Gone & Forgotten

No Sad Songs for a Scarlet Speedster

2012-02-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

Those kids don't know where to look.

The rumor is that DC Editor and midwife of the Silver Age Julius Schwartz had a rule for selling comics; put a gorilla on the cover, and it would sell. Additionally, the rule expanded to include fire, motorcycles, the color purple (as in the actual color purple and not, you know, The Color Purple, although look for Dynamite to launch their Purple Powers line next year with original covers by Alex Ross and special deluxe bonus covers by a photo negative of Alex Ross) and interrogatives (Why is Batman Ironing the Joker’s Shirts?? I know I’d like to find out).

What would also help sell a comic by gracing its covers would be big tits, wet ass, and well hung dudes sticking it in big open beavers, but then maybe I’m pitching to a different market. I’d have been a millionaire in the 1950s. Also, imagine a switcheroo world where there were tits on comic book covers but Julius Schwartz was running Maxim and every cover had a gorilla riding a purple motorcycle out of an inferno. Hey, as an aside, how do you check for a gas leak in your home office?

Also a part of the passel of tried-and-true comic book cover sales-boosters was flat-out blubbering like a stinking, fat, stupid baby. Tears sold comic books – no doubt it was part of the recipe for success enjoyed by the romance books, but the trend passed handily into super-hero adventure stories. Superman wept over many a man seemingly murdered by a misuse of the Man of Steel’s mighty super-powers, Batman bawled over the occasional cadaver of the Boy Wonder, and Green Lantern was snuffling through his own snot after he woke up in that hotel room with that dead hooker and a suitcase of Peruvian flake in his bed. “Why is Green Lantern Stuffing This Rolled-Up Carpet In The Trunk Of The Used Car He Bought For Cash At A Needles Dealership? Why Is He Buying So Much Lighter Fluid??” (PS Also purple and a gorilla.)

Still among the crying cadres over at DC in the swinging Sixties, the weepingest of the all was – by my estimation - the fastest man alive, Barry “Flash” Allen. I count at least a half-dozen covers where the Flash loses his shit and hucks back salt tears like an emotional deficient, not the least of which is the spectacularly treacly, awkward and plain unusual Flash #198…

I think maybe she's trying not to laugh, champ.

The story – amazingly titled “No Sad Songs for a Scarlet Speedster” – is the handiwork of well-respected writer and editor Bob Kanigher, whom youmight recall as being the inspired hand behind many of DC’s best war stories and the utterly berserk hand behind the story of how one time Wonder Girl fought a jive-talking splooge fountain. Basically, he was never at home writing the super-hero stuff.

Also ill at ease, by his own reports, with the super-hero stuff was penciller Gil Kane, who nonetheless never failed to put a single line down to paper which didn’t punch you out in front of your girlfriend and steal your wallet. Kane was always amazing, even in this … unusual … story. “The worst thing Gil Kane ever drew” is like “The worst thousand dollars a guy gave you for no reason to spend however you want.” The worst Gil Kane is also inked by Vince Colleta, but I digress …

The premise of the story is that The Flash is an imbecile. More specifically, he’s rendered an imbecile while trying to show off for three recalcitrant, angry youths he’d been asked to entertain at what I suspect was an Orphanage for Ungrateful Children. Probably most of these kids had parents, they were just such dicks about it they had to go to the orphanage.

Ahhh-ahhhh, he'll touch every one of us!

The three callow youths – I didn’t bother to remember their names, they’re just that same group of three kids who always appeared somewhere in the Sixties and Seventies when someone wanted to show ‘a diverse group of youngsters’, one black guy and a coupla white kids, one of ‘em’s a girl. Infinite Junior Mod Squads, as far as the eye can see – sneer and turn their back on Flash, who just wants to spin on a single finger like a top for their amusement (This is, legit, what the Flash does to entertain kids. It’s even mentioned in an earlier issue as the stunt Flash likes to pull for kiddie bashes. I can’t front, I’d like to see that, possibly at that B-Boy competition Red Bull holds every year in Bavaria or wherever).

To get on their good side, the Flash tries to build a clubhouse for the kids, only to end up having to haul bricks and defend the kids from gunfire when a group of baddies show up and take affront at the casual abandon of zoning permit application procedures happening on their turf. The Flash takes a ricochet to the part of the brain which manages “self-respect” and promptly adopts the mental and emotional level of a five year old or something.

The kids take the Flash to a cave, as you usually do for victims who have suffered traumatic head injuries, and then hunker down to endure a siege by the aforementioned baddies, revved up for more of the o’ bang-a-bang. While the seemingly powerless Flash hangs out in the cave, communing with animals (I kid you not. He nurses an injured pigeon named Petey back to health while hiding out in the cave), the kids find their stones and civic responsibility, and defend the Flash long enough for him to get a second swat on the noggin and come back to normal.

Mind you, not before this scene happens:

Thanks to my Super DC 1976 calendar, this is an image
I will forever associate with Thanksgiving.

This is THE weirdest thing I think I may have ever seen in a comic book, and I’ve seen … almost everything else that’s ever happened in a comic book since forever.

Flash recovers thanks to cerebral hemorrhaging and the grace of the Almighty, and the kids learn something I forget what, leaving our hero to drag his tear-soaked cheeks and snot-bedewed upper lip back home and to a much deserved rest …

Hey lady, that guy probably has a major concussion, you shouldn't let him fall asleep!

A short'un: DIE CUT!

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

He looks like he's wearing the Epcot Center.

There is no end to the list of possible contenders for the title of the Nineties-est character ever – certainly Rob Liefeld’s Cable might just be the pouched and shoulder-padded patron saint of the breed, with the only possible also-rans being every single other character Rob Liefeld created since then including up to now. For my money, though, no one character had more potential – wasted potential, mind you, but it was the Nineties so almost no comic lived up to its potential – to hit the heights than Marvel UK’s Die-Cut.

He is the picture perfect Man of Tomorrow for the Mylar Age – he’s got a cybernetic eyepatch, a solid-gold shoulder-pad the size of an Ikea Billy bookshelf, wires and knives and blades bigger than baby deer and guns that appear to be metal cylinders with no trigger or chamber, plus somehow his feet were always off-panel. Always. Even his name was a combination of two things which you wouldn’t want to have happen to you, just like “Deathstroke” (As an aside, when I was a kid I’d never heard the word ‘deathstroke’ before … in fact, I still haven’t, it’s usually ‘killing stroke’ … so I didn’t understand that they meant ‘killing stroke’ when they called the guy Deathstroke, and I just assumed … you know … because one of his eyes didn’t work and half his mask was blacked out, I assumed he’d … like, had a stroke. I thought that he was the super-assassin guy who’d had a stroke, and they called him Deathstroke because maybe he could still kill you even though he’d had a stroke? I was a complicated kid, and maybe not too smart. I read comics, after all).

Even though he was a product of the often-impish chaps at Marvel UK, a character as unambitiously over-the-top and egregious as Die-Cut amazingly was not handled tongue-in-cheek. Nowhere was there the charm of Death’s Head or Dragon’s Claws, which is a shame because this guy was freaking asking for it.

As a matter of fact, Die Cut was a product of the general dumbing/Americaning-down of the Marvel UK line, some promotion called “Pumping Iron” which I’m assuming is a Britishism for “Shooting Heroin” or “Shrooming Balls” because it was all a muddy, psychohorrific series of bellowing and castration-paranoia. Die Cut specifically even emerged from the ruins of the aforementioned charmer, Death’s Head, as a former backup schizophrenic personality of the lame-as-hell sequel Death’s Head II who subsequently - for reasons I ern’t gonna bother with here - manages to get himself his own vat-grown body and add another bland, screaming face to the line-up of how boring the Marvel UK imprint had become.

Special Cover Enhancement by Mrs.Mulligan's
Second Grade Class, Daybridge Elementary,
Akron OH. Go Jaguars!

Worst of all, for a guy who is actually NAMED “Die Cut” at a time when comics were apeshit about die-cutting things and you would imagine would lend himself to some amazing die-cut cover opportunities, his debut die-cut cover … sucks so incredibly bad.

I was originally going to mention Die Cut only as part of a larger series on the worst gimmick covers of the 90s (which is yet to come, stay tuned), but in the end he was such an impassable mass of fucking awful combined with a shit-bucket of terrible that he has to receive some stand-out attention. His first issue cover, more than anything else, is just mindboggling. I’m sure, with very little effort, anyone reading this could come up with a half-dozen at-least-halfway decent ideas about how to make a die-cut cover for a character named Die Cut work. A cut-out logo, a silhouette, the iconic shape of his signature weapon (look below), a body of cybernetic wires and gears, the international sign for “urinal” … lots to be done!

What they did instead was wildly hack at the cover so it looked … jagged. Not even like Die Cut had cut it, but like a guy had shown up in the comic shop before anyone else got there and cut up the thing with safety scissors. He didn’t even do a good job, some of the jagged edges are going the wrong way and you end up with a triangular piece that rips right off if you’re not careful with it – luckily, who wouldn’t be careful with a mint condition copy of Die Cut #1, right folks?

It’s even really hard to know where to start – or stop – with Die Cut. Here’s one for you – his name is Czorn Yson. Actually, now I want to stop.

Guys, I want to give you one more thing about Die-Cut – he was so-named because he had a big dumb enormous sword spot-soldered to the gauntlet on his left arm (and presumably you would die if it cut you). This thing was one of those phony-baloney super-weapons from the Image era which was so poorly defined as to effectively make it all-powerful, because this sword could cut through not just every known material, but also energy (I guess that answers the particle vs wave debate) and through dimensions and also could surgically excise memories. Buh-fuh-what? But wait, bear with me, best of all – it was called his “Pscythe”. I am not shitting you. Can you envision a word which looks more like you smashed “piss” and “shite” together? It’s a summary weapon. Brilliant.

Aaa-aaah, he'll save every one of us!

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 5)

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

You know what the secret to comedy is? Timing. And with that in mind, here’s the final part of The Many Foes of Power Man …

Yeah, shut up Cage, I'm trying to do a thing here.

He actually sounds like a really avoidable Milton-Bradley game Mister Fish has been a general source of internet chuckles forever and a day, but in all of the coverage of his appearance – his ridiculously slack-jawed Mister Limpet likeness, his frilly ear pieces, his scandalous Satsuma-colored silky one-piece ensemble, his demands for respect –no one thought to mention to me that he had a sass-talking dwarf sidekick. GUYS I AM ALL ABOUT THE SASS TALKING DWARF SIDEKICKS.

Mister Fish began his crime career as a petty criminal who stumbles across a truckload of radioactive isotopes. As one does in comic books, he promptly opened the protective casings so he could get a damn good sniff of them, then fell backwards into the East River and emerged as a fish-man. With super-strength. And he translated the accident into a full-fledged high-level Maggia franchise, so … he’s a real “when life gives you lemons” kind of guy, I guess.

Mister Fish buys the farm at the end of his debut story, but he makes appearances elsewhere in the Marvel Universe later. These are explained away as being the original Mister Fish’s brother, who took pains to accurately recreate the circumstances of his brother’s mutation, and when I say “explained” I mean “That actually requires a lot more explanation, on a lot of levels.”

Weirdest thing to me about Mister Fish is why not give him a cool fish name instead of something as ridiculous as Mister Fish? Why not call him The Goblin Shark or The Chimaera or – oh, hey, why not Piranha? Marvel doesn’t have a villain named Piranha yet, right?

Piranha

Oh.

Now let us "rap" and talk about "what's going down".

…Go together like a horse and carriage.
In a weird-super-villain-intensive story arc, Cage fell afoul of and then later was hired by and then fell afoul again of a supervillainous mastermind named Big Brother. I am shocked it took them this long to get to that name. Someone was nappin’.

Big Brother basically looked like he shopped exclusively in a store which specialized in life-size recreations of totally unfun action figure accessories, and spoke like a highly articulate drunk, basically. He hired a bunch of other super-villains to hassle Cage and then convinced Cage to go fight another super-villain named The Baron and then Cage came back and slugged Big Brother instead. That’s what we call “miles walked, not much ground covered.”

BB was assisted by a selectively invisible informant named The Cheshire Cat, and again I’m shocked it took them so long to get around to that name, too. Dressed like a pimp Hamburglar, Cheshire Cat’s big trick was to literally turn invisible – in fits and starts. His body would vanish, leaving behind the stripes on his suit, then the rest of him until only the smile remained. Where do they get their ideas?

Save it for your drive-time radio show, blowhard.

Another one’a these guys
Wildfire was a one-off character and yet another bad guy who couldn’t stop making mention of just how impolite it was for Luke Cage to be black in this day and age. I’m not going to front, it was a pretty good story for the ouvre – Cage and Wildfire tussle in a mostly white neighborhood, both stating their case for the prominent racial issues of the day (“You portray us as beer-belching Archie Bunkers!” says Wildfire, “You make us out to be the bad guys!” as he torches an innocent man’s home and tries to murder the guy who protected him) and while Wildfire is decidedly an evil straw man (and that’s dangerous with so much fire around, gosh!) he nonetheless finds supporters in the crowd in a pretty dramatic scene.

Counter-point: It’s about the fiftieth Cage villain who’s got a thesaurus of race-hate handy in lieu of dialogue. You know, it wears on you after a while …

By the Goldberg?

Who dressed this guy?
I feel like I need copious explanations of GoldBug, who is a brilliant inventor and gold thief who also uses gold as a weapon and probably wouldn’t need to steal as much gold if he wasn’t going around caking people in it. Yes, he had a gun that caked you in gold dust. He is a gold thief who leaves gold lying around on the people who are trying to recover the gold he stole. Hm.

But mostly it’s this costume, he looks like a tragic condiment accident at a hot dog stand. The cap, of all things. It’s a bike helmet, right? He has to wear that so he doesn’t hurt himself, right? It’s the only answer that makes sense, that he’s a ward of the state.

I’ll be upfront, there are a lot of truly ugly comic book costumes I love – the original Captain Britain, Daredevil’s old yellow outfit, Luke frickin’ Cage - but this is beyond the pale … yellow and desaturated orange.

Guy's probably got his secret supervillain
headquarters under a false floor on the Bang Bus.

One of these kids is exactly like the others
Bushmaster makes the third snake-themed super-villain whom Luke Cage battles in the course of his solo book, but at least unlike Diamond-Back and Cottonmouth, Bushmaster isn’t the head of a criminal organization. Oh, he is? Well, at least his power isn’t just super-strength like Cottonmouth. Oh, it is? Well, at least his name sounds like a title of a series of pornos. There, we found a positive.

Bushmaster is the last villain Cage faces in his solo series, after which he teams up for possibly the best-remember team book of the Seventies with Iron Fist. Naturally, this starts with him battling Iron Fist for two issues before they team up to clock Bushmaster, and also this is the story where Colleen Wing refers to Cage as a “buck”, so who’s the real bad guy here, right?

But Cage’s most persistent, most implacable foe?
I'm gonna say "The soda machine in the lobby of his building."

And that's it for Luke Cage, goodnight folks!

Not So Much Fallen As Hobbled and Limping...

2011-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

"Jeffrey!"

Fallen Angels (Marvel, 1987)
I imagine this may come as a shock to you little shavers and young whippersnappers and all you other folks who grew up in an atmosphere where super-powered mutants on the new comic rack are as common as nitrogen in the atmosphere, but there was a time – believe it or not - when you could count all the X-Men miniseries and spin-offs on the adamantium claws of two hands.

I mean, obviously Stan and Jack didn’t launch X-Men #1 in September of 1963 and then follow up in November with fourteen tie-ins, a new origin for Cable and a foil-cover edition special where they bring back Banshee just to off him again. The series had to start somewhere, and for that matter it started off as one of Marvel’s least-popular ongoing series. Even when it finally started making it big in the market share, it took forever to create its first spin-off – and despite what was to come, it didn’t have the common courtesy to slap an “X-“ in front of its name.

The first miniseries and one-shot both come out in 1982 – the definitive Claremont/Miller “Wolverine” and the equally landmark Claremont/Anderson graphic novel “God Loves, Man Kills” – and through the subsequent decade there were hardly a dozen more – although the quality may have started to slip. The very next year you get what Your Humble Editor considers to be a highly underrated series, Magik, but you also get Obnoxio the Clown vs The X-Men, suggesting Marvel wasn’t yet quite sure who their franchise player was going to turn out to be.

Among the lesser luminaries like the uncertain “Iceman” and the criminally befuddled “Kitty Pryde and Wolverine” was Fallen Angels, spinning out of the X-Men farm team’s book, The New Mutants.

Aw, he's fine.

A creation of Jo Duffy and Kerry Gammill (with Joe Staton stepping in for a couple of issues), the premise of Fallen Angels centers around hot-headed New Mutant Bobby DaCosta, who is Brazilian (and that’s weird, because most of the New Mutants are in their teens but this guy is a whole brazilian!) Known as the superhero-in-training Sunspot, on account of how all the good names were already taken, Bobby is capable of adapting sunlight into ferocious, raw strength – a power he uses by having a soccer-based hissy fit and stubbing a whole tree into teammate Sam “Want you cuckoo Cannonball” Guthrie’s frontal lobe, rendering him terminally Southern.

Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can Sunspot find rest but in a meandering eight-issue limited series accompanied by titanic gibbering nitwit and the toppled ink bottle which was the leading suspect in a thousand cases of carpal tunnel among the Marvel Bullpen up through 1992, alien shapeshifting novelty keychain Warlock?

Sunspot and Warlock leave the comfort of the Charles Xavier Academy of Not Having All That Many Students Really So You Think You’d Notice Two Of Them Leaving in Westchester and head to nearby seedy New York City, trailed by ancillary X-Men types Jamie “Multiple Man” Madrox and Theresa “Siryn” Cassidy – who, as an aside, have set up for them in this series basically everything Peter David has ever done with them in the pages of X-Factor. There, I just gave you a reason for Fallen Angels to exist.

"...with my enormous
man-hands?"

While in New York, Bobby and Warlock manage to walk into street thugs mugging someone every ten minutes – New York, am I right? – and in doing so meet up with the young she’ll-turn-out-to-be-a-mutant-even-thought-she-doesn’t-think-she-is-sorry-spoiler-warning Chance and her pals, The Fallen Angels. Led by former X-Villian The Vanisher – now dressed like Community’s Dean Pelton wearing Bea Arthur’s nightdress as a jacket – and a slightly elongated alien named Ariel who can teleport herself and others through any doorway and who sort of looks like Geena Davis crossed with a televangelist dressed for aerobics class.

