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.
Voltron’s accompanying universe was much more involved and insufferable than I remember
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.
A comic begat by the TV show that also begat John Travolta. YOU’RE WELCOME, EARTH. – Welcome Back, Kotter #2
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.
I can picture this arraignment:
Judge: “So, Mr. Knievel, you’ve chosen a career in death defiance.”
Knievel: “Yes, your honor.”
Judge: “And you thought it would be a good idea to have your son stand on the back of your ROCKET-POWERED bike as you launched it over trucks, cars, and assorted natural and man-made landmarks?”
Knievel: “Yes, your honor. I even let Robbie do the ‘Look, no hands!’ bit.”
Judge: “…”
Hey, Superman — you seem to think that juvenile courts can work wonders in any family situation. How about this one?
You’ll become so good at playing the guitar, hearts will magically appear above your girl’s head
Do all guitar lesson ads carry the implied promise of getting laid? Let me rephrase that: Shouldn’t all guitar lesson ads carry the implied promise of getting laid? Because I think that’s the reason most nascent strummers take up the instrument in the first place.
Thank you, Ed Sale, for helping many a young man learn both chord progressions and the touch of a woman.
The comics-loving audience won’t soon forget the time when Green Arrow exclaimed “NEEE! Speedy is een JUNKIE!”
I don’t have much to say about this comic. I’ve profiled a foreign Green Lantern book here before, but unlike my limited (and fading) grasp of French, I have absolutely no working knowledge of Dutch. I’m not entirely sure of the effect the translation here has on the original Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams script, other than making the reader look for windmills, clogs and marijuana in every panel. I also don’t want to dawdle on looking at the book, lest this post take on a moronic ”Dance for me, monkey!” parlor game vibe. “Look, dey’re talkin’ Dutch or sometin’! Huhuhuh!” And lastly, everyone knows the story of Speedy’s dalliance with needles and opiates by rote at this point.
But, just to give you a feel for what our friends in Holland got when they read this — with its recolored Adams/Dick Giordano art — here’s some bookends. The first page, with skulking toughs waiting to take out an oblivious Oliver Queen:
And the last few panels, which give us the mainlining money shot:
Hey, where’d Speedy’s costume go? And Green Arrow’s hat? ”O, lieve God!” indeed.
Join salty-tongued baseball manager Dick Williams as he philosophizes on the merits of BB gun ownership
All baseball managers come pre-installed with chewing tobacco and a profane vocabulary, so I’m a bit surprised this ad didn’t have a few more four-letter words and barnyard allusions. And, apart from the obvious coordination benefits, I’m skeptical about the baseball cross-training advantages of BB guns that Mr. Williams advocates here. “Your team slumping at the plate? Get them Daisies!”
Still, this is less eyebrow-arching than classroom ads and living room shooting galleries.
Is it just me, or is that a harrowing first panel or what?
This is another of the old Superman PSAs that pimped the wonders of the juvenile court system. As great as it would be to have Superman show up just as you’re about to get the piss knocked out of you by your old man (even better than Spider-Man stepping in), I’m guessing the beating would happen anyway as soon as the Man of Steel went off to fight Brainiac, Lex Luthor or whoever. And maybe — just maybe — Superman shouldn’t be so middle of the road on this one. It might be okay to flat out side with the kid here.
Were you all fired up to read Jack Kirby’s Silver Star back in the day? No? Yeah, no one was.
Everyone who loves comics loves Jack Kirby. Or almost everyone. There are holdouts out there who wear anti-Kirby iconoclasm like a badge of honor (like I do with Neal Adams). Anyway, the vast majority of us love Kirby. But the imaginative premises of his fertile mind started to get a bit thin in the later stages of his career. Silver Star, the “Homo Geneticus” creation of his 1980s Captain Victory period, is one of the more tired looking of these latter-day concepts. The alliterative Morgan Miller — born in a 1970s unproduced screenplay — looks like Kirby fused Galactus with Orion, then said “screw it” and moved on.
Have to love the Kirby dots though. And I like the “Visual Novel” terminology A LOT more than the offensively overused “Graphic Novel” — a soapbox I’ll mount at some later date.
Hey, Aquaman has a new blue costume. Kids will LOVE him now. – Aquaman (1986 Mini-Series)
Lord knows that I rip on Aquaman just as much as anybody. Maybe more than most. It’s so easy. Anyone with water-based powers is susceptible to whatever the equivalent of bullying is within comic book fandom, from Namor to the Man from Atlantis. But you want to know what I find even more infuriating than Aquaman himself? When people try to shine him up, gussy him up with a new costume and a new grooming style. That always sucks. Own him, you know? If you’re going to write and draw a damn Aquaman story, man up and do it, with the green pants and orange top and clean-shaven looks. What the hell was that look he sported in the past decade? No shirt, a cyborg arm, long hair and a beard? Was he supposed to be underwater Cable or something?
