The Subtext in Casper the Friendly Ghost

When I was a kid in the 1960s  and 1970s, my favorite comic book title was Harvey, with its odd jack-in-the-box logo and its fantasy characters (Casper the Friendly Ghost, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Hot Stuff the Little Devil)

Harvey also produced comics about human kids, like Richie Rich, Little Dot, and Little Lotta.  Casper the Friendly Ghost was about a ghost boy who lives with three nameless adult guardians in the Enchanted Forest (Not to be confused with the inferior Charlton knockoff Timmy the Timid Ghost).

In Casper’s world, ghosts were not dead people, but beings in their own right, who are born, grow up, take jobs and houses, and eventually grow old and die.  Their main pastime and means to social prestige is scaring, but Casper refuses to scare. 

Gay-coded, but no sissy or milquetoast, Casper is a strong-willed nonconformist, a Vietnam-Era pacifist who refuses to follow the hawkish status quo of ghost society. So strong are his principles that even when his life is in danger, he refuses to “boo” his way to safety.

Casper has an ally and confidant in Wendy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed witch girl in a red jumpsuit who lives with three guardians of her own. They are not romantically involved; they are merely friends and comrades, thrown together by their common disdain for the social institutions that tell them they must scare. Neither expresses any heterosexual interest. (The 1995 movie starring Devon Sawa turned Casper heterosexual.)

But occasionally Casper moves beyond a simple lack of heterosexual desire to offer a glimpse of that other world. His efforts to bond with other beings (almost always male) sometimes transcend the merely friendly, especially whe the objects of his attention are perfect strangers whose struggles may cost him his life.

He accompanies Oliver Ogre on a perilous journey to the moon (Casper 113, January 1968), and helps an ancient Egyptian pharaoh regain his throne from a villainous usurper in (Casper 117, August 1968).

 When his new friends are adult humans, pixies, or Greek gods, drawn with the hard tight chests and rippling biceps more commonly associated with the DC and Marvel lines, it is easy to locate romantic attraction among his motives.

We see similar gay subtexts in “The Evil Planet” (Casper in Space 6, June 1973): Casper dreams that he has joined the deep space expedition of Crash Hammerfist, a Buck Rogers-type adventurer drawn as a brawny muscleman. They land on The Evil Planet, where flying bird-men abduct Crash’s female companion, Gale. While Casper calmly evaluates their options, Crash goes to pieces:

Crash: This is a disaster! Look – my cape is ruined! I can’t explore this evil planet looking like this!

Casper: [Trying to keep him focused on the crisis.] Is Gale your girlfriend?

Crash: No. . .she’s my seamstress. She made this entire outfit. [Hand swishily on hip.] Do you like it?

Casper: [Looking decidedly suspicious.] Er. . .yes.

At Casper’s urging, they ignore the soiled cape and set out to rescue Gail. They discover that she is being forced to compete in a beauty contest; the winner will become the wife of Emperor Zinzang, a young, slim Castro Clone. 

 When Crash bursts in, flexing his muscles and issuing taunts, the Emperor seems quite impressed, if not downright attracted; he forgets all about the beauty contest and challenges the superhero to single combat. They spend several panels lunging, grabbing, and jumping on top of each other, in the process accidentally shredding their outfits so the interplay of their muscles becomes even more evident.

During a lull in the battle, the Emperor explains to Casper that he really likes Crash, and he’s not evil, he’s just crazed with power – he received a year’s worth of invulnerability for his 27th birthday, and he’s been behaving rudely ever since. But in a few minutes he’ll be 28, normal again, and Crash will annihilate him.

Casper suggests that he call a truce and apologize for abducting Gail, and then he and Crash could start over as friends. The Emperor agrees.

 Then, abruptly, Casper wakes up. We never find out if the Emperor selects a wife, or if Crash and Gail ever leave the Evil Planet. Should we attribute this sudden jerk into “reality” to the writer’ incompetence, to running out of space in the issue, or to the realization that the only logical conclusion to the story as portrayed involves Crash and the Emperor arm in arm, watching the sun set on the Evil Planet?