I hate to find myself saying “Well, to make a long story short” so early into this, but I don’t really have a choice – Fallen Angels is LONG, despite coming in at no more than eight issues, and it’s mostly exposition and sudden introductions to character after character. Multiple Man and Siryn ultimately catch up with the Angels, a mildly telekinetic cyborg named Gomi and his cybernetic mutant lobster friends Don and Bill are introduced, they pick up Boom-Boom from X-Factor headquarters and take a trip through time and alternate dimensions to come back with Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy. And having finally introduced all the players, I guess we can finally start the story … around the closing pages of issue six.

Yup! On paper, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Fallen Angels. Jo Duffy is a fine writer, Kerry Gammill is nowhere near my favorite artist but he’s a completely competent and likable draughtsman, and while the weird mix of characters was a little too blatantly youth-oriented and the designs were dated before the cash register was finished ringing on the first copy ever purchased, it was actually a pretty appealing title.

Oh god, I want to die.

So why is it a fizzle in the firmament of X-Books? Well, among other problems, I was not kidding when I say that the plot did not start until the end of issue six. It’s at this point that we have it underlined for us that anorexic fashion calamity Ariel was not just your ordinary everyday spandex-addict who could step through doorways to any point in space and exercise small amounts of mind control, she was also an alien! An alien from a planet called The Coconut … called The Coconut Grove. I’m sorry, I nervously hiccupped in the middle of saying that, I may have had a small stroke.

But yes, Ariel comes from a planet called The Coconut Grove and which is decked out like the sets in the dance numbers from Xanadu AND everyone looks like a goblin Liberace. Seriously, if Charles Nelson Reilly’s cravats were ever possessed by poltergeists, it’d look like these guys. “Seriously”, that’s the word I used to describe that scenario…

Anyway, it turns out the Coconut Grove peeps sent Ariel to Earth to abduct mutants, on account of the Coconut Grove peeps have hit an evolutionary dead-end and want to dissect mutants to identify their mutant-ness so that the Coconut Grove peeps can give themselves those qualities and continue to evolve. I’m sorry to keep saying “Coconut Grove peeps”, but the only likely name I could think of for them was “Coconut Grovers”, which sounds like a sex act, a Girl Scout cookie or a sex act involving a Girl Scout cookie.

Naturally, after she’s handed all her Earth friends to her overlords to dissect and mess around with, we discover that Ariel herself is some sort of mutant and is going to be dissected herself, so she rebels. Hey, do you remember a moment ago when I said that the Coconut Grovers were studying mutants because, as a people, they had hit an evolutionary dead-end and didn’t mutate anymore and also how I mentioned that Ariel is a Coconut Grover and also a mutant so obviously that first premise is wrong and therefore this plot – which we waited six issues to start – doesn’t make any sense any longer? Mm.

There was never again any mention of them anywhere forever.

Besides the belated start time and the auto-correcting plot point, I’m going to lay part of the blame for the fact that we’re not checking out X-Men Origins: Fallen Angels in theaters this Christmas at the feet of the other new characters in the book. I am being sincere when I say that there is no end of very good character concept and development going on in this book, at least as far as some characters like Madrox and Siryn go. Both the telekinetic Gomi and tough-as-nails street-wise kid Chance end up taking up prime real estate for their personal story arcs, Gomi even eating up space at the table for an origin story that doesn’t do particularly much for the character and definitely nothing for the plot.

The gimmick of Chance being a secret-mutant is telegraphed brazenly through the series, and generally in lieu of giving her anything of use to do. Whenever other mutants are around Chance, their powers either double or disappear completely, and also they feel compelled to mention it while Chance is hanging around in the immediate vicinity, and also what you might laughably call a ‘portable’ Cerebro unit keeps identifying a mutant that no one seems to know who in the room it is AND ALSO Chance keeps saying she’s not a mutant … Consider the hints picked up.

Oh, and one of the lobsters is a mutant, too. You’re welcome.

In the end, Fallen Angels is a decent book with the one exception that you can’t really explain why it happened. After eight issues, the X-World returned to its status quo without much as a ripple. Sunspot and Warlock go back to the New Mutants to help feed oatmeal to Sam through a tube, all of the other pre-established characters disappear for half a decade or so before they get picked up for new purposes, and the new characters just drop off the face off the Earth - except I looked up Ariel on Wikipedia and she apparently popped up in X-Men recently and then was slugged to death by someone. Possibly me.

I guess our one takeaway is that we got to see Devil Dinosaur pulling off headscarf bandana look a la Travolta in Staying Alive …

Haha, Bill's saying "boobs".

The Sword of Superman

2011-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

Phallic object upon phallic object, the basis of all mythology.

Among the workhorses on the writing staff of the Pre-Crisis Superman, Elliot S(!) Maggin was your go-to guy for bird’s-eye view myth building. He wasn’t down in the trenches or generally coloring within the lines, pulling familiar Phantom Zone villains into the dirt like Cary Bates and Marty Pasko (Which I say with Res. Pect. The tattoos on my eyelids read “Bates” and “Pasko”).

Maggin’s cup of tea was invention: It’s from Maggin that we get Miracle Monday, Thirsty Thursday, 29th Century Superwoman Kristin Wells, Albert Einstein wrapped up in Superman’s origin, that obnoxious intergalactic rhyming bard that pops up in a couple of stories, Lex Luthor saying cuss words … you know, the high end stuff that no other writer in his right mind ever touched again.

Don’t get me wrong - I love Maggin like I love all the pre-Crisis Superman writers. Summarizing his contributions to the character, though, I’d suggest he specialized in the outlying territories. He loved adding new planks to the fence, some of which worked and some of which – well, some of which are the Sword of Superman.

"Ma, what did you mean
when you said I was
growing up into a very
handsome young hilt?"

The story in question – “The Day the Cheering Stopped” - ran in Superman Annual #10 in 1984. The DC Annuals had just been revived and revamped to behave as a transitional state between normal comics and longer, proto-graphic novel books – two issues earlier, the Annuals had been your typical reprint collection, two issues later you’d get “For The Man Who Has Everything”. True to the new format, Maggin wrote a big story – he revisited his familiar theme of “the totally made up and sort of indistinctly defined legend” – the problem with it being that it was too big.

Not so much answering a question no one thought to ask, Maggin invented a question no one in their right mind would ask because the answer was already so simple, obvious and commonsense: Why does everyone in the universe know Superman, revere him and call him by his name, “Superman”?

Your obvious answer is “He went there, was memorable, and that’s his name.” I have never asked why the clerk at my credit union knows my name – she’s seen me before, for crying out loud. Same goes for my parole officer, the checkout guy at the liquor store and the fellow who power-washes the vomit out of the alley beside the OTB. Bros, every one.

Mind you, this isn’t even taking into consideration the more obvious answer of “Actually, they probably don’t all call him the same thing on different planets, I mean, they call him a bunch of different things in different languages here on Earth, alone!” BUT since they call him “Superman” on every intergalactic backwater slum, we’ve apparently got to have an intergalactic backwater reason.

Now, before I share with you the apparently really real and bugnuts as hell reason – and trust me, it’s not a good reason at all – lemme explain why this is a bad idea.

He's saying "Sometimes you're a real
condescending ass, pal."

One of the reasons why Superman even works as a character at all is because, at the end of the day and no matter how unlikely or unrealistic he may be, you only need to suspend your disbelief with him once. You only have to accept the idea “He is a super-powered alien from a highly advanced civilization”, and everything else follows. How can he fly, why does he have super-breath? He’s a super-powered alien from a highly advanced civilization. How come no one recognizes him when he wears glasses? He’s a super-powered alien from a high advanced civilization. Why the red pants? He’s got a super-powered dog? How does Lois Lane still have a pelvis? Super-powered etcetera from etcetera etcetera … it’s the do-all, be-all answer, you can harvest from it any answer you realistically need.

When you add something to the character, you have to make sure it’s covered by that one suspension of disbelief, because if it requires a second suspension of disbelief – if it requires another coincidence or far-fetched explanation or willful indulgence of ignorance – then the whole story starts to sag under the burden.

Okay? Okay, so here’s Maggin’s reason for why everyone in the universe recognizes Superman and says his name the same way: At the Big Bang, a big chunk of roughly sword-shaped primordial matter coalesced, and after time it was polished by space-rays into being not just a sword and not only not just a sword but also a sword that basically looks like the kind of sword you could get from 14th century Europe even though this is billions of years before the Earth even existed AND also on the hilt it has Superman’s S-insignia on it and it is apparently magical and also sentient and used mind-rays to give Jonathan Kent the idea of the stylized “S” on Superboy’s uniform and it floated around eluding capture by space-faring races who eventually called it “The Sword of Superman” even though those are English words from 20th century Earth that, again, didn’t even exist back then and also it was Excalibur (!) but mostly it floats around in space waiting to help Superman fight a pretty middle-weight super-villain and then to piss the fuck off back to space or something.

Ta-daa! Say, does anyone else feel like they have a head injury?

"This story! I don't want it in canon!"

The rest of the story is a pleasant boilerplate pre-Crisis tale, and there’s a lot to love about Maggin’s writing – he’s not afraid to have the characters be flippant or casual with their dialogue, he’s willing to let the plot coast for clever character moments, and he’s charmingly unashamed to have a villain named Oswald Mandias floating around.

I’ve always wondered about the world which comic book people inhabit – are they, as a general population completely ignorant of classical literature and wordplay, or are they far too aware of it? If your last name is Mandias (and trust me, I’ve tried putting the stress all over that word, it never doesn’t sound ridiculous), is it just accepted that you’ll name your kid Oscar Mandias or Osbourne Mandias, it’s just a given you’ll be introducing “This is our little Ozzy, say hi to everyone Ozzy”? If your last name is Hood, does heavy cultural weight determine you’ll name your kid “Robert N. Hood?” “Meet my youngest, Stephen Hakes Spear…” Does Edward Nigma only fly under the radar because it’s among the least dumb pun names these people have ever heard?

Man, this was frustrating.

Anyway, Mandias smuggles himself aboard the space shuttle, gets taken over by a Maggin baddie named King Kosmos who hypnotizes everyone on Earth into loving him and perceiving Superman as a horrible monster that they’re scared of and it shakes Superman’s confirdence, at which point the sword shows up and takes Superman to a library where it shows him a book and is all “I am all hell of Excalibur, baby” and then unrelatedly Superman hypnotizes himself into thinking that all the people who are scared of him are actually cheering him and he uses that self-confidence boost to punch King Kosmos in the pecker real hard a bunch of times.

The sword goes on to do something indeterminate to tip the tide of battle in Superman’s favor, and then flips out like a crazy maniac and tries to give Superman all the power in the universe, which Superman refuses, whereupon the blade disintegrates and Superman hucks the hilt into outer space and then we get a very Elliot S.Maggin-ey epilogue where a space-vagrant recounts the dumb story we just heard as “a legend”.

I’m sorry, like I say, I like the guy and everything but at one point he has Superman look at the sword with his microscopic vision and say “If I’m right – and that is nearly impossible in this case - this is made of the original material of the universe!” Of COURSE it’s made of the original material of the universe, the only thing we’ve got in this universe is the original material of the universe. We haven’t been spooning in brand-new Helium or anything*.

(* I await corrections, science nerds)

Still – hey, you know how Maggin’s Superwoman stories always implied that she would go down in history as the greatest hero of the twentieth century, but he never actually got around to explaining why? I’d pay him fourteen dollars to hear the real answer, although I got a theory of my own that I’d bet seven bucks at two-to-one odds is better. I’d also bet at two-to-one odds that half the comments for this article are going to be people chiding me for not liking Elliot S!Maggin even though I said like five times I totally love Elliot S!Maggin. Nobody reads all the way to the end on these things, anyway.

Bust on this story all I might, this panel is fuckin' perfection.

DC FIFTY-TOO IS LIVE!

2011-08-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

This blog remains on hiatus for a little longer as DC FIFTY-TOO officially launches today! Don't miss out!

DC FIFTY-TOO

2011-08-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

Your Humble Editor has been busy these last few weeks organizing what I hope will be a fun independent project to coincide with the relaunch of the DC Comics line of books: DC FIFTY-TOO. Fifty-two (and then some) very different and very talented artists have created their own first issue covers for DC Comics they'd like to see.

Swing on over to the blog to learn more, and stay tuned for August 15th when the first four covers will be revealed!

Crisis On Infinite Earths in the Front, Party in the Back!

2011-06-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

DC Comics is taking a lot of criticism for its announced washbucket full of upcoming redesigns* - and rightly so. The redesigns so far range from the downright stupid (I'm looking at you, Harley Quinn. Seriously, I can't stop looking, I don't know when the trainwreck will end) to the plainly underwhelming (Hi Firestorm!) to the merely unnecessary with one or two decent ones thrown in just to keep us on our toes.

*...from, for instance, the fine folks at Project:Rooftop (including Your Humble Editor his own damn self). Watch me say mean things about Deadshot and a turtle!

You would think - given all the high-hattin' haberdashery hubbub and sneering sartorial sideswipes - that DC Comics had never undertaken some unpopular redesigns of their characters before, BUT OH HOW WRONG YOU'D BE! It wasn't so long ago - you know, a couple of decades really, but in the geological terms taking into account the overall age of the Earth, more like "mere seconds" - that DC updated its characters for the tumultuous Nineties. Strap down your mullets, let's take a quick look at Who's Horribly Dressed in the DC Universe...

BLACK LIGHTNING

I'm not even sure where this costume appeared, if it appeared anywhere, but thank goodness they got rid of Black Lightning's ridiculous afro ... in favor of a hightop fade. "Whew", you suspect the editorial team was saying to themselves, "At least THIS hairstyle won't seem catastrophically out of date in a few years!" And then to make it extra-relevant to the youngsters, they've got Lightning throwing the horns. "OZZZZYYY! *bzzzzt!*"

THE CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN

I don't know anything about Tim Sale as a person or whether he's a decent guy or gives blood to orphans (sometimes they come collecting it door-to-door, all in mason jars stacked in a little red wagon), but I do really want to sit down with some fans of his some day and ask what the heck the big deal's supposed to be? This guy keeps getting big, fancy graphic novels and high-profile color-themed prestige format series (and THAT'S not getting old!), and ... why? It looks like he inks with a sausage. Did you see that cover he drew for the debut issue of the otherwise excellent Solo series? Pencils got erasers, Tim.

Anyway, the Challengers were given a new look to get themselves into the updated, edgy and more serious Nineties, and I think we're all on the same page these days that when we say a comic is "more serious", we mean it's "exceptionally more ridiculous than it's ever been before." Big guns, a sort of haunted "produces porn movies in the basement" look for Prof, a buzzcut and at least one character started off the series dead. Maybe. I recall about zero percent of this, so let's pretend they all opened an ice cream stand and this is a joke card they sent out for Christmas...

ELEMENT WOMAN (Girl, whatever)

Element Woman gets her own giant-sized Who's Who page and THIS is the image they choose? Poor girl, this must have been like getting your senior yearbook photo on the first day of your period and also you had a pube between your front teeth.

Allegedly, the Element Woman story from Sandman was written because several other DC authors had "misused" Neil Gaiman's character Death in some of their comics. Rather than considering the possibility that he had opened himself to misinterpretation by neglecting to craft any coherent sense of the character's motivation, her personality (beyond "babbling nitwit") and the scope of her powers and authority, Gaiman decided to pen this single issue vignette to set the record straight - and then used Death in a vague throwaway which didn't answer any questions at all and trod less ground than they'd trod with the character earlier.

Besides, Neil Gaiman had used Element Woman as the focus of the story only because it was a character he could off without anyone's panties getting in a bunch. Somehow, when other authors line up Z-List cannon fodder, they get pilloried. When Gaiman does it? Oh the magic of storytelling and the stories of dreams and dreams are the greatest stories ... blech. I liked her better when she was up on Metamorpho's jock, because Bob Haney is GOLDEN.

FIRESTORM, THE NUKULAR MAN

Honestly, when considering the unsightly carnival of spilled condiments and a grease fire which constituted Firestorm's original costume, this is hardly worse. However, the part of Firestorm's costume that everyone hates on ... okay, excepting the puffy sleeves ... is the fiery head. How does the fiery head work? Where's his brain? Does it crackle and pop while it burns? Why is it dumb? Who is the dumb guy who made it? So many questions.

So Firestorm 2.0 not only gets a BIGGER fiery head ... like, the Jim Henson Studio and a fly-gang of sixteen and every spandexed metal band of the Eighties amount of fiery head ... but he also gets colorful little accents on his wrists and his feet. Just above his TOES on his feet. And a collar. His wallet is probably on fire too, and his car keys. I bet he comes home and the DVD player and his family photo albums are all made of fire. This guy cannot get ENOUGH of the FIRE!

THE WANDERERS (They wander 'round 'round 'round 'round ...)

The Wanderers were some sort of ancillary super-team which operated in the 30th century alongside the Legion of Super-Heroes, and were given a makeover because before this they were all just wearing clothes and we all know how stupid wearing clothes is. It doesn't help that they've posed them like an intergalactic frat party, but then again I'm not sure what would help. Maybe amnesia, so I don't have to remember having ever seen these outfits.

FIRE

Okay, look past the Adam Hughes art for a moment - I know it's difficult, inasmuch as there as two pretty significant impediments in your path - but look at this and answer a question for me: From what country does Beatriz "Fire" DaCosta originate? That's right: Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation. She's the Secretary of the Interior, as a matter of fact!

Probably what sticks out for me most in this costume (think clean thoughts, chums) is that belt. I had three girlfriends in high school who wore that belt, and one who had that hair. None of them burst into flames, but I could nominate at least two of them I'd like to see that happen to oh ho, ho ho ...

ORION

AH HOLY JESUS WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

MY CHANGELING, MY CHANGELING, WON'T YOU PLAY WITH MY CHANGELING?

Nice animullet, champ.

BRAINIAC ON THE FLOOR

In the late Eighties, they went out of their way to revamp Superman and all of his Rogues Gallery, backstory, etc etc and so on. I think they even changed the combination on his bike lock.

One of the things they did with Superman was to address the issue of his power level - deciding that a Superman who could juggle mountains, eat fire and shit ice from the git-go* was a turn-off for new, modern-day readers (and then deciding a couple years later that new, modern-day readers would prefer it if Superman could smash planets flat between his toes), they dropped Superman's power level down to an admirable near-nil.

