We continue our look at Bicentennial Comics with one of America's most American of comics, that capitalist icon of American enterprise, Richie Rich.


Along with Jackie Jokers and Kool Katz, Harvey characters played an important part in our nation's birth!


Here Paul "Kool Katz" Revere demonstrates that jokes about hippies are always funny.


And with Richie to play straight man George Washington to Jackie "Yankee Doodle" Jokers, the British are handily defeated and America is born. But we're not through with Bicentennial Fever, no sir!


DC Comics managed to plaster a "salute" across the top of all their titles just to remind everybody that they were as patriotic as the next comic book company. Nothing like a little red, white, and blue bunting to really bring home the horror of skeletons doing things that skeletons do not normally do.


But there are plenty of actual scary stories surrounding the birth of our nation, right? Right, says this issue of "Ghosts"!


So what if these ghost stories are only tangentially related to 1776? As long as they involve men in wigs and knee breeches, they qualify! Anyway, comic book readers know there's only ONE real menace to worry about.


Dennis the Menace, that is! Whether he's harrassing the entire eastern seaboard during a family vacation to historic Revolutionary War sites or running roughshod through the hometown's Bicentennial celebration, he drives home the point that "liberty and justice for all" is sometimes really annoying.


Can't he be the Hippie Thomas Paine? Isn't America supposed to be about FREEDOM, MAN? Instead it's do this, don't do that, can't you read the signs!!


Yessir, making the Mitchell family and the Wilsons an integral part of our Bicentennial celebration was the best idea this little town ever had! By the way our town's name is Wacky Hijinksburg. So, we've seen a lot of comic book companies here. What about Marvel Comics? How did they celebrate our nation's 200th birthday?


With ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AWESOME, that's how. They managed to schedule it so that the 200th issue of Captain America would be published in the summer of 1976 and that Captain America creator Jack Kirby would have returned to Marvel Comics where he was powering through a five-year burst of imaginative fury. Now that's what I call long-term planning!


The plot? Aristocratic retro-dressing millionaires plan to use "The Madbomb" to incapacitate most of America and rule the country as slave-owning oligarchs! Years before this became an acknowledged part of the Republican Party platform, Jack Kirby tackled the issue head-on!


And after freakouts, sonic attacks, underground duels, and patented Kirby double-truck splash pages, the U.S.A. is saved thanks to Captain America and The Falcon. Happy birthday, America! See you in 2076!

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