The Gay Enchanted Forest of Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost

When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comics by far were the Harvey supernatural titles: ghosts, witches, and devils roaming an oddly-Medieval Enchanted Forest where same-sex desire was commonplace.

I preferred Casper, but in a pinch, I would read about Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, a ghost boy with a Brooklyn accent, freckles, and a derby (or, as he pronounced it,  “doiby”).  (Not to be confused with Charlton's far inferior Timmy the Timid Ghost).

But while Casper was a 1960s nonconformist with a gay-coded softness and sensitivity, the hawkish Spooky had no aversion to booing.

 In Spooky’s wild region of the Enchanted Forest, ravenous bears, ogres, monsters, and evil wizards leapt out from behind every boulder, so booing was an essential form of self defense.  But for Spooky, it was an all-consuming passion.  He specialized in complex, artistic boos, creating statements similar to the happenings and guerilla theater of the 1960’s art scene: he might boo a horse and rider into trading places, so that the rider runs off with the horse on his back, or he might boo a lake out of its bed so precisely that the fish remain, swimming in mid-air.

In “Once upon a Scaresday," Spooky explains how he took up booing in the first place.  As a child, he was a coward and a sissy, always running away from danger.  One day he was walking in the hills beyond Spooktown with some friends, when cannibalistic monsters called Ghostcatchers attacked.  Spooky managed to run away, but his best friend Googy was captured and dragged off to be cooked and eaten.  Distraught with guilt and mourning his loss, Spooky asked his grandfather for advice, and the elderly ghost taught him how to defend himself by booing.  He proved to have a great gift for this ghostly martial art, and soon he was able to seek out the monsters and rescue his friend just as the cooking-fire was being lit.

A same-sex relationship originally motivated Spooky to boo, and a heterosexual relationship now compels him to stop.  Spooky and Poil (his pronunciation of Pearl) are quite an adult couple, dating, dining at each other’s homes, and even kissing on couches.  Pearl forbids him from booing.  She claims that it is immoral, but her real reason is class-based snobbery: she considers booing boorish and vulgar, a working-class pastime likely to offend her high-society ghost friends (but they usually turn out to be closet booing fans).

Spooky is constantly promising to refrain from booing, to keep Poil from brow-beating or even leaving him.  Many stories involved his frantic but quite clever schemes to continue booing after such a pledge, either for self defense or to assuage his addiction: he throws his voice, writes “boo” in the sand, spells it out with smoke signals.  But why would Spooky even agree to cease a useful, artistic, socially-praised, and strategically necessary activity, just because Poil disapproves?  Obviously she offers something more valuable than any of these things, more valuable than any love, but what?  I was mystified; I could imagine giving up a bad habit or even an innocuous hobby at the admonition of a friend, but a career, a passion, a veritable calling?

I knew it had something to do with the girls who jumped their ropes and played their singsong games in the shadow of the school.  At recess, we boys were herded far away to fields to play baseball and dodge ball, and if ever once we tried to play jump rope, or merely sit on the steps nearby to avoid the midday sun, a teacher would scream wildly at us to stay put.  What danger lurked there, against the cool bricks?  What threat did girls pose that could force Tommy Kirk to forsake his buddies at Midvale College, or Alec to forsake the wonders of the Earth’s Core, or Spooky to forsake his booing?

Devon Sawa

I wasn't happy when Casper (1995) made the Harvey Comics character into a real ghost -- a dead boy -- rather than a magical being, and then eliminated the gay subtext by giving him a girlfriend.   So, by implication, I wasn't happy with the star, 16-year old Devon Sawa.













But I forgave him when he starred in a string of homoromantic buddy-bonding movies (most required extensive shirtless and underwear shots and skinny-dipping scenes for teenage fans to gaze at):

1. Night of the Twisters (1996), based on the novel by Ivy Ruckman.  Nebraska teens Dan (Devon) and Arthur (Amos Crawley) try to find their families during a spate of tornados.  Unfortunately, there's a fade-out-kiss conclusion.