Then, for some reason, they also dropped his enemies' power levels down to near nil. And made them fat. And balding. Also Luthor had cancer. And I suspect Brainiac never had anything approaching a formal education, and he dressed in what appears to be the kind of pajamas they give out in the terminal ward of a childrens hospital.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO WEAKEN SUPERMAN, WHY WEAKEN HIS ENEMIES TOO? I'm pretty sure I could have taken out Brainiac with a box full of donuts and patience enough for high cholesterol to claim his life.

Possibly the funniest part of Brainiac's new costume is how it has the silhouette of a skinnier man on it. Way to rub it in, comics guys!

*I will send you a copy of Youngblood #1 if you can place this reference as it applies to Superman. Hell, I'll draw the cast of Youngblood for you on the inside cover ...

POWER GIRL

It's hard to argue that DC - and superhero comics in general - don't have some real anger issues towards women, but usually the argument focuses on how Power Girl's costume is too revealing and reduces the character to a sex object and not about how DC's 90's-era answer to this criticism was to put Power Girl in a gathered turtleneck and give her a pet cat. Next up: Power Girl starts a blog about her knitting projects and gets real defensive whenever anyone in her comments section claims that it's dumb to be thirty and still a virgin. And she has to wax her mustache. (Notice that it still accentuates her tits, though - no dummies, the comic book guys!)

THORN TO BE WILD

The 1970's (Rose and ) Thorn wasn't winning any fashion awards with her original costume, which included a miniskirt trimmed with green briars, but then she comes back in the modern Nineties tricked out like a hooker and shoving poison needles into dudes' faces. Hey, do you know what turn of phrase I end up using a lot when talking about character design in the Nineties? "Turned out like a hooker." Now guess why.

NIGHTWING

It's amazing to imagine that Spider-Dick here was an improvement on an existing costume, but you know what?

It was.

Bonus G&F: ...And don't let the big gold door hit you where the good Rao split you.

2011-06-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

It’s been about twenty-five years since DC Comics’ first conscious effort to revamp, reboot and relaunch their universe, The Crisis on Infinite Earths. For better or worse, it was an exceptional moment of change as DC took what was then fifty years of a publishing history and wiped the slate clean, inviting readers to step into a new - and optimistically - streamlined universe where such disparate characters as Captain Marvel and Captain Atom stood beside Dr.Fate and the Blue Beetle, where the panoply of multiple earths had never existed, and where Superman and Batman had yet to meet and Wonder Woman had yet to set foot in Man’s World.

Considering the depth and breadth of his continuity – both personal and among his extended family – no one required a cleaner slate more than the Man of Steel. Every hero had their supporting cast and in-canon errata, but none so much as Superman, who boasted a bottle city, a quartet of super-pets, a parade of robot duplicates, identical uncles, cousins, emergency squadroneers, a planet of imperfect duplicates, a nightmare dimension of villains, one of the vastest rogues galleries in comics history, an entirely distinct teenage continuity and roughly half a dozen super-teams which counted him among their members – if not founder and inspiration. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Naturally, DC wanted to honor their flagship hero of half-a-century and to say farewell to his many incarnations and spin-offs. Here’s how they did it:

The original Superman of 1938 – with his beloved wife Lois Lane – walks into a luminous, heavenly paradise, arm-in-arm with the rescued Superboy of a vanished universe and the legacy of Luthor, reconciled at last.

Meanwhile, the Superboy of the Legion of Super-Heroes sacrifices his life to ensure that the future which his legacy inspired survives.

In no less a tangible sacrifice, Supergirl buys the heroes of five worlds all-too-precious time, at a great personal cost. She is mourned universally.

Lastly, the Silver Age Superman mythos is put to bed amidst the tears and tragedy with a smile, a wink and a happy ending.

Now let’s look at how modern-day DC is putting the Superman legacy to bed in anticipation of their September relaunch:

Superboy is a mass-murdering madman dressed like a sky-blue Ford Fairlane with gold piping.

The Superman of 1938 is an emotion-manipulating zombie who rips out the hearts of the living (as does his wife, by the way).

And would somebody just rape Supergirl already??

COMICS. They never needed a Dan Didio.

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 4)

2011-06-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Where'd we leave off? Steeplejack? Okay, feeling good about this decision!

He is indeed far more than a chair.

#16 It never doesn't sound like a racial slur
Your Humble Editor has to admit to a personal failing in that -for all the bazillions of comics I read as a wee little shaver - I never really got around to Captain America. I am, in fact, just now getting around to reading the Caps of the 70s and 80s, and in the process of doing so I am learning that many characters whom I thought were enemies of both America's shield-slinging Avenger and our own beloved Hero for Hire, Luke Cage, are in no way whatsoever related.

Like, for instance - and I actually find myself embarrassed about this for no sane reason because dude I conflated two out of a hundred million comic book characters it's understandable - I thought the the Hero for Hire's supporting character Misty Knight was the same character as evil biologist and sassy afro-puff possessor Nightshade. I guess what makes that embarrassing is that it turns out Nightshade is insanely awesome and everything I ever wanted out of a comic book villain, primarily because her epithet of choice is "Oh poo" and she makes werewolves, and I should have known better, earlier.

Anyway, same fate befell me with the Serpent Society's Cottonmouth and Luke Cage's foe Cottonmouth. The Luke Cage villain is crime boss Cornell Cottonmouth (of the Alabama Cottonmouths, I presume) who decks himself out in snakeskin and is sort of generically strong and tough, in the mold of most of Cage's crimeboss enemies, and also kills people with cottonmouth snakes (and bazookas).

The Cottonmouth associated with Captain America is a guy in a purple suit who famously swallows people whole. So while they are, in fact, two distinct characters, it's possible that one day we could see the people-eating Cottonmouth eating the non-people-eating Cottonmouth in what I preemptively call the single moment which superhero comics were waiting for.

ALWAYS with the racial slurs, these guys!

#17 I meet people with my first name, too, and I don't try to hit them with theater seats
Before Luke Cage claimed the nom du guerre Power Man, it was the property of a villain and occasional Avengers foe - later known and reformed and the Thunderbolt Atlas. Considering that Luke Cage is, these days, in charge of the Thunderbolts program, there must be some uncomfortable conversations about the time Atlas picked a fight with Cage and then let slip a racial slur and all.

Presuming Atlas isn't dead. He's dead, isn't he? Everybody's dead these days, swear to god ...

Anyway, Power Man busted into the theater over which Luke Cage had his office and started hucking seats and empty popcorn boxes and sandbags - WHY DOES A MODERN DAY MOVIE THEATER HAVE SANDBAGS? - at him. Not to fail to give the original Power Man credit where it's due, he also tore down the movie screen, rolled it up and smacked Luke Cage with it. That is not a thing I've ever really wanted to do in my life, but now I have a goal: Some day I'm going to roll up a movie screen and whack someone in the face with it. I'll need to start carbo-loading.

#18 Well, for starters, I imagine it glows in the dark ...
I engineered for myself much merriment many months back imagining Stan "The Man" Lee being called on to provide a spectacular sobriquet for Spider-Man vibro-villain THE SHOCKER, and I double my delight imagining writer Steve Engelhart and editor Len Wein walking out of Stan's office, shaking their heads. I don't know what a Night Shocker is, but it sounds even more or a rude surprise than the regular kind.

Obviously, Len and Steve crafted here a vampirey version of Kolchak, television's Night Stalker (ohhhhhh I get it now) character, in a story which is actually very well done, with some twist and turns and a very sneaky murder plot. It would have ranked among my favorite Luke Cage stories simply because I was getting to the end and none of the white characters felt they had to mention how ding-dang black Luke Cage had the temerity to be, but then it turns out the would-be victim of the crime was an albino and he had to mention that his skin lacked "what yours holds in such abundance - pigmentation!"

EVERY TIME WITH THESE GUYS.

#19 Most villains would consider it flattering to have a theme song, but this guy's is played on novelty car horns.
It was only a matter of time before Luke Cage got himself a villain called "The Cockroach". That he predated Mister Fish is one for the books, frankly, but what constitutes the bottom of the barrel for other books is sometimes the cream of the crop for poor Lucas.

Cockroach worked for another crime boss, one of the bazillions who bedeviled Cage time and again in the long quest for a color-conscious Kingpin to set up against Marvel's most prominent street-level black superhero. He also dressed like a character from The Electric Company, carried around a six-barreled shotgun called "Josh" and exclusively ate Cheese Snips.

Hey, you know what they did a lot of in the Marvel offices in the Seventies? Drugs. I bet this routine seemed like the goddamndest funniest fucking thing since Cheech and Chong, at the time. Maybe I'll find it funny, too, if I lit a blunt, but comic books have left me utterly incapable of finding and buying drugs on my own. According to Captain America, marijuana comes from space aliens and they only give it to aspiring Little Leaguers, so I don't even know where to begin buying drugs, even though all my friends are artists and I live down the street from a high school.

We're going to wrap this series up with the next installment, even though Cage has about forty-seven thousand more dumb foes, but life is short and I get the premium channels on cable now, so I've got things to do. In the meantime, allow me to transport you back to those magic days of long ago when we, as a nation, were in the grip of a massive gas shortage and were at the mercy of spiraling prices...

SEVENTY-TWO POINT NINE FUCKING CENTS???

Make Way for the DC Resplosion -or- Why We Are So Weary -or- Fuck the Morning People

2011-06-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

(This is part of a cross-site series of thoughts on the recent DC Whatever-It-Is. If you'd like to read more, please visit my Tumblr and two new articles at the at-least-briefly-revived Seebelow)

Gone&Forgotten isn't a current events blog, but I do think it attracts an audience which itself represents a significant wedge of the mainstream comics-reading population: long-time readers who have a history of supporting these comics and want to continue to support these comics, but feel excluded from them at the same time.

These are people who have, at the very least, a cogent muscle memory of having been excited and enthusiastic for comics once but who - in recent years - have increasingly felt themselves uninvited to the party and unable to stir in themselves the old passion for four-color escapism. In short, a reliable crowd, consistently shelling out cash money for the muted thrill of familiarity, glumly thumbing through newsprint pamphlets with the lethargic, bovine persistence of a predatory tortoise, looking for the barest morsel of community and wonder. You know, the winners.

In the midst of the recent hubbubbery over at DC Comics and their upcoming Pre-Re-Implosion, this crowd has found itself more on the outs than ever.

At the risk of choosing to speak for that audience, and furthermore at the risk of making that fatal assumption endemic to the well-seasoned human (i.e. “old people”) that there’s no reason they can’t have the same fun and enjoy the same things in the same way as their younger counterparts, might I suggest that the root cause of the exclusion we feel does not necessarily lie with this stalwart audience of the less frequently marketed to. Rather, could the problem possibly be that mainstream superhero comics are inherently young, and like all things young, they wear their jeans too low and they’re too goddamn loud? I think so, yes.

Bombast has always been a part and parcel of mainstream comics. Even if you remove Stan Lee from the equation, there’s no shortage of bold claims made in orange print and braced by a legion of exclamation marks on every fourth or fifth page of our childhood favorites.

“NOT AN IMAGINARY TALE!” it reads, “NOT A HOAX!” and “Do YOU remember THIS OATH which turned YOUNG BRUCE WAYNE into BAT-MAN?” Full-page in-house ads in garish yellow and orange, “THE LATEST FROM THE HOUSE OF IDEAS,” “the DYNAMIC NEW DIRECTION that will CHANGE COMIC MAGS FOREVER!” … “AMAZING! DARiNG! DIFFERENT! … AN IDEA SO ASTONISHING THAT YOU WILL SHIT YOURSELF! YOU WILL LITERALLY SHIT YOURSELF … AND THEN YOU WILL RUN NEXT DOOR AND SHIT THE NEIGHBORS! PREPARE YOURSELF AND YOUR SHIT AND YOUR NEIGHBORS FOR THE GREATEST SUPERHERO IN COMICS HISTORY! MARVEL’S GOT HER, AND HER NAME IS … DAZZLER!”

The difference is that – back then – you could just close the cover and the noise was over, no one was shoving superlatives, spandex and punctuation into your eyeholes. You put the book down, the sun shone, birds sang, and your friends called for you to come outside. “Come play with us,” they’d say, “We’re playing DAZZLER.”

I kid. We played ROM.

Some years back, however, comics were bought kit and caboodle by major multinational media conglomerates of one sort or another, companies which owned their own news networks, newspapers, magazines, television studios, television channels, radio stations, internet entertainment and movie studios. It was only a matter of time before these companies realized that these properties were eminently licensable – to the tune of literally billions of dollars a year - and therefore they had a vested interest in promoting them relentlessly.

Thirty years ago, if you saw your favorite superheroes in the newspaper, it was most likely an ad for an in-store appearance at Montgomery Ward by some unfortunate minimum wage earner in a tremendously awkward foam rubber Hulk costume. Nowadays, there’s round-the-clock coverage when Wonder Woman wears pants.

The end result of this – and what makes modern day comics so unappealing to readers in this aforementioned group – is that comics have basically become Morning People - relentlessly chirpy, in-your-face and over-positive - and there’s nothing more annoying than a Morning Person.

You're out of bed at oh-dark-thirty, sitting on the shitter with a full cup of coffee because it’s so damn early that even your colon isn’t awake yet, and you have to make sure you have time to catch the bus, so you’re shaving too, and then after a while you slump into the kitchen and pour your coffee down the drain because it smells like shit and has beard stubble in it for some reason, and you cram a cold Pop Tart into your mouth where it dangles like a cartoon cigarette as you accidentally slam your hand in the cabinet door blearily putting the dirty coffee cup back on the shelf with the clean ones and BAM, in through the kitchen door comes COMICS! Jogging up and down and beaming with the rosy flush of health! “You missed the best part of the day!” it says through laser-whitened teeth, “I got up at 3:30 and jogged fourteen kay! This month in Superman, the Man of Steel gets a fresh new look, but do these amazing new powers come with a price?

“Is that what you’re having for breakfast?” it says to you, still jogging, “That stuff will kill you. You really ought to try a yeast-germ omelette. Swear by ‘em! In a very special new Green Arrow, the Emerald Archer gets a new sidekick – who has AIDS and Asperger’s Syndrome! Mind if I grab a shower? What fateful decision does Spider-Man make in this month’s Fear Itself? Don’t you dare miss it – it will change the face of comics FOREVER!”

And then Comics all hogs the bathroom while you stand at the sink, blinking hard and trying to remember what it was you liked about that guy when you first met him. This is the thing you think to yourself as you hear it singing Smashmouth really loud through the wall and using all the hot water.

Comics! Fuck 'em!*

==========

Many apologies, folks. The blog has been neglected lately as Your Humble Editor found himself (A) needing to find a new place to live and (B) having found a new place to live (C) had to go get more work to afford the new place to live and then (D) spent a couple weeks packing and (E) moving into the new place to live, which is currently a drawing table and a laptop set up amidst as many filthy, bedraggled boxes as you might recall from the opening half-hour of Wall-E. I’ll be back on the ball shortly, with some bonus material to make up for the absence of content.

* I've clearly never been of the "comics are for kids" crowd, and I've likewise never thought that adults should be ashamed of reading superhero comic, even if most superhero comics are generally intended for an audience of mildly bright children.

I WILL say, however, that if you are an adult and a comics-reader BUT you only read titles from the two big superhero/mainstream companies, then you're really cheating yourself. Comics are an amazing medium, with what I would consider an even greater robustness of variety than film or written fiction. Even if you've tried the big alternative creators- as a for-instance, say Ware, Crumb and Clowes - and they didn't do anything for you, there are still literally hundreds of other creators, both fresh and veteran, producing books and webcomics worth delving into. You'll find something, and you're only hurting yourself (well, and the creators' pocketbooks) if you've never sought out the alternatives.

As a last note, let me add: DC has said that this sea change makes for "a good jumping on point". Keep in mind that a good jumping on point is also a good jumping off point. If the ride's coming back around to the loading dock and you didn't enjoy it the first time, it's a good time to hop off and find another way to spend your ticket ...

Peace!

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 3)

2011-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

"Fruitboots", eh? Discus: His superpowers include living in glass houses, throwing stones.

#11: Ding dong, ding dong …
Big Ben Donovan (Birth name: Bigworth Benjamin Dovetonsils) is actually a high-priced attorney who ends up as Luke Cage’s lawyer some time after their initial imbroglio. However – prior to that – he starts off as a blue-balled berserker who busts into Cage’s office at three in the ay-em, hot on the (and forgive me for this) tail of one of Cage’s foxy but hotheaded former clients.

I ... Oh dear.

After having met with Donovan to settle her late husband’s affairs, she ends up being wined and dined by the big oaf until the wee small hours of the morning, at which point it dawns on her that the meeting is anything but business and she bolts to the relative safety of Luke Cage’s apartment. After getting an earful from our hapless hero – whom she calls an “ego-tripping bear”, which is honestly an act I’d love to see at the circus – the would-be victim finds her spurned date at the door with a line I’m going to pretend is from Tyler Perry’s remake of The Shining.

That Big Ben was – however briefly – envisioned as a black urban Kingpin for Luke Cage to test his mettle against is fairly self-evident, particularly as the captions actually make it a point to draw comparisons between the two. To Ben’s advantage, where the Kingpin has a taser or something crammed in his walking stick, Donovan came quipped with steel-toe boots and six-inch iron heels. SIX INCHES. IRON SOLED SHOES. He cut quite a figure in the courtroom, I’m sure.

Keep talking, jive turkeys.

#12 – After you, Alphonse …
Comanche and Shades were former prison-mates of Cage’s and, having escaped with revenge on former prison guard Rackham foremost in their minds, knockoff heroes for hire muscling in on Cage’s territory.

Outfitting themselves with outlandish costumes (which makes them look “a coupla cats outta the Village”, and no one in the Village would be caught dead looking like that, thank you very much) and occupying themselves with a complicated plan of high-profile petty larceny to set themselves up as Kings of Harlem, not to mention making their presence known not only to their former cellmate Cage but also their former prison guard, I think it’s sufficient to suggest that these two strategic geniuses have really nailed down the best way to behave after an escape from prison. Next up: Skywriting their home addresses over police headquarters, pressing hams on the district attorney’s windshield, actually turning themselves in.

Comanche and Shades - while theoretically out to get Rackham and happy to mention it every other panel – spend a lot of time blowing hot balloon juice and dragging their feet on actually arranging the revenge. Story-wise, I tend to think of Comanche and Shades as the over-polite gophers from the old Looney Tunes cartoons, except at one point they both probably shivved a guy in the joint. The gophers, I mean, them cats look tough.

Ahh-ah! He'll save
every one of us!

