This is not an artifact of me fooling around with Photoshop. Nor can I imagine some Google drone did this during the newspaper-scanning process. You're welcome to look at the original here.
My guess is some bored artist or letterer in 1947 seeing what he could sneak past the editor.
News of the Weird has several ancestors. One is Strange As It Seems.
Strange as it Seems featured bizarre stories based on cartoons created by John Hix who was a staff artist at the Washington Herald. The comic strip Strange as it Seems was syndicated in American newspapers between 1928 and 1944. Strange as it Seems was comparable to Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Sponsored by Exlax in the 1930s and Palmolive Shave Cream when the show reappeared in 1947-1948.
The brand has recently been revivied, and features a YouTube Channel. Check it out!
If you enjoy old school comics, especially by the master, Jack Kirby, you'll want to purchase the volume depicted at right. It's full of Silver Age weirdness in the unselfconscious manner of the day.
Here's my favorite example, from the story titled "I Was Big-Game on Neptune."
An Earthman is kidnapped and finds himself in prison with five other beings, all uniquely bizarre. Pretty hard to mistake one for another, right?
Not according to our hero, who has to label them for ease of identification, with hard-to-distinguish-at-a-distance nametags!
I love the expression on the beaky face of the orange guy. He's thinking, "This guy is dumber than a bag of Saturnian hammers!"
I presume that Archie is not hallucinating here, and that Veronica's Alice-like abilities are canonical, part of the Riverdale continuity. And I look forward to her future exploits.
Category: Food, Comics, Fetish, 1940's, Eating, Goofs and Screw-ups