2. The Boys Club (1997).   Ontario teens Eric (Devon),  his boyfriend Kyle (Dominic Zamprogna), and their friend Brad (Stuart Stone), who seem too old for a clubhouse, are terrorized by an escaped con (Chris Penn).

3. Wild America (1997).  Three "brothers" (Devon, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Scott Bairstow) head out into the wilderness to make a movie.

Meanwhile Devon was getting the full teen-idol treatment, with dozens of photo shoots in teen idol magazines and interviewers asking such probing questions as "What kind of girls do you like?"

His teen idol career lasted for only a few years.  Then he was relegated to sleazy horror films like Idle Hands  (1999), Final Destination (1999), and Devil's Den (2006), or sleazy teen sex comedies like Slackers (2002).

More recently Devon has re-invented himself as an action hero, the heavily-muscled, heavily-tattooed assassin Owen in Nikita (2010-2013), or the unscrupulous cop-turned-detective Nico in Somewhere Between (2017). 

Mostly the kind, sympathetic women and rough, aggressive men bit.  Not a lot of buddy bonding.

There's a sausage sighting story on Tales of West Hollywood

Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper

One of the Harvey Comics stable of magical beings, Hot Stuff the Little Devil is a queer outsider.  He lives in the same Enchanted Forest as Casper, Wendy, and Spooky, but their paths never cross.  There is no devil society, like the ghosts have; Hot Stuff rarely encounters another devil.  In most stories he is alone, peering into the daylit world without understanding it, or defending himself from its threats.

To emphasize his outsider status, many stories have Hot Stuff trapped in bizarre sub-worlds with their own incomprehensible rules, struggling to break free.

One wonders why Hot Stuff isn't underground with the other devils.  Was he banished, cast out of Paradise for some fault only devils know of?

Hot Stuff also has a sexual potential that the other magical beings lack. First, his name is 1950s slang for "sexually appealing," and you would call someone a "little devil" for making a mischievous sexual advance.

Second, he carries a phallic trident, which fails here as an ice king freezes his flames.

Third, the ghosts wear no clothes, and their bodies are smooth and formless, but Hot Stuff's asbestos diaper suggests a need to cover sex organs.

And infancy -- Hot Stuff is very, very young, in spite of his self-sufficiency.  Like a baby, his main concerns are eating and sleeping.  But he will grow. He will become tall and strong, and potent, in a way that the ghosts never will.

When that day come, will he long for the male or the female?

Hot Stuff occasionally encounters the Fairy Princess Charma, but she is by no means a regular character, and they are not interpreted as romantic partners.  Instead, she makes attempts to civilize him, to draw him from his savage infant world through gender polarization.  Here, for instance, he grudgingly allows her to use his super-hot hand to iron clothes.

In a story from 1970, Hot Stuff and a friend wonder what games human children play.  They peer in a window at a group of boys and girls playing “spin the bottle," in which you must spin and then bestow a kiss upon whomever the bottle points to (in the presumably gay-free 1970s, opposite sex only).  The two devils rush back to the Enchanted Forest and play their own version of the game, bestowing zaps of fire rather than kisses.  They, and the human children, do not experience heterosexual desire at all, and can only imagine that heterosexual practice is a form of torture.

When Hot Stuff grows up, he will long for the male.

See also: Why the Devil has no Penis.

Sad Sack

When I was a kid, I loved Harvey comics' supernatural titles, Casper, Spooky, and Hot Stuff having science-fiction and espionage adventures in the Enchanted Forest.  In a pinch, I didn't mind the kids-with-crazy-obsession titles, Little Dot, Little Lotta, and Richie Rich.  But I never even picked up Sad Sack.  

Military humor -- gross!  It was the middle of the Vietnam War.  Our fathers and older brothers were dying in Vietnam, or burning their draft cards and going into exile in Canada.  Who wanted to be reminded of all that?

