“All the alterations to your new suit have been made, sir. You should cut a fine figure at the bicentennial gala. Now, to complete the ensemble, can I interest you in a Superman belt buckle? It’s made of authentic, 100% metal!”

“Yes. Yes you can. Please tell me more!”

“Wonderful! It can be yours free. All you have to do is deface several wonderful comic books.”

“…”

“Sir?”

“How dare you?”

I confess to having a weakness for the glorious tripe that is Maury. Watching Mr. Povich wade through humanity’s underbelly one DNA/Lie Detector test at a time is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. But, though I normally watch it alone, I’m always a bit creeped out by the virtual company that I keep. I can’t see the other people whose eyes are glued to the screen, but there are the commercials to clue me into the viewership.

Title loans. Vocational schools. Shady personal injury attorneys. You get the picture. It makes you wonder what horrible turn your life has taken that you find yourself amongst a demographic that would call on the services of payday loans or the Mike Slocombe Law Firm. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from what you see when you wander into afternoon soap operas, where you get bombarded by cat food and tampon commercials. YOU HAVE TURNED DOWN THE WRONG AISLE AT THE SUPERMARKET.

There was always a similar strange element comics — not so much today, but once upon a time, it was there. No title loans or vocational schools, but career self-improvement was ever on display, whether it was electronics or other worthwhile blue-collar fields. The above ad, for the still-going Duraclean, fits right in. Kind of. Well, not really. It made you wonder if the comic book reading public could be divided into kids on the one hand, and adults with acute career path dissatisfaction on the other.

While being able to retire at 50 is an admirable goal, if I might poke a little fun at the Duraclean ad… The picture looks like a Last Known Photo, one you’d see on an old Unsolved Mysteries segment. The van looks like the “dangerous loner” model with a business name tacked on the side for cover. Put amongst the rest of the x-ray glasses and superhero chachkes, it’s a tad out of place, like fishing tackle in a romance comic. I’m sure Duraclean is a fine, upstanding business, and not a front for a religious cult. Nevertheless…

It’s a bit odd. Like others of its ilk. But I’ve never seen Duraclean on Maury. So there’s that.

I think we can all agree that completing the Marvel Try-Out book, sending it in the Marvel offices, and – dream of dreams — landing a job at the House of Ideas would be a comic lovers Horatio Alger story. But meeting with the eight-foot tall Jim Shooter – a man who’s burned a bridge or two in his day – would be a bit intimidating. No matter how many gumball machines and stuffed animals were strategically placed on his desk.

There’s a massive confluence of silliness in this comic, a gathering of stupid that threatens to collapse in upon itself and suck us all into never ending downward spiral of terrible. You see, in this book the Super-Sons — the imaginary obnoxious hipster doofus kids of Superman, Batman and their never-revealed mates — travel to Lexor, the Silver Age planet that celebrated the villainous Lex Luthor as the greatest hero in the Universe. Lexor, where a goofy gigantism plague is devastating the populace and threatens to turn Superman Jr. into a Macy’s parade balloon up there on the cover. (Incidentally, did you ever wonder where Lexor was located in the galaxy relative to Bizarro World? Like maybe they were stuffed into the same corner and formed out of the same stupid primordial matter?)

Super-Sons. Lexor. Gigantism. It’s a potent compost, one that might give lie to the “World’s Finest” tag.

For those unfamiliar with the Super-Sons, Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. were the adolescent offspring of their famous fathers, and they incorporated the trying-too-hard dialogue of the Teen Titans (the Sons and the Titans were both co-conjured by scripter Bob Haney) in a cloying, fruitless attempt to connect with younger readers. If you’re just skimming one of their appearances, you can almost forget that they’re younger versions of their dads, and start wondering “Why the f–k are Superman and Batman talking like this?” And then you realize. Perhaps to help differentiate them, Batman Jr.’s eyes were visible, whereas Batman’s are usually the solid white. A young Alex Ross was pleased, I’m sure.

It was eventually revealed that they were mere simulations inside a Fortress of Solitude computer, so that the World’s Finest duo could see what their children would turn out like. And one imagines that, after viewing the simulation, our heroes promptly looked in the Yellow Pages for the nearest all-night vasectomy clinic. DOUBLE ORDER.

