Tower's Peanut Butter Story Writer

In The Comic Reader 198 (Jan/82), Mike Tiefenbacher says that Ralph Reese "definitely wrote the famous 'peanut butter' Dynamo story ('Bad Day for Leonard Brown')." In Comic Interview 133 (1994), Dan Adkins mentions to Lou Mougin a "story about peanut butter or something" as being written by Reese. The Tower Comics checklist in Comic Book Artist 14 (Jan/01) credits the "Bad Day for Leonard Brown" script in Dynamo 3 to Reese.

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.