But recently I came across an old book, The Sad Sack.  Apparently the character existed before Harvey Comics, in a pantomime strip published by Sergeant George Baker in the military magazine Yank during World War II.  The Sad Sack (short for "Sad Sack of Sh*) was a classic schmiel, beset-upon by bad luck, but tough, masculine, and sexually active (although here he's paying a woman to iron his pants).




Two hardcover compilations of Sad Sack strips appeared in 1944 and 1946.  There was a radio series (1946) starring Herb Vigran and a movie adaption (1957) starring Jerry Lewis.

Harvey took over the franchise in 1949, giving Sad Sack a voice, a nebbish personality, and surprisingly, a lot of shirtless and semi-nude shots (although he didn't have much of a physique).

 He was now a permanent private at Camp Calamity, so he would never go to war (like Beetle Bailey and Gomer Pyle), and he had a coterie of friends and superior officers, notably Sarge.

Sad Sack and Sarge have a "antagonistic best friend" relationship similar to that of Beetle Bailey and Sgt. Snorkel, with the same homoerotic subtext.

There were many spin-off titles, including Sad Sack's Funny Friends, Sad Sack's Gobs n Gals, Sad Sack and the Sarge, and Sad Sack Laugh Special.  Sounds like Archie spin-offs like Pals n Gals, and Laugh.

I never knew whether Sadie Sack was Sad in drag or just his girlfriend, but she turns out to be his female identical-twin cousin.  Rather a gender bender.

The Sad Sack title continued to be published for over thirty years, ending only when Harvey Comics folded in 1982.   so somebody was interested in Sad's chubby physique and buddy-bonding with the Sarge.

Just not me.

Baby Huey and Dimwit: Bottom of the Barrel Buddy-Bonding

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I loved Harvey Comics, in this order:

1. The Ghosts (Casper, Spooky, Ghostland, Spooktown), whose weird paranormal and science fiction adventures were full of gay subtexts.

2. Hot Stuff the Little Devil (Hot Stuff, Sizzlers, Devil Kids).  Sometimes he had paranormal and science fiction adventures, too, but more often he was stuck in crazy pun-ridden lands that made no sense.

4. Richie Rich.  Usually he was insufferable, with joke stories about how rich he was.  Who cares?  But sometimes there were fun adventure and spy stories.

5. The Girls with Halfway Interesting Adventures (Little Lotta, Little Dot).

6. The Girl with Incredibly Boring Adventures (Little Audrey).

7. Baby Huey.  Only if I was desperate.

Baby Huey was a gigantic duck toddler in a diaper and bonnet who got involved in slapstick shenanigans.  He had super-strength, like Little Lotta, but combined with basic lack of understanding of how anything worked.  The result was mayhem. He rarely if ever saved the day, although sometimes he succeeded through pure dumb luck.

He sparred with three normal-sized ducks who disapproved of him, and a fox who kept trying to eat him.  (Although the ducks were civilized and lived in cities, they were still likely to be victimized by predators.)

And he had an annoying lisping girlfriend, Matilda.  What did she see in the baby giant?  "You're so big and shtrong, Huey!"  I get it -- he was three times the size of a normal duck, so if he was proportional beneath the belt...

Who'd believe that there were 92 issues of Baby Huey (1956-1972), plus compendium titles Baby Huey Duckland (1962-66) and Baby Huey and Papa (1962-68).

As in all of the Harvey comics, there was a big change in theme and emphasis after 1966.  Baby Huey was still wearing a stupid bonnet and diaper, but he was older, able to go out on adventures by himself.

He was often accompanied by his Cousin Dimwit: an adult duck, rather cute as anthropomorphic ducks go, with a shirt that extended beyond his hands (a sign of stupidity, I suppose).

A sort of inventor, Dimwit popped in out of nowhere and announced "I want to take Cousin Huey on a trip to the Moon!"  Huey's parents would, strangely enough, permit this.