#13 We have much to discus
Stiletto debuts a few issues before his equally buff, blow-dried playmate Discus, hot on the tail of Cage and interrupting the culmination of the aforementioned Comanche and Shades’ revenge plan against prison guard Rackham (Short version: They fell through his roof and shot at him). Stiletto’s one of those villains with a single weapon that’s been converted to function as fifteen or twenty different weapons, so all he has on him are stilettos but he’s got stilettos that shoot lightning and cryogenic stilettos that shoot cold gas and a stiletto that I think shoots sonic beams and another that shoots gas and a wrist-shooter that shoots tiny stilettos and someone ought to tell him that if you’re so into shooting, buy a gun.

By the time Discus shows up, the pair are pursuing Cage again and inadvertently and somewhat hilariously making it sound like they’re secret homosexual lovers with every third line. They’re actually brothers, so that’s just creepy, but it does underline what dopey goofs these two are. Incidentally, while Stiletto had all those awesome shooting stilettos, Discus only had the one steel discus, so sometimes he’d throw it and then have nothing else to do so he’d just stand over his brother’s shoulder and grimace. Those two ought to take this act on the road.

By the end, it’s revealed that the pair are the malicious, revenge-bent sons of former Seagate prison warden Tyler Stuart, and the news so depresses Cage that he has to go to California to beat up Black Goliath.

#14 A Guy In A Jiffy Pop Popcorn Suit
A Guy in the Jiffy Pop Popcorn Suit deserves a mention simply because his was the adventure where Luke Cage decided to change his sobriquet to Power Man. So now he’s been mentioned. Well done, me!

I can't tell if he's saying "common" or if he's one of those dumbasses
who spells "c'mon" like that alla damn time.

It's always about race with these guys ...

#15 High On The Roof Is A Lonely Goatherd …
Len Wein gets his hands on the villain I bet every New York-based comics writer wanted to create – the evil construction worker!

Steeplejack was a shirtless, hairy hulk of a man armed with a gun which shot hot rivets (so much better than a gun that shoots bullets, because … you know, hot rivets are so much less portable and you have to carry around a big heater strapped to your back to get them red-hot, and that’s very very safe). Steeplejack was also the only super-villain I’ve ever seen who was smart enough to wear a construction helmet while working, in case of falling debris or – if it’s a Mark Millar story – superheroes falling from the sky.

Other things Steeplejack was capable of doing: Shouting dishearteningly vulgar things at women, criminally not working on anything, menacingly sitting on a very high girder and eating a sandwich out of a tin pail, and exploding when he falls to his death at the end of this issue.

In closing, enjoy this scene of Luke Cage actually deciding that something is 'too ethnic' for his book. HIS book! Too ethnic! Wow!

Okay, maybe that IS too ethnic.

They Came From The Public Domain ...

2011-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Former Golden Age superheroes who’ve recently fallen into the public domain have been showing their faces all around comics lately. Excepting the few who popped up in mildly copyright-defying form in Bill Black’s Americomics or Malbiu’s old Protectors series, among others, there’s Alan Moore’s cast of Terra Obscura characters, while Alex Ross and Jim Krueger have been spinning a complicated (and some might rightly suggest “incomprehensible”) superhero soap opera with a cast of bazillions in Project: Super-Powers and the original boomerang-slinging Daredevil has made a series of appearances in Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon.

More than a few (hundred) of the Golden Age’s lesser lights, however, have failed to make an appearance in the big new era of combing other people’s long-dead ideas for cash money. Here’s a list of a few I’m dying to see make a reappearance in modern comics:

Minimidget
That’s “Minimidget” as in “Smaller than your average midget”. As far as midgets go, he makes ‘em look like giants, that should be your take-away from this. Is being smaller than a midget a super-power? Well, if not, let’s see you try it.

This seems condescending as all hell.

Minimidget – a.k.a. The Super-Midget (except that he is not super in any capacity) or The Miniature Man (okay, I can accept that) – has one of the weirdest character arcs in comicdom. Minimidget first debuted as Jack Rhodes, adventurer, in the pages of Amazing Man #5 and – later that same issue – appears again in a story which takes place some time after Rhodes and his girlfriend Rinny (wait what?) have been abducted, shrunk and turned into poison-needle-bearing nighttime assassins by some mad scientist of the other.

Just to make sure you catch this: The part of the story where Jack Rhodes is captured and transformed and enslaved by a mad scientist and turned into a pint-size murderer-by-command? They didn’t show that part.

By his next appearance, Minimidget is back on the side of the angels, and is so small that maybe he can answer that question for us about how many of ‘em can dance on a pin. He and Rinny make themselves useful to the rest of the regular-sized world by flying around in their toy plane passing on messages, getting attacked by wildlife and having difficulty doing everything.

Everyone they meet or help is so enthusiastic about supporting them that the stories take on this air that everyone feels really bad for Rhodes and Rinny, so they want to support them for every little thing they do. “You didn’t get killed by a bird,” they may say, “Good for you! Good for you!”

Aah-aah. He'll save every one of us.

Dash Dartwell, the Human Meteor
As a run-of-the-mill comic book speedster, Dash Dartwell is missing the flashy costume worn by your average Whizzer or Flash. He makes up for it by sprinting everywhere in his double-breasted blue suit, which after even a few sprints across town probably smells like the underside of a brisket’s armpit.

I don’t actually like Dash Dartwell or anything about his origin or narrative, but I am perpetually amused at the manner in which they draw him running: Legs fully extended both directions, as far as they can go, like a jointed wooden toy being tossed carelessly through the air. I could read a whole book of that.

Now THAT'S using your head! PS I hate myself.

The Iron Skull
Golden Age comics had more than their share of robotic super-humans, from Bozo the Robot to Robotman to one or two others who – and I stress this as being practically key to their popularity – made sure to put the word “robot” somewhere in their name. This is handy when you’re a reader trying to figure out exactly why some cross-eyed goon is cramming his pumpkin through brick walls.

The Iron Skull was apparently a robot – or possibly, like Robotman, a robot body with a human brain attached – but within the actual pages of his stories they sort of neglected to mention that. So what you end up with is the comic book adventures of a very smartly-dressed grim-looking guy with a Jack-O-Lantern nose suddenly bashing his noggin violently against flat surfaces. This is not a super-power, necessarily, this is a symptom deserving of medication.

I’ll be honest with you, though - as super-powers go, it’s not a barker. In the story cited in these panels – Amazing Man #22 – Iron Skull bashes through no fewer than three walls with his head and then punches through the top of a sedan feet-first. He’s got panache, you can’t deny that.

Settle down, nerd.

The Moth
I am being deadly serious when I say that, of all the characters in this list, The Moth is the one I most want to see brought back in some capacity.

Not to be confused with Steve Rude’s stuntman superhero, the Moth is apparently a grim figure of justice, appearing in the night to redress terrible wrongs and visit horrible vengeance on the cruel and criminal. You know, LIKE MOTHS DO. It also helps that he wears fluffy orange wings and a swimming cap and little velour shorts. And a cape. Like moths do.

In the story from Mystery Men #11 (1940), The Moth – “Like an avenging shadow” – flutters awkwardly above the mansion of the widow Nancy Torrence, whose nephew and girlfriend plan to murder her in order to swipe some old magazines she keeps under her recliner or something. This part is vague.

What also is vague is how the Moth knows any of this is happening or what’s going on – at one point, choosing to actually foil the attempted murder rather than continually flutter past the mansion’s massive picture windows (which he spent valuable time beforehand endlessly doing), The Moth collects the intended victim and has to grill her as to the misdeeds planned this evening. That’s right – EVEN THE INTENDED VICTIM KNEW MORE THAN THE CRIME FIGHTER.

Better than that, The Moth then leaves the elderly old woman in a tree for AN HOUR (no joke, that’s what the caption said) while he drags her nefarious nephew and his cold-hearted better half down to the police station, then returns only to inform her that, um, well … he can’t have them arrested. She’ll need to go downtown and do that. But AVENGING JUSTICE or something, he’s useless, it actually would have been better if he’d walked to the mansion and called the cops.

Thanks, Moth.

Continuity Comics Part 3: Cover Story

2011-04-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

Continuity Comics is a strange traveler in comics history; its roots are with its creator Neal Adams in the exceptionally mainstream 1970s, its origins date back to the first big indie boom of the 1980s, its heyday was in the tumultuous market-driven 1990s and, today, it sort of gamely pokes at motion comics and licensed properties via its internet hub.

If there were a particular era, however, where Continuity most seemed at home, it would definitely be in the Nineties: Bloodier and grimmer than the average super-hero or adventure comic, loaded with terse codenames and stabby knife-hands and the like, muddily colored, utterly unedited, and – most importantly – ultimately subscribing to the gimmick cover phenomenon.

Some day I will light this fucking thing
on fire, I swear ...

There was a time, not so long ago, when every new comics day meant a rainbow of gimmick covers spread out across your local shop’s “Latest Releases” rack: gold foil, silver foil, platinum foil and holograms, glow-in-the-dark, embossed and die-cut, drilled-through and sweetly made love to in the men’s bathroom at Brenner Printing by the weird guy who works the night shift (not to mention a plethora of polybagged cards, pogs and – in the exceptionally grim case of the Death of Superman issue – a black armband).

Continuity certainly couldn’t resist the allure of the gimmick cover, so a decent number of their own stock came out with bells and whistles.

During its Deathwatch 2000 crossover - stay tuned for Deathwatches 2001 through 2011, we’re due! – Continuity invested heavily in the stereogrammatic process, which was a process requiring the viewer to stand staring cross-eyed at a dorm room wall until the pot leaf became visible.

As amusing an idea as it is to picture hundreds of comic book readers staring cross-eyed at inside covers, the pay-off was less than ambitious – you had revealed to you the Deathwatch 2000 logo, which was plastered over all the front of the comic and across a bazillion pages of advertising besides.

Here’s a quick run-down of some of Continuity’s other gimmick covers:

Crazyman – or, as I like to call it, “The most sensitive portrayal of mental illness in the history of everything” – joined the die-cut fervor with a Golden Book-style shaped book featuring Crazyman getting his head molested by the hand of an unseen assailant. If that don’t sell a book, I don’t know what will.
Hybrids had one of the most annoying cover gimmicks ever – a thermodynamic patch which was supposed to change color under the heat of your hand to reveal the primary villain of the series. I own this goddamn book and I can promise you that it DOES. NOT. WORK. I literally even dropped freshly dried laundry on it once, hoping to generate some result, but no juice. Evidently, the enemy of the series was an indistinct orange blob. Next up, I’m going to light this thing on fire.
Ms.Mystic, who typically wore zip-a-tone body stockings in her appearances, was portrayed statically dishabille on one cover of her own comic via stereogrammatic printing, capitalizing on the idea that a teenage boy will stare cross-eyed at something for hours providing it vaguely resembles tits in some fashion.
The Hybrids and Megalith also had some common-or-garden foil covers while Cyberrad has a hologram card insert. Booo! Bring on the mulch and phosphorus covers! Where’s the imagination?

There are probably twenty thousand
copies of this thing floating in that swirling
plastic mass in the Pacific Ocean ...

The best of all of them, however, was Continuity’s love affair with TYVEK, a space-age polymer out of which the company’s later covers were uniformly made, and which Continuity advertised as “INDESTRUCTIBLE”. I have not yet put this to the test, although I bet I probably could. I could always huck it on the fire with that thermodynamic issue of Hybrids.

Tyvek is a material used in environmental hazard suits and those wristbands you get at street fairs which allow you to drink beer (by which I mean they identify you as old enough to drink beer and that you’ve shown ID to the right people, not that it physically allows you to drink beer. I expect you knew that. Sorry, I’ve been drinking beers. Probably because of all the Tyvek I have lying around now) and which are impossible to remove without a blowtorch or Wolverine.

Additionally, Tyvek is meant to be recyclable BUT you can’t just huck it in your blue bin and wait for the nice garbage collector to take it away. It has to be specially disposed of in a dedicated facility. Which makes it additionally hilarious that the Tyvek was used on the covers of Ms Mystic and URTH 4, two books whose heroes were meant to be super-powered protectors of the environment…

Yeah, see what I mean?

Bucky O’Hare
Continuity’s entry into the world of anthropomorphic action-adventure, and arguably the one title least messed with by Adams in his role as enthusiastic editorial overseer. Produced by Larry Hama and Michael Golden, the series started in the Continuity anthology Echoes of Futurepast and ended up in its own graphic novel, video game, cartoon series and toy line. So, arguably the most successful of the Continuity properties, providing there hasn’t been a Cable ACE Award-winning Crazyman miniseries I’ve missed running over on HBO. Larry David’s Cyberrad. Something like that.

Bucky O’Hare got a lot of credit for its serious and violent tone, and to this day a lot of fans of the series praise it for its maturity. I’m gonna get some mail from those folks but – it’s a shoot-em-up about a green rabbit in space fighting robot toads with help from a displaced tweenie human pal. There’s only so much maturity you can cram into such a thing, this ain’t Usagi Yojimbo exactly…

CyberRad
Rockstar Simon Peak awakens one day to find his memory wiped, parts of his body replaced with cybernetic weapons and implants, and some dumb robot pursuing him for whatever reason. I don’t know from any of that, except that – having read several dozen assorted Continuity offerings - I envied Cyberrad for having his mind wiped.

Everything in the Continuity line at this point is relatively bog-standard Continuity-brand yelling and half-swears, but Cyberrad takes it to a whole new dimension with: MOTION COMICS! Never letting a property die a dignified death – or live a dignified life, I suppose – modern Continuity studios has put together a Cyberrad motion comic, complete with live action and oh-let’s-say slightly substandard cgi sequences to create something that looks like an even more adolescent version of Cool World or A-Ha’s Take On Me Pt2: The Reckoning:

You could certainly read a whole series like this, right?

Ms Mystic and URTH 4
Urth! Ayre! Fyre! Watr! I’m clearly having a stroke!

Urth 4 had debuted back in Ms.Mystic’s Pacific Comics series as The Elementals, but then were sat on for a decade and whoopsie Bill Willingham came along and claimed the name for his excellent-at-the-time-but-have-you-tried-rereading-it-since title of that specific name (i.e. The Elementals, not “excellent-at-the … “ etc etc). Anyway, I’ll give you a dollar if you can guess the super-powers of each of the individual members of URTH 4, and then I’ll take the dollar away because, for Christs sake, look at ‘em.

Ms Mystic herself was a victim of 17th century witch-trials, except she was also apparently actually a witch, so … score one for the witch-trials. She returned as a heavy investor in zip-a-tone with a bend for environmental issues and for staggering out a publishing schedule over a decade or so.

Special insider knowledge for you aficionados of Urth 4: The guy who turned into Urth would suddenly find himself speaking in a Thor-ful pidgin Elizabethan dialect whenever he transformed and also, believe it or not, his name was Dwight Godd. Of the Pennsylvania Godds. Here’s some more special insider knowledge for you aficionados of Urth 4: There are no aficionados of Urth 4.

Hint: It's the one with claws.

Hybrids
The Hybrids – or “Highbreeds”, enh – consisted of seven half-human/half-alien super-people from a baker’s half-dozen of alien worlds in this half-baked half-witted geegaw. See what I did there? Half jokes is what I did there.

The Hybrids consisted of Cyclone, Gymcrack, Horror, Hyperion, Mite, Sheath and Sprang, and if you say them all out loud in a row without pausing then you sound like a maniac.

The plot of the comic centered around the fact that all seven of the Hybrids shared a psychic link, despite the vast intergalactic distance between their homeworlds. United by their common Earthling heritage, they all came here to crash on our couch while shooting raybeams at robots and monsters and stuff.

You recall how incomprehensible your average Continuity Comic was with just ONE protagonist? How jumbled and impossible-to-follow Toyboy was, or Armor, or Samuree? Okay, try seven protagonists in one book. It’s like tuning all the televisions in Sears’ electronics department to a different channel and blasting the volume. PS Guess which one of these guys was their Wolverine…

Tasteful

Valeria The She-Bat
Okay. Valeria the She-Bat was legitimately so lame a character that I had her conflated with another company’s incredibly lame she-bat superhero.

Valeria is a hybrid, specifically a were-bred, more specifically a were-bat, and also somehow a fashion model. More famously, though, Valeria was intended to enjoy a crossover with Todd Mcfarlane’s Spawn – a crossover on which McFarlane voted with his feet, pulling out for reasons of his own. The Spawn appearances were redrawn to involve Knighthawk. That right there accounts for pretty much everything I know about Valeria the She-Bat, except this was the one Continuity/Windjammer comic that finally got to get the female lead almost raped. A RED-LETTER DAY!

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 2)

2011-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Continued from Part 1.

On the other hand, I
think it's a shame when
people DON'T go out
of their way to make
Christmas festive.

#6 This Freaking Maniac
Debuting in a Steve Engelhart story delightfully titled "Jingle BOMBS", I hesitate to mention - but can't see any way around it - that this villain very likely may have been intended to have been called "The Schizo". Luke off-handedly refers to him by that moniker on two occasions, and we get no alternate sobriquet from this highly theatrical loomakick, so "Schizo" it is. My apologies to America's mental health professionals and its many full-blown street-legal wackadoos.

Schizo pops up in a story taking place on Christmas Eve - supposedly a year after Luke Cage escaped from Seagate Prison and took up the identity of Harlem's Hero for Hire - which means that our hero gets to partake in the weirdest pastiche of A Christmas Carol ever committed to paper.

Dressed like Ebeneezer Scrooge, Schizo is first encountered by Luke Cage on accounta the yuletide yobbo is taking his play acting too seriously and is beating the tar out of a little kid. Cage breaks it up, and Schizo returns later dressed as a legless vet begging on a streetcorner, and also shooting at Luke Cage with a machine gun from a street corner. And lastly, he returns as a law enforcement officer from the distant year of 1984 and threatens Cage with a laser pistol. Ta-Da!

In the end, Jingle BOMBS ends as do most Christmas stories - Schizo dresses up as a medieval executioner, is revealed to have an atomic bomb with which he plans to blow up "Manhatten" (sic, and there's clearly no excuse for that), and then a cat burglar falls down the chimney and distracts him so Luke can slap him on the face real hard. God bless us, every one!

This is amazing.

#7 Hass du geseht in deine leben? The schwartze wants I should giff him ein bische geld!
Doctor Doom - Tyrant, Genius, Anti-Hero, magical Momma's Boy, backup repository for fridge magnets, and - most importantly of all - welsher.

