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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 4, 2021 12:54:09 GMT -5
Superman #245, Giant #DC-7 On sale in October, 1971 Cover by Murphy Anderson My first of the glorious 100 PAGE SUPER-SPECTACULAR comics! It’s a big one, obviously, so I’m going to forego detailed synopses, and focus instead on what I, as a comics newby, learned from my 50 cent investment. This issue had two Superman reprints bookending the contents. “The Team of Luthor and Brainiac” was by Edmond Hamilton, Curt Swan, and George Klein from SUPERMAN #167, 1964. This was only seven years old, but I could detect a difference between this and the tone of modern comics, even if most of the comics in the Superman Family weren’t yet that far removed, with Curt Swan still Superman’s primary artist. I’d met the young Luthor in a prior issue of SUPERBOY, and Brainiac’s descendent in the Legion, but this was my first look at Superman’s top two villains, teaming up in what surely was a momentous event. This huge, 3-part story started out giving me the low-down on Luthor, soon followed with the origin of Brainiac, as Luthor discovers what was presumably previously unknown: that Brainiac was not a natural native of Colu, the planet which became a victim of what we now term The Singularity here in the real world: Artificial Intelligence overtaking human intellect and making itself master of civilization. Brainiac is instead a super-computer in android form. The story provides the origin of his descendent Brainiac 5, patching over the problem (of which I was then unaware) of 5’s claim to being the descendent of an android; he is instead the descendent of Brainiac’s adopted human son. I also got the back story behind that bottled city of Kandor I’d seen previously, shrunken by Brainiac and stolen from Krypton. In part 2, Luthor rewires Brainiac’s intelligence to “Twelfth Level” from its current Tenth. Returning to the comics’ hero, I get my first look at Superman using the key to his arctic Fortress of Solitude, and a quick look at the villains trapped in the Phantom Zone. Next, there’s a world where Luthor is considered its greatest hero and savior, and a return to Colu (unidentified by name, so I didn’t know the planet’s name at the time), where the humans have defeated their computer tyrants. In the final part, after Brainiac shrinks Superman, Brainiac hypnotizes Luthor to repress his knowledge of Brainiac’s artificial nature and Superman signals for the Emergency Squad, Kandorians wearing Superman’s uniform and enlarged to a few inches in height. All with Superman’s powers, just bite-sized! Brainiac is put on trial in Kandor (after he and Luthor are themselves shrunk to the appropriate dimensions), and they escape condemnation to the Phantom Zone only by ransoming the ability to cure the stricken Superman, who is honor-bound to allow them to depart (returned to full size, of course). This one obviously pegs out the LORE meter by exposing me to so much essential information in a highly entertaining story. While it may not have been as dynamically depicted as other stories I’d read, it delivered big on plot and variety, with at least enough emotional impact to register on a youngster like myself. It would have struck me very much in kind with the Legion reprints I’d seen, with impressive scope and some intriguing concepts. On the other end of the comic, “The Prankster’s Greatest Role” was by William Woolfolk and Al Plastino, from SUPERMAN #87, 1954. It begins with a startling scene of Clark Kent openly changing into his Superman identity before Lois’s unsurprised eyes, before flashing back to fill us all in on how Clark is playing Superman in the News Association’s annual play, at Lois’s behest. The play depicts Superman vs. The Prankster, which of course infuriates the pint-size Comedian of Crime, leading to multiple scenarios in which Clark, as “Superman”, must make genuine use of his powers to appear as rationally-explicable events. A fun enough story, spoiled a bit by the ending, in which Lois comes to suspect Clark really is Superman, only to be fooled with super-ventriloquism (my first of many exposures to this rather ridiculous super power) and a cardboard Clark Kent standee, which looks phoney even as Al Plastino draws the scene! Next up is Kid Eternity drawn by Mac Raboy, from KID ETERNITY #3, 1946. Here’s a character I’d never heard of. His power, the ability to summon assistance from deceased historical, artistic or literary figures, appealed a lot to a “Class Brain” like me. You’d have to be the smartest kid in the group to be able to think of the ideal historical figure to call upon in a given event—you can’t always rely on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington! I’ve also always been fascinated by depictions of the afterlife, so seeing Kid E and his pal Mr. Keeper hanging out in the clouds talking to Rembrandt would have been cool. This would also have been, I think, my first exposure to a reprint from a comic published by Quality Comics, teaching me to recognize some elements of that publisher’s distinctive house style, such as its use of lower-case text in the captions. The Atom in “The Time Trap” was by Gardner Fox, Gil Kane, and Murphy Anderson, from THE ATOM #3, 1962. Even as an early reader of comics not yet fully familiar with costume conventions of the genre, those striped types Chronos sported struck me as ridiculous, and detracted from any sense of genuine threat. I did really like the concept of the Atom, though, and I remember wondering about Chronos’s claim that “the U.S. Army has developed a type of flying saucer of which my ‘flying sundial’ is an improvement!” It was a cool mode of transportation, rather awkwardly modified to suit the villain’s inviolable “time” motif. Next up was “The Crowning of Super-Chief” by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino, from ALL STAR WESTERN #117, 1961. I wasn’t a Western fan, but I was intrigued by the concept of a super-powered Indian, and I liked the bizarre bison mask. What really stands out in retrospect was that this series was set prior to the arrival of Europeans, so the population is all Native American. No cowboys, no cattle ranches, no sheriffs, none of the usual Western trappings. That’s something you’d rarely see in a Western comic. At the end of the story, the editorial note explains that this feature only ran for three episodes, and asks the readers if they want to see the other two. My answer would have been “Yes”. Air Wave appears next in “The Adventure of the Shooting Sparks” by Murray Boltinoff, Harris Levy, and Charles Paris, from DETECTIVE COMICS #66, 1942. I would be enthusiastic to meet another Golden Age superhero I’d never heard of. While “Air Wave” seemed like a strange monicker, I liked it. I recall disliking the jagged shape on the mask, and I probably didn’t get the significance of that as a design component representing static or waveforms. I did like the antennas on his earpieces, though. The big mystery, frustratingly never explained, is why the character had a mustache that disappeared when he put on his mask! Air Wave’s powers interested me: the ability to transmit his voice through any metal objects and the ability to skate on transmission lines. You don’t see those every day in the comics! Hawkman appears in “The Super-Motorized Menace” by Fox and Anderson, from MYSTERY IN SPACE #89, 1964. Hawkman hadn’t appeared in the JLA adventures I’d read so far, so this was my formal introduction to the high-flying hero and his wife, Hawkgirl. Although the character would eventually become one of my favorites, I wasn’t impressed with the character, and I would not be upset when he would, in the coming month, be temporarily removed from the JLA, in limbo back on Thanagar. He flies, he talks to birds, he swipes weapons from his museum. For some reason, I couldn’t see how cool that blend was, and didn’t appreciate that costume that I would come to appreciate as one of the best designs in superhero comics. This story’s villain was underwhelming in comparison with others I’d seen. He’s a guy on a motorcycle that generates mini-tornados. The Giant Metropolis Mailbag features letters commenting on a recent Giant reprint issue. There’s mention of “our new process for reproducing the old stories” and a plug for the hardback Superman: from the Thirties to the Seventies, a volume I’d spend a lot of time browsing in the bookstore while my parents shopped in the Southland mall. Comments on issue 239’s map of Krypton made me feel like I’d missed out on something I would have liked seeing. The Glass Forest, Vathlo Island (“home of a highly developed black race”), it sounded like this map (credited in the lettercol to Sal Amendola) would have been a lot of fun to ponder. Finally, Curt Swan’s art is highlighted in The Many Faces of Superman: I remember once seeing an online critic characterize Curt Swan’s art as lacking emotion. Swan was in fact far better at depicting emotional expression than most comics artists, whose ranges of facial emotion depiction comprise cold stare, wide-mouth shock, range, and maybe, just maybe, a smile. That was 50 cents very well spent. Much of this material was better than the new comics I'd sampled, the stories were re-readable, the variety was big, everything stood well on its own, and it caught me up on a whole lot of DC lore while introducing me or better familiarizing me with some lesser-known characters. MONSTER APPEAL: Not a motivator here. 0 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: After this, most of the Super-Specs would be easy sells. 3 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: Good intro to prime Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, Infantino did some very moody stuff on Super-Chief, Kane's Atom was dynamic and clean, Raboy was a Golden Age classic. Lots of artistic skill on display for my study and appreciation. 3 out of 5! LORE: Hard to imagine packing more into a comic while still delivering satisfying stories. 5 out of 5!
