Golden Age Space Wars!

Skyman is not a Charlton character. The aviation hero actually was part of Columbia comics scene. But Skyman's adventures were popular and he appeared briefly in his own title as well for years in Big Shot Comics. The stories reprinted by Mort Todd in these Charlton Neo volumes come from Big Shot. If you enjoy classic movie serials you will like these tales which are paced almost exactly the same as say Radar Men from the Moon. 

The series began soon after Ogden Whitney returned from active duty during WWII. While never featured on the covers of Big Shot, this series of stories featuring Skyman going to the Moon where he encounters Martians and Hitler are well paced adventures with proper cliffhanger endings. The series ran for years from 1946 until late 1948. 

In addition to aliens and Nazis, Skyman and his girlfriend Fawn must confront threats such as giant green rats who live inside the Moon. (No reference is made about cheese, but that must've been in the back of Whitney's mind.)

Hitler has a bombastic scheme to conquer the Earth with bombs from the Moon, but of course that goes awry. But when Skyman is able to end that odious threat, that doesn't mean the danger is over. 

Aliens from Venus are the next obstacle facing Skyman and Fawn as well as several Earth people who have been snatched by Venusians. Skyman has to salvage more than one spaceship to get around the solar system. 

But it will come as little surprise that Skyman and his girl do find their way back to Earth, but it's not without more mayhem and death than I expected. This story was exceedingly well told, but waiting for chapters over several years must've been excruciating for readers back in the day. 

On a different note, Steve Ditko drew a Skyman adventure written by Mort Todd way back in the 90's which appeared under the Indy ACE Comics brand. I have the original around here somewhere. 

I don't sadly have this version of the story from Charlton Neo which presented the Ditko story and pencil art for the tale. I'd love to see and compare. 

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Of Maus And Meta-Maus!

Yesterday was a certain lunatic dictator's birthday. To commemorate this asshole's entry into the world, I give you Art Spiegelman's Maus, one of the most powerful examinations and indictments of the Holocaust in comics form. I've re-read Maus, but this time with insights gleaned from reading MetaMaus, a tome which gathers together sundry interviews and other materials pertinent to the creation. 

This time I read the collected Maus. MetaMaus is keyed to this volume and page numbers are specific to this collection book. It's only been a few years since I read and commented on this story, but current events push me to engage with it again. I wonder how my feelings will change when the oppressions depicted in the story are similar to those we might feel today. 

Art Spiegelman's Maus - A Survivor's Tale is one of the most brutally frank comics I've ever read. Spiegelman is not only intent on relating the dreadful details of his father's survival of the Nazi regime's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, but he shows what effect that bloody campaign had on the survivors of the genocide. His father was one such survivor and the man Vladek Spiegelman is presented as a fully rounded character, a man with grit and capacity for love, but a man who is overwhelmed by his need to be prepared for the next time the Jews come under assault. This need expresses itself in his miserly approach to life which makes him a challenging person to live with. Spiegelman does not attribute all of Vadek's stingy ways on his war experience, but increasingly as the story unfolds before us in chapter after chapter, we see that had Vladek been someone else, he and his wife might not have lived through the horror of Auschwitz. And we also can tell that the survival has also had a toll on Vladek 's spirit. The story follows Vladek's and Anja's story as they see the rise of the Nazi regime and attempt to survive and later hide from the predations. They are ultimately unsuccessful, and the story leaves off as they are both ultimately captured and sent to join their people in Hitler's death camps. 

Maus was originally produced in six chapters spread over six issues of the comic magazine RAW. RAW produced a new issue annually for the most part and so the saga of Maus was begun by Spiegelman in issue number two of RAW in 1980. And each issue and year after that until the final installment of what became part one of the saga was published in RAW#7 in 1985. The story was then collected and published by Pantheon Books as Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986. When a sequel was finished some years later the title was lengthened to Maus - A Survivor's Tale Part I My Father Bleeds History. (We'll get around to Part II next week.) 

