Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in mere weeks. Here are some grotesque Jack Davis baseball caricatures to whet your appetite.
Julius Erving and Dave Barry once got the Jack Davis treatment in a Spalding ad, and the attendant gangly limbs were appropriate for their hoopster frames. I’m wondering who might deserve similar treatment in the hardball realm. I’ll go with John Kruk, the man who at a party once proclaimed to a woman, one aghast that he could smoke while playing a professional sport, “I ain’t an athlete, lady. I’m a baseball player.” He could have stood some svelting up.
Now listen to Spider-Man, you superpowered little brats. He speaks from experience. – Power Pack #6
Power Pack. It’s definitely a book that can generate different reactions. When I was little, I hated it. HATED IT. I couldn’t stand that these kids, the same age as me, were gifted with such incredible abilities. That they could fly and stuff. I was green with envy, and couldn’t even manage a vicarious thrill in seeing fictional peers soaring and fighting evil over the New York skyline. At least with other characters, like the red and blue champion above, I could dream of growing up to be just like them. But these Power rugrats had a head start. It wasn’t fair.
Hell, I even begrudged them their stylized alien-made feety pajamas/costumes. Which just looked SO COMFY.
Now, as a grownup, I can appreciate the series a little more. Louise Simonson’s scripts were solid, and dealt with a number of sensitive topics, weighty stuff that told you, in big bold letters, THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS, MISTER. Who can forget that omnipresent child abuse awareness ad alongside this issue’s guest star, Spider-Man (no stranger to that milieu)? It was the Gordon Jump Diff’rent Strokes episode of comics. (Even though it didn’t really make me aware of much, because I didn’t quite get that their were adults out there that might want to fondle my genitals. Youthful ignorance is bliss.)
Well, that ad might as well have been for the whole series, because it seemed like every month there was a new downbeat dirge. There was some quality material in the run, but my God, it could get depressing. It sure as hell wasn’t all gumdrops and Fiddle Faddle with the Pack. There’s another issue that’s been sitting on my desk for months, one that guest-starred a barrel full of Marvel characters, one that I’ve planned on writing about for a good long while. That is, I’d write about it if I could ever get up the strength. BECAUSE IT’S ONE OF THE MOST DEPRESSING COMICS YOU WILL EVER READ. It has some poor little mutant monster that gets beaten and abused and who at one point is locked in a kitchen cupboard. Where it cowers as a cat mews outside the cupboard door. It’s enough to make you go all nihilist and Goth.
I won’t say more about it, because maybe I’ll get around to writing about it one day. Plus, I don’t want you to kill yourself.
Anyway, there’s no acute downer material in this issue, but there is a sobering, rather touching moment shared with Marvel’s resident web-slinger. One tangentially about, yes, Great Power and Responsibility, bullet points that your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has had drilled into his head since 1962. It’s an obvious sequence, one that pretty much writes itself, but it’s effective. I like it, and it’s representative of the latter-day respect I’ve developed for the title and it’s meaty topicality.
Simonson, co-creator June Brigman and Bob Wiacek brought us this issue, entitled, appropriately, “Secrets.” I say “appropriately” because the parents in this nuclear family are still operating in the dark about their changed offspring, and the kids are still working through, in a childish way, the hazards of a double life. And they’re still very much feeling out their alien abilities, which you can see in this small slice of bedroom domesticity between the Power fils:
The boys have superpowers AND bunk beds. Do you see now why I was so jealous of them? DO YOU SEE?
Here’s the whole brood gathered around the breakfast table, where they can’t escape that bane of all children, a mom-bidden errand:
This issue was actually published within a year of the Hobgoblin’s first appearance, and Spider-Man battled him in the next month’s Amazing Spider-Man (#249). So that newspaper is quite current, apart from clueing in the kids to the “Fire-Breathing Monster” on the loose.