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 7, 2021 20:50:14 GMT -5
Batman #238 (DC-8) 100 SUPER-SPECTACULAR PAGES World’s Greatest Super-Heroes Starring Batman On sale in November 1971 Cover by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano Last month’s Super-Spec had been a real winner with me, so I didn’t hesitate to lay out 5 dimes plus tax for another helping. As did the previous Super-Spec, the headliner got two stories reprinted, to open and close the issue. “The Masterminds of Crime” by David V. Reed, Curt Swan, and Charles Paris, was from Batman #70, 1952. The splash credits the art to Win Mortimer, but my trained adult eye agrees with all of the online attributions I see, declaring this the work of Curt Swan. Just look at these faces: “Mr. Roulette’s Greatest Gamble” by David V. Reed, Dick Sprang, and Charles Paris was first published in BATMAN #75, 1953. Mr. Roulette is an inveterate gambler who is taking on Batman and Robin for the thrill that gambling with money no longer can supply. When the apparent corpse of Mr. Roulette is unmasked, Batman spots a phoney, because Mr. Roulette had bragged about the “gum soles” of his shoes, while this dead guy has leather soles. I wasn’t familiar with the term “gum soles”, I don’t think, but I immediately associated them with some kinds of shoes that were still fairly common in the 60’s and early 70’s. The story finishes up with some oversized props, including a giant roulette wheel: I didn’t know at the time that these oversize props were a common feature of old Batman stories, but with the many reprints of the era, I’d soon figure that out. Neither of these stories would belong in a list of the Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, but they were entertaining enough. Doom Patrol: “The Doom Patrol” was by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani from MY GREATEST ADVENTURE #80, 1963. The introduction and origin of the Doom Patrol. I could just leave it there. It was astounding. Look, I hadn’t seen many origin stories yet. This was the best so far, and, thinking back on it, I might go so far as to say this was the best origin story ever. High praise, yes, but I can’t think of any others that delivered as fully as this one. We get the complete origin, and a complete first adventure with a fully realized key villain in General Immortus. Not just an origin story standing alone. Not the origin merged with a Frankensteinian edit of an inventory story like FANTASTIC FOUR #1. Not a half-baked first attempt like the first Thor story. Maybe Spider-Man’s origin competes, but that doesn’t give us a real first adventure like this one does. Premiani’s artwork was mature and elegant, the characters were memorable, and Negative Man had the coolest name ever and the most bizarre super-power imaginable. Oh, and one of the most haunting visuals, with his body bandaged to prevent leaking dangerous radiation, and the weird crackly negative being flying around. Robot Man’s design evoked an unromantic industrial quality unique in comics, and General Immortus proved that no one could do a more convincing old man face than ol’ Bruno could. So yeah, this one just blew me away. I’d never heard of them, but they were instant favorites. I wanted more, more, more of the Doom Patrol! Plastic Man in “Oh Plastic Man!” by Jack Cole is reprinted from POLICE COMICS #14, 1942. I knew from the splash page above that I was going to like this one. While I could see that the artwork had that old-fashioned look, it was so expressive and engaging and dynamic! The faces were full of character, the staging was expert, I could visualize all the movements and gestures on the page. The story had plenty of demonstrations of Plastic Man’s powers, introduced me to Woozy Winks, a comic relief character I didn’t hate (unlike the one coming up in the next story!), and filled me in on Plas’s rarely seen alter ego of Eel O’Brian, criminal (which was an unexpected twist). The story was even educational, as Plas has to rescue divers from the depths of the ocean and has to stop every 20 feet to avoid “the bends”, something I’d never heard of before. My father confirmed that this was really a thing, not just comic book science. The villain meets a grisly end, overcome by the bends before he can outrun a flaming sea…come to think of it, that was another concept that I was seeing for the first time, the idea that the surface of the sea could be set on fire if a flammable liquid was floating atop it! Sargon the Sorcerer by John Broome and Joe Kubert was originally published in SENSATION COMICS #57, 1946. Seeing this story again reminds me of how annoyed I was by the comic relief character, Max. The cartoony face looked out of place and like a very amateurish design, even to my young eyes. The idea of a character wearing a shirt collar up to his upper lip also bothered me, since I’ve always been a very tactile person, and seeing that made me feel almost as uncomfortable as wearing it. And I knew enough about art to know that the checkerboard design on Max’s suit couldn’t possibly align like that; it seemed like a very lazy thing for an artist to do. I’ve seen many other artists do that, over the years, and I still don’t get it. Is it supposed to be funny? It just seems like a hack’s approach, not a reasonable cartooning approach. Sargon has an adventure at the circus, where he makes very little use of the “Ruby of Life” on his turban. A very muscular Black man appears to threaten the circus, but it turns out he’s an African who raised the circus lion from a kitten. He just wanted to buy the lion back! The Golden Age Atom: “Danger in the Totem’s Eye” by Arthur Adler, Art Peddy and Bob Oksner was labeled “A Golden Age Story—Never Published Before”. I had figured out by this time that some of the modern day characters had different versions with the same code name published in the 40’s, so I don’t think it threw me for a loop to see an “Atom” with no shrinking powers. This story was apparently a leftover that got shelved when the super-heroes died out. I’d see a couple more of these from DC in the months to come, which gave me a sense of what happened behind the scenes, where stories might be prepared and then languish unused. In this one, Al Pratt is turned away from the American Indian Museum, where he had intended to do research for a college paper. He argues with the guard, since the sign outside says it is open until 9:00. Al’s interested in the artifacts from the Haida tribe of the north Pacific coast, and changes into his Atom outfit after dodging a tomahawk thrown by a trio of men in Indian costume, masquerading as a totem pole by standing on each other’s shoulders. Al dominates the fight, but is battered down from behind by the “guard”, who’s one of the gang. They’re not all that swift, because they assume the “school kid” got scared off by the tomahawk before the Atom arrived. The thugs put the Atom in a low-budget death trap, hanging over a pit of knives. The thugs make off with Indian loot, leaving the Atom to fall to his death as soon as the rope gives out. The Atom’s able to swing to safety right before the rope snaps: The brass ring leads him to the circus where he captured the gang. Turns out they’re a trio of acrobats, as suggested by their totem pole pose and the brass ring they dropped. OK, this one was a trivial bit of filler, and it didn’t do anything to make me appreciate the Golden Age Atom. I thought the costume—this being his late-career costume with dopey red crest on his mask—was as lame as the character was. The writer did refer to him as “the mighty mite”, but I don’t think I picked up on the premise of the strip: that this super-hero was shorter than average. Even if I had, it would have struck me as something that made the strip even lamer than it already was, but then, I was never picked on for being a “shrimp”, and I’ve always assumed it was kids like those who were the target audience. Aquaman: “The Aqua-Thief of the Seven Seas” by Robert Bernstein and Ramona Fradon originated in ADVENTURE COMICS #275, 1960. This would have been my first exposure to Ramona Fradon’s artwork. I liked it enough to remember her name, but female artists were clearly a rarity, so remembering it wasn’t much of a feat. (This scene does not actually occur in this story.) In this story, a tv station is broadcasting the “Ritual of the Jewels”, in which the 2 year-old prince of Timtu is gifted with his weight in jewels: 26 pounds of diamonds. When no one is looking, the toddler apparently pushes the chest of diamonds overboard, so Aquaman (with Aqualad) is called to assist. This Aqualad is much younger than the guy I saw in TEEN TITANS, or the guy I remembered from the Saturday morning cartoon. Aqualad looks like he’s about 9, but he evidently is quite capable, tackling the capture of a pirate crew’s submarine on his own (assisted by electric eels under his command). Aquaman recovers only an empty chest when he assists the king of Timtu, and the prime minister accuses Aquaman of stealing the jewels. Aquaman tries again, and this time returns to the yacht with phoney jewels filling the chest, leading the real thieves (the prime minister and his accomplice, of course) to expose themselves. Another trivial tale, but one with much livelier art, and at least featuring a character I already had some fondness for. Legion of Super-Heroes: “The Legion of Super-Outlaws” was by Edmond Hamilton and John Forte from ADVENTURE COMICS #324, 1964. These Legion reprints had yet to let me down, and I was eager to read another. First off, we’re told of a deceased hero, Jungle King. JK’s brother is out for vengeance, blaming the Legion for his death, and he finds the instruments of his vengeance on the distant planet Lallor, where atomic explosions granted superpowers to five infants. They grow up to be Beast Boy, who can change into different animals, Gas Girl, who can transform to gas, Life Lass, who can animate objects, Evolvo Lad, whose power misrepresents the science of evolution by permitting him to turn into an ape, and Duplicate Boy, who can mimic any other super-power. The heroes of Lallor are tricked into taking on the Legion, with Dupe and Shrinking Violet seeing sparks. It’s a two-part story, with plenty of demonstrations of the myriad superpowers, misunderstandings resolved, and ultimately, the Legion’s opponents for this tale establishing themselves as the “Super-Heroes of Lallor!” A cracking good story, to my view! It was surprising that these characters I’d never heard of were proving to be the most reliably enjoyable reads of everything I sampled. It was a super-hero overdose, but I loved it! Giant Batmail gives me another review of a comic I’d missed, BATMAN #233, which was apparently all Batman stories. I did learn a couple of things from this letter column: there was a Bat woman character I’d never known of before, and that bi-monthly comics come out every two months, but only have the date of the last of their two months. Technical details like this were actually pretty valuable bits of information to a nascent collector. The inside back cover featured a Key to the Super-Heroes featured on the wraparound cover. This was especially informative since the back cover featured the entire Legion of Super-Heroes, many of whom had not appeared in the few stories I had read so far. Code names, real names, and brief summaries of their super powers made for fascinating reading. I learned all the members of the Legion of Super-Pets, the Legion Reservists, and one hero who had been killed in action, who immediately became my favorite. Emphasizing just how lame the character is, the character list concludes with: “Not shown—THE ATOM (Al Pratt).” MONSTER APPEAL: Once again, not a motivator. I didn't need monsters so much any more when I could get a superhero fix like this one. 0 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: Despite the weak points, this was an example of how good comics could be. Doom Patrol, Plastic Man, Legion, all concepts I'd never heard of until the last few months, all rocketing to favorite status. 5 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: I wouldn't be seeing any new Premiani work, and it would be a while before Fradon returned to the newsstands, so this was some important exposure to a couple of artists I would come to rank among the best. 3 out of 5! LORE: Almost every Legion story was packed with critical information, but the bonus of the index to the cover supercharged this. I also got that glorious introduction to the Doom Patrol, and my first taste of Plastic Man with Woozy Winks and Eel O'Brian. I got a sample of the minor Golden Age features Atom and Sargon. 5 out of 5!
