TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : YANK AND DOODLE

This happen next season on Downton Abbey. Spoilers.

Among the roster of patriotic avengers who've adorned comics since the inception of the super-hero, surely there have never been two more obnoxious dicks than Yank and Doodle, the chest-bumping bro-hams of the spandex circle. Their modern-day equivalents would almost certainly use homophobic slurs over Xbox Live and reek of Axe.

The wartime teenaged duo was, when unmasked, the wealthy and athletic twins Rick and Dick Walters – yes, Rick and Dick, I do not know how that works since they’re both short for “Richard”. Perhaps they’re Rickard and Richard, or Ricardo and Richard, or Dichard and Richard, or Richard 1 and Richard 2, or some other indicator of remarkably lazy parentage. Here’s another; while other superheroes hid their alter-ego’s derring-do behind acts of timidity, meek manners and physical awkwardness, such was not a reality for young athletes Rick and Dick – so they hid behind a disguise of being horrible entitled jackasses.

Our heroes.

When not shoving around youngsters at summer camp, the unaccountably wealthy jagoffs were busy tormenting their butler and his innocent son. In this typical adventure, for instance, Rick and Dick (who am I kidding, they’re both dicks) unleash abuse both verbal and physical in nature upon their aged butler, secure in the knowledge that he’s bound by threat of reprisal to accept their beating, mockery an belittling willingly, if begrudgingly. But wait, they've abused the butler so badly that he’s sent his own son away, because they've also been abusing him! Then they put on costumes and fight “bad guys”, which by all rights should be a mirror.

Yank and Doodle were most likely emotionally stunted owing to the trauma of losing their mother in childbirth, and emboldened by the fact that they somehow developed unbeatable super-strength when in one another’s presence. Keep in mind that they never restricted the use of their super-strength to their costumed identities – they happily used it to bolster their own athletic careers. Born on third and swearing they hit a triple, it’s Yank and Doodle!

A fine cherry on top of their loathsome sundae, Yank and Doodle also have the honor of inadvertently naming the once-and-only assemblage of Prize Comics heroes. In Prize Comics #24, Yank and Doodle joined sub-zero superhero Doctor Frost, nighttime avenger Black Owl, comedic characters The General and The Corporal and mystic Green Lama in battling the Frankenstein Monster, a menace (up to that point) who’d had his own feature in the book for some time. Having defeated the monsters, Doodle dubs the group “I guess we’re just … an invincible bunch of guys!” It looks terrific on the letterhead.

They weren't.

GONE & FORGOTTEN REVISITED : THE GREEN TEAM Part 1

The Green Team
Personal jetplanes, luxury yachts, cash-laden jumpsuits and an absence of parental oversight, what do all of these things add up to? That’s right, celebrity sextapes, but how about also DC Comics’ original answer to the question Richie Rich was just too square to ask, man, it’s The Green Team.

"We'll have a soft-serv ice cream machine and a toppings bar"

The Green Team has recently experienced a reinvention inside the Nu52 as Teen Trillionaires - where they managed to pull an eight-issue run prior to cancellation. You can’t deny an eight-issue run isn’t too bad, particularly considering that the originals debuted in the second issue of the just-a-little-inappropriately titled “First Issue Special” and then died before anything could come of it except unpublished inventory stories available for decades only as photocopies handed around at cons.

Created by writer Joe Simon and artist Jerry Grandenetti, the Green Team is, of course, lead vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Drint and drummer Tre Cool, and they redefined punk for the 90s. Beyond that, the Green Team is, in increasing order of hair length and starting – like all wealth culture does – with the white kids:

Commodore Murphy: A shipping magnate who, despite his youth, dresses like Thurston P.Howell joining McHale’s Navy.

J.P.Huston: Boy oil magnate and son of mustachioed private detective Matt Houston and his wife Whitney (maybe)

J.P. and Murph score all the choice dialogue and action in the stories, leaving the other two Green Teamers a little less to do. This might have something to do with who they are, simply because:

Cecil Sunbeam: Boy film director and the first of two problematic character portrayals in the book, being as he’s a flamboyant, outrageous, Hollywood boheme type, and the implication in his manner of dress and expression is that he might be – and pardon my late Sixties terminology here, but - the fruit of the group.  He doesn’t get enough screen time for us to determine whether this is a sort-of Antonio Fargas as Lindy portrayal of the savage dignity earned by the routinely despised, or if he’s merely a self-indulgent louche whose affectations are a tissue-thin façade for a two-fisted he-man. There's a chance this is my casting modern-day interpretations on an otherwise innocent portrayal, I'll cop. Still, whatever way, he doesn't get it as bad as…

Abdul Smith: Shoeshine kid and sucker.

The debut of the Green Team involves a convoluted arc of Abdul Smith, impoverished shoeshine kid from the ghetto whose lifelong dream is to be part of a club – any club, anywhere, and considering how poorly whitey treats him throughout this story, may I suggest the Black Panthers? How about the Nation of Islam?

Whoa. Up yours, honky.

Abdul eventually gets to join the Green Team, not because of his intelligence, drive, ambition or ingenuity, but because of an accounting error; the thirty-two clams in his bank account (which is, I believe, actually a million dollars in today’s money) is mis-deposited as five hundred thousand clams (or five super-mega-clams, metrically speaking). Before the bank can correct their own error and probably charge Abdul twenty bucks as a penalty, one of the young shoeshine boy’s loyal customers invests it for him and nets him the million-dollar entry fee into the Green Team.

The Green Team is one of Simon’s fairly subversive trilogy of titles for DC in the late Sixties and early Seventies – the other two being Brother Power and Prez – so while it’s impressive that he introduces a black character onto this team, the question of why Abdul has to fail upwards into the ranks of his partners is pertinent. There are black millionaires to be used as examples in this era – athletes and performers not the least of which, with neither career necessarily conflicting with the assorted industries monopolized by the white Green Teamers – but instead Abdul is catapulted from the streets by way of clerical error. If this doesn't seem weird to you, ask yourself why Abdul wasn't one of the original Green Teamers and one of the white kids had to accidentally join the ranks instead.

With Abdul effectively prohibited, story-wise, from every achieving parity with his peers in the team, he is left little choice but to remain “The other”. He actually ends up shoved to the side in subsequent adventures (and even on the cover, where he lingers so far in the back as to be practically absent), when in reality he’s the only Green Teamer to have been given any sort of backstory. Even in the 2013 revival, Abdul – the only African-American member – was jettisoned in favor of an Arabic prince. Abdul kind of deserves another shot.

