Big Shot #46
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeBig Shot Comics #46 is a documented artifact of American comics' full-throttle wartime propaganda mode, preserving a Joe Palooka story in which Ham Fisher's all-American boxer squares off alongside Uncle Sam against Adolf Hitler — a story singled out for inclusion in Mark Fertig's landmark Fantagraphics anthology Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War (2017), which established the cultural weight of exactly this kind of Golden Age anti-Axis storytelling. The issue also carries a Skyman aviation adventure set with the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force in China, grounding a superhero narrative directly in the real geography of the Pacific theater at a moment when comic book sales were at a wartime peak. Together, these stories make the issue a compact record of how Columbia Comics — one of the Golden Age's most underappreciated publishers — channeled newspaper-strip patriotism and original superhero adventure into a unified wartime reading experience. The Joe Palooka content carries particular historical resonance given that Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels reportedly singled out the strip as among the most dangerous anti-Axis material reaching German-occupied audiences.
Big Shot #46 is an anthology featuring multiple stories, including "Sparky," in which a young boy and his dog become unlikely heroes when they help catch a burglar. Another story involves a man discovering a fortune in gold hidden within ancient houses and temples, leading him to search for a way to access it. The issue also features additional stories with characters including The Skyman, Dixie Dugan, Joe Palooka, and The Face, as advertised on the cover.
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Big Shot Comics was the flagship title of Columbia Comics Corporation, formed in 1940 as a three-way partnership between editor-artist Vin Sullivan, the McNaught Syndicate, and the Frank Jay Markey Syndicate — an arrangement that gave the book a uniquely hybrid character, blending syndicated newspaper-strip reprints with original superhero and adventure features. Sullivan, who by various accounts had been involved in acquiring Superman for DC and prompting the creation of Batman before leaving for Columbia, recruited Golden Age luminaries including Gardner Fox, Ogden Whitney, and Mart Bailey from his industry network. By the time issue #46 appeared in 1944, the series was in its fourth volume year and firmly in its wartime stride, with Fox continuing to script Skyman under the pseudonym 'Paul Dean,' a pen name he used to maintain professional distance from his primary work at DC Comics.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published in 1944 by Columbia Comics Corporation (indicia publisher), edited by Vin Sullivan, credited in the indicia as Vincent Sullivan.
- Contains a Joe Palooka story by Ham Fisher in which Joe Palooka appears alongside Uncle Sam and Adolf Hitler — a wartime propaganda-themed strip that carries a 'racial stereotypes' content flag in the Grand Comics Database.
- The Joe Palooka story from this issue was selected for reprinting in Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War, the 2017 Fantagraphics anthology compiled by Mark Fertig documenting over 500 World War II-era comics covers and stories.
- A Skyman story is set 'In China with the Fourteenth Air Force,' placing Columbia's aviation superhero directly within the real-world 1944 CBI (China-Burma-India) theater of World War II.
- The Skyman story is scripted by Gardner Fox under his pseudonym 'Paul Dean' — a pen name Fox used across his Columbia Comics work to maintain separation from his concurrent DC Comics assignments.
- Mart Bailey, the artist most closely associated with Columbia's The Face feature, is credited on pencils and inks for at least one story in the issue.
- Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, is credited for script, pencils, and inks on the Palooka installment — consistent with his total creative control of the strip, which at its wartime peak appeared in over 900 daily newspapers and was cited by the U.S. Army's morale department as essential GI reading.
- Big Shot Comics ran 104 issues in total (May 1940–August 1949), making issue #46 a mid-run entry from the series' most commercially active wartime period.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War #[nn] (2017)
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