Gay Comics #27
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeGay Comics #27 (cover date May 1947) is a representative entry in Timely Comics' surprisingly robust Golden Age humor line — a publishing category that comic book scholarship has historically underserved compared to the superhero titles of the same era. The issue is notable as one of the last installments of Basil Wolverton's 'Lily-Belle' feature (a brief rechristening of the 'Eustace Hayseed and Choo-Choo' strip) in this title before the feature migrated to Joker Comics; it thus marks a small but traceable moment in the shuffling of anthology features across Timely's humor books. As a Wolverton-illustrated issue during his most productive period at Timely, it also stands as a document of one of the most distinctive cartooning voices of the Golden Age working squarely within the mainstream humor-anthology format.
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Gay Comics ran as an ongoing Timely anthology from 1944 to 1949, growing out of the same stable as Joker Comics during a period when publisher Martin Goodman — with Stan Lee away on wartime military service — pivoted aggressively toward humor titles to capitalize on the genre's commercial success. By the time issue #27 reached newsstands in early 1947, Lee had returned from the Army and was serving as editor, with Wolverton contributing as writer, penciler, inker, and letterer on his own strips — a level of solo creative control unusual for Timely's anthology material. The broader humor line suffered from a near-total lack of production records, making precise attribution for many of the non-Wolverton stories in any given issue difficult for historians to nail down definitively.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: May 1947; release date: January 24, 1947 (per Marvel Database).
- Stan Lee served as editor; Basil Wolverton acted as sole writer, penciler, inker, and letterer on his featured strips in this issue.
- The issue contains the only appearance of the 'Lily-Belle' feature in Gay Comics — a short-lived renaming of the 'Eustace Hayseed and Choo-Choo' strip, with Choo-Choo renamed Lily-Belle. After this issue the feature moved to Joker Comics starting with issue #28.
- Millie the Model (Millicent Collins) and her supporting cast — including rival Chili Storm, photographer Clicker Holbrook, and agency head Mr. Hanover — appear in one of the issue's stories, part of Millie's ongoing rotation through Timely's humor anthologies before and alongside her own solo title.
- Tessie the Typist, one of Timely's earliest female comedic leads, also appears in this issue alongside her supporting character Skidsy Spencer.
- A cover-advertised 'Willie' feature does not actually appear inside the issue — noted explicitly in the Marvel Database as an editorial anomaly.
- The lead story is titled 'The Weird Beard,' which appears to be a Wolverton-penned piece consistent with his signature alliterative, pun-dense humor style.
- Gay Comics ran for 40 issues total (March 1944 – October 1949) before being retitled Honeymoon with issue #41, with Millie the Model continuing in her own long-running solo series until 1973.
Reprints
Reprinted in The Basil Wolverton Reader #2 (2004)
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