What a way to kick off Super Bowl week.
I love these newspaper inserts. They’re so odd, so local and so fun. I took at look at one back at Christmas-time, which was actually the sequel to this affair. A certain inventor, Stanley Mudge, and his levitation device, one that sent the Kingpin careening to the heavens, both had their first appearance in this comic. The cosmic synergy of the Super Bowl coming up and said event taking place in Dallas made it absolutely imperitive that I blog about this now, so here we are.
“Danger in Dallas!” is brought to us by Marie Severin (Plot/Layouts), David Anthony Kraft (Script), Kerry Gammill (Pencils) and Mike Esposito (Inks). We open with J. Jonah Jameson travelling to Dallas with his friend, Dr. Mudge, and Mudge’s wheelchair bound son. Peter Parker’s also along for the plane ride, but he’s stuck back in coach. That guy never gets any breaks, does he? Well, except for the gaining incredible powers bit.
When they land, Mudge gives his kid a “little push” off the plane:
No, Dad did not just hurl his kid into the air like Frank Drebin pushing Nordberg down the stairs in The Naked Gun. He’s using that nifty anti-gravity device of his.
The foursome (Jonah, Peter, Mudge and Mark) head to Texas Stadium, where the Cowboys are holding a Saturday practice before their opening game and where Mark, who was crippled saving a young girl from a runaway car, is going to meet some of the players. If you’re a football fan you may recognize some of these names, if not the faces — and keep in mind that this was published in 1983:
Peter’s Spider-Sense starts going wild, and with good reason — the Circus of Crime is in town, and they want to get their hands on that anti-gravity device. They grab Mark and spirit him away as Peter sneaks off to make a costume change. He barely has a chance to get his pj-ed feet underneath him before he’s accidentally taken out by Randy White:
Let this be a lesson to you — if a defensive lineman collides with a person who has the proportional strength of a spider, the lineman wins.
Soon there’s chaos. The Circus of Crime thinks that the device is in Mark’s wheelchair but it’s not, they go to Plan B, Mark sneaks away, and before you know it everyone is on the field. The Ringmaster learns that Mudge has the device, and then the action gets going, with all the football-themed dialogue you’d expect from an effort such as this:
Jonah manages to get his hands on the device and starts to float away (let him go, I say), and the dumb as bricks jocks manage to mistake Spider-Man for one of the bad guys and hinder his rescue efforts:
Long story short, Spidey, with a little help from the Cowboys, rescues Jonah and subdues the criminals, and the next day everyone’s able to enjoy the season opener in peace:
Let’s play some football!
If you read the Christmas post, you saw a series of local ads that wrangled Spidey into shilling for the most banal and bizarre range of local wares that you could ever conjure up. Some of the identical ads were in this first issue, including the stupid boot ads. I can’t resist posting some new ones, though.
Here’s a full-page ad for Wing Tips, whatever the hell that is/was:
Captain America even makes a cameo appearance in a blinds ad:
Yes. Nothing makes me want to buy a new set of Venetians more than Captain America. And the prospect of Captain America crawling through said Venetians.
Finally, we have Spider-Man vaulting out of a washing machine like a Jack-in-the-box:
I remember liking Gammill’s work on the Superman titles in the early 90s quite a bit, as his straight-forward style was always easy on the eyes and never distracted from the plots he was pencilling. His well-built figures remind me a bit of John Romita’s in their, well, I’ll call it wholesomeness for the lack of a better word (and Romita coincidentally handled this cover). It’s neat to see Gammill’s work on an oddball little thing like this. As far as the story content, I grew up hating the Cowboys and now I live in the DC area where they’re loathed on a level just below al-Qaeda, so seeing Spider-Man team up with them makes me want to throw up in my mouth. But, as with its Christmas sequel, this local giveaway has its moments, and my comics palette tingles to see Marvel superstars pitching VCRs and dishwashers. Appliances in the Mighty Marvel Manner. Excelsior!
And my early bet on the game? Packers by a touchdown.
The name’s Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia. – Lawrence
There is no greater epic than Lawrence of Arabia. None. Ben-Hur has scenes like “Ramming speed!” and the chariot race to get your blood pumping, but for wide shots of unimaginably rich vistas, sweeping battle scenes and some of the finest actors of the 20th century making the screen sizzle, nothing can compare to David Lean’s masterpiece. It’s one of the few films truly worthy of the “epic” description, a brand of film that’s still imitated year after year but, sadly, seems to have vanished in a sea of CGI and 3-D chicanery. Years ago I bought my parents their first DVD player as a Christmas gift, and Lawrence was the movie I got them to christen it. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.
