Silver Age Comics

And On the Third Issue, He Arose Again...

2012-01-29T00:22:00.000-08:00

I have talked a little bit about death and resurrection in the past. Lightning Lad was one of the first major instances of it involving a hero in the DC universe, at least where the resurrection was not immediate.

But in the Silver Age, Marvel seemed to be the place where corpses got up and walked on a regular basis (especially villains), and so I thought I would try to catalog all of their examples. Of course, an undertaking like this is going to require the assistance of my readers. Although I have read virtually all of the Silver Age Marvel line, my memory's nowhere near as good as it used to be.

First up is Doctor Doom. The Lord of Latveria apparently succumbed at the end of several of his early adventures. For example:

Or:

And:

Let me point out here that there's actually a pretty good reason for the "death" ending; it saves the writers the necessity of explaining how the villain got out of jail. And Doctor Doom was, in a way copying an earlier DC villain in meeting his apparent demise at the end of many of his early meetings:

And:

This last bit, with the villain falling into water, has become something of a cliche for comic writers. It has the advantage of giving the appearance of death, combined with the uncertainty. Plus, conveniently, it doesn't really have to be explained much in the subsequent resurrection. See there was this pipe/cave nearby with a convenient air pocket....

Anyway, Dr Doom had more than his share of deaths in the early Marvel Age, so we'll skip over him. The next major villain to "die" in the FF was the Puppet Master:

He returned in FF #14 and, although he apparently bit the bullet at the end of that issue, many more times as well. One of the interesting things about that initial resurrection, though, was that Stan didn't bother to explain it. Never mind that (as shown above), we'd seen him fall out of a skyscraper. This would become the rule, rather than the exception.

I'm not sure if there are any other "deaths" in the Silver Age Fantastic Four, so let's move on to the Amazing Spiderman. The only real death and resurrection I'm aware of there involves the Vulture:

The original Vulture apparently shuffles off the mortal coil shortly after that scene, although he returns in ASM #63 to battle both Spidey and Blackie Drago, his chosen successor. I'm again not aware of any other deaths and resurrections in the Silver Age involving Spiderman, although there are some (Silvermane, for example) who died in the SA but didn't respawn until much later.

The only example of a major Marvel hero dying and not coming back for a couple of issues (a la Lightning Lad) involved Captain America. Death here from CA #111:
Note the "falling into water" bit I mentioned earlier. Cap's resurrection came in the first issue of his magazine that I ever bought:

I'm struggling now to think of resurrections involving other Marvel villains. About the only one that's coming to mind is the Rhino's passing from Hulk #104:

The Rhino would return along with the Leader to bedevil Bruce Banner's wedding in Hulk #124 as I covered awhile ago.Oh, the Leader, that's right, he died in Tales to Astonish #74:

The Black Widow had a couple of brushes with the Grim Reaper, as I have covered in the past. And I know the Unicorn appeared to die in Iron Man #4. Any more examples? I'm mostly interested in cases where the resurrection happened by the end of the Silver Age, simply because there are so many examples after that.

Hawkeye Versus Captain America

2012-01-25T10:06:00.000-08:00

As I have discussed in the past, heroic characters in the Golden and Silver Age for the most part didn't require a motivation. They fought against crime and injustice simply because they were heroes. This is part of what makes Batman and Spiderman so unique; they did have strong personal motivations.Hawkeye, on the other hand, did have a motivation, but it was an odd one: He wanted the acclaim that comes along with being a hero. Remember, the first we see him is when he's simply a carnival side-show act:

When a carnival ride goes haywire, Iron Man appears to save the passengers, and Hawkeye experiences the green-eyed monster:

So he puts together a uniform and some gadget arrows and goes into the hero business. But things go off the rails almost immediately, as the cops mistake him for the accomplice of a smash and grab artist. While getting away, he is picked up by the Black Widow, who recruits him to the cause of international peace:

Which turned out to mostly involve attacking Tony Stark's industrial plants.

Awhile later, after the apparent death of the Black Widow, Hawkeye decided to try out for the Avengers. He showed his suitability for the team by breaking into their HQ and tying up Jarvis:

But as it happened, the Avengers were in no position to turn down new recruits, as in that same issue, Iron Man, Thor, and Giant Man all decide to take a leave of absence from the team. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, reluctant former members of the gang of Evil Mutants also join up, with Captain America assuming the leadership role.It was this last factor which grated on Hawkeye:

And over the next year or two, Hawkeye frequently bickered with Captain America, questioning both his decisions and his right to command the group. Indeed, it often seemed as though the only reason Steve Rogers kept his position was because Quicksilver also wanted to lead and the Scarlet Witch, with the deciding vote, formed a crush on Cap. Oh, and no particular surprise, Hawkeye didn't have the noblest of reasons for wanting to run the show; he sometimes admitted to himself that he just wanted the glory of being known as the leader of the Avengers.

There was another aspect of the quarrel between Hawkeye and Cap that was interesting. Despite appearing physically the same age, Cap was from a different generation. Hawkeye was brash and arrogant, while Rogers was cautious and a bit stodgy.

At first, I confess that I found their verbal jousting a bit tedious. Stan Lee's arguing characters tended never to resolve their differences. JJJ always hated Spiderman and the feeling was mutual. The Thing constantly bickered with Johnny and Reed.

But then a funny thing started to happen. Gradually, over a period of several years, we began to perceive that Hawkeye was starting to appreciate Captain America. Here's a hint of it:

And when Hawkeye failed to stop Powerman and the Swordsman from escaping because he didn't want to risk hurting the Black Widow, we got this scene:

That's characterization done right, because it's positive for both characters. We see Cap's understanding and Hawkeye's guilt at having treated him badly. In the next issue, Cap agrees when Hawkeye asks to tackle the Widow and her henchmen alone.

And while Hawkeye did not give up the occasional jibes about Captain America being Methuselah, you definitely began to get the feeling that it was pro-forma; that there was no real antipathy between the pair. It was a nice moment of growth and change.

Brave and Bold #1

2012-01-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

Although it became known in the 1960s as a tryout magazine, and later as a team-up comic, the Brave and the Bold started out as a swashbuckler.

The comic opens with the Golden Gladiator, by France Herron and Russ Heath. The GG only lasted for the first four issues, before the magazine converted to a complete medieval format with the addition of Robin Hood. Marcus is a young shepherd, falsely accused of attempting to kill a Roman noble. He is sentenced to the galleys as a slave, where:

You may recall that a similar origin was proposed for Conan's muscles in the first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. A lion gets loose in the galley and Marcus manages to break his chains and kill the beast with them. The slave-master realizes his young oarsman will fetch a good price as a gladiator. Unfortunately for our hero, he is sold to Cinna, the Roman who accused him of attempted murder.

But Marcus defeats Caius in battle. His gallantry in battle wins the heart of Cinna's beautiful niece:

In a surprise, the Praetor announces that the gladiator who wins the chariot race will be set free, and become the Golden Gladiator. But Cinna has plans to prevent that; he gives his favored gladiator a sword, while equipping Marcus with but a shield. However:

And Marcus rides on to victory, although Cinna still plans to find a way to kill him in the future.

Comments: Entertaining origin story and terrific art by Heath. Check out the design on Cinna's breastplate in that next to last panel above; just marvelous details. The plot bears quite a resemblance to the novel Ben-Hur, but unfortunately for the feature the famed movie featuring Charlton Heston was still a few years in the future. Trivia bit: Did you know that Ben-Hur was for many years the best-selling American novel of all time, until the publication of Gone With the Wind?

The issue continues with the Viking Prince. The story begins with a fishing skiff picking up a young warrior, nearly drowned in the sea. He has amnesia, but we quickly learn that he was the subject of an attempted assassination by a Viking lord named Thorvald.

Thorvald's guards attack the Captain's home, but the young Viking proves adept as a fighter:

Gunnda names him Jon, after a fighting prince of yore. Jon trains the fishermen in the manly arts of combat, while they teach him whaling. The former comes in more useful:

The dragon ship rams the fishermen and things look dire. But they load Jon onto the giant crossbow used to harpoon whales and he rips apart the sail of the warship. Then, just as it looks as if Thorvald's men will overwhelm the Viking Prince, the fishermen board and take command of the vessel:

Comments: Another fine story by Bob Kanigher and adept art by Kubert.

The finale features Silent Knight. Brian Kent is a young prince whose father ruled jointly with Sir Oswald a kingdom "South of the Thames". Sir Oswald kills his father during a tournament, and there is strong indication that foul play was at work:

Sir Oswald assigns Sir Grot to train the young Brian in the ways of knighthood. Grot is a crusty and difficult tutor, and Brian finds it difficult to win his praise despite his obvious ability:

He also learns about falconry, and when he scares off Slasher, Sir Grot's prize bird, he chases the animal into the forest, where he discovers:

After trying on the armor, he overhears some of Sir Oswald's men waylaying some travelers (including the requisite fair maiden). He springs to their rescue, but when the men demand his name, he realizes he cannot speak without revealing his true identity. Thus they dub him the Silent Knight. With the help of Slasher, he defeats the brigands and leaves the armor back in the hidden glade.

Comments: Kanigher and Irv Novick team up on this solid origin tale. Overall the issue was quite entertaining and it must have been at least moderately successful, as the swordfighting continued for the next four years.

The Continuing Dilemma of Brainiac 5

2012-01-18T09:47:00.000-08:00

Mort Weisinger and his writers had continual problems with the Legion of Super-Heroes. In a way, this is not terribly surprising. The Legion was initially intended for just one story, the original tale in Adventure #247. But a few issues later, Mort began putting letters pages in Adventure, and while I haven't been able to locate any letters that were actually published, it seems logical to assume that at least some fans wrote in requesting a return of the superhero team. And so, over time, they became a regular part of the Superman family, eventually supplanting Superboy himself as the cover feature in Adventure.

But the process was not without some growing pains. Because the stories had been written on an ad hoc basis, there were contradictions here and there. For instance, in the initial story, the Legion was set 1000 years in the future:

But in some stories, the Legion was set only 100 years in the future. This seems like a minor problem, except for one thing.

In Action #267, Weisinger gave Supergirl a tryout with the Legion. However, either he or his writer for that story, realized there would be problems with having Supergirl and Superboy in the same club. After all, wouldn't Superboy then know that a Supergirl would arrive on Earth several years later? So they made the Legion that Supergirl tried out for the descendants of the original LSH:

As I have discussed in the past, when DC reprinted that story years later, they edited the text, so that Supergirl was joining the same Legion. In the interim between the two appearances, Weisinger had come up with a solution to the dilemma of having Superboy know of the existence of a Supergirl in the future. Supergirl had hypnotized him into forgetting her except when he was in the future.

But there was another problem that popped up that never was resolved in the Silver Age. Supergirl actually was rejected for membership in the Legion in that first story, although there was a reason. She had been exposed to Red Kryptonite, which turned her temporarily into an adult. Since the Legion was for teenagers only, she was unable to join that time.

She finally made the grade in Action #276. In that issue, she met another applicant, with a strangely familiar appearance:

Note that the coloring in that panel is in error; for most of the story, Brainiac 5 has a green face, like his ancestor (and like his hands). Also note that the numbering appears wrong; Brainiac's son would be Brainiac 2, his grandson Brainiac 3, his great-grandson Brainiac 4 and his great-great-grandson would be Brainiac 5. So his great-great-great-great-grandson should be Brainiac 7. Of course, the possibility exists that only male descendants of Brainiac inherited the name.

But the problems don't end there. Remember, this story is supposedly taking place 1000 years in the future. Unless the Brainiac clan has an extraordinary lifespan, wouldn't his great-great-great-great-grandson be living more like 150 years in the future, rather than 1000? A likely explanation is that the writer thought the Legion was only 100 years in the future. A generation is usually considered to be 20 years, Brainiac 5 (ignoring the great-great-great-great grandson mistake) would be around 100 years after his ancestor.

A further dilemma was introduced in Superman #167, when we learned:

Weisinger and his writer had a ready explanation for Brainiac 5:

Except that doesn't really explain anything. For starters, if Brainiac II escaped and despised the original Brainiac, why would his descendants continue to be named after the computer? So maybe they did find him and brainwash him into thinking that Brainiac was indeed his father. But there's still a problem. Remember, Brainiac 5 supposedly had a super-genius mind; that was his super-power that got him into the Legion. But Brainiac II was just an ordinary boy (from a planet where the inhabitants had green skin). How did his descendants get so smart?

By the way, DC has now apparently decided to ignore the story in Action #276. Remember, this was the story that showed Brainiac 5 and Supergirl getting inducted into the Legion:

But in modern reprintings of Adventure #247, the original Legion story, one of the characters in several panels has been recolored to look like Brainiac 5. For example, in the Millenium edition:

But in the original there was no green-skinned lad:

Around the Horn

2012-01-14T00:11:00.000-08:00

Been awhile since I did a roundup post, so here we go:

Loston Wallace created a terrific picture of the Thing, featuring the other members of the FF and some of their more memorable antagonists. I wish I had that kind of talent; even my stick figures look bad.

Commander Benson has a post up about how the death of Bucky Barnes was covered in the Silver Age. I read all those stories out of order, so it's nice to see someone put it together chronologically. I like this observation:

For nearly forty years, despite all the times Marvel had tantalised Captain America and the readers with “Bucky Returns!” plotlines, the true Bucky Barnes had remained really, most sincerely dead. So certain was this that the comics fanship coined the term Bucky-dead for any character perceived to have been killed off permanently, with no chance of revival.

Blog Into Mystery blogs the wedding of Barry and Iris back in 1966, and points out a very interesting and early Easter Egg on the cover of that issue that I'm ashamed to admit I missed entirely up until now.

Booksteve covers the Marvel Universe 50 years ago this month. Of course, back then there were only two comics that really qualify as Marvels, and one of them comes with an asterisk.

A 324-page comic book for Christmas? And no, it's not one of the Cerebus phonebooks, it's a Golden Age comic featuring Captain Marvel and other Fawcett superheroes.

When I'm the Evil Genius...

2012-01-09T22:31:00.000-08:00

I will not regret that they have no chance:

For previous installments in the When I'm the Evil Genius series, click here.

Forbidden Worlds #108

2012-01-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

The first story presents the usual Silver Age characterization on the fly:

We can get a quick sense of Caton from just those two panels; kind of a wimp and yet it's not really his fault, so we also sympathize with him. We subsequently learn that he has one particular tormentor: Bat Jennison, and a love object: Celia Jones. When he grows up, he applies for a job at the local rocket plant:

Okay, so Celia isn't really his type. Bat decides to pull a prank on him. He gets several buddies to dress up as generals. They tell Caton that the astronaut scheduled for the next mission has taken ill, and that they have decided that he must take the rocket jockey's place. They strap him in and put a firecracker under his seat, knowing this will scare him thoroughly. It succeeds, so well that Caton is blown out of his seat and lands on the rocket's firing mechanism.

When the rocket finally lands on another planet, Caton discovers that the humans there have patterned their civilization after Earth's medieval period, with knights in armor. He also learns that he's tremendously strong and has other powers:

And when the princess is threatened:

He wins the heart of the princess, but one thing makes him miserable. When he returns to Earth, he'll go back to being a weakling. Fortunately she has a wizard who can take care of that:

And when he gets back on the rocket, he's pleased to discover that the princess has joined him. When he gets back to Earth, he's a big hero, but Bat still intends to bully him. Bad idea:

And with a princess won, he has no interest in Celia Jones when she flirts with him. He even wins first prize in the company costume ball, dressing up as (what else?) a knight in shining armor.

Comments: Cute story. Writer Richard Hughes did a lot of these types of tales, where the hero takes a trip (often to another planet) and comes back with new confidence and drive. It's not hard to see the appeal to adolescent boys, who were often subjected to bullying and the scorn of the girls they adored.

The next tale concerns a chemist who works for a tobacco company, trying to come up with a filter that doesn't change the taste of the cigarette. His latest effort seems to work at first, but soon leaves him feeling dizzy. He reads the news on the bus home and learns that Ambassador Alvarez was killed and that Pan-Oceanic Oil's stock had soared. When he gets home, he still feels odd and his wife suggests that he go to bed right after supper:

The next morning, he's eating breakfast with Susan when the radio breaks in with a news bulletin. Ambassador Alvarez has just been assassinated! Wait a minute, didn't that happen yesterday? He hunts around for the newspaper, but can't find it. He realizes that somehow he tapped into the future, and thinks quickly:

Sure enough, Pan-Oceanic shares climb into the stratosphere, and Arthur sells his shares for over $200,000. Now there are lots of ways this story could go, but Hughes pulls a big surprise on us:

Comments: A beautiful little story. Hughes often used a similar plot of someone gaining unexpected riches and then blowing it. Arthur shows that he deserved his little stroke of good fortune, and has more sense than to try to parlay it into a bigger payday.

The third story is a very shot tale of a sailor who receives a visit from his wife in a dream. She's concerned about reports of severe weather on the seas. The next morning, his bunkmate reports that he also saw the woman. And when he returns home, his wife had had the same dream of visiting him. What happened?