Spiegelman is attempting some complex things in this story. He simultaneously wants to detail the horrors of the Holocaust as seen first-hand through his father's eyes. In addition, he wants to show the relationship between himself and his father which is rocky at best. Spiegelman's mother Anja had committed suicide some years before and his father had remarried to a woman named Mala. Spiegelman also had a brother who was killed during the Holocaust, and he seems to suffer from having been compared all his life to this ideal brother who never grew up. It's clear that guilt and angst are wide and deep inside the family and getting an understanding of that dysfunction seems to be Spiegelman's ultimate goal in pushing his father for details of the WWII atrocities. 

Maus also makes an interesting choice, one which I'm sure has made for its long-lasting reputation and that is to use the tried-and-true comic book convention of using intelligent animals to stand in for human beings. Whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or Huckleberry Hound, we respond to this idea with eagerness, and it allows for the crimes and horrors to be shown with a degree of separation which oddly allows them to bypass our defense mechanisms to no see horror. It seems we understand immediately that certain animals can represent certain kinds of people, perhaps too easily. Spiegelman has drawn criticism for using pigs to represent non-Jewish Poles and cats to represent the Nazis. But it only makes sense in a universe in which the oppressed Jews are seen as Mice. The seeming slow but steady progress by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews is presented at one level in the story as literally a "cat-and-mouse" game. 

Given this trope, it's easy to understand why some folks who are careless in their thinking and lazy in their reading might jump to a conclusion that the treatment is inappropriate for kids. Funny animal comics are the very essence of kid's stuff, but this is a different animal story which ain't all that funny after all. The Tennessee school board which banned Maus from its classrooms only succeeded in making sure that more people were aware of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning work and that sales flew through the roof. Their objections to the work are laughable and it seems clear that these folks want their children to grow up free of the moral dilemma the Holocaust presents to all modern peoples. They are derelict in their responsibility both to the students under their care and to history itself which requires that we remember the evil which is done, so that the chances of that evil reviving is minimized. 

The publication of Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986 was one of the markers that comics had grown up into a fully mature narrative form. The splendid creativity and diversity sparked by the advances of the direct sales market meant that while comic books diminished as a mass market entertainment they had in place become fully realized art. Art Spiegelman had hit a home run in the field, book that defied the conventional attempts to categorize it and which functioned equally well as both biographical and autobiographical and which used outsized metaphor to drive home themes that much of a broad audience might reject in a less user-friendly format. 

 

But Spiegelman was not finished. The first chapter of the second volume of the story which would become known as Maus - A Survivor's Tale II - And Here My Troubles Began was first published in the eighth and final issue of RAW magazine where the first part had been serialized. There is a jump in the framing narrative which we'd been following about Spiegelman trying to get the story of his father Vladek's survival of the Holocaust when we learn that Vladek has died. Part of the angst seen in Maus is that of Spiegelman himself who was tortured by his demanding father and the suicide of his mother in 1968. He made it quite clear in the story that he blamed her death on his father and his unyielding pressure about money and other details of daily life. Working through this anger with the help of his wife Francoise Mouly is part of the story we must also consider. 

This story has Vladek and his wife Anja captured at last after many long months of avoiding the Nazis. They are sent to the death camps, and we follow Vladek as we lose touch with Anja's story. There is intense frustration on Spiegelman's part about this aspect of the story since his father had destroyed his wife's diaries about the events of the Holocaust. So, we are left with only Vladek's story, and we see that he survived the camps by good fortune and savvy working of personalities and resources. The Jews in the camps are beaten and killed and summarily marched to their deaths by a regime that seemed all too intent on this singular proposition. From the perspective of this story WWII seems much less about tactical decisions on the battlefield and all about the singular mania which demanded that Jews everywhere be put to death, that all things Jewish be absorbed or obliterated. There was little distinction between man and woman or adult and child, all were subject to perhaps the most organized and banal genocide in human history. 