Lame. The kind of lame you only get when you try to tart up lame. Lame².
This series, published after DC’s first massive spring cleaning of their ever-jumbled universe, gives us a fresh take on the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Aquaman. (Unlike the old Wonder Woman’s rearview mirror post-Crisis sendoff, this mini looks forward.) Not that there are any radical departures from the nuts and bolts of Aquaman’s Atlantean lore. Familiar faces are found in their customary roles, whether Mera or the Ocean Master, and it’s not like he was switched out with Hawkman and became Lord of the Clouds or some B.S. like that.
The biggest difference here is an obvious one. A new costume. An ugly, new, used very briefly costume. One that makes him look like a figure skater or something. Are there sequins on it? If not, why not?
Not a fan.
That’s not to say that the series is bad. Actually it’s pretty good. Writer Neal Pozner and artists Craig Hamilton and Steve Montano craft a story that richly re-orders and expands DC’s undersea regions. New realms are added to the map, magic and sacred objects are incorporated, quests are begun for stolen seals, and for a brief moment you actually start to think that Aquaman’s environs might be an interesting place to visit — and revisit. The art is quality, and the script does its damnedest. There’s an extended sequence in the final issue where Aquaman looks back on his history and seems to come to peace with his place in the universe, with several splash-pages giving us a timeline of his life, and it’s perhaps one of the best bits of Aquaman storytelling that I’ve ever read. (A low bar, granted…) Some of the dialogue in the series is a bit glib, but that’s a minor complaint. The thing reads well.
But there’s that costume.
The storyline reason for the fresh duds is that the varying shades of blue will provide better cover for Aquaman as sneaks around the ocean depths. Camouflage. Of course, by the end of the first issue Aquaman – in true Aquaman fashion – is captured, so we’re not exactly dealing with an Elfin Cloak of Invisibility here. So really THERE’S NO POINT TO IT WHATSOEVER, other than to make Aquaman more modern and, heaven help us, hip.
(Shakes head.)
The main impetus for the story’s action is our hero’s long-standing sibling rivalry with his nutcase brother, Ocean Master. He attacks Aquaman’s surface home with a new panoply of powers, and has his usual “No, YOU’RE the booger!” set-to with his bro:
I prefer Thor and Loki’s family squabbles, but that’s just me. And pretty much everyone else.
Again — back to the costume. Here’s Arthur getting the duds and getting nude. A little something for the ladies:
Yeah. I’m sure you’ll be able to handle anything that comes your way, Artie. No need for the JLA signal. YOUR COMPETENCE OVERWHELMS US.
I’ve made my feelings on the camouflage clear. Again, NOT A FAN. But I’m willing to concede that others might me more amenable to a change of sartorial pace for Aquaman, and I present you with this “The Pen is Mightier than the Swordfish” (…) letters column from the last issue to give some opposing viewpoints:
Aquaman sported the blue tights once more, in a one-off special in 1988, and then went back to the orange and green that we know and, well, not love — perhaps tolerate. Yeah, know and tolerate. At least, until the next time he was scheduled for a futile reinvention.
Short? Don’t want to stretch yourself out with a torture rack? Then try these simple Tom Cruise-style lifts.
I remember quite clearly when I first watched the Stephen Spielberg-directed War of the Worlds, and more specifically its unbelievably well-crafted first appearance of an alien tripod. It was probably one of my favorite extended movie scenes of the past decade, a moment that reminded me why I go to theaters and put up with people talking and noisily thrusting their fat fingers into huge vats of buttery popcorn. Seeing such a sight on a big screen makes it all worthwhile.
But there were a few frames in that scene where I was dragged kicking and screaming out of the effects-laden drama unfolding before me. Spielberg has long understood that a simple trick to help give an audience a childlike sense of wonder is to keep the camera low, because that way you’re looking up at what’s going on in the world — like a kid. He did that in this scene, placing the camera right on the ground as Tom Cruise scurried and the alien war machine rose up through the city street.
Problem was, at that low vantage we got a good look at Cruise’s shoes. And all I could think of was how thick the soles were. We’re talking New-York-delicatessen-pastrami-sandwich thick. Webster’s Dictionary thick. Whatever a not-that-tall leading man has to do to squeeze out an extra inch or two, you know?
I’m not trying to pile onto the omnipresent ”Tom Cruise is short” internet trolling (though I probably am, intent be damned). It just made me laugh. And this ad for lifts made me think of Cruise fleeing tripods in his gigunda platformy shoes. All “get taller” ads make me think of Cruise. But this one really did.