Comments: These stories are not Hughes' forte, because there isn't room for any real characterization.

The finale is the cover story. Twin boys were separated at birth due to the divorce of their parents. One of the twins, Leonard, grows up in America and becomes an unsuccessful painter. He's told his paintings don't have any effect, and so:

Cue the fella with the horns and a red costume. Leonard discovers that his new paintings do have an effect; the scenes that he paints come true the next day. Is he seeing into the future? No, instead he's changing it, as he soon discovers. So he gets a great idea:

And sure enough, despite nearly universal scorn for his still life painting, the judges find themselves awarding him the prize. But he needs new supplies and when he visits his rich uncle, the old man refuses to untrouser the wallet. Knowing that he's the only heir, Leonard paints again:

Sure enough, the uncle dies in a car wreck. But Leonard had completely forgotten about his twin brother Henry, who inherits half the estate. Time for yet another painting:

But by painting the beard out, he blundered, for the man in the painting was himself. And sure enough, he
falls into an old well the next morning and drowns, much to the delight of Mephisto, who comes to collect his soul.

Comments: Somewhat predictable, but still very entertaining. It's the flip side of the Arthur tale. Overall, as usual with ACG comics, I loved this issue.

Falling In Love #99

2012-01-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

As you can see, the psychedelic and op-art influences were being reflected in DC's romance line fairly early; this was the May 1968 issue. Just a beautiful cover by Ric Estrada. Note the tribute to Palisades Amusement Park, a longtime DC advertiser.

You can get a quick idea of the opening story from this sequence:

She doesn't resist him, but she refuses to tell him she loves him. And after they're going steady she decides to try to attract her old boyfriend, Greg. But then she realizes she's just playing Rod's game:

As you can see, Rod's already fooling around on her with the brunette in the background. And it turns out that Greg really does want her back:

Cute ending, with the final line probably swiped from the movie Some Like It Hot.

The second story concerns a gal who arrives in the big city for the first time. Fortunately a handsome stranger helps her flag down a taxi to her old friend's apartment, where she'll be staying. She assumes she'll never see him again, but that evening:

Gail finds herself falling for her roommate's boyfriend. To make matters more difficult, Marjorie and Cliff insist on including her in their dates, making her uncomfortable whenever they get a little lovey-dovey. Finally, one evening Marjorie asks Gail to entertain Cliff as she is going to be working late. Cliff falls asleep and Gail confesses all:

But it turns out Cliff heard everything, and returns her love. And surprise, while Marjorie isn't overjoyed, she realized something was up:

Comments: I like the characterization for everybody in this story, although I doubt that Marjorie would really have been as phlegmatic as it appears here.

The final story is the cover feature, and it's a doozy. Lisa and Amy have been friends since they were kids, but Lisa starts to realize that the boys are interested in her buddy:

So she gets a new bff:

Heh. But although the guys notice her more now that she's not around Amy, they still tend to have wandering eyes:

But finally she meets Frankie, who notices only her:

Well, happy ending, right? Not quite, for Lisa notices that Frankie, while not straying, still doesn't treat her the way she wants. And this is where the story gets a little murky, because it appears that Lisa's kinda bitchy:

And when it looks like he forgot her birthday she's in tears. However, he does show up with a present and this time it's obvious that he's not very thoughtful:

Any guy who's ever given a prank gift to a gal will know that doesn't go over well. And as time goes on, Lisa realizes that while Frankie may be faithful, he's not satisfying her other needs.

But this time she's had enough. Maybe she needed him at one point, but no longer:

Comments: Entertaining story and beautiful artwork by Estrada. Frankie comes off as a bit of a cypher; why exactly doesn't he flirt with the other girls? I assume because that's what the plot required.

DC Comics Trends Througout the Silver Age

2011-12-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

Superheroes represented about 45% of DC's output during the Silver Age, while war comics made up somewhere around 13% of the total. But those overall numbers mask significant changes in their publication over time, and so I thought it might be interesting to do a year-by-year look at each category or genre of comics to see how things changed over time.

Some notes on categories; the ones chosen are simply my best guess as to where each comic fits best. For example, I put Challengers of the Unknown in Adventure, while Metal Men got lumped in with the Superheroes. I classified House of Mystery and House of Secrets as "horror" although of course they weren't very horrifying. HoM is considered Superhero from 143-173, during the Martian Manhunter/Robby Reed era. One comic is absolutely misclassified; I put Blackhawk in the war category rather than adventure. My bad, but I'm really looking more at changes over time, and Blackhawk didn't change much until the very end. I carefully classified the issues of Showcase and Brave and Bold individually.

Here's what DC's output looked like in 1955:

Category	#
Adventure	19
Comedy	22
Crime/Detective	18
Funny Animal	68
Horror	12
Romance	20
Science Fiction	18
Superhero	81
Teen	18
War	42
Western	35

As you can see, Funny Animal was right up there with Superhero comics; that would not last long. For 1956 and thereafter, I'll add a column showing the change in each category since the prior year:

1956	Adventure	19	0
1956	Comedy	29	7
1956	Crime/Detective	18	0
1956	Funny Animal	56	-12
1956	Horror	21	9
1956	Romance	24	4
1956	Science Fiction	18	0
1956	Superhero	86	5
1956	Teen	18	0
1956	War	45	3
1956	Western	45	10

Funny Animal started to decline, while Western picked up nicely.

1957	Adventure	24	5
1957	Comedy	36	7
1957	Crime/Detective	18	0
1957	Funny Animal	50	-6
1957	Horror	30	9
1957	Romance	32	8
1957	Science Fiction	18	0
1957	Superhero	88	2
1957	Teen	18	0
1957	War	72	27
1957	Western	26	-19

In 1957, DC inherited a couple of titles from Quality Comics, including Blackhawk and GI Combat, as well as Heart Throbs for the Romance line. Funny Animal continued to decline, and Western gave back all it had gained the prior year, and more.

1958	Adventure	27	3
1958	Comedy	35	-1
1958	Crime/Detective	18	0
1958	Funny Animal	40	-10
1958	Horror	32	2
1958	Romance	36	4
1958	Science Fiction	20	2
1958	Superhero	94	6
1958	Teen	8	-10
1958	War	72	0
1958	Western	25	-1

Continuing declines in Funny Animal and a sharp decrease in Teen titles as Leave it to Binky and Buzzy were cancelled. You will note that Superhero still had only gained 13 issues a year or about one a month; the dizzying climb upwards for that genre was just about to start.

1959	Adventure	28	1
1959	Comedy	32	-3
1959	Crime/Detective	3	-15
1959	Funny Animal	27	-13
1959	Horror	36	4
1959	Romance	33	-3
1959	Science Fiction	20	0
1959	Superhero	104	10
1959	Teen	6	-2
1959	War	72	0
1959	Western	21	-4

DC's Crime and Detective titles were mostly licensed properties like Mr District Attorney and Big Town, both of which had gone off the air by then; the New Adventures of Charlie Chan was cancelled early that year, emptying the category for the duration of the Silver Age.

1960	Adventure	22	-6
1960	Comedy	24	-8
1960	Funny Animal	17	-10
1960	Horror	36	0
1960	Romance	38	5
1960	Science Fiction	20	0
1960	Superhero	113	9
1960	Teen	9	3
1960	War	48	-24
1960	Western	18	-3

War dropped pretty significanty, and the overall number of comics declined quite a bit. DC was experiencing some financial pressure in 1960, which would eventually result in the price increase to 12 cents at the end of the next year. IIRC, the decrease in the War genre was not caused by any cancellations, but by DC switching most of their war titles to bi-monthly from monthly.

1961	Adventure	28	6
1961	Comedy	18	-6
1961	Funny Animal	8	-9
1961	Horror	36	0
1961	Romance	38	0
1961	Science Fiction	20	0
1961	Superhero	125	12
1961	Teen	6	-3
1961	War	48	0
1961	Western	10	-8

By this point, Funny Animal and Western, two of DC's top four lines in 1955, were limping along with essentially one title apiece, (Fox and Crow and Tomahawk), which would remain the case for most of the 1960s.

1962	Adventure	32	4
1962	Comedy	18	0
1962	Funny Animal	7	-1
1962	Horror	24	-12
1962	Romance	39	1
1962	Science Fiction	20	0
1962	Superhero	141	16
1962	Teen	6	0
1962	War	50	2
1962	Western	6	-4

Superhero makes another big jump; the decline in horror titles was again due to DC changing some titles from monthly publication to bi-monthly. Teen comics were now reduced to the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

1963	Adventure	24	-8
1963	Comedy	18	0
1963	Funny Animal	6	-1
1963	Horror	22	-2
1963	Romance	44	5
1963	Science Fiction	27	7
1963	Superhero	147	6
1963	Teen	6	0
1963	War	51	1
1963	Western	6	0

Pretty modest changes in 1963. Sci-fi ticked up a bit due to temporary changes including the Strange Sports Stories series in Brave and Bold and Tommy Tomorrow tryouts in Showcase.

1964	Adventure	18	-6
1964	Comedy	18	0
1964	Funny Animal	6	0
1964	Horror	15	-7
1964	Romance	50	6
1964	Science Fiction	20	-7
1964	Superhero	172	25
1964	Teen	4	-2
1964	War	56	5
1964	Western	6	0

Strong gains again for DC's superhero line, which had more than doubled since 1955. Romance continued its steady upward momentum, while War comics reached their highest mark since 1959. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was cancelled (well after the TV show), which left DC without a Teen title for the first time since the 1940s.

1965	Adventure	18	0
1965	Comedy	18	0
1965	Funny Animal	6	0
1965	Horror	12	-3
1965	Romance	50	0
1965	Science Fiction	20	0
1965	Superhero	182	10
1965	Teen	0	-4
1965	War	57	1
1965	Western	6	0

Not much change there other than the continuing domination by the Superheroes. And with Batmania around the corner, that was not going to change.

1966	Adventure	12	-6
1966	Comedy	18	0
1966	Funny Animal	6	0
1966	Horror	11	-1
1966	Romance	50	0
1966	Science Fiction	18	-2
1966	Superhero	195	13
1966	Teen	4	4
1966	War	56	-1
1966	Western	6	0

By now over 50% of DC's publications were Superhero, and I am sure that if we take circulation into account it was well over 70%. Teen comics returned with Scooter.

1967	Adventure	9	-3
1967	Comedy	26	8
1967	Funny Animal	6	0
1967	Horror	6	-5
1967	Romance	50	0
1967	Science Fiction	9	-9
1967	Superhero	197	2
1967	Teen	8	4
1967	War	44	-12
1967	Western	6	0

Financial pressures were again rearing their ugly head, with a lot of titles headed towards the chopping block. Comedy was the (temporary) gainer as DC tried titles like the Inferior Five and the Maniacs (in Showcase). Superhero titles showed only a modest gain.

1968	Adventure	22	13
1968	Comedy	23	-3
1968	Funny Animal	1	-5
1968	Horror	10	4
1968	Romance	51	1
1968	Science Fiction	0	-9
1968	Superhero	200	3
1968	Teen	11	3
1968	War	36	-8
1968	Western	10	4

Sci-Fi dropped off DC's radar in 1968, as Strange Adventures began featuring Deadman. Superhero titles increased for the thirteenth consecutive year, but again only by a smidgeon. Adventure showed temporary gains due to short-lived titles like Anthro, Secret Six, Bomba the Jungle Boy and Captain Action.

1969	Adventure	14	-8
1969	Comedy	19	-4
1969	Funny Animal	0	-1
1969	Horror	25	15
1969	Romance	50	-1
1969	Science Fiction	7	7
1969	Superhero	168	-32
1969	Teen	36	25
1969	War	31	-5
1969	Western	15	5

Financial pressures writ large there; the Superhero line finally collapsed, with DC switching resources to Horror and Teen. The Horror titles would work, while the Teen fad failed.

Joe Simon Dies

2011-12-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a rough month for the Golden Age, with the co-creator (with Jack Kirby) of Captain America, the Newsboy Legion and the Boy Commandos passing.

He was born Hymie Simon in Rochester, N.Y., in 1913, and as a youngster he was drawn to journalism. Instead, he ended up in the scruffy, deadline-driven comic book business that popped up in New York City in the 1930s. His first collaboration with Kirby came in 1940 with a hero called Blue Bolt, but they struck gold with Captain America — who was punching Adolf Hitler on newsstands months before Pearl Harbor. It turned out to be a quick hit for Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel Comics.Simon, who was both a writer and artist, came up with the concept of the red, white and blue character, but it was Kirby — by most appraisals the most important comics artist ever — who created the dynamic artwork in the early issues.

I covered Simon's oddball series for the late Silver Age DC, Brother Power the Geek back in the early days of this blog.

Digging for the Gold Watch

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so last night I was reading Forbidden Worlds #81, which includes a very interesting story:

The story has a very simple premise, most of which you can guess from the summary above. Amos is perpetually late (hello, Barry Allen!), but then he buys a gold pocketwatch to make sure he's on time. And suddenly something happens:

The entire world comes to a stop. And so did I, because I immediately recognized this story. It's The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a famous novel by John MacDonald, the creator of Travis McGee, and a writer who's probably sold more novels than all but 20 people on the planet.

So I thought, well, it might make an interesting post to talk about how Richard Hughes, who wrote almost all of ACG's stories, copied MacDonald's novel, so I looked up TGTGWAE on Wikipedia.The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (1962) is a science fiction novel written by John D. MacDonald, considered "a classic screwball mystery".And I frowned, because I already sensed that Forbidden Worlds #81 was earlier than that, and sure enough, it turned out to be the August, 1959 issue.

My god, had one of the most famous writers ever cribbed a story from a comic book? And not just a story, but one according to WP which had 24 printings and been made into not one, but two TV movies?Well, it goes quite a bit deeper than that. The Wikipedia entry notes:

A similar plot line - a man stopping time - already appeared in 1955 in Roger Lee Vernon's story "The Stop Watch", included in the collection "The Space Frontiers". Vernon treated the theme far more seriously, with his protagonist using the device to commit crimes with impunity and win the Third World War all by himself, and finally suffering a terrible perdition.

So I googled Roger Lee Vernon Stop Watch and guess what came up? A blog by the man himself where he had apparently posted the complete contents of The Space Frontiers. As you can see if you scroll down to the table of contents there is no story called The Stop Watch, but there is one called The Time Tablets, about a pharmaceutical chemist who invents a drug which stops time. It's a very, very cool story, and I highly recommend scrolling down and reading it.

But, at least compared to the Wikipedia entry it is not directly comparable to either All the Time in the World or The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything. Same premise (stoppage of time), but lacking the watch angle. And the whole bit about him stopping WWIII was completely lacking in The Time Tablets.

End of story? Not quite. You see, in my Googling, I learned of another story called All the Time in the World, by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most famous science fiction authors of all time. Among other stories, he wrote the novels that were turned into the movies of 2001 A Space Oddysey and Fantastic Voyage.And that would be an easy place to close, but I Googled Clarke and All the Time in the World and found out that his story had been turned into an episode of a very early sci-fi TV series called Tales of Tomorrow. Not only that but you could watch that very episode online here.

I really, really recommend you watch that episode; it's 1952 TV, it was apparently performed live (with set changes during commercial breaks) and it's terrific. As you can see, Clarke seems to be the father of all the "stopped time" stories. At least from what I can see, the originator of the watch to stop the clock is Hughes in Forbidden Worlds #81.

What I find more interesting for the purposes of this post is that Hughes' protagonist, Amos Dalrymple, unlike the characters in Clarke, Vernon, or MacDonald, decides to pass on the obvious pecuniary advantages of stopping time, because he is honest:

Instead he tries to make it to his date on time, but when he does he sees a problem:

Worse still, he learns that he cannot save her while time is stopped, because everything is frozen in time. He must do the only thing possible:

He shoves her out of the way of the bus. Thus he does not make a lot of money (although he is given a job by a bank president who had previously declined him a job due to him being late for the interview) but he does get what the characters in the two previous stories do not: the Girl.It's interesting to speculate more on the inspirations for MacDonald's best-seller. From what I can see, Hughes added the crucial element of the watch, which gets mentioned at the end of the ACG story:

But it is very obvious from the title that he was inspired by Clarke's short story.As for Vernon, I simply note two strange elements from his story.1. At one point the protagonist's girlfriend says that she makes $20,000 a year more than he does.2. The protagonist mentions that depositing more than $10,000 into a bank account draws the attention of the feds, who suspect drug dealing.Both of those points, despite numerous other markers, make me suspect that the Vernon story was updated for modern audiences from its initial 1950s publication.

Update: J.L. Bell in the comments points to this short story by L. Frank Baum from the early 1900s as an even earlier example of the stopped time plot. Thanks!Update II: Here's an earlier example of a watch used to stop time, from Strange Adventures #50 (November 1954):

Thanks to an anonymous commenter!

Tomahawk #81

2011-12-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

Add Miss Liberty to my list of unexpected DC female heroines of 1959-62. I believe she qualifies as DC's earliest masked character with a few arguable exceptions, and none of those made second appearances, while Miss Liberty returned several times in the next few years.

