Plop! Magazine

 

 

Plop!, “The New Magazine of Weird Humor!”, was a comic book published by DC Comics in the mid 1970s. There were 24 issues in all and the series ran from Sept./Oct. 1973 to Nov./Dec. 1976.

 

Each issue was hosted by three ghoulish characters - Cain, Abel, and Eve – who would try to outgross each other with a story.  To wet your appetite for the foul …

 

… here is the tale about a gourmet diner whose love for frog legs leads to a predictable amphibian revenge – he is left without his own legs, doomed to navigate the world on a trolley.

Plop! employed a number of the great minds of MAD magazine fame – Basil Wolverton and Wallace Wood provided distinctive some amazingly twisted covers for the first 19 issues, while Sergio Aragones and Dave Manak drew many of the more cartoonish tales and most of the surrounding banter between the three hosts.

 

 

Pretty amazingly excellent.  If only more of these sorts of comics were still around I think kids might read more!

 

Muhammad Ali vs. Everyone

When Muhammad Ali was at that the top of his game he fought quite a few fierce opponents – Joe Frazier, George Forman, Sonny Liston – but did you know he also boxed his way through a few lesser known, but arguably more evil battles?!  You couldn’t watch these fights in Vegas or New York, in the theaters or on closed circuit television, they were far too special for that…

… because in the first Ali was battling Superman!  The matchup to end all matchups featured the big blue boyscout from Krypton entering the ring to practice the sweet science against one Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., better known to the world as one Muhammad Ali, in 1978.

So, here’s the story:  alien invaders, called Star Warriors, come to planet earth looking for a champion to fight their top warrior.  Their choices, found on a basketball court in Metropolis’s down-town “inner city ghetto,” end up being Superman (natch) and Muhammad Ali (floating like a butterfly as he teaches inner-city ghetto kids how to dunk a basketball because that’s what a boxing champion does- he plays basketball.)  To test their mettle, the two potential champions of Earth are forced to have their own boxing match to determine who will face the intergalactic warriors.  After Ali trains Superman, who constructed a ring at the fringes of space where time moves much slower so they could get a lot of training done in the span of hours, Ali whups Superman’s butt in the real match, proving that he is the greatest and is truly the Earth’s champion.

And that’s just the first half of the story.  It only gets more absurd and more wonderful from there, but I won’t ruin it for you…

Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali is a perfectly ridiculous, and absolutely fantastic story that is drawn to perfection by Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams and the folks at DC Comics.  The cover of the comic book was one of the best parts as it features a drawing of 170 celebrities, writers, artists, DC staffers and even DC characters.  It’s nice to know that if this fight ever took place in an arena like Madison Square Garden, Lex Luthor and Batman woud be able to get ringside seats next to Sonny Bono and President Jimmy Carter!

Stay tuned for the next post on Ali’s second super-powered fight against an enemy that threatens us all …