That Spider-Man appearance is gonna come in handy for
some pub trivia night, keep it in mind.

In their pursuit of further wealth, the Green Team funds bizarre projects and, when the time comes for them to take a direct hand in protecting – or shutting down – their investments, they get decked out in fancy little green Dickies with four combination-locked pockets used to carry CASH MONEY. Even Don Draper had a Diners Club card – still, each member carries around a quarter million on them at all times, and then use them for such daring and innovative activities as – throwing it all on a roof and running away (this is true). I think this is actually part of their strategy to quickly divest Abdul of his million dollars so they can kick him out of the club and get back to telling jokes like "What would you call the Flintstones if they were black?" "Haw haw, good one Cecil!"

The Green Team advertise themselves via billboards bearing such enticing Craigslist-murderer-bait as "Boy Millionaires seek ACTION!" and "MONEY for THRILLS! ... We Pay for Play!" Another board reads "WANTED - Adventurous boys to join the GREEN TEAM" and then by way of small print, "Must Have A Million Dollars" all of which sounds suspiciously like a really transparent NAMBLA scheme. "Clean-Limbed boys wanted for big, exciting adventure. Must have million dollars, be willing to travel to Thailand. Orphans with no kin preferred."

What the NSA sees when it taps your webcam

As for the actual stories; Joe Simon was in a weird place with a lot of his DC work, undoubtedly unaided by the outright antipathy powerful editor and living harassment generator Mort Weisinger had towards Simon’s youth-celebrating work. In Brother Power, there were Nazi bikers and a villainous President Reagan (or “California” as I like to call it), in Prez there were robot chess maniacs and legless vampires, and in The Green Team there was down-on-his-luck Hitler and something called – lord help us – Professor Dinkle's Great American Pleasure Machine.

Rather than a novelty eatery at the upscale mall, the Great American Pleasure Machine (now the invention of Professor Apple. Poor Dinkle got recast. Long story) is a machine which is so adept at delivering pleasure that it’ll drive all entertainers out of business. That’s why a destructive marching band of evil is assembled to tear it down, and if they won’t do it then the comic book characters. Then, after that, the hookers!

Via a text piece in the back we gain insight into the origins of the Green Team, specifically that it's the invention of the heretofore-unseen P.T.Green, a multi-millionaire who pulled himself up from humble origins and decided to give back to the world by inventing an adventurers' club for idle rich kids (despite the fact that we already have one of those, it's called "The Kennedys"). Why he didn't form a club to assist the same kind of underprivileged kids he himself once was, I dunno, except I feel like it's a metaphor for capitalism in some way.

Lookin' like a million bucks.

Next Wednesday: The Unpublished Adventures!

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE : WHO ARE THE OUTSIDERS?

Batman and the Outsiders No.1  August 1983

In a lot of ways, it’s difficult to imagine that the first team of super-powered operatives specifically assembled by Batman in order to expand his war on crime was founded thirty years ago, although I stopped myself short of saying “The people who read comics these days weren’t even born when Batman and the Outsiders first debuted”, because that is observably incorrect. Most of the people who read comics these days were college graduates when Batman and the Outsiders first debuted, or at least to judge by how they’re marketed.

Still, it’s been three decades since Batman first threw a glass of pinot in Superman’s face and told the Justice League to east his dust, he was going back to beautician school! While the team he subsequently founded – The Outsiders – went through a few fluctuations and revivals, the fact remains that it’s one of those popular touchstones of the contemporary DC Universe while simultaneously never having been particularly exceptional, relevant or pivotal. Such is the power of Batman.

Attempts to revive the Outsiders over the last few years were met by general ambivalence, and if you want to argue that point I’m going to ask you to defend the issues which DC grand vizier Dan Didio once wrote in an apparent bid to prove why Paul Levitz burdened the postal service with rejection letters stamped with Didio’s return address on ‘em in the first place. Here, wriggle your way out of this’un: Didio debuted the superhero Freight Train because he’d missed the opportunity to create him for Bloodlines. HE CREATED A BLOODLINES SUPERHERO SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER THE FACT. Surely that’s the kind of behavior that gets you committed against your will.

But who were the original Outsiders? They were these people:

HALO: NOT ACTUALLY PEOPLE. Daffy blonde naïf Halo was actually some sort of energy balloon from space, where most of your high-end energy balloons come from. Fused with a runaway suburban WASP who’d turned to a life of crime well before Orange is the New Black made it cool, she actually represented kind of a troubling trend in superhero comics – the “bad girl” whose entire life and personality are wiped out so a supernatural “good girl” personality can take over her body and redeem her misbehavior. Don’t worry though, comics are for girls, or so I’m informed.

Halo used different color auras to create different special effects, like an indigo tractor beam, a green stasis beam, red balloons, yellow stars and blue diamonds.

KATANA: RHYMES WITH BANANA (in my mind) Was a lady samurai on a mission to avenge her murdered husband, whose soul lived in her samurai sword. When my parents split up, my dad just lived at the Y, but different strokes I guess. Her primary superpower was that she had a sword and never managed to kill anybody with it, which if you think isn’t a superpower I’d like to see you try it (please don’t try it).

Also, here’s this story – I used to be really chummy with the ladies who worked the butcher block at my local supermarket, and just before one of them left for her maternity leave, I asked if they’d picked a name for the baby. She sighed really heavy and tells me her husband wants to name the kid “Katana”. I ask “After the sword or the Mortal Kombat character” and she replies “Ugh, after some superhero I guess?” and when I replied “From Batman and the Outsiders??” she goes like “IT’S A REAL THING??” and just throws her hands in the air in disgust. Anyway, in conclusion, I hope for everyone’s sake they just named the baby “Carol” or something.

BLACK LIGHTNING: JIVE TOFURKEY. I like Black Lightning, I think he’s one of the DC superheroes they could pretty successfully spin off into film and television franchise. The thing they hafta deal with, with this guy, it’s not the disco-era costume or the giant afro or the spot-on-the-nose name, it’s all the time he goes around speaking “jive” and then spends a thought balloon complaining about speaking “jive”. Like, he’s from the streets, he works the streets, but ugh how he hates pretending to be street. That seems like … that seems like maybe a white guy wrote that? I know, I’m out on a limb there. I like Tony Isabella, too, motherfucker created The Champions, what am I gonna do about that? Still seems dumb.