While we follow Vladek's journey in the camps and then out again where the danger is no less intense it seems, we see the horrors of Nazi regime and the war it perpetrated reflected in individuals and their losses. They might be mice and cats and pigs and dogs as rendered by Spiegelman but never does the forget that these are people suffering in stunningly brutal ways. Sudden violent death was a commonplace and only relentless effort and luck could stave it off.  By the end of this second tale, we have followed Vladek not only from Auschwitz to Sweden to New York to Florida and to New York again, we have seen one old and tortured soul who longs for connection with his son but cannot give of himself long enough to find it. There is no happy ending in Maus - Survivor's Tale, just an ending of sorts. Survival is a story that never ends and travels from generation to generation for all time as tragically we are learning again today. 

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Daredevil Battles The Man Of Hate!

Once upon a time in America, Adolph Hitler was the epitome of evil. He was the loathsome skunk who forced two of my uncles to go to war to protect the civil order of the Western world itself. Once upon a time we all hated him. And we have the comic books to prove it. Arguably the most infamous is the cover above for the debut of the Daredevil series from Lev Gleason which has the one-off title of Daredevil Battles Hitler! Signing as "Woodro" the infamous cover above was created by Charles Biro. 

In this absolute riot of a comic book Daredevil battles Hitler and his minions on many fronts, and he is helped by other Lev Gleason heroes of all kinds in this comic dated July 1941. (For the record, I love comic images which showcase heroes coming out of the very pages of book or even bursting through the cover.)

Daredevil joins forces with Silver Streak to combat the malevolent dictator. This splash page showcases Hitler as a giant crushing regular folks under his boot and crashing buildings to the ground. Charles Biro produces both story and art for this initial chapter. 

One the biggest "stars" for the company was actually the villain the Claw, who is a maniacal giant with fangs. He seems like an ideal choice to help the little dictator but as the title suggests there's little honor among malevolent maniacs. The villains team-up but then fall-out as Daredevil does his best to wind the day. Writer Biro was joined by the great artist Jack Cole for weird outing. 

The action switches to the jungle where Daredevil joins up with Lance Hale, a Tarzan inspired hero. The duo drive the Nazis out of this little corner of deepest darkest Africa. It's assumed Biro wrote this one, bt the artist's name is lost to time. 

I love this double-page spread which advertises the various heroes Lev Gleason publishes. Not all of them get featured in this comic. 

When Dickie Dean invents a new decoding machine, the news reaches the ears of Joseph Goebbels who sends out his henchmen to kidnap Dickie and his friend Zip Todd. Daredevil seeks them out in enemy territory and the heroes not only return with the machine but do some harm to the Nazis as well. Biro and Cole team up again for this story. 

Next Daredevil takes to the skies as he teams up with Cloud Curtis to battle Herman Goering's dangerous fighter planes. It takes more than a dash of derring-do to subdue the enemy. Sadly, again the artist for this story is unknown. As we learned yesterday, they produced them fast at Lev Gleason. 

In perhaps the strangest of the adventures Daredevil is in conflict with Grand Admiral Von Roeder who is attacking shipping. The Pirate Prince appears from the mists of time to assist in putting down this threat and then he and his sailing ship disappear just as mysteriously. Harry Anderson supplies the artwork for this Biro story. 

The comic takes a turn by leaving off with these focuses instead on Adolph Hitler himself and muses upon how his vile man came to power. The story is both written and drawn by Bob Davis. 

Hitler's notorious biography is tracked in a two-page prose offering which details many of how he came to prominence and ultimately a threat to the world. 

We then get some potent pages showing how Hitler and his forces moved beyond their borders and became an immediate menace to all of Europe and beyond. The story has the Roman god of war Mars join Hitler in his predations. 

The story "Man of Hate" was reprinted in 2001 in All-Hitler Comics from Bill  Black's AC Comics. 

This is a wild comic book, published before the beginning of the war and so it could be argued was needlessly provocative. Those arguments are largely hogwash. Recognizing the immensity of a menace, whether overseas or in one's own homeland, it's necessary to face up to the task of defeating evil. 

I read this story in The Original Daredevil Archives from Dark Horse. If you can't wait and I haven't spoiled too much, you can read it here. 

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Lord Of The Swastika!

This a post from less than a year ago that I felt I needed to share again, given that some of our "leaders" have chosen to revive the heinous salute. 

