Thursday, January 30, 2014

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : THE SENTINELS


They probably ended up in The L.A.W. but I can't make heads nor tails of that series.
Among the Charlton Action Heroes who apparently didn’t come over when DC Comics bought the company’s intellectual property – or were unloved enough that no one bothered to revive them once they were over, one or the other – was this timely trio of Beatniks-turned-baddie-bashers, THE SENTINELS.

Actually a group of domino-masked counter-culture musicians troubadoring together under the name of The Protestors, the soon-to-be-Sentinels were rock-jawed leading man Rick Strong, beautiful blonde Cindy Carson, and Crunch Wilson, the delicious snack just bursting with nuts. Gifted by their dying landlord – secretly a super-genius scientist on the run from the Communists – they become, in order, HELIOS (gifted with flight), MENTALIA (gifted with mentals) and superstrong THE BRUTE (gifted with power gloves or something).

This seems alarmingly intimate.

Mind you, you’re not going to see real live Beatnik action ripped from the headlines in any magazine over which the Comics Code Authority continues to swing its far-reaching dick, so the Sentinels are portrayed as the unlikeliest Beats since all your friends in college discovered On The Road and started wearing turtlenecks; they love the government, they hate commies, they hop to for any authority figure who flashes a badge and they’re only in the superhero and/or music game until (Rick) the fame and money rolls in, (Cindy) she’s discovered by Hollywood and (Crunch) that pro football contract arrives.

Still, musically, the Protestors’ catalog contains some of the most head-scratching lyrics of all time, including:

Got me a great big explodin' bomb
Fixin' to drop it on Vietnam
But I lost my way and instead
I dropped it on my Uncle's head


And

I was sitting in the jailhouse late last night
Getting really bugged by all the peace and quiet
When an idea came to me that seemed all right
And I decided that I would incite a riot

Then I flung a pie into the warden's face
And he yelled of tricks like that you should be wary
Then he grabbed me and he said you're a disgrace
Now I'm eating bread and water in solitary!


Compelling. Woody Guthrie they ain't. Still, remember all the backlash when The Sentinels went electric?

You can tell!

Until their fortunes kick in, The Sentinels battle against Mind-Bender and his enormous bronze superman Titan, get a surprise visit from Sarge Steel, and then vanish completely in comicdom’s most familiar exit, the “You’ll see more of them next month!” blurb.

I ... couldn't say.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE : EARTH WITHOUT A JUSTICE LEAGUE


Justice League of America vol.1 No.37 – EARTH WITHOUT A JUSTICE LEAGUE
Bear with your Humble Editor just a tetch.

In DC Comics, there was a long-running tradition – which I’m sure anyone reading this blog is probably already intimately familiar – of teaming the young, modern-day heroes of the Justice League with the veteran superheroes of the original super-team, The Justice Society of America.

Now, way back in the early days of the JLA, smack in the Silver Age, this required traveling between parallel earths, digging some old heroes out of storage, matching lookalike heroes with their younger and otherwise identical OR completely different counterparts, lots of duplicate names, et cetera ...

(I mean, your humble editor thinks often about the chummy relationship that existed between the Supermen of Earth-1 and Earth-2, which seemed to be a relationship between equals. They treated each other  not just like peers but like beloved relatives, cousins maybe, even though they were essentially the same person with a couple of decades separating them. Come to think of it, Superman was always pretty chummy with any duplicate selves who ever popped up from some pseudo-scientific nonsense, from Superman-X to Supermen-Red and –Blue. Maybe the guy just really likes himself. Hm)

Now, this particular team-up was the third of the series, so they’d already cashed in on the spectacle of the affair, then used the second occasion to introduce a third earth of evil superheroes (Which, technically, I guess you’d call those supervillains. You’d think I’d never read any of these things before).

