Joe Palooka #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeJoe Palooka #4 (Columbia, 1944) carries a double distinction: it is the final issue of Columbia Comics' pioneering four-issue run — the first publisher to bring Ham Fisher's enormously popular newspaper strip to comic-book format — and it caps the series with its most overtly wartime content, reprinting strips in which Joe covertly penetrates Nazi-occupied Europe ahead of the Allied invasion. At the peak of the strip's cultural reach, when the character was being used by the U.S. armed services for recruiting and instructional material, this issue put Joe's anti-fascist credentials front and center, complete with a behind-the-scenes introduction by Fisher himself detailing how the strip's wartime turn resonated even with Free France. As the bookend of the Columbia era, it marks the handoff point before Harvey Comics relaunched the title in 1945 as an all-new original-story series — a transition that shifted Joe Palooka from reprint anthology to original superhero-adjacent comic-book hero.
Joe Palooka #4 contains two stories. In "Farewell to Friends," a soldier says goodbye to loved ones before deployment, including a woman named Nada at a hospital where he visits wounded servicemen; the story concludes with the soldier's plane being shot down during combat. In "Jerry Finds a Treasure," Jerry and his military unit discover a buried pirate treasure map while stationed in a tropical location, leading them to excavate and uncover a chest of gold coins hidden on an island.
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Columbia Comics (operating as Publication Enterprises, edited by Vin Sullivan) launched the Joe Palooka comic-book series in 1942, making it the first dedicated comic-book home for Ham Fisher's McNaught-syndicated newspaper strip, which had debuted April 21, 1930, and by the mid-1940s reached an estimated 50 million daily readers across 900 newspapers worldwide. All four issues in the Columbia run consisted of strip reprints with cover art and story material by Fisher himself; the copyright dates and original publication dates of the underlying newspaper strips were deliberately stripped from the indicia by the publisher. Issue #4 was distributed by the American News Company, as were its predecessors in the run, and carried a ten-cent cover price across its 52 full-color pages — slightly slimmer than the 64- and 68-page earlier entries, suggesting winding-down production ahead of the Harvey transition.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Final (4th and last) issue of Columbia Comics' Joe Palooka series (1942 series); the Harvey Comics continuation launched separately in 1945 with original stories.
- Entire issue consists of Ham Fisher newspaper strip reprints focused on Joe's WWII military service, specifically his infiltration of Nazi-held Europe — the most combat-intensive content in the Columbia run.
- Includes a prose introduction by creator Ham Fisher discussing Joe Palooka's wartime story arc and the response it generated from Free France — a rare behind-the-scenes editorial document from Fisher himself.
- All story and cover art credited to Ham Fisher, the strip's sole credited creator; the Columbia series was the first comic-book venue for these strips.
- Story content: Joe's unit ships out; Joe rescues a fellow boxer (Biff Williams) overboard and the two capture a German U-boat while still in boxing gear; the unit lands at an Allied staging area where Joe meets his younger brother Steve; Joe and Jerry are assigned to round up Nazi paratroopers and expose German boxer Schmeller as an enemy fifth-columnist.
- The Columbia series as a whole contains what Key Collector Comics identifies as the first appearance of a sitting U.S. president (FDR) in a comic book — an appearance that originated in the 1938 newspaper strip and was reprinted within the Columbia run — granted with special permission from the White House.
- Published and distributed by Publication Enterprises / American News Company; edited by Vin Sullivan (per Grand Comics Database).
- The Joe Palooka newspaper strip, source material for all Columbia issues, was cited by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels as 'the most vicious of anti-Nazi propagandists,' underlining the real-world ideological weight the strip carried during the war years.
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