Anyway, Black Lightning is pretty terrific, but he’s no …

METAMORPHO: THE FREAK OF 1,000 ELEMENTS Goddamn Metamorpho is great but you know this already.

GEO-FORCE: LAST AND THE LEAST The final member of Batman’s original Outsiders lineup is exactly what a team of low-profile, expendable, black ops superheroes needs – a titanic white idiot who is also the prince regent of an embattled nation. Surely no one will recognize Prince Brion of Markovia, who appears on TV and like announces for the Olympics and has most of his face exposed in his superhero costume?

Geo-Force is a tremendous triple play in that he’s a dull personality married with one of the dumbest names in comics and once “upgraded” to a costume with the color palette of sports pickles on a Chicago dog. That he ended up having a pivotal storyline in Brad Meltzer’s largely unreadable Justice League run ought to tell you volumes. He did once sort of dress like Wolverine, I guess. Points.

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : E-MAN

E-ManThere’s no character I’ve more reluctantly queued up for this Truly Gone & Forgotten feature more than E-man, because I hate to admit that this bright, colorful character’s time is probably done – not that he ever seemed to fit in any of the venues which hosted him.

Created by Nick Cuti and Joe Staton and originally published in Charlton Comics, he was even an odd fit for a company which produced the Blue Beetle, Spookman and Son of Vulcan. Played for straight superheroics with dashes of light humor and occasional flat-out farce, you had here a comic which involved a hero battling life-and-death stakes but starring characters with punny sobriquets like Nova Kane and Alec Tronn, ominous and recurring menaces rendered in Staton’s breezy style and partnered up with pint-size private dicks and a walking, self-aware koala bear which took it upon itself to routinely break the fourth wall.

They got websites where you can watch girl bustin' bulbs.

Beginning his existence as a self-aware burst of energy born in the Big Bang, E-Man subsequently spends “millions” and “thousands” of years (cosmology is not a strong point) bouncing around the universe, hungry for another intelligent life form to provide him with company. When an impending invasion of the planet Earth puts him in the company of exotic dancer Nova Kane, E-Man quickly adopts a human identity, transforming his energy to matter in the fashion of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, after which he takes his super-hero codename (E-Man being short for “E=mc2 Man”).

Gifted with the power to fly, shoot energy bolts and transform his body a la Plastic Man, E-Man made for a light and fun character. The question of why a shape-changing alien entity uncountable eons old would wear the shape of a handsome white male and pick up a relationship with the first human female he meets aside (although that gets addressed in a later, slightly retconned story), he seemed to exist in a world of limitless possibility where light comedy and adventuring heroics could go hand in hand.

After ten solidly entertaining issues with Charlton, E-Man was revived with First Comics during the big indy boom of the Eighties, albeit now under different writers (a royal flush of DC Comics’ roster at the time, featuring Martin Pasko, Paul Kupperberg and a Mike W.Barr guest gig, before Staton picked up the pen) and turning in a distinctly satirical bent. E-Man’s enemies – both recurring and passing – included parodies of the X-Men (and a Dark Phoenix theme that didn’t excuse the creators from its satire), Elfquest, 2001, Pogo and a few more, and entered the annals of “most unexpected crossover ever” by sidling up next to First’s sexy space opera Warp.

I feel like holding her nose was maybe just plain hurtful.

 E-Man has enjoyed a few brief revivals over the last few decades, but never seeming to find a comfortable fit – he was too light-hearted for the relevant 70s, too satirical for the self-important 80s, and too sporadic for the creator-owned booms of the 90s and 21st century … although surely there’s always hope for a shape-changing superhero who’s happy to hop across genre.

"YOU HAVE TO NUMB IT. YOU KNOW, NUM NUM NUM NUM NUM NUM NUM NUM!"

POWER PACK #51/#52 – The Numinus

Stunt casting is a tricky business, because you’re ostensibly hiring a performer strictly on the basis of the amount of recognition they’re generate as themselves – you know, it’s Nicole Richie and she’s shooting at Chuck! It’s Britney Spears an she’s trying to hump How I Met Your Mother’s friend! It’s Prince as an awkward purple paperweight, or whatever it was Bob Dylan was doing on Dharma and Greg that one time! Actors are theoretically cast to bring life to a character and to reinforce the suspension of disbelief which the story needs to survive, but stunt casting deliberately suspends that disbelief for the sake of the novelty.

So say you have a book about a quintet of precocious grade schoolers who have a talking spaceship and were given super-powers by a race of magical horse people, you might think your suspension of disbelief is already a notably fragile glass unicorn and you’re going to want to avoid waltzing smack into it and knocking it to the floor. Especially if your book has historically been criticized for its depictions of deadly violence directed at young children and is ramping up to a climax involving the genocide of an entire race in the course of an intergalactic blood feud, you might find yourself thinking “This is not the time to bring in Whoopi Goldberg”.

I mean, I know they're space horsies, and you know they're space horsies, we all know that they're space horsies,
but it's kind of jarring that their ancient enemy would ever relate to them in that context ...

Well, at least they brought her in BIG. Hitting the landmark fiftieth issue of Power Pack, the crusading children (the four siblings of the Power family, Alex, Jack, Julie and Katie, and their friend and youngest son of Reed and Sue Richards, Franklin Richards) find themselves witnesses to the attempted planetary genocide committed by Maraud, matriarch of the reptilian race of “Snarks”, against her people’s hereditary enemies the Kymellians (those are the magical horse-people), while simultaneously attempting to save from death their “smartship” Friday (who is literally saved by LOVE, I swan), and rescue their parents from well-intentioned alien brainwashing while a quartet of Kymellian heroes use them as target practice just for the ever-lovin’ heck of it and a supernatural deity is trying to possess one of ‘em.

(The horse-people superheroes, by the way, are called Force 4 and are comprised of the imaginatively titled Teamleader, the ethereal Ghostmare, and the powerful Thunderhoof and his pal Firemane. These last two guys are great because they come off as bro-hams, one a gentle giant and the other a brash frat jerk. If only I could think of some word to describe horse people who are bros, like bro ponies of some sort, if only there were some word…)

So anyway, there is a lot going on, and by no means did a four-thousand foot tall Whoopi Goldberg make any of it seem any clearer.