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 11, 2021 13:24:40 GMT -5
Adventure Comics #414 On sale in November, 1971 Cover by Bob Oksner I’d read JIMMY OLSEN, ACTION COMICS, SUPERBOY, WORLD’S FINEST, and now it was about time to sample the Girl of Steel, Supergirl. I’m sure I had never been exposed to any stories featuring this character yet, in comics or in any other medium, since she had not, to my knowledge, been on the cartoon in the 1960’s, or in the JLA or Titans, and in none of the Legion stories I’d read. I don’t recall being surprised at the character’s existence, though. I must have at least seen her book on the stands in prior months, seen house ads, mentions in the letter columns or promotional pages, and perhaps had casually noticed her before I ever started paying any attention to the comics stands. At the least I had pretty quickly figured that the Superman Family was a much bigger one than television had led me to think, and that this was a deep comic book franchise. It was a franchise that had satisfied me so far, and I wasn’t ready to try an issue of LOIS LANE yet, so this was my start with the super-ladies… “Vortex!” by Len Wein and Bob Oksner begins with a brand new sky scraper being whisked away by a tornado as soon as its owner exits the building. (The story takes pains to make clear that the building is empty, since whirlwinding away a 40-story building would definitely lead to casualties if anyone were inside.) On page 2, Wein informs me that Supergirl’s secret identity is “Linda” who works as a reporter for TV station KSF-TV, with a mustachioed guy named Geoff and a sour-faced woman who suspects she’s Supergirl. I believe this would have been the first comic that I’d seen trying to depict 1972 styles of clothing and hair, although Barry Allen did have a stylish cut with sideburns. Supergirl investigates, and her super-vision detects an “ionic trail” that she begins following to track the stolen erection: I guess it’s important for me to know that some “professor’s pill” is causing her powers to occasionally fade out. They hold steady long enough for her to save a train crossing an elevated track that has been one of the only things—other than the skyscraper—damaged by “the neatest tornado I’ve ever seen!” Supergirl tracks the stolen construction into the Grand Canyon, as the reader follows close behind her: Here she encounters the villain we saw on the cover, Vortex, who uses his gear to stir up a waterspout, which gives Supergirl a challenge, since her powers have turned off. She’s drenched with the spray before she can activate a “power-bracelet” which can, I assume restore her powers, or maybe substitute for them? When she comes to, she’s inside the skyscraper with Vortex and Harry Porgus, the owner of the building. Supergirl and Porgus are bound helpless as Vortex explains: he was the building’s architect, but Porgus took all the credit and got rid of Vortex. To get revenge, Vortex “learned how to control the power of centrifugal force”. He’s going to generate an earthquake to destroy the building, with Porgus and Supergirl trapped inside! But of course Supergirl’s powers have returned, and she “hurtles from the window, carrying the fat man to safety…” (Do we really need the body shaming, Len?) Porgus insists that Supergirl save the building, so she spends a few panels repairing damage Vortex has done to the building and the earth below it. Vortex has not taken the opportunity to flee; he takes the fight to her mounted on his flying ski-boat, trying to work up another waterspout, but Supergirl is not about to let him ruin another hairdo. She hurls a chunk of rock that wrecks his flyer, and he plunges to his demise within his own waterspout. Supergirl’s accidentally death-dealing victory doesn’t soothe Porgus’ state of mind. Why? Check out this surprise ending: As an adult, I see a lot of flaws with this story. Wein is trying to establish Porgus as an unsympathetic character, but there’s little on which to base Supergirl’s characterization of him as “heartless”. Yes, he cared about his building, but come on, that’s entirely reasonable, Supergirl! I guess the implication was that since he was willing to let Vortex get away, that he cared more about property than whatever further dangers Vortex could unleash, then revealing that he wanted Vortex to escape because he was family. The idea doesn’t land, though. I gather this was at least a little influenced by Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, with its embittered architect rebelling against the corporate pig that stole the credit for his masterpiece. Not that I would have gotten that at age 11. What I did get at age 11 was…well, how do I put this delicately? In his Oddball Comics work, Scott Shaw! has often drawn on this era of Supergirl, and he’s said that based on conversations with knowledgeable parties, that editor Joe Orlando and artist Bob Oksner were intentional in introducing titillating content and visual sexual innuendo. If you look very closely at the samples above, you might just get a little hint of some of what I’m talking about. But then again, maybe that’s just me. Maybe it was all innocent comics, and I’m seeing things that were never intended. Well, I can admit that with my heterosexual orientation and at the age when my hormones were kicking in, I found myself very interested in the leggy back views that Oksner was treating me to. These would become some of my very favorite parts of the female anatomy, and there was plenty on display for me to appreciate. Well, let’s cool those jets, young Mike, there’s more comics ahead. What’s next?... Zatanna the Magician in “The Tower of the Dead!” by Len Wein and Gray Morrow. Oh. My. Meet Mr. Gray Morrow, perhaps the best artist drawing realistic and gorgeous women in mainstream American comics, circa 1971. Meet Zatanna, in the feature you read about in a previous letter column, a beautiful woman in top hat and fishnet stockings, with yet another mustachioed boyfriend dress for the times (“Jeff” with a J). Zatanna’s in some mystical kingdom, held captive, along with Jeff, by some cavemen types. They’re taken to meet the king, Varnu. Len Wein chooses to give Varnu a distinct dialogue tic, inserting an “—eh—” in every sentence. OK, almost every sentence. But every one of his word balloons, anyway. Are there people who do that? Yes, there are. Do I want to read an authentic recreation of their annoying speech habit? No, I do not. Varnu takes the pair to The Tower of the Dead, an eerie castle on a barren plain. Zatanna and Jeff take on an army of skeletal warriors and discover a portal to Earth inside the tower, but they are interrupted by Gorgonus, a male gorgon, with snakes for hair. Zatanna distracts Gorgonus with a quick “Segami, Ylpitlum!” to create illusory duplicates of herself. Um, yeah, that’d work for me. When Gorgonus dives for one, he falls into the not-yet-in-focus portal: But we all know what gorgons do, right? The story ends with Jeff turned to stone, thanks to the creature’s stare on the previous page. What ever will Zatanna do? Gray Morrow didn’t get blatant with butt shots or crotch shots like Oksner, but c’mon, he didn’t need to. Those thighs, those hips, those legs, that face…I hadn’t seen anything like this yet. Just wow. I don’t think I’ll be missing next issue… And it’s reprint time, with “The Return of the Man With Animal Powers”, by Dave Wood and Gil Kane, from STRANGE ADVENTURES #184, 1966. This is a sequel to a story that was reprinted in ADVENTURE #412, so I missed the origin of Buddy Baker, who was given the power to adopt the abilities of any nearby animal, but, as he tells his fiancée Ellen, those powers are gone now. Buddy’s pal Roger arrives, reporting on the appearance of an alien spacecraft in the nearby wilderness. It may be the aliens who previously gave him animal powers! Along the way, Buddy and Roger find the very same aliens parading through the streets on the back of a bizarre pink beast, zapping everyone with rays that don’t appear to have any effect, at first…but then, all the townspeople turn on each other with violence. All except for Buddy…the ray has returned his animal powers! It’s also allowed a random tomcat to transform into a tiger, but Buddy can match him, taking him out of the picture. Next, Buddy adds in some gorilla power to knock out the aliens’ pink “xtona” steed (Dave Wood either forgot the requirement that the “donor” animal be nearby, or that limitation hadn’t yet been defined). Buddy does some kangaroo hopping to corral the crazed townspeople, then goes after the aliens. They’re digging up some gadget that will improve their hate ray. I don’t know why it’s buried on Earth, but that was the goal of the previous arrival in that first installment. Buddy defeats his opponents with a variety of animal powers, and gets to the booty before they do, shooting them with their own ray and putting them under hypnotic command. They’re forced to undo all effects of their hate ray and, after taking care of the rampaging xtona, Buddy sends them all packing. His powers are now permanent, and the next issue ad promises another “Animal Man” thriller coming up. “Animal Man”. He didn’t use that here, but obviously it fits, and I liked the sound of it. I liked the character a lot. This was the second time I fell for an obscure defunct character. I had no idea how few Animal Man stories had been published at this point in time, but I wanted to see them! In the letters column, “Super Fe-Mail”, I learned that Legion of Super-Heroes reprints would be confined to Superboy and various Super-Spectaculars. OK, won’t be missing any of those. There’s also mention of an old title called “Angel and the Ape” that sounds interesting. A previous issue had some pages out of order, and another reader asks and receives a synopsis of how Supergirl’s powers went on the fritz. Thanks from this newcomer, E.N.B.! “The Kidnapping” by John Albano and Bob Oksner concludes the issue. The opening caption fills me in on a weird situation: Linda’s living with a little girl, Judy, who was the daughter of an alien tyrant who tried to conquer Earth but was destroyed in a previous issue. Linda’s not the