You've seen this one already, but just for the record, here it goes: Over the course of a two-issue story arc, Doctor Doom hires Luke Cage to beat the tar out of some rogue Latverian robots of his who've disguised themselves as black men. He specifically hires Cage because, as he says, "I needed a black, and I needed to hire him". You've just described the central premise of the book, Doom, well done!

Hilariously, Doom then defaults on Cage's $200 fee for no reason and returns to Latveria, so Cage basically jacks the Fantasticar and flies there to demand his check. There's a big throwdown, an assassination attempt on Doom which Cage stops, and a grateful Victor von Doom whipping two hundred bucks in American cash from his funky European man-purse. I'm barely kidding about that.

I was actually disappointed that there weren't more collections-based storylines in the book: Luke is hired to repossess The Wizard's Camaro. Luke is tipped off that the Red Skull is stealing cable. Luke gets a contract gig with Rent-A-Center and has to get the couches and washing machine from The Masters of Evil headquarters. The stories write themselves!

"It's a real bear to
try and rub one out,
I must confess ..."

#8 Mister Men and Little Misses
Gambling czar of New York, Ramon Garcia was known in his legitimate business as "Senor Suerte" - Mister Luck - and to the criminal underworld of which he was a part as "Senor Muerte" - Mister Death. Oh, but also he was known to the criminal underworld as Senor Suerte, because his whole gimmick was that he wore a roulette wheel on his chest and as he spun it, one of his gloves became electrified and the other didn't and if it didn't and you touched that glove then everyone was all "Oh hey Senor Suerte, 'sup?"

It's almost exactly like that old nursery rhyme: "Senor Suerte / Senor Muerte / When he spins his chest roulette / If one hand's electric his name is Senor Muerte / If one hand's not electric his name is Senor Suerte / He wasn't that smart and he electrocuted himself / Awww Suffragette."

There is a prescient moment in the comic when, in a single panel flashback, Senor S(M)uerte regales a flunky with an anecdote about how he once scored a perfect 100% on an intelligence test - not because he was smart but because he was lucky. I've never before seen a master villain admit that he was a dunderhead, but then I've never seen a master villain who'd accidentally electrocute himself if he was trying to dig his keys out of the wrong pocket.

One of the very few villains to wear a working gambling device on his outfit, and yet he bore no relation to the villain I just made up, Pachinko Pants Pat. Damn shame that.

That's not skin-colored, man.

#9 The foot-shootin'est villain of them all!
Repeat-villain (sort-of) Chemistro was super-scientist research flunky Curtis Carr - a man who somehow not only invented a gun which could turn anything it hit into another element, but also made it so simple that he'd later on be able to just describe the process to a cellmate and that uneducated slob could build one of his own. Yet, did he realize that he'd invented a thing which could make gold out of loose gravel and coffee grounds and so he had no real incentive to become a super-villain? No, he did not.
Chemistro and Cage tumble in an battle which ends with Chemistro wisely deciding to give himself an advantage over Cage's terrific strength and steel-hard skin by transmuting his own foot into solid steel. And then it disintegrates, which even if it didn't, it was still not smart to turn one's own foot to solid steel.

Unrelatedly, the first appearance of Chemistro was reprinted a few years after it originally run in the pages of the very same magazine. This was evidence that Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, was SO poor he couldn't even afford inventory material. Snap!

"But at least I acknowledge my limitations. That
is the first step towards real emotional growth, no?"

#10 Rawr!
Easily my favorite Power Man villain, and of course he up and died at the end of his first appearance.
Dig it: Alejandro Cortez, schoolteacher, invents a machine capable of giving students the knowledge of their professors. When the educational community for some reason turns down the device, Alejandro uses it to teach a bunch of jungle cats how to speak Spanish and to kill on command,and then he dresses himself up in an admirably crazy-ass costume and also has gloves that shoot electricity because he loves the circus. Which is why he wears leopard-print undies.

Oh, and he can do trapeze stuff. Guys, this is the greatest comic book villain ever. I'll trade you two Magnetos and all my spare Red Skulls if we can just elevate Lionfang back to the peak of Marvel's villain heap.

Stay tuned for The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man parts three through whatever, I still haven't counted all these guys.

I think that might be Will Elder's mom.

Solson Comics - Gary & Al:How To Draw Sexy Women (The Comic)

2011-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Five bucks. FIVE FREAKIN' BUCKS.

I've never been able to precisely put my finger on the reason, but this is a fact: Above and beyond all other comic companies, I hate Solson Publications.

Your Humble Editor's relationship with many of the comics covered on this blog is complex and may contain multitudes of contradictions. There's the feeling to be had, as a for instance, about companies like Continuity and Atlas/Seaboard, where the potential was great but the execution was club-footed. Likewise, there are series like Secret Wars II and Kitty Pryde and Wolverine where a simple premise was overwhelmed by escalating pretensions, or you've got stories like "Krypto-Mouse" which are so enthusiastically stupid that they grab the reader's sense of distaste and aggressively flip them over to pure love. Solson is none of these.

This looks like a manual for some-
thing the cops would frown on you
doing to a stranger.

My feelings towards Solson don't even mirror my distaste towards the execution-style editing oversight of Dan Didio or the institutionalized misogyny, passive racism and hypocritical class boosterism of comics in general; Solson doesn't register that level of offensiveness, even in a book legitimately titled "How to Draw Sexy Women" - far from it, in fact. Solson is just so godawfully mediocre.

The backstory of Solson is brief: Founded by Gary Brodsky, son of Marvel exec and onetime Fantastic Four member Sol Brodsky (thus "Sol's Son" comics), artistic elements largely (man)handled by Rich Buckler, the most dynamic artist in comics assuming all the other artists are taking the day off.

I shouldn't take potshots at Buckler, who is a longtime comics vet on a bazillion titles, but who is unfortunately also possibly one of the most boring artists in ZZZZZZZZ. Sorry about that. I was finishing that sentence and found myself thinking about Buckler's art, and it put me to sleZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Therein lies the real problem with Solson: Buckler had dozens of titles under his belt, Brodsky was the son of a founding Marvel artist and production manager - Brodsky's dad was Stan Lee's right-hand man and Buckler's collaborations were with some of Marvel's most daring writers, and yet the whole endeavor was a mish-mosh of dull. The Solson properties fell into three camps:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles swipes, ranging all the way from The Bushido Blade of Zaitoichi Walrus to an instructional guide on ninjitsu taught by an actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (where better to learn?)
Dumb girly books which barely qualified as stroke material, such as Sultry Teenage Super-Foxes and Iron Maidens.
Gory pop-culture pastiches, e.g.Texas Chainsaw Samurai, a footnote in the complicated publishing history of the THUNDER Agents, and most notably their biggest hit Reagan's Raiders, a book where a Rambo-ic Ronnie and three of his top staffers machine gun America's enemies in a story too tame to be satire and too stupid to be good.

That's really all there is to it!

If Reagan's Raiders wasn't off-putting enough, then prepare to be sufficiently put off by Solson's How To Draw Comics Comic series. The title is drawn from the fact that it is, you see, a comic about how to draw comics, except a book isn't a comic book just because it's comic-sized and printed on comic paper. If I printed a comic book and inside it was wallpaper samples and a shopping list ("Pick up more wallpaper samples"), then it isn't a comic book. A comic book has conventions of storytelling which make it a comic book. The Solson How To Draw series were illustrated instructional pamphlets, and also they were lousy at it.

I only ever found the first and third issues of the series, so I can only speak to those installments, but I can at the very least attest to a pretty significant drop in quality between the unbelievably shitty third issue and the first, which was merely a rotten-as-hell ripoff.

To its credit, the first volume boasted some legitimate bad girl comics cred by way of including artists Buzz and Louis Small Jr, both of whom had acquired some fame for their contributions to Harris Comics' Vampirella at the time and also neither of whom you've thought about since 1992 until I mentioned them. You're welcome.

AHH THE FINISHED PIECE!!

Likewise, the first issue had the elder John Romita providing several pages of basic but essential information regarding anatomical structure. Keep in mind that it wasn't explicitly information on how to draw sexy women, and it was certainly in there in order to justify the book's labeling as an art instructional, but ... wait, I'm not sure what my point was. Keep that in mind, though.

By and large, the remainder of the book was shy on actual instruction, and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was a cynical attempt to throw together a pinup book and fill spare pages with assorted sketchbook doodles (each issue also included blank pages in the front and back, I guess so aspiring artists could practice their pen techniques or chronic masturbators could tear something out of the book to clean up the mess, one'a the two).

Come to the third issue, the gig is up, and all the production values - inside and outside of the book - fall apart. Far from the color cover of the first issue, the third ish is two-color on white and even uses freakin' Hobo as one of the fonts. I mean, I love Morris Fuller Benton and the American Type Foundry and all, but ... Hobo?* (Those last two sentences may be invisible to people who are not typography nerds)

A Nazi uniform, for instance. A
Hazmat suit. Anything, really

As for the interior art, it's now been cut back to a single illustration per page AND the same illustration shown in different stages over multiple pages, the end result being altogether as erotic as a tire fire in a sewage treatment facility. Even as far as wank material goes, that's pushing it.

The only possible high point is, at this point, the obvious desperation in the captioning, insisting that these hasty sketches of ladies with one boob showing is the ultimate in sexuality. "This is raw sexuality jumping off the page" insists the caption accompanying an illustration which resembles as topographic map of Arkansas in thigh high boots. "Sexy shoes add the touch sometimes!" Sometimes. "Fishnet stockings always accentuate sexuality!" Not if you're a fish.

As an aside, a good way to determine if an artist has a future in the erotic side of art is to take a look at whether he's willing to draw a lady's private parts or her legs below the thigh. If she's as smooth as a dolphin's muzzle and needs a boost to get into the booth at Round Table Pizza, then you're probably dealing with an artist who doesn't really belong in the biz of the lady drawin's.

Yeah, I couldn't be more turned on.

In the end, what makes How To Draw Sexy Women The Comic so awful is just that it's such a blatantly cynical attempt to cash in on what was already the most cynically marketed period in comics history. Before this book, you could almost believe that Solson was merely a collection of unremarkable, unimaginative comic fans running a vanity press simply because they wanted to produce comics, no matter how ineptly and pointlessly. After this book, it couldn't be clearer that they were in it for the cash, but couldn't even bother their asses to put some real effort into it. In the end, that's the real crime - it's one thing to crash and burn, it's another thing to deserve to crash and burn, but it's altogether wrong to deserve to crash and burn and to do it small.

And now: Your How To Draw Sexy Women (The Comic) instructional art gallery! Tell me if you figure out which of these ladies is Gary and which is Al.

(Behind the cut for possible NSFW-ness)

Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Super-Hero

2011-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

The theoretically still-upcoming and terminally ill-fated Broadway musical disaster porn Spider-Man:Turn Off The Dark has taken on the comic proportions of a Max Bialystock production, particularly as no sign has yet been given that they’re going to call it off. One imagines Bono and Julie Taymor are probably creeping through the theatre’s basement with sticks of dynamite cradled in their arms, amazed that no one’s called their bluff before now.

With the dogged determination driving forward the debut date, you’d think Marvel had never had a successful musical theatre property before. Long-time comic fans (i.e. “old people”) may remember that Captain America had been slated for a Broadway musical way back when dinosaurs were only available on cassette, and don’t forget that Marvel scored Tony and Academy Award success with their production of Kiss of the Spider-Woman, a musical rom-com about Jessica Drew’s topsy-turvy love life. Sort of a super-powered Bridget Jones’ Diary (PS I just saw this movie last Friday and, no, that’s not what it is about).

Of course, way-y-y-y back in 1975, Marvel (and Lifesong Records, a company which couldn’t sound more like a front for the kind of skeevy cult you’d find on episodes of The Streets of San Francisco or ChiPs if it had a permed guru in a white dashiki and Italian sunglasses talking to the cops at poolside), there was Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Super-Hero! An admittedly impressive – if inordinately obnoxious – rock opera based around the life and hardships of Peter Parker, narrated in intervals by Stan Lee and featuring the musical stylings of the Marvel Universe, if the flipside of the album art was to be believed (I bet The Falcon rocks the handclap. I seriously bet he does).

The irony is that if he did
this while he was flying,
he'd fall to his death.

The album was largely put together by assorted members of West Virginian prog-rock combo Crack The Sky, a well-received Seventies debut who – through a series of circumstances so sad and strange and grimly amusing that I can’t help but wonder if I made it up – never made it big outside Baltimore. No joke, I send thee to their Wikipedia article, if you can Adam ‘n’ Eve it.

As for the album itself, it’s twelve(ish) tracks of original songs recounting in what certainly feels like painstaking detail the origin and general big-event storylines of Spider-Man.

In-between the tracks, Stan “The Man” himself tacks on handy narration in a surprisingly deliberate and clearly enunciated tone so very unlike every other narration, interview or audio track I ever heard the guy put together. He’s enunciating so clearly and speaking so deliberately that, after the second or third narration track, you can’t help but suspect that he’s being held captive somewhere and is sending coded messages through the dialogue tracks. Let’s see, if we take the first letter of every stressed word from alternate sentences, and omit proper names whenever Stan rattles his gold-link necklace ... yes, I think Stan’s telling us the cross-streets near the building where his kidnappers have taken him! Let’s roll, team!

"But Mom, all the other
Gods are outside playing
stickball! Why do I have to
stay inside and practice?"

It's legitimately strange to listen to Stan in remastered audio, speaking with such broad spaces that you have to assume someone told him that the album was falling a little shy of the proposed running time. I also learned that - at least back in 1975 - Stan is very selective about his "R"s. Sometimes - like in Peter Parker - he hits them like an ESL student with a grudge. Other times, they're non-existent - he pronounces "Murder" as "Muhdeh", as a for instance. If you listen to the tracks, pay close attention, it'll drive you nuts.

The songs are performed in a variety of styles, starting with "High Wire" - a celebration of web-swinging and definite gender assignment (chorus lyric: “I’m a man – I’m a Spi-i-i-i-i-ider-Ma-a-a-a-n!!”), the intro of which sure keeps you guessing. There’s a touch of Diamond Dog-era Bowie, but then there’s some classic R&B-influenced guitar, so maybe there’s a dash of Jeff Lynne and ELO? But wait, maybe it’s a little more … yeah, Meat Loaf. This could be Meat Loaf. Except the singer sounds like Neil Diamond. ANYWAY THERE’S YOUR FIRST TRACK.

He's actually quite skilled,
but it was still a mistake to
have let him play a drum
memorial at Captain Mar-
Vell's funeral ...

Following that is a wistful reflection on dual identity, “Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes” (Think “Too Old To Rock ‘n’ Roll” era Jethro Tull, maybe) followed by the INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS “Square Boy”, the first of two songs on this album that do their goddamndest to get stuck in your fucking head until you Jesus Christing die. In fact, I waited until this point to direct you to Amazon’s MP3 album Download page – where you can hear short samples of each of these tracks (although do keep in mind that they’re out of order for some reason or another) – so that I could warn you that “Square Boy”, some strange homage to the Andrews Sisters recapping Peter’s encounter with the radioactive spider, is highly toxic ear candy. No need to thank me, it’s my civic duty.

From there, it’s an upbeat and peppy “New Point of View” with the Sears-bought synthesizer set to “reggae” and the songwriting tuned to “primetime Gabe Kaplan vehicle theme song” (Here’s a second one for free: It sounds like the Starlight Vocal Band haunted by ghosts). Then comes the eponymous “Spider-Man” (which starts with a Who-like riff and makes the most advantage of the lead vocalist’s Neil Diamondesque qualities by sounding exactly like a Neil Diamond song), and “No One’s Got a Crush on Peter”, which has a bit of a Wild Cherry sound to it BUT keep in mind, too, that the backup singers who carry this piece are supposed to be the Fantastic Four. The Seventies were a goddamn mess.

Surprisingly, Ben Grimm is
an alto.

Now: I don’t know if this has ever come up in these pages before – and I don’t see why it should have – but I feel now’s the time to mention that I am of the opinion that any musicians after, say, 1965 producing or performing a doo-wop song should be punished by Face Murder. This is a type of murder I invented which is entirely face-centric. It takes an artist’s touch. Sorry Sha-Na-Na. I mention this because of “Gwendolyn”, the doo-wop diddy meant to capture Peter’s sudden head-over-heelsness with poor, doomed Gwen Stacy. If this really is her theme, though, I feel like she deserved getting her neck broken.

Following “Count on Me”, which sounds like the Partridge Family, frankly, we get to the first song dedicated to Spidey’s impressive rogues gallery: “Dr.Octopus Pt 1” and “Dr.Octopus Pt2”.

You might remember his
long-running team-up
book, "Power Man and
The MGs"

You may be aware that the only superhero property to legitimately get to Broadway was in the form of “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … Superman!”, a critically celebrated but unfortunately unpopular 1966 offering from the team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.

Now, the thing with this musical is that, however trite and reedy some of the songs were, everything the villains sang was pure gold. The villainous genius Dr.Sedgwick sings “Revenge”, a delightfully funny song of exceptional value to anyone who cares to remember the billing order of all the Nobel Prizes given out for science in a particular decade. Gossip columnist Max Mencken attempts to seduce Lois Lane with a nihilistic ballad about man’s existential irrelevance in “We Don’t Matter”, while the pair of them team up for the very catchy “You’ve Got What I Need” ode to evil bromance. On top of this, there’s salacious secretary Sydney (played originally by Linda Lavin) trying to steal Superman away in his identity of Clark with “Possibilities”, a song which has had legs outside of the musical.

So where I’m going with this is that – no matter how bad the hero’s musical material – you should expect that the villains might have the GOOD parts, the songs that really rock. THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS WITH DOCTOR OCTOPUS, because he instead gets a very weird, bombastic version of The Who’s Tommy with maybe the most obnoxious chorus in musical history:

“We love Doctor Octo-
Doctor Octo-
Doctor Oc – To - PUS!”
(repeat til dead)

"...And to hear the
lamentations of their cellos."

The song takes place during a dream Peter has in which Doctor Octopus has conquered the world and turned all of its citizens into mindless slaves. A dream. This happens in a dream. Keep in mind that one of the benefits of having super-powers in an imaginary world of a made-up record album is that you don’t have to have incredibly weird, stupid things happen in dreams. Doctor Octopus can actually conquer the world and turn its citizens into mindless slaves! He can! And then you can have them fight! Someone tell the world of music publishing!