But that was yet to come. In this tale (crafted by the co-creators of these derivative dopes, Haney and Dick Dillin) we’re in the heyday of the Super-Sons, as they bop about on a motorcycle like costumed Peter Fondas and Dennis Hoppers, spouting things that adults imagine kids say. It’s while they’re on two wheels — Superman Jr. rides bitch, take from that what you will — that they come upon some (literal) clowns roughing up a fetching babe and her travelling road show. In the immediate aftermath of the rescue, we’re treated to this overload of sexism and stupidity:

So Dora travels around entertaining the downtrodden with puppets. More power to her. She’s in for her toughest crowd yet, though, because her next stop is the hoosegow. “Live from Folsom Prison: A Puppet Show.” And, since her last volunteer assistants didn’t work out — the whole “tried to rape her” thing — the Sons step into the breach. Off they go to prison, put on the show and OMG DORA WAS REALLY ARDORA LUTHOR WHO JUST BUSTED HER FATHER OUT OF THE JAIL UNDER THE SONS’ NOSES.

How embarassing. Your parents are so totally going to ream you.

Ardora – a daughter who Lex didn’t know about – has a conveniently parked rocketship to take Lex back to the fairyland Lexor. That horrible gigantism plague needs a cure, and Lex is the only one with the brain power to come up with one. And, no surprise, this was his diabolical plan all along:

Lex’s eagerness to see his wife, the original Ardora (which makes Dora Ardora Jr. — Jrs all around, I guess) is deflated a tad when he sees how, um, inflated she is:

I’ll hand it to Lex: If I were him (i.e. a career criminal) and I returned to my wife and saw that she’d morphed into some Biggest Loser land-grazer, I don’t know that I’d take it as well as he does here. He immediately gets going on the cure. I’m a bit surprised he didn’t pull a Newt Gingrich and serve her with divorce papers, what with him being a great evil mastermind and all. Or at least say that he had to get something from the car and the last thing she’d ever hear of him would be the sound of squealing tires — something like that. But love conquers all, even for villains.

The Super-Sons. Remember them? They stowed away on the rocket ship (with Supes still mooning over Dora), but are neutralized quickly when Superman Jr.’s powers are nixed by the red sun. USELESS. But they’re suddenly needed when it’s revealed that Lex’s lab, which stored the gigantism cure, has been destroyed by an irradiated meteor. What’re the odds, right? Lex zaps young Supes with yellow energy top re-power him, and off the Sons go in search of a special Lizard that has a venom which holds the only hope for Lexor and its legion of fatties. And the Sons find it just in the nick of time, because Superman Jr. is morphing into John Candy:

The lizard venom cures him before he has to start shopping in the “Big” half of Big and Tall, and his envenomed blood is distilled into a vaccine. Joy. And now it’s the awkward moment we’ve all been waiting for. Will Lex go willingly back to prison with the Sons? Will there be a fight? Will they have to call their dads to bail their asses out?

None of the above, because the Luthor clan is as sadly disfunctional as you can get:

Dora — the David Kaczynski of Lexor.

And that’s it. The tale of how the Super-Sons went to Lexor stumbled and bumbled their way to saving the populace from being fat. A cautionary tale, to be sure…

If you haven’t picked up on the negative vibe, let me be clear: I’m not a Super-Sons fan. I grew up loving World’s Finest, which offered the unfathomable riches of  the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel in a dual adventure EACH AND EVERY MONTH. It was one of my favorites, and that horrible day when I held issue #323 in my seven-year-old hands and saw “THE END” emblazoned across the cover was a sad day indeed. The Sons and their WF run had gone by the wayside before I came around, or else I probably wouldn’t have fallen so in love with the title — or maybe I would have, who the hell knows. But now, as an adult, seeing their juvenile asshattery profaning this holiest of comics disgusts me to no end. I can’t like these guys, with their insufferable dialogue and rank stupidity. I just can’t. They’re douches. They’re douches where the two greatest icons in comics should rightfully be. They’re not a change of pace. They’re a tripping wire. I WANT THEM BLOTTED FROM HISTORY LIKE UNPERSONS IN ORWELL’S 1984.

