Spidey vs. The Printed Word – The Amazing Spider Man: Adventures in Reading Vol. 2, #1
We’ve seen Spider-Man tackle child abuse, and we’ve seen him promote racially-diverse engineering. Now he comes up against the deadliest foe of all.
Books.
Before we get to that, a little on this comic… This was a giveaway that had some different geographic and sponsorship variations. This particular version is from the D.C./Baltimore region, with the kind backing of Giant (a Mid-Atlantic grocery chain). On the inside front cover two letters are posted, written by the mayors of those two fine cities. See if you can spot what’s wrong with this picture:
Did you see it? It’s the D.C. mayor’s name — the name on the letterhead and the signed name don’t match. Sharon Pratt Dixon/Kelly (best known for two things: briefly replacing a crackhead mayor and letting personal pique chase the Washington Redskins into Maryland) was married during her term, but they couldn’t get around to reprinting the letterhead? Really? You just have to love Washington’s municipal government. You really do.
On to the story (from Louise Simonson, Jon Bogdanove, and Hilary Barta). The action starts right off the bat. An ugly dude called Trog (short for Troglodyte) has stolen a device that allows people to transport into fictional works. I’m not sure how all that fits into the laws of physics, but we’ll go with it. Spidey and some teens get sucked in along with Trog, and go through a series of near-death literary experiences.
First they battle dinos in The Lost World:
Then they come up against the tripods of The War of the Worlds:
The next stop is The Jungle Book, where Spidey shoots his webbing first and asks questions later, and gets answers from the most articulate bear in the history of the world (sorry, Smokey):
Soon they’re warped into a book I had never heard of, That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton (of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish fame), which apparently is full of parking lots and teen angst:
The last stop is Ivanhoe:
Spider-Man is finally able to corrall Trog, and he and his useless teen cohorts are transported back to the present. The kids are rewarded with library cards (gee, thanks) and Trog’s lament gives Spidey a chance to deliver the moral of the whole damn thing:
Call me paranoid, but this book might put me off reading. Stay away from books, kids, because THEY MIGHT COME ALIVE AND KILL YOU.
You have been warned.
Wait, it did WHAT? – The Tootsie Roll Toot Sweet
At first I thought that this was simply a cute pictogram ad for Tootsie Rolls. Than I actually read/deciphered the thing, and I learned that it was actually an ad for a toy called the “Toot Sweet.” A toy that made whistles. Out of Tootsie Rolls.
I’m in awe of the insidious ingenuity that went into this thing.
I’ve never watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but “Toot Sweets” apparently had their origin in a Dick Van Dyke musical number:
Make an irritating noise and rot your teeth all in one fell swoop — count me in!
A rogues gallery in brief – The Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest #14, “Batman’s Villains”
The digest-sized books are kind of interesting. They’re small, difficult to read, usually chock full of reprints, and, as I just learned, they’re a bitch to scan. They’re like anti-treasuries. This one is a bit unique in that, in addition to the reprinted Batman tales focusing on each of the baddies on the cover, there’s also an assortment of new one page origin tales for these primary enemies of the Caped Crusader. You want to see them? Sure you do. And they’re easier to read when scanned. Everybody wins!
We start with (who else?) the Joker:
Next up is Two-Face:
Then there’s the prominent probiscis of the Penguin:
Here’s the Riddler:
And — ladies last — Catwoman:
There’s not a great deal of new information or character insights to be gleaned from these, but it’s different to see these characters boiled down to one miniature page. Their brevity is quite fitting when one considers their diminutive surroundings. There were no credits in the book for these short stories, and I couldn’t track any down on the web. I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. If anyone knows, feel free to leave a comment.
I boldly went where I’ve never gone before – Star Trek TV Guides
This post has a most tenuous link with the world of comics, but there is a connection. More on that in a second. When I saw these (from 1967, 1968, and 1969) the other day for a dirt cheap price, I couldn’t resist buying them. They’re like stepping into a paper and ink time machine (or slingshotting around the sun, as it were). Here are the covers that sucked me in, with the labels covered up as unobtrusively as I could manage:
I like the two non-photo covers. Groovy.