I had no idea that their was a comic version of the film until I found this by rummaging in a few loose piles of stuff one day, though this book is less an adaptation of the movie than an alternate take on the idealistic life of T.E. Lawrence. It suffers in comparison along with its other adaptation cousins, but there are moments when the sweeping action of the subject’s warrior career shines through, as in this rather large panel:
Certain bits are lacking for obvious reasons. Remember the scene in the film where Lawrence, drunk with his own sense of infallability and invincibility, is captured and brought before the Turkish Bey? The one played by the late, great Jose Ferrer? The one who strips Lawrence nude, ogles him and assaults him, with all the attendant homosexual undercurrents and overcurrents that would be so disturbing and scintillating to a 1960s audience? The incident, including the sexual doings, is regarded as established history and is taken from Lawrence’s own memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but for obvious reasons the comic excises the salacious bits:
Then there’s the end, with the famous epitaph offered up by Winston Churchill, who comes out here looking as if Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Winters had a love-child:
If anyone can tell me who scripted and tackled the art in this one, I’d be glad to be enlightened. I like to give credit where credit’s due, and I certainly enjoyed chunks of this comic — some of the art was quite pleasing to the eye.
What a movie. I haven’t watched it in years — maybe it’s time to carve out a few hours. We shall never see its like again.
Do NOT call her “Miss” Marvel – Ms. Marvel #1
I’m more familiar with Ms. Marvel’s later hot as Hades outfit, the one with the thigh high boots and the clinging top, not this earliest bastardized version of the original Captain Marvel’s garb. While this one doesn’t stack up (though Ms. Marvel is, like most superheroines, stacked), I will doff my cap to the significant amount of back that it shows:
I don’t know what it says about me that a woman’s bare back reminds me of Michael Richards — nevertheless, Kramer’s “What an entrance!” moment on Seinfeld comes to mind:
This set-up issue (Script: Gerry Conway, Pencils: John Buscema, Inks: Joe Sinnott) tries its damnedest to get you to care about Carol Danvers, firmly enmeshing her in the penumbra of Marvel’s flagship title, The Amazing Spider-Man. The John Romita cover promises faces from the Spider-Man clique, and by God we’re going to get them.
Here’s Carol meeting with her potential new boss as she embarks on a journalism career:
She soon corrects Mr. Jameson about his use of “Miss.” I once had a woman do that to me when I was in my early 20s, telling me icily that it was “Ms.” and not “Miss.” I was a bit embarrassed at my faux pas, so I tried to lighten the mood with a joking retort of “Sure thing, toots.” She was not amused. I was young and stupid, okay? And she later turned out to be a real prize of a human being, so I don’t feel so bad. But now I shudder to think that I may have some J. Jonah Jameson in me.
Anyway, Ms. Danvers soon runs into the other two friendly faces from the cover:
And that, my friends, is the full extent of Peter Parker’s cameo.
Mary Jane and Carol head off for a gab-fest, and Jonah gets his acerbic ass kidnapped by the Scorpion. After he strings up the most loathed publisher in history, the Scorpion offers what is perhaps the simplest but most persuasive rationale I’ve ever heard for wanting to kill that cigar-chomping dolt:
Carol, who doesn’t realize at this point that she and Ms. Marvel are one and the same, begs out of her yak with Mary Jane and faints, and then our costumed heroine goes and rescues J. Jonah. I’m not sure if seeing her twirl a guy around by his long appendage will be gratifying to anyone, but here it is:
We end with Jonah lamenting this newest thorn in his side:
This issue (along with other “girl power” books of that era) reeks of Marvel belatedly trying to come on board the women’s movement and shed the comics ethos that brought us such unintentionally demeaning monikers as “The Maid of Steel.” Conway’s opening words about the series in this first issue’s “letters” page (called “Ms. Prints” — nyuk nyuk) makes this intention explicit. As is so often the case, the well-intentioned efforts of not-quite-fully-modernized men to prove their equality bona fides fall a little flat, but, like watching Jonah’s stumbling and bumbling sexism, the endeavor certainly has its appeal.
