Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, July 1922 · page 5 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #35 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from **Captain Billy's Whiz Bang** (a 1920s-era satirical magazine) contains three brief anecdotes rather than cartoons: 1. **Financial fraud complaint**: A farmer describes being pressured into buying bonds by a Bindsdale firm that went bankrupt, leaving him with worthless securities while others claimed priority. The satire mocks investment scams and the vulnerability of rural Americans. 2. **Darkly comic priorities**: A farmer mentions his hogs died of cholera and his wife died a week later—but emphasizes the hog loss because they were worth $50 each. The joke's cruelty reflects the magazine's cynical, edgy humor. 3. **Editor's three-year anniversary**: The editor notes *Whiz Bang*'s success, positioning it as filling a gap between "Victorian bawdiness" and modern prudishness—claiming the magazine offers frank, irreverent humor. The overall tone is anti-establishment, critical of financial swindlers, and proudly crude—typical of this irreverent publication's appeal to working-class readers skeptical of authority and uplift movements.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
4 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang binsdale editorial sanctum and strong-armed me into sinking a couple of months' savings into gilt-edged bonds. The firm has since gone flat broke; the bonds have been claimed by several others, and it looks as if this old farmer is going to be left holding at least one corner of the gunny sack for the snipes to run into. So, I add with emphasis, one doesn't have to grab off a royal steerage suite on the old cattleboat line for La Bill France to rub elbows with thieves and philanderers. There are plenty of distinguished "high jackers" wandering around loose at home under our own eighteen amendments. I hope and trust that one or two of them will not be quite so loose ere another frost settles on the pumpkins. * * * S TOPPED at a farmhouse near Brainerd one day last week to fill my radiator. The farmer told me that six of his finest hogs died with the cholera last month, and his wife died a week later. He stated that losing the hogs was a big loss as he could have gotten fifty dollars apiece for them. * * * I T IS getting close onto three years since ye editor launched Whiz Bang onto the startled world. The little old Banger made an almost instantaneous hit. I had always imagined that somewhere between the rollicking bawdiness of Victorian times and the finical nasty-niceness of present day uplift lit-