The Star Trek articles inside are just the same stories that have been told and retold a thousand times in subsequent years: Nimoy adjusting to his ears, the shocking intensity of the fandom, DeForest Kelley feeling like the forgotten man. Still, it’s kind of neat to read this stuff when you consider that it was written contemporaneously with the series. Plus there’s the slew of rugged cigarette ads to go along with the retro-programming nostalgia.
An aside — if there are TV Guide collectors out there, do they feel they have to get the different editions for each individual broadcasting market? That seems like a hellish version of variant covers. At least none were foil-enhanced (as far as I know).
Oh yeah, the connection to comics… Here you go:
There was a Beatles cartoon?
And no, I didn’t steal these from Frank Costanza. So I don’t have his wrath to worry about:
From the depths of Jack Kirby’s D-List – Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers Special #1
I’m a Kirby fan, but I’m not a Kirby nut. I think the difference between the two is recognizing the man’s visual genius, but not being enthusiastic about everything that issued from his pencils and pens.
I’d throw Captain Victory into that “stuff-I’m-not-nuts-about” category. It was published intermittently by Pacific Comics in the early 1980’s and, I’m though I’m not overly familiar with the characters involved, I can safely say that none grabbed me in this special. The art and story are unfocused, and lack the taut energy that characterized Kirby’s most transcendent work. I’ve never been all that crazy about Kirby’s scripts — they’ve always seemed a bit flabby, even the DC material that’s so warmly remembered — but at this point in his career even his pencils and inks had lost some of their steam.
This tale, with Victory and some of the rangers transported back in time and, yes, at one point donning the costumes of the Musketeers, rumbles along far too quickly for one to ever get acquainted with the characters or their surroundings. If this book were a person, you’d want to grab it by the shoulders and yell “Slow Down! Enunciate!” It’s a mess.
Still, there are moments where the old Kirby genius makes a cameo, most notably a couple of splash pages and tableaus like the one you see at the bottom of this page:
There are also some pin-ups in the back of the book of characters and devices — this one caught my attention:
The way Kirby drew such exaggerated, gigantic machinery, you might almost wonder if he was — *ahem* — compensating for something. This device in particular… I mean, it’s just an array of phalluses (phalli?). We get it, Jack! We get it, okay?!
The bottom line? This is a not-so-special special.
Wear your manly bracelets! – Joe Weider and Arnold
This is a follow up to an earlier post about muscle ads and comics — I love the puffery in this particular one. And I like exercise, don’t get me wrong, but you would never ever catch me dead in those things. I think only a guy with guns like Arnold Schwarzenegger could get away with sporting them. Maybe Luke Cage. And I doubt that those bracelets would really make your arms balloon up unless there was a cocktail of drugs involved.
One observation — I noticed that Arnold’s name is nowhere to be seen here. In other ads he’s usually labeled with the “Joe Weider’s Star Pupil” subtitle. Maybe this one was from before he had any sort of name recognition, though other Arnold-centered ads I’ve seen have come from the same time period. It’s a little strange and jarring to see him unidentified.
Dazzler vs. Doom … Can we spot her some points? – Dazzler #3
You know Dazzler. She’s the roller skating mutant who can transmute sound into dazzling (hey) bursts of light, who by day is a sometimes pop star and sometimes actress — typically flighty professions for a fluffily portrayed young lady. I notice that she’s never been a by day “respected neurosurgeon.”
This issue opens with Dazzler having her powers tested by Reed Richards:
Yeah. He’s testing her powers. He’s not just using this as an excuse to watch her jiggle and gyrate. Reed, you old goat.
There’s a lot of nonsense in this issue (from the law firm of DeFalco, Romita Jr., Kupperberg, Bulanadi & Gil) about Dazzler’s stern, unapproving dad, a concert at the United Nations, her flirting with the male contingent of the Fantastic Four, some Latverian jewels, and some thugs dressed up like low-rent Village People. Let’s skip all that and get to the crux of this thing:
Doom surprises with an initial burst of chivalry:
Dazzler is, um, impressed:
I’m surprised that there wasn’t an “I wonder if he’s seeing anyone” in that thought balloon.