greatest adoptive parent, because the little girl is kidnapped while Linda is out shopping. The kidnappers somehow know that Linda is Supergirl, and blackmail her into committing crimes for them, in a disguise: Back in her Supergirl garb, she delivers the loot to a location arranged with the kidnappers, who have left a photo to prove that Judy is captive and alive. With her super-vision, Supergirl can read the fine print on a book of matches, and spots a phone number. Doing a reverse phone lookup courtesy of a phone book and super speed, Supergirl finds out the apartment to which this number is connected. Evidently the kidnapper’s girlfriend lives here, and he had put her number on the matchbook. Sure enough x-ray vision confirms that little Judy is tied up next to the trashy girlfriend of the kidnapper: It looks like Supergirl will be able to wrap things up, but then laser beams from off the street bisect the felon, after which Bob Oksner treats me to another butt shot: When the girlfriend flees into the street, she gets mowed down as well! Who’s causing this mayhem? Judy’s grandparents, arrived to take her back! Supergirl gives up her ward to the murderous couple, who saucer her back into space, and ends the story smiling at the memory of the precious little angel that had lived in her now-lonely apartment. The final caption reports that Supergirl returned all the items she stole and reported the incident to the police. No mention of the mutilated kidnappers, though. Justice is swift and brutal when dispatched by space-grandparents! MONSTER APPEAL: My monster-craving was being replaced by superhero-craving, but it wasn’t gone. I was, by this point, though, perfectly willing to invest in a comic with limited creature content. The Zatanna story did have animated skeletons and a gorgon, though. 1 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: I was pretty sure I’d be buying more ADVENTURE COMICS, especially if it had more Zatanna! Oh, and Animal Man. Supergirl, too. 2 out of 5! ART SCHOOLING: I’d seen Gil Kane before. This one had a somewhat different look than the Atom story I’d previously seen, which I now realize was because Kane was inking himself, something I’d later come to view as a mild negative. But boy oh boy, Gray Morrow! Wow! His style was immediately unforgettable, and I don’t think I ever from that day forward failed to recognize his work at a glance. 4 out of 5! LORE: While I did pick up a lot about Supergirl’s status quo as of 1971, virtually all of it would prove irrelevant in the years to follow. Geoff, the tv reporting job she apparently had in San Francisco (although she was never shown actually performing any work on that job), the power-bracelet, the fading powers, all would soon be gone. I still didn’t know how this Kryptonian girl was here, given that Krypton blew up…but then, there was that city of miniature Kryptonians… Zatanna’s gimmick was easy to figure out, but I had no way of knowing her father had had a long-running feature in ACTION COMICS since the days of Superman. Animal Man would remain a neglected character for another decade+, appearing in a Wonder Woman story I missed and as one of the “Forgotten Heroes” in DC COMICS PRESENTS. I never forgot, Buddy! 2 out of 5!
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 17, 2021 14:33:39 GMT -5
Superboy #181 Cover by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson One more for November 1971! It’s back for another helping of Superboy, an early favorite that would stay on my regular purchase list for a while. This month’s lead feature is “The Menace of the Mysterious Voyager” by Leo Dorfman, Bob Brown, and Murphy Anderson. It opens with Superboy helping some construction workers in Metropolis to open a vault they have uncovered. Inside the vault is the famed Jules Verne, early science fiction novelist, who has time traveled via his Time-Transvector machine into the 20th century! Evidently, Verne wasn’t just a creative writer, but an ingenious scientist, and he created a time machine to advance himself 25 years, but his device malfunction, carrying him into Superboy’s era (whatever that was as of 1971 our time). Superboy is skeptical, but Verne’s carrying authentic French money of Verne’s time, a picture of his wife, Honorine, and a letter to be posted, with an authentic Verne signature (as confirmed by an x-ray/telescopic vision check of the Metropolis library. Superboy takes the time-traveler on a tour of the modern world, so he can see that all of his predictions—solar energy, electric power, skyscrapers—came true. He even takes Verne on a tour of a restricted Naval base to see a nuclear submarine: “And imagine—it all began with the imaginary submarine Nautilus which I wrote about in “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea!” Elsewhere, though, some sinister figures are monitoring Superboy and Verne with a remote camera, and disaster strikes at the base: the glass between the observers and the water in which the sub is immersed shatters! The break is easily repaired (although unconvincingly illustrated to my adult eyes—Brown shows a tremendous deluge that would have almost instantly killed Verne, not something easily patched with a blast of heat vision!). Superboy continues to abuse his military security clearance by taking Verne to see the electronic mole: Inspired by “A Journey to the Center of the Earth”? Perhaps, but give some credit to Cave Carson, who was probably the undepicted genius behind this secret project! Verne is not nearly as impressed with a visit to a TV studio, where he and Superboy are watching a hootenanny performance. Verne declares himself “a man of science! To me, music has always been unimportant!” Next on the tour, a rocket launch, where another accident occurs as a launch stand collapses. The only casualty is Verne’s sleeve, which Superboy kindly mends. The tour over, Superboy returns Verne to his time machine, set to go back to his own era. Under cover of the dust from the unexpected explosion that follows, “Verne” escapes, wearing a gas mask. Was he blown to bits? No, he’s a secret agent, and he’s been gathering intelligence from military facilities with Superboy’s unintentional assistance. Of course, Superboy is on to him, and busts through the walls of the bunker in which “Verne” is meeting his handlers—the U.S. Military Counter-Intelligence. It’s all been a test intended to confirm that Superboy is a security risk! Not so fast, boys. That film “Verne” took? Erased with x-ray vision. The disasters were generated by “Verne” himself with a “vibro-beam ring”, but he gave the con away: Superboy knew that Verne was quite the music-lover, having written several opera librettos, and the sleeve, which Superboy repaired, had nylon thread. Superboy has proven himself a reliable steward of military secrets. Unconvincing to an adult reader, yes. I can’t buy the military giving free reign to a teenager, even if he did have super-powers. And the elaborate scenario on which the hoax was based seems unnecessarily expensive and risky. I’d have just accepted it as an 11-year-old, and, unlike many of the stories I’ve been revisiting, there were several elements of this one that stuck in my memory over the decades since I last re-read this comic: the music slip-up and the sleeve fabric error, in particular. In reality, I could easily imagine even a real music lover not being all that eager to listen to pop music of the early 60’s. Also, at that age, I hadn’t given any real thought to clothing fabric, so the idea that a form of fabric didn’t even exist in the past would have been a novel bit of information. Next, it’s reprint time with—oh boy!—another tale “from the files of the Legion of Super-Heroes”! This one is “The Six-Legged Legionnaire” from ADVENTURE COMICS #355, 1967, written by Otto Binder and drawn by Curt Swan and George Klein, introducing me to Insect Queen (who had appeared on this month’s BATMAN back cover). A splash page blurb informs us that “Lana Lang first became Insect Queen in issue #124 of SUPERBOY”. Well, reprinted there, anyway, but I understood this wasn’t her first appearance. The splash shows her resenting the Legion’s refusal to accept Superboy’s recommendation for her membership. As the story opens, Lana politely refrains from seeing who walks out of the phone booth Superboy enters in order to change back into his Clark Kent identity. As a reward, Superboy brings Lana with him to the 30th century to attend a Legion meeting. But since the Legion has a closed business meeting first, Lana’s left to explore the future Metropolish, which she does as a butterfly girl, using her Insect Queen costume and bio-ring. (The caption helpfully explains that this ring, given to her by an alien whose life she saved, can change her to any insect form). She saves actual Legionnaire Dream Girl, whose precognitive power evidently failed to predict the failure of the ultra-dyne fuel tank on the space cruiser she was flying in on. Dreamy’s compliments lead Lana to apply for membership at the Legion meeting. Alas, the Legion rules stipulate only “natural” powers, not technologically-generated ones, so Lana’s rejected. Chameleon Boy, Shrinking Violet, and Colossal Boy are called off to an emergency in Antarctica, and Lana’s new pal Dream Girl predicts that all three will run into serious dangers…and that Lana will face tragedy if she changes into a Moth Maid. With plenty of other options, Lana accompanies Superboy to Ice City: Villain Oggar-Kon is a condemned criminal who was sentenced to “slide the plank”, frozen in a block of ice ejected into space, but a meteor deflected him to Earth’s South Pole, where he revived. As the Legionnaire’s battle him, Cham, CB, and Violet all run into troubles that Lana saves them from, until finally Superboy is dusted with Green Kryptonite. Uh-oh! The only insect form that can help with this is that of the sphinx moth, which could shake out the Green K! (“The sphinx moth is often mistaken for a humming bird, because they can both vibrate their wings at super-speed and over in the air..”) Selflessly, Lana risks tragedy to save her beloved Superboy, losing her ring in the process, which traps her in this repellent