The opening story has Tomahawk chasing down a renegade and his band of Indian followers who have robbed a small settlement. The quarry splits up into three different parties to make tracking them down harder. The first band is headed for the forest, where they will be impossible to catch, but Tomahawk has an idea:

He frees the logs and they roll down the hill, blocking the pass so he can capture the first third of the group. When they have been captured, they reveal that an old medicine man had predicted the means of trapping them:

Mysterious predictions like this one are a staple of DC plots; the entertainment comes from seeing how they come true. As usual, there are three predictions the seer made, but the first party refuses to reveal the other two.

A little later they encounter the second group. Caught out in the open they are forced to improvise until the enemy runs out of ammunition:

And thus we learn what the second prediction had been. Tomahawk and Dan locate the old medicine man to find out his third forecast:

And sure enough, when they encounter the last group of the renegade's men, the prediction comes true:

Comments: Solid entertainment. GCD doesn't list the writer, but the art is by longtime Tomahawk stalwart, Fred Ray.

The second story is Tomahawk's Frontier Valet. The basic premise of the story is laid out here:

As you can probably tell from that panel, the gag here is the basic "fish out of water" premise that is very common in TV and movies; The Beverly Hillbillies is a good example. It's not hard to guess that Tomahawk and Dan will find having a valet a very mixed blessing, although one assumes that on at least one occasion he will prove useful.

Word comes of Lord Boswell's whereabouts:

Note the stark simplicity and beauty of that panel. Fred Ray's name doesn't come up often on the list of great artists of the Silver Age, but that's mostly because he wasn't drawing superheroes.

As they set out in search of Lord Boswell, Tomahawk and Dan are captured by the hostile tribe. And, as I predicted:

Terrific characterization there. However, he falls from his horse and accidentally destroys a sacred war-club. The hostiles decide that they must take the trio back to their chief to determine their fate. When they meet the chief, they discover Lord Boswell is there as well. He's apparently lost his memory as he does not recognize them. The chief decrees that they are to die at sunrise.

But Tomahawk escapes, kayos Lord Boswell and disguises himself to look like the English gentleman. This enables him to move freely about the camp and prepare some surprises for the hostile tribe:

They escape with Lord Boswell, who has recovered his memory thanks to that sock on the jaw from Tomahawk.

Comments: A little gem of a story, where everything meshes perfectly.

The finale is the cover story. As shown on the cover, Tomahawk and Dan have been captured by a force of Indians and Redcoats, when Miss Liberty makes her first dramatic appearance:

She frees the buckskin-clad heroes and then diverts the attention of the chasers so that Tomahawk and Dan can make their way into the nearby town of Newton. We learn what has attracted the attention of the British:

We also meet a pretty nurse who's about to journey to the next town with some medicines. Afterwards, she lingers outside the apothecary shop:

And indeed, the British have prepared a trap for them. Fortunately, Miss Liberty and some friends of hers have arranged a surprise:

We learn more about her here, including the need for a secret identity:

The British issue a proclamation that any village harboring Tomahawk and Dan will be razed and its inhabitants driven from the territory. In due course they learn that the heroes are in Wilk's Landing and thus:

But it was all a plan to get the munitions out of the town and to Washington's army:

Comments: Wow, once again terrific characterization; the sacrifice of the townspeople is quite moving.

Overall the Silver Age Tomahawk is not that fondly remembered, due to some of the sillier elements of apes, monsters and weird transformations so common to the time infecting the series. But this issue is superb, with three great stories and excellent art throughout by Ray. In fact, I have no hesitation in dubbing this one of the Silver Age's:

RIP, Jerry Robinson

2011-12-08T17:08:00.001-08:00

One of the giants of the Golden Age and the creator of the Joker has passed.

I have a number of posts on Robinson's terrific artwork at Nothing But Batman. Although Dick Sprang was to me the definitive Batman artist, I actually thought Robinson's lithe, gymnast-like body for the Caped Crusader seemed more realistic. A great artist, and by all accounts an even better human being.

Update: More tributes to Jerry Robinson, by Bill Jourdain and Chuck Wells.

The Flash's Final Fling--Twice

2011-12-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a real oddity from DC's Silver Age. In March, 1966, Flash #159 bore this cover:

That's something of an unusual cover for DC; we'd expect to see it more from Marvel (as indeed we did several times in Spiderman). But more unusual still was seeing this cover on the next regular issue of the Flash, #161 (#160 was an 80-Page Giant):

Notice, down at the bottom, that Julius Schwartz was advertising another, completely different story, also based on the cover from #159. As the splash page notes:

A couple of comments before I proceed with the review. First, it's worth noting that neither story was written by the Flash's main writer, John Broome. The first version was scripted by Gardner Fox, while the second was contributed by Bob Kanigher. Second, the stories amount to breaking the fourth wall, as announcing that you're publishing a second story based on the cover is admitting that these are fictional stories.

The Fox story starts with Kid Flash and Barry Allen visiting the offices of Dr McNider (aka Dr Midnight), an Earth-Two physician. The doc is pleased to see the Earth-One heroes, but he wonders why Barry's not in his uniform. It turns out that the Flash is no more, because he feels underappreciated:

Dr McNider puts him under and probes to find out the real answer:

It turns out that a future criminal with the improbable name of Frand Mattar had sent a bomb back in time to Central City in 1966, which would explode if a high-speed wave hit it; Mattar had a trigger that would cause this to happen and was blackmailing the authorities to force them to allow him to loot at will. Of course, there was another thing that could cause the bomb to go off; if the Flash traveled at super-speed. Thus the "chronal officer" had hypnotized Barry to make him believe that nobody in Central City appreciated his efforts, so that he would resign.

Armed with this knowledge, Flash and his junior partner travel to the future, defeat Frand Mattar, and return to 1966 just in time to prevent the bomb explosion from destroying the city. Flash gets banner headlines and the key to the city, showing that he is still Central City's hero.

Comments: Some tricky time paradox problems with this story. Wouldn't the future world know that the Flash had saved the city? And why would Frand Mattar send a bomb into the past in the first place (other than to provide Fox with a rationale for the cover)? Wouldn't a bomb about to affect a city in 3780 be more compelling to the people of that era?

However, the Fox effort is a masterpiece compared to the second story. Kanigher compares Flash's relationship with his uniform to that of a soldier and his gun.

Whaaaaat? And even more oddly, Kanigher has the uniform answer:

The scene shifts to the day of Barry and Iris' wedding. Iris has planned things so that even her perennially late boyfriend will arrive on time; she has told him the nuptials take place an hour before the actual scheduled time. But as Barry is walking to the church he spots a super-speed turtle (no, I am not kidding):

He finds himself in a super-speed dimension, where ironically that turtle is considered quite slow. But when he travels back to our dimension, he discovers:

Iris breaks off with Barry, and in the days that follow, he begins to feel like his costume has ruined his life. So he discards it:

He visits Iris in the secluded cabin where they had planned their honeymoon, but when he arrives she is being menaced by a giant bear. He tries to save her without using his super-speed, but is kayoed by the grizzly. Fortunately, it turns out that the bear is a retired circus performer. However, Iris is not thrilled at Barry's effort, and indeed, compares him unfavorably to the Flash.Barry returns to Central City, where his uniform, discovered by a passing hitchhiker, is on display at the Flash Museum:

Moved, Barry puts on the uniform again, just as Iris enters the room, followed shortly by some crooks. As the Flash, he quickly corrals the villains. But now Iris will know his secret identity, right? Well, no:

Cue happy ending, with Barry back as the Flash and Iris back in love with him.

Comments: Sweet jeebus, this is a wacky story! Kanigher's anthropomorphizing inanimate objects works in the war stories, but it is wildly out of place here. One thing that I do find interesting is that Kanigher gives Barry a better reason for quitting (and one that is more in line with what Lee would do with Spiderman a year later in ASM #50).

You Can't Judge a Book By Looking At the Cover?

2011-12-01T11:57:00.001-08:00

I decided to test that old saw by looking at the covers of several books I haven't read in many years and don't remember the story. Of course, I do have an advantage in that I know Weisinger's tricks.

Looking at the cover: My guess here is that Superman XXX didn't really commit those crimes; they were misinterpretations of actual events that were harmless.

Inside the book: Close. Superman did not commit those crimes. The other man on the cover is a descendant of Luthor, who oddly enough runs a Superman museum in the future. While he's not evil like his ancestor, he's upset at the Lad of Steel for helping out a competitor and thus is showing him an illusion created with that helmet he's wearing.

Looking at the cover: I'd guess it's some sort of trick to fool the aliens.

Inside the book: Nope, it's an effect of Red Kryptonite.

Looking at the cover: Must be Red K again.

Inside the book: Dingdingding, although Weisinger did throw a curve at me. It's an imaginary tale about what might have happened if Superboy had been exposed to Red Kryptonite on the day he announced his presence to the world.

Looking at the cover: It's clearly some sort of fakeout. We know that nobody could invent anything that would harm Superboy other than Green K. I'm going to guess in this instance that it's a plan to fool some crook.

Inside the book: Bzzt! It's the adult Luthor, who has brought back Superman's Fortress of Solitude in time to Superboy's era, complete with weapons from Kandor that can harm Kal-El.

BTW, note the bit about the Agony and the Ecstasy. It's clearly intended as a reference to a 1965 movie of the same title.

Looking at the cover: Mort gives this one away. Since Superboy and Clark are one and the same person, they must have been split somehow, and Red Kryptonite seems the logical culprit.

Inside the book: Dingdingding, but with still another curve. In the story, Superboy is turned into a monkey by Red K, and later grows enormously in size. Beppo, the super-monkey is affected by the same Red K, and turns into a human. While human-sized (he later grows giant, just as Superboy had) the scene on the cover happens.

Overall I was 3 for 5.

Lois Lane, Foreign Correspondent

2011-11-28T22:20:00.001-08:00

As you recall, in my last post, Lois was subjected to an inhumane experiment by Editor Perry White. He got Lois' friends, her sister, and even the warden at the state prison, to go along with a hoax where everybody pretended they'd never heard of a Lois Lane. But it was all for a good reason, we were assured. Perry was testing her to ensure that she had the ingenuity to handle the tricks and intrigues of foreign agents. The ending of the story promised that in the next issue we would see Lois abroad, handling difficult assignments with aplomb.

But in Lois Lane #37-39, no such story appeared. In the letters column of #39 someone remarked on the missing adventure:

And the tale finally arrived in LL #40:

Okay, so what's Lois' dangerous and thrilling assignment, for which she required such careful vetting?

!!!!No kidding, she was assigned to do a feature article on a wax museum? And actually, that's not some cover story; that's really her whole reason for visiting the tiny European country of Brozna.

Granted, the story develops rather oddly from there, with Lois apparently marrying a very eligible local Duke, although she cannot remember the ceremony as she was involved in a monorail crash while setting out on their honeymoon which gave her a mild case of amnesia. She decides that she doesn't really want to be married to the Duke, but when he threatens to kill himself:

While back in Metropolis, Lois receives wedding gifts from all her old friends, but:

That's even worse than re-gifting! But the roaring fire causes something inside her husband's luggage to melt; it's a bunch of masks that he wears to deceive people. It turns out he was Brozna's Nazi collaborator during World War II, that he used his supposed status as Lois' husband to escape to America, and that they never actually were married. Instead he had drugged her and faked the monorail accident, convincing her that she simply forgot their wedding due to her injuries.

So even though Lois was supposedly tested so that she would be able to withstand the best tricks enemy agents could throw at her, she still was duped by the Duke! Fortunately Superman is around to save her, and she gets a big scoop.

Comments: How bad must this story have been the first time around?

Lois Lane #36

2011-11-26T20:57:00.001-08:00

The opening story is The Day Lois Lane Vanished. It's a very standard DC plot, where the protagonist suddenly finds that nobody remembers him or her:

Offhand I can think of at least two stories where Batman faced the same puzzle; Am I Really Batman from Batman #112 and The Batman Nobody Remembered, from World's Finest #136. There are basically two answers to the puzzle; either it's a hoax for some reason, or the protagonist has somehow ended up in another dimension. In the first Batman story it was a plot to keep Batman awake for 24 hours because a villain had poisoned him with a drug that would kill him if he fell asleep anytime in the next day, and in the second Batman story it was another dimension.In the Lois Lane story:

The story is also remarkable for the efforts Lois goes through to prove to herself that she really existed; after her co-workers and sister deny her reality, she even visits Lex Luthor in prison, but he also claims to have no memory of her. As you can probably guess from that above panel, the story reaches a climax in tragedy, as Lois apparently throws herself off a cliff, convinced she is insane.Well, no. See, she realized that Lex Luthor was in solitary confinement, and therefore the warden would never have allowed her to see him. So she pulls a gag on everybody by making them think she's died. That Lois, such a kidder! And in the end:

But that is a tale for another time. For the second story, we get:

No particular surprise; everybody gets that wrong. Dr Jekyll was the good guy; it was Mr Hyde who was the villain in the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale. Lois is addressing the first meeting of the Lois Lane fan club, lecturing them on the various effects that Red Kryptonite has had on Superman, when suddenly:

The LL fan club holds their meetings in a room next to a cyclotron? Anyway the particular specimen of Red K that Lois was showing off to her admirers was one that had turned Superman into a Jekyll-Hyde creature, and Jimmy wonders if it will have that effect on Lois due to the neutron beam. Good guess:

Later, she cuts off Lucy's hair:

And when she turns on the TV to see Lana Lang talking about her Superboy memorabilia, she becomes fanatically jealous:

But Lana refuses to press charges and Perry offers to take responsibility for Lois. When she changes again, to save himself from her he offers her a chunk of Green K. She goes to an auditorium to kill Superman (as shown on the splash), but once there:

See, it wasn't really Green K, but a chunk of "Good Samaritan" Red K, which turned Lois back into her normal self. And that wasn't really Superman, but a puppet manipulated by a couple of Lois' talented fan club members.The finale is the cover story, and it's an imaginary tale. Superman comes up with a way to give Lois permanent superpowers and finally marries her. They have twins (many of the imaginary tales feature this outcome, for some reason). Lana is of course devastated, but she wears the mask:

She volunteers to test an experimental time machine, which sends her into the future. She meets up with Superman in the future, who falls immediately in love with her, although she resists him at first, thinking he's still the man she knew. He explains:

Hmmm, given that we saw Lois and Superman had a son, wouldn't their grandson be Superman III? Assuming of course that there weren't three generations of only girls in the family.
They fall in love and get married... and that's the end of the story. Rather dull and unsurprising given the cover.

Overall the issue was entertaining, particularly the opening story. I will have to check up on the following issue to find out about Lois' adventures as a foreign correspondent.

My Greatest Adventure #73

2011-11-21T21:52:00.001-08:00

My Greatest Adventure was a DC series that mostly featured first-person tales of derring-do. The opening tale is the cover feature, and it's a definite corker. Mitchell, the "sahib" on the cover, has tried and failed three times to climb Nanda Devi, the tallest mountain entirely in India, and the 23rd tallest in the world.When he turns back from the third attempt, he meets an aged monk:

As a young man, the monk had been entrusted with a prayer wheel that he was supposed to deliver to the lamasery. But on spotting the summit so close, he decided to try to become the first to reach it. Leaving the wheel behind, he nearly reached the peak, but was driven back by fierce weather.Lamed by frostbite, he was unable to reclimb the mountain to retrieve the prayer wheel, but he had discovered a way around the tricky ledge that had foiled Mitchell. He tells the latter the route, on the condition that the climber bring back the wheel on his descent.

They reach the summit, but Mitchell reneges on his promise and during the descent the mountain strikes back (as shown on the cover). Finally he decides to return for the prayer wheel:

Comments: A terrific story by Bob Haney and superb art by Lee Elias. Mitchell may be based loosely on Hugh Ruttledge, who indeed failed in his three attempts to summit Nanda Devi. Incidentally, the letters page includes some comments about Haney's qualifications to write this story:

The second story is about a man surveying a cavern. He discovers a pool which has a strange effect on him:

He heads back to the nearest town, where he finds himself compelled to steal a carboy of heavy water. Once again the pool works its strange magic, and he returns to town to steal some radium. This time he discovers that an alien has controlled him:

He steals the gyroscope and the alien is able to leave Earth behind.Comments: The story is nothing special, but the art is by Gene Colan.The finale is drawn by Mort Meskin. We Fought the Lost Kamikaze Battalion is a pretty standard story about some folks visiting a Pacific island and encountering some Japanese soldiers who do not accept that the war is over; I have discussed these stories before. However, this one does have a definite twist ending:

And thus:

Comments: Love that ending; it comes completely out of the blue.

One oddity to note: This title was at the time (late 1962) edited by Murray Boltinoff. I am not sure if this was the first book he officially edited but I do know that the vast majority of DC non-romance titles at the time were edited by Jack Schiff, Robert Kanigher, Mort Weissinger and Julius Schwartz.

The Iron Giant

2011-11-17T21:05:00.001-08:00

Mark Engblom recommended this movie a couple years back but I never got around to watching it. Then the other day I found out a friend of mine had the DVD and I borrowed it.

