The only problem is that the story in which Dynamo is buried in peanut butter (at a PB factory) is "Once upon a Time..."—the Weed story in Dynamo 4, drawn by Steve Ditko and Wally Wood (Chic Stone drew "Bad Day").
I had to work pretty much from scratch at identifying Ralph Reese's writing style, since I didn't know which of those two to start from; but then finding a couple of Marvel stories crediting him as writer/artist helped. (With "fooey," "h'lo," and "woops" among the expressions tying together a group of Tower stories, I found "woops" in one of Reese's Marvel stories.) The peanut butter/bad day problem solved itself when I saw that he wrote both stories, among more than twenty at Tower.
Stories in Dynamo Written by Ralph Reese
| Aug/66 | #1 | A Day in the Life of Dynamo | Dynamo |
| Oct/66 | #2 | The Priceless Counterfeit | Dynamo |
| Mar/67 | #3 | Bad Day for Leonard Brown | Dynamo |
| The Feats of Samson | Dynamo | ||
| Honeymoon or High Noon? | Dynamo | ||
| Weed vs. THUNDER | Weed | ||
| June/67 | #4 | The Secret Word Is... | Dynamo |
| Dynamo's Day Off | Dynamo | ||
| The Weakest Man in the World | Dynamo | ||
| Once upon a Time... | Weed |
Stories in THUNDER Agents Written by Reese
| Oct/66 | #9 | Corporal Dynamo, U.S.A. | Dynamo |
| Nov/66 | #10 | Operation Armageddon | Dynamo |
| June/67 | #13 | The Black Helmet | THUNDER Agents |
| Sept/67 | #15 | Hail to the Chief | Dynamo |
| Dig We Must | Weed | ||
| Oct/67 | #16 | Dream of Doom | Dynamo |
| The End of the THUNDER Agents? | THUNDER Agents | ||
| Dec/67 | #17 | Return of the Hyena | Dynamo |
| Weed Out West | Weed | ||
| Put Them All Together, They Spell SPIDER | Dynamo | ||
| Sept/68 | #18 | Dynamo and the Amazing Mr. Mek | Dynamo |
| Secret of the Abominable Snowmen | Dynamo | ||
| Nov/68 | #19 | Half an Hour of Power | Dynamo |
| All-Girl Gang | Dynamo |
These are not necessarily every story Ralph Reese wrote for Tower; I'm still looking at a few in 1966 that I haven't yet convinced myself on. ("Corporal Dynamo" and "Operation Armageddon" just squeaked onto this list; "The Hyena" in Dynamo 2 didn't.)
Reese uses the names of Wood assistants Battersby, Brand, Coleman, Pearson, and Reese for some walk-on characters.
Kind of fitting that the infamous Weed peanut butter story should be one of Reese's pieces.
ReplyDelete"Oh, the ignominy of it."
ReplyDeleteHey Martin,
ReplyDeleteFYI, we at the GCD received notice from a Twitter poster that Ralph Reese claims he did not write T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents June/67 #13 The Black Helmet. It is claimed he said Wally Wood did the plot and probably wrote it too.
I know this is several years down the line, but I wonder if you think that might be true or not.
-Ray Bottorff Jr
Ray, at this point, with my old lists of writers' characteristics in storage and with Ralph Reese's one I haven't recreated, looking at The Black Helmet again didn't set off any memories of why I added it to others I credited him with. As far as Wally Wood's writing goes, I find it harder to be definite about him than anyone else. Since he seems to have added sound effects and such to other writer's scripts when as artist he lettered them, he muddied the waters. (Of course that doesn’t apply to this Tuska-drawn story). So I'll fearlessly straddle the fence--I don't know.
Delete