insect form! Even Superboy can’t find it with his x-ray vision! Once the villain is defeated, everybody joins in looking for the ring, and it’s Light Lass’s generally useless power that does the trick, somehow directing her power to make things “super-lightweight” causing the undetected ring to rise: it was in Superboy’s cape all the time! For her heroism, Lana is granted membership in the Legion Reserves, where I guess the rules are less stringent. Seems like an honorary declaration to me, since she can’t help all that much from 1000 years away, but she’s proud of it! The Superboy adventures I’d read up to now hadn’t devoted much attention to Lana, but I was figuring out that anybody in the Superman Family was fair game for all sorts of weird stuff. Of all the superpowers to bestow on a teenage girl, being able to change into human/insect hybrids has always struck me as a strange choice. I’d later see stories in which Lana would change into a spider or other non-insect creature, which aggravated me; if a pre-teen kid knew that not all creepy-crawlies were “insects”, a professional writer surely should! Fortunately, she kept to genuine insects here, but I never questioned why an alien would have a ring that restricted its transformations to a specific category of Earth animals. This was probably my least satisfying Legion read so far, but it still had enough interesting visuals and variety to keep me entertained. The last story is “Super-Marriage…or Super-Flop?” by Frank Robbins, Bob Brown, and Murphy Anderson. Interestingly, this one is billed as “Superboy and his Girl Friend Lana Lang”. I guess if Lois and Jimmy could get headliner status, why not Lana? (Little did I know then how many incidental Superman Family characters would get such a privilege!) Superboy and Lana get into a spat on the way to the soda shop, when Lana gripes about being stood up for Superboy’s emergency-tackling responsibilities. They make up, but Lana’s ire is reignited when Superboy has to blow the scene for yet another emergency. Taunted by her catty girlfriends, Lana shares her vision of how things will be different in the future, when she and Superboy are married. He’ll get a regular job, such as…scamming Chinese peasants, Russian soldiers, and Asian elephant-trainers by making them think they can have muscles like his if they buy Superboy’s exercise equipment?! When Lana’s friends point out that this would be fraudulent, she realizes the consequences would be even worse for the people he’d suckered. Her fantasy is spoiled, and when Superboy returns from his mission, Lana is so mad she tells him off and hits him in the face with an ice cream cone before storming out. Lana’s friends see a nice opportunity and begin flirting as the story trails off. This was a kind of story you didn’t see much of in the Bronze Age, or even the Silver Age, unless you were reading DOBY GILLIS or something. Definitely not the kind of stuff I was reading SUPERBOY for, although I did enjoy sitcoms, so I guess I probably wasn’t too disappointed. MONSTER APPEAL: Well, Lana’s powers are kind of disgusting, but it was only the time-traveling Jules Verne that held any of the kind of appeal I held for fantastic fiction. At the time, I hadn’t actually read any of Jules Verne’s work. As of today, I’ve only actually read two of his novels, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I finally read this year, and The Ice Sphinx, his sequel to Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. It was a Gallaher family tradition to watch the film version of The Mysterious Island whenever it was televised, so I knew who Verne was at that age of 11, but it’s a strange gimmick to build a story around. 0 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: I’d be sticking with the SUPERBOY title for a while to come, but not because of issues like this. 0 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: Nothing I hadn’t seen before. It is interesting that I had so much early exposure to the work of Bob Brown, a minor figure in the comics art pantheon. He wasn’t flashy, but he was competent at presenting a story, especially with the slick embellishment of Murphy Anderson. 0 out of 5! LORE: Not much new added to my store of knowledge about the DC characters, other than seeing some additional Legionnaires in action. 1 out of 5!
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Post by berkley on Sept 17, 2021 19:53:55 GMT -5
Agree about Gray Morrow - too bad these back-up Zatanna stories weren't reprinted together, I don't want to buy Supergirl comics just for the 7-page back-up. I think the sexual innuendo is pretty clear in some of the poses and angles Supergirl is drawn in but Oskner's style leaves me cold so it's all wasted effort for me personally.
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 19, 2021 0:13:12 GMT -5
Agree about Gray Morrow - too bad these back-up Zatanna stories weren't reprinted together, I don't want to buy Supergirl comics just for the 7-page back-up. I think the sexual innuendo is pretty clear in some of the poses and angles Supergirl is drawn in but Oskner's style leaves me cold so it's all wasted effort for me personally. The Zatanna stories were eventually reprinted together:
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 19, 2021 0:20:41 GMT -5
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #3 On sale in December, 1971 Werewolf By Night in “Werewolf by Night!” Gerry Conway, scripter Mike Ploog, artist Sam Rosen, letterer I’d never heard of “Werewolf By Night”, of course, since this was only his second appearance, something I would have deduced from the letters page (which was filled with letters on SPOTLIGHT’s first issue feature, Red Wolf). But that didn’t matter: this was a monster comic, my first where the monster was the headline star of the comic. To the best of my recollection, I picked this up at a stop on a family Christmas trip to visit my sister in Michigan, so I wouldn’t have had much time to make my selections, but this would have been an easy choice for my monster-loving self. The splash page was memorable; there was nobody else drawing like Mike Ploog in the mainstream back then! The Werewolf, posed by a gnarled tree at the California seashore (ok…) in front of an impossibly huge full moon, with Jack Russell’s haunted face merging into the blue waves…tattered green jeans blowing, bristling fur over a lean and fit musculature, colored artfully in nighttime hues…this was awesome! The story opens with a gang of bikers attacking Jack (Werewolf) Russell’s sister Lissa as she drives down the 101 in her convertible to the Russell home. At the time, I wouldn’t have appreciated Ploog’s realistic renderings of the bikes, nor would I have picked up on the implications of sexual assault against her, but I would have been plenty disgusted by the brutal, stereotypical bikers, so I’d have been on the Werewolf’s side when he comes to her rescue. References to the events of “last issue” were too vague to be helpful, but I could ignore the Werewolf’s thought balloon—yeah, this early Werewolf’s thoughts were written out, something I’m pretty sure got dropped shortly after WBN graduated to its own comic. The bikers flee, the cops arrive, and the Werewolf runs, with Lissa declaring the beast has “done something terrible to Jack”. The next day, once again in human form, Jack gets a ride with Nathan Timly, who takes him to his own home to meet his wife, Andrea. Seems Nathan and Andrea know not only about Jack’s lycanthropy, but about his father’s secret book of spells, The Darkhold. Jack can’t provide the book, since he knows nothing about it, but Andrea refuses to believe him, and locks Jack up. (If I’d taken good care of my comics, I might have a moneymaker on my hands today, since this was the first mention of The Darkhold, which has gotten some attention via its mention in WandaVision.) Anyway, Jack’s guard in the dungeon is the misshapen brute Kraig, who has a metal claw in place of his right hand. (This would have amused me, since my best friend’s name was Craig.) But since full moons persist for three nights (something I learned from this comic!), they find they’ve got a werewolf locked up once night falls. He stays locked up, fortunately for the villains, and the next day, Conway brings me up to speed on Jack’s origin from last issue. Andrea still refuses to believe Jack doesn’t have the book, and sets Kraig to “persuade” him. Nathan interferes, and angers Kraig, who accidentally both kills Nathan and frees Jack. Jack escapes and hides in the stable, but passes out, awakening after sunset in time to transform on the third night of the full moon. (I would have dug the classic facial transformation panel, reminiscent of Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman change.) Andrea sends Kraig out to hunt the werewolf, we get the obligatory fight scene, and just when Jack is about to kill his enemy, lightning strikes Kraig’s upraised metal weaponized prosthetic, sparing Jack the future guilt of a death on his paws. Andrea’s goals have gone unspecified, but in the story’s coda, she attempts to “evoke long-dead gods…without the information she needed from the book called Darkhold”, and fails, meeting—according to Conway—“her penultimate end.” (At 11 years of age, I’d have been excused for assuming that “penultimate” was just a fancier way of saying “ultimate”, but I would soon learn better—and I’d learn it from comic books written by writers who had a better command of vocabulary than Gerry Conway in 1971!) I wouldn’t have picked up on it back then, but this finale with Andrea highlights a problem with WBN’s conceit of being narrated in the first person, something I would later see Roy Thomas explaining as his mandate for the book he originally wanted to call “I, Werewolf”. Since Jack wasn’t present for Andrea’s demise, Conway writes something about Jack seeing all this in his dreams. I don’t see any reason that Jack would have that kind of psychic connection to his captor, but I must admit it has a kind of cool vibe of the inexplicable: somehow he just knows what became of her, and he can only explain that as a “dream”. To close, Ploog treats us to