The boys decide to help track down the monster while out on their milk-run. They’re still working through that whole “secret identities” business:
The first Halloween costume that I can remember ever donning was a Spider-Man number. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world, even though it was a rather half-hearted store-bought affair with a stifling plastic mask. What I’m getting at is that, though my verdant envy of the Pack remains, I do feel a tie of kinship with young Alex here.
And off we go to the cover-promised action, where a (misunderstood) dragon-thing has kidnapped its creator and is dragging a once again in over his head Spidey about. That’s when Alex gets to not just be the hero, but the hero that saves his hero:
That’s like if I fed Magic Johnson for a game-winning lay-up while wearing a Magic Johnson jersey. Or drove in Don Mattingly on a series-ending double while wearing a pinstriped 23. Or, yes, caught a free-falling Spider-Man with that old mask. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Spider-Man tells the kids to head home — the nerve! — and heads off to find the dragon, but the female half of the Pack, jealous of the boys being out doing their thing, have actually tamed the beast and sequestered him in their garage (Can we keep him?). Later on, Spidey re-unites with the boys and has a brief heart-to-heart rap with them:
That last panel is a goofy comic book equivalent of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
What do you think — will Spider-Man’s counsel register? Maybe yes, maybe no:
They got the milk, if you were worried.
Secrets. Responsibility. These were ongoing themes in the series. There was always tension among the kids on whether or not they should tell their parents what they were sneaking out and doing, and also how they should be using their abilities. Was it right to keep their parents out of the loop? Could they use their powers to help their friends? It made for good reading, totally apart from the battles with their oft-enemies, the Snarks. Whatever bad things you can say about Power Pack, I imagine that it’s about 1000x better in the “young people with powers” genre than that Chronicle movie that’s coming out. You know, the “Bro, we’ve got superpowers bro!” thing (“What if there were multiple Superboy-Primes, and what if they were all frat-boy douchebags?”), which looks positively dreadful.
I’m sure minds greater than mine have pointed out and mulled that Power Pack was created and crafted by two women, not the most common thing in this y-chromosomed industry. My bringing it up might make me a sexist pig. Possibly — Gloria Allred press conference and lawsuit to follow. But I have the feeling that the unique perspective that only women can bring had a positive impact on the book, with family taking on a central, critical role in the overall dynamic. The dialogue and rivalries between the kids ring true, and the art goes a long way towards capturing the shared space of a close-knit family. At the very least Simonson and Brigman shook things up in this small corner of the comics world, and got something fresh and good going.
Once again, I’m trying not to sound inadvertently sexist. Maybe I should just drop this line. Okay, I will.
I’m sure of one thing, and that’s that I like Spider-Man as he’s presented here, a kind of tights-wearing camp counselor. His age — though unknown to the Pack boys (they probably think, like I did, that everyone over 20 is ancient) — makes his words all the more poignant. He was a teen when bitten by the spider, but he knows of what he speaks. And it’s a different aspect of the character. He’s usually a young guy surrounded by heroes older, more powerful and/or more experienced than himself, but here the tables are turned. This is a fresh view of him: Spider-Man as mentor, and one that doesn’t want these kids to have their own tragic Uncle Ben moment.
It’s a touching little interlude. We can thank the Power Pack — and their feety pajamas — for it.
This haphazard Fig Newton treasure map doesn’t lead to actual treasure. Nor does it make any sense.
When do you pass through Fig Forest? Do you pass through it before travelling in the Apple Airship? Is it just decoration?
I yearn for the rigid strictures of Candy Land.
Spectacles. Testicles. Wallet. Watch. Superman Belt Buckle.
“All the alterations to your new suit have been made, sir. You should cut a fine figure at the bicentennial gala. Now, to complete the ensemble, can I interest you in a Superman belt buckle? It’s made of 100% authentic metal!”
“Yes. Yes you can. Please tell me more!”
“Wonderful! It can be yours free. All you have to do is deface several wonderful comic books.”
“…”
“Sir?”
“How dare you?”
“I’m here to clean the carpets. Most of the world is carpeted. And, one day, we will do the cleaning.”
