Bike tire comic book ads can verge into the bizarre, whether it’s Flash Farrell waltzing unescorted around a nuclear submarine or a kid wearing a cape as he rides his tiger-tailed bike. This one lacks such eccentricities, but you have to love the helmetless devil-may-care days of the 1940s. Maybe U.S. could have borrowed a leather helmet from the guys driving open-top racecars. WHY NOT JUST WRAP A WET TOWEL AROUND YOUR HEAD?

If you see some bike-riding idiot on the track at the Indy 500 today, you’ll know who it is.

The only Will Rogers influence that reached down to me was the choking commercial that George Peppard — during the peak of his A-Team fame — did in the 1980s for The Will Rogers Institute. To this day I think of Hannibal extolling the virtues of the Heimlich Maneuver, and how to apply it to an adult, a baby(!), or yourself, and his plastic bottle/cork analogy. Here it is if you can’t remember it, or never saw the damn thing:

If only Peppard smoked a cigar while taping it… (And I’m not making fun, because once, while I was scarfing down a cheesy frozen pizza during my earliest days of living alone during law school, I started to choke, and a vision of the dude leaning over the back of the chair leapt to my mind. I hacked out the menacing cheese glob without benefit of the chair, but it was nice to have that to fall back on.)

So all I think of with Will Rogers is goofy but useful PSAs. And this comic will do nothing to drive that out of me, or anyone else that has such associations.

Not to give Mr. Rogers short shrift. Though he wasn’t born in poverty, his unlikely rise to great fame and fortune as one of the pre-eminent humorists our nation has ever seen has more than a tinge of Horatio Alger in it. He’s uniquely American. A favorite son of Oklahoma, Rogers went from being a cowboy to Vaudeville, films, radio, newspaper columns and any other medium through which he could communicate with a rapt national audience. The only individual who shared a similar talent set (that I can think of) was Mark Twain, and he never had the benefit of the silver screen or airwaves to spread his raconteurism (I don’t think that’s a word, but it applies to these men). Rogers was an entertainer and national conscience whose like, thanks to the fracturing of the cable-turned-digital age, we will never see again.

Not that this old-timey comic would clue you in on any of that.

Published only twelve years after Rogers’ untimely death in an airplane accident, this 1947 anthology book has several extraordinarily uninteresting features, not the least of which is this perfunctory Rogers bio. It will teach you next to nothing, and contains not a scintilla of the humor that made the man famous from sea to shining sea and beyond.

His switch from lassos to microphones is handled as quickly as possible, with stilted dialogue to fill the requisite balloons:

The meekest bright spot here is this full-page montage highlighting the man’s good works, which has a design sense that at least holds the eye for a second or two:

In a sad end, Rogers, an early enthusiast for aviation, died as a rickety plane crashed in Alaska, which left only memories and monuments:

I’ve seen that statue. It has more life than this book.

Chalk this comic up with other lesser Golden Age books which seemed to be all filler, like meatloaf featuring 100% sawdust. I’m always amazed how the ads in these things (the Bert LaBrucherie Wheaties ad, and others to come, came from this comic) so often have more verve and interest than the cobbled-together stories. They can be like a lop-sided Super Bowl in that regard. This definitely could have used George Peppard, a plastic bottle and a cork to spice things up.

I genuinely enjoyed the Wein/Gibbons run on Green Lantern. Maybe it wasn’t the best Lantern ever, but it was — at worst — good. I loathed the loud, dumb film Green Lantern. This is an unavoidable mental juxtaposition when I see the above ad. Yin and Yang.

There’s no stopping the Green Lantern.* (*Excepting a terrible movie.)

One good season at UCLA was apparently enough to get you a full page spread hawking Wheaties back in 1947. Frank McCormick and Hank Greenberg, they of sustained diamond excellence, are still shaking their heads up in baseball heaven over this.

I’ll say this for the handsome Mr. LaBrucherie: He was at least less jowly than contemporaneous football coach Frank Thomas. Perhaps he didn’t wash his bowl of Wheaties down with a hearty plate of eggs and bacon.