another memorable panel, with Jack in human form by another gnarled dead tree, this time with the Werewolf’s face formed symbolically in the clouds of smock rising from Andre’s burning mansion in the background. A really nice bookend effect that wouldn’t have registered on me in my 1971 reading. While Ploog’s visuals were cool, the book over all didn’t make enough of an impact to convince me to commit, but I would sample plenty of issues once the feature graduated to its own series after one more SPOTLIGHT installment. At least I got a complete story, something that was hard to come by in the other Marvel comics I was beginning to sample. From the letters page, I would learn that totem poles were used only by Northwest Coast Indians, thanks to letter writer Sharon F. Urban (Miss), archaeologist from Tucson, Arizona. My modern day detective work shows that Miss Urban would work for many years at the Arizona State Museum; I found a reference to a lecture she gave in 2012 on the Hohokam society, an ancient native people who are known for having developed large complex irrigation systems in the desert Southwest. Sharon would have been 29 when she wrote in as “a recent convert to Marvel Comics”, and she was eager to see Red Wolf graduate to his own comic, which he of course did. She didn’t have any letters printed in Red Wolf, so I don’t know if she followed through on her promise: “By all means sign me up for a subscription.” MONSTER APPEAL: While I was very willing to indulge in DC Comics for superhero stories now, I still needed some monstrosities to tempt me to buy Marvels. But with everybody jumping on the monster bandwagon, they were easy to find. I’d never been especially interested in werewolves, but this was worth a try. DC, after all, weren’t devoting any of their comics at the time to a lead character who was a monster, like Marvel was! 4 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: This was one of the first Marvels for which I got in close to the start. Not feeling too far behind the curve, I could feel good about keeping up with this series, making it a viable prospect for future purposes, even if I wasn’t particularly inspired to follow it. 2 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: Mike Ploog was notably different from the artists I was seeing elsewhere on the stands, helping me begin to distinguish between artists. His work felt a little cartoony to me, but not displeasingly so. 3 out of 5! LORE: While The Darkhold would come to be a fairly significant item of lore in the Marvel Universe, it wasn’t apparent at this point, and the Werewolf was not a particularly useful on-ramp to Marvel’s continuity. It was geographically located far from the NYC hotspot of their superhero stories, and Marvel was keeping their monster lineup intentionally disconnected from the main continuity at the start. Monster book crossovers would precede the monsters’ introduction into the superhero universe. 1 out of 5!
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Post by kirby101 on Sept 19, 2021 8:29:54 GMT -5
I was just starting to buy most Marvel comics at this point. I bought Spotlight 1, 2, 3... I liked those early issues of WBN. But in hindsight it was Ploog's art that was the driving force, once he left, the book was only so-so.
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 19, 2021 10:22:16 GMT -5
Creatures on the Loose #16 Cover by Gil Kane “Warrior of Mars” by Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, and Bill Everett Gullivar Jones leaves the officer’s club, and with it, his career with the Marines, looking forward to a life beyond that of a war no one wanted, only to encounter a yellow-skinned wizard on a flying nimbus. This is Lu-Pov, who has journeyed from the ancient past of Mars. He is dying, but bestows upon Jones the Amulet of Understanding. Taking it in his hands, the nimbus rises with Jones aboard, and Lu-Pov passing lifelessly through it, left on the city streets as it transports Jones through time and space. Gullivar’s dark hair is shocked to white as he arrives at a monolithic city on Mars, populated with beastly humanoids with red skin and tails who are demanding tribute from the yellow-skinned race of Prince Hath. The cowardly Prince is handing over the beautiful Princess Heru, his own betrothed, to become the bride of the red-skinned Martians’ leader Ar-Hap. But the new arrival Gullivar Jones interferes. The Amulet has granted him understanding of the Martian language, and he has remarkable strength on this planet, breaking one kidnapper’s neck with his bare hands before snatching up a sword to become the only one brave enough to resist the “lobster-backs” threatening this timid race. Jones’ strength on the lesser gravity of Mars makes it easy to bound onto the back of a lizard-like mount and follow in pursuit of the abducted Princess, and the barbaric Martian dumps Heru, leaving Gullivar to abandon the pursuit to rescue the Princess before she hits the ground. Heru recognizes the amulet and identifies Gullivar as “the one promised by Lu-Pov”, who had left them to find “the greatest champion in any time or place.” Gullivar doesn’t think he ranks quite that high, but Heru is confident in Lu-Pov’s judgment. Heru acquaints Jones with Martian culture: the people live and do commerce in tents outside the city, which is forbidden from entry by all, both the timid yellow Martians and the barbaric red ones. The yellow Martians are the “Hither People”, who mature quickly and retain their youthfulness until near death (like the more ancient-looking Lu-Pov). The dead are set adrift on barges on the River of the Dead, which leads to the Land of Snow and Ice. Over the following days, Heru shares more stories, and the pair fall in love: But their romantic tryst is interrupted by a trio of Wing-Men, purple pterodactyl-like beings, one of whom snatches the Princess. Jones leaps to grab one of the three, but is kicked off, landing unconscious on a funeral barge streaming down the River of the Dead! Only ten pages, but satisfying stuff thanks mainly to the engaging work of Gil Kane. Years later, I’d see more yellow-skinned green haired people in his SWORD OF THE ATOM miniseries. I wasn’t at all versed in this kind of heroic fantasy but I did like what I read here. The world-building was kind of like what I’d enjoyed in the Legion of Super-Heroes stories, and I do remember thinking the white-haired look was pretty cool (making it a lot easier to accept it when I eventually turned gray, myself!). At this time, Marvel was padding a lot of its minor efforts with reprint material. First up, “The Impossible Tunnel!” by Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, and Dick Ayers, from STRANGE TALES #96, 1962. The splash shows a giant octopus-like monster attacking an underground drilling vehicle manned by a large number of men in construction outfits. The story then flashes back to the college days of Bob Saunders, who is teased over his dreams of digging a tunnel from the US to Europe. Later, atomic powered-drills make that possible, and Bob convinces the government to back his efforts to do just that. All is going well until they encounter the octopus, but they manage to defeat it. To Bob’s surprise, they then encounter an underground civilization, with people and animals and plant life and elegant architecture. This is a Utopian community of peace and prosperity, the last unspoiled society on Earth, and Bob recognizes that its idyllic way of life will be destroyed by contact with the Earthlings above. Freeing the octopus, Bob allows it to wreck the equipment, collapsing the tunnel as the men escape back above ground, and convinces the government that no further attempts be made. The undersea people are known to the public, but are beyond contact ever again. And while the public assumes Bob would be depressed his failure, Bob is always happy, knowing that he has saved a paradise. Nothing too special here. I’d seen television shows that tried to make a “monster” out of an octopus, but I could never work up any fear or even the slightest revulsion for these creatures. Hypothetically, one would think that the mechanics of tentacles would be as unnerving as spider legs or stingers or powerful jaws lined with razor-sharp teeth, and perhaps that is the case for some, but it never was for me. The octopus has always been an elegant and fascinating animal to me, not the least bit repelling or frightening. Next is “The Frightened Man” by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, from TALES TO ASTONISH #33, 1962. John Bentley is a New York City commuter who is unnerved by the unceasing worries over the Cold War. He tries to distract himself with his scientific experiences and, to his surprise, develops a ray that makes objects disappear, only to reappear shortly thereafter. The only explanation: he has invented time travel! Surely he can modify this ray to send things to the past—including himself! That’s the answer! He’ll pack up and head to a time before this nightmarish atomic age, back when the world was safe to live in! His machine works, depicted cinematically by the genius Jack Kirby, showing with just a few panels in a throwaway story how to bring pictures to life. Without resorting to motion lines, we know from panel one that the front door of the time cabinet is dropping down, thanks to Kirby’s choice of picking the moment when the door has covered the speaker’s face. In panel two, the distortion of straight lines bring a waving fadeout, and the vortex of panel three snatches the cabinet away from us, sinking into the page at high speed, before materializing in panel four in a flash, beginning to come into focus and solidity. It sends him to… The French Revolution, where his garments suggest to the peasants that he is an aristocrat suitable for the guillotine! The Spanish Inquisition, where his Time Cabinet marks him as a sorcerer suitable for execution! Fourteenth Century Europe, the era of the Black Plague! First Century Rome, in the gladitorial games at the Colosseum! And of course, he then returns to his own time, understanding that every era must face its own problems, and there is no escaping to a better time. It was a predictable tale with a trite lesson, but it would have been fresh to me, and given me a bit of a leg up on some key historical events. I’m sure that every one of us who read comics in our youth had the experience of knowing about a lot of real world history and science that our peers hadn’t been exposed to, and that we had a significantly larger vocabulary than they did, too, thanks to stories like this. In the “Creature Features” editorial page, Roy Thomas fills us in on the development of this issue’s lead feature. It’s based on an obscure 1905 novel by Edwin L. Arnold called “Lt. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation”. This novel reads like a rip-off of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Warrior of Mars books, but it predated them! Was it Burroughs’ “inspiration”? No way to know for sure, but its copyright had expired, and was now public domain, although Roy notes that a 1965 edition by Ace was still in print, helpfully providing an address from which to order it. I can’t help but wonder if this was part of a deal with Ace to avoid legal complications; while the copyright may have expired, there could be trademark disputes that Ace could raise. Perhaps that’s why the series ran in CREATURES ON THE LOOSE rather than under its own “Gullivar Jones” banner as a new title. Roy explains that Marvel was actively seeking to expand their “heroic fantasy” titles, given the success of Conan. He mentions some false starts: perhaps they had been competing with DC who had won the ERB rights after Western Publishing lost them. DC was about to begin running John Carter stories in WEIRD WORLDS, but Marvel would jump on the series when DC relinquished the rights a few years later. Roy notes that the original novel has served only as inspiration, requiring some updates to suit their needs. Specifically, he mentions Jones traveling in time to an ancient Mars when alien civilizations would seem more feasible. I tried to read the novel on the Gutenberg.org website a few years ago, and it was pretty primitive and boring, so I certainly wouldn’t complain about Thomas and Kane jazzing it up a lot more. In conclusion, he notes that the name of the wizard in the story is a hat-tip to Dick Lupoff, who alerted Thomas to the original novel. Lupoff’s name is one that I’d remember when I discovered his book All In Color for a Dime in the Memphis Main Library. It was a collection of comic book essays from his fan publications (by various authors), and I checked it out repeatedly as I became more and more enraptured by comic books and comic book history. MONSTER APPEAL: Increasingly less important to me, but a title like “Creatures on the Loose” would trigger some attraction. I did get lizard mounts, flying dinosaur people, aliens, time travel, and science fiction from this one. 1 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: This book does mark a pretty important collecting milestone, as it was the first time I was in on the ground floor of a new feature. It wouldn’t turn out to be a long lasting one, but at least I was there at the start, and seeing the origin and debut of a comic book character felt like a big deal. It was also important to get some exposure to the Atlas-era shorts that kept Marvel alive during the lean years. This was one of those early comics that comes along with some incidental memories: I got this on a family vacation trip and read it in a motel room, so we must have visited some family in Texas or Florida over the Christmas vacation in 1971. 3 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: It wasn’t my first exposure to Gil Kane, but this was mature Kane, operating at the level he would maintain from here on out. I didn’t appreciate the contributions of the inkers yet, but Bill Everett did a fine job here as well. He’d become one of my favorites, eventually, and from a mature perspective, I can see what his talent added to the pages. I’ve already commented on some of what I now see in even a minor Jack Kirby work. I wasn’t analyzing such things then, but I was absorbing them! 2 out of 5! LORE: Gullivar Jones wouldn’t go on to be a significant part of the Marvel lore, but in the grander scheme of things, I did get a serving of a different genre than I was accustomed to, and I got some behind-the-scenes info, which was important to me.
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Post by kirby101 on Sept 19, 2021 10:49:22 GMT -5
Good assesment M W. Those reprints were my first exposure to the earlier Marvel Monster books. Kane really loved doing this kinda of book. A note about Everett, who was a wonderful inker. Mark Evanier was once talking to Kirby about one of the Thors Everett inked, Jack didn't accept Everett inked him, said "That can't be, Bill is a great artist, why would he be inking anyone else?" Mark had to show him the issue.
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Post by brutalis on Sept 19, 2021 11:35:07 GMT -5
Actually M. W. it is the reverse on all of the Marvel Monster books. They all began life as reprints of the Atlas 1950 fantasy, horror and science-fiction shorts. Like any reprint series they were all hit or miss in sales, depending on the writer and artists and what captured a youngsters own attention. The BIG Monster stuff of Kirby and Ditko went over big as 70's television was introducing kids to 1950/60's sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies.
The horror reprints fared less well in the sales department as kids wanted to see the well known Universal monsters and not ghosts and spooks or morality tales, so management made the decision to "pad" these horror reprints with newly created modern stories in the hopes of bolstering sagging sales. As time has shown, it didn't work out. Now I do love me some Gullivar Jones and Thongor (I have their complete stories) as they would become the focus part for us collectors after these reprints were cancelled but at the time 10 pages of them wasn't enough of a reason for my spending.
Lucky me though, as I liked both the new and reprint stories it was easy for me to convince my neighboring kids with trades. I was quite happy trading off used toys or candy for these monstrous gems.
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 20, 2021 19:03:59 GMT -5
Superboy #182 Cover by Nick Cardy On sale in December, 1971 This story opens with an odd little panel: the DC editors arguing about whether to reveal “the real story” they found “lost in the files!” That story is… “The Forging of Young Batman” by Leo Dorfman, Bob Brown, and Murphy Anderson In Smallville, young Clark Kent reads a newspaper account of the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. He suits up and heads to Gotham, where he catches young Bruce Wayne trapping an intruder to Wayne Mansion with an “electric web”. It’s a harmless trap, according to Bruce, who retells the story of his parents’ murder. Superboy, who was away from Earth at the time, and thus couldn’t save the Waynes, offers to help Bruce find the murderer, but Bruce wants exclusive credit for revenge. Why’s Superboy so interested? Because his time-scope has given him partial glimpses of his future partnership with Batman, and he wants to help Bruce move beyond his vengeful motivations to a brighter future. Superboy finds Bruce getting a good start on what will be his Batman career, with bodybuilding, acrobatics, martial arts, and elaborate communications set-ups that alert him to crimes. But he’s waiting for one particular call, dictated by, of all things, the zodiac?! That call comes on this, the last day of Aquarius… While Superboy is responding to arson at the Gotham Museum and a truck accident at the bay, Bruce is suiting up in a costume of his own. At the pier, Superboy finds a curious symbol: two parallel wiggly lines (that look a lot like Wonder Woman’s later chest emblem to me, but she was still sporting the eagle when this was published): No, it’s the sign of the Zodiac Killer—not the one we knew in the real world, but a serial killer in the DC Universe who killed by the stars, leaving the matching Zodiac symbol and murdering in ways suggestive of the star sign. The black-clad Bruce is also on the case, as Superboy discovers. Guess what? The Waynes died under the sign of Sagittarius, and cops found the Zodiac Killer’s trademark appropriate symbol left behind at the scene: Superboy’s next idea is to fine-tune his time-scope to create a “visi-computer” that simulates Superboy and young Bruce Wayne teaming up with the adult Superman and Batman! (Wait, are we sure this isn’t a Bob Haney story?) The simulation ends with Superboy and “Batlad” showing up their adult counterparts. A fun show, but Superboy turns it off—apparently the only purpose of this two-page sequence was to show Superboy “how good a fighter Bruce will be when he finally straightens out?” In Gotham, the Zodiac Killer is planning his Pisces murder… In Bruce’s lab, Superboy finds the orphaned hero-to-be investigating bats’ ability to fly in the dark, and Superboy gives Bruce his own costume: Bruce rejects “Batlad” in favor of “The Executioner”. His “fact microfile” (“like an automated encyclopedia!”) has pinpointed the site of the Pisces crime, and Bruce intends to make himself the target by winning a fishing contest (thanks to some ingenious application of chemistry!). “The Executioner” captures the Zodiac Killer, only to discover… …that there is no “Zodiac Killer”! A failing reporter has been planting the signs at the scenes of various other murders and accidents, taking advantage of conveniently suggestive found items like a twisted wrought iron fence and a one-way sign that happened to look like the date’s Zodiac symbol, or sometimes just got “lucky”: the Aquarius symbol was really just a tire track, the Pisces symbol was a gouge made by a chain on the wood of a boat! Superboy has shown every step of Bruce’s crimefighting career to be in error, or endangering innocents. Bruce’s final line in the story: “Just remember—I must have done something right! Didn’t I catch Higbee [the reporter] on my own? Or did I? Maybe Superboy helped me secretly!” Presumably, this comeuppance has taught Bruce a lesson, because