Unfortunately for the potential romance, Dazzler can’t subdue her crime-fighting impulses:
Guess who wins:
So “brav[ing] the extreme dangers of inter-dimensional travel” was what the kids were calling the act of love back in those days. Huh. And this story’s title, “The Jewels of Doom,” now seems like a big whopping double entendre.
I couldn’t give a flying fig about Dazzler, but this is one of those instances where the contrast of two characters makes for some interesting reading. The imperious Doctor is oftentimes one half of those contrasts — perfect fodder, so it seems. And the thought of a Doom/Dazzler union tickles the senses. What would we call it, now that we’re in the age of abbreviated terms (Bennifer, Billary, et al.) for power couples? Dazzoom? Doozler?
In one final note, I should point out that I’ve always associated Dazzler with a mid-80’s cartoon heroine, Jem, and even the most cursory of internet searches shows that I’m not alone in that. Jem was about a hot studio exec who had a supercomputer that turned her into an even hotter face-painted pop star, and though she didn’t fight crime she did constantly battle a mischievous evil all-female rock group. I remember the show because it was broadcast in between G.I. Joe and Transformers on one of my local TV stations, so I’d have to sit through all that yucky girly stuff while I waited for more guns and explosions. That’s my story at least, and I’m sticking to it — have to protect the macho credentials, you know? And God forbid I got up off my lazy keister and went outside for those 30 minutes.
Jem’s fiendishly catchy theme song is still stuck in my head all these years later:
Glamor and glitter. Fashion and fame. I think Dazzler would approve.
I’d argue that calling it gritty actually makes it LESS gritty – The Dark Knight Returns Ad
I won’t heap any additional praise on The Dark Knight Returns. Maybe some other time. It’s just that I had never seen this particular ad until the other day. The “1200” limit on subscriptions struck me as rather arbitrary. I guess I can see the “Not available through newsstands” limitation, though that would have squeezed out my living-in-the-sticks self had I been more comics-c0nscious at that point in my life.
And seeing as how Robin was a chick in this, he/she was most definitely as we had never seen him/her before.
The ad’s design reminded me of a treasured old tome on my bookshelves, something I’ve been toting around with me for about twenty years or so:
I thought this was so unbelievably cool when I bought it back in the day with my lawn mowing money. The idea that comics could come bound in leather (“handsomely bound,” as encyclopedia salesmen would be wont to say), like the complete works of William Shakespeare or something, blew my mind. Even the pages had a cool smell — and they still carry that faint scent. I just checked. It has TDKR, Year One, and “Wanted: Santa Claus — Dead or Alive,” a Batman story that Miller drew years before either of those classics.
It’s still cool, though I guess its title is out of date now. It’s not The Complete Frank Miller Batman anymore. Now I just think of it as The Complete Frank Miller Batman (That Isn’t Abyssmally Awful).
Lord, please forgive me for what I am about to unleash – ALF #2
ALF. Yes, ALF. The “Alien Life Form” that also went by the unprepossessing name of “Gordon Shumway,” the puppet that had a show that ran for a few years, who somehow spawned a cartoon and even a brief interview program in the past decade. And yes, he had a comic too. We’re all so very blessed.
I was never a big ALF fan, though I can remember watching the show, perhaps out of some sort of kiddie obligation. I mean, it was a show that revolved around a wise-cracking (or perhaps unwise-cracking) puppet — when this show started I was in a ripe pre-double digit age bracket for just this sort of tomfoolery. It just never grabbed me, but I do remember that my grandfather liked the show quite a bit. I have no idea why, and I feel like I’m profaning his memory just by bringing that up. Sorry, Grandpa.