The coda to Doc’s braggadocious rap is this series of threats offered to the world of super-herodom:

"Captain America, The Avengers, you will fall at my feet, you will all surrender /
Fantastic Four, and you, the Hulk, you’re gonna cry like a baby and you’re gonna sulk /
Power Man, and you Silver Surfer, you messed with me long enough and I’m gonna hurt ya /
Thor, Black Panther, I’m gonna turn you all into go go dancers"
He says something after that, but I can’t make it out (anyone?), but also I don’t care because I’ll still smarting that he rhymed “Surfer” with “Hurt Ya”.

Anyway, following that is “Green Goblin”, a narrative piece spoken over music and a song I hope to have played at my funeral, then two forgettable outros in the form of “A Soldier Starts To Bleed” and “Time Will Show Me The Way”, and what I hope you take away from this article is that while Turn Off The Dark is going to be a mega-disaster, I sure hope you take a moment to realize that it’s not like it’s gonna be the first bad Spider-Man musical. Now. What do we have to do to get Adam Warrock to cover this album?

"AHHH! THE MIC IS LIVE!!! AHHH!"

By the way: I don't know why I never thought of doing this before, but if you'd like to share the pain and also contribute back to this site a little bit, you can download a digital copy of Rock Reflections of a Super-Hero from Amazon here, or order a real honest-to-goodness CD here. Proceeds go to my subsequent therapy.

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 1)

2011-03-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

That is a really sweet-ass snakeskin onesie.

He’s no Batman or Barry Allen, but Luke Cage – the former Power Man – has as weird and varied a rogues gallery as either hero on his best (and weirdest) day. Enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the mainstream Marvel universe – along with no small number of his fellow Bronze Age graduates from Moon Knight to Misty Knight, Paladin to Iron Fist and Ms.Marvel to Spider-Woman, to name a very few – Luke Cage is in the readers spotlight in a way he’s never been before.

As a kid, Power Man and Iron Fist was one of my favorite books, largely for its incongruous action heroes and breezy, chummy supporting cast. In retrospect, the stories weren’t exactly the best comics had to offer, but they did send me scrabbling back to find the individual issues of its predecessor titles.

Even having had an opportunity to gather under the banner of The Flashmob, most of Luke Cage’s really insane and pretty offensive villains are nonetheless relegated to the wastebin of history. With that in mind, let me take you on a meet-and-greet of the grittiest street-level cats the 1970s had to offer.

One'a these days, bang-zoom!

#1 The Great Entertainer Jackie Gleason as Rackham, the Racist Prison Guard.
Cage’s rise from framed jailbird to super-blaxploitation poster child came by way of Rackham, the former captain of the guards at the penitentiary where Cage was interred and where a secret experiment gifted him with the super-strength and bullet-proof skin he utilized as a crime fighter. You can recognize Rackham from a distance by the pervading smell of pork chops and a speech defect which requires every sentence he speaks to end with the word “boy”.

Although starting off as a fairly by-the-book racist prison guard – you can pick up a half-dozen of them for ten bucks at any prison movie stock character shop – and having lost his position of corrupt power thanks to Cage, Rackham returned to plague Power Man again. Rackham’s even responsible for a storyline featuring two of Cage’s former cellmates donning cheap costume shop leftovers and turning to something resembling super-crime. So. He’s got staying power, just like the Silly Putty he so resembled.

If you had to compare Rackham to any other classic Rogues Gallery villain from one of the mainstream heroes, he’s probably most like Clayface, if just because he’s such a big, doughy load of chicken fat. Actually, let me write that one down for a Yiddish Batman parody – the villains known as SCHMALTZMANN aw you know what I’m already bored with that.

That expression conveys all the emotion of
suddenly reconsidering one's decision to load
the handles of one's knives up with napalm.

#2 Your 2001 World Series Champ – DIAMONDBACK!
Willis Stryker was a former running buddy of Luke Cage’s – back before Power Man picked up the sobriquet, sweet threads and Hero for Hire gimmick – and, in fact, was the guy who framed Cage and sent him to jail. Motive! Someone’s got it!

Stryker goes on to build a seriously fuckin’ pennyante criminal empire using the awesome super-villain name Diamondback, and maybe one of the most hilarious gimmicks any weapon-based super-character has thought to have: Knives, but with GAS CARTRIDGES IN THE HANDLES. So he can throw a knife at you – and to be fair, he’s quite good at that – and then when the knife is sticking in the wall behind you, poison gas or knockout gas or fart spray or PAM can spray out all over you, messing you up. As an aside, sticking someone with a knife will also mess them up, gas cartridge or no.

Back when I was younger: I never read Captain America, but was always dimly aware that there was a character named Diamondback (and Cottonmouth, more on that later) over in Cap’s book, and I sort of blithely assumed it was the same character. And then I heard that Cap was fuckin’ Diamondback, and HO HO, boy, superhero comics sure got daring when I wasn’t looking.

Anyway, Diamondback made for an appropriate foe for Luke Cage, and cut a pretty sweet figure in his snakeskin onesie, but his story is cut fairly short on accounta he threw some of his knives right straight up in the air over his head and … well, they came down. GAS CARTRIDGE BOOM and goodbye Diamondback. To that end, the classic mainstream Rogue he most resembles is … I dunno, Kraven by way of Kingpin and an inner ear disorder, or Captain Cold if Captain Cold’s main gimmick was to shot himself in the face with his cold gun and get killed doing that.

#3 MACE IS THE PLACE WITH THE GUY WITH A MACE FOR A HAND
Vietnam vet and asymmetrical muscle development aficionado Gideon (are you fuckin’ serious?) Mace made up Cage’s third-ever villain as an attention-hungry paramilitary psychopath with a spiky iron basketball for a shifting hand.

Look out Ba-Low!

Mace’s gimmick involved organizing a militia to violently take over Manhattan island, as a wake-up call to a ‘soft’ nation who’d disrespected their soldiers and were growing complacent in the face of corruption. So. He’s a Tea Partier, with a metal hedgehog where his tiny American flag is supposed to sit.

He actually proves to be one of Cage’s most ardent foes, and even gets upgraded to a fight with Spider-Man. He eventually gets his funding and organization together enough to create “Security City”, a seemingly idyllic throwback to 1950s Americana which was effectively a repressive prison where nonconformists were brutally punished. Like they were in 1950, actually. So, bravo for his superb vision.

Mace eventually upgrades his mace-hand to fire from his arm like a cannonball, an inspired bit of engineering in a world where Newton never got around to writing a third law. Firing a gigantic iron weight from your arm stump seems like a good way to guarantee ending up with a mace attached to one’s shattered shoulder-stump. Also, how lucky was Gideon Mace that, when he needed to replace his hand, he could draw on his own surname for inspiration? Imagine if his name were Evergreen? Cotton? What about Hogg? Oh, how I wish it had been Hogg.

The classic mainstream Rogue he most resembles? Brainiac, if Brainiac had been more concerned with building life-size cities instead of stealing miniature ones and also if Brainiac had been named Maceiac and also if he was kind of an idiot.

I got nothing.

#4 How do you get to The Phantom of 42nd Street ? Practice.
Possibly one of my favorite throwaway villains ever, because the Phantom of 42nd Street was two guys. “How do you mean, Humble Editor?” I can hear you asking. “Did they take turns disguising themselves as a single villain in order to provide alibis for their criminal activities? Were they competitors trying to lay claim to a single gimmick, or to take mutual advantage of a rumored menace?” Well, no, try this on: It was one guy sitting on another guy’s shoulders wearing a robe.

That’s right, the same gimmick the Little Rascals would use to try to sneak into a fancy restaurant or the way the Peanuts gang might try sneaking into a Triple-X movie theater – sitting on each other’s shoulders and wearing their dad’s coat and hat.

I don’t even know how that counts as – what, a power? A weapon? Being tall isn’t a super-power, unless you’re, say, twenty-five feet tall. A dwarf on a normal guy’s shoulders is just a guy who can see how dusty the top of the refrigerator is and has to duck when going from room to room. What in the world is their strategy in case of a fist-fight? “When he hits what he thinks is our solar plexus, he’ll just be punching you in the face, and then your head will snap back and crack me in the nuts! BRILLIANT!”

Mainstream Rogue he most resembles: Batman’s foes Scarface and The Ventriloquist, if they could take a moment to come up with an even dumber gimmick that leaves them open for more face-punching.

If this WERE a Martin Lawrence film, then this
moment would be accompanied by a fart sound.

#5 Diary of a Mad Black Fat Woman
Rounding out – literally, ho ho ho – the first installment of this feature is the incredibly embarrassing and … and just so Steve Engleharty villainess, Black Mariah! Talking like a slightly brain-damaged Moms Mabley and looking like King Kong Bundy standing in for Martin Lawrence, Black Mariah runs a scam ambulance service which collects wealthy dead people (when they happen to drop dead in public – no joke, that’s part of their strategy) and then strips them of their cash money and house keys, so they can break in and steal they shit. And this is a PROFITABLE BUSINESS SOMEHOW.

And just in case you didn’t think this character had legs – well, obviously she does, they’re the girth of tree trunks and have their own double-chins. If you didn’t think she had staying power, though, think again – she came back! At one point, she had knitting needles with poison tips, which must have been a downer for her nephews when their Christmas sweaters arrived with curare smeared all over them. She should have stuck gas cartridges in the handles.

Rogue she most resembles: Catwoman, after swallowing a Golden Corral buffet line whole.

Stay tuned for The Many Foes of Luke Cage Parts 2 through however many there are, I haven't counted yet...

Sometimes comics in the Seventies got really
Inside Baseball ...

Continuity Comics Part Two

2011-03-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I don' think you're doing this right, kid.

Continuity Comics’ editorial and advertising branches painted a starkly schizophrenic portrait of the company. While trying to play to its strengths (the berserk and muddy but nonetheless dynamic art produced under Adams’ watchful eye, the gravitas granted by having a bona fide comics legend overlooking the output, etc), Continuity managed to underline its weaknesses (everything else).

I think those WERE
his last words. You
really stole his
thunder there, man.

Even if it Adams hadn’t explicitly had his hand in every aspect of the company – he was known to routinely add his peculiar editorial flair to every part of the comic except the staples – you couldn’t mistake his unique voice at play in the company’s marketing and promotion. If you’ve taken the time to read Adams’ responses to the many criticisms of his expanding earth theory video or caught up on his blog as best as someone dependent on complete, coherent sentences to extract meaning from the written word possibly could, you’ll recognize the half-distracted, exceptionally annotated and breakneck frantic cadence of his writing in every ad and on every cover.

The ads which populated the interior of the comics near the end of the company’s run – during the simply baffling and obtuse Rise of Magic crossover event – seemed to have been scrawled in desperation on post-it notes and rushed to the typsetter with half of them falling out of the envelope on the way.

Your humble editor distinctly remembers one Rise of Magic-era ad where the copy gave up on trying to sell whatever unfortunately-capsized heap of dreck was meant to be pedded and instead adopted a confessional, intimate voice with the readers. “Continuity Comics”, it says (well, I’m paraphrasing, anyway) “Some people say we ought to change the name because kids don’t know what it means. What do you think?”

Reading that for the first time, I legitimately had no idea who I was meant to respond to – possibly the comic itself? “Maybe,” I replied, “I mean, it doesn’t really flow off the tongue.” The comic remained unimpressed and silent. Perhaps I’d hurt its feelings.

Click to enlarge, I left a lot out that
you're gonna want to know about.

The rambling and broken exclamations continued onto the covers (and, well, frankly … into the scripts as well, but that’s a whole other picture). Not only were the covers themselves freaked-out psychotic episodes full of colorful logos in full-on grinding lesbian embrace and wraparound Where’s Waldo diorama in which “The point of focus” was the little fella in the stripey shirt and glasses, just about every comic had some character or another shouting – invariably in bold type – some puzzling inanity or babbling cacophany.

Here’s a few of my favorites:

“SLAG TIME, RAD” (Cyberrad)
“Yeah, you’ve got my mother … my … MOTHER! … very … BIG … BIG … MISTAKE!” (Megalith)
“? Father … “ (Megalith)
“You believe you are gods, Earth 4 … well I am the God of … Hellfire!” “And we bring you recycling!” (EARTH 4)
“Im sorry I cannot give you the correct time” “Idiot” (Ms.Mystic)
“OUR ENEMY!” (Valeria the She-Bat)
“HO HO HO HO HO OHMMMMM” (Cyberrad)
and the limitless classic:
“RAGE … I’m taking you down! I’m releasing ALL the slaves … I’m cutting your fleet to ribbons … And I’m gonna humiliate you … Just ‘cause you got a UGLY FACE!” (Armor)

Some of these adjectives are
being badly misused.

In its earlier days, no small number of Continuity’s ads were stressing its high standards of art (which it had) and writing (which it didn’t) as well as its timely shipping (nuh-unh) and its kid-friendliness. One well-used full-page ad had All-American Joe Majurac – Megalith, the one Continuity character I’ve admitted to having enjoyed – sitting on the bench of a Nautilus-style weight machine, Continuity Comics in his confident hands, a broad smile on his face as he encourages parents to trust Continuity to bring their kids the best in real, literate entertainment made just for them.

Mind you, this is the same company that had a running gag involving Crazyman repeatedly ripping his female partner’s eye out and also a scene in Toyboy where the hero’s father confronts a group of characters whom he believes to have abducted his child by calling them “flaming faggots” (among no end of other cusses, some bleeped and others not). So … no, not that much, the kid-friendly.

ARMOR (and Silver Streak)

The fuck is a wennie?

Easily the two most obnoxious idiots in the entire Continuity lineup of bellowing roid-casualties. Two brothers are abducted by the alien slaver RAGE during what appears to be a full-on invasion, resulting in one brother being given some super-powers and sent to work in the alien mines and the other being given other super-powers and a shit-ton of training on how to use those powers to kill aliens in what is CLEARLY a really good idea on behalf of the slavers.

No small amount of Armor’s original run focuses on the boys trapped in space, developing and mastering their powers – at some point, and I may have missed exactly why this happened, but the brother who can shoot lasers out of his hands and who works in the mine is given the name Silver Streak which sounds less like a slave name and more like what happens if you’re into colloidal mercury supplements and you get the shits.

At some point, Armor confronts and ultimately kills Rage, although I don’t think they ever bothered to show it to us, even though the majority of the first storyline is all about Armor wanting to off his former slavemaster.

Despite this, the boys just show up on Earth and start farting around and ruining Megalith for me.
Also, at some point, they find their long-lost sister. She was also abducted by aliens and given super-powers and her name is Scarlet Streak, so go ahead and use my colloidal mercury joke from up there except make it a little grosser and I guess a little gynophobic while you’re at it, too, would you? Thanks.

Way to make me root for kidnappers
over homophobes, Continuity.

TOYBOY
The eponymous Toyboy is Jason Kriter – essentially an engineering-minded Richie Rich with even more fucked-up daddy issues.

The brilliant but isolated little fella longs to spend time with his busy and perpetually absent father, so distracts himself in the meantime by designing and building an array of hi-tech “toys”, everything from super-fast motorcycles to little ambulatory robot assistants to a big robot suit that has no protection on the front so that bad guys can shoot him if they want.

Toyboy eventually discovers that his father isn’t quite as good a man as he’d imagined – the old man, as a for instance, develops a gun which every fourth bullet or so is actually a hypo filled with fear gas that’ll freak a dude out. After you’ve shot him three times, anyway.

Jason’s and his toys have one of the weirdest adventures in the entire Continuity ouvre wherein a mad scientist seeks to gain control of America’s nuclear arsenal with the aid of his robot army – each of whom is made to look like a famous celebrity of some sort or another. It starts off with mostly old-timey comedians, meaning I was presented with a panel at one point wherein I found myself thinking “Oh god, not another comic book nerd’s fucking obession with the Three Stooges”. Lucky me, the reality could have actually benefitted from some obsession.

The ‘highlight’ of this encounter would have to be the super-powerful Dr.Ruth Westheimer robot who takes on an entire armed base, including messing the tar out of a tank … all the while spouting entendres and sex advice. The beat-up pint-sized robot duplicate of a plucky Israeli woman saying “Of course, you can always use a cucumber” may be the companys high point.

This is timeless.

KNIGHTHAWK
(Full disclosure – Knighthawk got his own title printed under the Windjammer line, and that’s where most of what follows comes from)

How do you even pronounce those *s?

This guy, Knighthawk, this guy is a dude who gets cloned and he has sort of useless vestigal wings. Later, he grows up and builds full-size wing prosthetics which allow him to fly, but his identical clone brother who also has wings steals it and crashes to the ground and dies, and later the dude fixes the wings so he doesn’t die when he puts them on. Pity.

Knighthawk showcases the one thing Continuity was doing which made it resemble the comics of the Golden Age – it had the same reckless, breathlessly piled-on, anything-goes invention of the old comics of the 30s and 40s, when nothing was too ridiculous to fly. Please to keep in mind that almost all of the comics released back then were meant for eight-year olds and were terrible to boot.

Knighthawk goes on to become some insanely hardcore vigilante, complete with not only his wing prosthetics but also magnetic guns he can launch from his boots to his gloves and then back again – a trick he shows off while shooting up an orphanage, no kidding.

The Windjammer series ends with an arc in which Knighthawk is blackmailed into joining Theta Force, which appears on the surface to be some sort of parallel take on Marvel’s Avengers. I could say more for certain if any of Theta Force had any personality or did anything.

Next up: Continuity - The Cover Story.

Hey, you guys know where I could score some coke? I got some copy to write...

Artists Alley, Table D-15, you'll be checked for weapons at the door ...

2011-03-02T13:18:00.000-08:00

It's the Emerald City Comicon this weekend, and Your Humble Editor has been busy stitching up the moth-eaten holes and washing out the bloodstains on his best Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes for his first event appearance in many a moon.

Because of this, there won't be a full Gone&Forgotten this week, so in the interim I bring you this exceptionally accurate two-page depiction of the life of a comic artist, from Marvel's classic inside-baseball parody mag Not Brand Echh...

Supplemental: The Legionnaires' New Clothes

2011-02-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

In addition to the story of Karkan, The Boy Who Loved The Apestika, last week's Superboy #183 also marked the first (and, I think, only) appearance of the reader-submitted costumes for the Legion of Super-Heroes which was covered in this here blog many many moons ago. (None, sadly, as designed by Paul Decker of Oconowomoc WI, the maniac...)

Oh freakin' boy!

The story starts with Princess Projectra, Shadow Lass, Mon-El and Karate Kid hitting the spacelanes to discover Space-America, wearing clothes so painfully hip that they won't even be fashionable until the 30th century - if then!

Comic books are full of smart advice for dumb kids.