And I have no personal beef with Mr. Haney. Some of his stories were quite good, and the dialogue he wrote for the Teen Titans was rather delightful in a square, eye-rollingly bad way (he could have thrown in a contraction now and again, though). But here I’m driven nuts by it. I’m driven nuts by the whole thing. (The art, inked by John Calnan, is passable – and I’m a tad amused by the enfattened Superman Jr. — but it certainly isn’t sufficient to rescue things.)

The Super-Sons. My God, I hate them.

But, oddly enough, I don’t have a problem with Lexor. Or Ardora. Or Dora. Maddeningly inconsistent, I know.

This comic was reprinted with other Super-Sons stories in a trade a few years back (The Saga of the Super Sons — no hyphen). I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot cattle prod, but others enjoy this stuff. If you’re unfamiliar, you might too. Groove on.

That the 1978 Marvel Super Special adaptation of the Beatles’ story was advertised not once, but twice in the Devil Dinosaur comic featured yesterday, is a testament to the lingering power of Beatlemania. You can almost hear Ed Sullivan calling it a “really big book.”

“Why hello there, Mr. Jaws. What’s that? You have a problem?” KERPOW! “Good luck finding all your rows of teeth. Dick.”

As beneficial to my retirement planning as a Batman bank would be, the Superman/shark slugfest is the must have in this advertisement. It far outshines the endless autumnal scene jigsaw puzzles that my grandmother was always plodding through at her house. Instead of “here’s the piece where the branch crosses over the barn’s roof,” you have “here’s the piece with Superman’s righteous shark-pummeling underwater fist.” NO CONTEST.

Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur offered a sublime sampling of boyish (and maybe girlish too – I can’t speak to that) wish-fulfillment. What kid doesn’t ask for a dog at some point in their childhood? What kid isn’t fascinated by dinosaurs? Put those two things together, and WHAT KID WOULD NOT WANT A FIERCELY LOYAL PET DINOSAUR? Better yet, a T-Rex, which is like getting Magnum P.I.’s Ferrari for your first car?

Everyone envies Moon Boy and his scaly, red companion. His loyal companion.

How loyal? Dogs are man’s best friends, and they’ve been properly venerated in fiction. But did Lassie or Rin Tin Tin ever conjure up an elaborate scheme to avenge the apparent death of their master? To kill the killers in a most terrible way? Some HE’S BACK AND HE’S PISSED comeuppance? The answer we’re looking for here is NO. But Devil Dinosaur  — apparently he’s heard all the digs about the pea-brains of dinos — in this issue puts into motion a scheme with multiple moving parts, one that puts Walter White’s ass-saving plan in Season 4 of Breaking Bad to shame. It’s a whopper, involving a series of contingencies and a healthy dose of good luck.

Put Devil in the next Danny Ocean heist movie. Ocean’s Dinosaur.

Of course, it’s made all the more joyous by the talents of the King. Kirby’s pencil and brush were perfectly suited for the world that Devil and Moon Boy traipsed over, whether it was supposed to be prehistoric Earth or an alternate Earth or a fever dream or whatever. Dinosaurs, craggly hills, rocky landscapes and towering volcanos are about as much in Jolly Jack’s wheelhouse as anything. Oh, and robots. Yeah. Robots. Because this issue’s villains are mechanized aliens that have taken Moon Boy aboard their spaceship as a specimen. They look a bit like differently colored, smaller versions of Terminus. Terminii. And HOLY BALLS THIS TWO-PAGE SPREAD RULES:

Sometimes I wish Kirby could have drawn my life. Not the story of my life. My actual life. So I could see things like this while I walk to get groceries.

In “Journey to the Center of the Ants” (oh, Jack…), Moon Boy is cooped up in a glass tube, waiting for an “examination,” which one fears is alien carny for “dissection.” All that’s left is putting a little chloroformed chunk of cotton on top of his jar, and it might be a permanent lights out for him. Meanwhile his pals, an elder named White-Hair (Look, he’s so old he’s WHITE!), a somewhat skeptical warrior named Stone-Hand, and Devil, are all under threat from the same “Sky Demons.”

Dire straits. Straits that call for a devilish way out.

There’s an apostrophe and an “S” missing in the following panel, but that doesn’t take away from Devil’s agitation — and maybe you can see the first embryonic stages of a plan developing behind those reptilian eyes:

Show you he shall, Stone-Hand. “RUMPF!” indeed.

White-Hair convinces Stone-Hand to follow Devil’s lead. “What’s that boy? Farmer Jesse fell down a well? Show us!” And where does he lead them? OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE FIRE:

Swarmers. Sounds charming. We get our intro to these nasties when the Sky Demons come a calling:

Where are Cate Blanchett’s thighs when you need them?

Devil has been pretty much winging it up until this point, but now his saurian synapses really start popping:

He may be a dinosaur, but he ain’t no dummy. Like monkeys stacking boxes to get the bananas.

He leads his two pals inside the Swarmers’ Tower of Death (!), where they avoid detection for a spell, only to be discovered and, well, swarmed. It’s then that the Sky Demons decide to take care of this new Swarmer threat by blowing up their home, which may cause some second guessing at the next Sky Demon council meeting:

When I was little, my father was mowing the lawn one day when he ran over a yellowjacket nest. I have a clear memory of him charging back the house, ripping his pants off and screaming as he ran. SO I HAVE FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE WITH HORROR LIKE THIS. The Sky Demons have no idea what they’re in for.

Devil extracts himself and his friends from the rubble, content that the Swarmers are on the way to destroy the Sky Demons, who have probably killed Moon Boy (who still lives, by the way). ”And on the Seventh Day, Devil Dinosaur rested”:

He’s a cute-a-saurus. He thinks he’s prehistoric people.

And there you have it. That Devil Dinosaur, he’s one clever Rex.

DD might be some of Kirby’s best 1970s output. With a young man beleaguered in a hostile world, Devil is like Kamandi. But with goddamn dinosaurs and a T-Rex that’s like a giant, red, mute, short-armed E.T., which means it’s about 1000x better. It certainly outshines much of Kirby’s short-lived DC output, like OMAC, or abandoned concepts like Atlas. The more you think about Devil Dinosaur, the more you like it. I’ve had several dogs in my life, but I doubt any of them would have avenged my apparent death. That’s where the whole wish-fulfillment angle comes in. It’s the stuff of daydreams, and we owe Kirby a debt of homage for committing this daydream to paper.

Devil Dinosaur got the Omnibus treatment a few years back, but that tome is now out of print. Criminal. One hopes that this can be rectified at some point in the future, so that future generations can revel in the boy-meets-dinosaur magic ladled out during its brief run.

If you build a time machine for the unafthomable purpose of travelling back to 1977 so you can watch soccer, here’s a schedule to help you plan your itinerary. Maybe try to get a group discount on those $2 tickets. And give my regards to Pelé.

Was “Montezuma’s Revenge” firmly entrenched in the 1980s as a euphemism for diarrhea? I have to think that it was. If so, that makes this game’s title, if topically appropriate, extremely unfortunate. Or maybe the ultimate goal in the game was helping Panama Joe find a commode.

Still, it looks fun — in a classic Mario kind of way. And the classic Mario kind of way is indeed fun.

A recent local news scare report about the youth-corrupting dangers of breast-riddled comic books — horror of horrors — got me thinking about the assorted Jayne Mansfields amongst DC Comics heroines. One really stands out among all the rest, and you know who I’m talking about. Yes, the blonde-tressed bombshell called Power Girl, the young lady whose breasts have been purposefully amplified over the years, the one who could poke an eye out with those things — and you would willingly go blind. THEY ARE HUGE.

And what do you know, this book was sitting on my desk. Kismet. A real, genuine 1970s comic book with Power Girl’s assets on full display (and oh, how they’re showcased). Sadly, there’s no deep story analysis to be had here. I prefer it when my Justice Society stories have a Roy Thomas element to them, and this one, featuring a botched invasion from below, an invasion in serious need of Marvel’s Mole Man’s (nearsighted) genius, is an average read. No offense to scripter Paul Levitz (Joe Staton and Bob Layton handled the art), but there just isn’t much to be said about it.

Or maybe I was too distracted reading it, because Power Girl’s mammaries are two of the featured performers, with super-feats of their very own. Her big boobs fight evil. It’s all enough to turn a kid into a rampaging, aroused, homicidal lunatic, and therefore it’s worthy of our rapt, slavering attention.