Chuck Norris laughs at this comic’s paucity of spinning heel kicks – Jace Pearson’s Tales of the Texas Rangers #11
There’s an entire generation out there that probably thinks all Texas Rangers (the law enforcement kind, not the baseball kind) know every manner of martial arts, and rarely have to resort to using their issued sidearms. That they’re nigh-superhuman, with hyper-masculine beards to go along with the de rigueur hat. That they’re all cut from the same Chuck Norris mold. Thanks, Walker, Texas Ranger. You’ve spoiled being a Ranger for all of them.
Mr. Norris’ Walker may have been the most recent and most famous TV Texas Ranger, but he was by no means the first. Jace Pearson, as played by Willard Parker (and seen on the photo cover above), patrolled the airwaves for several years in the latter half of the 1950s in Tales of the Texas Rangers. (The franchise had existed as a radio drama before that.) It combined the by the book morality of Jack Webb’s Dragnet with any of the million or so Western dramas of the day. The short-lived comic series, of which today’s issue was a part, was a standard-for-its-time companion to the show. In all the versions, Jace, often with his partner Clay at his side, would range over the wide open fields of Texas, battling crime as his horse-riding forbears had done before , just with a lot less Comanches threatening to ride in at any moment.
But he never kicked anyone in the face in a most spectacular manner. Which is a shame.
Ted Ushler provided art in this issue (as he did with the Davy Crockett one-shot profiled here last month), and while reading this story — the scripter is unknown, btw – I found myself thinking “this is a perfect time to spin in midair and nearly decapitate your foe, Jace” all too often. The propensity for cartoonish violence (to go along with the awkward drama) was one of the standout features of the improbably long-running Walker, and it also gave Conan O’Brien one of the best bits Late Night ever had. (Does he still have the Walker Lever on the TBS show? I guess he probably can’t because of rights issues. Oh well.) This kung fu cowboy silliness will cloud my views of the Rangers until the day I die. Likely that’s true for others.
There are three stories within this comic, and Jace matches the battle prowess of Walker to varying degrees in each. I’ll give you a brief look.
Here’s some scrubby convict, with his state issued jumpsuit and stubble, getting the drop on our hapless hero in the first tale:
Walker would have been the one shooting the gun out of a hand, methinks.
Here’s Jace getting a rock to the head:
Seems to me that a well-timed aerial sweep of a foot would have deflected that crude missile quite nicely.
Jace isn’t a complete milquetoast. A pansy check-cashing scheme in the second story proves more amenable to his ground-based brand of physicality:
I’ll say this for Jace: I don’t think Walker ever used a stack of soup cans to catch his man (or men.) So Jace gets points for this finale to the third of this issue’s entries:
Of course, he ruins it in the next panel by dropping an awful, awful pun:
HAW-HAW indeed.
There isn’t much to recommend this comic to a modern reader. The stories are plodding and unoriginal (the first two share a “twist” — the victim of a crime turns out to be a criminal himself) and the art, while at times offering clean views of sere, open Texas land (which evokes but doesn’t match the art in the Roy Rogers book reviewed here a long time ago), can’t overcome that. And there’s always that Walker nonsense in the back of your head. Chuck Norris may have spoiled all Texas Ranger properties for us forever. Jace, with his steely blue eyes, would not be happy.
Ah. Keanu Reeves. On the game console of your choice. Your move, early 1990s gamer. Place this where you will among the John Elway’s Quarterback — Spy vs. Spy pantheon. (There’s technically some George Carlin in this, too. So there’s that.)
Have you seen The Avengers yet? If you did, it was pretty great, wasn’t it? YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT WAS. I’m still walking on air about it. (And I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have given it the full five out of five on my “toothy Hulk smile” metric.) The comic book movie that we always dreamed of was finally dropped into our laps, and it was as close to distilled perfection as we’re ever going to get. I live within a ten-minute walk of a multiplex, and it’s a constant struggle to not go over there every night and watch the damn thing. It’s the kind of movie that you make plans to see again as you’re walking out of a screening. It’s a miracle that I’m not on a first-name basis with every employee at that theater by now.
We’ve all been psychically high-fiving each other for days now, like fans of a team that just won a championship. The World Series. The Super Bowl. In that vein, I thought it might be nice to take a victory lap of sorts, a quick look at a random issue of Tales from Suspense featuring Iron Man and Captain America, whose clashes and eventual respect and teamwork provided some of the best drama in the film. I’ve talked about ToS comics here before, but it seems a fresh trip down memory lane is in order. And this comic drips with heavyweight talent. It’s great to see how much of the artistic work was eventually incorporated into our recent celluloid acid trip. It’s as if Jack Kirby and Gene Colan were doing storyboards in the production offices.