Buscema did his customary steady work with the primary art chores, though I’ve always found many of his male faces to look way too much like monkeys. And I have to confess to my usual disappointment when I get a Romita cover and open the comic to find that someone else handled the interior art. I realize that it’s no great loss to be denied the umpteenth John Romita rendition of Mary Jane Watson, yet I remain mildly crestfallen, like a kid who’s promised a bike for Christmas and gets a basketball.
I wanted a bike. I wanted Romita. Waaaah.
It’s not bragging if you can back it up
How often have comic book solicitations made promises that couldn’t be kept? You know what I mean, things like “A story that will change the way you look at Hawk and Dove” or “A new Namor saga that will surely be a bestseller.”
In this case, I think calling The Killing Joke “The definitive Joker Story” is, if anything, an understatement. A comic that somehow manages to simultaneously depict Batman’s premier villain at his most evil (shooting Barbara Gordon through the spine, stripping her naked and snapping pictures all the while) yet also his most pathetic (who wouldn’t have gone mad after what happened to him?) merits the most absolute of absolute superlatives.
“What do you think I am? Crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across!”
A Duck and a Gentleman – Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #238
I never cared much for Mickey Mouse or many of the other Disney characters, though I did have a pair of pet flying squirrels for a few months as a kid that I christened Chip and Dale (a story for another time). I much preferred Bugs and Daffy and their Warner Bros. pals.
But I made an exception for Donald Duck.
There was something appealing about his temper, his spastic fits of anger, those big expressive Disney eyes, that bulbous butt, and even his hard to understand baby-talk voice. His hard edges were allayed somewhat by those soft white feathers of his and the rather adorable sailor’s garb he almost always wore. There was also a subliminal association between his diminutive size and the children (like me) who loved him so — kids could identify with his little guy/big world struggles, and could admire his pluck (does that count as a pun?) as he met life’s challenges. But even disregarding those things, you could tell that under all his bluster he was a pretty good guy. He must have been — Daisy saw something in him, and his proxy-parental relationship with Huey, Dewey and Louie somehow worked. He had (and has) his charm.
I had a nice relationship with the character when I was growing up. As a kid one of my treasured possessions was VHS tape of Donald Duck shorts called “An Officer and a Duck” which collected some wartime cartoons. I wore that thing out. I even had a real live “Unca Donald” myself for a while, but he died when I was very young, so young that as I sit here typing I can’t even remember what he looked like. I can remember calling him “Unca Donald” though, that’s for damn sure. And when my parents and I made the long drive down to Disney World when I was eight years old, I almost expired with joy when I saw the “real” Donald Duck walking around the park. I got his autograph, which sits proudly in a photo album somewhere in my parents’ house. I now realize that it’s actually the autograph of some minimum wage schlub who was sweating his balls off in that suit on a hot Orlando summer day, but still…
All that means I still have a lot of residual affection and loyalty when it comes to Mr. Duck, and I was eager to delve into this book when I picked it up. Even if he did once call Daffy the N-word in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? — go check that out if you get a second.
Apart from the cute cover, the comic falls short of the sputtering majesty that is the Duck. It suffers from a similar problem that I pointed out with a Porky Pig tale a while back. In Porky’s case, it was the stutter that was M.I.A., and its absence undermined the entire enterprise. In Donald’s, it’s the fact that there’s really no way to adequately capture (and if there is, it’d be a Herculean task) his voice in word balloons. And, sadly, his dialogue reads like the “Wrong Sounding Muppets” from Family Guy sound:
The setup for Donald’s tale comes as his nephews have to go to a club meeting, and Donald gets saddled with their sitting job:
This’ll go great, right?:
Just like Watergate, the coverup is worse than the crime:
Finally, after all the shenanigans, Huey, Dewey and Louie end up with tanned hides:
It’s still nice to let my eyes wash over the crisp, clean Carl Barks artwork. He did great work in capturing Donald’s visual appeal — I can’t deny that. And I understand that he developed his own little Duck universe (Duckiverse?) in comic books that split off from the Disney screen depictions, but it’s hard for me to disassociate Donald’s voice from what I’m reading and accept this more erudite fowl.
But there’s more!
We have a Mickey Mouse story inside that carries a residual tinge of earlier cartoon racism (another reason to loathe that ****ing rodent). Mickey’s fostering some youngster from Africa — here’s the visitor (named Thursday) trying to cook Pluto:
I swear, Mickey calls this spear-carrying dude an “uneducated savage” or some variation thereof about forty times in this story. All that’s lacking is a bone through the nose and some watermelon to complete the tableau. I realize that today we here in America are not perfect as a society, but we have come a loooooooooong way.