My favorite Huey/Dimwit stories:

1, They build a mechanical Frankenstein that terrorizes the town.
2. Trying to fly to Florida, they end up at the North Pole
3, They're hired by the governmnt to take top-secret pictures.
4. They use dehydrating pills to foil a criminal gang.
5. They take a wrong turn and end up kidnapped by spies.

Still humorous/slapstick, but with enough buddy bonding and nick-of-time rescues to create at least minimal gay subtexts.

Boy, I could really find it everywhere, couldn't I?

By the way, here are some people and businesses who have taken the nom de plum Baby Huey:

1. James Ramos (left), the front man for Baby Huey and the Babysitters, 1970s precursors to the hip hop style.  He weighed 350 pounds.

2. MMA fighter Tito Ortiz (top photo).  He's not fat at all.

3. Hell's Angels motorcycle club member George Wethern.

4. "Baby Huey," the host of the Saturday night show on The Bone (KSAN, 107.7 FM).  He also does the podcast "The Second Shift" with cohost Chasta.

Baby Huey is also:

1. A popular dance club and hipster hangout in Toronto

2. A moving company in Katy, Texas, and

3. A barbecue restaurant in Fremont, Nebraska.

The Guys Who Made Harvey Comics Gay-Friendly

When I was a kid, I loved Harvey Comics, especially Casper, Spooky, and Hot Stuff, the residents of the Enchanted Forest.  Their pacifist nonconformity and buddy-bonding gave me some of my first hints of gay potential.

It didn't hurt that I usually read them while spending the night with my Cousin Buster in the trailer in the dark woods.

I also read Harvey Comics set in the real world, about kids with weird obsessions: Richie Rich, Little Lotta, Little Dot.  They were evocative, but didn't provide the magic of the ghosts.

It never occurred to me, by the way, that the stories were supposed to be humor.  Jokes detracted from my deadly serious quest to find a "good place," where boys could live together without being forced to express an interest in girls every five seconds.

The Harvey character style was instantly recognizable. Male or female, ghost or human, they were all drawn the same:

Disproportionately huge heads (especially when compared with real boys)

No necks.

Pear-shaped heads, large oval eyes with black pupils, pug noses, mouths curving downward a little lower than on a real person.

I was confused by some stories with a different character style:  far less attractive: fat, dumpy, with a bigger head and bigger head and bigger eyes.

Eventually I realized that those stories were reprints from the 1950s and early 1960s.  The house style changed abruptly in 1966.

There was a change in the plotlines, too.  In the early stories, Casper and company visit mythological and fairy-tale creatures.  The Milky Way is full of actual milk, and the sun is a sentient being.

Later stories are mostly realistic science fiction, with mad scientists and alien invaders.  In 1972, Casper goes to the moon on the Apollo 16 (he was, in fact, the mission mascot).

The same thing happened to the human Harvey characters.  In 1966, Richie Richie Rich became slimmer, with smaller eyes, and a smaller tie.

By the 1970s, he even had a muscular physique, and he had moved from humor stories to adventure, espionage, and science fiction.

Harvey Comics never divulged the writers or artists, so it wasn't until many years later that I discovered who was responsible for the change: Sid Jacobson  who began working at Harvey in the 1950s, and became story editor in 1964.  He tried to modernize the Harvey stories for the space-oriented 1960s.

Meanwhile Warren Kremer, the art editor, spearheaded a new, attractive, "hip" character style.

Ernie Colon, who joined Harvey in 1967, completed the transformation.  He and Sid Jacobson collaborated on most of stories for the next 15 years, until Harvey stopped publishing comics in 1982.

When Harvey Comics folded, Colon moved to DC Comics, where he worked on such projects as Arak, Son of Thunder, Arion, Prince of Atlantis, and the graphic novel Ax.

  He and Sid Jacobsen collaborated on several graphic novels, including, a history of the African-American experience, the story of Anne Frank, and The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaption.

Kremer moved on to Star Comics, where he created two new characters, Planet Terry and Royal Roy.