In the middle of their space-jaunt, the crew of four are sideswiped by some strange alien force - which critically damages their ship and apparently burns all the sensible clothes they'd thought to bring with them.

"Thank goodness for dignity!"

The quartet are subsequently possessed by the four space-ray-beam-people-things, because apparently that's the thing they do. Little time passes before the inexperienced, mind-controlling phony baloney cosmic phantom things find their host bodies in mortal danger from ... whatever this thing is.

Yeah, I don't ... I don't think that's what you're saying it is.

When azure-skinned hottie Shadow Lass is critically injured by the ~~thing that is obviously a penis~~ Vege-Demon, it shocks the phantomy-thingie beasts out of their host bodies, or possibly they passed a mirror and caught a good look at what they were wearing.

If this ain't terrifying it already,
no illusion's gonna make a diff.

Anyway, it all wraps up with this weirdly cheery half-huddle at the end of the story, which purports to 'explain' the things which 'happened' during the 'story'.

"Can we get out of these things, now?"

BUT WAIT! The Legion of Super-Heroes weren't the only folks to get a new look in this issue of Superboy, so did Lana Lang - decked out as the superheroic Gravity Girl and rocking the white dress, green cape and lead gimp mask look for all it was worth!

"As long as you're wearing that skirt, I just sort of want to
fly behind you for a while ..."

In the story, Superboy is challenged to discover Gravity Girl's true identity, but is forbidden to use a few of his powers - he's not allowed his telescopic vision, his flight or super-speed. Cleverly (sort of), Superboy uses his tremendous strength and super-hearing to trick Lana into bringing home a two-ton pebble (formerly a wrecking ball which Superboy crushed in front of Gravity Girl's slit-obscured eyes). Superboy is counting on Lana's being too stupid to remember her new gravity-bequeathed super-strength, and she sort-of is and sort-of isn't, as exhibited in these two panels which originally occurred one panel apart from one another:

Except ... she had realized that, Superboy. She just said as much, right in front of you, WITH YOUR SUPER-HEARING ON AND EVERYTHING.

Anyway, don't worry, Superboy did the right thing in the end. Besides wrecking her house, he also destroyed the belt which gave her super-powers. Can't say fairer than that!

The X-Men Are A Little Racist.

2011-02-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

You may recall that Marvel ran into a little trouble back in 1998, when an issue of Wolverine had been inadvertently misletterred so as to include an ethnic slur.

I’ve heard a few versions of the reason behind the introduction of the insult, which interrupted the flow of the dialogue so suddenly and out of left field that it seemed less like any sort of intentional race-baiting and more like a particularly malevolent text message auto-suggest feature gone horribly awry.

The most common variation of the story was that Wolverine’s equally savage nemesis Sabretooth had been described in the original script as “the assassin known as Sabretooth”, which had then been corrected in the margins to read “the killer known as Sabretooth”, and the letterer had been rinsing his eyes with lemon juice and managed to read the scribbled note as “the kike known as Sabretooth” at which point he rather amazingly decided “oh, okay, got it, let me just add that in there la-de-da”. And then everyone at Marvel editorial went to bed for the afternoon so it slipped past all the proofreading that was supposed to be going on there but sure as hecky hay wasn’t.

No one would have said anything and everyone would've laughed but,
shit, they didn't notice that Kitty Pryde was in the room until it was too late!

The publishing of the unintentional slur ended up raising less of a stink and more of a snicker, although Marvel was a little red-faced at having the impeccability of its editorial reputation rather openly hindenburged (mind you, this was no surprise to those of us who read the inside-cover issue summaries which were running around the same time, and which were rife with misused homophones, grade-school grammatical and punctuation errors and so many noun-verb disagreements that it could’ve counted as the most contentious company-wide crossover in Marvel’s history).

Also, I may be misremembering this, but didn’t they bring in a rabbi to preemptively absolve the company of any wrongdoing? This was contemporaneous with the whole “Superman saves the Jews but forgets to call them Jews and what is a ‘Hall O’Cost’ anyway” debacle over at the Distinguished C, so there was a lot of potentially ruffled feathers conceivably requiring speculative smoothing.

For my part, I was less surprised by it happening if just because the X-Men were a little bit of a politically incorrect bunch long before this, and there had been some slurs flung around having nothing to do with lettering errors and crossed wires. Basically, what I’m saying is “Warpath? Really, Warpath?” and also “Wolverine hates black people.”

Going back to the early days of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, the characterizations of the individual X-Men were still being settled (rather delightfully, for instance, those early stories were setting up a rivalry between Wolverine and Iceman, of all people). In one early appearance, Wolverine escorts Storm to her old stamping grounds in New York’s Harlem. Concerned about her safety in such a rough neighborhood, Wolverine is frustrated that Storm has refused to allow him to accompany and protect her from conceivable danger, and he makes no bones about from whom precisely he was expecting to protect her:

"Buck Henry, for instance."

Not to worry, though, as when Ororo finally wanders into her old apartment and finds it converted into a shooting gallery for heroin addicts, it’s luckily one of those comic book drug dens populated entirely by white people.

Wolverine is a couple hundred years old at this point, so I’m not surprised that he’s comfortable busting out archaic slurs – I’m gonna buy a round if I can find evidence of him using the terms Gyppo, Quashie or Sawney. I mean, Marvel trotted out the same slur a few years later before realizing that dubbing the black sidekick to their new Captain America “Bucky” might have been a tetch insensitive.

There’s very little profit in figuring out the answers to this ponderable, but if you did sit down and try to determine which ethnic group most consistently gets the saw in mainstream comics, I think Arab culture is going to give you a run for your dinar.
It’s only within recent memory that all Arab characters were represented in comics without being dressed up like Jamie Farr in Cannonball Run, or that they weren’t colored with a charcoal-purple skintone better suited to Goofy Grape or a scratch-and-sniff sticker.

Keep in mind, too, the relative culture-blindness involved with creating Arabic super-heroes and super-villains, such as Marvel’s The Arabian Knight, who wore a Sikh turban and flew around on a Persian carpet and oh who was Egyptian. Likewise, the super-villainess The Asp, an Egyptian “exotic dancer” (I haven’t read her origin story, but I bet they mean “belly dancer”), colored a lovely slate-grey, whose real name was “Cleopatra Nefertiti”. This is like naming an American character “HOT DOG YANKEE HOLLYWOOD” or “MARILYN MONROE WHITE HOUSE”, it’s just cultural reference in an expulsive rush.

The X-Men also don’t let’em get off easy, specifically during this adventure from X-Men Annual #2 (from the pre-All-New All-Different days, when they were just the Same-Old, As-They-Were X-Men) involving the Living Pharaoh/Living Monolith.

Scott “Cyclops” Summer goes to Egypt with some of his fellow X-Men to rescue his brother, Alex “Not Quite Yet Havok But Working On It” Summers. Attracting the attention of the local constabulary, the X-Men are confronted by a camel-riding cop who rather sensibly orders all participants in this midnight hootenanny of the weird to return to HQ for some pertinent questions about who laser-beamed the pyramids in half. Cool, level-headed Scott Summers make such-and-such a reply, something along the lines of “Well, as much as I see your point of view, I must respectfully disagree” or “Now now, before tempers begin to flare”, or something more like:

Classy.

Tune in next week where I complain about how bad the Scottish were portrayed in the classic Captain Marvel vs The Monster Society of Evil (not really*).

*I mean, they were, but so was every ethnicity in the Golden Age ever, so I'm not gonna talk about it here.

Dare I Say It? Superboy ... GOES APE!

2011-02-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Brace yourselves ...

So, picking up where we left off with super-powered anthropo-pest Krypto Mouse, here’s to the Teen of Steel’s more-than-frequent encounters with your average, everyday super-powered ape (Latin name: Gorilla Kryptonicus, commonly known as the “African Plains Fire-Shitting Ape” or “Super-Magilla”).

How often does the Last Son of Krypton find himself in a situation which leaves glowing-green super-poop bursting against his spandex dickey? Well, here’s a handy chart from Superman Family #165 which covers just the essentials, and which is actually used in lieu of the periodic table in some Kansas district schools.

"...and does anyone know the atomic number of Titano? Class?"

Missing from this chart is Yango, the Super-Ape from Krypton (and also Superboy #172 “World of the Super-Ape”).

Pa Kent ain't the brightest
tool in the basket.

The story begins with a retelling of what is possibly the most-frequently told story in comics – the story of how Superman came to Earth! Still, you can forgive them telling it again because, this time around, they also need to explain how a super-intelligent Kryptonian gorilla drag-raced him all the way across the universe in the process.

After a slightly Doolittlized re-rendition of the traditional “yokels found a durn sputnik” origin of the Babe of Tomorrow, the story takes us to Africa, where poachers are being vaporized or abducted or just plain disappearing without a trace in the commission of their crimes. Stumped – and giving a good goddamn for some reason which fucking escapes me – local authorities summon Superboy to help them crack the impenetrable mystery.

Feel free to make your own joke about
Madonna or Brangelina here...

It’s a good thing too, because if you ever doubted the sneakily analytical mind of Superboy, prepare to be astonished at the depths of his capacity to deceive. Deciding – for, again, some goddamn reason which fucking escapes me – that the gorillas are somehow involved, Superboy engineers a cunning plan to make the gorillas give up their secrets. ~~Waterboarding.~~ The Boy of Steel uses a hollowed-out gorilla skin borrowed from a taxidermist friend to disguise himself as a wounded gorilla, and I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally have an opportunity to write that sentence about someone other than myself.

Aping (haha) a wounded gorilla, Superboy is collected by a passing clutch of noble primates - Luckily for him they weren’t just horny and opportunistic – and take his apparently injured form to a hidden cave carved out with super-creepy monster faces and a big glowing red orbs (which Superboy chokingly acknowledges remind him of the sun of his home planet, just in case it escaped us).

Inside, Superboy finds some of the abducted poachers – and YANGO, SUPER-APE from KRYPTON, who has AN AWESOME JUMPER and RAD TASTE IN HEADGEAR and also SPEAKS FLUENT KRYPTONIAN and still somehow the thing where Superboy dressed up in a gorilla suit was the weirdest part of this story. I’ve been reading comics for too damn long.

Whoa, Superboy hardly ever uses the "K-Word"...

Yango and Superboy engage in a mighty tussle, trading powerful blows and lashing out at each other with torrents of heat vision, and probably all the gorillas in that cave should have died because of the volcano-hot temperatures. The battle ends with Yango whipping Superboy around by his cape and flinging him into the night like so much poop. I leave it to your discretion to decide whether - by subsequently escaping into the timestream - Superboy was conducting a tactical strategic retreat for the purposes of gathering intelligence or if the chicken-shit beat super-cheeks at breakneck speeds BUT whatever the case, there he went.

He can't take it there!

Painfully assembling all the clues – Yango has super-powers just like his, speaks Kryptonese, worships a red sun – Superboy manages to thickly eke out the conclusion that Yango too comes from Krypton! Who says Batman is the world’s greatest detective anyway? Make way for Superlock Holmesboy!

Turns out Superboy is right, and he travels back to the halcyon days of everything he ever knew or loved being blowed up into radioactive cinders to witness Kryptonian super-scientist and noted anthropologist Professor An-Kal wrapping a tiny gorilla baby in swaddling clothes and swaddling rocket. “You must not die with this ungrateful planet’s* passing,” he tells the insensate, sleeping baby ape, “Not after the years of intensive conditioned-cybernetic brain-programming I’ve devoted to you since birth!” Of course not! Then he does what all scientists do with the hard scientific work of a lifetime dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge – he launches it randomly into space.

*Hey, what did the planet ever do to you? Besides blow up.


"Because I hadn't thought of it until now? Thanks kid!" ZOOM

ANYWAY, so Superboy goes back to the present (well, the past, still, I guess, if he’s SuperBOY) and he and Yango end up becoming best buddies and Superboy promises to spread the word about Yango’s good works and then he flies away and never so much as thinks of the guy again. In his defense, he probably got distracted because he turned into Super-werewolfboy or met the teenaged Hawkman or something as soon as he got back to Smallville.

SOON THEREAFTER – about a year later, in fact, in Superboy #183 a slight variation on the theme is visited in the pages of a story titled “Karkan The Mighty - - Lord of the Jungle!”

I’ve been pretty good about not referring to gorillas as monkeys, but I’m going to willfully abandon this so I can describe this story as RED SON ... but with monkeys. WHY DON’T YOU PUT ALL THE BANANAS IN A BOTTLE?

Gosh, I dunno Pa, it wasn't there yesterday on
your way home from the store ...

Baby Kal-El’s rocket, in this imaginary story, decides to muddle Superboy’s inspiring history with a birth certificate controversy, landing the mighty tyke in the wilds of Kenya rather than the sun-bleached and boring-as-sin farmyards of Smallville. It makes you wonder, you know? I mean, if he’s really an American citizen and not a native of Kenya, why won’t he come forward with a legitimate Kansas state certificate of live birth? I mean, come on people, let’s keep fighting for the truth, you whackjobs…

Anyway, because there aren’t apparently any people in Kenya, Superbaby is found, adopted and raised by gorillas, taking the name Karkan and wisely hiding his junk – first under a leopard print tunic and later under the swaddling blankets from his Kryptonian rocket, meaning that even though he lived his entire life in the deepest, darkest forests of Africa, he still knew how to dress like Rick James. Civilization will out, you know.

This is almost exactly like Tarzan meets Avatar or Dances With Wolves meets Gorillas in the Mist, only with a head injury and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Yeah, that is messed up.

Eventually, wild trappers show up in the jungle – I should clarify that by ‘wild trapper” I mean they trap wild animals, not they are trappers and they are just fucking out-of-control or anything. They’re not trappers gone wild. They ARE, however, divided into the mostly good trappers (who attempt to save a bunch of their trapped animals from a flood, and certainly there’s no way they could have simply been protecting an investment, no-o-o-o-o, they cared about those baby cheetahs and ibixes and all the other infant animals destined to become comfortable slippers) and the one bad trapper, Karl Something-or-the-other (who is so evil he doesn’t even get a last name).

Karl comes complete with a pretty, good-hearted niece named Toni, and I applaud the creative team for not naming her Laura Langley or Loretta Lincoln or Lisa Lampenelli or some other double-L combination which takes the already-stretched series of coincidences and throws them off a bridge.

Karl manages to capture Super-Karkan (there’s kryptonite, of course), has his amusingly named native servant Tarugi tie up and cage the wild super-teen, and then gets on a boat back to America in order to … sell … tickets … to see a … half-dressed, illiterate white boy feeling ill and turning a little green. I honestly don’t quite understand Karl’s plans here, but suffice it to say that Superboy is on a boat and that’s what passes for a story here so far.

All right, now this Superboy-monkey story is getting sexy...

Toni helps rescue Karkan, Karkan flips over the boat, he tries to go back to his gorilla chums but they encourage him to follow his dreams of moving to America’s east coast and becoming a stand-up in the highly competitive Boston club scene, and then he flies off with Toni and we sort of hope he understands that she’s not got super-powers too so he doesn’t fly into space with her or something, because he doesn’t speak English and she probably doesn’t speak phoney-baloney ape yammer.

For instance, "the reacharound".

You know what this story is, besides a surprising way for a bunch of grown men to exercise their skills as writers and artists? IT IS A MISSED OPPORTUNITY, because a story – in canon – presented only a year earlier already established that Yango The Super-Ape’s rocket crashed in Africa at the same time Kal-El’s rocket was crashing in Kansas, and so either they could have teamed up super-intelligent Yango and dumb-as-bricks monkey-talking Super-Karkan for an amusing buddy cop action-comedy set in the deepest wilds of Kenya OR EVEN BETTER Yango could have landed in Smallville and been raised as Jonathan and Martha Kent’s exceptionally large and hairy son. All dodging Lana Lang’s attempts to prove that meek mild Yango Kent is actually the mighty and powerful SUPER-APE, playing with his super-kitty, using super-sign language to tell Mister Rogers how much he loves him. It writes itself!

Continuity Comics Part One

2011-02-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Karaoke night is going all sorts of downhill.

Neal Adams is going to leave behind him a fairly complicated legacy.

On the one hand - and just to begin with - Adams completely revolutionized the look of comics. Realistically rendered and more reminiscent of advertising art than cartooning, it’s arguable that the entire ouvre of “issue” stories (Green Arrow/Green Lantern being not the least of which) would never have been possible without Adams having changed the game. It’s not only a matter of his being the hand which illustrated Denny O’Neil’s ground-breaking, socially conscious story arc, but that tackling such an ambitious target would have been unthinkable without the gravitas lent by Adam’s previous work on other more traditional books.

In addition, Adams has been a tireless advocate for creator’s rights – his ceaseless efforts were undoubtedly pivotal in acquiring recompense for Siegel and Shuster from the DC offices, to name only the most public example. He’s put pen to page for at least a dozen timeless classics of the industry, and has been at the center of an ever-burgeoning font of young, new creators for more than the last thirty-plus years. All gold star stuff, to be sure.

On the other hand, he’s helped Stan Lee develop those puzzling hockey-playing superheroes, gave us Skateman, and has devoted a surprising amount of time and energy to some ding-dang theory about how the Earth is made of expanding funny-foam and that’s the reason your bedsheets never stay tucked in. (In a true moment of “What exactly is in this for him, again?”, he’s gone so far as to create an animated tutorial over expanding Earth theory, so … enjoy that, I guess).

The good obviously far outweighs the bad, but this is comics fandom and comics fandom loves to eat their own. Take for example how many so-called admirers and fans of Watchmen spit pure venom at Alan Moore because he kept them from having a stuffed Rorschach to sleep with at night. Also note how quickly they turn on creators who have the audacity to take their employers to court over ownership of intellectual property, how they sneer at every writer who fails to kowtow to continuity, and everything ever said by every comic book blog on the internet since all time forever – particularly this one.

In the “Against” column of Adams’ career, we can add Continuity Comics.

This is honestly what passes for "award-winning
dialogue" in a Continuity book.

Emerging from Adams’ Continuity Associates – the studio he founded with Charlton and DC Comics editor and illustrator Dick Giordano, and which launched the careers of dozens of “Crusty Bunkers” (Continuity associates and employees, including Walt Simonson, Terry Austin, Howard Chaykin and more) – Continuity was admittedly ground-breaking in terms of improving the lot of creators’ rights. Then again, so was Atlas-Seaboard, and that’s damning company for any dinner party.