There’s also a story with the long-forgotten Scamp and an odd pairing of Chip and Dale with Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Strange — that’s all I can say about the feel of the latter “team-up.”
On the whole the material on hand is no better than the Looney Tunes books I looked at a while back, but the residual affection I have for Donald makes this an somewhat enjoyable read. I’d be remiss if I didn’t embed some favorite shorts of his to wrap things up — thanks to YouTube I managed to track down a couple that were in that old tape of mine. I haven’t seen them in years — decades, even — but I could still remember them clearly. They’re quite good, and might be worth a look.
Or maybe not. As Donald is wont to say, “Ahhhhhh phooey!”
This seems tailor-made for Ricochet Rabbit
It’s a race car that you fire from a gun. And it involves Spider-Man and Captain America. What’s not to love?
Sadly, as with many things the anticipation is a bit better than the actuality:
My thanks to Batman #402 for letting me appropriate its title.
The “Superman vs. Clark Kent” trope is a venerable old storyline, one so well-travelled it even found its way out to Hollywood. There were many things wrong with the Richard Pryor-infused Superman III — the battle between a Kryptonite-addled Man of Steel and a certain bespectacled mild-mannered reporter was not one of them. Though I can’t embed this particular video clip, go here if you want a reminder of that awesomeness.
The unshockingly titled “Superman Versus Super Clark Kent!,” scripted by Otto Binder with art from Al Plastino (with a Curt Swan cover), opens with robots stealing nuclear weapons from military installations:
Perhaps next time the military could guard the most powerful weapons on Earth with more than a few woebegone Gomer Pyles.
The robots are apparently controlled by a man named Baron X, who starts issuing ultimatums and whose shenanigans bring Superman into the fray. Supes is to late too stop the Baron from nuking a deserted island, and he’s in for a bit of a surprise when the fallout clears:
So that’s where Superman keeps his civvies when he’s out crimefighting — in a cape kangaroo pouch. Okay, I’ll buy that. Maybe.
This super Clark Kent quickly engages in various Festivus-like feats of strength, and our hero starts believing that the nuclear explosion actually did split him in two. Supes is a bit emasculated when Clark retrieves all the stolen nuclear weapons, and then even starts besting him at his day job:
It seems that this new Clark is a nice guy, though, because he soon volunteers to leave Earth to find a new place for himself, but not before fashioning Superman a new belt in the Fortress of Solitude:
How nice.
But *gasp* “Clark” is actually Professor Vakox, an escaped prisoner from the Phantom Zone!:
Forgive me another aside, but I have to note that the Phantom Zone seems to be the lowest-security prison in the cosmos. Sort of like an extra-dimensional halfway house. I don’t even think that the people “imprisoned” there have to sign in and sign out.
The robots, the nuclear weapons — they were all part of Vakox’s elaborate plot, and the belt he made has a device that’ll banish Superman to the Zone. But, in an improbable turn, Superman figures out that this Clark is an imposter and banishes Vakox back to the Zone, which we can all rest assured he’ll escape again in a matter of minutes. Superman’s way of figuring out the ruse was a pretty weak broth — it reminded me of Stephen King’s Misery and her figurines. Track this comic down if you want to know what it is.
We end with the standard Clark/Lois panel at the Daily Planet:
Where’s the wink?
I’m a little more tolerant of silliness in Silver Age Superman stories than I am with contemporaneous Batman material — the alien aspect makes the regular outer space and nuclear nonsense much more palatable. And this one even answered an actual geek question — where does Superman keep his Clark Kent clothes when he makes a quick change? Now all we have to figure out is how he gets the wrinkles out when he gets back into his Kent guise. Dry-cleaning breath?
You’ll shoot your eye out
I was a bit blown away by this one. I’m all for getting your kid a Daisy BB gun, but I’m not sure of the parenting precedent involved in ERECTING AN INDOOR SHOOTING RANGE. What mother, unless her name is Annie Oakley, thinks that this is a good idea?
It is well that war is not this wonderfully goofy, lest we should grow too fond of it – Weird War Tales #116
My apologies to Robert E. Lee for my corruption of one of his more famous quotes.
Weird War Tales could be a lot of fun. Sometimes the run of the mill features that revolved around haunted submarines and the like were dull, but many of the more cartoony stories rocked, and rocked hard.
