Deadly Nightshade Day!

Jim Aparo was born on this date in 1932. Aparo first made his mark at Charlton Comics on features such as The Phantom and Nightshade, the focus for today. Later he shifted over to DC Comics where he took up residence on The Brave and the Bold and other Batman-related titles. Aparo supplied his own lettering, giving his work a distinct look like no other. 

The Darling of Darkness, the Deadly Nightshade is the only female member of the Charlton Action Heroes line-up. She never had her own self-titled comic book like Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Judomaster, Thunderbolt or even Peacemaker, but she was in many ways a central figure in making various disparate elements of the Charlton Universe cohere. I'll explain in a moment.

Nightshade debuted in Captain Atom #82 plotted and written by her co-creators Dave Kaler and Steve Ditko,and of course drawn by Ditko with inks by Rocke Mastroserio.

She is a government agent, soon revealed to be the beautiful Eve Eden, the daughter of a United States Senator and a part of the Washington, DC jet set community which serves as a convenient cover for her espionage work for the U.S. government.

She is partnered with Captain Atom as they try to stop the super-spy The Ghost. Captain Atom is of course Captain Adam and since Nightshade is Eve Eden we get "Adam and Eve" no less as our light and dark partners in crimefighting.

Some issues later in Captain Atom #85 in another story by Kaler, Ditko and Mastroserio, she is again teamed up with the good Captain, this time with a slight costume alteration that allowed her beautiful hair to flow freely as they duo battle the super-villainous team of Punch and Jewelee.

Formerly Nightshade had been merely an adept hand-to-hand fighter but in this appearance it is shown that she has the uncanny ability to transform into a shadow.

The battle against The Ghost continues into Captain Atom #86 and again Cap and Nightshade take on the elusive criminal.

Nightshade gets a focus as she uses some new tools, specifically Ebony Bombs to battle the slippery spy. 

And that's that until Captain Atom #87 when after the departure of Steve Ditko's Blue Beetle, Nightshade takes up residence as the back-up feature. Written by her creator Dave Kaler, the series enjoys the considerable artistic talent of the great Jim Aparo, who brings a whole new level of grace and power to Nightshade's adventures.

In the opening two-part adventure which continues into Captain Atom #88, she battles The Image, a foreign agent who can use mirrors to travel instantly from place to place.

His ability seems to have some connection to the very origin of Nightshade and her own weird talent for becoming a shadow. But the origin will have to wait.

We finally get the answer in her final Charlton appearance in Captain Atom #89, the final issue of the run.

We learn that Eve and her brother were the hybrid progeny of their human father and an otherworldly mother from another dimension, a dimension of shades and shadows.

We further learn that Eve has gotten her training from a familiar face, Tiger from the pages of Judomaster. This series set in the then modern day was some decades after World War II, so Tiger is an adult now, but this bit of connection does a great deal to suggest that the sometimes disparate storylines of the Action Heroes all take place in a single universe.

Of course, that universe, named Earth-4 when it makes its official DC appearance during the Crisis on Infinite Earths is clearly a world in which the heroes all mingle, but when little Charlton tried to do it, it was a whisper of what that superhero universe might have become had they found more marketplace success.

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Action-Heroes Day!

Dick Giordano was born on this date in 1932. Giordano began his career as an artist, working for Charlton Comics for many years. In the late 60's when superheroes were all the rage, he assumed the role of editor of the comics line. His goal was to create not "super-heroes" so much as what he called "Action-Heroes". These would be heroes, but people with skills and not so much power. Later Giordano was an editor at DC and was a partner with Neal Adams in the art firm Continuity Associates. 

Dick Giordano became editor of Charlton Comics after Pat Masulli. Giordano had made his mark with Sarge Steel, a hard-nosed detective turned super-spy. His artwork was always crisp and attractive. Shifting to the editor's desk, he surveyed the landscaped and decided that if Charlton were to make a move into the superhero market, they would need to find a way to make their heroes distinctive. Some heroes were already around and might need adjusting and new fresh heroes were needed. 