Continuity managed to hold a complicated and tumultuous flight path for ten years, debuting in 1984 and kicking up dust with a stuttering two-point landing a decade later. In the interim, they were a company typified by some absurd shipping delays (One of their earliest, maddest titles – Armor – shipped thirteen issues in SEVEN YEARS), unrivaled gore and flamboyant T&A, and an editorial policy-cum-inhouse advertising scheme apparently overseen by a hyperactive thirteen year old with a word processor, a palette of Jolt cola and a fourth-grade literacy level.

The company’s house style, for better or worse, was a strict emulation of Adams’ own style – the process included Adams himself editing, adding to and correcting pages by hand, so that practically every book enjoyed his direct intervention. This put the comics grandmaster’s guiding hand on the rudders – and I’m speaking strictly non-sexually, here – of Mike Deodato, Bart Sears, Esteban Maroto and a passel of other quality draftsmen. Unfortunately, all of this prime comic capability too often ended up hidden swamped under scripts left soaking wet with rambling nonsense and behind gimmick covers – bagged, carded, heat-sensitive, chromed and "indestructible", in turn.

More on that in subsequent articles but, for now, here’s a rundown of some of the Continuity regulars…

Well, this is a sensitive portrayal.

CRAZYMAN
Not in a particular rush to win any awards for a sensitive portrayal of mental illness, the ‘superhero’ Crazyman (more of an in-the-field operative for a troubleshooting private corporation, as a matter of fact) is actually unfortunate lunatic Danny Brody. Unable to manage his emotional extremes, Brody occasionally flips out into violent, uncontrolled rages – and freed of the concerns of physical trauma, he taps into a well of seemingly inhuman strength and a terrific resistance to pain. I pause here so you may add your own Charlie Sheen joke.

Brody’s corporate handlers drop him into troubled hotspots under flimsy pretenses – it’s in this manner that you get a throwback portrayal of a corrupt African dictator in Crazyman’s 1992 debut issue, a caricature some twenty years past its expiration date - and wait for him to flip out on the bad guys.

It’s crass stuff and like I say - there’s no accolades from the Mental Health Provider community waiting in the wings, unless “accolades” means “truncheons”. Somewhere amidst Brody’s constant screaming, arm-flailing and subsequent spasms of mewling regret, you’ll find a tortured Prisoner homage and a recurring gag about ripping a woman’s eye out of the socket. The same woman, and the same eye, in fact, each time. Oh, and is it worth mentioning that she’s his friend and partner, and would be probably a love interest if most Continuity comics weren’t chaste in the most objectionably adolescent manner possible? It probably is.

It’s hard not to wonder if Crazyman was inspired at all by Mike Baron’s The Badger, a nonetheless-gonzo yet more skillfully managed book when it came to balancing the line between wacky superhero action and the legitimate pathos of the psychologically afflicted. But then again, Crazyman’s such a tortuous read that it might actually have been inspired by a forty year stretch in a Chinese jail.

There's our guy!

MEGALITH
On the other side of the spectrum from Crazyman’s undisciplined, premium-grade spazzing-out, there’s Joe Majurac – MEGALITH! Megalith is pretty much the dumbest name in comics, especially when you realize he could’ve been called “Menhir” or “Ziggurat”, which are pretty damn cool … by comparison. However, I guess they don’t have “Mega” in the name and I sort of suspect he was either named on the principle of how everything in the late Eighties and Nineties had to be “EXTREME” or alternatively “It’s like a monlith … BUT A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!”

Young Joe is a hard-working, hard-studying farmboy who – like the 6th century wrestler Milo of Crotos – lifts a newborn calf every day of its life until he’s able to lift an entire steer. This comes in handy if you want to be a server at Golden Corral.

I hope he's only
LIFTING that thing.

Eyeing him as a potential Olympic athlete, a shadowy organization lures him away from his family to a hidden German castle where, after years of oppressive training, they try to sell him to another country for THEIR Olympic team! The dirty sneaks! But ho, look out, Joe has conveniently mastered some weird phony-baloney thing called the “Mind-Body Link” and that means something something super-powers and he escapes. Yay.

I actually have a real soft spot for Megalith, even if he did spend an inordinate amount of time in his early appearances hanging out with those jackoffs Armor and Silver Streak.

Butt.

SAMUREE
“Samuree” is apparently Japanese for “Man this thing rides up”.

An orphaned American girl who ends up on an isolated island of Japanese martial arts experts when the USAF transport plane carrying her explodes or something, Samuree is a testament to the old saying that if a woman wants to compete in a man’s world, she’s got to do everything a man can do but in Eighties’ power-suit shoulder pads and a vinyl thong. Just like Ginger Rogers.

Samuree predates just about every other gratuitously hot ninja babe who populated comics in the late Eighties and beyond (although she’s preceded by Elektra, who arguably started the whole bizness), and unfortunately it’s difficult to discuss her outside of that. The interior of Samuree’s books were crotch shot after buttshot after copious flashes of hot (underage, I might wanna add) skin, and the interior of Samuree herself was damn near on display what with the most serious cameltoes in comics.

There’s also the small matter of the name – Samuree is not a real word, I didn’t have to tell you that, you already know there’s no such thing as a female samurai. AND I have to mention that she’s not even a samurai anyway, she’s a ninja, which means her name probably should have been Ninjette, or to keep it properly thematic Ninjeree, which frankly doesn’t sound like a superhero at all but more like a place where ninja parents take their ninja kids for ninja playdates.

Next up in Continuity Comics Part TwoMore character summaries, the absolutely insane in-house ad strategy from Continuity and something about this dumb garbage:

DC Comics' Most Pointless Deaths...

2011-02-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

"...and No More Lonely Nights."

Over in the Gone&Forgotten Tumblr, I’ve started an occasional series of entries entitled “Dan Didio Loves Death” (and its partner tag, “Geoff Johns is Hungry for Blood” ... and also the mostly unrelated "The Bulleteer Doesn't Fly" because THE BULLETEER DOESN'T FLY, PEOPLE), a showcase of the rampant death, destruction and degradation which has typified DC since Didio took over as Executive Editor in 2004.

Most comics have, of course, always invested heavily in violence and destruction in order to create drama – not just superheroes, but also westerns, science fiction, sword and sorcery and also not just anything within the over-arching adventure genre but also often in books whose focus was intended to be biographic, historical, inspirational or comedic. Criticism of this violence is also nothing new, and obviously has had little effect overall on the industry – pre-Didio DC specifically is notorious for the invention of a corpse-stuffed refrigerator which handily and tackily cut the fledgling Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s supporting cast down by one for a cheap pop and a tragedy-based emotional gravitas awarded to a character who – despite being the high-profile successor to a highly popular predecessor -was effectively a cipher.

Here, cat-slappin' action like you like
it, happy now?

The comics industry was asked to learn a lesson from the uproar and continued distaste over that scene, and DC exercises their subsequent education with more gore and blood and stuffed corpses than you can shake a stick at*.

(* I didn’t do a “shake a dead cat at” joke on purpose, please don’t wreck it for me)

What makes Didio’s tumultuous turn at the helm (and putting aside the argument as to whether he's individually personally responsible for the phenomenon) remarkable is the frequency and haste with which characters are offed, and for such little reason. There’s a philosophy of “putting the toys away” which has helped make DC comics what Neil Gaiman once impressively observed was the largest story ever told by humanity – Didio’s DC seems dedicated to breaking as many of those toys as possible, faster than they can build new ones, and shrinking the potential for new stories with every exploded face.

There are a lot of elements of this open to discussion in terms of story development and narrative theory and the general psychology of conflict and gender and such, so while I could go on at length about this (and do, over at the Tumblr, despite my best intentions) I try not to, as I find that it sort of winds me up – and not in the Secret Wars II way, not in the manner of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine or Captain “Split” Marvel, where the stories are so inspired yet inept or cluelessly enthusiastic or generally enjoyable for how thoroughly they miss the mark.

Three different villains in three different
titles during the same month back in
2009 all made references to wanting to
rape Supergirl. That's not grim-and-gritty,
that's the sign of a fuckin' problem.

They don’t wind me up in the way where it’s easy to find the humor in it, but rather they wind me up in a way that disappoints me. It’s a pretty common refrain - among those of us in the last few generations who have reached a respectable similacrum of adulthood - that so-and-so “raped their childhoods”, that because some form of entertainment wasn’t exactly like we remember from our youth, it was therefore a betrayal and is bad, regardless of the fact that a new generation will remember these remakes and reimaginations from their childhoods when they are our ages and obviously it’s all subjective.

I promise you, that isn’t my complaint – I don’t want to read comics which are exactly like the ones I read when I was a kid. For one thing, I’ve already read those, I want something new. For another, I’m an adult now and I’m looking for more emotionally and structurally complex comics. And for yet another reason, most of those comics weren’t very good – if comics in 2001 were exactly like the comics of 1981, I might walk into DC’s Countdown:Arena and let two bigger, meaner versions of me from some grim alternate universes slaughter me off-handed – what would be the point?

I wouldn’t mind the death, destruction and degradation if only it had some purpose in the storyline – I wouldn’t mind a hundred thousand deaths or the massacre of an entire nation (well, I’m in luck!) if it made even one character feel sad for more than a panel.

So, what follows is what I am sure is an incomplete list, but of those which stuck out to me in recent memory of the most meaningless deaths in the DC Universe as of late. Add your own, we could make a list long enough to been seen from space and to have its face punched out through the back of its head by Black Adam.

Meet the new Kryptonians - Dead-El, Deceased-El,
Asphyxiated-El, Blowed Up-El, Knifed In The Gut-El ...

100,000 Kryptonians
The Superman story arc New Krypton brought back the original bottle city of Kandor BUT – in an admittedly unexpected twist – immediately enlarged the city, sparking a culture clash between one hundred thousand newly re-displaced and freshly super-powered Kryptonians and a planet full of normal humans ill-suited to accommodate the unexpected guests.

There’s obviously no limit to the potential of a story which suddenly introduces a metric shit-hiaz*of flying transients – at the very least, you’re bound to see some new heroes and villains and some stunning cultural clashes and investigate a weird and previously unknown world.

But no, the villains were pretty much Zod and Brainiac, the heroes were some Metropolis regulars and the culture was a rigorous caste system with some obvious inequities we readers could stomp our feet and go “boo” at.

Naturally, it’s still pretty remarkable that we were introduced to as many as a dozen assorted new Kryptonian faces out of that 100,000, since the subsequent series were dedicated to blowing up anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred at any given moment. And just to make sure that no Kryptonians escaped the devastation, almost all the survivors asphyxiated en masse in space. Boom.

So: 100,000 potential new characters, a year of comics in a multitude of series and the whole point was a bunch of super-corpses in space. Hooray for comics!

(*It’s the only unit of measurement I remember from the original World of Krypton miniseries. It’s liquid. So. That’s grosser)

And for your birthday, we got you ... being royally
screwed over. Make a wish and blow out your wife!

Ralph Dibny
It pains me to have the former Elongated Man on this list, because I have to admit that I was one of many who bought the hype and became emotionally involved with Ralph’s character arc in the ambitious although flawed (yet still underrated) series 52.

A Silver Age staple and superheroic take on The Thin Man, the crime-solving adventures of Ralph and his globetrotting heiress wife Sue are fondly remembered by a lot of comic fans. The serial detective format of the stories didn’t translate into the Bronze Age and beyond, but a lot of writers found purchase in the portrayal of the couple as a bickering, buoyant pair of partnered romantics.

SO BRING ON THE MURDER! Ralph and Sue undergo a trial separation in the form of Sue’s freshly murdered corpse being set ablaze just before she gets the chance to tell him that she’s pregnant. Oh, and it was also Ralph’s birthday, no kidding. And Firehawk stole his wallet. I’m kidding about that. And this too: Superman farted on him also, I guess. Why stop with the misfortune there? We’re only an issue away from retconning a rape for Mrs.Dibny, after all, let’s rub some salt in this shit.

Ralph spent a year in the series 52, and I’ll spare you the many twists and turns and sidetracks which he encountered – like I say, for all its flaws, 52 is a helluva read, so you might owe it to yourself to check it out – but will cut to the chase: In the end, Ralph and Sue are reunited in death and are partnering up once again as … RALPH AND SUE DIBNY, GHOST DETECTIVES!

All’s well that ends well, right? And there even seemed to be some real potential in the premise of a deceased detectives solving supernatural crimes – well, there was, but the Ghost Detectives thing fizzled. Ralph’s and Sue’s next big moment came cackling in the pages of Blackest Night, where they murdered Hawkgirl and Hawkman with maces. C’est la vie.

"Dear Sirs, this letter is to inform you that you are to
have your asses handed to you on the following date ...

The Three Dimwits
The Golden Age Flash was occasionally bedeviled and/or assisted by a trio of comic relief caricatures of the very popular Three Stooges. Going under assorted names – but most frequently under the collective sobriquet “The Three Dimwits” – the characters Blinky, Winky and Noddy were effectively harmless and all but forgotten comic characters.

Since passing the mantle of the Flash on to Barry Allen, Jay Garrick’s comic sidekicks only made a sparse few appearances, the last before their final appearance being all the way back in 2000. In 2009, James Robinson added them to the prodigious body count of his Cry For Justice series, alongside a bunch of gorillas, Global Guardians and other tertiary supporting characters.

The point of their brutal murder seems to have been to give veteran superhero some sort of additional motivation to do good – probably unnecessary since Garrick has been doing the superhero thing for more than seventy years. It’s like deciding in 2011 that television host Guy Fieri needs a reason to look like a shaved, greased ewok – he’s already doing that.

Back in the days of Animal Man, Grant Morrison postulated the existence of a comic book limbo where characters who’d fallen out of publication disappeared, awaiting their calls back up the ranks. It’s slightly funny and slightly embarrassing to imagine Winky, Blinky and Noddy being summoned to Limbo’s county line, being asked to step back into continuity. “You’re needed”, says an authoritative editorial voice, so they step up from Limbo into the hyper-reality of comics … and return less than five seconds later, newly murdered and subsequently re-forgotten…

*sad trombone*

Haha, yes it is.

The All-New Atom
To be fair, I wasn’t all that big a fan of the “all-new” Atom – he resembled the “Same-Old” Atom a little too much for my tastes. The leap from Golden Age Atom and pint-sized pugilist Al Pratt to Silver Age Atom and super-physicist Ray Palmer described a dramatic distinction. Meanwhile, Modern Age Atom Ryan Choi is (like his predecessor) a physicist from Ivy Town who wears a red-and-blue costume and shrinks. Yawnsville. OH BUT HE’S ASIAN I forgot. Worlds of difference.

Still, I didn’t want him brutally beaten and murdered, especially just to give gravitas to Ray Palmer – again, who’s already had character motivation for the last fifty years – and a supervillainess who murders with the heat from her va-jayjay. I’m not even kidding. God, I have a headache.

What makes Ryan Choi’s recent assassination so puzzling is that he’s been a frequent guest on the very popular Batman: Brave and the Bold cartoon, the primary source of media which is turning the current crop of kids into the fans of tomorrow. Just like the movies, television shows and cartoons of my generation’s youth informed our perception of a (Richard Donner-inspired) Superman, (Tim Burton-inspired) Batman and (Super Friends-inspired) Justice League, so too will Brave and the Bold form a lot of kids’ expectations about the comics they’ll be reading in a few years (and hopefully into adulthood).

To that end, they’re going to be a little surprised at their anglo Atom and even moreso that Aquaman is glumly hucking undead sea animals out of the waves…

"Just bein' a good guy, here, sittin' in my
good guy chair ..."

The Nation of Bialya
There is a rumor that, as 52 came to a close, Didio allegedly stuck his hand into the carefully simmering stew and demanded some big “event” storyline. Given the bloodiness of the big event – the plodding World War III - and how it upset the carefully-built house of cards up to that point, I’m comfortable taking that rumor at face value.

Furious at the leadership of the nation of Bialya for personal injuries and an invasion of his home country, Captain Marvel-baddie Black Adam goes on a super-speed murder spree. He manages to rack up an impressive genocidal bodycount of TWO MILLION people inside Bialya’s borders with his own two fists before the super-heroes of the world gather to curtail his afternoon-long indiscretion. That’s what we call focus.

Black Adam’s subsequent punishment was exceptionally mild and, for that matter, short-lived, but what made the storyline intolerable is that, somehow, the character came out of it still treading the line in DC’s decade-long is-he-or-isn’t-he love affair with the question of whether Black Adam is truly a villain or just a good man making very hard decisions.

I can answer that question for them: HE KILLED TWO MILLION PEOPLE. IN AN AFTERNOON. I can barely get my laundry put away in an afternoon, I’m going to have to call anyone who can kill in the seven digits before Judge Judy a go-getter for badness. Which he would be, you know, if all those deaths had a point beyond shock and gore …

Cute kid, right?
They smooshed her under a brick.

Lian Harper
The infant daughter of former Teen Titan Roy Harper and international assassin Chesire (it’s complicated), killed with tens of thousands of others – both showcased and not – in the godawful Cry For Justice.

Ostensibly, Lian Harper was killed so that Roy Harper – a former heroin addict – would have sufficient reason to backslide, lending the character a certain amount of gritty conflict as he struggled against the allure of drugs. Of course, he’d also just had his arm amputated and replaced with some exceptionally uncomfortable, phony baloney robot prosthetic and his mentor had killed a dude and also he’s apparently got erectile dysfunction (Thanks comics. Thanks for letting me know that) and, you know, he’s a professional recently promoted to the pinnacle of a pretty high-stress career where maniacs shoot at you all the time and also one other thing oh yeah he’s a former goddamn heroin addict.

So he had more than his fair share of reasons to pick up the needle once more, and the death of his daughter not only wasn’t really necessary – it was bad writing.

Obviously all of these horrible things happening to Roy Harper in turn are awful, but they also make him a man who has nothing to lose – and, frankly, with that being the case, I don’t see why he shouldn’t shoot up. If Lian Harper were still alive, then we’d have the potential for an interesting story – a man having suffered a crippling injury and struggling with a persistent addiction, but he has so much to live for in the person of his daughter, whom he loves more than life itself. Can our hero battle back his demons for the sake of his daughter and her best interests?

Good stuff there, potentially, but it’s moot now because she’s been smooshed dead. Roy Harper is literally a character with nothing to lose and nothing to live for, so … fuck him. What’s the upshot of him beating his addiction and becoming accustomed to his prosthetic and being able to get his wood up again (THANKS COMICS. THANKS SO FUCKING MUCH FOR THAT)? Narratively speaking, there’s nothing except what will probably be a poorly-received by-the-numbers four-issue miniseries, so that’s just … that’s just great.

That's actually a pretty good fuckin' question.