This issue has a double dose of the latter, as promised by that nice Gil Kane cover.
First there’s the Creature Commandos. Avengers, shmavengers. The Commandos were a crack Dirty Dozen type unit created to battle America’s foes, but instead of providing soldiers with advanced combat training the great minds of the U.S. military decided to turn them into monsters. I’m not sure about the ethics of all that, but you can’t argue with results. The only way that these guys could rule any more would be if they were the “actual” Medusa, Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein.
Wait. Let me take that back — that might be too much of a good thing. It’d be like having Sherlock Holmes and Magnum P.I. solving crimes together. With Detective Chimp. In space. You get the picture — sensory overload.
It’s with great sadness that I report that the Commandos story in this issue (“Doorway to Hell!”, written by Robert Kanigher with art by Fred Carrillo and Jerry Serpe) isn’t all that great, though you have to love how their normal minder, Lt. Shrieve, unrelentingly berates them for their gruesome appearances and abilities:
I think he calls them freaks no less than 1,834,926 times in these pages.
The story, which has the Commandos grappling with enemy forces and a fiery underground deity, is serviceable, but the dialogue is atrocious. Here’s one exchange between Inferna, the aforementioned deity, and Doctor Medusa:
“Why do I weep…if I have no heart?”
“Without a heart…you could not weep.”
The words fall like bricks, folks.
The G.I. Robot tale is far more enjoyable. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s a mechanized, silent World War II Pacific-front warrior named Jake who bears a passing resemblance to Nien Nunb from The Return of the Jedi:
In “The Lonely Robot!” (Kanigher, Carmine Infantino, Sal Trapini) we learn that even robot warriors get the blues. Jake seems a little down, right up until a supply shipment comes in and one of the crates opens to reveal a special surprise:
Yes, it’s a robot dog, with a wagging robot tail.
I love comics.
This riveted canine soon gets the moniker of “Cap,” and it’s not long before he sees some action. One day he inexplicably swims out into the ocean where…:
Jake swims out after him, blows up the shark and spots what Cap was really going after — a Japanese sub. He dispatches it with his incredibly explosive finger missiles, and then drags Cap’s broken body back to shore. Finally we have the clichéd anxious wait and happy ending:
Let’s just be thankful that Cap didn’t run up against a mecha-Michael Vick. Ain’t no dog — metal or not– escapin’ that guy.
This G.I. Robot tale, though only eight pages long, is a treat. Infantino has that rare gift of being able to invest even the thinnest of material with graphic gravitas, and G.I. Robot’s pathos couldn’t have fallen — even if briefly — into better hands. It more than makes up for the stilted hoo-ha that bogged down those stupendous Creature Commandos.
“Without a heart…you could not weep!” indeed.
The co-opting of the World’s Greatest Hero – Pizzazz #16
You know a movie’s touched a nerve when the competition has to jump on the bandwagon.
I had never heard of Pizzazz until I saw a few of them in a box of magazines a couple of months back. From what I can gather it was Marvel’s lame attempt at crossing Mad Magazine, Tiger Beat and Starlog, hence the “humor” aspects combining with nerdy movie stories and the celebritology of the day, including de rigueur profiles of someone named “Cassidy” and the like. The mag also contained serialized Star Wars stories, which may be the only feature that gives it any collectible staying power.
Here’s the table of contents of this particular issue, just to give you a taste of what the vibe is — should you want to imbibe any at all:
What made me buy this one was, of course, the Man of Steel’s appearance on the front cover. Kind of cute. And while I certainly read nothing in the accompanying article that either I didn’t already know or wasn’t completely useless, here’s the story on the original Christopher Reeve Superman:
I could go on for hours and hours about that movie and how gobsmackingly perfect Reeve was in the role. Maybe someday I’ll treat myself and blather for a good long while on that topic. And that “connection” between Superman and Spider-Man? I think there was a less tenuous connection between Dark Helmet and Lonestar in Spaceballs — “uncle’s cousin’s former roommate” and so forth.
There’s one other item of interest here, and that’s a fictitious interaction between Doc Samson and the Hulk written by Roger Stern. Once again I reproduce the whole thing for your viewing pleasure:
I think that this was the last issue of this mag. Not a great loss.