Whoopi (or her likeness, anyway, I don’t think she was helping to write this nonsense) is represented by “Numinus”, a towering cosmic being whose name references the concept of the “numinous”, the presence of the divine, and not – as I originally thought when I first read the book, and which I’m really ashamed to admit out loud, but brace yourselves, because here we go – a portmanteau of “Negro” and “Luminous”. LOOK, I DIDN'T THINK IT WAS COOL EITHER. “They’re not—“ I asked myself, incredulously, “They’re not calling her ‘Negro Luminous’, are they?” That is seriously what I thought. I’m sorry. America has a lot of healing to do.

Numinus turns out to be a cosmic entity who controls individual moments of saving grace, and it’s implied in her Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition Update entry that she is “more powerful than Galactus”, which I guess is true in the sense that “Hey I found a nickel” beats out “Hey, my planet is being melted”.  We find out, through the course of her exposition, that she’s the benevolent universal presence responsible for things like stepping in dog poop but when you look down you see a twenty dollar bill on the ground, or Lt.Col. Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov sparing the world a nuclear apocalypse because he decided the missile alert he received was totally bogus (that’s eighties-talk), or that plastic bag scene in American Beauty. Somebody had to be responsible for that.

Breaking the basic literary rule that you can use magic to get your characters into trouble but not to get them out of trouble, Numinus ends up pointing out that all of the galactic carnage and countless deaths was actually for the best because one of the horse-people superheroes becomes a godlike being and they all find a new planet to live on in the end. So. Score.

Wait, explain how the pink pearl eraser part relates again ... 

Undoubtedly the best part of this story is that there’s a character in the book named “Aelfyre Whitemane” (you know, of the Connecticut Whitemanes. In fact, I went to school with an Amanda Whitemane, I wonder if there’s any relation) whom every casually refers to as “Whitey” so you not only get characters running around yelling “You leave Whitey out of this!” and “We thought you guys were so great – like Whitey!” and (I love this one) “They called Whitey a sorcerer, but he really was just a throwback to the olden days!”, you get Whoopi/Numinus saying the line “Whitey showed me that love and respect are everyone’s birthright”. Terrific. Well, we do our best.

In the second part of her appearance in Power Pack, Numinus is colored purple which helps a little in making her look less like a giant Whoopi Goldberg balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade but on the other hand it basically just makes her look like a purple Whoopi, which sounds either like something you do with a wet finger to an unwilling participant or something you have to pay extra for during a trip to Thailand. Or both.

Uh, this seems to be getting a little intimate...

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE : THE DAY THE BAT CRIED

I sometimes wonder – assuming that the everyday world of the DC Universe is much like the everyday world in the real universe – if DC’s Earth is as obsessed with Batman as ours is, and how does Batman feel about that? What does the DC Internet look like, and how can he get anything done if every three seconds someone is creating a new Batman meme, typing Impact over a photo of a fat dog with two shaved ice cones tied to his head with rubber string. Batman must avoid Tumblr like the plague. Imagine if his bat-smartphone had those little Google cards on it – “Who’s playing me in the movie? Shit, focus Bruce, the Penguin just murdered like fifty babies, wait, they cancelled my cartoon? Ugh, well, at least this guy who said the Batmobile gave him feels has a hundred and twenty five likes and reblogs. Gah, fuckin’ Robin – enough with the Candy Crush requests.”

I expect Batman would probably be pretty sick of his popularity, which is also the premise explored in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis No.97, Nov.-Dec. 1966, when Batmania was at its peak and DC was still publishing those awesome humor comics starring television and movie celebrities. It’s a bygone age, we’ll never see The Adventures of Daniel Tosh or Dave Chapelle’s Laffs and Gags. More’s the pity.

The Adventures of Jerry Lewis revolved around Jerry, his rotten nephew Renfrew and their housekeeper, a genuine witch named Witch Kraft (Over in the Bob Hope comic, the local high school was staffed entirely by movie monsters of the Universal variety, so there was a theme unifying these books. I’ve never read the Jackie Gleason comic which DC produced, so as far as I’m aware it had Cthulu selling newspapers on the corner). When Kraft has to leave the house, Renfrew – caught up in Batmania – convinces his uncle to don costumes with him and emerge into the night for the cause of justice as Ratman and Rotten the Boy Blunder.

They’re not the only idle saps trying on crimefighting for fun, which is how they run across the original Dynamic Duo – exhausted from having to chase all over town after their hapless imitators.  There’s Catman and Kitten and Fatman and Tubbin, Flatman and Ribbon, Sadman and Sobbin,  and in a more enlightened time there probably also would have been Thatman and This’un, @Man and ROFLin, and Scatman and Cruthers.

Teaming up with Jerry in order to rescue Renfrew/Rotten from the clutches of The Kangaroo (who turns out to be Witch Kraft in disguise), it’s probably the most realistic Batman story I've yet to read – Batman and Robin spend the majority of it exhausted and put out by their admirers and bored with the ridiculous hoops their colorful crooks inevitably put them through. I also think it’s better than The Long Halloween.

They meant "Bat-Pooped"

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : "COMICS" MCCORMICK

For as long as there have been comics, there’s been comics fandom – and as long as there’s been fandom, there’s been, recursively, comics about fans of comics.

Most of the comics which feature comic book fans and collectors as their protagonists aren’t typically all that kind – consider the number of comics and television shows you’ve encountered where the avid collector is portrayed as an unclean, juvenile wretch, an obsessive-compulsive criminal, or just an all-around unlikable jackass. Even the few where an avid comic book aficionado is the hero have a tendency to play the protagonist for laughs as a well-meaning but incompetent dolt.

Well, not so with “Comics” McCormick, one of – if not THE – first comic book fan to be the star of his own comic feature. Created by Ed Wheelan as a supporting character in a number of books (EC’s Fat and Slat and Land of the Lost, Holyoke’s Catman and Terrific), Comics is sort of a pint-sized Walter Mitty with his imagination fixated firmly on four-color misadventures. Billed as the world’s #1 comic book fan, “Comics” - even his mother and sister call him that – often finds himself lost in idle fantasy, battling terrible super-menaces, spies and crooks either alongside famous (more or less) heroes or adopting super-powers of his own.

If my math is correct, there were only nine “Comics” McCormick stories ever published, but he packs a colorful catalog of criminals and comrades into those brief appearances – Alongside heroes like Captain Catapult, Voltage (Man of Lightning), Waterman and Marvel Maid, “Comics” helps stick it to baddies like the black-caped Super-Robot, the insidious Dr.Hunchback and the sinister Octopus (bearing a resemblance to the Octopus appearing in this week’s Batman Leads An Interesting Life feature – see , I told you to bear with me!), and likewise picks up a few super-powers of his own, including invisibility, electric powers and a quick turn as a human bullet!

