Funny Folks #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFunny Folks #4 (cover-dated October 1946, published by National Periodical Publications — the company that would become DC Comics) is a Golden Age funny-animal anthology that serves as an early host vehicle for Captain Tootsie and his sidekick Rollo, the kid-gang member indexed here. Captain Tootsie was not a traditional comic book character but rather a full-page adventure advertisement created to promote Tootsie Roll candy products; his appearance inside a National Periodical anthology demonstrates how mid-1940s publishers routinely carried commercially sponsored comic-strip ads alongside their original editorial content, blurring the line between storytelling and product promotion in ways that would echo through the medium for decades. The series itself — a humor-and-funny-animal anthology launched the same year — represents DC's postwar expansion beyond superhero fare into the lighter, kid-focused humor genre that was booming across the industry in 1946.
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Funny Folks was launched by National Periodical Publications in April–May 1946 and ran for 26 issues before being retitled Hollywood Funny Folks at issue #27; the line eventually evolved into a Nutsy Squirrel title. The Captain Tootsie feature that appeared as a paid advertisement within issues like #4 was created in 1943 by C.C. Beck — the same artist and studio behind the original Fawcett Captain Marvel — working initially with writer Rod Reed, with inker Pete Costanza later sharing the art credit. Beck's studio produced the ads as one-page, full-color adventure strips running in newspaper comic pages and in comic books throughout the 1940s and into the mid-1950s, making them among the most widely distributed advertorial comics of the Golden Age.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Funny Folks #4 was published (cover date October 1946) by National Periodical Publications, the predecessor company to DC Comics.
- The series Funny Folks ran as an ongoing anthology for 26 issues (May 1946–July 1950) before being retitled Hollywood Funny Folks with issue #27.
- Captain Tootsie was created in 1943 by C.C. Beck and writer Rod Reed as a comic-strip advertisement promoting Tootsie Roll candy products; Pete Costanza later joined Beck on art duties.
- Captain Tootsie's kid-gang companions — collectively called the Secret Legion — included Rollo (a black-haired boy), Fatso, and Fisty; Rollo is the sidekick character indexed for this issue.
- The Captain Tootsie strips appearing in issues like Funny Folks #4 were paid advertorial pages, not editorial content — making their presence a notable example of Golden Age product-placement comics.
- C.C. Beck's Captain Tootsie work came directly out of the same studio responsible for Fawcett's Captain Marvel line, and Captain Tootsie's visual design bears a recognizable resemblance to the Captain Marvel/Shazam character.
- The Captain Tootsie character later received two standalone comic book issues published by Toby Press in 1950, and was revived as a public-domain character in Erik Larsen's Image Comics series Savage Dragon starting around issue #199.
- The Funny Folks series also featured recurring funny-animal characters including Nutsy Squirrel (scripted by Woody Gelman), Creepy and Cheepy (art by Otto Feuer), and Sweeney and Willie (art by Ronald Santi), among others.
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