Superboy knows that they will someday make a great team! “Album of Unsung Heroes” by David George, Bob Brown, and Murphy Anderson follows, with Superboy consulting his mento-tape to review some other brave youths he’s known, youths who will not go on to the sort of fame Bruce will achieve. It seems tasteless to present a “Zodiac Killer” in a Superboy comic just a couple of years after the real-life Zodiac Killer finished his spree (so far as we know). I don’t remember how aware of the case I was at age 11, but I doubt I made the connection. I was mostly interested in the titular forging of Batman, and I remember three things making a visual impression on me: the proto-Batman costume, the tire track, and the Pisces sign being gouged into the deck railing by a chain. Interesting how specific individual elements of a story can stick with you even when the story itself doesn’t. I remember reading about a psychology experiment in college, where participants read a barely coherent story about Indians and were asked to recall it different amounts of time later. The one thing people tended to remember was a scene where something black came out of someone’s mouth…and that’s about all I remember of it, myself. Ah, here it is, the War of the Ghosts! The sequence with the “visi-computer” provided some interesting action sequences, but from an adult perspective is superfluous and nonsensical. I’m sure I took it in stride, but it sticks out like a sore thumb today when I try to synopsize the story. What’s the point in simulating how young Clark and Bruce would compare against their adult counterparts? And what’s with this time-scope machine, anyway? As far as I knew, this was something Superboy frequently used to check on the future, but I would learn that he had a zillion ways to do that, including, obviously from the Legion stories, by travelling in time physically. Could he have traveled back in time and saved the Waynes? I don’t remember asking this question, but Dorfman obviously didn’t want to open that can of worms. Folks like Zar-al the Krypton Kid (ADVENTURE COMICS #242, a Kryptonian time traveler who assists Superboy but fails to find the element Zeelium, which could save Krypton. Zar-al returned to Krypton to share its final hours. And Dworn, from SUPERBOY #65, an interplanetary traveler who could change anything into gold. It also turned out that Kryptonite gave Dworn super-powers, so he left Earth with a stash of Green K so he could become a super-hero on his own world, a world where he wouldn’t be endangering his pal. And finally Supremo, from SUPERBOY #132, in reality Allan Vale, whose scientist uncle gave him artificial super-powers…powers he used to save Superboy before he died from the terminal disease he was suffering from. I think I liked these little history lessons you’d get in that era of DC comics, probably more than I would have liked the original stories. Just get to the good parts of showing me some of these other heroes…not that any of these guys was all that impressive visually or conceptually. My adult eyes are detecting the possibility of Dave Cockrum contributing to the art on this one. Cockrum was an assistant to Murphy Anderson, so it certainly could be. This issue’s reprint was “The Amazing Tots of Smallville” by Jerry Siegel and Al Plastino, from SUPERBOY #102, 1963, tagged as “an untold tale of Superboy when he was a Superbaby”. The caption identifies this story as occurring during World War II, and deals with black market bootlegging of rationed items. Scarface Louie is the brains behind the outfit, operating a gasoline bootlegging setup in Smallville, but Professor Lang has announced an invention that will be able to locate their supply of petrol, and Jonathan Kent has been “shooting off his mouth demanding the law drive our gang away from Smallville!” They attempt to firebomb the Kent General Store, but Superbaby eats it, thinking it’s a chocolate egg (I guess it took a while for that super-intelligence to kick in!), then manages to destroy the crooks’ car. At a masquerade party for the toddlers, on a schooner owned by the Science Research Society, Clark is dressed like Samson, Lana like a nurse, Pete Ross as Robin Hood, and Lex Luthor as a buccaneer. Wait, Lex Luthor was from Smallville?! The black marketeers attempt to extort Lang’s invention by aiming a gun from a boat. Little Lex makes convenient trouble by destroying the radio, then makes Clark walk the plank, which allows the super-strong tot to disarm the crooks, who flee like cowards. Scarface Louie has local accomplices who hide the bootleg gas under the hay in a wagon, and the kids go on a hayride in that very wagon! Coincidentally, an Earth-dog ends up as a proto-Krypto: This dog manages to take out the bumbling crooks himself, even appearing to fly! Clark really does fly, but it appears that helium balloons are carrying him off. He plunges back into the haywagon, rupturing the tanks of gas beneath his little red-briefed bottom. Clark saves the dog from the cave in which he had been trapped, removing a moss-covered boulder (“just as Superboy will often save Krypto from Green Kryptonite meteors in the future!”). In a far-too complicated finale, Superbaby foils the crooks, revealing them to the police, and Pa Kent advises him not to fly in public, lest he spoil the secret identity he’ll have in the future. But his flight has already made little Lana suspicious… This kind of tripe was no substitute for a Legion reprint! I’m baffled as to why the writer wanted to show Superbaby experiencing a preview of Krypto, and devoting so much of the story to that. And did Superboy routinely rescue Krypto from Green K? I recall it being the other way around, more often. I’d forgotten that Silver Age lore had established Luthor as a Smallvillian. Man, that had to be torture for an ambitious young genius, but the story does show that even early on in the Silver Age, Smallville could be and have whatever the story called for, including world-class scientists (wait, wasn’t Professor Lang an archeologist in a previous story?), Science Research Society throwing parties for little kids, gangsters running criminal operations… Its environment included lakes, forests, mountains, plains, whatever was needed for the plot. I suspect my patience with SUPERBOY was wearing thin, but I continued buying most of the issues following, and was soon rewarded with the return of the Legion, but I’m glad I was in on this era of the series. Horror, retcons, sitcoms, retrospectives…this book did, at least offer variety! MONSTER APPEAL: It’s about time to drop this. By this point, the superheroes had me in their grip. 0 out of 5! COLLECTING INSPIRATION: I was already hooked on this series, so this didn’t do much to advance the collecting bug. 0 out of 5! ART-SCHOOLING: More of the Brown/Anderson team, Al Plastino, and possibly Dave Cockrum. Nothing new to see here. I’m struck again by how much Bob Brown work I saw in these early months. 0 out of 5! LORE: A bit of the Batman origin that never again was acknowledged…I guess the DC editors from panel 1 clamped down on this game-changing information! Still, I did get a bit more on Batman’s origin that remained valid, with young Bruce training himself in a variety of skills.
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Post by berkley on Sept 20, 2021 20:15:43 GMT -5
Agree about Gray Morrow - too bad these back-up Zatanna stories weren't reprinted together, I don't want to buy Supergirl comics just for the 7-page back-up. I think the sexual innuendo is pretty clear in some of the poses and angles Supergirl is drawn in but Oskner's style leaves me cold so it's all wasted effort for me personally. The Zatanna stories were eventually reprinted together:
Yes, and I take back wat I said earlier, because it looks ike it might be cheaper to buy the three Supergirl comics than the collection. But the collection seems to be priced around $45 US, which is way out of my price range.
Great cover, though!
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Post by MWGallaher on Sept 20, 2021 21:01:51 GMT -5
The Zatanna stories were eventually reprinted together: Yes, and I take back wat I said earlier, because it looks ike it might be cheaper to buy the three Supergirl comics than the collection. But the collection seems to be priced around $45 US, which is way out of my price range. Great cover, though! Plus, the collection is edited to make the multiple installments into a seamless page-to-page, so you lose some splashes. In something like this, you want all the Gray Morrow art!
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Post by berkley on Sept 20, 2021 21:52:13 GMT -5
Yes, and I take back wat I said earlier, because it looks ike it might be cheaper to buy the three Supergirl comics than the collection. But the collection seems to be priced around $45 US, which is way out of my price range. Great cover, though! Plus, the collection is edited to make the multiple installments into a seamless page-to-page, so you lose some splashes. In something like this, you want all the Gray Morrow art! Absolutely. Don't want to miss any of those story pages. The cover I can see online whenever I want.
Werewolf by Night: I think my first issue was the one after this one, Marvel Spotlight #4, but I'd have to read them again to be sure, and my WbN comics seem to be buried in a not easily accessible corner right now. I'll have to clear that up sometime soon. I know I missed at least the first issue because I remember it seemed to be in the middle of the story when I started reading.
Anyway, I really loved those few early Werewolf by Night issues that i did manage to read. The whole idea of the mysterious book of magic, the Darkhold, connected with my imagination in a big way, for some reason. And Ploog's art was perfect for the spooky atmosphere, though I was still too young to pay much attention to the names of the creators and at a conscious level probably didn't think of how effective the artwork was, I just experienced the effect . WbN is still probably my favourite werewolf thing in any medium, movies, books, comics, whatever.
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