TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : SUPER LUCK

Oh, no, never burst into a room when someone is flapping their pages, man.

Appearing in only two pages of Big Hero No.1 (September 1966), it’s understandable that teenage superhero Super Luck doesn’t stand out in anyone’s memory – after all, he was sharing a page count with Jigsaw, the man of stretchable meat and broken crockery. Imagine what kind of gimmick you’d have to apply in order to eclipse Jigsaw in the readers’ memories. “My erections make criminals moon walk!” cries a strange figure dressed like a rooster and driving a piano, as a for instance, is the first and most mild possibility which comes to mind.  Basically, you have to walk more than a few moon miles to overshadow Jigsaw.

Whatever you gotta tell yourself to make it through
the day, little man, whatever you gotta do.

Super Luck is secretly Homer Glitch, which is a name I swear sounds familiar but when I looked it up online, all I found were a lot of forum posts about something going wrong in a Simpsons video game. Blame the new media, I guess.

A stockboy at a local drug store, Homer is also allegedly the world’s #1 comic fan – a title I wince at seeing applied to any character except Comics McCormick. In fact, like Comics McCormick, Glitch possesses a wild imagination and a fascination with comic books which sees him transported into essentially the world within the pages of any comic book – what he calls “Comicdon’s Danger Dimension”.

Uttering the magic words “Whammo-Pow-Yipes-Crack-Zap-Kazoom” – described in the captions as “mystic words spoken only in super-hero land”, but which I’d bet you’d hear if you listened in on someone with Tourette’s Syndrome while they were masturbating – Homer is transformed into Super Luck, a flying boy who can summon good and bad luck avatars by rubbing the emblem on his shirt. And rubbing it, and rubbing it, “faster … faster … Super Luck rubs his good luck emblem … quickly the world’s #1 comic fan rubs his emblem again …” and then, I assume, you hear  “Whammo-Pow-Yipes-Crack-Zap-Kazoom” from the other side of a bathroom door.

Rather than physical gratification, what Super Luck is able to summon with his frantic friction is things like a horde of killer black cats, or an ice-cutting clover leaf buzzsaw, with which he is able to save the portly but fiery superhero Ignito from the menace of Monstro, a doughy guy who wears a Kaiser helmet, orange briefs and a spiked belt. Fetish enthusiast or 1980s wrestler, you tell me.

Of course, the entire affair is wholly imagined by Homer, who returns to consciousness, sleepy and disheveled, amidst the scattered ruins of gleefully manhandled comic books. Listen, I don’t want to over-hammer the point but … that wasn’t a “good luck emblem” he was rubbing, clearly.

Isn't this from an old Dan Clowes comic?