Dead bat walkin’ on the green mile! Dead bat walkin’ on the green mile! – Batman #206
What a magnificent cover. From the bald priest to the arms poking out of the death row cells to the text incorporated into the logo to the laceless boots, it’s a triumph. My only quibble is the tag. When I read the way it’s written, I trip over it. “This is the…end!” seems like it should be written as “This is…the end!,”know what I mean?
Or maybe I’m way off base.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the story inside is a bit of a letdown after that splendiferous cover. Frank Robbins, Irv Novick and Joe Giella bring us a tale which finds Batman and Robin squaring off against the reputation-ruining machinations of the Planner. After the Dynamic Duo foils a scheme involving robbery and a Native American-themed band (a foiling replete with the customary and groan-inducing puns), the Planner (a villain who devises crimes for others from his dark construction-site stomping grounds)decides to destroy them by taking on the guise of “E.G. Never” and showing that they aren’t the great detectives that they purport to be:
Batman gets a little spooked, thinking that this man may be onto his secret identity, and agrees to the challenge — see who can solve crimes first.
The Planner of course rigs the game by, you guessed it, planning the crimes and solving them with ease. Here’s the first one:
So Batman didn’t pick up on the fact that this guy knows where the perps are hiding despite a complete lack of any evidence? Maybe this Never gent is onto something…
To prove this first triumph isn’t a fluke, the Planner next plans (hey!) a burglary with a costumed thief known as the Cat-Crook, and our heroes have some egg on their faces when they bring in the wrong man and Never delivers the goods. Then the villain ups the ante, while the Cat-Crook has a revelation:
Notice how the Cat-Crook’s costume is so much like Batman’s? That’s important, because Batman and Robin go after Never when he leaves (pretending to be furious with him), and this is all part of his plan (again with the plans!) to finally off the two of them in “self-defense.” But the Cat-Crook, realizing that the Planner double-crossed him, follows too, and sets up this big oopsie:
The Planner shoots the shadowy figure — really the Cat-Crook — dead, and after a brief tussle Batman and Robin bring him to justice. The other criminals who the Planner has manipulated along the way all ID him by voice at his trial, and then we finally build to what we were promised earlier:
Now that the Planner is irrevocably coocoo for Cocoa Puffs, we get the other side of the cover image:
You have to love a justice system that allows a condemned man to meet his maker in costume. “Screw the last meal — fetch me my cape, mask and tights!”
The story’s a bit of a clunker. While the situation depicted is kind of cool, the details are hammy. Just for one example — the suspect that Batman and Robin drag in instead of the Cat-Crook is a TV repairman called A.N. Tenna. I kid you not. And Irv Novick’s art, while more than adequate, seems a bit unfocused. The frequent diagonal panels are a little much — it’s a graphic gimmick that can be effective in limited doses, but one that wears out its welcome all too quickly when overused, and Novick’s style is less suited to them than someone else’s might be. I know Gene Colan often employed them, and that always worked in my eyes.
But that cover…Magnifique!
This isn’t so much a post about comics, but about the accompanying mania that so many suffer under. Well, “suffer” might not be the best word. It’s a good sort of suffer. It’s enjoyable. It can be relaxing. But a lot of you probably catch my drift.
Sometimes I think of a line from The Simpsons, where Comic Book Guy, in a moment of clarity, declares sadly: “I’ve wasted my life.” I don’t think I’ve wasted too much of my allotment of days on my comic books, but sometimes I look around the Blog into Mystery World Headquarters, at the boxes filled with bagged and boarded comics with the brief notes I’ve scribbled on the backs of the boards (when and where I bought the book, and for how much) and I wonder “What the hell’s the point of all this?”
But I take comfort in one man — Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
While F.D.R. wasn’t a comics afficianado — born too early — he was a reknowned, and I mean reknowned, stamp collector. I pulled the photo above from the National Postal Museum website — here’s another one:
The only thing missing that would make the pictures complete is if that trademark cigarette holder was jutting proudly out of his mouth. And I have to say, if someone took a picture of me when I’m working with my comics, it wouldn’t look a lot different than those shots.
What I always loved about F.D.R. and his stamps was that it wasn’t a fair-weather hobby, one he fell back on when he had some free time. No, he made time for his stamps. At the height of the biggest war this world has ever known and hopefully will ever know, he’d steal away for a few hours to his stamps. Or a mistress. But mostly his stamps. It helped his Zen, even if he had no clue what Zen was.