The line-up consisted of Frank McLaughlin's creation Rip Jagger, a WWII soldier who becomes a deadly master of martial arts Judomaster, who battles the Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater with his young partner Tiger. Peter Cannon - The Thunderbolt created by Pete Morisi, is a man trained by Tibetan monks and is possessed of fantastic skills and powers of the mind. Christopher Smith, the Peacemaker created by Pat Boyette and Joe Gill, is a diplomat who realizes that talk alone will fail to solve all problems and uses his technology to fight when necessary to preserve the peace. Giordano inherited Captain Atom, created by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko a decade before. Giordano had the good Captain's vast powers muchly diminished, and Steve Ditko was all too happy to do so. Added to the Captain Atom cast was Charlton's lone female super-heroine of the era, Nightshade. We learn more about her when Steve Skeates and Jim Aparo take over. 

The line-up was completed by the arrival of Steve Ditko's "All-New" Blue Beetle. Ted Kord becomes a Blue Beetle who is not reliant on a magical scarab but who turns to modern technology and fisticuffs to bring villains to heel. With the arrival of Blue Beetle the "Action-Hero" line was complete, just in time for it all to end. Sales were not what everyone hoped for and the super-hero craze which allowed for this flowering of talent and creations withered. The arrival of a new fresh look for Charlton, the big "C" which would in a few years be replaced by the famous Charlton Bullseye badge, marked both the height and the end of the "Action-Hero" line.

Dick Giordano went to DC and took many of his most talented artists with him. He found great success at DC, sticking with the company for decades. DC purchased the "Action-Heroes", mostly as a gift to Giordano, the editor who had made these fondly remembered heroes possible. As we all likely know, the "Action-Heroes" formed the basis for Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's The Watchmen, which originally began as a vehicle for the classic Charlton characters, before DC decided to save them for other things. Hence the "Action-Heroes" live on. 

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Charlton Meets The Multiverse!

I picked up Multiversity- Pax Americana for the very simple reason that I love the old Charlton Action-Heroes and this is as close as we're ever going to get to seeing new adventures featuring those awesome characters.

These characters, created largely under the aegis of editor Dick Giordano were a brief but brilliant attempt to mine the superhero market which blossomed briefly during the Silver Age. Captain Atom and Blue Beetle were dusted off and revamped with new heroes such as Peacemaker, Nightshade, The Question and Judomaster brought along to fill in the ranks.

These characters of course these days are mostly remembered as the inspirations for Alan Moore's iconic Watchmen series and many dismiss them beyond that point. Alas, in this story Grant Morrison, a storyteller with stones, tries to revisit these heroes but clearly through the goggles of the Watchmen variations.

We are invited into a complex story, told by Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, which travels back and forth through time and space with all sorts of visual hijinks, all serving to create some larger mystery and make some larger point. The heroes are not as developed as individuals but merely used as elements of the one-shot story which explores the nature of heroes and justice and how the society can best make use of them.

We get good looks at Captain Atom, a man removed from his fellows by the dint of awesome power and who seems lost inside himself and the universe he sees differently from everyone else. The lovely Nightshade is a very young government agent who seeks to find the right way, but seems out of her depth most of the time. Peacemaker is a man on a mission which makes little sense for most of the story. The Question as always seeks answers regardless, while the Blue Beetle is a loyal government man.

We get glimpses of Sarge Steel and while Rip Jagger the Judomaster doesn't make the cut, his sidekick Tiger is around for a few pages as a member of a superhero unit which has a lot of vintage fun picking out a sobriquet.

The story even has a reference to Charlton's first superhero, the Golden Age Yellowjacket.

(Frank Quitely)

This is a complicated yarn, a mystery which has an answer, but which demands mighty attention from the reader and frankly more than one pass through the material. 