Having gone large-concept previously, the storyline for this crossover involves underdog Earth-2 superhero and all-around hot-boiled fuckup Johnny Thunder (who commands a magic wish-granting Bahdnesian Thunderbolt with the power of impolite grammar). Curious about his own Earth-1 counterpart, Johnny wishes his way across the gulf of reality into the apartment of the other world’s crooked, black-hearted Johnny Thunder. The criminal Johnny, in short order, steals control of the Thunderbolt from the original Johnny and goes about setting up an unconquerable criminal empire – but first, to do away with the Justice League!

So Thunderbolt obeys his new master’s wishes and flits back and forth through time, preventing the formation of the Justice League by intervening in the members’ individual origin stories. In short order, T-Bolt shock-blocks the bolt of lightning which had been the vital component in transforming Police Scientist Barry Allen into the super-fast Flash, turns Krypton’s unstable uranium core into stable lead and thereby erases the need to send little baby Superman to safety on Earth, and banishes the “yellow radiation” (which is radiation that the huskies have peed on, don’t eat it, even if someone tells you it tastes like lemonade) which doomed Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s predecessor. Additionally, he smashes the Atom’s white dwarf energy source and short-circuits the machine which teleported the Martian Manhunter to Earth. (He also somehow stops Green Arrow’s, Aquaman’s and Wonder Woman’s origins although two of those must have involved getting the heroes’ moms to change their minds about having kids. Hell, maybe all three. Maybe he’s persuasive).

Eventually, T-bolt – of course – makes his way to Batman, and how does he keep Bruce Wayne from becoming Batman, using only the magic powers that allow him to chest-bump lightning and travel through time? Well, he could have merely slapped the gun out of Joe Chill’s hand, but that’s apparently too uninspired. I suppose he also could have had the movie break in the middle and everyone went home from the theater too early to get mugged. Maybe he could’ve put a detour sign in front of Crime Alley, although calling a murder-besotted urban byway “Crime Alley” already seems like enough of a detour sign to make your average pedestrian reconsider their walk home. Maybe he could’ve given Joe Chill a happier childhood.

It’s a tough call, you have the entire universe of possibilities open to you – and keep in mind that, despite acting under the orders of a criminal tyrant, T-Bolt has managed to perform acts of incalculable good while circumventing these superheroic origins. Up to this point, he’s spared the Martian Manhunter the exile from his people, he’s saved the life of Abin Sur, and he’s reprieved the uncountable species and peoples of Krypton from extinction. Surely he’ll want to remove Batman from the timeline by an act of incalculable good.

Nope, here’s what T-Bolt did:



Apparently the way to convince Batman not to be Batman is if, on the first night of his career, he gets his ass so badly handed to him that he immediately retires. Like, he didn’t even have a chance to get knocked down, this makes it look like two shots to the breadbasket and a little chin music nixes the Caped Crusader’s drive for justice. “Oh shit, crooks might punch me! I never considered that!” “I thought bats were immune to punches!” Maybe Alfred told him that his bat-costume was magic and would turn him invisible. Maybe Alfred is a dick.

Of course, without that last thought balloon, it would’ve looked like Thunderbolt had just helped murder him. Problem solved!

Later in the issue, Thunderbolt is ordered to create criminal equivalents of the Justice League, and that’s how this unshaven mouth-breather becomes Batman.


I mean, to be fair, he looks like he can take a punch.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : ZIPPO

The Human Segway of Justice! 

Police detective Joe Blair is also an inventor of some note and manages to create a fantastic set of high-speed carbon steel wheels and a belt engine which turns him into the superheroic equivalent of Mom’s Taxi – ZIPPO!

Here lies Zippo, The First Guy Ever Buried In A Monkey Suit Like That

Lacking any other superpowers, Zippo luckily and routinely finds himself in situations where going very fast is the only solution – there’s a few car chases, a concave wall-crawling situation here or there when centrifugal force is the only answer, and of course using his wheels to saw through safe walls and such. Apparently his wheels can spin fast enough to drill through steel; I’m fairly sure that would inevitably end with Zippo’s broken ankles dragging an unconscious body through the streets at top speeds.