For a firsthand account from a very reliable source, here’s a quote from the fourth volume, entitled The Hinge of Fate, of Winston Churchill’s massive World War II memoir. The setting is Churchill’s third wartime visit to the Unites States, in May of 1943, as he and Roosevelt and their respective staffs retired to Shangri-La, which we all know these days as Camp David. Here’s Churchill’s account of what happened just after their arrival (and, for added kicks, be sure to read it with his unique “We shall fight them in the fields” diction in mind):
The President had been looking forward to a few hours with his stamp collection. General “Pa” Watson, his personal aide, brought him several large albums and a number of envelopes full of specimens he had long desired. I watched him with much interest and in silence for perhaps a half an hour as he stuck them in, each in its proper place, and so forgot the cares of state. But soon another car drove up to the door, and out stepped General Bedell Smith, quick-winged from Eisenhower’s headquarters, with a budget of serious questions on which decisions were urgently required. Sadly F.D.R. left his stamp collection and addressed himself to his task.
I love how he “sadly” pushed himself away from his stamps.
Here’s the point… If the Leader of the Free World can take time out for his stamps, then, by God, I can relax with my comics, especially when the biggest concern I have in a day is often whether or not I can make it to the cleaners to pick up my shirts before the place closes. It’s someting i kep in the back of my mind.
And one final note — when he became President, the philatelist-in-chief started getting stamps from people all over the world. Now that’s a scam I have to get going for myself — to somehow get the people who read this dopey little blog to mail me comics.
In my most intense comics reading phase (in the late 80’s/early 90’s) there were two characters that I could not escape who I actively loathed. The first was the Punisher. I understand his revenge-driven man-with-guns appeal, but he always seemed a very shallow creation, and one that I could just never get into. And he was guest-starring in every. Comic. That came out. He was inescapable. Now it vexes me to no end that one day, should I ever want to complete a run of The Amazing Spider-Man, I’m going to have to pay through the nose to get his first appearance.
Oy.
The other character I had a hard time stomaching, and this one may get me in a little more trouble with folks, was Wolverine. This was back in the “Ooh, what’s his origin, he’s so mysterious” days when he too showed up in every. Comic. That came out. With Wolvie it could simply be that I’m a straight-laced square — after all, I would always side with Cyclops in any of their inter-X-Men tiffs, just like I used to root for Pete Sampras when he faced Andre Agassi. I have a long history of backing the establishment guy.
Or it he could really be just a slightly taller version of Alpha Flight’s Puck, and therefore deserving of my contempt. Hugh Jackman may be the greatest actor ever to have trod the boards (or walked the Earth, for that matter), because he somehow made me care about that putz.
Since I could never work up much enthusiasm for either of these characters, comics like the two I’m about to look at passed under my radar. And seeing a cover that promises a donnybrook between these two reminds me of a holiday dinner conversation among my family eons ago, one that has stuck in my mind all these years. Two local ruffians, both of them idiots that no one but their own mothers (and perhaps not even them) could stand, had gotten into a fight outside of a bar, one that involved the usual sticks, knives, fists and kitchen sinks. The general consensus around the dinner table was that it was a shame that the two of them couldn’t have killed each other and rid us all of two problems at once.
I think you see where I’m going with this. We’re starting on the wrong foot, and this could get ugly.
Or, in some algebraic alchemy, perhaps putting these two negatives together might make a positive.
Let’s check it out.
The two-parter (“On the Track of Unknown Animals” and “Endangered Species”) is written by Carl Potts, who also handled the art in collaboration with Jim Lee. The whole setup is as follows…. The Punisher is getting a little worn out, so his pal Micro convinces him to take a working vacation in Africa, guarding (under an alias) a research mission that’s trying to find living dinosaurs, the Mokele-mbembe of actual African legend. Meanwhile, Wolverine uncovers a poaching ring, gets pissed, and heads to Africa to exact his sweet revenge.
We’re on a collision course for wackiness!
The poachers actually glom onto the research mission, and in moments when they can steal away they massacre whatever rare endangered animals are within arm’s (or bullet’s) reach, including gorillas. When Big Pun starts to figure out that something is going on and heads out into the wild to investigate, he crosses paths with a pissed off alpha male:
Lest the sad irony of this death-struggle escape us:
Wolverine stumbles onto this jungle crime scene, and in the inevitable misunderstanding thinks the Punisher is a poacher. Let the battle commence!:
Round 1 goes to Wolverine, who leaves Mr. Castle for dead. Things wrap up in the next issue as the Punisher recovers and comes looking for some payback. Round 2 goes to the man with the skull shirt:
Then, in one of those It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World convergences, Wolverine, the Punisher, the research expedition, the poachers and the dinosaurs all end up in the same place. Schemes are exposed, motivations are revealed, and the big brave Punisher ends things by shooting a woman in the back:
She’s one of the poachers, granted, but still…
The dinosaurs melt back into the jungle, and the two heroes go their seperate ways without learning one another’s identities.