Like other successful light comedy pieces from the Golden Age – say, for instance, Sheldon Mayer’s excellent Scribbly or John Stanley Little Lulu, of which “Comics” McCormick put me in mind on more than one occasion – the strength of the series lies not only in its imagination but in its supporting cast. Like Scribbly and Lulu, “Comics” has a large number of women in his cast – he has a pair of boy chums (the chubby schoolmate Wilbur and the their cook’s son, Ajax), but his mother, sister, his girlfriend Rosalie Brown and family cook comprise the remainder of his dramatis personae, with only kindly Officer Kelly providing an adult male influence on the strip. Even “Comics” nemesis is his comics-disapproving schoolteacher, Miss Slate.

In fact, among the high adventure and boyish daydreams, there’s a surprisingly timely message about inclusiveness in “Comics” McCormick – when Rosalie is submitted for membership in the boys’ “Little Conquerors Athletic and Reading Club”, Wilbur raises a fuss about admitting a girl to a boys club – “Girls don’t fit in as Conquerors, shux, anybody knows that!” he argues. “Comics” is quick to list off a parade of superheroines in his defense – “How about Super-Dame a’ Lady Wonder an’ The Pink Pigeon an’ the Crimson Canary? How about them, huh??!!” he demands of his chastised pals, who promptly vote to allow Rosalie in, to her delight.

With comic fandom currently struggling to cast off its image as an aggressively exclusionist, intensely gatekeepered boys’ club, there are probably few other comics characters so well-suited to embody the appeal and inclusiveness of the medium than “Comics” McCormick, a character who is just aching for a comeback…

Of course, maybe we could do something about how Ajax looks and talks.

PUT IT ON MY BILL - THE OFFICIAL HOWARD THE DUCK MOVIE ADAPTATION

Marvel Super-Special #41 - Howard the Duck
Kyle Baker is almost undeniably one of the most-respected graphic novelists of the last thirty years, having produced one of the funniest books to grace the medium in The Cowboy Wally Show and one of the most acclaimed in Why I Hate Saturn – not to mention some of his more underrated works like I Die At Midnight, or his still-fondly-remembered mainstream comic runs on Andy Helfer's The Shadow and DC’s Plastic Man. A master of the form, all around.

So when I stumbled across a copy of the comic book adaptation of the motion picture of George Lucas’ Howard the Duck, how else could I choose to look at it except as Kyle Baker’s Great Lost Volume! It’s either that or weep salt tears until I dehydrate and die.

Howard the Duck, the movie, holds tremendous power in comic book fandom – if nothing else can save Elektra, X-Men 3:Last Stand or Man of Steel, it’s the reminder that “At least it’s not as bad as Howard the Duck.” It’s the Citizen Kane of the worst movies ever made, except now that I think about it the Citizen Kane of the worst movies ever made is Plan 9 from Outer Space. Howard the Duck is the Battleship Potemkin of movies that make The Godfather III look like The Godfather. Wait, maybe it’s the Space Battleship Yamato of the Oh God movies. I've lost my thread. Where am I?

He's pus with a bill!

Until Howard the Duck, George Lucas’ name had been attached to American Graffiti, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, so it’s understandable that no one recognized the movie for the warning sign it actually was. Two great franchises and an American classic (and I know I’m not mentioning “Willow” here and – well, is this shameful to admit, I've never seen it? Although I understand it basically to be Star Wars skinned with a sword and sorcery coat and guest starring Lenny and Squiggy as white smurfs?) and the next thing you know the guy keeps leaving the digital equivalent of oreo-cookie-stained fingerprints all over the Star Wars movies - adding slapstick robots, bouncing Han Solos and farting Dewbacks willy nilly every decade or so. We should have seen it coming.

If you've never seen the cinematic version of Howard the Duck, then don’t bother buying a lottery ticket – you've already used up your lifetime luck allotment. Allegedly intended to be a wacky, zany, wonky, bonky, zonky, “fun” movie about a singing nymphet, a sexually promiscuous duck-man who resembled an oversedated pillow following a debilitating stroke and the half-scorpion/half-knife-vagina monster which brings them together, it’s actually kind of a slog.

I remember catching Howard the Duck in the theatre – for the record, I have excellent taste in films, but the only other major motion picture coming out that weekend was Friday the 13th Part 6, so don’t even start with me. I took a date. At least we made out, although I’m still angry with Howard the Duck for creating the confusing adolescent visual of a near-naked Lea Thompson cavorting with a gross bird imp.

Gross.

I understand the idea of a movie which is so bad it becomes good, or at least a movie which is so spectacularly bad that it’s a phenomenon of garish incompetence (one of your humble editor’s favorite movies is 1997’s Batman and Robin, for instance, if only for its Kaufman-esque endurance in trudging through depths of uncomfortable unwatchability, and the scene where Pat Hingle stumbles half-drunk through a soundstage and almost knocks over a façade. “Ivy, you just met the most dangerous man in Gothaumble sumble” *smash*), but this movie. This movie. This'un.

No one gave Baker a
model sheet for the
Dark Overlord or, for
that matter, used the
words "Pulsating tooth
vagina on legs" while
describing it.

Allegedly, the only reason Lucas decided to go forth with Howard was because he was contractually obligated to produce another live-action film, and he felt he had the technology to make a man-duck believable. It’s a terrible reason to make a movie, forcing a narrative to be built around the frame of a technology, particularly considering the ultimate effect; Lucas wanted to see a live action man-duck walk the silver screen – as have we all since the dawn on mankind - and what he got instead was something that looked like a wizard’s wet beard eating a block of cheese.

It’s to Baker’s credit as the book’s artist that his caricatures of the assorted actors – Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones and Tim Robbins, just to namedrop a few for the unlikeliest SEO trifecta possible – are spot-on, but he absolutely refused to approach Howard in any other manner than his comic book likeness. Whether that was an artistic or editorial decision, it’s for the best, because the movie Howard did actually resemble something like a McDonald’s fish sandwich turned inside out and moved like a diminutive epileptic who was cursed by a wizard. Which is not even to mention the eyes, the eyes on that robot duck puppet looked like weary testicles lost forever in a fog of velvet toenails. Correct artistic decisions were made in the context of the comic, to be sure, in the face of what appeared to be a used albino teabag which was the size of a Selectric typewriter

Scripting the adaptation was editor Danny Fingeroth, who simultaneously seems like the best and worst candidate to approach the book – if you are, after all, merely adapting an existing script, then you’ll want an editor. With that being said, though, Marvel had on speed dial a whole cadre of Seventies vets whose drug-addled early days made them more than suitable for tackling the typical Howard vibe. Gerber, of course, would have been the best choice to write an adaptation, but he spent the period of promotion surrounding the movie’s release in an apparent state of shellshocked optimism, brutally let down by the finished product.