(Elon reaches out to his people both past and present)

The Iron Dream purports to be nothing less than a novel by the science fiction writer Adolph Hitler. Norman Spinrad's conceit in this brazen 1972 work is that in an alternative world Adolph Hitler did not rise to power to lead the Third Riech to evil ruin, but rather that he migrated to the United States and took up the career of a science fiction writer, finding some small success in the myriad sci-fi pulps of the day. The Iron Dream contains the final 1959 novel of Hitler known as Lord of the Swastika which proves to be his magnum opus, and it's a doozy. Within the meta-frame of the story the novel was reputedly a Hugo award winner and triggered a following of devoted acolytes. In our actual, real world The Iron Dream did actually win the Nebula. 

Norman Spinrad's novel was first published in 1972 and I first encountered it when I went to college in 1975 and chanced upon SF Rediscovery edition in the college bookstore. The cover art is fascinating, a clear image of Hitler astride a stylized motorcycle with the omnipresent swastika in the background. Even as callow college Freshman I got the joke, that this was a takedown of the attitudes and beliefs of Hitler and the cretins who believed as he did in the morbid notion of racial purity. 

The story is that of Feric Jaeger, a young pure-blooded Aryan who leaves the limits of his sordid little hamlet in a post-apocalyptic world and seeks to enter the center of "true humans". He is dismayed by the lack of rigor in thought and practice to maintain the purity of the race. Radiation from what is referred to as the "Great Fire of the Ancients" has mutated mankind. And he takes it upon himself with no hint of self-doubt to bring a violent revival to the land. To that end he takes command of the local political group and later still a gang of motorcycle toughs. These he blends into his "storm troop". The sign of his leadership is not just his might and powerful personality but a mythic powerful truncheon which responds to his unblemished genetic heritage, marking him in Arthurian fashion as the chosen leader. (It's just about as phallic as it gets as the story unfolds.)

As we follow Feric, he gains more and more power preaching his message of racial purity. Long passages describe the leather garb and resplendent decor of this racially ideal culture. Rarely if ever does Feric make a misstep as we see the repulsive characters around him somehow fail to see the true power of a true man fueled by his undaunted philosophy. It's "might makes right", but the "right" here is a reverse-engineered psychotic vision of a singular race stable and dominant in the world. Feric leads his assembled nation against the hated enemies in the East, sweeping the enemy away in a mighty swathe of pure will and military glory. Eventually we are treated to the sight of camps built and run for the express purpose of gleaning the preferred genetic models and disposing of the remainder either by exile or euthanasia. It's an orgy of battle, blood, metal, explosions and gory destruction of all that is less than the ideal of humanity which somehow dances in the heads of the psychopaths we are to see as the heroes of our tale. 

Spinrad even goes so far as to create a bogus critical essay by a fabricated professor who puts this blasphemous saga into a bogus literary context. Spinrad even goes so far as to create a bogus critical essay by a fabricated professor who puts this blasphemous saga into a bogus literary context. "Afterword to the Second Edition" is a little essay written by "Homer Whipple" which lays bare the neurotic and psychotic content of the novel suggesting even that the man Adolph Hitler who wrote Lord of the Swastika was at the end of his days and his sanity thanks to syphilis. He points out that there is not a single female character in the book and the homoeroticism is redolent page after page, though likely unknown to the author. With this essay Spinrad through the voice of Whipple gives us the point. In regard to the hero, it says "Of course, such a man could gain power only in the extravagant fancies of pathological science fiction novel. For Feric Jaggar is especially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior." Sound like anyone we know. 

One way to view The Iron Dream is that it gives insight into the stunted mind of those who dream of something as inane as racial dominance. The fear and loathing of the other is first and foremost a theme in this book and I cannot read it today without hearing despicable echoes from the political discussion of my own land in my own time. Another way to see the book is an enormous prank played on racists and bigots of all kinds. But the biggest joke there is they are incapable of getting it. Most ironically of all is that Nazis hold this satire in high regard, proving how dim they are and how thoroughly they have missed the entire point. Or course the dullards did. 

And that's it for the Reich for now. 