I confess to having a weakness for the glorious tripe that is Maury. Watching Mr. Povich wade through humanity’s underbelly one DNA/Lie Detector test at a time is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. But, though I normally watch it alone, I’m always a bit creeped out by the virtual company that I keep. I can’t see the other people whose eyes are glued to the screen, but there are the commercials to clue me into the viewership.
Title loans. Vocational schools. Shady personal injury attorneys. You get the picture. It makes you wonder what horrible turn your life has taken that you find yourself amongst a demographic that would call on the services of payday loans or the Mike Slocombe Law Firm. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from what you see when you wander into afternoon soap operas, where you get bombarded by cat food and tampon commercials. YOU HAVE TURNED DOWN THE WRONG AISLE AT THE SUPERMARKET.
There was always a similar strange element comics — not so much today, but once upon a time, it was there. No title loans or vocational schools, but career self-improvement was ever on display, whether it was electronics or other worthwhile blue-collar fields. The above ad, for the still-going Duraclean, fits right in. Kind of. Well, not really. It made you wonder if the comic book reading public could be divided into kids on the one hand, and adults with acute career path dissatisfaction on the other.
While being able to retire at 50 is an admirable goal, if I might poke a little fun at the Duraclean ad… The picture looks like a Last Known Photo, one you’d see on an old Unsolved Mysteries segment. The van looks like the “dangerous loner” model with a business name tacked on the side for cover. Put amongst the rest of the x-ray glasses and superhero chachkes, it’s a tad out of place, like fishing tackle in a romance comic. I’m sure Duraclean is a fine, upstanding business, and not a front for a religious cult. Nevertheless…
It’s a bit odd. Like others of its ilk. But I’ve never seen Duraclean on Maury. So there’s that.
So Jim Shooter is like the final boss in a video game?
I think we can all agree that completing the Marvel Try-Out book, sending it in the Marvel offices, and — dream of dreams — landing a job at the House of Ideas would be a comic lovers Horatio Alger story. But meeting with the eight-foot tall Jim Shooter — a man who’s burned a bridge or two in his day — would be a bit intimidating. No matter how many gumball machines and stuffed animals were strategically placed on his desk.
The Super-Sons groovily invite you swinging hepcats to rap with them. On Lexor. – World’s Finest Comics #238
There’s a massive confluence of silliness in this comic, a gathering of stupid that threatens to collapse in upon itself and suck us all into never ending downward spiral of terrible. You see, in this book the Super-Sons — the imaginary obnoxious hipster doofus kids of Superman, Batman and their never-revealed mates — travel to Lexor, the Silver Age planet that celebrated the villainous Lex Luthor as the greatest hero in the Universe. Lexor, where a goofy gigantism plague is devastating the populace and threatens to turn Superman Jr. into a Macy’s parade balloon up there on the cover. (Incidentally, did you ever wonder where Lexor was located in the galaxy relative to Bizarro World? Like maybe they were stuffed into the same corner and formed out of the same stupid primordial matter?)
Super-Sons. Lexor. Gigantism. It’s a potent compost, one that might give lie to the “World’s Finest” tag.
For those unfamiliar with the Super-Sons, Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. were the adolescent offspring of their famous fathers, and they incorporated the trying-too-hard dialogue of the Teen Titans (the Sons and the Titans were both co-conjured by scripter Bob Haney) in a cloying, fruitless attempt to connect with younger readers. If you’re just skimming one of their appearances, you can almost forget that they’re younger versions of their dads, and start wondering “Why the f–k are Superman and Batman talking like this?” And then you realize. Perhaps to help differentiate them, Batman Jr.’s eyes were visible, whereas Batman’s are usually the solid white. A young Alex Ross was pleased, I’m sure.
It was eventually revealed that they were mere simulations inside a Fortress of Solitude computer, so that the World’s Finest duo could see what their children would turn out like. And one imagines that, after viewing the simulation, our heroes promptly looked in the Yellow Pages for the nearest all-night vasectomy clinic. DOUBLE ORDER.