Before we get her (or them), a word about Earth-2′s (former) Caped Crusader, Gotham City Police Commissioner Bruce Wayne, who makes a sub-plot appearance in these pages. There was always a refreshing taste of passing time in that alternate Earth, one populated by the old Golden Age heroes. It was a place where the cycle of years could take its toll even on the greatest of champions, and the mortal, all too human Batman fit right into that. There’s a definite Admiral James T. Kirk dynamic at play with this Commish, an old war-horse past his prime, now stuck behind a desk far from the front lines he once prowled. Once the guy out and about crushing skulls and such, Wayne (with his George Clooney hair) has traded the batarangs for a pipe, the cape for a trench coat, and is stuck chasing down those whom he used to walk amongst:

One can empathize with the frustrations that a retired Dark Knight would have in civilian togs. IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE A MAN POUND HIS DESK AND ALMOST SNAP HIS PIPE WITH HIS TEETH:

I wonder if Wayne can puff little bats with his pipe smoke. One hopes. And if on Earth-1 Batman brings Commissioner Gordon pipe tobacco, who brings Commissioner Wayne his? Robin?

Okay, enough of that. Onto the boobs.

Nothing helps a superheroine’s cans jut more than being bound with her arms over her head, and it makes her BUSTing free all the more delicious:

They must have helped her generate some breakaway momentum, right? Gravity?

There’s no ambiguity of what’s doing the work here — THE MONEY SHOT:

Keep up with the “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” exercises, girls. They’ll all pay off one day. BREASTS TRIUMPHANT.

Lastly, if the reader isn’t a breast man, the final page has this gratuitous ass shot thrown in for good measure:

Nice.

And that’s it. This book came out in 1977. Viewed chestularly, it’s really no worse than (or, as I prefer to think of it, JUST AS AWESOME AS) the buxom works of today. For decades kids have been awakened to the amplified and unrealistic female form through comic books, and the ogling is harmless. We all turn out fine. 

Consider this a mild, hastily composed, booby rebuttal to Fox5′s silly piece.

I haven’t seen a lot of ads for superhero socks. If there are some Spider-Man socks out there printed like the red and black webbing of his costume, then they might make it into the dates/church/job interviews apparel rotation.

Just like how sometimes a frisbee is just a frisbee no matter how much you guss it up, sometimes a top is just a top. I remember one of these in a cache of toys left over at my grandparents’ house from when an older cousin was little. It was just as underwhelming as this ad makes it seem.

Comics as educational tools, as repositories of important historical fact, can be a dicey proposition. We can all endorse a serious use of the medium that we love, and the easy-going combination of words and pictures can open doors to younger audiences. They can be a step up from the storybooks that are read to you when you’re little. But condensing immense and weighty events into one single normal sized comic is difficult from a storytelling perspective. Events are glossed over, there might be a lack of a unifying narrative thread, and that glosses our eyes over.

We see some of that here, in a well-intentioned and professionally crafted square-bound comic that fails to make much of an impact. This isn’t a vicious indictment, because more power to folks who try to bring something different to a medium built on capes and tights. But it’s truth.

This comic was part of a four issue series (all published under the Marvel banner) that told the story of significant Civil War engagements, the others covered being First Bull Run, Shiloh, and, of course, Gettysburg. Antietam was scripted by John Ford, with Angelo Torres (of Mad fame — more on that in a moment) tackling the pencils and inks. All installments featured different writing and art talent, so I can’t extrapolate any successes or failings here to the broader effort. But I do have several observations to make on this volume.

First, a few words on Antietam from the guy who always dozed off in the back of the class. It was the bloodiest day of battle in American history — granted, it’s easier raise the sad tally of casualties when there are Americans killing Americans, but the sanguinary record still stands. Over 20,000 men were killed and wounded. Ugly. When I was a kid there was a bad fire on our property, and to this day you can still find charred bits of wood in fields. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if I were told that those fields in Western Maryland were still stained red.

Antietam also made possible one of the seminal milestones in American history. On the micro scale the battle drove Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia back into the Confederacy. A battle that was a stalemate could thus be translated into a Union victory, and that solitary chit finally gave Abraham Lincoln the political cover to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

Antietam screams THIS IS BIG STUFF.