If you've never seen the movie, I highly recommend it. A young boy named Hogarth befriends an alien robot who has crash landed on Earth. The robot has no memory, and so the boy teaches him English and at one point gives him a comic book to read:

This becomes a key plot point in the movie, as the giant begins to model himself after Superman. At any rate, the cover looks real enough that I decided to poke around. Since the story is set in 1957, I figured it had to be from sometime around then. Sure enough, it's Action #188, from January 1954:

Aside from a few liberties taken with the coloring, it's a reasonably accurate reproduction, even including the mention of Tommy Tomorrow at the top.

Incidentally, this is the second movie I've seen recently that included comics as a major theme; Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks prominently featured a number of issues of the Flash.

Mad Man

2011-11-14T21:03:00.001-08:00

Between the ages of about 9 and 13, virtually every kid in the country went MAD, and I was certainly no exception. Unlike the comics, I didn't hang onto my collection, but fortunately the folks at EC put out a massive CD set about 10 years ago, with something like 500 issues of the seminal American humor magazine. Here are some of the bits I remember reading back then.

For some reason, the song parodies always worked with me:

I remembered that one virtually word for word except that in the first stanza I recalled it being "then you know you've got..."

The Spy Vs. Spy series was always hilarious, and I suppose most of us remember that the morse code under the splash reads "By Prohias". But how many remember that there was a short-lived third spy, the grey woman?

I suspect she was eliminated because she always won, upsetting the general balance between the black and white spies. Of course, after awhile, even the dullest reader must have figured out that whoever won the splash battle clearly lost the panel bout, and the guy who seems to be winning in the first three panels always dies in the last one.BTW, there was a pretty entertaining computer game for the Commodore 64 back in the 1980s featuring Spy Vs. Spy.

Everybody remembers the terrific movie and TV parodies, often illustrated by the incomparable Mort Drucker:

There were lots of funny bits involving photographs. For some unknown reason, this one just popped out at me:

For the life of me, I can't imagine why I remember that.

The covers were mostly forgettable; even though I bought lots of issues in the 1964-1967 timeframe, this is the only one I specifically remember:

And it's not because I got the joke; it's because I saw it at a friend's house and somebody had poked holes in poor Alfred's eyes.

Of course, MAD did lots of stuff we didn't understand; a lot of the political humor went right over my head. But that was okay; we were used to not getting the joke all the time, and MAD prepared us for National Lampoon in the 1970s, where, for the most part, we did.

MAD had so much more; those terrific little gags in the margins that I'd need a magnifying glass to see nowadays. Or Dave Berg's endless "The Lighter Side of..." series. Or MAD's maddest artist, Don Martin. Or those amusing fold-ins on the inside back cover.

I'm sure that most of you know that MAD actually started as a regular-sized comic book. One thing that I was not aware of until recently was just how many imitators there were. Everybody remembers Cracked, but there were easily a dozen others.

Trivia Quiz #45: Answers

2011-11-10T17:02:00.001-08:00

1. In what year did Ray Palmer graduate from college?In the Atom #10, we learned that Ray was a 1954 grad of Ivy University. That would have made him about 32 in 1964, or a geezer of 79 today.

2. What do Lois Lane's lips taste like?Clark Kent discovered at a Christmas party in Action #306 that her lips tasted like peaches:

3. What holiday do people on Thanagar celebrate on the same day Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?Folks on Thanagar celebrate Impossible Day, on which they are supposed to do three impossible things. BTW, for a really cool treat, check out Pappy's Golden Age Blogazine post on this story; he has the original Gardner Fox manuscript for the tale, complete with Julius Schwartz's editorial changes, plus scans of the actual story so you can see how it went from script to finished product.

4. What was Jay Garrick's address?When Barry Allen discovered that he'd vibrated onto an Earth-like planet where Central City was known as Keystone City, he looked up Jay Garrick in the phone book:

And discovered that he lived at 5252 78th Street.

5. What was Perry White's favorite TV program?Perry White loved to relax at home and check out Allan Funt and Candid Camera:

These were intended to be really tough, but Jim got four out of the five correct. I stumped a couple folks who usually do quite well. Nobody got the question about Lois' flavor of lipstick.

Trivia Quiz #45: DC Grab-Bag Toughies

2011-11-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

1. In what year did Ray Palmer graduate from college?

2. What do Lois Lane's lips taste like?

3. What holiday do people on Thanagar celebrate on the same day Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?

4. What was Jay Garrick's address?

5. What was Perry White's favorite TV program?

Fatal Attraction

2011-11-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

It's kind of a minor thing, but did you ever notice that a lot of Stan Lee's male characters tended to fall for bad women? Let's see, we can start off with Hawkeye:

He starts out wanting to be a hero, and before you know it he's betraying his country:

Foggy Nelson met an old high school crush:

But it turns out she was just playing him for a sucker:

Balder the Brave was under no delusions about Karnilla, Queen of the Norns:

And yet he still falls prey to her charms:

Jasper Sitwell was apparently fooled by Whitney Frost, secretly the head of the Maggia:

Or was he?

But when it came down to the nitty gritty:

Observations:

1. Note that it is never the leading male character who falls for the bad girl. Stan senses that this is bad characterization for his heroes, even though it never really hurt Batman in the case of Catwoman, for example.

2. It tends to be the main supporting actor. Hawkeye doesn't fit that pattern, but Foggy and Balder certainly qualify and by that point Happy Hogan had largely disappeared from Iron Man, so Jasper Sitwell was the number two.

3. Most of the evil women "reformed", although you can make an argument that some of them never really were quite as bad as they appeared. It turned out that the Black Widow's parents were being held hostage in the Soviet Union and eventually she rebelled against her communist masters and became a heroine. Debbie Harris did reform and began dating Foggy again, eventually becoming his wife. I am unsure about Karnilla; at one point she did help Asgard due to her fondness for Balder, and Balder eventually admitted his love for her. Whitney Frost's tale is more complex; in that original Iron Man saga we learned that she was genuinely conflicted in her role as the head of the Maggia, having taken it over from her father, Count Nefaria.

4. Stan used these relationships to open up new plotlines or to add new dimension to his characters. Hawkeye was allowed to become a temporary villain while leaving open the possibility that he would reform and become a hero, as in fact he did with the Avengers. Debbie was paired off with Foggy to clear the decks (twice) for Matt and Karen Page to become an item, although in neither case did it last for the latter couple. Balder and Sitwell had both been pretty much portrayed as Boy Scouts (quite literally in Jasper's case); this was a way of humanizing them.

5. Aside from Batman, I can't think of a comparable situation in the Silver Age DC, and even his relationship with Catwoman was more of a Golden Age and late Bronze Age affair.

6. Marvel only reversed the roles once; you can make an argument for Sue Storm and the Sub-Mariner setting the template for what came later. DC did have Wonder Woman and Supergirl fall for a few rats at the end of the Silver Age, although in both cases that was more due to short-term plot demands than long-term characterization.

Update: Johnny Bacardi points out that Archie Goodwin actually did the scripting for the Iron Man series by the time of the Sitwell/Frost affair.

Update II: Debbie Harris was apparently introduced during the one issue that Wally Wood scripted of Daredevil, per Fraser Sherman.

Silly Panel Saturday

2011-11-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

If Perry White ever tried this stunt today, he'd be facing a sexual harassment lawsuit:

Tracers: The Ape Cover Limit

2011-11-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have read in several different places that Julius Schwartz had a file in his desk which proved that DC comics featuring apes on the cover sold better in general than comics without simians. I believe that Schwartz even mentioned this in his autobiography, Man of Two Worlds. It has also been claimed that to avoid overexposure, the number of ape covers was strictly limited by DC management to one per month.

This latter claim has never made a lot of sense to me. If your objective as an editor or a publisher is to sell as many comic books as you can (and I suspect that is, or ought to be the goal), then why would you refrain from doing something that has been proven to work in the past? And DC generally published 30 comics a month, would two gorilla covers really saturate the market?

So I decided to take a look at the matter. I started with 1960 and used the DC Indexes Time Machine to look at all the covers for a given month quickly. Note that the default option is for comics on sale in a given month, not cover dates. It seemed reasonable to use that option, since the concern was not to have to many ape covers on the newsstands at once.

First observation: If DC was worried about saturating the market with similar covers, it sure doesn't show. In 1960, as many others have noted, DC had an almost endless variety of covers featuring aliens, monsters and dinosaurs. It was not until looking at comics on sale in April that I located an ape cover:

Okay, so it's a gorilla; I suspect that Schwartz meant ape as a very generic term. The next month featured one of DC's most famous apes:

After an absence of apes in June, July included an alien ape:

DC then resisted the siren call of the apes until December:

Strange Adventures thus becomes the first series to hit two apes in one year.

And then came 1961. I am astounded to report that I can find no comics that went on sale from DC in that year which included apes, gorillas, or monkeys on the cover. There appears to be only one sensible conclusion; at this point, Schwartz had not yet developed his evidence about simians on the cover boosting the sales.

In January 1962, Grodd made his first cover appearance:

This is further evidence that Schwartz had not yet discovered the link between sales and gorillas, as Grodd had appeared four times already inside the comics.

The following month saw the debut of Bizarro Titano:

After three months's hiatus, a simian was prominently featured on the cover of Batman Annual #3:

And once again, there was a gap all the way to March 1963. You might think it would be hard for Tomahawk, a revolutionary-era hero to encounter an ape. You would be wrong:

In June of that year, we got one of the classic ape covers:

Let me tell you, if an gorilla is sliding into third base, it's a pretty brave fielder standing there waiting for the throw.

Grodd popped up on the first Flash Annual in August:

And the Great White Ape appeared in October's Star Spangled War #111 that same month, the first time we've seen two in the same calendar period.

But that's it for 1963. Monsieur Mallah appeared on the cover of Doom Patrol #86 in January 1964:

Tomahawk's giant ape returned in May:

But then there was another gap until November when Jerry Lewis #86 featured a King-Kong type cover. In December there were two ape covers: Hawkman #6 and Fox and Crow #90.

By this point I was getting pretty skeptical. Out of 60 months and about 1800 comics, only 16 covers had featured an ape or a gorilla. And 1965 was not much different, with only two ape covers.

Ah, but then came 1966, and suddenly the African invasion. In January, came Strange Adventures #186:

In February there were two covers:

And Monsieur Mallah appeared on the cover of Brave & Bold #65.

After a couple months gap, an ape popped up on Sea Devils #30 in May, and Bob Hope #100 in June. Nothing for July, but August saw Hawkman #16, September had King Colosso yet again in Tomahawk (this time shooting a bow and arrow no less), October had Jimmy Olsen marrying a female gorilla, and November's Showcase #66 had Bwana Beast duking it out with an ape. All told, there were nine different covers with the simian theme in 1966.

And if you think about it, it makes sense that the editors at DC were pulling out all the stops that year. Although the company as a whole did well with Batmania, the gains were very uneven. Batman sales skyrocketed, but the Superman-related titles all dipped as did many other books.

In 1967, there were seven more ape-featured covers, with only two coming in one month: September had Jerry Lewis 103 and Plastic Man #7.

Overall impressions:

1. The number of ape covers do not seem excessive. However, there certainly was a jump in 1966-67; those two years saw as many of those covers as had been seen in the six years previous.

2. There is little evidence for a hard and fast rule against two ape covers in one month. There were three months where apes did appear on two covers. I suspect that the real edict was not to overdo it.

In 1968, the number of simian covers did drop, at least until this series launched:

The Luckiest Character Ever?

2011-11-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

My vote goes to the Black Canary. She got a very late start, debuting as a guest star in the Johnny Thunder feature in Flash #86. Johnny Thunder had a long history in the DC universe at that point, having appeared in such historic comics as NY Worlds Fair Comics #2, Flash Comics #1, and All-Star #3, in which he became a charter member of the Justice Society of America. And yet just six issues after her debut as a guest star, she not only bumped Johnny Thunder from Flash Comics, but she was granted a cover appearance:

With the exception of some small insets, it was the only time a feature other than Flash or Hawkman was highlighted on the cover of that magazine.

But even before her own series debuted, she appeared with the Justice Society of America in All-Star #38, and with the next issue she began appearing on the cover:

By #40, she had replaced Johnny Thunder in the JSA; he never again appeared in the Golden Age. She appeared on every cover until #45.

At that point, she found herself without a feature as Flash Comics had been canceled by DC. By rights she should have disappeared like Starman and Dr Fate and many others had. Except... she got lucky. You see, she was not the only JSA member without a feature; longtime members the Flash and the Hawkman had their series canceled at that time as well, and Green Lantern was on his last legs. All-American had been converted to a western comic title the year before, and GL's own book mostly featured Streak the Wonder Dog on the cover for the last few issues. So she continued appearing in every issue of All-Star and occasionally popped up on the cover as well, until the JSA made its last appearance in #57.

Fast forward 12 years. In Flash #137, the JSA made its first appearance since that last issue of All-Star. Although the bulk of the story concerned Jay Garrick and Barry Allen teaming up against Vandal Savage, at the very end the two Flashes freed the old JSA members who'd been captured by that villain:

Ironically, as you can see, the Black Canary did not appear there. Instead Johnny Thunder returns. Note as well that Wonder Woman is in that scene; that's the Earth-2 (JSA) Wondy. She has a suggestion:

And sure enough, only a month or two later, JLA #21 appeared on the newsstands, inaugurating the annual "Crisis" teamups between the JLA and the JSA. But guess who did not make an appearance?

The GA Wonder Woman vanished and in her place was:

The Black Canary. There would appear to be two possible, non-exclusive reasons for her appearance rather than the GA Diana Prince:

1. DC was still unwilling to acknowledge the notion of the GA and SA Wonder Woman being separate people, as it raised uncomfortable questions about whether the GA Superman and Batman were not the same characters we were reading in the 1960s. I note that the GA Superman and Batman did not appear for several years in these teamups (although oddly enough the GA Robin was prominently featured in the 1967 crossover).

2. There was little to differentiate the GA Wonder Woman and the Silver Age version (at the time). The GA and SA Green Lanterns had markedly different costumes, as did the two Flashes. The SA Hawkman hadn't entered the JLA as yet, so his similarity with the GA version didn't matter.

At any rate, Black Canary got lucky and was tapped for that very important team-up. And the next one:

She missed the next one, but there was a big consolation prize, as she was featured in Brave and Bold #61 in a Starman teamup:

In which, by the way, we learned that she had married her longtime sweetheart, detective Larry Lance, who had appeared with her back in the Golden Age Flash stories.

The Starman/Black Canary pairing got a second outing the following issue (with a guest appearance by Wildcat). Those two issues are superbly entertaining, with terrific art by Murphy Anderson, but for whatever reason they did not result in a solo book for either character, and so it might appear that her luck had run out.Still, she got back into the JSA/JLA teamups with JLA #46-47, but then she got a bad break; in JLA #55 not only did the Earth-2 Robin appear, but so did that world's Wonder Woman. A big reason why the Black Canary had been featured in all those team-ups save one so far was that she was the only other female member of the JSA.

And then she got lucky again, and this time it was really a big break. In Wonder Woman #178 Diana Prince lost her super-powers and became an Emma Peel clone. A few months later, in JLA #69 WW left the Justice League to pursue her non-super career.This left the JLA as an all-male bastion, and in 1969, that was becoming an increasingly untenable situation. So a few issues later, when it comes time for the annual JLA/JSA teamup, a couple of things happen:

1. Larry Lance dies, heroically.

2. Black Canary decides to switch to our world:

We'd love to see you bare, but we can understand why you can't bear to go on living on Earth-2.And so she becomes a JLA member effective with the next issue, JLA #75. But there is one little problem. Black Canary never had any super-powers on Earth-2; like Batman she was just a good fighter. So she got lucky again; it turns out that the trip over to Earth-1 gave her some sort of sonic scream that was quite effective (if hard to control):

And you can even argue that's not the end of her lucky streak. In the Crisis on Infinite Earths series, one of the very notable casualties was the Barry Allen Flash, who had been responsible for opening up the whole Earth-1, Earth 2, Earth X+1 can of worms. And yet the Black Canary survived, and even thrived beyond that. Of course, she did have to put up with the insufferable Green Arrow for awhile as a boyfriend....

But all that is beyond the scope of this blog. Black Canary, you must be Irish!

Silver Age Trivia Video

2011-10-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

Mark Waid versus some fans from a 2005 convention:

What strikes me is how many of these have been answered here.

Bob Hope's landlady?

Villain who escaped from Doiby Dickle's taxi?

Lois Lane's parents?

If in Battle I Fail? (Quizmaster misstates the title as If in Battle I Fall).

Little old gooey monster me wants Wonder Girl mine to be? Can't find it now, but I know I highlighted this cover a long time ago.

There are six parts of the video quiz in total, you can see the rest of the show by clicking here.