Rule one: never let Jeffrey Jones show you a videotape.

As far as goes the adaptation, Fingeroth did his duty in terms of representing in the book what happened in the film (minus the music by Thomas Dolby, which had been one of the few high points of the film – we only get the lyrics, none of which are exactly Maya Angelou. It’s pretty much an even trade, though, considering that Baker thankfully spared us any rendition of that walking rubber glove orgy that passed for Howard in the film). The absence of extrapolation, though, underlines the toothlessness of the source material – what had been one of Marvel’s odd, experimental, existential stabs of the 1970s had been repackaged, neutered, and dumbed down within an inch of its life.

The film has its strengths, too, in a perky Lea Thompson and a surprisingly comedically gifted Tim Robbins – I have to admit, I've seen the man in a thousand serious roles and I still think of him as a comic actor, if just because of this film ... and his hairstyle. Jeffrey Jones wins hearts and minds as a demonic Mister Rooney, although he’s let down by the number of scenes which requires laser beams to erupt from his eyes and a scary Michael Ironside voice dubbed over his real one. Imagine that happening in Deadwood. Now imagine Swearengan played by Ian McShane in the Howard costume. It’d be what the bacteria inside your intestines might look like in a striped suit.

Of course, these strengths don’t translate to the comic book adaptation, which suffers the worst of all possible worlds; no music, no performances (for better or worst), no special effects, but still the same lame plot, time-wasting chase scenes and allegedly comedic asides, all having shunted the elements which made Howard the Duck a desirable read in the first place. As far as the masterpieces of Kyle Baker goes, I rank this under, um, Nat Turner, but slightly higher than … um … the alien races he penciled for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. No, wait, higher than that.

Still, since Disney now owns Marvel, Lucasfilm – hell, AND the Muppets – live-action Howard the Duck could show up again anywhere. You might be in the middle of the next Star Wars movie or Muppet movie or the inevitable Star Wars Muppet Movie (don’t get excited, it’s just words) and right when you least expect it, BAM – Darth Howard! Consider yourself warned.

This was all shot in a single take, like the opening to Touch of Evil.

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE : THE MYSTERY OF THE CRIMSON AVENGER

World’s Finest Vol 1 No.131 February 1962 – THE MYSTERY OF THE CRIMSON AVENGER
Superman, Batman and Robin all glided out of National Periodical’s Golden Age and into DC Comics’ Silver Age without much in the way of cosmetic or substantive changes (as did Wonder Woman and Green Arrow, altho to not much acclaim), while other heroes got a complete revamp; you already know that Flash came out of his transition as a jet age speedster, Green Lantern a space cop, and the Atom as a size-changing scientist (which is, I think, also one of Stephen Hawking’s many accolades. Little known fact, that: Stephen Hawking can shrink to the size of an ant but retain his full human strength, thanks to the seemingly magic powers of his miraculous Wonder Chair. PS Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a ring that lets him turn himself into a sea serpent or to shoot lightning from his hands. Carl Sagan had death eyes. Check your library for more science facts), while Aquaman and Hawkman quietly adopted whole new backstories while maintaining a relatively unchanging cosmetic front.

Others, like the Black Canary, got a hall pass to Earth-1 and others were replaced with pale imitations (I’m looking at you, Red Tornado).

Like you can fuckin' talk, pixie boots.

A few – very few – other Golden Age heroes made the transition to post-war existence, with middling levels of success. Prairie troubadour cowboy hero The Vigilante, for instance, ca-a-a-a-asually strolled into Earth-1 a short while before his predecessor and the rest of the Seven Soldiers of Victory were rescued from time-tossed limbo , and Earth-1 Spectre and Wildcat just sort of appeared without much fanfare.

Preceding all of these, however, was a revamp of the Vigilante’s crimefighting comrade and DC’s first costume crimefighter, The Crimson Avenger, in the pages of World’s Finest.

In the midst of pursuing The Octopus Gang, a cadre of clever crooks who operate under a villainous mastermind wearing what appears to be fifty pounds of unwashed laundry as a costume, the World’s Finest team is interrupted by a brand-spanking new superhero calling himself The Crimson Avenger (after a “former lawman”, which he doesn’t specify if he meant the Earth-2 hero or mama Avenger’s little boy Crimson, a cop in his old neighborhood). Armed with a batch of bizarre weapons and decked out in a costume that resembles what you might get if you cross one of Santa’s elves with a Ku Klux Klansman, the well-meaning but only mostly-competent crimefighter gets on Superman’s and Batman’s mutual nerves almost right away.

Oh my god, Batman actually detectived something!

I’m not a hundred percent sure why that is, he’s actually surprisingly good at beating up criminals, despite being a doughy middle-aged inventor in his spare time. The only reason he ends up stepping on any of the established super-toes in the region isn’t really his fault, it’s because Robin steps in the way of one of his super-scientific weapons – and isn’t that what Robin is there for? There’s a reason Batman’s always standing behind him in all of those promo shots – “Shoot the boy!” he seems to cry.

The Avenger is loaded up with a terrific armament of weapons of his own invention, including a gun which shoots flame-rings, another gun which shoots restricting force bubbles (which Robin learned at his cost), yet another gun which turns people into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, a ring full of knockout gas, and a sedan-mounted battering ram cannon WHICH SHOOTS A GIANT FLYING ROBOTIC RAM’S HEAD and already he’s my favorite superhero ever, this guy.  Plus his insignia kinda of looks like a triple-A Baseball franchise logo and I admire his bold sense of graphic design.

C.A. unfortunately DOES end up getting kidnapped by sea-themed supervillain The Octopus, a baddie who resembles an old comedy villain from this Ed Wheelan strip I remember (Bear with me until this week’s Truly Gone&Forgotten feature on Thursday) and his weapons are turned against Supes and Bats, but isn’t it sort of their fault? If only they’d decided to work WITH the new Crimson Avenger instead of discouraging him at every turn, maybe they could have ALL gotten guns which turn people into fat floating babies.

This is hilarious.