Although I’m only speculating, Zippo may be one of the very few superheroes whose cowl-fin actually serves a legitimate purpose, but I’m assuming he uses it like a rudder. Whadda I know, I’m no scientist/cop/weird roller skating superhero, maybe it’s only there so he can pick up AM radio.

Illustration by a four-year old Eliot R Brown.

What’s for certain, though, is that Zippo’s necessarily crouched and ready-for-speed pose combined with the twin exhaust fumes constantly sputtering from his belt-engine make him seem like the only superhero in history whose power appears to have something to do with terrible farts.

The end of Zippo.


Wednesday, January 22, 2014

HEY DONNA / WHY YOU WANT TO DO ME LIKE THAT?


DONNA MATRIX
First thing out of the gate, credit to Donna Matrix creator Mike Saenz where credit is due; At a time when digital publishing was dynamically on the rise, comics were still drawn in the traditional manner. Saenz – the original artist on First Comics’ digitally-illustrated comic Shatter, and then the writer and artist on the first digital graphic novel Iron Man:Crash – was willing to implement new technologies in the creation of comics, even as imperfect as they were. Saenz' pages were illustrated on the computer but – as the technology hit a roadblock at that stage of production – had to be printed out then traditionally photographed in order to be printed as a physical comic.

Those dead eyes are judging you for
reading this comic.
The current model of comics – particularly mainstream comics, assembled more or less in factory conditions with individual art chores broken down to steps handled by different artists and departments – not only allows for digital creation, it encourages it. While the end product of Saenz' earliest work may have been necessarily imperfect, someone had to take the first step towards digital comics, or else we’d be sitting here in the early days of the twenty-first century never having heard the name “Greg Land”.  Yep, we’d just be idly swinging our feet over the edges of our gilded thrones, dangling our toes into crystal-clear water running from cool mountain streams, attended by super-robots of the future attending our every need, watching the pollutant-free jetcars speed across a sapphire sky, at one with God and Nature, ignorant of sin and Greg Land.

All of that being said, there is that pesky ol' necessary imperfection of Saenz' comic book work to address, as the technology becomes something of an impediment to artistry. Even by 1993, the 3-D modelling he uses in his debut effort with Reactor Comics – the slightly spooneristic but, come on, admittedly clever Donna Matrix – has the nasty habit of making every character look like a package of hot dogs speared on a hatrack. I mean, they make the Money for Nothing guys look like hot shit wrapped in a cat’s pancake, so it’s got that going for it, right?

You could gleefully wallow in the technical achievements – as modest as they seem by contemporary standards – of Donna Matrix, were it not for the fact that Donna Matrix is a comic book about a rogue sex bot largely comprised of visually incomprehensible panels of vector edges and sound effects.

"I get my money for nothing and my kicks for free!"
Sex bots – fandom's fascination with sticking their dicks inside a walking Cuisinart must date back to the stone age, when early Cro Magnon nerds shouted at the guys painting antelope on the cave walls “Make the tits bigger!” You can’t blame them – do you know how long it was after motion pictures had been invented before someone made a porno on them? A YEAR EARLIER. It’s only human nature to wonder how long it’ll take before any great advance in science comes in natural flesh color and can be easily cleaned with a wet-nap.

Saenz, additionally, already had one foot in the other side of sex-in-early-technology, having been the creator of something called Virtual Valerie, which your humble editor had to Google and apparently it’s a game where you take an imaginary hooker to a motel on your computer and use your keyboard to stick things in her hoo-ha until she climaxes. It was apparently a Mac thing. I had a PCjr.

