Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The other WTF covers.

The Golden Age thread is chockablock with poor art, bizarre anatomy, unintentionally (?) suggestive elements, general nuttiness. WTF, right?

Then there are the other ones. Every so often I run across a cover that seems like it should "make sense" but I can't quite work out what the artist was trying to convey. It probably comes down to one of three things:

• cultural references no longer commonly understood
• poorly realized situation/gag
• 99 out of 100 people understand it just fine (I am the 1%!)

I'll post 'em, you guys help me out. Deal?

<spits in hand. extends to shake with LYL>

Can we just exclude all Liefeld covers right off the bat and accept that they are in a class all their own?

what category would that be.

I can only think of really bad things to say.

Better left unsaid methinks.

Grand Comics Database page for issue
Full issue at the Digital Comic Museum . (Cover doesn't seem to be related to contents.)

The sign"definitely references service flags

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for Eight-ball says that it's "U.S. military jargon for a soldier often in trouble"

OK, that's sort of making sense. But how does the guard house play into it? I've heard of standing guard as punishment, but that sounds pretty plush when compared to a frozen trench on the Russian front*. (The comic is dated January 1946 which probably means it was written months earlier, possibly even when the war was on.)


*thank you, Colonel Klink

The only thing I can think of is she is a mother who doesnt want her son going off to war and is pretending he's crazy?

8 ball = "Section 8", which is when the army dismisses you for cracking up.

"he's in the guard house" = meaning, that's where they'd lock up a crazy person? I'm unsure of that one. "We locked him in the guard house" *sounds* like it could be a recurring phrase in the 40's, but I cant pinpoint where I've heard it.

Now I cant tell if the man is a soldier or some milkman / trash collector mash-up.

There we go. I'd only been thinking of a guard house as a guard BOOTH (at an entrance of a camp) but guardhouse can mean JAIL in the military.

Where's the guys other leg? In the can?

Any bakers in the house?



What the F is in her left hand, and what the F is she doing with her right hand?

That could be a special kind of cake pan, I guess. I'm no expert in the field.

As for the right hand, that sort of looks like testing a cake for 'doneness' with a toothpick, but it doesn't work. First, if that is NOT the pan but the actual cake, well, shiny blue/black cake? That could be explained by poor touch-up work to the photo. BUT...who turns a cake out of a pan and THEN tests it?

It's burnt to a crisp and bent the toothpick. Anyway, that's what I "see" when I look at it.

Not a good dating tip from Van Johnson.

NO ONE holds a cake like that to test it, but I'll ignore that because the scene is exaggerated for the camera.

Also, if your cake is burned SO BAD that it is blue/black, there's no way you'd test it. You'd know it by the smell. Again, exaggeration for the camera -- fine.

It's a photo so I expect "reality" (as opposed to something in a drawing that doesn't work) but of course they didn't burn a cake just to take this picture. So what IS that prop in the model's hand?

Jeepers! She's just a young, inexperienced teenager! She clearly has no idea what she's doing.

Hence her taking dating advice from clearly gay actors!

It's clearly a indication that it's okay to put something crooked into baked goods.

And why is she holding the cake with a towel? if she knew the cake was tough enough to be held by a towel, why waste a perfectly good toothpick testing it?

Teens never think about wasting things!

What teens do you know?

I feel a little sorry for the model on the cover. I am sure she thought it would be her big break. Instead, she likely died a penniless, cat-hoarding spinster, her one claim to "fame" dissected 60 years later by nerds on a message board. Heartbreaking, really. *dabs tear*

Poor Matilda.

She waltzes... and bakes... no more.

But she shall live on... in the annals of Legion World history.

My first thought is that it was a horribly bad translation, and the original word was 'garderobe,' which can mean 'bathroom.'

But then a visit to Wikipedia reminded me that normal people haven't called bathrooms 'garderobes' since they stopped living in castles, and I need to come back to earth now.

Clearly Miss Teen America isn't testing a cake for 'done-ness,' but is actually 200 ft. tall and probing a blue-black alien saucer-craft to torment the aliens inside!