At five bucks for a copy, I guess I should thank Morrison and Quitely for giving me a comic which demands to be read more than once, since the density makes the entertainment value rise.

This is a book any Charlton Action-Hero fan should read, if only to see some vintage imagery and old rather obscure Charlton references hanging around in various panels. It has been collected up a few times. 

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Judomaster Day!

Frank McLaughlin was born on this date in 1935. McLaughlin of course created Judomaster, the mascot for this blog.  He worked with Dick Giordano at Charlton for some time.  When he shifted to Marvel and other publishers from time to time he mostly concentrated on inking, which he did with great aplomb. His sharp inks rescued many a tired layout. 

It will come as a surprise to no one that Judomaster is on this list of my favorite heroes given the name and longstanding design of this blog. Rip Jagger fell into my hands when I was a tyke when my grandmother gave me some comics she'd found somewhere. There were two issues of Judomaster in the batch, the two halves of the second Mountain Storm saga and I was pulled into McLaughlin's martial arts mania once and for all.

Frank McLaughlin is the man, a trained martial artist who sought to bring to the comic book page an accurate representation of the skills which have formed the basis for so much exploitation entertainment over the last many decades. The thrill of Judomaster is the novel setting -- World War II. What we have is a re-imagining of the Captain America story minus the super-soldier serum. Jagger is a capable U.S. soldier who due to circumstances becomes trained in martial arts and adopts a persona to better wage war on the Japanese threat in the Pacific Theater. He is joined by a young boy named Tiger and this ersatz Cap and Bucky proceed to kick butt. Judomaster's WWII setting is at once his blessing and his curse. His adventures felt like little else in the superhero universe at the time, but his isolation in time made his eventual teaming with other of Charlton's "Action Heroes" difficult.

Alas the line did not last long enough for that problem to really develop and eventually Judomaster like most of his Action Hero kin were snapped up by DC and blended into the background of that sprawling universe. Judomaster himself has been barely used but nonetheless multiple versions exist. But for me it will always be the original Rip Jagger stuff by McLaughlin which makes my heartbeat race a little more. Here are the covers from that brief but powerful run. 

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Sarge Steel - The Judomaster Years!

When Sarge Steel lost his comic, he became a back-up feature in Judomaster. It was a great fit with Dick Giordano's crisp artwork showing up nice alongside Frank McLaughlin's equally sharp imagery. 

 

A great example of cross-promotion was when Judomaster narrated a piece in Sarge's own mag titled "What is Karate?" Also, the two heroes a villain in the Smiling Skull. 

Judomaster #91 is dated October 1966. The second feature in this issue is the debut of Sarge Steel or really the continuation of that feature sliding from his own book into the back of Judomaster. There are no credits but the feature is certainly drawn by Dick Giordano and GCD says Joe Gill did the script. Titled the "Case of the Double Agent" this is File 110. It begins with Sarge Steel shooting an astronaut as he approaches his rocket. It turns out the victim was a foreign agent posing as an astronaut and he poisons himself before he can be questioned. Sarge knows that the spy was sent by Irena Dubaya, a dangerous foreign agent who just happens to have a bug on Steel and plans to take her revenge. She poses as a replacement secretary for Sarge in his Private Investigator office but he recognizes her and then decides to pretend to become a double agent offering to sell his services to the highest bidder. She eventually offers him a job as a double-spy but not before he has beat up a few of her thugs with his steel fist. She takes a photo of his first payoff and Sarge realizes he is playing a most dangerous game as the first part of the story ends.