I actually sort of enjoyed these stories, even if the plot is ripped from a William Katt and Sean Young starring bit of tripe called Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. These two guys allying to go after poachers (dino-poachers, no less) is a cause I can’t help but get behind. It’s not enough to raise them on my depth chart — all things being equal, there are many, many characters that I’d rather read about before settling for them, in much the same way a lot of people have to become incapacitated in the Presidential succession before the Secretary of Agriculture becomes Chief Executive. But I guess I’m softening as I age.
The fact that this is the first time these characters met and that neither had ever heard of the other before seems a bit of a stretch, even in a story with live dinosaurs. And though I’ve never been that big a fan of Jim Lee’s art (I’m either showing my bravery or my ignorance in going after all these sacred cows) his work here was pretty good, and lacked the “All Pin-Ups, All the Time!” aspect it took on in later years.
Not bad.
And maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the Punisher. His character did eventually spawn this bit of delectable tomfoolery:
Nice shot, bub.
Now here’s a post we hope you really like…
I seem to have seen this kind thing before:
I miss being a kid and watching Rocky and Bullwinkle. Their adventures were both trippy and hilarious, but I haven’t seen one of their cartoons in years. Maybe it’s time to do some digging on YouTube. And these two guys and Cheerios seems to be a bit of an odd match — not enough sugar in that particular cereal to have cartoon characters flogging it, I guess.
Then again…
Get this man a barber STAT – OMAC #7
It’s a mohawk…OF THE FUTURE!
I like OMAC. The old OMAC, not the re-imagined cyborgs that showed up a few years ago to plague the heroes of the DC Universe. He was Kirby’s future version of Captain America, drawing his strength not from a serum but Matrix-style from a literal (Brother) Eye in the sky. Who needs a single Super Soldier when you can have a real honest-to-goodness One Man Army Corps? There was a straight-ahead, unadorned quality to the character that I still find appealing.
And I see a lot of guys walking around today with modified mohawks, so I suppose he was a hairstyle trailblazer on top of all that.
In “The Ocean Stealers!”, Jolly Jack’s penultimate issue with the future-man of questionable hair, water is going missing. And we’re not talking about the some pig drinking all the aqua in the office water cooler. No, we’re talking about entire bodies of water:
That spread reminds of that first Galactus arc in The Fantastic Four, when the damage that the world-devourer would do was presaged. I seem to recall (I don’t have that issue handy) dried ocean beds and such, much like this.
And I like those nifty snowshoes that OMAC sports.
While he’s wandering around the dried lakebed he stumbles across a strange looking metal bar. When he tries to lift it he can’t, and it takes a boost from Brother Eye for him to finally heft it — and Kirby makes us feel every ounce of the effort, putting us right in OMAC’s (snow)shoes:
The strain is too much for the guy, and he needs to head to the nearest metrosexual spa…OF THE FUTURE!:
Why don’t you get a pedicure while you’re at it, “hero”…
The pre-transformatio-Beta-Ray-Bill-looking guy fills OMAC in on the bar and what’s going on with the water:
That’s a scheme worthy of Mr. Burns, I have to admit.
When OMAC goes after the bug-eyed Doctor Skuba (and his strangely normal and utterly useless daughter and her boyfriend), the baddie blasts him with a ray that takes away his evolved powers:
So before he was basically Billy Batson, right down to the fashion sense and the double-B initials. Huh.
My enthusiasm for Kirby’s 1970’s DC work isn’t at the level of many’s. Jack could be ham-fisted when he was scripting, but I’ve always like the energy of the efforts and the goofy tableaus he’d put his characters into. I’d say this ish gamely represents that, with oceans condensed into metal bars and vitamin rays aplenty.
Oh, and OMAC is Kamandi’s grandfather. I didn’t know that until I scoped his Wikipedia article before I wrote this post (or I had forgotten that particular factoid). Apparently his bad-hair gene was recessive.
Jared
blog into mystery 