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Killing Hitler - An American Myth!

How could I resist a title like that -- The Man Who Killed Hitler and the The Bigfoot is a movie that demands that it be seen. and requires that whatever you expect, you must anticipate surprise and possible disappointment. With the great Sam Elliot, one of the few actors of our time who is almost always larger than the parts he plays, this is a 2018 movie that was only ever going to be so bad regardless of what else anybody other than Elliot did. He has delivered in every movie I've ever seen him in and that made me feel safe in trusting my imagination to this film.

Get it and see it. I highly recommend it.

Now for those who have already seen the movie let me continue.

The yarn (I use that word a lot but never more accurately) here is divided fragmented in time. We begin with a weary old warrior named Calvin Barr who lives alone and mired in regrets and oddly some degree of guilt. He was commissioned by his country in World War II to infiltrate the Nazi territories, find the real Adolph Hitler and assassinate him. He did and we follow along as the young Calvin (Aiden Turner) completes his mission. But we also see him leave behind the love of his life, hesitate to make her his wife and then lose her for all time in that way so many people leave our lives, they just go away. Nothing of his life between that spectacular secret mission and the modern day is really revealed save a few comments between Barr and his brother, a local barber who has had a regular life (whatever that means). We get feelings but not details, not really.

It is into this somber environment that two agents appear, one from the United States and the other from Canada and they say they need the help of Calvin Barr yet again. There is a mission he is uniquely qualified for because he is among the very very few with the training, talent and blood immunity to confront the Bigfoot. The creature is alone and sick, and that illness is threatening to spill across all borders as a plague they world has rarely seen and which civilization would be hard pressed to survive. With the nuclear option at the ready and looming in the distance Calvin journeys beyond the firewalls meant to keep out the curious and into the depths of the Canadian wilderness, to find Bigfoot and put it down.

But what's the movie about? As it turns out it ain't really about Hitler and it ain't really about Bigfoot, it's about what it requires of men and women to deal with the monsters in the world, monsters rearing up from the bowels of civilization or leaping forth from the depths of the natural world. It's about that what it happens to people when they face cold reality and still must find a means to progress forward. It's a love story too of course, but it's a heartbroken love story and how a person must come to terms with time after lost opportunity. It's about what's real and what's myth.

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Lest We Forget!

It's Inauguration Day in these United States. I thought it a salient time to re-post this Dojo classic from some years ago. 

For the record, I won't be watching any of the proceedings. Instead, I'll be reading Art Spieglman's MetaMaus which describes how he came to write Maus his epic comic tale about the Holoaust. (It was a Christmas present, one I asked for.)

Adolph Hitler! The name still resonates in the culture, a single man who has become the very symbol of unblinking hatred. Adolph Hitler became for the World War II generation an icon against which every atom was put to the wheel against his brutal aggression. The way in which his name is still evoked with such relative ease makes me wonder sometime if people don't miss the nostalgic glow of presumed simpler times when enemies were easy to identify and against which they were eager to rally their will.

(Special Note: To read Daredevil Battles Hitler at the Internet Archive use this Link.) 

Of course, those years were far more complicated, but having a shared mission is something that can give a fragmented society its identity and mission for good or ill. But we forget that was the very thing Hitler was so very good at too; it's a dangerous game to play. We must be careful as a general population not to fall into those nationalistic traps ourselves, nor should we imagine for a moment our modern sophistication makes us immune. We sure haven't proved we are any smarter than the folks who fell under Hitler's evil spell. 

Here are fifty comic book covers from across the decades which showcase the terrible and sometimes terrifying image of the Hitler and in some instances his Axis allies Mussolini and Hirohito. Some of the images challenge our modern morality, but alas they are at least understandable if not justifiable given the tenor of the times. 

Hitler and the Holocaust he instigated and inspired must never be forgotten, nor should we allow history to be revised to make that horror other than what it was -- mankind at its most savage. We are still that animal after all, and we must always strive to rise above those twisted passions which can consume us if we do not follow our better angels. 

More Nazi nonsense tomorrow.

A Revised Classic Dojo Post. 

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