But that was yet to come. In this tale (crafted by the co-creators of these derivative dopes, Haney and Dick Dillin) we’re in the heyday of the Super-Sons, as they bop about on a motorcycle like costumed Peter Fondas and Dennis Hoppers, spouting things that adults imagine kids say. It’s while they’re on two wheels — Superman Jr. rides bitch, take from that what you will — that they come upon some (literal) clowns roughing up a fetching babe and her travelling road show. In the immediate aftermath of the rescue, we’re treated to this overload of sexism and stupidity:
So Dora travels around entertaining the downtrodden with puppets. More power to her. She’s in for her toughest crowd yet, though, because her next stop is the hoosegow. “Live from Folsom Prison: A Puppet Show.” And, since her last volunteer assistants didn’t work out — the whole “tried to rape her” thing — the Sons step into the breach. Off they go to prison, put on the show and OMG DORA WAS REALLY ARDORA LUTHOR WHO JUST BUSTED HER FATHER OUT OF THE JAIL UNDER THE SONS’ NOSES.
How embarassing. Your parents are so totally going to ream you.
Ardora — a daughter who Lex didn’t know about — has a conveniently parked rocketship to take Lex back to the fairyland Lexor. That horrible gigantism plague needs a cure, and Lex is the only one with the brain power to come up with one. And, no surprise, this was his diabolical plan all along:
Lex’s eagerness to see his wife, the original Ardora (which makes Dora Ardora Jr. — Jrs all around, I guess) is deflated a tad when he sees how, um, inflated she is:
I’ll hand it to Lex: If I were him (i.e. a career criminal) and I returned to my wife and saw that she’d morphed into some Biggest Loser land-grazer, I don’t know that I’d take it as well as he does here. He immediately gets going on the cure. I’m a bit surprised he didn’t pull a Newt Gingrich and serve her with divorce papers, what with him being a great evil mastermind and all. Or at least say that he had to get something from the car and the last thing she’d ever hear of him would be the sound of squealing tires — something like that. But love conquers all, even for villains.
The Super-Sons. Remember them? They stowed away on the rocket ship (with Supes still mooning over Dora), but are neutralized quickly when Superman Jr.’s powers are nixed by the red sun. USELESS. But they’re suddenly needed when it’s revealed that Lex’s lab, which stored the gigantism cure, has been destroyed by an irradiated meteor. What’re the odds, right? Lex zaps young Supes with yellow energy top re-power him, and off the Sons go in search of a special Lizard that has a venom which holds the only hope for Lexor and its legion of fatties. And the Sons find it just in the nick of time, because Superman Jr. is morphing into John Candy:
The lizard venom cures him before he has to start shopping in the “Big” half of Big and Tall, and his envenomed blood is distilled into a vaccine. Joy. And now it’s the awkward moment we’ve all been waiting for. Will Lex go willingly back to prison with the Sons? Will there be a fight? Will they have to call their dads to bail their asses out?
None of the above, because the Luthor clan is as sadly disfunctional as you can get:
Dora — the David Kaczynski of Lexor.
And that’s it. The tale of how the Super-Sons went to Lexor stumbled and bumbled their way to saving the populace from being fat. A cautionary tale, to be sure…
If you haven’t picked up on the negative vibe, let me be clear: I’m not a Super-Sons fan. I grew up loving World’s Finest, which offered the unfathomable riches of the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel in a dual adventure EACH AND EVERY MONTH. It was one of my favorites, and that horrible day when I held issue #323 in my seven-year-old hands and saw “THE END” emblazoned across the cover was a sad day indeed. The Sons and their WF run had gone by the wayside before I came around, or else I probably wouldn’t have fallen so in love with the title — or maybe I would have, who the hell knows. But now, as an adult, seeing their juvenile asshattery profaning this holiest of comics disgusts me to no end. I can’t like these guys, with their insufferable dialogue and rank stupidity. I just can’t. They’re douches. They’re douches where the two greatest icons in comics should rightfully be. They’re not a change of pace. They’re a tripping wire. I WANT THEM BLOTTED FROM HISTORY LIKE UNPERSONS IN ORWELL’S 1984.