I’ve referenced this comic on multiple occasions, and I figured it was time the Spider-Man/Power Pack sexual abuse comic was highlighted here on the blog. It’s definitely one of the most important and venerable of the many free PSA comics that have been put out over the years, and for a long time I thought I had read it. Turns out I never have, and I’m sure of that. Why am I so sure? Because an event happens in this thin little tome that is UNFORGETTABLE, and mind-numbing in a sad, searing way. One that would be burned into my consciousness had I ever flipped through these pages in the days of yore. Yes, as alluded to in this post’s title, young Peter Parker, the skinny bullied boy with the big spectacles, whose sweaters and ironed pants were like catnip for schoolyard book-dumpers, was molested. And he was molested by someone he trusted, someone who brought a little bit of light into his nerdy, bleak, lonely, orphaned, library-dwelling childhood. Someone who for a little while made him feel like he belonged.

This may ruin your day. You have been warned.

This comic is broken up into two different sections, one centered on Spider-Man, the other around Power Pack, and each talking about a different kind of sexual abuse and the challenges a kid would face in trying to deal with it. I don’t want to belittle the Pack half, because it’s equally well done, but it’s not the show-stealer. That distinction goes to the Parker portion, for the aforementioned reason.

The instigator for the heart-rending Peter flashback is a confrontation Spider-Man overhears in a neighboring apartment, one between a babysitter (Judy) and her charge (Tony), which is prompted by these events:

Spider-Man breaks things up after Judy threatens Tony with violence if he ever tells. And this is when our hero — and Tony’s hero — opens up to the kid, with an “A Boy I Know” flashback:

Coud Peter look any sweeter? And any more unaware of what’s about to fall on his head?

Skip and ”Einstein” become best pals, hanging out, doing projects together, and in general giving poor Peter a slightly older friend he so desperately needs. And then:

We never see what was done to Peter. We only know that something was done. A bad something, and, as always, our imaginations are fearsome things when it comes to filling in blanks. I’m imagining bad stuff, and I don’t think I’m off base at all. THERE IS NO LIGHT, THERE IS NO JUSTICE.

Peter told his Aunt and Uncle about this, and when Spider-Man finishes his story, he tells Tony that this kid was him. Now empowered, Tony’s webslung to his parents, and things feel a little righter.

More on all this in one moment.

The Power Pack segment is just as (if not more) harrowing, as the kids come upon a runaway in an alley, a little girl with good reason to have fled her home:

Jesus, you know? Just Jesus. What more can you say?

Back to Peter. I’m man enough to confess that reading about his rough patch brought a few tears to my eyes. Seriously. The tears may not have broken the eye barrier and streamed down my cheek, but the eyes weren’t dry, that’s for sure. The story — stories, actually — are so, SO well put together. (Here’s the talent list: John Byrne, June Brigman, Bon Wiacek – Cover/Nancy Allen, Jim Salicrup, Jim Mooney, Mike Esposito — Spider-Man/Louise Simonson, Brigman, Mary Wilshire, Wiacek – Power Pack.) On the inside front cover there’s a long list of professionals who advised in the making of the book, and in this case there’s no whiff of having to many cooks in the kitchen. Whatever editorial input they had went into honing the message to children, and to that end the job was done masterfully. The story educates without condescension. But it grabs (no pun intended — GOOD GOD no pun intended) on an adult level, too. The art in both stories captures the pain that only a child can experience, that sense of not knowing what’s happening to them and whether they’ve done something wrong to bring it upon themselves. Art is supposed to make you feel. This book made me feel. That the ostracized kid who found a little bit of happiness could have it snatched away so grotesquely speaks to the bullied in all of us. There but for the Grace of God… Peter’s flashback made me want to wrap my arm around him and tell him it was going to be all right. Look at him up there in that panel where he says “Um, hi, Skip!” That’s what got me. There’s young hope in those eyes. Put this together with what comes after, and you want to cry, punch a wall and hang yourself all at the same time. (I only did a little of one of those. The other impulses were there, though, I assure you.)