Here’s a taste of the ALF “humor”:
ALF’s Marvel comic book was under the Star imprint, though it’s hard to call it an “imprint” since “Star” doesn’t appear on this particular cover. It ran for roughly as long as the series did, which is far, far too long, and it contains the same sort of comedy, i.e. comedy that produces no laughs. And, as we all know, there are no laugh tracks in comics to bail things out.
This particular issue has three stories in it. In the first, ALF has himself a flying belt:
The whole thing seems like a setup for ALF’s final line:
The second has ALF telling a story from his days on Melmac, his home planet, about a time when he had to confront some ruffians:
Multiple ALFs. Biker ALFs, no less. I think we’ll leave it at that.
The finale has ALF and his earth family heading to a zoo, where wackiness ensues and ALF gets the opportunity to pilfer a catchphrase from another comic/TV show/merchandising machine:
You remember who I’m talking about. The characters that were teenagers. And mutants. And ninjas. And turtles.
The comic is designed for children, and I’m taking that into consideration, but that can’t change the fact that the book, like the show upon which it’s based, is puerile. It’s aimed at kids, but not in the Toy Story kids-will-think-it’s-funny-but-adults-won’t-want-to-stick-a-fork-in-their-brain sort of way. It’s painful. It’s not as bad as the show, but few things could be.
And I usually mention the names of the creative teams for the issues I look at. Not this time, though they’re there on the first interior scan if you’re curious. I envision them as being upset at having to slum around in this crap. Maybe they were happy for the paycheck, and maybe they were glad to work on this property, but I have my doubts. Just a gut feeling. Take a look at ALF’s Wikipedia page if you want to read about how miserable everyone was on the show’s set. It sounds like all the folks who ever came around this smelly thing wanted to rip their hair out.
That’s kind of comforting, actually. Misery loves company.
3…2…1…oops – Countdown on Excellence
This is a stiff Silver Age PSA that caught my fancy. I managed to dredge up that Jack Schiff wrote it and Sheldon Moldoff drew it — credit where credit is due. Something about the technician’s “Somebody goofed!” made me laugh. Apparently the space program consisted/consists of one guy in a darkened room.
And I couldn’t help but reflect that my father, bless him, would have instilled this virtue with a profanity-laced browbeating, not a calm recitation of examples.
Hey, this ad has inspired me — from now on, every blog post os going to be free from speling mistakes and bad gramar. Doo the job rite!
You know, for an evil cube-creature it looks rather cheerful – Justice League of America #52
This is a pretty interesting issue, in that it answers the question of just what the Hell the other Leaguers are doing when they’re absent from the drama of a particular book. In issue #50 various characters hadn’t answered the call to assemble, and this story shows what they were up to.
“Missing in Action — 5 Justice Leaguers!” is brought to us by Gardner Fox, Mike Sekowsky, and Sid Greene, and our guide on this trip down memory lane is the League’s obnoxious looking honorary member, Snapper Carr:
He has the mein of someone who needs a good smack in the face. Sort of a smug little bastard, you know? Though it could be that I’m just jealous of his access to the world’s greatest heroes.
And I like the fact that the League members are setting down their remembrances on their state of the art reel-to-reel tape recorder. My technophile grandfather would have been so proud of them back in the day.
First up is Hawkman, who was on a case with Hawkgirl. They battled the jowly villain Faceless, but Hawkman got a rude awakening when he engaged his foe:
In the course of their fight Hawkman’s wings were set on fire, and only after that did he put Faceless down for the count. Then he unmasked him:
It turns out that the Martian Manhunter was infiltrating Faceless’ gang, but was hypnotized by some strange force, and actually believed he was Faceless. Oops. After mopping up the gang they headed off to figure out what the strange force that messed with the Manhunter was.
Now we hear from Green Lantern, who was investigating what had been interfering with his power battery when he stumbled onto a farm family menaced by an enormous dog:
Seriously, this thing is huge. Jeff makes Stephen King’s Cujo look like one of those yippy little things that socialites carry in their purses.