That said, many of the story elements are what we generously call, here on our evolved post-millennial moral perch, “products of their time.” There are racial and political angles to the Iron Man portion that at worst offend and at best give one pause, and Captain America patronizes Sharon Carter/Agent 13 to a stunning degree. There’s some Mad Men in this little comic — the only thing Cap doesn’t do is pinch his gal pal’s behind.
Still, this is quality 1960s sequential art myth-making. Neither of the stories here is a standalone, but they can stand alone, if you will. The Tony Stark half of the equation (scripted by Stan Lee, art by Colan and Frank Giacoia) has Iron Man battling that classic Cold War foe, the Titanium Man, who’s under control of the not-as-insulting-as-Egg-Fu Asian villain, Half-Face. (“Two-Face” was taken.)
What’s that? You have a sudden hankering for a full-page splash of Iron Man locked in mortal combat with Titanium Man? And to have it illustrated by Genial Gene, the man who could get blood from the Man from Atlantis stone? FEAST ON THIS:
There was a fluidity with Colan’s Iron Man. That was a quality in all of his work, but no one else has ever drawn Rivet-Head with such — there’s no other word for it — malleability.
This story, set in the bloody peak of the Vietnam War, the milieu so intricately wound up with Iron Man’s origin, has a healthy dose of anti-Commie propaganda. Half-Face is a man (literally) consumed by his work for the Viet-Cong, to the detriment of his family — as can be seen in this fluffy-bordered flashback:
And then he had his face blown off in a lab accident, one that offered a chance for the customary evil Asian buck-toothed caricature to be accentuated. Wonderful.
And our hero… While Stark was always the playboy, there was definitely a greater amount of Red, White and Blue patriotism in his classic portrayal, clearly seen in these last panels:
All for one and one for all. U S A. U S A. I have a hard time imagine Robert Downey Jr.’s Stark having such thoughts. Not that he should, mind you. I like Movie-Stark the way he is, with altruism woven in with irreverent prick. Just saying. (And if he did have them, there’d be some snappy pop culture references in those thoughts, surely.)
It’s been indicated that the next Captain America movie will have Steve Rogers closely associated with SHIELD. The CA story here is appropriate then, because it has him neck-deep in SHIELD vs. AIM hijinks (and the introduction — off-panel — of MODOK). And he’s also ensconced in a wonderfully silly Jack Kirby-designed SHIELD apparatus (script again by Lee, art by Kirby and Joe Sinnott):
Do not let any ladies see you in that, Cap. You’ll never again know the touch of a woman, perfect physique and blond good looks notwithstanding. It’s like Dukakis in the tank.
Here’s Cap going through his ass-kicking floor routine, with improbable contortions that I was grateful to see replicated in the Avengers stunt work:
Now for the bad.
Cap only breaks out the demeaning wordplay at a few points here, but the story feels weighed down with it, as if every other word of his mouth was “doll” and/or “toots.” That he refers to a resourceful female agent, Agent 13, as “little girl” is sure to send every hair-trigger feminist into a frothing rage:
“Little lady” seems enlightened by comparison. And “girl” wasn’t a one time slip of the tongue:
Pardon me, Mr. Rogers, but who’s the one flat on his back from a paralyzing ray? Hm?
Thankfully, movie-Cap sticks to a straight-laced “ma’am” when addressing the fairer sex. Then again, Rogers and Carter eventually became paramours. So maybe “little girl” is like Spanish Fly to her. Whatever.
There you have it. Vietnam. Titanium Man. Buck-Toothed Asian villains. Rolling bowling ball attacks. ”Little lady.” A rich smorgasbord of its time, but one with influence — the good stuff – that has wafted down to the present. So pop your bottle of Cristal, sit back and enjoy the moment. It’s a fun time to be a devotee of this stuff.
The X-Men join the scam artist ranks of Dionne Warwick, Miss Cleo and countless phone sex lines
There needs to be some belated “You ought to be ashamed of yourself” commentary about this 1991 ”game.” Really, Marvel? Really? I mean, it’s great and all that you capped the number of minutes that each call could last and the number of calls that could be placed in a week, but still… Without even getting into the shady economics of it, the game itself sounds mind-numbingly lame, with dumb prizes that I’m sure no one ever won. That this Erik Larsen-drawn promotion occupied two pages of prime advertising real estate (this one was scanned out of The Silver Surfer #56) is even more of a blight. It’s Marvel grabbing its audience by the ankles, tipping it upside down, and shaking the loose change from its pockets.
If this had been X-Men phone sex (“I’m the Juggernaut, and I’ve been a bad boy”) or tarot card readings it would have had more class. I mean, Psylocke was in her taut, cantaloupe-jugged prime at this point. They couldn’t have done something with that?
A side note: I’ve often wondered how many times parental permission was sought out before a call was placed to one of these numbers, and how many times it was actually given. Measured in the teens, I’m sure.
Jared M.