This comic makes dopey books that clumsily try to encourage reading and interest in the sciences seem horribly glib by comparison. Trite. It operates on another level entirely. Seeing something so terrible happen to the whole-world-in-front-of-him Peter hits home because we know him. The other two victims in this book, though fictional, matter too, but Peter Parker/Spider-Man is a part of our lives. He’s a national myth, hence there’s a reality to him, and that elevates his story into something that truly matters. It’s all just statistics and campfire ghost stories until it happens to someone you know. Peter is part of all our blocks, all our cul-de-sacs.

In that vein, good for Marvel for letting Spider-Man, their flagship, their biggest icon, be a victim of the abuse upon which the comic is trying to shine a light. Nothing could better drive home that this could happen to anyone, and that having it happen to you doesn’t make you a bad person, quite like a real genuine superhero going through the same thing. There was probably a suit somewhere that cautioned against this choice, arguing that doing something like this would damage the almighty brand. Maybe not. But the fact is, Spider-Man is presented here as a victim of sexual abuse in his youth, and he made it through. That’s a powerful message to the people with single-digit ages that make up the target audience, and a good one. (And editorial balls like this makes the artificiality of DC’s OMG WE’RE HAVING A CHARACTER COME OUT OF THE CLOSET LOOK HOW GREAT WE ARE OH AND BY THE WAY WE’RE DOING INSULTING WATCHMEN PREQUELS TOO feel even more off-putting.)

The inside of the back cover has some follow-up on the contents, as well as outdated contact information. If I have one complaint about the book, it’s that the epilogues to the two stories are a bit too sunny. (Actually, two complaints: The “MEET THE SENSATIONAL POWER PACK!” blurb on the front is jarring in a serious work like this one.)  I guess you need a ray of optimism here and there in life, and kids would need a bit of encouragement if put in similar situations:

No word on what happened to Steven ”Skip” Westcott, his Steve Martin hair, his stacks of dirty magazines and his genital-fondling hands. Maybe Uncle Ben beat him to death with a tire iron. Maybe he got some totally ineffectual treatment. Or maybe be grew up, changed his name and became a long-time Defensive Coordinator at Penn State. CHEERY OPTIONS ALL.

Anyway. This book was published in 1984, but its message still has force today. Kids should read it. Adults should read it. The cap is belatedly tipped to all who put it together. This is quality, even if its subject is dark as a moonless night. Excelsior.

Athlete autobiographies are almost uniformly dreadful, and I can’t imagine this Joe DiMaggio book, surely a glossy lump of fluff, would be an exception. And one couldn’t expect the Yankee Clipper, who kept much of his private life — except for that Marilyn Monroe business — close to the vest, to write a Jim Bouton Ball Four. And that’s especially true since he was still in the midst of his playing career when this came out (1947). There’s no looking back and settling scores at play here.

That said, I’m certain that young boys like my father would have devoured this book, scrutinizing it with a Talmudic intensity. And lo, unto thee shall come a Joseph, and he will hitteth in fifty-six straight games.

If the Atari 2600/Intellivision era proved anything, it’s that the thinnest of premises could be turned into a simple two-dimensional time-waster. ENTER THE KOOL-AID MAN. Yes, the loud, fat, sugary mascot, to whom WALLS MEAN NOTHING, was turned into a dreadfully dull video game.

Also, not sure what the price of Kool-Aid was back in the day, but the 125 proof-of-purchase threshold seems to take some steam out of the “FREE.”

Perhaps one of the more puerile Walt Disney live action offerings, The Shaggy Dog was a substantial box office success for the Mouse. This 1959 talking dog flick featured turns from child stars Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello, as well as My Three Sons padre Fred MacMurray, one of those 1960s fathers who had a pipe glued to his mouth and a closet full of bathrobes. Several sequels and remakes have followed the shaggy original over the years, including one in 2006 that had Robert Downey Jr. in a supporting role, amidst his pre-Iron Man, post-57th rehab walk of shame.

It’s had a long shelf life. Huzzah.

Let’s not mince words here: ALL VERSIONS OF THIS TALKING DOG PREMISE ARE STUPID BEYOND THE POWER OF WORDS TO DESCRIBE. Yes, they’re family movies, but there are plenty of kid-friendly movies that don’t make everyone who’s old enough for a driver’s license want to lop off their own head. Like a story about a sex-starved teenage Aunt May, I’m not in the target demographic for fiction of this sort, but I can’t help thinking of Artie Lange’s mocking critique of this genre on The Howard Stern Show. “How can a dog be a district attorney? And where did it learn sarcasm? YARYARYARYAR!”

In an odd twist, the comic adaptation comes off as less obnoxious than the source material. The wan Tommy Kirk smirks are less egregious on the printed page, I guess. But it’s still dopey as all get out.

Kirk’s character, Wilby Daniels, is a whiz kid whose schemes, with brother “Moochie” (a recurring Disney character, played by Kevin Corcoran) at his side, often run afoul of their curmudgeonly father (MacMurray). And Dad is, get this, allergic to dogs. In fact, he hates dogs. Wait, but this is a story about a dog — it says so in the title. OH MAN THIS IS GOING TO BE GREAT. Wilby moons over Funicello’s young lass, who’s also pursued by Wilby’s best friend. Things get crazy when a father and daughter move in across the street, they have a dog, and Kirk accidentally carries away a cursed ring from a museum, and said ring puts him in the body of the new pooch on the block.

Got that? Good, because that’s all the setup that I can stomach.

Here’s the first transformation sequence, as Wilby becomes the dog that just moved in next door:

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the storyline is that the new “father” neighbor isn’t really the girl’s father at all (some loosely explained adoption or something), but a spy set on stealing sensitive missile information. And, of course, Wilby’s new canine persona is perfectly suited for eavesdropping:

It all builds up to a final chase, with, yes, a dog driving a car. Films with great vehicle pursuits, like Ronin and Bullitt, have nothing to fear rankings-wise from this one:

This adaptation was scripted by Eric Freiwald and Robert Schaefer, while Dan Spiegle handled the art. No complaints on this front, as they couldn’t exactly have gone to town creatively while boxed in by the screen shenanigans. You know what? The art is actually half-decent. So there’s that.

I love dogs. I hate movies like this. I’m not fond of this book. Maybe I’m a stick in the mud. Always possible. If there are any Baby Boomers out there reading this for whom The Shaggy Dog is a fond walk down memory lane, here’s a pin-up with the young stars of the film and their senses-shattering autographs (Annette’s is appropriately bubbly). Feel free to tack it to your bedroom wall:

This is the big coupon advertised on the cover of Detective Comics #248, which was featured here a couple of days ago. The redundancy of the “FREE!” — is there ever a coupon you pay for? — surely confused some ice cream craving youngsters out there. “You still owe me a dime and a nickel, kid.”

Also, is Dairy Queen ice cream more or less healthy today, or is it a push? It was probably more loaded with fat back in the ’50s, but had less preservatives, and was therefore less deadly. That’s my gut feeling. Whatever the case, KEEP STUFFING YOUR FAT GOBS, AMERICA.

That milk really has to work to get above Angelina’s big lips, no? It’s the dairy version of climbing Mount Everest.

I had a friend in college who was in love with playing his Tomb Raider game. Literally in love. Whenever he could, he’d work Lara Croft into some perverse position, where he’d get a good look at her virtual ass, virtual crotch or virtual rack. He’d chortle like Butt-head, controller in his lap, a look on his face like a lion sizing up a gazelle. If he ever saw this ad, his head probably exploded.

Anyway. Superman and Batman, eat your milk-loving hearts out.

Look at that Sheldon Moldoff cover. Batman just pole-vaulted his way out of a gondola to kick an evil gondolier right in his face. Already I have a feeling this comic will be much more entertaining than the Christopher Nolan Bane/Catwoman dirge that’s coming out in July.

Batman morphed into something a whole lot more goofy after his dark initial days as a pure crimefighter. He ditched the night and the shadows for ever-escalating preposterous scenarios, until finally he was put on more conventional, gritty footing heading into the 1970s. This 1957 comic doesn’t exactly have him on the moon fighting aliens, but oh, is it ever goofy. And I mean that in the most flattering sense imaginable. Because if you have a bucket list that includes reading Batman stories in which he rides a windmill’s blades, takes a gondola ride in Venice, and uses his cape to fight a bull, then friend, you have some checking off to do.

Seriously, this short story (12 pages) has all the fun of a good miniature golf course. Every turn is a dumb but enjoyable surprise, and all that’s lacking is a clown on the last hole whose mouth is the ball return. (Joker? Where are you?)

The impetus for all this Bill Finger (script)/Dick Sprang (pencils)/Charles Paris (inks) hullabaloo is a theft at a hospital, where an experimental drug has been stolen. Batman and Robin are called in, and — predictably — learn that the drug is the only cure for a dying man, and that they’re about to find themselves LOCKED IN A RACE AGAINST TIME. And it further turns out that the stolen goods have been split up and fenced around the world, which sets our heroes on a globe-hopping chase, one whose “Around the World in 8 Days” title is an obvious allusion to H.G. Wells’ Around the World in Eighty Days. (This one’s a lot faster because, instead of relying on rail and steamers, they have that Batplane thing.) They have a busy few days ahead of them. (We could pause and ask why in hell the thieves stole the cure and how the pilfered supplies were split up and spread across the world instantaneously, but to do so would  undermine the fun. And also, if you carry that questioning far enough, you get back to the fact that you’re reading about a guy dressed as a bat who has as his chosen companion a garishly attired half-naked teenage boy. What I’m saying is, turn off that inquisitive portion of your brain before stepping onto this thrill ride.)

Various clues at each point of their journey guide them to their next destination. First up is Holland, the proud nation that gave us a classic translated Green Lantern comic profiled here a few days ago. Being a 1950s comic book, the story has to make use of the most obvious, stereotypical features of each location visited. For Holland, that means windmills. And, whadaya know, some of the cure-holding hoodlums are cooped up in one. What are the odds of Batman using this windmill’s blades to help tackle the toughs that are hiding on said windmill? About 1:1, right? RIGHT:

Next it’s off to Venice (where maybe the Dynamic Duo will cross paths with the I Spy boys). Despite the amorous locale, there’s no time for romance, so Fredric Wertham couldn’t use this for an updated edition of The Seduction of the Innocent. There’s ass-kicking (or face-kicking, as it were) that needs doing (as seen on the cover):

Next up is the Orient, back in the days when you could still type ”Orient” without worrying whether you’re committing some sin against political correctness by doing so. (I think I’m okay. Aren’t I? Yeah, I think so.) How can you tell you’re in Asia? Well, there’s a giant dragon statue and perfidious guys in sarongs. At least Batman gets a chance to work his abs on this leg of the journey:

There’s a very, um, dainty quality to Batman’s foot positioning in that last panel. Granted, there’s no set masculine way to hold a burning torch between your feet, but still… Maybe ballet (complete with tutu) was part of Bruce Wayne’s pre-Batman training.

Last up is Mexico. And BULLFIGHTING. Yes, Batman pulls off his cape to dabble in the cruel, savage bloodsport that Ernest Hemingway so lovingly chronicled. There are no cheering crowds to shower him with roses, but our unCaped Crusader does an admirable job of mimicking a matador’s moves:

Does Batman get gored? Does he display bullfighting panache that outshines that of the great Bugs Bunny? YOU’LL HAVE TO READ THE BOOK TO FIND OUT. And also, of course, to learn whether or not they get the cure back to the hospital in time. (Hint: THEY DO.) Sadly, though, I don’t think this issue’s Batman tale has ever been reprinted in any of the numerous trades that have come out over the years, falling in a dead zone after the introduction of the character and the prime Silver Age hijinks. Patience will have to be a virtue in this instance. Someday.

It would be worth the wait. Some old Batman stuff is just awful. Putrid. This is good, and a quick, gratifying read. You can almost picture Finger twirling a pen in his writing hand while staring at a blank sheet of paper, an architect’s lamp his desk’s sole illumination, probably a lit cigarette in his hand waiting to join its extinguished brothers in the ashtray, and finally saying to himself ”Let’s have some fun with this goddamn thing.” And all due praise goes to the artwork. Just from the scans posted above, I was quite taken with Sprang’s use of perspective and point of view in the windmill sequence, as well as the lonely desolation of the empty stadium in the bullfighting scene. Paris’ inks made a haunting contribution to the deep moonshadows of the latter.

This story only takes up 12 pages, but provides more pleasurable bang than many more drawn-out affairs.

So get off your ass, DC. Get a Justice League movie made, and bring toreador Batman to the reading public. You have your marching orders. Now step to it.

Oh, lighten up, Fido. Or Terry, if that is your real name. After all, you could be the Griswold’s dog in National Lampoon’s Vacation. (And please, no Mitt Romney jokes.)

I posted a later iteration of this ad last year, one that also featured Batman (with a HUGE bat-symbol) and Wonder Woman. The Superman in this 1950s version looks like he has a bit more of the “leap tall buildings in a single bound” blood in him.

Also, a decade’s worth of amusment park inflation apparently took a 25 cent value up to $1.10. File that in your mental economic database.

The upcoming Amazing Spider-Man film isn’t content to merely frustrate fans of the character with another origin story only a decade after the first film hit. No, it also seems set on changing the dynamic of the titular hero, substituting some DARK SECRETS hokum about Peter Parker’s parents for the Uncle Ben/With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility foundational ethos. FANTASTIC. For any number of reasons (*cough* Lizard design *cough*), and no matter how much more lively Andrew Garfield is when compared to the dead-eyed Tobey Maguire, I just can’t get myself worked up for this flick. Do you hear that, Sony? I, a person who writes a blog focused on nothing but comics, can’t get worked up over an upcoming Spider-Man movie. Your brand might have some issues.

With this potential train wreck on the horizon, it seems like as good a time as any to look at another odd take on the early days of Spider-Man. In this case, one when he was merely a gleam in his parents’ eyes.

I missed the Mark Millar-scripted, Terry/Rachel Dodson-artified Trouble when it first hit (2003), but I had a co-worker around that time who used to give me his copies of Wizard, and I recall reading an article about this series, a thinly veiled re-imagining — or just plain imagining — of the nubile youths of May, Ben, Mary and Richie. Yes, those are some familiar names. They’re meant to be. It was hoped that the book would re-vitalize the Romance genre, taking defibrillator pads to that long-cool corpse by cramming young versions of the Parker forbears into an ill-suited narrative. In the first issue we meet brothers Ben and Richie and best friends May and Mary as they head off to spend the summer working at a Hamptons resort and MEET THEIR DESTINIES. The premier is bookended by May (the wild child) stealing some of her father’s hooch, and, well, and then making me want to punch a hole through the comic:

Yes, a young Aunt May held a condom aloft as she purloined a hideously overused Spider-cliche. AND WE’RE OFF.

What follows is a story set in the 1970s — though nothing about it really said “70s” apart from the cars — as our young leads have their sexual awakenings. Couples are formed, surreptitious switcheroos happen, May is willing to give it up while Mary wants to wait a while, and the senses-shattering topic of teen pregnancy is addressed in a most useless fashion.

Oh, and it’s also posited, quite needlessly, that May is actually Peter’s real mother. Yes, the guilt-trip broad with the tight gray bun is a real ho here. This in particular seemed designed to generate a loud, hearty, John McEnroe “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!”

I realize I’m giving away the store with the whole Mother May thing, but it’s a safety concern. Now you’re prepared if you ever want to read this, and you won’t karate chop the nearest karate choppable object when you come to this “revelation.” One that really means absolutely nothing, since this storyline has been thoroughly forgotten, but one that feels all the more of a waste of time because of it. (Also, don’t get me started on Aunt May apparently having aged HORRIBLY in the intervening years between Peter’s birth and his being bitten by the radioactive spider. Was she a meth addict? Did they have meth back then?)