And I have no personal beef with Mr. Haney. Some of his stories were quite good, and the dialogue he wrote for the Teen Titans was rather delightful in a square, eye-rollingly bad way (he could have thrown in a contraction now and again, though). But here I’m driven nuts by it. I’m driven nuts by the whole thing. (The art, inked by John Calnan, is passable — and I’m a tad amused by the enfattened Superman Jr. — but it certainly isn’t sufficient to rescue things.)
The Super-Sons. My God, I hate them.
But, oddly enough, I don’t have a problem with Lexor. Or Ardora. Or Dora. Maddeningly inconsistent, I know.
This comic was reprinted with other Super-Sons stories in a trade a few years back (The Saga of the Super Sons — no hyphen). I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot cattle prod, but others enjoy this stuff. If you’re unfamiliar, you might too. Groove on.
Commence screaming, Marvelites. IT’S THE BEATLES.
That the 1978 Marvel Super Special adaptation of the Beatles’ story was advertised not once, but twice in the Devil Dinosaur comic featured yesterday, is a testament to the lingering power of Beatlemania. You can almost hear Ed Sullivan calling it a “really big book.”
I’ll take one SUPERMAN PUNCHES A SHARK puzzle in a can, please
“Why hello there, Mr. Jaws. What’s that? You have a problem?” KERPOW! “Good luck finding all your rows of teeth. Dick.”
As beneficial to my retirement planning as a Batman bank would be, the Superman/shark slugfest is the must have in this advertisement. It far outshines the endless autumnal scene jigsaw puzzles that my grandmother was always plodding through at her house. Instead of “here’s the piece where the branch crosses over the barn’s roof,” you have “here’s the piece with Superman’s righteous shark-pummeling underwater fist.” NO CONTEST.
Devil Dinosaur and his stubby Cee Lo Green arms are about to dish out some SWEET, SWEET VENGEANCE – Devil Dinosaur #5
Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur offered a sublime sampling of boyish (and maybe girlish too — I can’t speak to that) wish-fulfillment. What kid doesn’t ask for a dog at some point in their childhood? What kid isn’t fascinated by dinosaurs? Put those two things together, and WHAT KID WOULD NOT WANT A FIERCELY LOYAL PET DINOSAUR? Better yet, a T-Rex, which is like getting Magnum P.I.’s Ferrari for your first car?
Everyone envies Moon Boy and his scaly, red companion. His loyal companion.
How loyal? Dogs are man’s best friends, and they’ve been properly venerated in fiction. But did Lassie or Rin Tin Tin ever conjure up an elaborate scheme to avenge the apparent death of their master? To kill the killers in a most terrible way? Some HE’S BACK AND HE’S PISSED comeuppance? The answer we’re looking for here is NO. But Devil Dinosaur — apparently he’s heard all the digs about the pea-brains of dinos — in this issue puts into motion a scheme with multiple moving parts, one that puts Walter White’s ass-saving plan in Season 4 of Breaking Bad to shame. It’s a whopper, involving a series of contingencies and a healthy dose of good luck.
Put Devil in the next Danny Ocean heist movie. Ocean’s Dinosaur.
Of course, it’s made all the more joyous by the talents of the King. Kirby’s pencil and brush were perfectly suited for the world that Devil and Moon Boy traipsed over, whether it was supposed to be prehistoric Earth or an alternate Earth or a fever dream or whatever. Dinosaurs, craggly hills, rocky landscapes and towering volcanos are about as much in Jolly Jack’s wheelhouse as anything. Oh, and robots. Yeah. Robots. Because this issue’s villains are mechanized aliens that have taken Moon Boy aboard their spaceship as a specimen. They look a bit like differently colored, smaller versions of Terminus. Terminii. And HOLY BALLS THIS TWO-PAGE SPREAD RULES:
Sometimes I wish Kirby could have drawn my life. Not the story of my life. My actual life. So I could see things like this while I walk to get groceries.