The opening five or six pages of Donna Matrix cover the short jump from Robo-Prostitute to Robo-Prostitute-Terminator in a concise story which would have made for a better-than-average entry into Creepy or 1984, maybe even (post-Eastman) Heavy Metal, one of the oversized horror and sci-fi magazines which owed a lot to the EC model of shock and suspense;  a gentleman masochist buys hisself a sexbot, but sexbots are prohibited by law from indulging in any kind of rough stuff (Apparently the government had legislated the morality of BDSM but not the morality of lifelike sex bots, which I guess implies the politicians were once again bowing to the influence of Big Sexbot). Illegally modeming what he thinks is a BDSM subroutine that he can Ctrl-Alt-Delete on his sexbot’s monitor (did I get the terminology right?), it turns out he actually got himself some kind of super-commando routine instead and gets snuffed when his sexbot dishes out a “punishment” that’s slightly more capital than carnal. The safe word is “EYAAAAAARGH”

All well and good, it would have been a nice contribution to an anthology at this point, but IT WOULD NOT ENNNND. Heck, I suppose if you went through all of the trouble to create the 3-D models, you may as well have them wander around in front of fluorescent shoeboxes blurting dull dialogue until an orange-and-white panel implies something’s exploded.

What do you think it was going to say in that first panel before it was interrupted?

There’s no real story after the first few pages, just Donna Matrix encountering things to blow up, one after the other, and everyone’s face looks like a clear plastic pillow filled with hot dog meat. Likewise, the printing doesn't do the limited palette and grim lighting any favors, so that the often-slightly-blurred figures are additionally muddled and colored in an assortment of earth tones and shades of chewed food to form a palette which we’re calling “The Chili Disagrees With Dad On The Flagstone Patio”.

Part of what makes Donna Matrix a bit of a slog is the potential of what could have been – true, the story was thin, pixelated gruel, but the foundation was there. The lettering, for instance, was fully traditional, if done digitally, and the word balloons and bold, stentorian typeface really fail to take advantage of the purported depth of the 3-D modelling which formed the foundation of the book. Likewise, the sound effects could have been lifted from any 90s Marvel comic, and shortened the depth of field, so the figures came to better resemble balloon animals infiltrating a Viewmaster slide.

Most disappointingly – in the back of the book, Saenz's character sketches were presented for review. They ended up looking much better than the finished characters within the book, which seemed to imply that there was not only a cannier design sense at work in the book than the technology allowed for, but a sense of design that probably would have been better served by having been in the service of a more fully-aware storyteller.

Donna Matrix is, after all, a story about a human(oid) being reduced to an object for the purposes of physical pleasure who then inverts her obligation to serve and becomes a deadly threat – at the very least, it’s a story that reveals volumes about contemporary American male middle class entitlement and its puritanical dread of retribution. Or, in the case of what actually happens in Donna Matrix, Blat Blat Blat CHOM.

That's not a nice thing to say, fat and tired Steven Seagal-lookin' guy!

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE : THE UNDERWORLD OLYMPICS ’76!



BATMAN No.272-275 February-April 1976 – THE UNDERWORLD OLYMPICS ’76!
Before multi-issue story arcs were the norm, DC Comics began experimenting lightly with abandoning their largely-episodic formula for three- and four-issue continuing stories in some of their flagship titles. Although DC’s books had maintained, since the Silver Age, an internal consistency (and no shortage of those little “See Issue such-and-such” caption boxes that would encourage the reader to go dig up some comic from years in the past), they’d only rarely, before the mid-Seventies, experimented with much more than a two-issue adventure separated by a single cliffhanger.

There's something tremendously
entertaining about The World's
Greatest Detective using the
phrase"How come?"
Naturally, Batman was one of these titles, and what with 1976 being the year of the Olympics in Montreal, this format experiment crossed over with the Olympic theme and came up with – THE UNDERWORLD OLYMPICS.

The concept of the story is decidedly Silver Age – International teams of criminals are invited to compete in a Crime-athalon (I just made up that word, but I powerfully wish it had been in the comic) for the honor of taking home the acclaim of Best Crime People Award ‘76, I think. Even with the extended format, brevity is an issue, so rather than being broken out by countries, the international crooks and murderers visiting Gotham for the felonious festivities are organized by continent.

With that in mind, let’s meet the teams!

