The things you see while scanning Golden Age superhero comics...

The other day I was scanning some random images from an old Shazam! Archives Edition for my post about Captain Marvel's quest to punch one of each animal species in the face like some kind of sadistic, caped Noah, and part of the scanning process involves blowing the pages up real big and then cropping them to cut out everything that's not Captain Marvel abusing an animal.

One of my favorite images is this one, of Cap wrestling a rhino to save a beautiful damsel in distress:



I like the sheer manliness of putting a wild animal in a headlock, and I like wondering how the hell it is that this random white chick ended up in the predicament of being charged at by a rhinocerous (The story in the comic which once wore that cover didn't involve any rhinos or imperilled young women in jungle settings).

But what I really love about the image is the text, "Captain Marvel On The Job!" Like it's his job to wrestle wild animals. Like Billy Batson's PDA had "Check and see if any pretty ladies need saved from wild animals" between "Meeting with Sterling Morris" and "Six o' clock broadcast."

At least, I thought that was why I liked the image so much. When I went to scan and crop it, however, I happened upon a couple of possible croppings that made me think that, well, that maybe Wertham wasn't such a crackpot. So, presented without any further commentary, are two portions of the image zoomed in on and removed from anything else that might put them in a less salacious context: