CURIOSITIES: DITKO RUBS OUT RATS

In JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 81-- slightly before the debut of Thor-- Lee and Ditko have an exaggerated opinion as to the power wielded by comic strip artists.  

For good measure, the same issue plays host to yet another King Kong Kalamity, name of "Kunga."

CURIOSITIES: ONE MAIDEN, ONE MUSLIM

 

While visiting Comic Book Plus. I came across a listing for a small publisher named Elliot, possessed of only two titles, launched in 1944, near the conclusion of WWII and both showing a strong patriotic air. The above cover is from BOMBER COMICS #3, showing most of the characters featured therein. On top are two costumed heroes, Wonder Boy and Kismet, and on the stage below are a black kid named Sunshine (from KID PATROL), the ghost-busting star of GRIMM GHOST DOCTOR and one of his specters, and hero-pilot EAGLE EVANS beating down an enemy while a hot nurse looks on.

The other title was SPITFIRE COMICS, named for its lead feature, SPITFIRE. This concerned a butt-kicking lady spy named Spitfire Sanders, and it's a minor point that it's probably the first war-themed comic with a female lead. 

The title only had two issues and the only other feature worthy of note is JUNGLEMAN, about a jungle-hero who can literally summon beasts to his aid. According to one source Jungleman first appeared in a Harvey title and so this single story may be a licensed reprint.

BOMBER, the other title, lasted four issues and showed a bit more diversity. GRIMM GHOST DOCTOR also appears to be a Harvey recycling, but I have not yet checked the other character's appearances.  Unlike a lot of ghost hunters, Grimm possesses an arcane weapon against spiritual menaces, a "ghost disintegrator," but the hero doesn't seem to use the device much in these four stories. I notice that most of the stories, mainly Rudy Palais, involve the spirits of comely women.          
      

Wonder Boy had been a hero at Quality, which was not yet defunct in 1944, so maybe this was a rare example of a hero being sold to another company without the first company collapsing. One source says that the Quality version didn't have a girlfriend, so the brunette above, seen catfighting a hefty woman, suggests that these are new stories.

Finally, all four issues of BOMBER play host to KISMET, MAN OF FATE, who may be the first Muslim costumed hero. Kismet has neither origin nor special powers, and all four adventures have him fighting Nazis in Europe while garbed in trousers, a cape and a fez. Each episode has the light-skinned Kismet swearing "by the beard of the Prophet" or invoking Allah, so his creator, billed as "Omar Tahan," almost certainly was seeking some personal representation, not unlike Black artist Matt Baker giving Black African tribesmen White wives in the same time period. The stories are nothing special except for #2, in which Satan is so annoyed with Kismet's victories that he sends two infernal emissaries, a big brute and a sexy siren named "Flame," to give the bumbling Hitler a new super-weapon.    

 

CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

CURIOSITIES: KID COLT OUTLAW #1 (1948)

 If you were a "Marvelite" of a certain age, and you even dipped for a little while into Marvel's line of westerns, you probably encountered the origin of Kid Colt, one of the company's oldest frontier heroes. And what you probably encountered was a four-page condensation of the origin, probably produced at a period when most of the character's adventures were of a similar length.

The "original origin," though no great classic even for the genre, has considerably more meat on its bones. On the first page, we meet Blaine Colt as he takes on a crooked deputy whipping one of the hands who works the ranch of Blaine's father. Blaine too gets whipped, in part because he wears no guns.

Slightly later, Blaine explains his reluctance to wear guns to the ranch-hand: he fears that his quick temper will cause him to take a life. But this attempt to enjoy a peaceful existence ends when Blaine is framed for the murder of his own father. The culprit is the crooked sheriff, whereas I believe the father's killer in the condensed version is just some owlhoot.

     

Blaine shoots it out with the crooked sheriff, and for good measure turns the whip of the crooked deputy on the malefactor, declaring that it's the end of crooked law in the town. However, though the origin probably doesn't explicitly come up again, Blaine's shooting of a lawman, however crooked, goes a long way toward explaining why he becomes Kid Colt, a fugitive wanted over numerous states (though this was never a consistent restriction). I'm not sure when the familiar condensed version was produced, but it seems likely that the idea of corrupt lawmen was elided to make the story more generic. Said "original origin," BTW, is credited to artist Bill Walsh and writer Ernie Hart. Hart was also a collaborator on the first ANT-MAN story to feature The Wasp, as I discussed in this post.    

  

CURIOSITIES #47: THE FIRST MASTER OF EVIL AND THE FIRST SPIDERMAN

 Yet another example of Stan Lee recycling a name (possibly without conscious intent) in the Silver Age (i.e., the Avengers' "Masters of Evil") from the title of a YOUNG ALLIES story--though technically the villain's name in the story is "The Mad Mechanic."

And while I was at it, I checked out BLONDE PHANTOM #12 online as well, and found a Miss America story with another familiar name. As it happens, the villain with the spider-fetish-- using sticky nets and giant man-eating spiders-- spends the whole story masquerading as an honest scientist, Professor Morte, and since the impostor's real name is not disclosed, the only thing to call him is-- Marvel's first "Spiderman!"

     

CURIOSITIES #46: A TALE OF TWO MATTS

 I happened to read a scanned copy of TWO GUN KID online and noticed that about five times in the text, the Kid's secret identity of "Matt Hawk" is addressed as "Matt Murdock." DAREDEVIL #6 was out at the time, so I don't find it hard to believe that Stan Lee was quickly typing the script and forget which Matt he was writing about. Presumably all was corrected in reprints.                                                          

CURIOSITIES #45: ALTRUISM ANALYSES

 Since posting this mythcomics essay on one of the stories in Reiji Miyajima's THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, I've kept monitoring the series. It's not likely to come to a conclusion any time soon, given that Miyajima created five possible romantic subplots for the male hero. The newest installments, Part 44 and 45 (both untitled according to the online translation I read), concerned one of the sisters whose relation to her not-brother Arata has not yet received a lot of attention. This is the "science-nerd" Seiha, on whom I briefly commented in the earlier essay. I've no insight on where Miyajima might be going with this subplot, but I found one page interesting for the following philosophical reflection on altruism.                                                                                                     

The plot-context of Seiha's meditation, conveyed to her rather puzzled brother-in-name-only Arata, is that moments before this conversation, Seiha was assaulted by a couple of punks who thought she'd accrued a slutty reputation due to school-gossip. Hunky brother Arata shows up and chases the punks away, so that all Seiha suffers is some brief manhandling. Arata seems to recover from the experience very quickly, for she immediately launches into a lecture about how "self-sacrifice and self-importance are two sides of the same coin." Is she trying to distance herself from the unpleasant experience? Quite likely, and she qualifies that her general opinion of altruism does not affect her feeling of gratitude to Arata for his intervention. However, given her earlier lecture about the chemical determinism of human biology, clearly these thoughts are not new to her. One might assert that, based on what the artist reveals about Seiha's life, she might be the type who distances herself from all experience in her attempt to take a dispassionate, quasi-scientific view on life.                                                                                         

   So, since Seiha admits that she has been the beneficiary of Shiunji's altruistic action-- an action one assumes he would have taken for any woman, from real sister to perfect stranger-- why veer off into a discussion of how an individual act of "self-sacrifice" is inevitably tied to that individual's sense of "self-importance?" The reader doesn't know, yet. I considered another possibility: that Seiha also might be seeking to de-emphasize any instinctive feminine reaction to her being a defenseless young woman "saved" by an armorless (but maybe not amour-less) knight.  Saying that Arata was motivated in part by his own sense of self-importance perhaps takes away some of the "savior glamor." Her last remarks bring the conversation back to the fact that they're not real siblings, so that his rescue isn't a response to blood ties. But I don't know how seriously to take the idea Miyajima puts in Seiha's mouth: the idea that their non-relation should negate basic altruism, such as defending an imperiled woman whether one knows her or not. Presumably Seiha would say that this form of altruism too would be compromised by the "other side of the coin," though this seems like false rhetoric at this point.                                                                                                 

 I may revisit Miyajima's concept in future posts. For now, I'll note that this short reflection resembles a much more developed line of similar thought in one of Mark Twain's last works, the 1906 essay WHAT IS MAN? I have not read this in twenty years, but at the time I found it massively impressive. This too I may seek to revisit in future posts somewhere down the line.           

CURIOSITIES: KIRBY'S 2001

 In my recent review of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I wondered about the alleged Nietzschean inspirations of the Kubrick-Clarke script, particularly with respect to the ending, wherein astronaut Bowman is transformed into a sort of superman-- or maybe "super-fetus." Because Kubrick's film utilized so little exposition, though, it's tough to figure out what's going on with Bowman when he transforms. Does he incarnate the Nietzschean idea of "self-overcoming?" I wasn't able to find an online copy of the final 2001 script, which I believe Kubrick changed a lot during the movie's production. The novelization by Kubrick's co-writer Arthur C. Clarke does include a lot of mental exposition by Bowman when he transforms. However, Clarke's description of the process is pretty vague. Novel-Bowman doesn't behold a monolith in his fantasy-bedroom. He goes to sleep and feels like "something invaded his mind," though one can only assume that his alien controllers have triggered this process. He experiences a vision of time flowing backward, and as he re-experiences old memories, he regresses to the super-fetus. Then, as Bowman-Fetus transitions into outer space, he then sees the Jupiter monolith. But Clarke never directly says that the aliens have transformed Bowman, though he may have assumed that all readers would make that assumption.                                                             

  I then gave a quick look to Jack Kirby's 1976 adaptation of 2001. Obviously Kirby had seen the film by then, as he duplicates the scenario of the bedroom-monolith, among many other scenes. Maverick that he was, Kirby diverges from the film in many ways too, sometimes just out of personal preference. According to one online source, Kirby also borrows elements from the Clarke novelization as well, one example being that Kirby has the primeval ape-men hunt Clarke's warthogs, rather than Kubrick's tapirs. But though I doubt Kirby ever read much if any Nietzsche-- it's in the conclusion of the 2001 adaptation that I found the most Nietschean statement about Bowman's transformation. To be sure, the first part of the "explanation" is jumbled, as a Kirby Kaption says, "What is the end or beginning to something that has known neither-- mortally is a condition of man." I can only assume Kirby meant to write "mortality," because the following sentence is, "And he must be taught to surmount it..." That's all the internal monologuing Kirby gives us before the monolith begins its transforming process, but the whole ideal of "surmounting death" bears comparison to Nietzsche's idea of "self-overcoming." Then, in the last few pages, Kirby totally dispenses with the endings of both Kubrick and Clarke, claiming that the Star Child is "the first of many new ones," implying that the monolith is programmed to transform other humans into a race of super-psychics. It's kind of a wacky take on both movie and novelization, but I must admit-- it's Kwintessential Kirby!                                           

TITANIC NEAR-MYTHS AND CURIOSITIES

 I wasn't expecting to write more than a quickie piece on DC's first TEEN TITANS title, which lasted (not counting three try-out stories) from issue #1 in 1966 through issue #43 in 1973. And this is still only a selective view at best, at that.                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

      

What prompted me to revisit this moldy oldie from my youth was my having reviewed all five seasons of Cartoon Network's TEEN TITANS teleseries. In this post, I evaluated the mythicity of the fifth-season episode "Revved Up" as "good," stating: 


'In the 1960s TITANS comic, the writer introduced a villain with the improbable name of "Ding Dong Daddy," who executed crimes with the help of specially rigged vehicles. This was a rare (for the time) shout-out to a cartoon character outside the boundaries of four-color comic books: the artistic persona of Earl "Big Daddy" Roth, a caricaturist renowned for weird monsters driving fast cars. REVVED UP introduces the animated Ding Dong as a guy who somehow gets hold of a secret treasure owned by the Teen Wonder himself. When Robin and the other Titans try to reacquire the mysterious item, Ding Dong compels them to participate in a car-race-- and Cyborg, who dearly loves his T-car, is more than happy to oblige.'                                                                                                                     I didn't adequately explain why I thought the episode had better than average mythicity, but it later occurred to me that I'd implied that the mere use of the imagery of the artist Roth and some of his caricatures alone conferred mythicity. I could have corrected the language of the post, and no one would have noticed but me, but I thought I could expand on my thoughts better in an ARCHIVE post. What I was trying to get across was that the images of "Big Daddy" Roth and his creations were not mythic in themselves but only accrued sociological mythicity as representations of the "car culture" of the time. I felt "Revved Up" tapped into some of the same sense of humans' fascination with high-velocity vehicles. That fascination comes across by the way the Titans, Ding Dong Daddy and other malefactors cpme up with inventive car-creations, albeit with a certain degree of reflection about how cars work in the first place. (Without that reflection, "Revved Up" wouldn't possess any more mythicity than an episode of WACKY RACES.)                                                                                                       

So much for the TITANS cartoon episode, but what about the original comic book, to which the cartoon occasionally paid homage? In the title's seven-year-run, it was comprised of three periods: "Wacky Titans" (the one all the fans joke about for its un-coolness), "Relevant Titans" (wherein some of the heroes put aside their costumes and tried to have more "street-level" adventures), and "Spooky Titans" (wherein the heroes reassumed their costumes but tended to get involved in markedly supernatural difficulties). Ding Dong Daddy appears in the third issue of the "Wacky Period," but it's one of the better issues on which writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy collaborated. There's still a lot of bad "hip" dialogue that made the Wacky Period so celebrated for its nuttiness, but the plot's not that different from one of Bill Finger's Golden Age tales about Batman and Robin trying to keep young boys on the straight and narrow.                                                                                                 

  The story opens when an automated car robs a bank in Gotham City and escapes the Dynamic Duo, managing even to outmaneuver the Batmobile. By dumb luck, a governmental education committee asks the Teen Titans to investigate a high incidence of dropout high-schoolers, right in River City (OK, not really). From typical teen Danny, the heroes learn that many local teens are deserting school thanks to the high pay they earn at Ding Dong Daddy's car shop. Ding Dong is a crook of course-- he must be, since he's contributing to the delinquency of minors-- but Haney doesn't bother describing what sort of business the villain's using as his cover for his nefarious activities-- like, does he repair vehicles, or does he sell both cars and motorcycles of his own personal design? What he really does in his crime-career is to design other vehicles, like the bank-robbery buggy in Gotham, to pull off automated robberies. It's the sort of crime-career that only makes sense in the world of superheroes and their "pattern villains."                                                                                     

One might expect that once the Titans pay a call on Ding Dong, he might just quell his criminal activities and lay low. Instead, the superheroes' advent functions like a thrown gauntlet, and he sends forth three different gimmick-vehicles to confuse and confound the Titans. When Robin spies on the "Hot Rod Hive," Ding Dong sics thugs on the Boy Wonder and puts him in a death trap-- the sort of thing that practically begs a visit from the local constabulary.             

                                                

Instead, the Titans respond with a flanking attack, masquerading as ordinary bike-riders and talking Danny into getting them jobs at the Hive. The heroes don't do a really good job of staying undercover, since they use their special powers to stomp some nasty bikers who have nothing to do with the main story. (Note the bizarre headgear Nick Cardy gives to the bad bikers.) What's to keep any dropout loyal to Ding Dong from exposing the Titans to the villain?                         

                                                                                                                                              

  Nevertheless, the subterfuge works, in large part because the wig-wearing Wonder Girl distracts the maker of crime-cars by shaking her moneymaker for him in private. In jig time the heroes are able to expose Ding Dong's criminal nature to his student-employees, who are duly aghast at being involved in felonious doings. Ding Dong unleashes one last gimmick on the heroes-- a killer gas pump, of all things-- and then River City can go back to the status quo. I don't believe Ding Dong appeared again until the cartoon show, but he's a decent enough pattern-criminal, given a little novelty by the Roth caricature and by the fact that there aren't that many vehicle-themed villains.                                                                                                       

As I said, I'm not going to attempt an overview of even one of the TITANS periods, but I will note a few other curiosities in the Wacky Years. Beast Boy, who was a vital member of the super-group in the 1980s, only got one guest-appearance in the 1966-73 run, when he tried to join the Titans in issue #6. The main story's not very good, and the art by Bill Molno is subpar, but the page I reprint above does show writer Haney seeking to emulate a little of Marvel's "misunderstood hero" trope, which was on fuller display in DOOM PATROL, where the animal-imitating teen originated.  For good measure, the letters column for the issue contains one letter of no particular consequence from future pro Mark Evanier. Also, a continuity-minded fan asked the editors of TITANS if Wonder Girl would get phased out since she'd been written out of the WONDER WOMAN series by Robert Kanigher, which event I addressed here. The TITANS editors did not respond to the continuity confusion.     

                                                                                           
Finally, just for grins, here's a page from the first appearance of the Mad Mod, who got more than a little exposure on the TEEN TITANS cartoon show. Haney and Cardy introduced the character, whose raison d'etre had more to do with fashion-gimmicks than with mind-control-- and who was apparently Cockney, since he had the habit of dropping his "H's." Though I rather doubt that any Brit of any linguistic division went as far as Haney's depiction, since Mad Mod even laughs without the use of the "H-sound," going, "'Aw, 'Aw" or occasionally "'Ar, 'Ar."  

CURIOSITIES #41: WONDER WOMAN'S "NEW GOLDEN AGE"

 

In WONDER WOMAN #156 (1965), editor/writer Robert Kanigher endeavored to goose sales by announcing a "New Golden Age" for the heroine. This brief reboot of the low-rated WW series only lasted about eight more issues, in which the words "Golden Age" would often be used on covers or splash pages. Kanigher revived a smattering of villains introduced by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s, and he even had his regular artists, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, emulate the drawing-style of the feature's original artist H.G. Peter. Once sales came in, probably indicating little if any improvement, Kanigher and the artists largely went back to what they'd been doing on the title in years previous.

One might think that Kanigher, who was himself a graduate of the Golden Age hard-knocks school, might have been able to capture something of the resonance of the Marston series. Indeed, for some years after Marston's passing, Kanigher even wrote scripts for Peter before DC gave the older artist his walking-papers. Since I haven't read every Kanigher WW script from his run of twenty-plus years, I can't make a decisive statement about why the feature began to lose readers over time, and I can't even say when the decline began. But my considered opinion is that Kanigher generally imitated the daffier aspects of Marston's scripts-- things like having Amazons riding kangaroos-- but he couldn't deliver on the heartfelt meaning that Moulton conveyed in his scripts. I'm not saying that any of Moulton's 1940s readers were necessarily converted to his unique feminist philosophy, or even that those readers understood what Moulton was talking about. But young readers are often attracted by the sense of an author's conviction in his principles, as long as he makes those principles into good stories. That's something Moulton was often able to do, in contrast to the modern generation of Progressive political comics-writers.

In summation, I think Kanigher looked around at the sales success of other DC revivals of Golden Age characters-- one of whom, THE FLASH, Kanigher had written at the dawn of the Silver Age, circa 1956. But the FLASH stories produced by dominant writer John Broome did possess a strong conviction in the types of science fiction and fantasy appropriate to juvenile audiences. In contrast, Kanigher writing a WW script in 1965 wasn't much different than a WW script in 1956: almost non-stop wackiness with a small moral sop tossed in. Kanigher looked at the success of some (though not all) of the Julius Schwartz line of DC magazines, and he thought all one had to do was mindlessly emulate the outward form of Golden Age stories-- which was exactly what the Schwartz line did NOT do. It's at least of passing interest that 1965 was the same year as the first full comic-book convention in New York, which is probably why Kanigher worked in a lot of references to the comic-collecting hobby in #156.

BTW, the fact that I have no comments on the featured "novel," "Brain Pirate of the Inner World," should be enough to signify my opinion of it.

CURIOSITES #40: RADIATION REVELS

I've been a little curious lately as to when comic books began making sustained use of the fantasy-trope that radiation can cause either (1) modifications in infants at conception or in the womb, or (2) spontaneous changes in fully grown entities. In prose science fiction, the trope has been traced back to the late twenties and early thirties.

So far the earliest comics-examples I've found appear in 1944. One is in a YOUNG ALLIES story, wherein a Nazi agent is mutated by radium exposure and changes into an atomic powerhouse who's variously referred to as both "The Green Death" and "The Radium Man."

By an interesting coincidence, 1944 also gave us the short-lived jungle girl strip, JUN-GAL, whose star gains super-strength from exposure to natural radium. There's no mention as to why the Black natives in her tribe fail to get similarly empowered.

CURIOSITIES #39: "WHO'S AFRAID OF A DUMB BUNNY?"

 Apparently, Dan Jergens was back in 2015, because when he wrote a chapter of his BAT-MITE series, he guest-starred The Inferior Five-- consisting of The Blimp, Awkwardman, White Feather, Merryman, and...

TOUGH BUNNY?????

So Jergens was too politically correct to call her "Dumb Bunny," for fear some noodge would say he was marginalizing women or the like. Yet the character he calls "Tough Bunny" is still as dopey as the original "Dumb Bunny." So he's still willing to tell jokes about dumb women, but he just won't say the WORDS "dumb bunny." 

Plus which, even the corny humor of the original INFERIOR FIVE was funnier than anything Jergens wrote in this dreckfest.

So glad I didn't spend any money on this one.

 

CURIOSITIES #38: ["JON THE MAD SCIENTIST"] (1941)

 I was looking up the second appearance of the original Clayface in DETECTIVE COMICS #49 and happened across this Crimson Avenger story. The low quality of the story may indicate why the Crimson Avenger (who for some reason is only called "The Crimson" in the main story) was largely ignored by readers in favor of Batman, even though the red-clad hero had appeared seven issues before the Cowled Crusader.

One thing I can't resist about this wonky story is that only once is the stereotypical mad scientist given a name-- that of "Jon." Really, Jack Lehti (or whoever wrote this)? If you wanted to save lettering-time-- which might be the reason for repeatedly calling the hero "The Crimson"-- why not use a stereotypically ghoulish name, like "Ool" or "Gor?"

Anyway, Jon shows his classical knowledge by naming his gargantuan killer robot "Echo," I guess meaning that the Frankensteinian automaton is the "echo" of his genius. I'll note that although the monster of Mary Shelley's book and of the Universal films is merely human-sized, some films intimate that the creature might be some sort of world-conquering menace-- a threat which is at least a little more credible with a robot about 20 stories tall. Robert Florey's unused script for the '31 FRANKENSTEIN ostensibly made the monster into a mindless killing machine.

By this time in the main character's history, the Avenger has shed most of his original "Green Hornet" attributes, taking on the general look of "union-suit" crimefighters. There's no mention of the hero's Asian sidekick here but he also donned a union-suit at some point. It's of minor interest that in this period the cops didn't automatically trust anyone in a superhero costume, and so this band of blue boys improbably blame "The Crimson" for the big robot.

The Avenger does still use his gas-gun, immobilizing Jon just after the latter calls his murder machine to kill the intruder. The hero deliberately leaves the scientist in the robot's path and then makes sure both entities are destroyed. A moderately cool moment of vigilante justice.

CURIOSITIES: WHAT NEAL ADAMS DID WAS CRIMINAL

 

Or rather, KRIMINAL.

That's assuming these KRIMINAL issues came first. If the art-swipe went the other way, just reverse the metaphor.

CURIOSITIES #36: ["KERRY'S LITTLE LECTURE"], KERRY DRAKE #10 (1948)

 

This one-page item appeared on the inside front cover of a comic book devoted to reprinting the Sunday pages of KERRY DRAKE, a patent DICK TRACY imitation. One interesting aspect is that though the lecture appears in a comic book, the complaining citizen is actually irate about violent crime stories in the newspapers, which for her set a bad example for the young. Prior to this, I hadn't seen much documentation of calls for comic-strip censorship, and indeed Wertham's SEDUCTION largely gives the newspaper comics a pass. According to Jay Maeder's history of the DICK TRACY strip, Chester Gould constantly dealt with complaints about violence for the entire history of TRACY. I imagine KERRY DRAKE might have caught some of the same criticism, though from what I've seen DRAKE was much tamer than TRACY. This proposition is strengthened by the fact that this lecture is signed by DRAKE's creator Alfred Andriola. Of course, some other artist might have ghosted the one-pager in his style. But if Andriola had been the victim of real citizen complaints, then there's no reason he would have refrained from using the interior of a reprint comic book as a "bully pulpit" to argue his case-- especially since he could not do so in the various newspapers that circulated his comic strip.

As an added amusement, the comic-strip continuity reprinted in issue #10 concerns illegal drugs, a topic which would be forbidden for comic books following the Comics Code. There never was an official Code for newspaper comics, but I imagine the existence of the Code might have had a chilling effect on, say, the depiction of various topics in the strips during the late fifties and the following decade.

CURIOSITIES #35: "THE MONSTER'S EYE" (PEP #157, 1962)

 I have to credit the writer of this forgotten story for cramming four impossible things into a six-page story and making it kinda fun:

(1) A hero with animal powers,

(2) An alien girl (smokin' hot as drawn by John Rosenberger) who can change animals into other animals, or into other versions of themselves,'

(3) A hurricane with a monster in its "eye,"

(4) A giant snail, the epitome of slowness, juxtaposed with the epitome of speed and force.

CURIOSITIES #34: 'THE KILLER SHARK" (BLACKHAWK #50, 1952)

I found most of the DC BLACKHAWK comics of the 1960s easy to acquire without much expense, and never thought they were anything but slightly entertaining formula-fare. I don't imagine I knew anything about the Blackhawks' earlier incarnation under Quality Comics until sometime in the seventies, which was both the era when DC began reprinting some of those adventures, and when I obtained a copy of the two volumes of Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS. 

Even without knowing anything about Early Blackhawk, I could tell that DC's version was dependent on the same sort of menaces I saw in other Silver Age titles: lots of space-aliens and costumed super-villains. Not many in either category ever made return appearances, but the one exception was a costumed fellow named Killer Shark. Once or twice, I remember wondering if DC kept giving this character exposure because he'd been a familiar face at Quality.

I never made any deliberate attempt to find out, not even by consulting online resources. But I found out, by accident, that Quality Blackhawk did have just one encounter with a version of Killer Shark. Artist Reed Crandall's design for the villain-- shark-fin cowl, goggles, and sharp teeth-- was pretty much followed by DC later. However, Quality only used the character once as far as I can tell, killing him at story's end-- probably because that Killer Shark was a literal killer, inviting a certain rough justice.

I'm not minded to search out DC's first usage of the character, but I think that, aside from costume modifications, he stayed much the same throughout the Silver Age: a sea-raider who kept coming up with gimmicks to confound the heroic aviators. The above scene is from BLACKHAWK #170 (1962), and involves Lady Blackhawk getting turned into a mermaid for some reason. 

It's likely that Killer Shark is the only villain DC transplanted from Quality, and the DC editors probably brought him back into use only because the original series did not use costumed villains very often, and it was easier to rework an earlier character than make a new one. Though no versions of Killer Shark rate as great villains, he has some distinction for another transformation: he brainwashed Lady Blackhawk into becoming his mate, Queen Killer Shark, which gave Blackhawk and his partners more than a little aggravation. And these are probably the only sixties BLACKHAWK stories that have any dramatic oompf.

CURIOSITIES #33: "THAT SURE WAS A BONER I PULLED WITH LANA" (SUPERBOY #13, 1950)

 Much funnier, IMO, than the better known "Joker's boners" meme.

I found this item reviewing the earliest appearances of Lana Lang in the Golden Age SUPERBOY. In her first outing, she's all but a xerox dupe of Lois Lane, and is overtly compared to the lady reporter. In this, her third appearance in the title, she monologues what I assume was the established credo of all the nosy women in the life of the Kryptonian hero: they think that if they can learn his secret ID, they can insinuate themselves into his private life and romance him. However, later in the same story she also makes clear that she wants to boast about her cleverness to all of her friends. Just like a woman!

Of course Superboy punishes the young girl for her pride and snoopiness. But in one sense Clark's more backward than Lana, for the super-Boy Scout doesn't seem the least complimented that this hot young redhead wants to romance him. All he can think about is how she may endanger his status as a superhero-- and I'm not sure if his indifference to romance makes him more mature or more childish. (I know which one DC writers meant to emphasize, but it would be an interesting bit of trivia to figure out the first time Superboy ever, like, noticed the unique appeal of pretty girls.)

ADDENDUM: Though in 1950 Whitney Ellsworth edited both SUPERBOY and the anthology ADVENTURE COMICS, where the Boy of Steel was the lead feature, he didn't bring Lana into the AC continuity until issue #161, dated February 1951. This quasi-introduction went further on portraying Lana as a demi-Lois, to the extent that both Lana and Clark get temporary summer jobs at a Smallville newspaper. Though this Lana still suspects Clark of being Superboy, she's less Superboy-crazy than scoop-crazy. I imagine the editors dropped the idea of "Lana Girl Reporter" pretty quickly.

And surprise, surprise-- I wasn't really expecting to find stirrings of romance between Clark and Lana (albeit with miscolored blonde hair) as early as November 1951. But the ADVENTURE COMICS for that month allows readers the first peek at Clark Kent's fancies turning lightly to-- well, maybe just puppy love.