Captain Billy's Whiz Bang

Here is an article about Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, a humor magazine that was popular from the 1910s to the 1930s. "Captain Billy" was William Fawcett, a war veteran who started the magazine as a newsletter for troop morale ("whiz bang" being slang for early incendiary rockets). Troop morale is, as always, a beast of curious hungers:

The techniques of the humor are even more old-fashioned than the content. Rambling narratives that build up to an often feeble punch line and the question-answer or he-she pattern made obsolete by the New Yorker are common. The style of humor resembles that of 1880 more than that of 1980. The kind of linguistic mayhem committed by Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Bill Nye, and other late nineteenth-century humorists is represented by anti-proverbs and mock quotations and especially by puns.

The magazine was a success, to the point where Captain Billy was able to set up a swank resort in the middle of Minnesota (the magazine was published in Minnesota, a fact still commemorated by the annual Whiz Bang Days). Unfortunately, paper shortages and the death of Captain Billy caused the flagship of the Fawcett fleet to undergo a major revamp. The title was shortened to "Whiz" and it became a superhero comic, memorializing its founder in the name of its marquee hero, Captain Marvel and his secret identity, Billy Batson.