A Very Special #Comicpanels

the STORY behind the COVER
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood

For a while there in Speed Comics back in the 40s, they’d have wild covers with the major heroes featured in the magazine all collaborating in some big fight (usually against the “Japanazis”). Inside the comic, there’d be two pages of narrative—yeah! That you had to READ!—that would purportedly explain what was going on in the cover scene. This was entitled, plainly enough, “The STORY behind the COVER”. As you can see from the title, the text was readily peppered with CAPITAL WORDS in order to EMPHASIZE their point and bring more DRAMA to the boring, non-pictorial story.

For some reason, I was reading one of these and my eyes blurred and I started to read only the CAPITALIZED words. Strung together, they looked almost poetic to me. So now, in a very special edition of #comicpanels, from Speed issue #39, I present “the POEM behind the STORY behind the COVER”. All punctuation is from the original, except where there was none, in which case I introduced an ellipsis, as a rule. Enjoy.

* * *

DEATH! GOD OF THE SEVEN DEATHS! BAROK!

BUT THE STAGE WAS EMPTY!

NOT

WHAT’S…WHO…WHOM?!

WE…CENTRAL AMERICA!!

CAPTAIN FREEDOM…AMERICA!

MONEY…THIS…BY RANSOM!

BLACK CAT!

THEN SHE LEAPED! ACTION! DISASTER!

NOW!

* * *

I thank you.