And really, who cares about Peter Parker’s parents? Is there a more useless mother and father combo for a major character? Batman’s were murdered in front of him. IMPORTANT. Superman had two pairs, with the birth set never met but remembered, and the adopted set forming his moral worldview. IMPORTANT. Peter never knew Richard and Mary, and their only big in-continuity “appearance” came in the 1990s as android doppelgängers, an awful plotline that, fortunately for those who conceived it, was overshadowed by the roughly contemporaneous and doubly asinine clone nonsense. Again: WHO CARES?

But here we get to see teenage versions of them acting like doofuses, with interminable dialogue about sex and life and blahblahblah. Wonderful. I’ll give Millar this: he did a decent job of capturing teen-speak, in that no one with any degree of maturity can stand listening to a teenager yammer on about anything for more than ten seconds, and every two pages of this mini you’ll want to fling the installment in your hands across the room.

A guy in his mid-thirties reading the book ten years after its publication probably isn’t the demographic Marvel was hoping to tap. Granted. But Trouble was a chore for me to read, and it’s a misfire on many levels.

As repugnant a reordering as the parentage twist was, and as puerile as Millar’s script felt, it was the photo covers that are the most memorable part of the series. The girls on them — though it was assured that the models weren’t minors — looked all of fifteen years old. With the bikinis, the bare flesh and the sunglasses, it was painfully obvious that they folks behind them were going for a forbidden Lolita vibe, and every issue seemed hell-bent on out-creeping its predecessors, with pubescent oral fixations the centerpiece of the first impression everyone would get of the book in their hands. (That uber-scummy douchebag teacher that recently brainwashed and ran off with one of his students probably owned a whole stack of these comics.) You had the first one, seen up there at the top (it had a conventional variant), with its coquettish lowering of shades (the broad on the left looks a bit like Paris Hilton, but without the lazy eye). Then you had the HEY SHE’S PUTTING THE SUNGLASSES IN HER MOUTH OOOH second issue:

Then the SHE’S BLOWING A BUBBLE I WONDER WHAT ELSE SHE COULD BLOW OOOH HOT third:

The fourth was a comedown “whispering of secrets” cover, but the fifth is perhaps the most disturbing, as OH GOD ONE OF THE GIRLS LOOKS LIKE MACAULAY CULKIN:

There. Trouble. If you’ve never read it, don’t take the trouble to. HA. A lame joke for a lame book, and a perfect way to wrap this up.

For a boy in the 1980s, there was no greater amalgamated transforming robot toy than the original lion-based Voltron. BAD. ASS. Not only was he gigantic with a huge sword, but all the component lion pieces that went into his multi-part assembly were well made. I’m a confirmed Transformers partisan, but the Autobot/Decepticon teams that would join up as larger robots — Devastator, Superion, Blahblablahion – fell apart at the first hint of play. You could barely pick the damn things up without them coming apart at your feet. Not so with Voltron. That big sumbitch was made for action.

Not even the overall crappiness of his lame and mostly forgotten kinsmen, Vehicle Voltron and Gladiator Voltron, which also wormed their way into my childhood toychest, could temper his greatness. But I don’t remember garbage like Haggar the Witch or the Doom Blaster. Wasn’t a big fan of the cartoon, I guess (the Transformers have an eternal trump in that arena). If I had had a greater familiarity with them, then maybe my enthusiasm would be doused a bit.

Anyway, I’ve always thought that the staying power of the Voltron mythos was mostly due to the sturdiness of the lion-based toy, not so much the quality of the series or the snot-nosed kids that piloted the arms, legs, and torso. The dopey sidebars in the above ad only gird that impression.

Dumb side characters or not, Voltron is still better than Robotix. ON THIS WE CAN ALL AGREE.

Combine Dungeons & Dragons with Major League Baseball! Bore people insensate with statistics and mind-numbing rows of figures! Strip the game of all the things that make it beautiful, not excluding crotch-scratching and tobacco juice!

Dick Williams would use this crap for BB bun target practice.

