Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1921 · page 19 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #19 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains moralizing text—no visible cartoon—condemning late-night hedonism and sexual vice, likely from the 1920s Prohibition era. The passage attacks: **Nightlife culture**: "Late hours," masked balls, and carousing that drain vitality and unfitness for respectable duties. **Women**: Described as ruling through scanty costumes and seductive behavior ("Cherubim of hell"), referencing the dissolute lifestyle of flappers and cabaret culture. **Libertinism**: References De Musset (19th-century French author associated with bohemian excess) to frame modern debauchery as spiritually destructive. **Religious/moral warning**: Uses vivid hellfire rhetoric—bodily disease, twisted limbs, literal damnation—to warn against prioritizing pleasure over virtue. The tone is intensely puritanical moralism typical of early 20th-century American religious publications, using satire's shock value to condemn Jazz Age social rebellion and changing sexual mores.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang 17 Late hours lure. The cup of foaming pleasure is mixed with tears of pain. Excitement and absence of restraint drain vitality so that carousers are unfit for life’s practical duties of business, home, society and religion. Midnight dissipation breaks down the reserve of virtue and becomes a vestibule to vice through which throng fevered bodies, stifled wits and sodden souls. Surely they show, as the mask is removed, faces that are anything but gay. Sin has pleasures, but they are only “for a season.” Soon the lights fade, the sweet turns bitter, apples of Sodom turn to dust and ashes, and we have nothing but grief and pain for promised joy. Women rule. Cherubim of hell, they sit around in scanty costumes that show what they are supposed to hide, and eat and drink, talk and look and leer with a flushed and overwrought animation of mind and body. De Musset’s confession is ours, and first astonishment gives way to horror and pity. The masked ball is but the scum of libertinism; the feast is ennui trying to live; the palace of sin is filled with yawning mouths, fixed eyes and hooked hands. If we believe with the Mohammedan that heaven here and hereafter is pleasure, and so smile at debauchery and defy death, we will live to shed tears hotter than blood, dream dreams that reflect the flames of a literal hell, and have a moral nature as hideous and deformed as our bodies, so twisted with disease that the undertaker must change the shape of the coffin to fit the limbs.