When using his energy on Jeff only made him grow larger, Green Lantern surmised that Jeff was somehow affected by the energy sapped from his battery. Back to the drawing board he went, and he coated his hands in yellow and gave the poor pup a good whack:
You have to feel for little Bobby — no bond is stronger than the one between a boy and his dog, even when the dog becomes a rampaging mutant devil-beast.
After this, Green Lantern tracked the source of his energy drain to Hawkman and the Manhunter. It turns out that Faceless’ gang had tapped the battery’s power and used that to hypnotize J’onn. Green Lantern puts a “special aura” around it to make sure this never happens again, in a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has already run away. I find this final resolution to these two stories utterly ridiculous (low-rent hoods pirating the energy from an outer space device), but hey, what’s a guy to do?
There’s one panel that shows what the Atom was doing (he was back in time in issue #27 of his own book). A tiny mention for a tiny character.
And now we come to the big guys. Superman and Batman were wrapping up a case when they come across the rampaging cube dudes from the cover. Check out Superman’s cringe inducing thought ballon in the third panel:
Ugh. No super-wit to go along with the super-breath and super-hearing.
The cubes proved to be worthy adversaries, and resisted all attempts to knock them down and keep them down, that is, until Batman got a bewilderingly preposterous idea. I’ll let him explain:
Whatever you say, Caped Crusader. And check out Superman’s reaction — you have to love the rivalry between these two super-studs:
Sure you would have. Sure.
The cubes beat a hasty retreat, but later, when Superman was alone in the Fortress of Solitude, a mysterious force transported him to another planet:
They didn’t really whack Superman with a giant stick, did they? DID THEY?!:
At least they didn’t hit him with an enormous rolled up newspaper. “Bad Superman! Bad!”
Superman realized that he’d been depowered by this world’s non-yellow sun, so he devised a filtration device under the pretext of helping the cubes learn the secret of his powers. They went along with the whole thing, proving that they might be the biggest f*****g morons that Supes ever faced, and were once again clobbered. Then Supes headed to the HQ to tell everyone about his adventure:
If you’re confused (I was), Eddie Brent was a character from the aforementioned issue #50.
While I like the tie-in with earlier material and answering a question that a fan would actually find rather pertinent, some of the plot devices in this issue were beyond stupid. But the giant dog bit was fun, and the cube creatures battering Superman made me laugh out loud.
You have to feel for the guy on that one. In the future, maybe he should just take out some insurance with Old Glory:
I hope he’s wearing some protection in his nether regions – Captain Action and his Super Hero Parachute
This thing looks like it would be painful in what we might gingerly refer to as “that most sensitive of areas.” Really painful.
For an overview of this toy and the various guises of Captain Action (including an absolutely horrifying pic of the figure without clothing), check out this site. I thought it was sort of interesting. I had a passing familiarity with the DC adaptation of the character, but not of the original toy. Color me informed.
The ad reminded me of a G.I. Joe parachute I had as a kid, and how that accessory made my action figures fall faster than they would without it. I swear. So, while it was a magnificent failure at its intended purpose, I suppose it had some merit in that it managed to thusly defy the most fundamental laws of physics.
Is this the one with a robot dog? – Space: 1999 #7
I’ve never watched a single solitary episode of Space: 1999, but I’ve also never let my ingorance get in the way of me taking a look at a tie-in book. So here I go, once more plunging headlong into uncharted waters.
For those like me who were born too late or were just indifferent to the damn thing, Space: 1999 (ah, the old future) followed a group of humans, led by Commander John Koenig, trapped on the Moon (Moonbase Alpha) when an explosion sent Earth’s satellite hurtling through space. They did a great job distancing it from Star Trek with the main character’s name — why not just call him “John Nimoy”? But I’ll say this for the show — I like its funkified intro:
Perhaps the best thing I can say about Charlton’s comic version is that the artist, Pat Boyette, did a nice job of depicting Martin Landau’s distinct look as Koenig. You need to nail the eyes and the upper lip when you’re drawing that guy, and nail them he did.
