Thursday, August 19, 2010

Around the Comicsphere

Comic historian Mike Madrid covers the history of female superheroes in a terrific interview at Collector's Weekly.

Batwoman was well-intentioned but Batman spent so much time telling her how incompetent she was and how fighting crime was not a woman’s job that they never developed much of a romance. She was portrayed as an inferior character that couldn’t be trusted. Batman trusted Robin, a 13-year-old boy, more than this grown woman.


Indeed, one of the main themes of Detective #249, where Robin teams up with Batwoman, is that the Boy Wonder is a much better sleuth than she.

Speaking of the fair sex, Jared at Blog Into Mystery has a post on one of the two stories in the Silver Age featuring a revolt of the girl members of the Legion of Superheroes. I touched briefly on the earlier story with the same plot here.

H at the Comic Treadmill covers four of the Silver Age Hawkman tryout issues in Brave & Bold. Excellent reading, and I heartily agree with this point:

Their three-issue tryout over, the Hawks vanished for a year of Earth-Prime time when they returned for a second three-issue stint in Brave & Bold. The first two issues had a mini-arc going with the goal of establishing a reason the Hawks would stay on Earth. The problem with it that it was the foundation of the series and Fox failed to sell it. The idea that Thanagarian police could learn from Earth methods required a smooth talking pitch by Fox and he failed to deliver. What did primitive Earth have to offer advanced Thanagarians? Apparently as shown in B&B 42’s, The Menace of the Dragonfly Raiders, Earth turned ropes into lariats, which turned out to be more effective than Stun Guns in subduing crooks mounted on dragon flies.


Indeed, assuming the Absorbascon worked as advertised, wouldn't Hawkman have learned all he needed to know about Earthling police methods without even bothering to set foot on the planet? And as H hints, he really wasn't studying police methods so much as he was studying ancient weapons.

Cartoon Snap reviews a collection of Felix the Cat comic book stories from the 1950s. As a second-grader in the early 1960s, I loved the Felix the Cat cartoons, although I recognize now that they were pretty crudely made. But the comics were very interesting and completely wild.

Bill Jourdain covers the latest release from DC's Golden Age, featuring the earliest adventures of Superboy. I am thrilled to hear that DC is finally reprinting significant material from that series, one of my favorites as you can probably guess from the way I've been covering it lately.

The Magic Whistle has a post on a rather bizarre 1960s book of one-panel gags called "My Son, the Daughter". Definitely not something that would have met with the approval of the CCA!

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