Judomaster #92 is dated December 1966. The back up is the second half of the Sarge Steel adventure by Joe Gill and Dick Giordano called File 110 "Case of the Double Agent". The story begins with Sarge and the spy Irena Dubaya on a military base where Dubaya is getting photos of the secure installation with a belt-buckle camera. Sarge is still pretending to be a double agent offering his services to the foreign spy ring. He tries though to turn Dubaya over to the Security chief of the base a Colonel Trask, but it turns out Trask is also a spy and having revealed his true colors Steel is forced to fight Trask saved from a bullet by his steel hand deflecting it. He knocks out Trask, but Dubaya gives him a judo flip and gets him at gunpoint. Then Trask and Dubaya take Steel aboard a jet and overpower the pilots and steal it with the intent of dumping the bodies along with Steel's out the bomb doors. Steel frustrates Trask's attempts to seal him inside a bomb casing using his steel mitt and uses its single-shot .38 gun to do him in. He then uses the hands sleeping gas to overcome Dubaya and take over the plane landing it safely and handing the spies over to the authorities.

Judomaster #93 is dated February 1967. The Sarge Steel story by Joe Gill and artists Bill Montes and Dick Giordano in this issue is File 111 "Case of the Devil's Wife". Sarge Steel is driving through town and comes under gunfire by a pursuing car. He shoots back with special explosive ammunition and disables the enemy's car. He heads to the airport to meet Ambassador Bruyden but is met by a beautiful redhead who gives him a kiss which paralyzes Sarge. Meanwhile the woman and her accomplice take the ambassador away in a wheelchair. When Sarge recovers, he and another agent Lowell Cade check into the woman and Sarge learns she is called "The Devil's Bride" and that she is an accomplished international blackmailer. Sarge threatens some other enemy agents with rough treatment if they do not give him the Devil's Bride's location but when he returns to his own apartment she is waiting. They struggle but her perfume paralyzes him again and he is taken by helicopter to an island estate where he finds Ambassador Bruyden who is carrying an explosive attache case. Sarge takes the Bride hostage but the guards prepare to release guard dogs on him as the story abruptly ends.

Judomaster #94 is dated April 1967. Sarge Steel is back in Part II of File 111 "Case of the Devil's Wife" by the team of Joe Gill on script, Bill Montes on pencils and Dick Giordano on inks. Sarge and the kidnapped ambassador find themselves on an island, prisoners of Satana the Devils Bride. She unleashes her hounds to attack Sarge, but he throws the dog into the shark-infested waters. The Ambassador awakes and denounces the cruelty of the act and Sarge uses his gun to save the dog which comes out of the water shaken. Then Satana rides up on horseback with a lance and begins to chase the pair along with her men and more dogs. Sarge uses his jacket to confuse the horse long to escape momentarily. The Ambassador indicates his case has a bomb inside as they run from the henchmen. They head inside the house on the island where Sarge is at last able to call for assistance and gain the upper hand by dropping a rope over Satana. Holding her captive the pair shoot their way out of the house as a helicopter comes to rescue them and carry them to safety along with the captured Satana.

Judomaster #95 is dated June 1967. Sarge Steel returns for Part I of File 112 "Case of the Village Moneyman". The script is by Steve Skeates, the art by Dick Giordano, and the lettering is by A. Machine. The story begins with Sarge on the ground having been attacked by a couple of thugs, but then he gets up and uses his steel fist to repel his attackers. The thugs did drop a name though, "Eric Summins" a name of a counterfeiter that Steel is familiar with. When he gets to his "pad" Sarge finds a beautiful young girl inside who turns out to be the Bebe Summins the daughter of the aforementioned criminal. Her dad has disappeared and she is being followed. Sarge becomes aware that someone else is in his apartment then a man attacks from the bedroom. Sarge defeats him and then drops Bebe off at the apartment of his secretary Bessie. He then begins the search for Summins checking out leads and various bars and dives. The next day he arrives in the office and Bessie is there saying Bebe slept in. Two CIA men show up and we learn that Sarge no longer works for the Agency full time. They tell him about new counterfeit bills that are surfacing and all agree that it is the work of Summins. When Sarge returns to his apartment he finds a note from Bebe saying "bugged out" and she will meet him at the Silver Spoon in the Village that evening. But Sarge finds evidence of a struggle and suspects foul play. What he doesn't seem to realize is that someone is pointing a gun at him through the window as the story comes to a close.