Representing South America is … well, we don’t actually learn their names – mind you, there is a big bruiser almost inevitably named “Pancho” who gets sacrificed early on to distract Batman and the Gotham City Airport customs agents (I have their first five albums) from the incoming international ne'er-do-wells. What we do know about the South Americans is that they’re characteristically adorned in traditional costume and armed with regional weaponry, their Bolivian representative carrying an Esada Brousse and an Argentinian player hucking bolas and punching soccer balls right into the goal, for instance.

The European squad covers a lot of ground and, additionally, gets names; The Italian Paolo – who, as the world’s classiest criminal, is portrayed in a loud red tie and fiestaware green suit, playing with his balls through his pants pocket – acts as Team Leader. Serving under him is the cantankerous British Cobb (heir to the salad fortune), the stern and easy-to-anger German Helmut, and the world’s stealthiest Russian, the red-bearded former KGB agent Boris who actually manages to sneak up on Batman despite wearing something like fourteen parkas and a pair of knee-high hobnailed boots.

With the South American and European teams eating up the page count in the first two issues, things have to condense a tetch in issue three, so the African and Asian contingent band together as The Afro-Asian Bloc, which sounds like something you’d hear struck at a drum circle. 

Marge Gunderbat.
Despite representing two whole continents AND the sub-continent of India, the Bloc – and when you say it like that, it sounds like a wrestling clique – is represented by only four members; There’s Calabar of Nigeria, Quong of China (decked out in a lavender People’s Uniform, so I defy you to suggest there’s not an interesting backstory to that character) and Hartley, a Great White Hunter type because honkeys gotta stick their noses into everything.

The leader of the Afro-Asian Bloc ends up being a sort of criminal superstar, Amba Kadiri, “The Scourge of Bombay”, whose razor-sharp fingernails and martial arts prowess end up almost besting Batman. The Caped Crusader has even heard of her – this is back in the days when Batman was still a mortal human bound by mildly fantastic but otherwise common-sense limitations of knowledge and ability, you understand, and not a guy who memorized Interpol every morning before breakfast and could beat five different Supermans with a single nerve pinch - so that implied she was something special. Yep, special, dangerous, a match for Batman, a female Indian martial artist with a deadly reputation that spreads half a world, lots to discover about a character like that, lots of stories to tell ... She never ever shows up ever again, the end.

And lastly, there are the North American scum; An unnamed Mexican fella (And before you ask, yes, complete with sombrero and sarape. Of COURSE he is, this is comics), an unnamed Canadian fella or at least I assume he’s Canadian because he’s got a perm and a buckskin leather jacket and it’s the Seventies, plus an easy-to-anger bald fella named  Joey One-Eye of indeterminate national origin (Unless we have an independent island nation of kvetchy cyclopses floating around Lake Michigan which no one mentioned to me before). Also filling the copious Nor-Am ranks are an African-American fella with the unlikely codename of Gopher and a Native American named Duke, which is possibly irony.

Batman's having a "fat day".
The covers and the title seem to imply some globe-spanning superheroics, but the action all takes place in Gotham City with each team of baddies being assigned an esoteric and needlessly complicated crime scheme at random – and when I say it’s “at random” I mean from start to finish, half of the things the Crime Olympians are doing don’t count as any crime above, say, noise violations. 

To wit: The Europeans have to steal a cannon, disassemble it, smuggle it to a Gotham Bank, steal it from the bank, fire it from Gotham and retrieve the shell which has a safe deposit from the bank in it, YOU COULD HAVE JUST ROBBED THE FUCKING BANK. 

Additionally, the seriousness of the crimes vary arbitrarily – While the Afro-Asian bloc only has to break into a few safes, the South American team, by contrast, has to murder a guy, abduct his body, then hide the body inside a park statue. Gross.