Incidentally, at least one of the answers in one of the parts was completely wrong; when asked who the Green Lanterns were freeing in JLA #21, the quizmaster (Craig Shutt, thanks to commenter Jonathan L. Miller) said no, it was not the two Flashes, it was the two Atoms:

And the question about the villain the JSA helped the two Flashes to defeat which lead to the reforming of the Society is mistaken; in fact the two Flashes only freed the JSA members at the very end, when Vandal Savage had already been effectively beaten.

Still and all, a terrific bit of entertainment, and as I have made errors in my own quizzes, I'm in no position to criticize.

The Curious Case of the Time Trapper

2011-10-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers of the Legion of Superheroes must have been confused at this sequence, which appeared in Adventure #317:

Why confused? Well, it turns out that this was the first mention of the Time Trapper in a Legion story. At the very end of that story (which mostly did not concern TT) came a semi-explanation:

In the next issue, we got our first glimpse of the villain:

Note in particular his physical appearance there. Over the next year or so, we'd see more futile efforts by the Legion to break through:

The Time Trapper turned out to be working behind the scenes in that story, trying to find out the secret of the Legion's super weapon, the concentrator:

But it turns out that he does not have the real secret of the concentrator and flees into the future again. Amazingly, the Time Trapper story would not be resolved until Adventure #338, almost two years after he was first mentioned:

In that story, the Time Trapper has recruited an evil female, Glorith of Baalour, to help him doom the Legion. We get a strong indication of the plot here:

However, when she tries the trick on several members of the Legion, they do not regress in age past babyhood:

Frustrated in his plot to turn the Legion into blobs of protoplasm, he joins Glorith, after first letting Superboy and Brainiac 5 through the Iron Curtain of Time. He leaves them trapped in the future and sets about training the baby Legionnaires to rob for him:

Then he brings them to a planet where elements in the atmosphere will resume their devolution. But this causes problems, too:

But one of the babies has spotted the Time Trapper's ring, which is responsible for keeping Superboy and Brainiac 5 in the future. He switches it off, allowing them to join the group. The Trapper makes a proposal:

Brainiac 5 agrees, but there is a trick:

End of story? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it quite literally is the end of the Time Trapper in the Silver Age; he did not appear again outside of a hallucination sequence in Adventure 363.Which, if you think about it, is very odd. Here's this villain whose confrontation with the Legion had been built up over the course of two years, and yet they dispose of him in a single 16-page story? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I began digging for clues and speculating a bit.The first clue is that initial mention of the Time Trapper in Adventure #317. It appears obvious that there was supposed to be a Time Trapper story which appeared before that, but which was bumped for some reason. And if we look at the cover to Adventure #317, we get a pretty good second clue:

Speculation: Perhaps the Time Trapper story which appeared in Adventure #338 was intended to appear just before #317, but editor Mort Weisinger belatedly realized that this would give him two consecutive stories featuring Legionnaires turning into babies? This fits, especially when you consider that Adventure #338 was written by Jerry Siegel, while #317 was written by Edmund Hamilton. Weisinger could have instructed Hamilton (or artist John Forte) to include a couple panels mentioning the Time Trapper.

There are certainly still some problems with this speculation. For example, the story does not end with the Time Trapper in the future, creating the Iron Curtain of Time. But this objection is easily overcome; Weisinger simply had the ending of the story rewritten because now it took place after the events in #317, instead of before. Note as well that the story in Adventure #338 did not explain what secret the Time Trapper was supposedly concealing from the Legion in the future.

So my best guess is that the Time Trapper story that was supposed to be published before Adventure #317 was in fact the story that ended up being published in Adventure #338, with some changes.Incidentally, the Time Trapper himself may have been based on the Time Master, a similar character that appeared in Wonder Woman #101:

Around the Horn

2011-10-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

Check out Blogged and Boarded, a blog that is going through the complete Marvel 1960s catalog in order of publication. Entertaining and informative.

Steve Does Comics has done a couple of recent polls on the greatest enemies of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. The first place finishers are not surprising, but there is a good argument to be made for one of the runners-up in Spidey; "himself".

Jacque Nodell covers some fashion mistakes in romance comics so bad, it looks like they're Halloween costumes.

Mark Ginocchio reminisces on the desire, nay the lust, he felt for ASM #32. As I mentioned in the commentsover there, a friend of mine traded me all his Spiderman back issues except for ASM #33, and so, irrationally, I decided that wasn't such a special issue. I subsequently recovered my senses.

Was Batman in his late 40s in the 1960s? Over at Nothing but Batman I cover Bob Haney's (and Neal Adams') Brave and Bold #84, which features Bruce Wayne parachuting into occupied France just before D-Day.

What's that the Challengers are Drinking?

2011-10-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

From Challengers of the Unknown #58 (Oct-Nov 1967). I'm surprised that the Comics Code Authority let that one slip through.

Early Easter Egg

2011-10-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

Just noticed this one in Sgt Fury #32 (July 1966):

Doc Daneeka was a character in Joseph Heller's famous novel, Catch-22. In a memorable bit in that book, Doc Daneeka "dies" when the plane he is supposedly in crashes into a mountain. Actually, Doc had simply signed his name in the log book for that flight to satisfy some regulation, but not gotten on the plane. Regardless, the military (and many of the characters in the book) treat him as if he no longer existed.

Sgt Fury #31

2011-10-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

Of all the series that Marvel published during the 1960s, Sgt Fury is probably the one that I have read the least. Well, except maybe for Patsy and Hedy. So when I found a small batch of issues on Ebay in reader grade, I snapped them up. This story starts out with the Howlers prepping for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Izzy earns a demerit for being too casual about his task:

The main plotline picks up when Captain Sawyer (aka Happy Sam) appears, just in time to head off to London for an important meeting. While there, the brass tells him the key date:

While there, Sawyer notes an aide who appears to be just a bit too interested:

There is something in the nature of fiction that tells us that these types of concerns are never "just your imagination". Although the aide does not hear the target dates for the invasion, he does find out that Sawyer has been informed. He quickly departs and radios the information to der Fatherland:

Now, in reality, the date of the invasion was not as important as the location. The Germans knew as well as the Allied generals that D-Day had several practical requirements: calm seas, high tides, and a full moon for illumination. The latter two virtually guaranteed the invasion would come on June 5 or June 6, or the invasion would have had to have been put off for a full month. As it happened, the weather was bad on the night of June 4, forcing the postponement of the mission to June 6, when the Allied meteorologist (correctly) projected better weather.On the other hand, the locations of the assaults were a closely-guarded secret and would have been worth quite a bit to the Germans. One of the logical spots was the Pas de Calais, the closest spot between England and France. As it happened, the Allies chose the Normandy beaches instead, but it was vital to keep this confidential so the Germans would be forced to defend both areas.The Germans kidnap Happy Sam (presumably named, like Happy Hogan, for his morose demeanor), but not without quite a fight:

The Germans attempt to torture the information out of Sawyer, but he refuses to divulge anything more than name, rank and serial number. So they try to trick the Allies into believing he has spilled the beans:

As you can see, the Howlers have picked up a British commando (apparently nicknamed Pinky, ouch), who talks straight out of central casting, with a lot of "cheerio" and "blighter" and "pip-pip, old bean" along with the obligatory brolly. No surprise, the Germans also toss around terms like "verdammt," "dummkopf" and "schweinhund". To be fair, Hollywood wasn't much more subtle in their stereotypes in WWII movies in the 1960s either.Anyway, the Howlers take the message to the brass, who apparently believe as Fury does, that Happy Sam would never tell. The general gives the commandos a chance to rescue their C.O., but warns them that the bombers will be shortly behind, as the information Sawyer has is too crucial to risk. Meanwhile:

But Fury and his men land virtually on top of Gestapo HQ and shortly:

The rest of the story virtually writes itself; they free Captain Sawyer, get away in a tank just before the bombers obliterate the Gestapo building, and are shortly headed for the English Channel.I enjoyed the plot, and I especially like the characterization for Happy Sam, who refuses to give up the date of the invasion. The tale was an early Roy Thomas outing, illustrated by Dick Ayers and J.Tartaglione.

Why I Love American Comics Group

2011-10-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently while I was reading My Romantic Adventures #115 (Nov-Dec 1960). I've talked a lot about ACG in the past. They were a relatively minor but regular publisher of comics in the Silver and Golden Ages; all told they put out about 1150 comics over the course of about 22 years, or roughly 50 comics a year, four comics a month. Most of their comics were written by their editor, Richard Hughes, under a variety of pseudonyms.Why do I love ACG? It's so simple that I can't believe I never put my finger on it before now. It's because Hughes was a master at creating interesting characters. And when you consider that most of ACG's stories were one-shots, that becomes even more remarkable.Here's the splash page that brought it all home to me:

Now that is a unique character: a female weightlifter who dreams of settling down in smalltown America. That makes for an interesting premise, but Hughes doesn't stop there. He creates a story that fits that character. Our Miss Hercules, Marcia Simms, gets enough money from the sideshow act to buy herself a farm in Carvertown. And it's not long before she attracts the attention of a handsome neighbor:

But as you can probably guess, he is not the right man for her particular character. She's not weak and helpless. Soon after, she introduces herself to another neighbor:

She finds out that Blake had gone to prison for a hit-and-run accident that he claims he didn't commit; in fact, he blames her beau, Otis, for framing him. And to get even, he steals a kiss:

She tells Otis what happens, and while he seems to shrug it off, later that night she hears the sound of raised voices at Blake's farm. Otis and a couple of his buddies intend to beat up Blake. And at last we see why Hughes made her a weightlifter:

Working together, they prove that Otis had indeed framed Blake for the hit-and-run accident, and fall in love.

In that story, Hughes has his protagonist use her singular characterization at the end. But in other stories, it is not uncommon to have the character have to overcome a major trait. Another romance story from ACG concerned a gal who's something of a klutz:

In that story, a key moment arrives when the man she loves is trapped on a girder and she must overcome her awkwardness:That, my friends, is superb characterization.

Hughes particularly liked to present us with downtrodden characters who suddenly succeed against all odds. Americans love the story of an underdog who makes it big. The paragon of this character is obviously Herbie, the "big nothing" to his father who turned out to be one of the most powerful men on Earth. But there are many other examples in the ACG canon. For example:

The shy, unassuming guy invents a potion that turns him into a strongman:

He becomes famous, and suddenly attractive to women:

But eventually Sally realizes that she liked the old Melvin better, and Melvin remembers that he did it all to impress her:

Want to read about interesting characters? Check out the ACG line.

The Secret Origin of the Atom (Ray Palmer)

2011-10-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

This came up in a chatroom yesterday, and since I haven't talked about it before, I thought it was the perfect topic for a post. Of all the DC Silver Age reboots, only the Atom was significantly different than his Golden Age counterpart. Barry Allen and Jay Garrick had essentially the same power of blinding speed. Hal Jordan and Alan Scott were interchangeable; they had green rings of incredible power but smite either of them with a club of yellow wood and they'd be helpless. There was no real difference between the two Hawkmen or the dueling Aquamen.

But Ray Palmer's Atom was nothing like the Al Pratt version. The Golden Age Atom had no real super-powers; he was just a very strong short guy who never got shorter or bigger. The Silver Age version, of course, had the ability to shrink himself down to a very tiny size and then become much larger again; he could also control his weight so that one moment he was as light as a feather, and the next had the full force of 180 pounds behind him.So it is worth wondering why Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox decided to give Ray Palmer significantly different abilities from Al Pratt.

For starters, I suspect that Palmer was intended to be a much more important character than his Golden Age counterpart. The GA Atom was never a cover feature; while he did appear on the covers of All-Star with his fellow Justice Society members, he never headlined All-American Comics, where his solo adventures appeared. The Silver Age Atom would have to hold down his own title.

But I suspect that other tiny heroes in the movies and on TV also influenced the decision. In 1957 (about four years before Ray Palmer's first appearance in Showcase #34), Richard Matheson's story, the Incredible Shrinking Man was brought to the silver screen. It's a terrific and suspenseful story of a man who suddenly finds himself becoming shorter and shorter with time. In the end, he discovers how threatening life is for a miniature man, as he's attacked in succession by the family cat and a spider in the basement. Here are some key moments in the film:

But there was also a 1959 TV series, obviously inspired by the Incredible Shrinking Man, that appears a more direct inspiration for the Ray Palmer Atom. World of Giants is the story of a six-inch high FBI agent:
Although the Atom could change his size to virtually anything under his normal height, the most common size that Ray Palmer assumed was six inches high, exactly the same height as Mel Hunter. For example:

And:

So it seems pretty apparent that the Silver Age Atom was inspired by this long-forgotten TV series. A hat tip to my comicchat buddy Jon for mentioning the TV show, which I confess I'd never seen before last night.

Trivia Quiz #44: Answers

2011-10-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

There were clues in each quote as to the speaker.

1. "I've found it! The legendary city of Caramanga!"

Adam Strange was an archaeologist.

2. "Well, here goes experiment #145!"

Ray Palmer, aka the Atom, was having problems with his experiments in shrinking things; every time he did it the object would explode.

3. "Lead never hurt a wooden leg!"

Captain Storm had a wooden leg.

4. "It is the first time I have found it necessary to give the signal!"

Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic, used a signal to summon the rest of the Fantastic Four:

5. "Huh? What? Go 'way! I wanna sleep! Lemme be!"

The Sub-Mariner (Silver Age version) was a bum living in a shelter when the Human Torch discovered him.

Scipio got 1 and 3 correct. Jim got 1, 2 and 3. Joplin John correctly identified the source of the quote for #4. Lou Mougin ran the table, getting all five speakers. Boosterrific got #5. Ed picked up #3. Mr Miller got 1, 3, 4 and 5, while Michael Rebain correctly answered #1 and #3.

Boosterrific makes a good point about the continuity between the Golden Age Sub-Mariner and the Silver Age version:

But that's not really the first published words of the character, is it? I mean, Johnny Storm was reading a comic book about the Sub-Mariner on the preceding page where it is implied that the Sub-Mariner character is the same as existed in the Golden Age. So wouldn't his "first words" be in 1939's MOTION PICTURES FUNNIES? (Granted, this is a blog about the Silver Age, and those are inarguably Namor's first Silver Age words, but still, you did say "the first words of the character." I'm not intentionally trolling, honest.)

Mort Weisinger would respond with some pun. I'll just acknowledge the "boo-boo".

Trivia Quiz #44: Famous First Words

2011-10-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Pretty obvious format here: I give you the first words of the character, you have to name him or her. Note: I am excluding cover and splash page statements here:

1. "I've found it! The legendary city of Caramanga!"

2. "Well, here goes experiment #145!"

3. "Lead never hurt a wooden leg!"

4. "It is the first time I have found it necessary to give the signal!"

5. "Huh? What? Go 'way! I wanna sleep! Lemme be!"

(Update: Corrected the quote on #5 per commenter Boosterrific)

Modern Silver: Alan Moore's 1963 Part I

2011-10-03T03:05:00.000-07:00

In 1993, Alan Moore collaborated with several artists at Image Comics on a project that alternately was an homage to and a spoof of the Marvel Comics of the 1960s. The intent was to contrast how comics were back in the Silver Age with the comics scene of the 1990s. The series as it stands is pretty terrific, although in the end it was done in by the 1990s lunacy, as a planned 80-Page Giant which would have had the 1963 characters confronting their then-current counterparts was never completed. Owing to ownership hassles involving the separate characters featured in the series, it has never been reprinted and probably never will be.But enough of that modern crap, I will try to treat this comic as a genuine 1960s artifact.

Mystery Incorporated is obviously intended as a Fantastic Four tribute, and it largely succeeds. The opening features a man breaking into their headquarters, opposed by three of the members:

No particular surprise, the fourth member is the intruder himself, just testing their defense systems. I love the opening, because, as with similar sequences in the early issues of the Fantastic Four, it serves as a painless introduction to the various powers of the individual members. We can quickly identify their FF counterparts: Crystal Man is clearly intended as a Mr Fantastic knockoff, Kid Dynamo is the Human Torch, Neon Queen is the Invisible Girl and the oddly named Planet (whose face resembles more the Moon) is the Thing.

For the most part the members of Mystery, Inc. behave the way their counterparts in the FF did, although there are a few differences. For instance, Kid Dynamo is the younger brother of Planet, and is apparently competing with Crystal Man for Neon Queen's affections. We get a quick origin (they gained their powers on a space flight when they encountered alien technology on an asteroid), followed by a scene where they read their fan mail. As in the real FF, there's a letter questioning why they need a girl with such useless powers on the team.

Then we get the real story. Neon Queen encounters a real intruder:

But although he seemed a trifle ill just before she attacked him, he gets healthier, and continues to walk backwards, then suddenly vanishes in a flash of light. The whole team investigates:

Of course, that's a little nod to the endless gadgetry in the FF HQ, most specifically the Negative Zone. Kid Dynamo flies off toward the computer room to see if the intruder did any damage there, while the rest of the team continues to inspect the area, looking for bombs and other devices that might have been left behind. Planet wonders if the intruder could have been Apocalypse:

A clear reference to Stan's ubiquitous and alliterative footnotes. Suddenly the defenses of the MI's headquarters act up against them and we get another look at their powers in action. Meanwhile, Kid Dynamo discovers that the intruder is still in the computer area. They duke it out for a bit, but the mystery man eventually captures him in a box:

Meanwhile Crystal Man has doped out what really happened. The intruder was a visitor from the future:

So instead of coming from the computer room, he had gone to to the computer room, as of course Kid Dynamo has already discovered. They race off to rescue him, but he and the intruder are both gone, so the issue ends with the other three dashing headlong into the Maybe Machine.