JIMMY OLSEN, RED-HEADED ROMEO : DAY FIVE

For the week leading up to Valentine's Day, Your Humble Editor will be presenting a selection of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen's romantic gal pals. Today, we meet ...

Jimmy, those are "Aunt Kisses"

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.74 (December 1963) – Jimmy Olsen’s Secret Love
Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane are terrible for one another – Jimmy is impulsive, thoughtless and needy, Lucy is fickle, jealous and hectoring. But what if they adopted completely different disguises and personalities, would it work out then? No, because that’s nuts.

Still, that’s exactly what happened in an epic series of romantic misadventures which ran through Jimmy Olsen comics from 1963 to 1965 – even The Crisis On Infinite Earths only took a year!

First off, the key coincidence – Lucy is assigned by the head of the airline to go undercover as a rotten fink, reporting on slacking airline employees. Sure, it’d be nice if Lucy were catching the mechanics getting high by the fuel pumps or the pilots flying with their dicks out, but no, she just starts handing out demerits for stewardesses who flirt with passengers. A thousand demerits for Hufflepuff!

To accomplish this, she dons a red wig and a phony British accent which I have to imagine sounds like a college kid who refuses to stop re-enacting Monty Python and the Holy Grail for you, and emerges out the other side as Sandra Rogers, a movie starlet visiting America for the first time. I guess having that backstory is SUPER-IMPORTANT in her mission to admonish the flight staff having moments of genuine human attraction to other living beings, an emotion which is alien to Lucy Lane.

Jimmy Olsen, for his part, is disguised as Magi The Magnificent, a “famous” magician (BUT HOW, HE’S MADE UP) in order to sneak up and catch jewel thief “Slick Eddie”. Of course, Slick Eddie might recognize Olsen, which is why he’s adopted the subtle disguise of a man in a tuxedo and top hat. Still, the best part about it is how they weren’t sure the story was going to be O.Henry-ish enough so they had to name Jimmy “Magi”…

They have fun together, these two.

Eventually Sandra/Lucy and Magi/Jimmy meet on the airplane/flying whorehouse (evidently) where they hit it off tremendously, united by Magi’s hatred of blondes and Sandra’s hatred of Jimmy Olsen. With so much in common, how can the romance go awry?

It ends like most Jimmy Olsen stories should, with Lucy and Jimmy trapped on top of a frozen glacier dying from exposure.  Superman comes along and ruins the whole thing, but at least he separates the young lovers and prevents them from living an unhealthy lie…

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.78 (July 1964) –The Return of Jimmy’s Lost Love!
…or did he? Six months later, Jimmy and Lucy are back at each other’s throat, sniping about imagined slights and sabotaging every attempt at even basic civil conversation. These kids really have it all, I hope it works out.

When Lucy is given another undercover assignment – someone’s been stealing things from planes, and this time it isn’t the TSA officials – she leaps at the chance to become Sandra again. By terrific coincidence, Jimmy happens to see her crossing the tarmac, and since he keeps a disguise kit in the trunk of his car – this is where most other psychopaths keep bodies, but bless Jimmy for defying the stereotype – he makes a rush change into Magi the Magnificent Bastard.

The pair help catch the thief – he’s been sawing his way through the nose cones of planes and stealing bags with the help of a long hook, and then I guess the planes depressurize once they’re in the air and everyone dies? – and then, suddenly left alone without excuses to dodge one another, they’re confronted with their lies and the chance to finally come clean, admit their true identities, and come to long-sought realizations about the truth of themselves.

But no, Magi just says he’s going to fuck off to Tibet for a while and Sandra says she’s got to go pursue her career – her movie career, by the way, which is kind of an easy career to check up on – so that’s the end of that, right? Back to their spiteful, bitter romance go Jimmy and Lucy …

"Me, a living mass of ground beef - a witness! Gosh!"

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.82 (January 1965) –The Wedding of Magi and Sandra!
…goddamnit! Bored on Saturday evening, Lucy dresses up as Sandra and prowls the park looking for muggers to belittle, and Jimmy happens to be driving by so – how big is Metropolis, anyway? I swear to god, half of these stories someone just happens to be walking or driving by at the right moment, it’s a city of what 10 million people? Or is it twelve? Twelve whole people, four streets, and all the storefronts are Superman-based, it’s like Downtown Disney but people live there who aren’t forced to by secret corporate police. One assumes.

Anyway, “Magi” craps out some lame story about having teleported to Lucy’s side from Tibet, and then helps emasculate a mugger, feeling for the first time the joy Lucy experiences when she breaks a man’s ego to brittle ribbons. Having lived – truly lived – for the first time in his life, Jimmy caps off the post-coital experience by jumping into the ocean and faking Magi’s death.

Lucy gets to mourn for a panel before we shoot into the unspecified future to find Jimmy glumly proposing to a joyless Lucy, and the two are off to a resort to stew in their bitterness as they wait for the justice of the peace to sleep one off (he claims it’s measles, but come on).

Only food play keeps them together.

The weirdest part about this chapter in the Sandra and Magi saga is that Jimmy and Lucy … go through with it? They actually end up married, and then resent it immediately, secretly plotting behind each other’s back to end it with an annulment (or murder, probably murder, I have a feeling it might end in murder).

When a snooping Lucy finds Jimmy’s disguise kit, complete with familiar Magi costume, she shows up to dinner dressed as Sandra, and pretty soon the two are throwing down in one of those public fights some couples have where it looks like they might start fucking on the table if no one comes along and hoses ‘em down? All throwing cake in each other’s face and sneering insults through the frosting. Face it, you’re turned on.

In the end, Lucy and Jimmy comes to some sort of acceptance about their mutual deception and find out they were accidentally not married anyway, by the contrivance law of that county as established in the late eighteen-hundreds. Weirdly, the couple fade into some sort of pleased acceptance of the absurdity of their situation, allegedly having gained additional respect for one another (they end up married for real – albeit briefly – in Jimmy Olsen 100, besieged by an army of Jimmy’s paranormal exes, but there’s another story). I guess the lesson here is fall in love with a dressed up, one-dimensional version of your significant other and pine for that peerless perfection in your heart all your days, until you find out it was all a cynical lie perpetrated by a partner whose words of love were born and killed only on their own lips, stranger to their heart. Mazel tov!

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

VALENTINE WEEK : TRULY GONE & FORGOTTEN : SPIDER-WIDOW AND THE RAVEN

I have no idea why she's doing that thing over on the side there.

