DC Comics Foldees

Comic Book Foldees were cards with perforated panels. Each card was scored so you could fold the top or bottom of a card over in various combinations to produce humorous results. DC super-heroes were on one side, other characters on the back. For example, card no.1 (in a series of 44) is:

The following picture shows the foldee being folded. As the card points out this makes it possible to make 9 funny pictures! (Surely only six really?)

They were put out by the Topps bubblegum company in the US, wrapped like so:

I bought mine when I was a child in the UK, and I don't remember the bubblegum (horrible stuff), and of course the cards didn't cost 5 cents; perhaps a threpence in pre-decimal days (?). I note that the foldees don't allow me to put an old-style dress on Superman, although foldee #3 is pretty close (see below).

The foldees box, which I also don't recall:

A list of the 44 foldees can be found at: Jeff Allender's House of Checklists, and a gallery of the cards here. There's a lot of cards for sale on eBay, at what seem to me excessive prices.

Foldees as a Java Program

Last weekend I was browsing the above sites, and decided it would be fun to write some code to fold the foldees. And so Foldee.java was born:

You can select a card from the popdown list at the top, or randomly choose one by pressing the "A Card" button. Alternatively, you can press the "Two Faces" button to get a randomly selected front and back of different foldees.

Once you have a foldee you like, as shown on the left, then press the "Refold" button to generate new folds of that card on the right:

You can download a zipped copy of the program below, which includes images for all the cards. Unzip the folder, and type java Foldee inside the directory. Since it's a Java program, you need a Java runtime system.

The souce code is included if you want to compile you're own version. Do that by typing javac Foldee.java. You'll need a JDK for compilation.

Download

• Zipped Foldee Code and Images (6.5 MB because of the images). Last updated: 6th Feb. 2017.