Comments: Moore captures the essence of the Silver Age FF in this story nearly perfectly, and Rick Veitch's pencils and Dave Gibbon's inks have the look and feel of mid-1960s Kirby goodness. The comic even includes a Bullpen Bulletins knockoff with this hilarious spoof of Stan's name-dropping:

There are two pages of letters, discussing (imaginary) previous issues, and even some faux-1960s ads:

Overall I give the story high marks; if it were an actual Silver Age comic it would surely rate in the top 100 comics of that era. Well worth the read if you can find it.

She's Josie #9

2011-09-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

Archie Comics had initially started out in the 1940s as MLJ, and their early features were superhero characters like the Shield (the first patriotic superhero) and the Hangman. Archie himself didn't come along until Pep Comics #22, and wasn't featured on a cover until #36. But he rapidly eclipsed the other characters in MLJ's line, which proved fortunate as the superheros began dying out shortly after the war for almost all the publishers. Archie even got the rare tribute of having a radio series, which popularized the character even more.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Archie brand exploded. Archie's buddy Jughead got his own magazine, as did his girlfriends Betty and Veronica. The character proved so popular that they even started publishing Little Archie, the adventures of our hero as a tyke.

But at the same time, the publisher wanted to diversify. In 1959, Jack Kirby was between his short-term gig at DC Comics (where he created Challengers of the Unknown) and his famed period at Marvel. Archie Comics commissioned Joe Simon and him to create a new superhero, initially known as The Fly (later redubbed Flyman). For the next several years Archie Comics labored to create a superhero universe with The Jaguar, a resurrected Shield, Steel Sterling and other superheroes, collectively known as the Mighty Crusaders.

Ironically, nothing worked except a female version of Archie named Josie. Josie had pretty much the standard backup cast for a teen comic. There's Josie's ditzy blonde friend Melody, her (initially beatnik) boyfriend Albert, wealthy Alexander, and brainy (but plain-looking) Pepper. The comic does not appear to have been a big success at first; I don't remember ever seeing these in the spinner rack in my hometown. But it got lucky. In 1968-1969, a Saturday Morning show featuring Archie in the inevitable rock band was picked up by CBS. It was a huge success, and the group who recorded under the name The Archies came up with a smash hit in the song Sugar, Sugar. Josie quickly became a rock star too, her comic was renamed Josie and the Pussycats, and their Saturday morning cartoon debuted in 1970.

All that was far in the future at the time this issue came out. As you can probably guess, this issue featured Josie and her pals going to the New York World's Fair of 1964-65. Comics often did tie-ins to major events like this, although I confess this is one of the only ones that I can remember for that World's Fair. Which is remarkable, because Marvel's characters were all set in the New York metropolitan area at that time.The story starts out with Josie announcing that she and her pals are going to enter a contest:

And so the goal becomes to amass a horde of Crispy Crunchy boxtops. Josie gets two from her house. Albert contributes three, but only after getting sick from eating all those boxes of the cereal. Melody uses her charm:

And Alexander just buys up a warehouse of Crispy Crunchies. They're certain to win, right?

Fortunately for the story, Alexander decides to simply foot the bill for the trip to New York:

I believe the only structure still remaining at the site is that globe known as the Unisphere:

But Alex loses his wallet while riding the monorail. A kid in a cowboy hat picks it up, and the next several pages are consumed with the teens chasing him around the fair.

That's pretty interesting, because as you may recall, Alan Shepard did hit a few golf balls on the moon:
Melody eventually turns up with the kid in tow; he's apparently been following her. Unfortunately, he gave the wallet to his mom, and now he's lost. They suggest putting him on the TV at the fair, but:

Nice mom! So now they go chasing after the mother, but it turns out that she gave it to a policeman. Fortunately she immediately spots the officer in question, and he actually has the wallet. Unfortunately, they are all so worn out from chasing around the fair that they decide to go home. But it turns out that their escapades with the Crispy Crunchies caused a flurry of publicity for the company, and so:

Comments: Entertaining fluff. Incidentally, there was a guest cameo:

Matt Murdock's Other Great Idea

2011-09-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

I've talked in the past about his silly notion of convincing Foggy and Karen that his hitherto-unseen brother Mike was actually Daredevil. That was ludicrous enough (although reasonably entertaining), but things got really bizarre when he came up with an even wilder idea of how to protect his secret identity:

See, he fakes a pilot's license and hires a plane, and then blows it up:

Resulting in this headline:

So now DD's problems are over.

Well, except for one thing; Matt Murdock's cane which doubles as Daredevil's billy club, is at the office. So he heads over there, but:

Despite his understanding, he follows her home and steals the cane. No, I am not kidding:

Okay, so at least he feels guilty about it, eh?

Now remember, Matt's not just a lawyer; he's supposed to be one of the best in the business. And what is it lawyers are supposed to be good at? Figuring out all the ramifications of a possible decision, right? I mean, that's why we hire them to look over our contracts, and why our contracts get more and more detailed over time.

But Matt hasn't thought this idea through. It's not half-baked--it isn't even defrosted! For example, there are the little things, like, oh, a place to sleep. And bigger things, like putting the girl whom he supposedly loves through the agony of believing that he's dead. And even the idea that he should not have blown up an airplane that didn't belong to him.

Inflation Since the Silver Age

2011-09-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

Longtime reader Mike F sent this analysis along and I thought it was interesting enough to post. I will append my own thoughts at the end.

At the start of the Silver Age, DC comic books were 10 cents and had 24-25 pages of story, plus filler (gag strips, letter pages, etc.). Then in 1962 the price went up to 12 cents.

Today, a typical DC comic is 2.99 with only 20 pages of story (and maybe 1-2 pages of filler).

The analysis at the end of this e-mail is an attempt to do an apples-to-apples cost comparison (using a CPI calculator.) The CPI calculator is probably not 100% accurate but it is probably in the ballpark enough for this purpose.

What it shows is that we are paying more than 4-5 times as much for comics as we were in the Silver Age.

I believe there are several factors that may explain this.

1) Writers and artists are paid more, including residuals
2) Paper used is slick, not pulp.
3) Printing quality is higher
4) Sales figures are 1/5 to 1/10 the size meaning production costs are spread across fewer sales
5) Most comics are sold through comics shops which need a higher sales price to stay in business (see lower sales figures)

Now to make things worse, most comics in the Silver Age had 1-3 stories per issue with considerably more text (dialogue and captions).

All in all, todays comics are vastly more expensive than they were in the Silver Age.

And of course, there is no comparison with the Golden Age when comics were ten cents and had around 60 pages of story and art.

$ Value
1956 2010
$0.10 $0.80

1962 2010
$0.12 $0.87

We will multiply each number by 20/25 (80%) to account for the drop in story pages.

$ Value
1956 2010
$0.08 $0.64

1962 2010
$0.096 $0.69

DC Price Today Vs. CPI

Un-Normalized Percentage Difference
1956 ($2.99/.80) x 100 = 373.75%
1962 ($2.99/.87) x 100 = 343.68%

Normalized for page count difference
1956 ($2.99/.64) x 100 = 467.19%
1962 ($2.99/.69) x 100 = 433.33%

What do you think?

Thoughts by Pat: Not sure I get all the math here, but this analysis does comport with an observation I came up with independently. Back in 1968, when I first started collecting comics, I earned money for at least part of the year by mowing lawns. I could make about $2.00 per hour whacking the grass, and with comics running 12 cents apiece, that means that I could translate my efforts into about 16.5 comics per hour. I'm not sure what the going rate is for yard work these days, but in order to afford 16.5 comics kids today would have to be earning around $50.00 per hour, and I suspect strongly that they'd be more likely to get $10-$12, which would mean an effective price increase of 300-400% or more.

Another thought: Do you remember how DC used to fiddle with the comic sizes every time they pushed through a price increase after 1969's jump to 15 cents? For example, look at Batman #214, the first issue with the new pricetag. Batman #234 saw a jump to a quarter, but DC confused the issue by increasing the total page count to 52. You can slice and dice that a lot of ways, but at least the price increase was accompanied by a value increase. The new size and price lasted until #243 (1972), when the comics returned to the old size and the price "dropped" by a nickel. Of course, the net effect was actually a nickel increase, hidden by the brief 52-page period. The price jumped all the way to 50 cents with Batman #253 (1974), but they also bumped the page count to 100 (with most of the new pages coming from reprints). Then the old size returned in Batman #263 (1975), but not the old price, which was now a full quarter. Along the way, real page counts dropped as well; Batman #214 had a 23-page story, while Batman #263 only featured 18 pages of story and art. So from 1969-1975, the cover price increased by 67%, but the price per page more than doubled. And this was fairly well-concealed by the brief period of bigger issues.

Wagon Train #13

2011-09-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

Comics have long looked to movies, TV and (in the 1940s and 1950s) to radio for inspiration for new series. Back in the 1950s, DC had many titles that were ported over from TV, including Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners, Sgt Bilko, Big Town, Mr District Attorney, A Date with Judy, as well as two long-running series featuring the movie stars Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis.

Dell Comics, in particular, went in for licensed features from other media. The appeal is obvious; TV shows and movies have existing fan bases who may be influenced to buy the comics based on their familiarity with the characters and storylines. Of course, one of the ironies today is that the licenses often go the other way, with old-time comic characters making the transition to the big and small screens.

Wagon Train was a hugely successful TV show which ran from 1957-1965. The show featured the adventures of a group of covered wagons crossing the prairies from Missouri to California, shortly after the Civil War. The stories mostly revolved around newcomers to the Wagon Train, and/or the local citizens whom they encountered along the way. This is a common theme in TV, with shows such as Route 66 and Star Trek having many similarities (in fact, Gene Roddenberry reportedly pitched TV executives that Star Trek would be Wagon Train in space). Wagon Train had two main characters; the wagon master Christopher Hale (played by John McIntire) and the scout Flint McCullough (played by Robert Horton).

Note the 15-cent price tag. Dell tried to lead the comics to break the 10-cent barrier on several occasions, starting as early as 1958, but were always frustrated by the reluctance of the other publishers to go along. Finally in late 1961 Marvel and DC raised their prices to 12 cents, while Dell tried to make the higher price stick into 1962 (this comic bears an indicia date of April-June of that year).

The story starts in typical fashion:

It turns out that a renegade Indian and his tribe have been attacking lone wagons along this route, and McCullough strongly advises that they join up with his group. They agree reluctantly, but their stand-offish behavior soon causes problems. In addition, it appears that the man is abusing the "hired man":

When another group mentions that the young man, Jack, had been pistol whipped for talking with another youngster, the wagon master insists that he get medical help for the lad. While they are way from the husband and wife, he tries to draw Jack out on what happened, but is unsuccessful.

Word reaches the wagon train that marshals are looking for a young man and an accomplice who robbed a Wells Fargo stagecoach of $50,000 and killed three people. The description fits Jack. Later, while passing through some mountainous country, the new wagon disappears. They have decided to strike out on their own. Fortunately, the scout comes along just as the renegade Indians attack, and saves them. When the battle is over, the older man shows little gratitude:

Eventually we learn the real secret. Jack's brother and Reed had been responsible for the Wells Fargo robbery, but the brother had gotten away. Reed was holding Jack hostage to force the brother to give him his half of the swag. As the story ends, Reed and Jack's brother have been captured and Jack will be staying behind to testify against them at the trial.

Comments: An interesting and unusually sophisticated tale; I can't help wondering if it's an adaptation of an actual episode of Wagon Train.

The backup tale is of a former circus acrobat and his son. It turns out that the father had lost his grip on his wife and she fell to her death. While the Wagon Train is stopped for a dust storm, the boy wanders off to recapture his pet calf. He is attacked by a mountain lion, and escapes onto an old wooden bridge:

The boy falls onto a rock ledge, where he is stuck. Can the father overcome his fear of heights and save his son from the fate that befell his wife?

Comments: An excellent, well-constructed story. The concept of a character having to overcome his personal phobia in order to save a family member is pretty common in TV and movies.

Overall, this was an excellent comic. Incidentally, the last page includes a circulation statement:

Not too shabby; 314,000 copies per issue was a little more than what the Flash was selling in 1961. As it happens, however, this was the final issue under the Dell imprint; a year and a half later Wagon Train (the comic) appeared as a Gold Key title, but by then the TV show had passed its prime and the comic only lasted four issues.

Our Army At War #175

2011-09-11T01:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a cover that gives only a hint as to the innards. As I have discussed in the past, Sgt. Rock scorned thoughts of romance as interfering with the business of killing Germans. This is not atypical in heroes for adolescent boys; Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage, for instance, were notably uncomfortable in the presence of the fairer sex.

Well, in this story we learn that Rock had indeed been a red-blooded American boy before his induction into the armed forces:

They made plans to marry after his service was over. But, no particular surprise, after insiring him through several battles, Mary sent him a "Dear Rock" letter:

So he goes off to ponder the cruelties of fate when:

They take him off in a German jeep, where Rock rebels, giving us the cover image. He kayos two of the Germans but the third one shoots him in the back as he flees. Fortunately he makes it to a cabin, and passes out. When he comes to:

You've gotta love that last panel. Around this time, the comics used to advertise these posters of sad-eyed kittens:

The resemblance is unmistakable. Well, as you can probably guess, Rock finds it impossible to shake little Mignon. And she turns out to be quite brave:

So Rock goes charging towards the nearest Germans, not to seek revenge, but to get help for the youngster. Of course, they don't see it his way, so he's got to fight his way through to the medical supplies:

After getting back to the allied lines, he turns her over to a medic. But she has one last request:

Yes, you can say that it seems a little creepy, but Rock's no molester. It's just a sweet little story about how Rock found something to fight for once Mary left him. When I was a much younger man, there were a couple of younger sisters of girlfriends who quite obviously had crushes on me. And I always tried to treat them as special, not out of some nefarious intent but because I could remember what it was like to be a kid and have a crush on an adult.

The backup story is an interesting tale about a young American who had tried on several occasions to swim the English Channel, but each time he was forced to abandon his quest due to the elements. A year later he is a volunteer fighter in the RAF, when he is shot down on a return flight from France. So the story is about him fighting his way back across the channel:

When he makes it back to England, he gains the confidence that the invasion of Normandy will succeed.

Overall, I loved this comic.

Don't Be A Wimp!

2011-09-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Comics advertisers knew that most comics buyers were young boys and adolescents, and they tailored their ads accordingly. This particular ad would be appealing to kids who really didn't want to put in the effort to actually build their bodies. Just think: No exercise at all!

Probably the most famous ad of this type was the Charles Atlas pitch:

If I recall correctly, there was a later, extended version of the ad that had Mac remarking ruefully that he noticed how his girlfriend had referred to the bully as "that man", while scornfully calling him "little boy".

Of course, in the all-too real world of childhood and adolescence, bullies were a regular problem, and so this fantasy presentation of getting even was quite powerful and, I suspect, effective.

Sports heroes were often used to push these body-building courses:

Although often the personal testimonial of a normal guy who had been turned into a hunk was favored:

Before and after pictures were often featured. I believe this one is probably my favorite:

They made sure to specify that you would be a hit with the gals if you followed the regimen:

Not to mention successful in "all sports":

Incidentally, the George Jowett books that were marketed using the last few ads are all available online here.

The Other Showcase

2011-08-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

Back when I was a young teen collecting comics, I remember picking up this issue at a garage sale and boggling:

Under "Still 10 cents" it says "No. 1115". I was flabbergasted. I knew that Ricky Nelson had starred with the rest of his family in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet for a very long time (in fact, that show is still the second longest-running sitcom in US history, behind only the Simpsons), and that he'd had some success as a rock star, but the idea that his comic had over five times as many issues as Superman (back then) was simply impossible to conceive.

And, of course, it wasn't true.

DC did not originate the concept of a tryout magazine, where new features could be tested to see if they sold. They borrowed the idea from Dell Comics, which had a series simply entitled Four Color Comics. Dell published approximately 1350 issues under that name, which I believe is still the all-time record for a single series in the United States, even though the last Four Color issue was published in 1962. Since the first issue appeared in 1942, it is obvious that they put out about 60 comics a year under this line, or five per month. And four of those issues, not 1100+, featured young Mr Nelson.

The Four Color line included the debuts of many long-running series for Dell and its later successors, including Donald Duck, (#9), Felix the Cat (#15), Roy Rogers (#38), Little Lulu (#74), Pogo (#105), Woody Woodpecker (#169). Of course those features had appeared elsewhere, but these were the tryouts that got them their own comic titles. Four Color also featured the first appearance anywhere of Uncle Scrooge (#178).

