Are you ready to travel back in time to see grizzled prospector days of the Old West, and possibly ghosts? Then saddle up boys because we're headed for the Ghost Town That Came To Life!
Yes sir, it's old timey saloons and manly beards and fancy ladies ahoy as this comic book kicks into high gear. I wonder what kind of fakey TV western action we'll be a-seein' hyar?
Wait a minute, it's 1950s family on convertible vacation, not 1850s family struggling with lawlessness and Apache attacks. We were swindled! Hornswoggled, consarn it! Well, we'd better get used to it. Whatever this comic is about, it's not about the wild west. It's about a family vacation trip, the BEST VACATION TRIP WE'VE EVER TAKEN, Mom hollers.
Whew, our grizzled bearded Western outlaw nightmare was just frontier cosplay in honor of National Electrial Week! Didn't you know that everybody dresses up like bearded cowboys for National Electrial Week? Nothing says "electricity" like the Gabby Hayes look! And if you don't have a beard, that's a fine. Women too!
Sure, we were halted in the street by Taliban-style bearded gunmen, but let's stay and see their electrical exhibits. In fact they insist.
And before we know it the family is whisked into the Electric Utility Exhibit where a polite, handsome, incongruous cowboy explains the work-saving and pleasure-giving electrical appliances that your local electric company really, really wishes you'd buy.
You know, your local electric company is ready and willing to supply you with as much electricity as you could ever possibly want, but your old-style home, with its primitive 1920s low-voltage wimpy unsafe old-fashioned 23-skidoo wiring, why your old wiring is inadequate! Don't you want to live in a home that meets the standards of your local electric company?
I can't think of anything funny to say about this giant diagram of a power plant, but they worked really hard on it so I figured we'd include it. Also, we finally learn what an 'ampere' is!
Coal is cheap and plentiful and just pops out of the ground leaving flowers and butterflies in its wake, and is burned in our clean, lovely, modern power plants, which have licked that soot problem with their dust collectors. So says 1955, which believes "strip mining" is a club out by the turnpike avoided by decent folk and "greenhouse gases" are a thing Nero Wolfe uses to grow orchids, or something.
Did you know that the steam in a power plant turns those thin ultrasharp turbine blades faster than the speed of sound?! That's honestly kind of frightening.
Remember your electric utility saves at every step. That's why your electric bill is so ridiculously low every month! Why not buy some more electric appliances and keep 'em running, just to show the electric utility that you care?
I can't get over how spotlessly clean everything is! You know as a utility that comes into your home, we want to make sure our electricity is as clean and pure as it possibly can be, and keeping things spotless and shiny is only part of our job here at Obsessive Compulsive Electric Company, Inc
In case you ever read one of E.E. "Doc" Smith's golden-age science fiction novels filled with gigantic spaceships using amazing space drives and ultra-powerful destructive weapons powered with really titanic amperages, and you were wondering what a "bus bar" was - well, now you know what a "bus bar" is. I don't advise touching it.
The electricity your generating station produces is so amazingly powerful that it has to be wimped-down in a sub-station, and then lowered even further by those transformers you see on the light poles in your neighborhood, the transformers that sometimes, when the load gets too spiky, will just explode like little bombs! That's when you break out the flashlights and the candles and really start your Ghost Town lifestyle.
Look at that smooth talking cowpoke operate! Nothing gets a girl to say "yes" to attending a school dance in a strange town like a stirring talk about farm electrification.
Smashing thru flooded rivers, climbing poles in the snow, engaging in some form of unspecified dance-related activity- it's all in day's work for Electrical Engineer Lineman!
Meanwhile the rest of the family, having ditched Sis at some kind of community ritual in this town full of bearded strangers with strange customs, not saying there's anything weird or untoward going on, just that I'm getting kind of an eerie modern-day Electric Wicker Man kind of thing going on, anyway the rest of the family gets further Electrical Indoctrination from Mr. Authority Figure down at the power plant. He's going to show us an amusing and instructive chart!
Dammit, why isn't your home properly wired?! It's filled with people using radios, hair dryers, fans, clocks, TVs, washing machines, ovens, lathes, saws, irons, and lights! People in every room! Who are all these people? Why didn't you wire your home correctly before they arrived?
Nancy returns safely from her dance with her new boyfriend, whose name, by the way, is never mentioned. The next day the family sets off again on their journey, changed forever by their encounter with one of the primal forces of the universe, as explained by cowboys.
Remember, your electric utility has all this expensive modern equipment for one reason and one reason only - to jam as much voltage into your home as is humanly possible! Why not do YOUR part and re-wire your entire house at great expense to take advantage of the kindness of your local electric utility? It's the least you can do!
Regional utility corporations weren't the only outfits selling 50's America on the idea of home electric wire upgrades - here's a spread from the Edison Electric Institute's all-electric cookbook that's really, really selling you on ripping out that old aluminum, newspaper-insulated wiring and replacing it with some modern stuff. Which you should actually do because hey 1920, it turns out newspaper is flammable. Who knew?
Don't curse at your fuse box or become entangled in power cords or fume at your TV set- get yourself some FULL HOUSEPOWER and LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY! At least until the 1970s come along and you have to re-wire all your outlets for those 3-prong sockets. Which is OK, the cable TV guy had to run coax everywhere, which worked great until somebody invented HDMI and now you gotta re-wire everything AGAIN, and while you're at it go ahead and install those new outlets with the USB chargers. Just send the bill to Reddy Kilowatt care of the cowboys at the Better Electrical Living Institute!
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