Despite a gimmicky premise that doesn't really pay out in long-term dividends, the arc has a lot to say for itself. In regards to the art, particularly, it boasts the excellent Ernie Chan on full art duties on three issues and inking the incomparable Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez on the first issue – and, strangely, the art for that issue doesn't work. It’s not terrible, mind you, but somehow the combination of Garcia-Lopez and Chan combines to make something actually lesser than their individual efforts. Terrible shame. Really jarring. I’m still in therapy. I've come back home, but I've not returned whole…

The most entertaining takeaway from the four issue arc, though, is Batman’s utterly bizarre complement of battle cries which he seems to have generated randomly from an ESL phrasebook, pretty much all of which I've assembled here in some sort of ultra-violent visual beat poem:

That last one – I love that he thought the first part and said the second part out loud. 

And finally, the coup de grace:

I AM THE NIGHT!



Thursday, January 16, 2014

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : THE TORPEDO


Marvel produced a lot of also-ran superheroes in the 1970s who’d eventually go on to middling success here and there (little-known do-gooders such as The Punisher, Wolverine, Ghost Rider; I think they’ve been in a cartoon once or twice)  as part of their second-wave of post-Silver Age spandex Samaritans. Some of them never had a real chance, such as Brock Jones - the man whose name sounds like a can of dogfood trying to anonymously check into a hotel - aka The Torpedo!

Kind of unfortunate that your suit is nuclear-powered, then.

The original superheroic Torpedo snuffed it in his first outing, leaving Brock to adopt the mantle of The Flying Man With Fans On His Hands, a task he undertook with immense courage and dedication for something like six appearances before he ate it. Adding insult to injury, Jones bought the farm in an issue of ROM Spaceknight which is a pretty far cry from snagging a whole issue of the Marvel Graphic Novel for yourself with a cover swiped from Michelangelo’s La Pieta.  At least he got to keep the incredibly stupid hat.

In the interim, The Torpedo headlined a pair of Marvel Premieres, issues which tested the limits of Gaspar Saladino’s ability to letter the sound effect made when someone’s atomic wrist-turbines buffet against a rocket man’s helmet. To date, Brock’s most heroic feat was saving New York from a runaway nuclear power station in the middle of meltdown smack in mid-city, and the danger-meter of which also bore an odometer.

The Torpedo was later succeeded by a pair of plucky kids who discovered his costume and took to the skies under the name Turbo, proving that you actually could make The Torpedo’s superhero nom de guerre sound more like a shady brand of prophylactic.

How many miles do you think this nuclear plant has on it?





Wednesday, January 15, 2014

CASEFILE OF THE CLOCKWORK FUCKUP PART 3

Learn the astonishing true origin of the Red Tornado for this week.

V3.0 – 10 Stack shit upon shit 20 goto 10

"I'm Ed Tornado, nice to meet you."
At this point in Red Tornado’s colorless yet convoluted history, he’s been a Trojan Horse robotic jinx sent to destroy the heroes of two worlds, then a mopey, bright red Pinocchio longing to become a real boy while walking around in a peach-colored gimp suit and trenchcoat, mentally scarring his unfortunate girlfriend and adopted daughter.

Having spun his wheels – figuratively and literally, I suppose – for the subsequent decade, Red Tornado more resembled a broken record player than a whirlwind super-hero. His character arc was permanently stuck in first gear because, unfortunately, that was the only gear his motivation gave him -  a lachrymose longing to be human, for nebulous reasons, while effectively being human in every way except he wasn’t meaty, squishy, and getting cancer from diet sodas like the rest of us.

So, jump ahead to July and August of 1981 in the pages of Justice League of America (vol.1) numbers 192 and 193, where writer Gerry Conway and artist George Perez promised “The astonishing true origin of Red Tornado” and “Red Tornado Revealed”, one of which sounds like that specialty video I mentioned last time.

The story opens in the Justice League’s satellite headquarters where the regular members are having a meeting and Red Tornado apparently wasn’t invited – when will he take the hint? 