In “Journey to the Center of the Ants” (oh, Jack…), Moon Boy is cooped up in a glass tube, waiting for an “examination,” which one fears is alien carny for “dissection.” All that’s left is putting a little chloroformed chunk of cotton on top of his jar, and it might be a permanent lights out for him. Meanwhile his pals, an elder named White-Hair (Look, he’s so old he’s WHITE!), a somewhat skeptical warrior named Stone-Hand, and Devil, are all under threat from the same “Sky Demons.”
Dire straits. Straits that call for a devilish way out.
There’s an apostrophe and an “S” missing in the following panel, but that doesn’t take away from Devil’s agitation — and maybe you can see the first embryonic stages of a plan developing behind those reptilian eyes:
Show you he shall, Stone-Hand. “RUMPF!” indeed.
White-Hair convinces Stone-Hand to follow Devil’s lead. “What’s that boy? Farmer Jesse fell down a well? Show us!” And where does he lead them? OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE FIRE:
Swarmers. Sounds charming. We get our intro to these nasties when the Sky Demons come a calling:
Where are Cate Blanchett’s thighs when you need them?
Devil has been pretty much winging it up until this point, but now his saurian synapses really start popping:
He may be a dinosaur, but he ain’t no dummy. Like monkeys stacking boxes to get the bananas.
He leads his two pals inside the Swarmers’ Tower of Death (!), where they avoid detection for a spell, only to be discovered and, well, swarmed. It’s then that the Sky Demons decide to take care of this new Swarmer threat by blowing up their home, which may cause some second guessing at the next Sky Demon council meeting:
When I was little, my father was mowing the lawn one day when he ran over a yellowjacket nest. I have a clear memory of him charging back the house, ripping his pants off and screaming as he ran. SO I HAVE FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE WITH HORROR LIKE THIS. The Sky Demons have no idea what they’re in for.
Devil extracts himself and his friends from the rubble, content that the Swarmers are on the way to destroy the Sky Demons, who have probably killed Moon Boy (who still lives, by the way). “And on the Seventh Day, Devil Dinosaur rested”:
He’s a cute-a-saurus. He thinks he’s prehistoric people.
And there you have it. That Devil Dinosaur, he’s one clever Rex.
DD might be some of Kirby’s best 1970s output. With a young man beleaguered in a hostile world, Devil is like Kamandi. But with goddamn dinosaurs and a T-Rex that’s like a giant, red, mute, short-armed E.T., which means it’s about 1000x better. It certainly outshines much of Kirby’s short-lived DC output, like OMAC, or abandoned concepts like Atlas. The more you think about Devil Dinosaur, the more you like it. I’ve had several dogs in my life, but I doubt any of them would have avenged my apparent death. That’s where the whole wish-fulfillment angle comes in. It’s the stuff of daydreams, and we owe Kirby a debt of homage for committing this daydream to paper.
Devil Dinosaur got the Omnibus treatment a few years back, but that tome is now out of print. Criminal. One hopes that this can be rectified at some point in the future, so that future generations can revel in the boy-meets-dinosaur magic ladled out during its brief run.
Pelé. Cosmos. Meadowlands. BE THERE.
If you build a time machine for the unafthomable purpose of travelling back to 1977 so you can watch soccer, here’s a schedule to help you plan your itinerary. Maybe try to get a group discount on those $2 tickets. And give my regards to Pelé.
“Montezuma’s Revenge.” Apparently “The Sh–s” was taken.
Was “Montezuma’s Revenge” firmly entrenched in the 1980s as a euphemism for diarrhea? I have to think that it was. If so, that makes this game’s title, if topically appropriate, extremely unfortunate. Or maybe the ultimate goal in the game was helping Panama Joe find a commode.