The Four Color series did create one problem which caused endless anxiety for collectors in the days before the Overstreet Guide. Dell would run, say, four tryout issues for Spin and Marty (a serial about two boys on a dude ranch that ran on TV in the Mickey Mouse Club), spaced out over a number of months, and if the sales justified it, they would start issuing the feature in its own magazine, starting with #5. Which meant that collectors might search forever for the elusive #s 1-4, not realizing that they bore issue #s 714, 767, 808 and 826 on the covers.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, Four Color was actually two series; there were 25 issues in Volume One, and 1300+ in V2. To add to the confusion, while the last issue of V2 was #1354, there were numerous missing issues in the last 100 or so; for example, there is no #1351, #1352 or #1353.

The most valuable issues in the Four Color line are generally the early Donald Duck appearances by Carl Barks, but there are plenty of cheap issues from the 1940s-1960s offering fine quality entertainment.

Repetitive Plots in Sgt Rock

2011-08-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

I love reading the DC war titles of the Silver Age; for the most part they have excellent art and entertaining stories. But there is one major problem with reading a bunch of them consecutively, and that is that the main features recycle plotlines consistently.

I've talked in the past about Gunner and Sarge, and how many of the stories featured the same action with Gunner acting as the decoy and the Sarge figuring out where the enemy was located by their fire at his counterpart. The Johnny Cloud stories always had some incident from his youth as a Navajo relating to his problems as an air ace in WWII. In the Haunted Tank series, the ghost of Jeb Stuart would give cryptic advice to his namesake, which inevitably proved prescient.

The Sergeant Rock series was no exception to this trend. The standard plot outline involved Rock being concerned about something that Easy Company is doing wrong that could lead to disaster. For example:

That bit about Easy Company being like a chain came up often. Sarge was as fanatical about eliminating the weakest link as Anne Robinson:

There would then follow several rapid-fire combat sequences proving Rock was right:

Or sometimes the combat-happy Joes would appear to be right for awhile:

Thus increasing the pressure on Rock to prove them wrong. In the end there was always a resolution, although I admit that Kanigher (who wrote these stories) was willing to be more creative in his denouements:

So I recommend these DC war series, but also caution that you should probably read them as they were published; with a month or two in between each issue.

False Dawns

2011-08-19T04:06:00.000-07:00

There is a light that precedes the actual dawn by about an hour; it is called the false dawn.

temporary light on the eastern horizon that precedes the rising sun by about an hour; also called zodiacal light

Most comics historians date the dawn of the Silver Age to the Sept-Oct 1956 and the appearance of Showcase #4, with the first Barry Allen Flash. Others will argue for November 1955 and Detective #225, featuring the introduction of Barry's JLA partner, the Martian Manhunter. As you know, I just use 1955 in general because of the appearance of the Comics Code Authority Seal on the covers, starting in around March of that year.

But if we were to date it from the resurgence of the superhero genre, which is certainly one of the hallmarks of the Silver Age, it's amazing how complicated things get, because there were a lot of efforts at relaunching old superheros and inaugurating new ones in the 1954-55 era. And despite Showcase #4 supposedly coming like a bolt from the blue, it took three more years before Flash graduated to his own magazine, and before DC attempted to bring back another updated Golden Age hero (Green Lantern).

For example, Sterling published four issues of a superhero named Captain Flash starting in November 1954. But before that, Headline Publications put out seven issues of Fighting American, a Simon & Kirby collaboration, with the first issue bearing an April-May 1954 cover date. Here's the cover to #2:

And earlier still, in December 1953 Marvel (then known as Atlas) tried bringing back the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner and Captain America, with five issues of Young Men:

In February 1955, Charlton attempted to bring back the Blue Beetle, although in this case it was simply a reprint title:

Nick Fury, Agent of Shield #1

2011-08-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

The secret agent boom in the 1960s was huge, propelled largely by the James Bond movies. TV responded with shows like Secret Agent, the Avengers, I Spy and the Man from UNCLE. The theme song to the first became a big hit for Johnny Rivers:

The comics were not far behind. Marvel came up with Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Fury was Marvel's World War II Sergeant, upgraded to Lt. Colonel and updated to the 1960s, and improbably placed in charge of SHIELD despite his fairly low officer's rank. And although he was the head of the organization, he also acted as its main field man.

The series was initially scripted by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby as a co-feature with Dr. Strange in Strange Tales. Effective with #151, Jim Steranko was assigned to do the pencils, initially based on Jack Kirby's layouts. He quickly graduated to doing his own design, and eventually wrote the scripts as well. I believe that he was the first artist on a major Marvel series to handle both chores officially, although of course Kirby often provided suggested dialogue for Lee.

Steranko brought something new to the effort. He was clearly inspired by the psychedelic and op/pop art of the times. These comics stood out on the spinner rack. The artwork is breathtaking in places:

The story is complex, and was certainly confusing to me as a 13-year old back in 1968. Nick Fury is testing a weapons protection system in the desert near Las Vegas. He is about to be hit by a very strong bomb (yep, he's also SHIELD's chief guinea pig), when he realizes that the system has been turned off. He activates a rocket sled which takes him out of range just as the missile explodes.

When he gets to the SHIELD building in Las Vegas, he learns that Scorpio, an unidentified villain who apparently holds a grudge against Fury of long standing, has gassed the occupants and turned off the defense system.

A subplot involves a failed comedian named Flip Mason, who has just gambled away his last cash and already owes plenty to the mob. Just as he's about to attempt a holdup, he apparently gets lucky. A mobster confuses him for Mitch Hackett (another crook) and hands him a briefcase, telling the comic that it contains $200,000. When the real Hackett shows up, he and the mobster engage in a gun duel, just as Scorpio is escaping in a helicopter after battling Fury. As Hackett lies dying, he squeezes off one last round, which hits Scorpio's copter, resulting in the crash and explosion.

And Flip Mason? Does he now get back to his wife and infant son with the cash that will put them on easy street? Nope, for it turns out that the mobster was already planning on double-crossing Hackett, and had put a bomb in the briefcase instead of the money. As Mason dials San Francisco to tell his wife that they're rich, it explodes, leading to that last panel shown above.

Comments: A terrific tale, innovatively illustrated by Steranko. About the only negative I can find with the artwork is that the standard panels which serve to move the story forward seem ordinary and dull by comparison. The story reads like an extended Spirit tale by Eisner. I do suspect it was beyond the understanding of even adolescents; as I said above I was quite confused. Part of the problem is that Mason and Hackett both bear a strong resemblance to longtime SHIELD character Jasper Sitwell:

Although Sitwell had moved over to become a sidekick in the Iron Man series by then, anybody who read the back issues of Strange Tales (as I had) would probably assume that somehow he was involved here, and be waiting for the explanation which never came.

NFAS lasted 15 issues before being canceled in late 1969. I suspect that Marvel overestimated the market for such a sophisticated comic; although older readers did buy comics back then, as a percentage of their age cohort they were tiny compared to the boys and adolescents who made up the bulk of comic buyers. In addition, the comic ran into the brief but sharp 1969 recession and the end of the secret agent fad.

This comic foreshadows much of the 1970s as Marvel and DC pursued the boomer market, often at the expense of the youngsters who came behind them.

Green Lantern #24

2011-08-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. when I was assembling my collection, I picked up most of my early-mid 1960s DC from a friend of mine named Jon, and his neighbor, Eric. They had long runs of the comics they were interested in, but every now and then there was an issue or two missing. I don't have a clue as to why; perhaps they had just forgotten to go to the newsstand that month, or perhaps they had been broke, or perhaps they had just used the money for a new baseball mitt or something else.

This was one of the issues I never found, and since I wasn't fanatical about completing my Green Lantern run like I was about Batman, it was only a few years ago that I finally found a low-grade copy cheap enough to justify the purchase. IIRC, the first story was reprinted in the 1970s, but I don't think that cover story was until the relatively recent advent of the Archive and Showcase Editions.

The first story is The Shark that Hunted Human Prey. An accident in an atomic station on the coast led to a sudden emission of radiation that hit a passing shark:

Now of course, as far as the science goes, that's absurd. Evolution is a slow, torturous process with many missteps along the way. Still, it's in keeping with the science of comic books, in which Ben Grimm can turn into a pile of orange rocks (and occasionally turn back again).

The Shark discovers he has extraordinary powers, but he retains his essential nature:

After dropping the heavyweight champ without raising a fist, the Shark uses his awesome mental powers to locate a foe worthy of his abilities:

The Shark contacts Hal mentally and issues a challenge. Hal quickly changes into his fighting duds and recharges his ring in the locker room, but:

And for much of the battle that ensues, the Shark maintains his desire to induce fear in Green Lantern. He demonstrates that GL's ring has no power over him as he can block it with his mind. Indeed, his mental powers seem unlimited:

GL realizes that the air in the room is not colored yellow, so he stuns the Shark with a bolt of compressed air. But the Shark recovers and ups the stakes:

His intent was to make Hal afraid, but instead the threat just redoubles GL's resolve to win. He condenses the water vapor in the room and creates a block of ice with which to kayo the villain. Then he uses his power ring to devolve the Shark back into his normal state:

Comments: I found the concept of a shark evolved into a human somewhat ludicrous, and that costume is inane. However, that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the character development was excellent and the story itself, with the threats to those Hal holds near and dear, is compelling.

The second story is the cover one, and it is pretty simple and straight-forward. While traveling through space, Hal encounters the planet, which suddenly forms a continent that looks like him. It shoots a rocket at him and one grazes him, forcing him to the ground. He encounters visions of Pieface, and several of his enemies. Finally the planet itself finds a way to contact him directly:

It was an intelligent planet who had searched the stars for more intelligence, and GL was the first it had ever encountered. It just wanted to make a friend, but couldn't find a way to express that at first. GL helps it by removing a volcanic core that was causing earthquakes, and they part as buddies.

Comments: Cute story, and the concept of a living planet would be "borrowed" a few years later by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Mighty Thor series.

Wonder Woman 155

2011-08-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

Even by the standards of the Silver Age Wonder Woman, that's a mind-boggling cover.

Back in the 1960s, young boys were off in the woods, playing army, possibly the dumbest game ever invented. Girls tended to want to play house, which certainly seemed dumb, but they were actually practicing the roles they were expected to grow into. The hope was that they would find a good man and settle down, just like Mommy had. Of course, there was also the fear that they would fall for the wrong man, or that only the wrong types would want to date them.

These hopes and fears were expressed and marketed to in many ways. For example remember the girls' board game, Mystery Date?

Note the reaction from the girl when she opens the door to discover the "dud" waiting to take her out. One of the amusing things about this ad is that by the 1970s, when these girls were dating for real, most of them were likely to date someone even more shabbily attired than him.

The covers of Lois Lane are filled with images of her falling for the wrong man:

The Wonder Woman story starts out similar to Wonder Woman #125, which I reviewed a few years ago. She's having problems with the men in her life being too aggressive:

She has similar encounters with Bird-Man and Manno, the Merman, during the latter of which we learn an interesting fact about Wonder Woman's physiology:

There's also this amusing bit:

King Kong's escaped again? What a pain!
She also gets some unwanted attention from an octopus. You have to see it to believe it:

So after all that excessive affection, she is intrigued when she meets a monster prince who rejects her friendship:

But when he destroys his castle during a battle with the Amazons who've come to befriend him:

We learn that's the real way to Wonder Woman's heart:

And she decides to marry him. There's an interesting statement on prejudice here:

Wow.

And so we get the scene on the cover. But at the last moment the groom gets cold feet:

There follows a zany sequence where a flying sphinx attacks her, and the monster helps save her and turns into a handsome dreamboat. But as they are falling off a cliff, he gets angry again and changes back into his monster self and rejects her, leading to this denouement:

Comments: Obviously the story is an insane remake of Beauty and the Beast. But it is redeemed a bit by the positive characterization of Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman 156--Return of the Golden Age

2011-07-29T15:53:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I've been meaning to do is look back through the comics to see when the concept of comics being "collectibles" first started; this must be a fairly early example, with an August 1965 cover date. Marvel Collectors' Item Classics started the same month, so obviously by then the news was getting out about the value of the older issues.

This issue also demonstrates the growing influence of fandom. In 1961 and 1964, Wonder Woman was selected by the Alley Awards as the "Worst Comic Book Currently Published."
While that is a bit unfair, I suspect what the fans were getting at was more like "The worst comic that used to be good."

In response, Robert Kanigher decided to give the fans what they wanted; a Golden Age-type story with Golden Age-type artwork. Does it work? Mostly it does. Oh, it's zany, but the GA Wonder Woman was quite wacky. The story starts out with Steve Trevor telling Diana Prince that he always knew his Wonder Woman was worth a million, and now he has the proof:

How'd you like to be able to buy early Golden Age issues for $100 per copy?

Intrigued, Wonder Woman visits the Dream Merchant (a fictional comic book shop). She starts reading an old comic and suddenly finds herself pulled into the story:

Incidentally, although the Brain Pirates were featured in a Golden Age Wonder Woman story in Sensation Comics #82, there is only a superficial similarity between that tale and this one.

The Brain Pirate tries to steal Wonder Woman's brain, but she throws off his control. However, he succeeds with Steve Trevor:

There follows a zany battle with the pirates over Steve's "brain"; at one point they load it into a cannon and threaten to fire it far out to sea. She prevents them from doing that, but she's stymied when they control Steve and order him to shoot her if she does not submit:

Just then the Holliday girls and Etta Candy happen to be rowing by, and the pirates threaten to ram them. Wonder Woman prevents this:

Err, but isn't she supposed to be only as strong as a normal woman when her bracelets are welded together? She returns to the pirate ship and is there when the Holliday girls attempt to rescue her by swimming to the ship. But the Brain Pirates capture the girls' brains, and the ship takes off for outer space.

After landing on the Brain Pirates' world, they torment Wonder Woman by making all the passengers walk the plank, into a shark-infested sea. Wondy fights off the sharks, and saves Steve and the Holliday girls:

She gets them safely to land, but the Brain Pirates still control them and force Steve and the girls to capture Wonder Woman. The BPs parade their slaves into their city. They attempt to kill Wonder Woman but she manages to avoid their spears and swords. Then comes the dartboard scene shown on the cover. She manages to get a dart to pierce the chains holding her bracelets together, and now she's free. The leader of the Brain Pirates makes a deal:

Except, as you can probably guess, the brains of Etta, Steve and the Holliday Girls are inside that box. Fortunately Wonder Woman realizes this, grabs the box and her friends, calls for her plane, and gets everybody safely back to Earth. And in the end Wonder Woman pops back out of the comic and into the store where she ponders:

The next two issues were done in Silver Age style and featured the memorable Egg Fu. Wonder Woman #159 featured a retelling of the origin of the Amazon princess, and Golden Age-style art, and Kanigher continued the experiment until #165, when the Silver Age artwork returned. Kanigher noted in the letters column of #166:

The Other Other Captain Marvel

2011-07-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

See, there was the Golden Age Captain Marvel, aka Billy Batson, aka the Big Red Cheese. And Marvel came out with its own version of Captain Marvel, the man of the Kree who could change places with Rick Jones. And then there was this fella:

Captain Marvel is a robot who was created on another planet. His mission is to help others avoid the wars that destroyed his homeworld:

So you might say that he was a strange being who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men....

His origin is told in flashback like that, because his memory is faulty. In a robot? He has to recharge his powers every day by passing his hand over that M-shaped medallion on his chest. It turns out that he has a young friend:

We learn that he's a writer for an important press service, and that his next assignment is to cover a revolution in the Caribbean. His flight crashes en route in a jungle. Captain Marvel investigates the area and discovers:

Inside the computer are some giant heads, who initially seem like villains, but then it turns out that they just need Captain Marvel's help getting enough power so they can return to their normal dimension.

Comments: A padded, silly story, although I enjoyed the cartoonish artwork and the insane gimmick of him separating his body into multiple pieces. Like many superheroes, Captain Marvel picked up abilities as needed by the plot:

The second story is pretty much more of the same. Aliens (from Venus) who seem like villains but are really kind of ambivalent:

And how can Captain Marvel prove to them that humans deserve to live? Why by defeating the Venutians' nemesis, the Gronks. And the Gronks are the "Bonus Feature" shown on the cover, Plastic Man. But not that Plastic Man:

Captain Marvel defeats him by using another yet-unrevealed power:

So the Venutians decide that the humans are indeed worthy of living, and head back to their own planet. Plastic Man escapes, setting up a return match with that villain in the next issue. But is he really a villain, or yet another ambivalent antagonist?

Comments: I get the sense that the publisher was intentionally pushing the envelope on copyright/trademark here to find out what they could get away with. Captain Marvel was a former Fawcett character, who had been retired after he was ruled a violation of DC's copyrighted Superman. But DC had not perfected their rights to the character by purchasing the name, so it was apparently out there in the public domain. On the other hand, Plastic Man had definitely been purchased by DC, and so by the next issue he was renamed:

Note that the envelope is again being pushed by that issue with Atom-Jaw clearly a swipe of the longtime Lev Gleason character Iron-Jaw (also a mid-70s Atlas-Seaboard protagonist), and Dr. Fate a GA DC hero.

