column (as this is for weird comics that are ultimately fun). This time around, Keith's suggestion is an odd appearance by the Dark Knight in a book called All Funny Comics.

While we typically think of the Golden Age of Comics mostly in terms of the superhero characters that were introduced in those years, it is important to note that all of the major comic book companies tried to diversify as much as they could in those days. The comic books that sold the best were the superhero comics, but that does not mean that there was not plenty of money to go around for other types of stories. For instance, MLJ realized that their superhero comic book characters weren't nearly as popular as a humor strip that they introduced in one of their superhero comic books that was meant to evoke the then-popular Andy Hardy films (starring a young Mickey Rooney as an "every teen"). Soon, that humor strip became so popular that MLJ changed its name to Archie Comics after the character, Archie Andrews.

So humor comics were still quite big even during the superhero boom of the early 1940s. In Star Spangled Comics #6 (a book starring a superhero character, the Star Spangled Kid), R.L. Ross introduced a new comedic character called Penniless Palmer. The idea was that he was a hapless detective who could never quite get rich off of his craft. Luckily, his girlfriend, Bunny, had a father who was loaded and so he paid for everything when Penniless couldn't (Penniless' sidekick was a big oaf named Oxie)...

You have to love how they laid out the entire premise of the strip in just that first page.

Penniless Palmer somehow made, like, 80 appearances throughout the 1940s.

Anyhow, in 1943, DC Comics had the idea of pooling together all of their various humor characters from different anthologies like Star-Spangled Comics and put them all into one quarterly title called All Funny Comics (they all kept their regular monthly features, as well). The first issue actually featured Penniless Palmer and his gang on the cover...

Penniless and his friends appeared in most issues of the comic, which lasted until 1948.

In All Funny Comics #16, in the Penniless Palmer feature (drawn by Thurston Harper), we see Batman, Superman, Green Arrow and Vigilante teamed up with...the Pink Eyebrow?!

What's going on here?

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The story opens with a comic book creator being pressured into selling his creation because he is being haunted by the contents of his comic book collection!

You have to love the inclusion of Vigilante and Green Arrow along with Superman and Batman. Vigilante actually was quite popular during the 1940s. He even had his own serial! It was probably more because it was well-suited for the serial format, but still!

Penniless might be penniless, but he was not a bad detective, so he quickly figured out the truth...

The odds are that the drawings of the superheroes were just literally cropped out of their respective comic books and not actually drawn by Harper.

Man, Penniless Palmer actually was a pretty interesting character.

Thanks for the suggestion, Keith! If anyone else has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You're Strange, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!