Still, it looks fun — in a classic Mario kind of way. And the classic Mario kind of way is indeed fun.
A recent local news scare report about the youth-corrupting dangers of breast-riddled comic books — horror of horrors — got me thinking about the assorted Jayne Mansfields amongst DC Comics heroines. One really stands out among all the rest, and you know who I’m talking about. Yes, the blonde-tressed bombshell called Power Girl, the young lady whose breasts have been purposefully amplified over the years, the one who could poke an eye out with those things — and you would willingly go blind. THEY ARE HUGE.
And what do you know, this book was sitting on my desk. Kismet. A real, genuine 1970s comic book with Power Girl’s assets on full display (and oh, how they’re showcased). Sadly, there’s no deep story analysis to be had here. I prefer it when my Justice Society stories have a Roy Thomas element to them, and this one, featuring a botched invasion from below, an invasion in serious need of Marvel’s Mole Man’s (nearsighted) genius, is an average read. No offense to scripter Paul Levitz (Joe Staton and Bob Layton handled the art), but there just isn’t much to be said about it.
Or maybe I was too distracted reading it, because Power Girl’s mammaries are two of the featured performers, with super-feats of their very own. Her big boobs fight evil. It’s all enough to turn a kid into a rampaging, aroused, homicidal lunatic, and therefore it’s worthy of our rapt, slavering attention.
Before we get her (or them), a word about Earth-2’s (former) Caped Crusader, Gotham City Police Commissioner Bruce Wayne, who makes a sub-plot appearance in these pages. There was always a refreshing taste of passing time in that alternate Earth, one populated by the old Golden Age heroes. It was a place where the cycle of years could take its toll even on the greatest of champions, and the mortal, all too human Batman fit right into that. There’s a definite Admiral James T. Kirk dynamic at play with this Commish, an old war-horse past his prime, now stuck behind a desk far from the front lines he once prowled. Once the guy out and about crushing skulls and such, Wayne (with his George Clooney hair) has traded the batarangs for a pipe, the cape for a trench coat, and is stuck chasing down those whom he used to walk amongst:
One can empathize with the frustrations that a retired Dark Knight would have in civilian togs. IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE A MAN POUND HIS DESK AND ALMOST SNAP HIS PIPE WITH HIS TEETH:
I wonder if Wayne can puff little bats with his pipe smoke. One hopes. And if on Earth-1 Batman brings Commissioner Gordon pipe tobacco, who brings Commissioner Wayne his? Robin?
Okay, enough of that. Onto the boobs.
Nothing helps a superheroine’s cans jut more than being bound with her arms over her head, and it makes her BUSTing free all the more delicious:
They must have helped her generate some breakaway momentum, right? Gravity?
There’s no ambiguity of what’s doing the work here — THE MONEY SHOT:
Keep up with the “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” exercises, girls. They’ll all pay off one day. BREASTS TRIUMPHANT.
Lastly, if the reader isn’t a breast man, the final page has this gratuitous ass shot thrown in for good measure:
Nice.
And that’s it. This book came out in 1977. Viewed chestularly, it’s really no worse than (or, as I prefer to think of it, JUST AS AWESOME AS) the buxom works of today. For decades kids have been awakened to the amplified and unrealistic female form through comic books, and the ogling is harmless. We all turn out fine.
Consider this a mild, hastily composed, booby rebuttal to Fox5’s silly piece.
I haven’t seen a lot of ads for superhero socks. If there are some Spider-Man socks out there printed like the red and black webbing of his costume, then they might make it into the dates/church/job interviews apparel rotation.
I thought “Groovy Grabber” was what chicks called my father at bars back in the ’70s. I stand corrected.
Just like how sometimes a frisbee is just a frisbee no matter how much you guss it up, sometimes a top is just a top. I remember one of these in a cache of toys left over at my grandparents’ house from when an older cousin was little. It was just as underwhelming as this ad makes it seem.
Jared
blog into mystery 