Judomaster #96 is dated August 1967. Sarge Steel returns in Part II of File 112 "Case of the Village Moneyman" written by Steve Skeates, drawn by Dick Giordano with lettering by A.Machine. The installment begins with Sarge dodging a gunshot from the window of Bebe Summin's apartment and returning fire killing the gunman. Steel finds a typed note from Bebe asking him to meet her at the Cafe Long Spoon. Sarge playing a hunch goes to the newspaper morgue and does some research before meeting Bebe at the cafe. He finds her and a brief conversation in which she tries to get him to stop looking for her dad he says he won't give up the search prompting an attack which he fends off but then guns convince Sarge to follow the men to a a printshop where the mastermind of the operation is waiting. The villain is a guy named Jackson who Steel is familiar with and Sarge reveals that Bebe's dad is in fact already dead, which Jackson confirms. Bebe runs from the building in tears while Sarge beats down the thugs with his steel hand. Apparently making Bebe think her dad was alive was an attempt to create confusion among the federal authorities while the counterfeiting was underway. Sarge comforts Bebe as the story closes.

Judomaster #97 is dated October 1967. Sarge Steel returns in a story written by Steve Skeates, drawn by Dick Giordano and again with A. Machine on letters. The story is title "Case of the Widow's Revenge", and it is File 114. (You'll notice the jump in numbers here. File 113 will show up later.) The story begins with a car trying to run down Sarge at a local newsstand but missing and demolishing the newsstand killing the proprietor a blind man we only see in profile named Old Charlie. Sarge then runs down an alley when he hears footsteps and is soon shot at, but he returns fire and kills his attacker. Returning to his car he finds a beautiful woman wrapped in a fur stole waiting for him. She claims to be the niece of Donald Reynolds a man Sarge sent to prison and who died there. His wife is the one behind the attempts on Sarge's life along with his old partner a man named Ralph Gonner. Sarge then goes to Gonner's house and confronts him becomes convinced he's not involved. Returning home he finds a figure in the dark waiting for him, but quickly turning on the lights blinds the person and after a quick exchange of gunfire he finds the girl who turns to be the daughter of Reynolds and not his niece and she is the one behind the plot. She dies in Sarge's arms, and he reminds us all what a rotten world it is. 

Judomaster #98 is dated December 1967. Sarge Steel turns up one more time in a story with no credits but clearly drawn by Dick Giordano and scripting attributed at GCD to Steve Skeates. The tale titled "Key West Caper" is File 115. It begins with Sarge coming out of the ocean in full scuba gear onto a deserted beach at night. He thinks back to finding his office ransacked and a note saying that Bessie his secretary had been kidnapped and taken to a location off the Florida Keys. He then gets transportation and gets to the Keys as quickly as he can and arrived at that spot. He is attacked by a guard but subdues him and then recognizes the machine gun the thug used. There is another shot and Sarge kills the sniper but others get the drop on him and take him to a house where Bessie is unconscious on a table. The villains turn out to be Eric Rinn and Roja a man and woman team of baddies who had battled Sarge a few times in his own book and had run an operation named POW. They gloat that they at last have Sarge in this power when Bessie awakes and a fight breaks out. Rinn tries to shoot Sarge who shoots him first making his shot go astray and kill Roja. Bessie grabs up a machine gun and after quick tutelage from Sarge levels the other thugs. Sarge then cradles the overwrought woman in his arms as the story closes. 

(Sam Grainger)

And that's a wrap for Sarge Steel as a back-up feature. With the Judomaster lead and the Sarge Steel back-ups these were rock solid comics, some of the best of their era. Sarge will return one more time for Charlton. More later when makes a guest-star appearance even gets his own magazine back for one precious issue. 

More Sarge Steel to come. 

This is a Revised Classic Charlton Post! 

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