Responding to an unscheduled meeting the only sane way possible – namely destroying the meeting room and throwing everybody involved around with a robot hurricane, just as I’m sure we’ve all felt like doing at least once or twice at the office – Tornado is overcome and seemingly destroyed by his overeager teammates (who seemed a little too enthusiastic to take Tornado apart, to be honest). Hospitalizing a quarter of the League in a shocking display of sudden competence, it’s revealed that the offending Red Tornado is one of a pair of duplicate Red Tornado robots created and sent to destroy the League by Tornado’s original creator, the presumed dead scientific genius T.O.Morrow (“D.E.Main” in the bande dessinée version, “D.O.Mani” in the fumetti). Yes, by popular demand of nothing nowhere, T.O.Morrow made more Red Tornados. Boo.

Primarily with your tailor, I'd say.
Ultimately, the surviving Red Faux-nado abducts the original and returns him to Morrow’s lair, at which time we’re treated to just way too complicated a backstory on Morrow’s behalf about some apparently contradictory appearances the villain had made in a couple of largely unread DC side properties, Super-Team Family and DC Presents Some Other Book I Forgot Which. Then, literally, after several exposition-heavy pages explaining a continuity error about which surely no one outside of an insane asylum or the modern-day internet could possibly care, the conclusion to Morrow’s tale is “So anyway, I’m the real T.O.Morrow”. Thank you for confirming.

Morrow’s exhaustive retelling of a story no one wanted to hear explaining a problem that probably three people even noticed represents this entire two-issue arc in miniature, as the larger story goes on to further tie up loose continuity into what was probably intended to be a nice, neat package but is actually more like a handful of warm potato salad flung into an open wallet.

TO DIGRESS A MOMENT: The appeal of so many older comics – books which predated our limitlessly accessible, forever available, preserved in light for eternity exhaustively complete modern-day comics marketplace – really lay in their disposability.

I like the way your master thinks.

The fact that any particular issue of a comic would appear on the racks for – at best – a month, and then effectively vanish lent them a trashy, dynamic sense of immediacy where creativity and craft collided under the mandates of a monthly schedule for the purpose of entertaining the reader and, ideally, bringing them back next month. At this point in the very early Eighties, trade paperback collections were exceptionally few and generally limited to historically exceptional stories, comic shops were present but thin on the ground, and neither the digital marketplace and “phone book” collections even existed. The monthly book was the peak of a story’s exposure, and that month was the time to be excited about it.

Remind me to mention how
Firestorm is just a huge dumb
jackass throughout both of
these issues.
Nonetheless, there was a solid decade of stories crafted, originally for Marvel and later for DC, by writers like Conway, Wolfman, Wein, Engelhart, Thomas and others which were – while enjoyable on the whole for any number of reasons – incredibly obsessed with connecting dots across continuity. These stories – now available in a variety of formats which would have seemed like pipe dreams to the writers at the time – baffle your humble editor and always have. Only diehard fans even had back issue collections back then, and it would take a collector of tremendous resources and an arguably obsessive level of detail to have collected not only the Justice League issues necessary to understand this level of continuity accounting, but the ancillary and rarely read comics which additionally tied in. These seemed to have been intended for a very specific crowd. Casual readers were left in the cold.

That being said, I can’t pretend that there wasn’t something personally exciting about reading these dense tomes that were, by far, more concerned with flashing back to arguably relevant and increasingly obscure errata than framing a story, but then again your humble editor was a fucking nerd, and letting nerds have their way is how you guys got Agents of SHIELD swirling the drain of the primetime network schedule. 

Still, this is the currency of an entire decade of comic book storytelling - if not more – and this story is so resplendent in the bounty of such that it’s practically the Fort Knox of getting into the weeds of dumb comics.

Because we discover in short order that what we know as The Red Tornado is not just a robot with spinny mitts, but is in fact TWO SENTIENT ALIEN TORNADOS! And just because it’s comics, two sentient alien tornados we’ve seen before back in the day! Flashing al-ll-ll the way back to Justice League of America (vol.1) #17, the League was recruited by a nearly-omnipotent man-sized tornado creature calling itself The Tornado Champion to battle its evil other half, the Tornado Tyrant, a monster who had plagued Adam Strange over in his Mystery In Space title.