She’s a fright-masked debutante with un penchant for vigilantism and a pocketful of black widow spiders, he’s a man with a giant purple bird costume and what appear to be khaki-color Dockers from the JC Penney’s collection.  Together they’re the Nick and Nora Charles of golden age comics except for about a hundred reasons – can they find true love in an age before Craigslist?

The Spider Widow and her eventual inamorata and sidekick The Raven are a pair of Quality Comics superheroes who never quite made it over into the mainstream DC Universe after the latter company snatched up the former’s copyrights, which is why you may have seen Plastic Man and Blackhawk comics in the sixties and seventies, but never a Spider Widow title. Well, that’s A reason.

Cab fare.

Unremarkable on her own, Spider Widow (aka Dianne Grayton) debuted as a bored debutante who discovers one day that she can control spiders, which I can do too if I have a stiff piece of cardboard and a drinking glass. “Whoosh,” I command, “Get thrown out my front door like you didn’t expect that to happen, spider,” and it does! Deciding to fight crime and Nazis, Spider Widow dons a rubber hag mask and otherwise form-fitting black dress and descends into the nightmares of criminals who have to now deal not only with a fear of poisonous spiders but an sexual attraction to a horrible witch with terrific tits.

She’s not solo for long when she’s joined by The Raven, another amateur vigilante with a pretty great bird costume which he ruins by painting the legs green. Fuck are you, Raven, a parrot? Swooping in to assist the Widow, Raven was alerted to the danger by a Help Wanted ad directed at the spidery superheroine. I assume it was a help wanted ad, anyway, not something in the personals. “SSW (Single Spider Widow) seeks BFM (Bird-Faced Man) for NSGT (Nazi-smashing Good Times) for fun, friendship, more. Pls include photo, NFB (No Fat Birds)”

The Spider Widow and Raven end up getting involved in a back-and-forth with The Phantom Lady, Quality’s highest-profile female superhero, with whom the Widow engages in a deadly – if temporary – feud crossing into both of their titles (Police and Feature Comics). I have to assume it all resolved itself in a subsequent ménage a trois, and so did you probably. Comics! They’re for the emotionally mature!

JIMMY OLSEN, RED-HEADED ROMEO : DAY FOUR

For the week leading up to Valentine's Day, Your Humble Editor will be presenting a selection of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen's romantic gal pals. Today, we meet ...

This has GOT to be treason or something.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.69 (June 1963) – Jimmy Olsen’s Viking Sweetheart
It must be interesting to have a fan club, think of all the ways they celebrate your life and accomplishments – arranging scrapbooks and photo albums, organizing events, building robot Viking maidens for you to fuck. It’s like being a king!

Jimmy takes his fan club on an ill-fated ski trip which is derailed by our red-headed hero hound-dogging after a disinterested Lucy Lane instead of hanging with his devoted pals. Not soon after ditching his entourage, Jimmy finds a red-headed Viking maiden trapped in the snow, and in short order begins a whirlwind romance with the flame-haired Holga. Holga, say it slow and it’s like a chimney fire choking itself out.

Unfortunately for fans of keeping their lunches down, Holga turns out to be a sophisticated robot – why, her control panel has a viewscreen and NINE settings, including “activate”! – under the control of Jimmy’s fan club. Ostensibly they’re trying to shore up his confidence and stick it to Lucy Lane and not use the recorder feature to create a Jimmy Olsen sextape … or so I assume. I don’t know how deep their fandom runs.

The Olsen/Holga relationship goes all the way to engagement and then to the next step any young couple takes immediately thereafter, meeting Jackie Onassis. I think Jimmy’s fan club may have crossed over from merely horrifying to actually violating federal law in some fashion. Do you think they were at all panicking when Jimmy proposed? “This is getting way out of hand, Alan” “Shut up Dennis, I’m fixing it, I can fix this!” It’s like the Breaking Bad of using robot Vikings to seduce your journalistic hero.

In the end, Lucy stumbles across the control panel and viewscreen and, furious that she’d been thrown over for a robot – you and Jennifer Aniston, sister -  Lucy hits the second most baffling button on the panel, “Treat Jimmy coldly”. Why do they even have that button? Worse yet, what does the one labeled “Act independently” do? Let’s not give robots too much power, kids, that’s how we get Terminators.

Why even HAVE this button??

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.73 (December 1963) – Jimmy’s Inter-Dimensional Romance
Jimmy’s got good luck with women from other realms and dimensions finding him so attractive that they have to cross immeasurable distances just to be with him. Welp, that luck’s about to change!

This is fucked up.

Trying his hand at sculpting – like he doesn’t have enough to keep him occupied – Jimmy’s finds himself to compelled to carve a particular likeness which, the following dawn, becomes a living woman named Rona, from the 7th Dimension! Even more shockingly, she claims to have been trapped in that marble block, and good lord how did Jimmy Olsen afford a marble block? Cub reporter’s salaries must be immense.

Rona falls for her savior, creating for him with her mental powers a chemical he can drink (always with drinking chemicals, this guy) which gives him a Superman physique. In fact, mentally creating chemical drinks out of thin air isn’t only how Four Loko does it, it’s Rona’s stock in trade, because it turns out – SHE’S A HORRIBLE MURDERER! With a dozen husbands poisoned and turned into statues (I don’t know how that works) behind her, Jimmy was set to become number thirteen! And still, compared to a life with Lucy Lane, how bad would it be?

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.85 (June 1965) –Love Me, Love My Beast!
Hey, that’s what my tattoo says!

I never had a dream that didn't start like this...

A radio telescope trained on distant space brings saucy Shara of the planet Salan to Earth’s shores, and into Jimmy’s arms. Accompanying the alien ambassador is Gnor, a pancake-faced dung beetle with arms for tits and Robin Williams’ body hair problem, her loyal pet who will not leave her side. Which is handy if you happen to ask yourself “I wonder what Clint Howard would look like in a tangerine poncho covered with pubic hair” because you can just look to the side and go “Oh, right, like that.”

Gnor isn’t merely a persistent pet, of course, he’s a parasitic alien who feeds on the life force of others by way of what is politely described as a “leash” around his neck but which is probably his weird alien genitals. Exhausting Shara’s energy supply, Gnor foists his enervating glottal tubesteak on Jimmy and starts suckin’.

Luckily Superman comes along at the end and causes Gnor to blow up, just straight-up murderin’ that guy, just … just POP, and that’s that. Tsk.

...And I never had one that didn't end like this.