BTW, I found out about the Silver Age Captain Marvel at one of my regular blogs from the sidebar, but I can't remember where; somebody wrote about him within the last two months or so and intrigued me enough to track down this issue. I'd be happy to link that blog, but I really can't remember where I heard about him. Anybody? Bueller? Update: Jim pointed me to Gorilla Daze, where Allan wrote about the other other Captain Marvel a few months ago. Update II: Booksteve also covered the faux Captain Marvel just last week.

Fifty Years Ago This Month

2011-07-22T16:58:00.000-07:00

The multiverse begins as Flash #123 goes on sale.

This story was implied by the very first Barry Allen Flash story in Showcase #4, which opened with Barry enjoying a Golden Age Flash comic during his lunch break:

That's an interesting decision by the writer (Bob Kanigher), I suppose chosen to explain why Barry quickly decides to become the Flash himself when the lightning bolt hits a page later. But it does raise some uncomfortable questions. If the superhero comics are assumed to take place in the real world, then in what world did the Jay Garrick stories take place, since Barry clearly considers the Golden Age Flash to be a fictional character.

As the Flash of Two Worlds story starts, Iris is trying to put on a show for her pet charity, a group of orphans. Unfortunately, the magician she arranged to provide the entertainment has not shown up, and it looks like the kids will be disappointed. Barry suggests that he call the police station, as he just saw the Flash over there, and perhaps the Scarlet Speedster will agree to dazzle the youngsters.

He plays a game of tennis with himself, and then tries the Indian fakir trick of climbing a rope, only to disappear suddenly:

The Flash finds himself suddenly in a field outside the city. But not Central City, as he quickly discovers. Although some of the landmarks look the same, the signs in the metropolis indicates this is Keystone City. But isn't that where... on a hunch, Barry looks into a phone book and sure enough:

So he visits the Garrick residence, where we learn that Jay has aged since his Golden Age adventures and that he has married his former girlfriend, Joan Williams. Barry explains that he knows all about Jay's adventures as a superhero, and gives his theory:

Barry has further thoughts on how Jay Garrick ended up as a fictional character on his own world:

That's interesting because Fox himself was writing this particular tale, in place of usual Flash scripter, John Broome. Note that this maintains the implication that Barry Allen's stories were taking place in "our" world, since Gardner Fox was a real person. This would be maintained as the official story for years, although it was eventually discarded in a 1970s Flash tale, when we learned that our Earth was Earth-Prime, while Barry was from Earth-1 and Jay Garrick from Earth-2.

This concept of multiple Earths became very popular in the DC universe for years, as it gave writers and editors additional "outs". If a current story contradicted another one from years ago, well that old story took place on an alternate Earth. It also gave them an opportunity to play "What if" games without quite admitting that these were "imaginary stories".

Of course, it also caused uncomfortable questions as well. For starters, since Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman had appeared in or were mentioned in several Justice Society stories, did that mean that the Golden Age appearances of those stars had also not taken place on Earth 1? DC was not yet ready to confront the implications of those questions, and would continue to dodge them until near the end of the decade.

As it happens, Jay Garrick has been debating coming out of retirement due to a series of strange robberies. We learn that three Golden Age villains, the Thinker, the Fiddler and the Shade are responsible. They have recently escaped jail and are hoping to defeat their old nemesis.

The individual Flashes split up and combat the Thinker and the Shade, but are defeated. They combine forces to face the Fiddler, but his fiddle controls them:

But they manage to plug up their ears with small jewels, and make quick work of the trio.

Afterwards, Barry returns to his own world and has an idea:

This story led to many more, including the annual JLA/JSA teamups, nearly annual Barry Allen/Jay Garrick pairings, as well as stories featuring the GA Green Lantern and Hal Jordan. It is, as I mentioned in an early post on this blog, one of the five most important DC comics of the Silver Age.

Update: Aaron reminds me of an interesting tidbit about that Flash issue that Barry Allen is reading at the opening of Showcase #4. If you look closely at the cover, especially this panel from an earlier page:

You will see that he appears to be reading Flash #13. The amusing thing is that's not what Flash #13's cover looks like:

You see, Flash Comics back in the Golden Age was an anthology title, like Action or Detective in the Silver Age, and Flash alternated covers with Hawkman, with the latter appearing on the odd-numbered issues all the way up to #87. In fact, that cover could not have appeared as on the covers featuring the Flash, the little inset picture was of Hawkman, and vice-versa.

Jim notes that there were two GA and Silver Age Atom teamups as well, but no pairings of the 1940s Hawkman with his 1960s counterpart. I suspect the problem there was that the two characters were simply too similar to make for an interesting combination.

Dennis the Menace Goes to Washington

2011-07-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Fawcett was a major comics publisher in the Golden Age, with Captain Marvel Adventures actually outselling Superman in the 1940s. But after losing the lawsuit to DC over whether the Big Red Cheese was a rip of the Man of Steel, Fawcett went out of the business for several years, before returning with only one character for the entirety of the Silver Age: Dennis the Menace.

Dennis was the creation of Hank Ketcham, and was originally published on the comics pages, as single-panel gags. In 1959, about the time that Fawcett started publishing the comic books, Dennis became the title feature of a TV show starring Jay North. The TV show lasted four seasons in its original series and virtually forever in reruns.

These Dennis Giants were generally organized around a theme, including trips to Mexico, California, Hollywood, Hawaii, and in this one, our nation's capital. They were also frequently republished; this particular giant appeared in 1963, 1964 and 1966. The stories are generally amusing if predictable tales of Dennis alternately exasperating his parents with his mischief, and amusing them with his childlike mistakes.

This giant starts with a quick travelogue of DC; the Mitchells visit the Washington Monument and see the Supreme Court, Lincoln Memorial and White House. While at the Mint, they have an interesting tour guide:

A black woman; pretty outstanding diversity by 1963 standards.

When they visit the White House, Dennis meets someone his own age:

That's obviously Caroline Kennedy; her line appears to be intended as a reference to this novelty song of the time:

Update: I had remembered that the girl who sang that song went with me to Traphagen Elementary School in Waldwick New Jersey, but wondered if that was just one of those crazy things you think you remember, but actually confused with something else. As it turns out, my memory was right (PDF file, see page 8, "Spotlight On"):

There was also a Jo Ann Morse who graduated high school with me in Allendale (one town away from Waldwick) in 1973; I suspect that she's the same one. Pixie gal who definitely loved to sing.

Dennis confronts her with the fact that her father didn't appear on any money, and therefore he couldn't possibly be the president. She checks:

The "Let me say this about that," line was a verbal tick of Kennedy's that was picked up by the impressionists of the time, particularly Vaughn Meader, much as Richard Nixon impersonators would use, "Let me make one thing perfectly clear."

The tour of Washington is occasionally interrupted by Dennis taking a nap and dreaming about himself involved in historical events, like Captain John Smith and Pocahontas:

Another wince-worthy moment is when Dennis comes up with a terrific product for the colonists to send back to England:

The family also visits the FBI, where Dennis meets J. Edgar, and the Pentagon, where he gets confused for a Russian spy:

All in all, it's an entertaining issue with just enough facts to be considered educational by adults, and enough fun so as not to be boring to kids.

Wow

2011-07-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

I'm not one of those folks to talk about racist covers on comics when it comes to World War II and the Japanese. It's easy to forget in these days when the wars we are involved in are not against a country and its people but against smaller groups (Al Qaeda, the Baathists, the Taliban), but in World War II we really were fighting Japan and Germany.

But I have to admit, it's covers like this one that makes me understand why Alan Moore had a character in Tom Strong refer to the Black Terror as a borderline psychopath. Killer artwork (literally) by Alex Schomburg.

Classics Illustrated

2011-07-14T00:19:00.000-07:00

When I decided at age 13 to start collecting comic books, the reaction from my family was, to say the least, not positive and supporting. My parents definitely shared the view that comics were throwaway trash entertainment for kids. And to be honest, that was not entirely an unfair characterization of the medium, although things were already changing on that front as both DC and Marvel started chasing the adolescents like me.

It's funny because I think of the comic collectors of my era that I've met over the years, and they're all pretty bright, but certainly the image of the time was a dummy who moved his lips as he read, slowly. I had always been a voracious reader; by third grade I was reading five-six books a week. True, it was mostly the Hardy Boys or the Bobbsey Twins, but it most definitely was not picture books for me. By sixth grade I was reading the "We Were There" series, novels of American history as (supposedly) told by the kids who lived at the time.

So comics definitely seemed like a regression to my parents. But I was an obstinate youngster and they gradually accepted my decision. Of course, it helped that I did not solely read comics; by that point I was also a sci-fi fan. I also picked up some "educational" comics, like the Classics Illustrated line, although they were mostly on the wane by then, and it was pretty obvious despite the new covers that the artwork was dated. But it did interest me in some of the stories, and so at 15 I borrowed a copy of The Three Musketeers from a friend.

Who committed suicide by jumping in front of a train a week later. Sorry to spring that on you, but it's a major part of the story. Needless to say, I was emotionally wrecked for the next month or so. But one of the ways I got through it was to dedicate myself. I set a goal for myself to read the classics--not the comics, but the original books on which they were based. I did use the list on the back cover as a starting guide:

How did I do? Pretty well I'd say. Now mind you, finding some of those books (other than the first 20 or so, which virtually any good library would have) was quite a chore. I read all but Adventures of Marco Polo and Michael Strogoff in the first 30. I read Moby Dick unabridged, and let me tell you that really required dedication. And although I'm a big Robert Louis Stevenson fan, I've never been able to finish The Black Arrow. Overall I've probably read about 90 or so of the 167 in the original series (not all of which are listed on that particular back cover.

But most of the books, once you got into them, were terrific. The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables and Crime and Punishment are books that everybody should read once.

The comics themselves varied in quality, both in the written adaptations and in the artwork. Here's the highly stylized splash to Arabian Nights (better known as 1001 Nights):

When the comic was redone in the 1960s, that beautiful style disappeared:

I'll always remember the moment when the inspector confronted Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment. During the story, he's seemingly befriended the young student, and they are discussing the murder that is the focus of the story here:

Of course, collecting the Classics Illustrated has presented many headaches as the comics were often reissued with new covers, and later with new interiors. At one point collectors used the HRN (highest reorder number) on the back cover to differentiate between various versions, but even that is not foolproof.

First Kiss #2

2011-07-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't talked much about Charlton Comics here. Aside from Steve Ditko's terrific work, it's safe to say that they are considered the ugly stepsister of Silver Age comics, with (mostly) mediocre art and stories. Their comics even seemed to be printed on cheaper paper than the other publishers. And yet they did publish a boatload of comics in the Silver Age; at least 2500 that I've been able to catalog, and I'm positive that I'm missing some.

Like most publishers in the Silver Age, Charlton eschewed the superhero comics except during Batmania. They published a LOT of romance comics, even more than
DC. Their active romance titles in the Silver Age included Career Girl Romances (37 issues), Cynthia Doyle, Nurse In Love, Dr Tom Brett Young Intern, First Kiss (40 issues), High School Confidential Diary and Confidential Diary (17), Hollywood Romances (10), I Love You (82), Just Married (74), Love Diary (69), My Secret Life (29), Nurse Betsy Crane (16), Romantic Secrets (44), Romantic Story (83), Secret Romance (10), Secrets of Love and Marriage (25), Secrets of Young Brides (40), Sweetheart Diary (34), Sweethearts (92), Teen Confessions (65), and Teen-Age Love (70 issues). When flipping through the comics racks back then, I often thought of Charlton as the equivalent of Harlequin in the comics.

The opening story in this issue is pretty good despite the dull-as-dishwater title, Love Him, Love What He Does. Alice is a bit ashamed of her prizefighter boyfriend George. She wants him to take up a more genteel profession, like her friends' husbands:

So she gives him an ultimatum: Either he gives up boxing or she dumps him. However, he's on the verge of a title bout and isn't about to abandon the sport he loves. Alice, who's been moping about, decides to attend the big fight, initially hoping that he will lose and come to his senses:

And win he does, making Alice realize that she's as proud of him as she would be of a lawyer or doctor:

The story could have been more dramatic if there had been a confrontation before the fight between the two lovers, with Alice initially admitting that she hoped George would lose, and then him recovering to win the bout when he realizes that she's rooting for him. Still, it's a solid effort. The subtext (accept your man for who he is, not for who you wish he were) is a frequent theme during romances of this era, although that would change as editors began to demand that leading men be wealthy and/or powerful. Of course, you could argue that a championship fighter was exactly that; back in the 1950s they were probably the most well-paid figures in sports.

The second story is not as satisfying; you can probably guess the ending from this panel alone:

The dreaded mustache tells us that he's not the right man for her. She goes out shopping, gets stuck in a ditch and meets an arrogant man who tells her to stop spinning her wheels. No real surprises here; the arrogant man is her true love.

The third story does present some interesting points. Doris Wiles had married a wealthy playboy, who died and left her and her infant son penniless. She works her way up from waitressing to running her own restaurant. A wealthy former friend of her husband, improbably named Carlos McLean, starts to woo her. But wait, he has the dreaded mustache! Is he a villain?

Nope, and he seals the deal when her son swallows something that puts him in peril:

I'm going to guess that the specialist went by the name of Dr Heimlich. ;)

There's an interesting PSA:

I don't remember DC publishing any overtly religious PSAs during the Silver Age, although they certainly published ones that promoted religious tolerance.

Solid Gold Heart closes out the book. Donna is a succesful model who wants to make the jump to acting. Her downstairs neighbor is Larry, a self-employed biochemist. Donna is promoting her career and making the gossip columns by going out with various wealthy playboys, but she wishes Larry were more successful. One days she promises to attend a sales pitch to an investor, but then her manager calls with a rich date who will certainly get her name in the paper. Torn, she attends the date even though it is at the same corner as Larry is waiting. But it all works out in the end, as:

It's an entertaining story, largely selling the same message about accepting your man for who he is as the opening tale. And as in the opener, the woman doesn't really have to suffer, as it is clear her man will become wealthy.

There's a "movie date" filler bit of advice here:

One oddity; the comic does not seem to contain many ads aimed at women; in fact the inside front cover contains a Joe Weider body-building ad.

Greatest Ad Ever?

2011-07-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

This one's slightly outside my bailiwick, as it was published in 1954 on the inside front cover of Wings #123, the penultimate issue of that long-running Fiction House title. But it's just so delightfully goofy that I couldn't resist. For starters, let's consider that galloping fellow up top:

He certainly seems happy, but he also appears to be dashing full-tilt to make a train. I suppose the idea is that he's going on a vacation with his well-deserved prize winnings, but why didn't he get to the station on time?

And check out the gal down below:

She looks like she's ready to do anything for that fistful of tens. But all she has to do is solve some exceedingly simple rebuses:

Now, I'm guessing most of you know that Indiana is the Hoosier State, so you wouldn't even need to work out the puzzle. But it's easy to do that as well; SINK + DIAL + ONEA - SOLE - K = INDIANA. It's a breeze!

HAM + CHAIN + ET - HAT - CH = MAINE, which is indeed the Pine Tree State.

That fistful of tens is as good as yours, young lady!

One clear difference between those days and now; note the complete absence of disclaimers and fine print. Back in my younger days I would have been all over this kind of contest, certain that I was going to win the big bucks. Now I look at it with a skeptical eye and assume that either the actual puzzles are much harder than shown or that there would be so many correct entries (and purchases from the National Book Club) that the winners would end up being drawn from a hat.

Trivia Quiz #43: Answers

2011-07-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

1. If you wanted to travel from Asgard to Earth, in what direction do you need to go?

The answer was shown in Journey into Mystery Annual #1:

You would have to go south from Asgard to reach Earth.

2. What non-mutant villain had his powers from childhood?
Giant Man and Avengers opponent, Whirlwind (aka the Human Top):

The Taskmaster, suggested by Forine is a valid answer, but I should have specified that we are talking Silver Age only here.

3. Excluding Uncle Ben, who were the first two non-villains to die in Amazing Spiderman?

The first two non-villains to die in Amazing Spiderman were Bennett Brant (brother of Betty Brant) in ASM #11 and Frederick Foswell who bought the farm in ASM #52.

4. Who was the Invincible Man?

The Invincible Man was secretly the Super-Skrull, as revealed in Fantastic Four #32.4

5. What villain was responsible for the death of Mike Murdock?

Something of a trick question, for Mike Murdock never really lived and thus could not die. Still, to Karen Page and Foggy Nelson, it would appear that the Executioner was responsible, and only Matt Murdock would know that he himself was responsible for his brother's "demise".

Phil gets #4 and #5 and half-credit for #3. Forine correctly answered #1 (which I thought nobody would get) and gets half-credit for #3.

Trivia Quiz #43: Marvel

2011-07-05T03:33:00.000-07:00

1. If you wanted to travel from Asgard to Earth, in what direction do you need to go?

2. What non-mutant villain had his powers from childhood?

3. Excluding Uncle Ben, who were the first two non-villains to die in Amazing Spiderman?

4. Who was the Invincible Man?

5. What villain was responsible for the death of Mike Murdock?