Pat the Brat #17

History

Pat the Brat launched in the summer of 1955 under the editorial stewardship of publisher John L. Goldwater and managing editor Harry Shorten, who recognized the commercial pull of the mischievous-child genre as personified by Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace on the comics page, on stage, and on television. Shorten assigned Bob Bolling to the title after deciding Bolling's draftsmanship was better suited to children than to teenagers; Bolling's time on the book ran roughly concurrent with the 1956 series, and that apprenticeship directly informed his designs when Goldwater tapped him to create Little Archie the same year. Other known contributors to the 1956 series include artists Leon Winik, Joe Edwards, Ray Osrin, and Bob White, though individual story credits for issue #17 specifically are not indexed in the Grand Comics Database, which is typical for Archie's unsigned output of the era.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published November 1956 by Archie/Radio Comics Inc. as part of the 1956 series (issues #15–#33), cover-priced at ten cents, 36 pages, saddle-stitched.
• Three stories from this issue — including a museum-trip gag starring Pat and his father Oswald, a footstool-building story, and a visit from Oswald's boss Mr. Grumpy — were reprinted in Pat the Brat Comics Digest Magazine #1 (February 1980), demonstrating the material's longevity in Archie's reprint catalogue.
• The issue's recurring cast includes Pat Smith (full name Patrick Smith), his father Oswald, his mother Alice (inconsistently named Helen in some issues of the same series), and supporting neighborhood characters such as Fatso, Sara Lee, and Blinky.
• The series' numbering jumped from #4 (May 1956, end of the 1955 quarterly run) to #15 (July 1956, start of the 1956 bi-monthly run), with issues #5–#14 never published under this title; no editorial explanation for the gap has been corroborated in any publicly available source.
• Bob Bolling is documented as a key creative contributor to the Pat the Brat series during this period; editor Harry Shorten specifically assigned him to the book because of his facility drawing young children, and Bolling's work here led directly to his being chosen to design and launch Little Archie in 1956.
• Other confirmed artists on the 1956 series include Leon Winik, Ray Osrin, Joe Edwards, and Bob White, though per-issue credits were not published in the comics themselves and remain partially unverified in existing databases.
• Pat the Brat's series run ended with #33 (July 1959), after which the title's numbering was absorbed by The Adventures of Pipsqueak beginning with #34 — a common postal-regulation workaround Archie used to avoid launching new #1 issues.
• Stories from the Pat the Brat 1956 series have continued to surface as filler reprints in Archie digest titles into the 2010s, including World of Archie Double Digest and Archie (Jumbo Comics) Double Digest.

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