Both stories in this issue are scripted by Mike Pellowski with art from Boyette. The first, “The Metamorph,” is a straight adaptation of the opening episode of the show’s second (and last) season. In that episode and in this issue a metamorph (surprise), Maya, joins the Alphans. Here’s her first appearance:
Meow.
To make a long story short, her father isn’t a very nice guy and their planet blows up and Maya falls in with the Alphans:
Is it just me, or do Commander Koenig’s words and look have a lascivious quality about them? Maybe?
The second story, “Escape from Vipon,” has most of the crew held captive by evil lizard people who look a lot like the Gorn from Star Trek. They want weapons in exchange for their hostages, but the remaining Alphans aren’t going to oblige. You see, they have a plan. First, one of them allows himself to be captured while uttering a Charlton-Heston-in-The-Planet-of-the-Apes inspired epithet, while Maya (fitting in quite nicely with her new crewmates) masquerades as that red cannister behind them:
She follows the Vipons back to where her friends are being held and frees them:
On their way out, Commander Koenig can’t resist showing that James T. Kirk isn’t the only outer space hero that can throw a punch:
He probably could have given the Shat a few pointers on how to battle warlike lizard people:
There’s also a brief two-page text story which I didn’t read. Short attention span, I guess.
I enjoyed Boyette’s art, as I did on an issue of Korg that I talked about a while back. I especially like his work on the cover, though it doesn’t seem that it was put together with a cover in mind — note how the “Space: 1999” blocks some of the figures. That kind of bugs me.
But he nailed Landau’s lip.
When I scanned this ad I was going to do some research on this exhibit and the World’s Fair of which it was a part. Sometimes the work gets done for you, and this post at SupermanFan.net tells you all that you need to know. Sadly, I wasn’t able to locate a picture of this battle between the Man of Steel and his ugly one-eyed foe. I have a feeling it was either awesome to look at or completely and utterly underwhelming, the very definition of “meh.” I’d be glad to hear from anyone who actually saw it, but I realize that any memory of this frozen fracas is murkily cloaked in the fogs of time.
Surely a racially diverse kung fu trio will save us! – Marvel Team-Up #40
I was born after the martial arts comic book phase of the 70’s, so I never really got into any of those characters. Just not my thing. I’m always surprised by the sheer number of karate chopping characters and titles that that period spawned. It’s like they’re still crawling out of the woodwork all these year later.
Enter the Sons of the Tiger.
Who?
They were an extremely short-lived team, made up of friends Lin Sun, Abe Brown and Bob Diamond, and the requisite babe of the group (though not a “Son”), Lotus Shinchuko. Here they are chopping and flying heel-kicking in their dojo:
Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito crafted “Murder’s Better the Second Time Around!” In this issue (part two of a story), Spider-Man and the Human Torch get roughed up by a team of the Crime-Master, the Big Man, the Enforcers, and the Sandman. That’s a lot on their plate, and they’re eventually overwhelmed and imprisoned in appropriately odd fashions:
The Sons show up and start cracking some skulls and free Spidey and the Torch, but the villains make an escape. The Torch is late for a hot date (I can’t be the first one to deploy that lame pun, can I?) and takes off, and in this break in the action Spidey shares a quiet moment with a kid on a nearby rooftop:
One of these clowns killed a pet pigeon? Bastard!
Spidey spots them crawling out of the sewer and he and the Sons team up (hey…) to take them down. The Crime-Master and the Big Man fight over who gets to deliver the coup de grâce to Spidey — this whole criminal enterprise was a revenge ploy — and C-M kills B-M in the process. Then we have the Scooby Doo “let’s see who you really are” moment:
I’ll say it again — Who?:
Ah.
And, on that downer, our story ends.
I couldn’t care less about the Sons of the Tiger, but I kind of like the callbacks in this issue to a couple of minor villains from the classic Ditko run on The Amazing Spider-Man. Sort of fun. Anything that harkens back to those days can’t be all bad. And Buscema’s steady, workmanlike approach to drawing Spider-Man is always easy on the eyes.
Jared
blog into mystery 