On to the comic, and a few brief selections (I apologize for the blurriness at the edges of the scans – the perils of square bindings) to illustrate the contents. Some of the work with the fighting — like this rebel yell soundtracked charge — works well:

There’s a dash of gallows humor within:

General George B. McClellan, whose organizational competence forged the eventually triumphant Army of the Potomac, but whose timorous dithering kept him seeing hordes of Confederates where there were none, has taken a retrospective drubbing over the last century and a half. He deserves much of it — most Americans’ blood boils when they read quotes from him referring to Lincoln, his (and our beloved) commander-in-chief, as a “baboon” and “the original gorilla.” That carries over to here. The following panel, coming after Little Mac had fought Lee to a bloody draw — but then failed to capitalize on it before the Confederates could recross the Potomac – conveys his vain disconnect:

Speaking of Lincoln, here he is in his natural habitat, as opposed to walking amongst talking beavers and poorly talking dogs:

There you have it.

The entire affair feels haphazard. Familiar faces and names flit in and out, with brief bits of characterization to illuminate these marble models of history (Stonewall Jackson chomping on a lemon, etc.), while the rank and file are presented in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them vignettes. There’s never much to latch onto. The geography and topography of battle, the movements of troops, and the personalities of the commanders all jumble together. It’s a morass. As I alluded to before, there’s no thread. It’s as if the most boring college lecture you ever had to sit through were rendered in graphic form.

Also — I suppose you could call this a side-criticism — when I see Torres’ art all I can think of is his Mad oeuvre. Torres does a fine job with likenesses and action, but at every turn you expect to be outflanked by a double entendre or a fart joke. When you’re dealing with hallowed history, THIS IS A PROBLEM. I realize that this is horribly unfair artistic typecasting for someone who’s no one trick pony, but it’s unavoidable, at least for this reader, and I can’t imagine I’d be the only one to suffer this infirmity. My apologies to Mr. Torres for saddling him with a failing that may be (far) more mine than his. But nevertheless…

The bottom line here is that there simply isn’t enough space in a slim comic to do such a time and such an event justice. It winds up being a lame and tame recitation of events, and that just doesn’t do the job. These Civil War comics can be found in a variety of places, including Amazon. I can’t exactly recommend the series based on this sampling, but a Civil War buff may get a charge out of them.

When I saw this ad, the Peter Graves “Have you ever been inside a Turkish prison?” exchanges from Airplane!, with little Joey marveling at his new toy, roared into my cerebral cortex. I’m probably not alone in this.

Ah, the days when a small child being physically menaced by a seven-foot tall professional athlete and hearing sexual innuendo from a gray-haired pilot could be sources of high amusement. Where have you gone, America?

This past weekend, as I was watching the Giants drive the Packers into the ground like tent stakes, my local Washington, D.C. Fox affiliate kept running promos for a feature story that was going to appear on the Wednesday news. What was the story going to be about? SEX AND VIOLENCE IN COMIC BOOKS AND HOW THEY ARE CORRUPTING OUR YOUTH. The spirit of Fredric Wertham is alive and well, my friends.

It aired last night. Here’s a link to the story and the accompanying article.

Putting aside my high dudgeon about not being interviewed (no, the “Jared” mentioned in the article isn’t me), this can be dismissed as your typical local news scare report. “These common household products, products you are probably using at this very moment, can kill you and your entire family. FIND OUT WHAT THEY ARE AT 11.” I’ll leave it to you to come up with the assorted devastating rejoinders that cut the legs out from underneath the piece. They only talk about DC Comics, which seems half-assed. No longer aimed at kids. Etc. At least the homosexuality and communism bogeymen didn’t come into play.

If the critique had been “Most comics now are garbage…” I think would have been more onboard.

I took some delight in the knickers in a twist child psychologist who was interviewed. “Fictionalized Playboy.” AND WHAT EXACTLY, SIR, IS WRONG WITH PLAYBOY? Insulting my comics is one thing, but when you bring my pornography into things, well…

Anyway, can hearings before Congress be far behind? Will the ‘Mazing Man-hating Comics Code Authority rise like Ra’s al Ghul from his Lazarus Pit? Let the hysteria begin!