I don't know if any of them were gay, but they certainly helped some gay kids find meaning in the homophobic 1970s.


See also: Casper the Friendly Ghost; Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost; Lesbian Subtexts in the Harvey Girls; Richie Rich Joins a Gym.

Charlton Comics: More Gay Subtexts than Casper

When I was a kid in the 1960s, my staple was Harvey comics: gay-vague pacifist Casper the Friendly Ghost saving the world from science-fiction threats.  I liked the Gold Key jungle comics, Little Lulu, Archie, and occasionally a Marvel or DC title, but I hated the bottom-of-the-barrel Charlton comics: cheaply printed on bad paper, amateurish illustrations, horrible dialogue, stupid stories.

Until one day my boyfriend Bill  suggested that I take another look: "They're all full of best men."

That was our word for gay romantic partners.

I wasn't convinced.  "No way.  Harveys are lots better."  I picked up the first on the pile.  "Abbot and Costello?  My Grandma talked about them -- they were on tv like a thousand years ago."

"The big guy has to rescue the little guy all the time."

A same-sex rescue was our main test of whether two guys were friends or "best men."

"What about Timmy the Timid Ghost? It's stupid!"

It was a blatant knock-off of Harvey's Casper the Friendly Ghost.  There was even a tough derby-wearing ghost, Manny, a blatant knock-off of Harvey's Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost

"Do Casper and Spooky live together?" Bill asked pointedly.

No.  Casper lived with his uncles, and Spooky lived alone.  Their paths rarely crossed in the vast Enchanted Forest.

Domesticity -- male characters living together -- was our second test of best men!

The only original characters made no sense, like Surf n' Wheels: good surfers vs. evil motorcyclists in one issue, then crime fighting surfer-motorcyclists in the next.

But Bill pointed out that they had their shirts off for about half of every issue, more than you ever got with Harveys.

Beefcake -- guys taking their shirts off, or even better, wearing only underwear or swimsuits -- was our third test!

Bill pointed out that some Charlton titles, like Hercules, Jungle Jim, and Robin Hood, were even more beefcake-heavy than the Gold Keys.

Beefcake, same-sex rescues, and domesticity.  What else could you ask for in a comic book?

Good stories, interesting artwork, and dialogue that made sense.  I still didn't like Charlton.

Little Max: A Gay Father in 1950s Comic Books

When I was a kid, whenever we visited my relatives in Indiana, I spent the night with my Cousin Buster in the trailer in the dark woods, and we would squeeze into his narrow twin bed, our bodies pressed together, reading Harvey Comics.  I read until long after he fell asleep, associating the tales of friendly ghosts and little devils with that warmth and affection.

Two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving....

In high school, I looked back on those moments of perfect happiness, and tried to get my hands on the Harvey Comics I read all those years ago (actually less than 10 years ago, but when you're 16, it seems like an eternity).

So I put an ad in the Rock Island Argus, and a very cute Augustana student named Clay answered with an offer of five Little Max comics from 1958-1959 for a dollar each.

I never heard of Little Max, they were from before I was born, and a dollar was four times what a comic cost on the newsstand.  But I bought them anyway.

It was a weird type of deja vu, like looking at a photo of your parents before you were born: familiar, yet bizarre, with a story going on that you are not a part of and can't possibly understand.  Readers were obviously expected to be familiar with these characters and their histories, but I had no idea who they were.

The star, Little Max, looks like Little Audrey in drag: he is drawn in the familiar Harvey style, cherubic-cute, with a big head and gigantic eyes. He doesn't speak, and his thought balloons are full of malapropisms that suggest a learning disorder: "They're both so kindly and generosity!"

His mentor, chum, adopted father, or something is Joe Palooka, a tall, very muscular guy with a weird toothless grin. Max calls him "Dear Joe."

Joe has also adopted or is mentoring an unnamed girl.  Max calls her "Dear Her."  "

She calls Max "Maxth" and Joe "Mith-ter Palooka."

In this Panel, she's looking at Max, not at Joe's swimsuit.








Most of adventures are slapstick, with Max trying to do a good deed that goes terribly wrong.  Here he dresses at an Easter Bunny, is treed by a dog, and reflects on how "embarristing" it is to be "previously engagemented."

There are also fantasies, in which Joe reads Max a fairy tale, and he acts it out in his head, or Max writes his own version.

Sometimes Max appears a bit older, free to wander around without adult supervision.  Although he still can't speak -- or use American Sign Language -- he makes himself understood adequately to interact with a group of friends.

Lots of stories are set on the beach, where Joe can wear a swimsuit and show off his physique, and Max can engage in some heroics (and, here, demonstrate a feminine limp wrist).

Other than the bizarre familiarity, I was attracted to the character of Max, heroic yet not macho, feminine yet never called a sissy.

And Joe Palooka, a single man who had adopted two children, but didn't have a wife or girlfriend.

I've done research since:

Joe Palooka was a naive immigrant boxer in a comic strip by Hal Fischer that premiered in 1921.  He was immensely popular, spinning off into movies, a radio series, Big-Little Books, toys, games, and comic books.  He was less popular by the 1950s, when his Harvey comic book series began, but Harvey in that era adapted several aging comic strip properties, including Terry and the Pirates and Blondie.

Little Max was a supporting character in the Palooka comic strip, a mute shoe-shine boy who Joe befriended.  He had his own comic book series from 1949 to 1961.

And I discovered the origin of Little Max: Max Bartikowsky, a boy artist Hal Fischer knew during his childhood, who roamed around town in his mother's floppy hat.  He became Big Max, owner of Bartikowsky Jewelry in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

He never married.

See also: Joe Palooka

Lesbian Subtexts in the Harvey Girls: Little Audrey, Little Lotta, and Little Dot

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I loved Harvey supernatural comics: Casper the Friendly Ghost, with his brave nonconformity to ghost society; Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, who had a homoromantic back story; and Hot Stuff the Little Devil, who had homoerotic potential.

I didn't care much for Richie Rich, until he began bulking up in the mid-1970s, and I never bothered with the "girl only" titles: Little Dot, Little Lotta, and Little Audrey.

But I recently bought an anthology of Harvey Girl comics in the interest of completeness (I already had the other volumes), and in retrospect, those girls had a lot to offer.

No quiet, sweet, well-behaved "little ladies,"  they were intelligent, resourceful, and daring.  They gleefully surpassed the boys in every masculine-coded activity, from playing football to catching crooks, and their adventures usually had a satiric edge.

1. Little Audrey was named after a series of 1930s jokes about a girl who got into a terrible, morbid, or dirty situation, then "laughed and laughed" before delivering the punchline.

She had an African-American friend, Tiny, a first in 1960s comics, and a working-class boyfriend:  Melvin, who wore a spiked fedora and spoke Brooklynese.  Middle-lower class friendships were often forbidden, lending their bond a queer subtext.

2. Little Lotta was fat, a compulsive eater, yet very strong and athletic.  She had a small, eyeglass-wearing, feminine-coded boyfriend, Gerald, reminding one of the old blues song "Masculine Women, Feminine Men."

Some stories involved Lotta saving the day from bullies, but mostly they were extended gags with the gay symbolism that must have appealed to preteen lesbians:  Lotta's parents, teachers, or friends complain that she is inadequately ladylike so she unsuccessfully tries to "femme" it up.  In the end they decide that she's just fine the way she is.

3. Little Dot had two claims to fame: an obsession with dots, and an endless proliferation of uncles and aunts, who took her on secret-agent and science-fiction style adventures.

 In the 1950s stories, she had a boyfriend named Red, but by the 1960s, Red was forgotten, leaving Dot the only Harvey Girl who doesn't display any heterosexual interest.  She is the most feminine-coded of the trio, however, interested in "girly" fashion.

Dot and Lotta were best friends; the two often shared a story as well as a bed, giving them a nice butch-femme lesbian subtext.