Welcome Back, Kotter was on the airwaves before my TV watching days. My first encounter with this 1970s John Travolta launching pad was a decade-plus later sketch on Saturday Night Live, where an all-grown up Barbarino was hosting that show and was in a great sketch called “Quentin Tarantino’s Welcome Back, Kotter.” (A sketch worth seeing mainly for Adam Sandler’s goofy grin as Epstein during the Reservoir Dogs-inspired intro.) I recognize that the show had a following and a number of breakout characters and catchphrases, but my limited viewing of it left me cold. Sitcoms — unless their name is Honeymooners – have the hardest time holding up over time, and Kotter was/is no different.

So maybe the show isn’t up in the stratoshpere of greatest shows ever. But hey, did M*A*S*H have a comic? No. No it didn’t. And this site would be incomplete without a brief trip through the comic series’ pages.

The main reason I chose this issue (Script: Elliot (S!) Maggin, Art: Jack Sparling) over any of the other nine that formed the series’ limited run is that, within its confines, the renowned Sweathogs defy the laws of New York and gravity to play a prank on the curmudgeonly principal, Mr. Woodman. Remember in Animal House when Flounder, Bluto and D-Day put Niedermeyer’s horse in Dean Wormer’s office? Well, the boys here decide to do the same, but substitute Woodman’s car for the equine prop. You might think to yourself, “Wow, I’d sure like to know how regular teenagers could get a car into a cramped little office without the benefit of superpowers. I’m sure it was an elaborate scheme, complete with Mr. Science-ish levers, pulleys, weights and counterweights.” WRONG. You’ll find no such answers here, as Newton’s Law can apparently be disengaged at will on Earth-Kotter:

I used to work with my father — a home-builder — in the summertime, and when we’d put siding on a house he’d set up this rickety staging with ladders, braces and long wooden planks like the ones seen above. The wood had a lot of give, to put it mildly, and it always felt like I was one step away from plummeting into the welcome arms of a Worker’s Comp claim. Perhaps the planks the Sweathogs use are hewn from petrified trees. Or Woodman drives an Adobe. Whatever.

Apart from that, things follow a cookie-cutter trajectory seen in countless episodes of this show and others — sans of course the laughtrack. In addition to Horshack’s guffaws and Epstein’s notes, much of the standard situational comedy is replicated within:

IT LOOKS LIKE HE HAS BREASTS! HARHARHARHAR! (Not sure if those are typos or puns or inside jokes in there or what. I’m sure that I don’t care, though.)

I was impressed with this bit, as a catchphrase of the time was repurposed so that Kotter could essentially tell Woodman to cram it up his ass:

Ass-allusions aren’t often found in comics, especially comics from this era. Just saying.

Finally, I thought readers might like some “Sweat Hog Scratchings,” with brief bios of the cast. It would have been eerie prescience if whoever wrote these had incorporated “Will be dogged by rumors that he is gay throughout his career” in the Travolta blurb — and LOGO BORDERS MEAN NOTHING TO EPSTEIN’S UNTAMABLE HAIR:

I’ll give Sparling – who did adaptations as disparate as Adam-12 and The Dirty Dozen – his due for providing reasonable likenesses of the familiar faces of the show. Barbarino’s gigantic mug looked like Travolta’s gigantic mug, for whatever that’s worth. And Maggin, credited without the S! here, does what he can in giving the world of James Buchanan High a degree of Riverdale elan. Problem is, I just don’t care that much about the source material. Others who were around to enjoy the show on its first run around the block might feel differently. If so, mazel. Go with God.

There. Welcome Back, Kotter. Done and done.

I remember this pre-release ad for Mr. Gold quite clearly. It seemed to my young eyes that he had it made — the Magnum, P.I. of comic book champions. (His spotty, at times lackluster heroing was still in the future.) Usually you don’t see piles of cash and accoutrements like those unless rap or cocaine is involved. “Booster Gold: Women Love Him, Men Respect Him.”

Something tells me that there’s a gold-plated bidet in Booster’s pad. Just a hunch. THE 99% WOULD NOT BE PLEASED. Not sure if he’s ever fired a gun in a nightclub, though.