Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 29, 2025 | 5 comments

A birthday tribute to the late, great funnyman…

By WALT GROGAN

I’m a big fan of Bob Hope, the legendary and perhaps most well-known entertainer of the 20th Century, who managed to live to be 100 years old!

In his century of life, he starred in vaudeville, radio, movies, television, and in his own autobiographies. If they had access to media, there was probably no one who didn’t know who ol’ Ski Nose was. While Bob was undoubtedly the world’s greatest self-promoter of his time, he gave back by entertaining US servicemen and women during wartime via the USO and by donating to various charities including his own Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, which championed healthcare initiatives.

Born Leslie Townes Hope in London, England, on May 29, 1903, he immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was a child, and started performing. He also went by the name Lester before settling on what he thought was the more friendly sounding name, Bob!

I was lucky enough to meet Bob on several occasions at book signings and also saw him perform once in the late 1980s.

In this photo of me and ol’ Ski Nose, from the mid-1980s, you can just see the top of my beat-up copy of Adventures of Bob Hope #1, that he kindly signed!

1985

And here’s the cover to my copy of Adventures of Bob Hope #1:

And here’s Bob’s signature on the splash page:

With no further ado, to celebrate Bob’s birthday, here are 13 gags from Bob’s self-titled DC comic book, which ran from 1950 to 1968 — a solid 18-year run!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #1 (Feb.-March 1950), by Cal Howard (possibly) and Owen Fitzgerald. Right from the start, Hope’s comic tied into the Superman/DC Universe with this panel of Bob’s mirror depicting him as the Man of Steel! And it didn’t hurt to reference Walt Disney’s classic Snow White.

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #12 (Dec. 1951-Jan. 1952), by Cal Howard (possibly) and Owen Fitzgerald. Bob had a reputation of being a ladies’ man, and that was certainly played up in this splash page panel.

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #25 (Feb.-March 1954), by Cal Howard and Owen Fitzgerald. This one plays into Bob’s cowardly –but generally and ultimately heroic –persona. Plus in this 50th anniversary year of my favorite movie of all time, Jaws, I had to include sharks!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #39 (June-July 1956), by Cal Howard and Owen Fitzgerald. I always love Bob’s middle name drop-ins — and his being broke!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #47 (Oct.-Nov. 1957), by Cal Howard and Owen Fitzgerald. Here’s another where Bob plays up being broke and hungry!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #55 (Feb.-March 1959), by Cal Howard and Owen Fitzgerald. Here’s Bob wolfing it up!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #61 (Feb.-March 1960), by Bob Oksner. I love the self-deprecating call out on his nose — and another middle-name drop-in!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #77 (Oct.-Nov. 1962), by Bob Oksner and Mort Drucker. Another great one of Bob looking for romance in the unlikeliest of places.

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #86 (April-May 1964), by (possibly) Mort Drucker. Harvard Harvard III gets introduced but my favorite part is that world famous crooner and Bob’s long time movie partner, Bing Crosby, and his family get a call-out!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #94, (Aug.-Sept. 1965), by Arnold Drake and Bob Oksner. Jerry Lewis seemed to meet all the great DC heroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash! Bob Hope got Aquaman! Just kidding, Aquaman fans! I love the King of the Seven Seas! I really do! And that Aquaman appears to be in the style of Nick Cardy!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #94. I didn’t want to include another panel from the same issue, let alone the same page — and one that referenced smoking, no less, it’s not good for you — but I like the sight gags and the fact that one of the jokes may be lost on younger readers.

The slogan “I’d rather fight than switch!,” was from a series of commercials for Tareyton cigarettes and featured actors with grease paint around one eye (to simulate a punch to the face) and spouting the phrase. Yep, cigarette commercials were all over the tube back in the ’60s and ’70s. The blue fish, at the bottom right, is presumably a smoker of Tareyton’s waterproof cigarettes.

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #95 (Oct.-Nov. 1965), by Arnold Drake and Bob Oksner. I like that Bob gives someone else credit for a good joke!

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The Adventures of Bob Hope #108 (Dec. 1967-Jan. 1968), by Arnold Drake and Neal Adams. While this one is not all that funny, I couldn’t not include a bit of Neal Adams’ artwork on Bob, particularly Neal’s take on the monster crew that was added a couple of years before to “liven” things up. Sadly, this was the penultimate issue before cancellation!

So there you have it, another Hope birthday bash in the can! But before we go, here are a couple of 13th Dimension lagniappes for you!

First up, is that Bob Hope-as-Superman panel, cleaned up, slightly redrawn here and there, and newly colored!

And, finally,here’s a GIF that I put together, from my favorite Bob Hope movie, The Cat and the Canary!

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MORE

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite ADVENTURES OF BOB HOPE Covers. Click here.

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite JERRY LEWIS COMIC BOOK APPEARANCES. Click here.

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A 10-year-old Walt Grogan fell in love with the original Captain Marvel thanks to essays written by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson in the paperback edition of All in Color for a Dime, released in 1970 and bought for him by his father off a paperback spinner rack in a liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. Walt runs The Marvel Family Web Facebook page devoted to all incarnations of the Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel and blogs about Captain Marvel at shazamshistorama.com.