Number 870


The Dover Boys


Goodbye, 2010! Tomorrow morning we wake up, bleary-eyed and cotton-mouthed, to the second decade of the 21st Century. It's been an eventful first decade, that's for sure.

We wrap up the decade here at Pappy's with an obscure comic from the folks at Archie, Adventures of The Dover Boys #1, from 1950. The title is a knock-off of a popular series of boys' books from the early part of the 20th Century, The Rover Boys, who did their roving from 1899 to 1926 in thirty novels written by Edward E. Stratemeyer, using the pen-name Arthur M. Winfield.

I haven't read any of the original Rover Boys novels, but have read many books from Stratemeyer's syndicate, as a boy supplementing my comic book reading with the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Jr. books. I'm not sure the comic book Dover Boys lasted only two issues because it didn't sell, or was a little too close to the original title for the Stratemeyer syndicate. By 1950 with founder Edward Stratemeyer dead, his company was run by his daughters. It was still doing well, even with the competition for juvenile readers tipped toward comic books.

Adventures of the Dover Boys is drawn by Harry Lucey.

Happy New Year, and I hope we'll see each other in 2011.