The original story of the Tornado Champion had been that the seemingly omnipotent alien being had tried to play hero by turning a barren planet into a perfect duplicate of Earth and splitting itself into perfect duplicates of the Justice League of the era, but then had to recruit the actual Justice League to defeat its evil half, the Tornado Tyrant. All of these sound like sandwiches. 

Mm, delicious sous-vide Aquaman.

After the defeat and the closing panels of JLA #17, we’re informed that a string of untenable coincidences occurred wherein the Tornado Champion, no longer interested in merely PLAYING hero, traveled into a different universe and happened to wander into T.O.Morrow’s lab just as Morrow was making a robot that happened to be tornado themed, and then the Champion tried to take over the robot but instead had its personality subsumed beneath Morrow’s programming. Apparently.

He has a purpose??
That is an all-you-can-eat buffet of unlikely happenstance, which is a pretty good way to describe Red Tornado right out of the gate. This story represents the first stage of Red Tornado becoming a tall stack of shit sandwich in lieu of developing an arc, and in a lot of ways is where the trouble really begins. Instead of having his existing character arc expanded, moving him to the next likely stage of his relationships and raison d’etre – frankly, the one thing that wouold have saved Tornado as a character, inasmuch as it’s how characters grow-  the decision is made to make him more interesting by chucking more stuff into him.

Which would be valid if the NEW content to his character is allowed to inform the character in any way, but it doesn’t – at the very least, the Tornado Tyrant is ridiculously powerful and the Tornado Champion has the power to give life to barren worlds and split its personality across homunculi of its own creation. Red Tornado, rather than incorporating any of these wildly new elements into his character, continues to merely suck the air out of rooms.

From here on out, Red Tornado becomes a character whose arc is forever stuck in first gear and yet continues to have more and more stuff added to his (upcoming) Who’s Who entry without any of it meaning much of anything. So he’s currently (a) the android invention of an evil genius and (b) a transfer from a parallel earth who is (c) a robot who longs for humanity and (d) a family man who (e) is also two space aliens. Why stop there? Why not also (f) a cross-dressing (g) cello student at Julliard (h) who gets adopted by the man who invented Donkey Kong and (i) competitively grows novelty mustaches (j) for the amusement of his neo-nazi wife and (k) wisecracking dog sidekick?

Who knows, maybe he will!



Tuesday, January 14, 2014

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE: THE ERASER WHO TRIED TO RUB OUT BATMAN

And yet you dress like that.
Batman No.188 December 1966 – THE ERASER WHO TRIED TO RUB OUT BATMAN

It’s the tail end of 1966 and the Batman comic book is doing everything in its power to evoke the television show which has swept the nation. Gone are the moody shadows of even a year ago and now it’s deliberate camp, a little sex appeal and a whole passel full of Zows, Bams and KaPows!

The Eraser identifies Bruce Wayne because he
spent years in college just breathing in his scent. 
The opening tale in Batman No.188 fixates on Bruce Wayne’s good luck with the ladies and an enemy who – like the best of all Silver Age supervillains – was clearly inspired by office supplies. A parade of goo-goo eyes made in Bruce Wayne’s direction by a bevy of wordless, nameless sexpots he’s encountering in both his identities leads Gotham’s most famous ninja-slash-millionaire into a reverie about former college classmate and inveterate screw-up Lenny Fiasco, a name which sounds like a Southern California ska band if ever there were one.

Remembering Lenny’s simultaneously terrible track record with both women and competence, the Dynamic Duo coincidentally finds themselves at odds with The Eraser, lean and rubber-helmeted criminal mastermind who dresses like a number two Dixon Ticonderoga and hires his services out to erase the evidence left behind by other crooks.

Lenny’s repeated experience with having to correct his own copious errors throughout school gives him an almost preternatural ability to detect the shortcomings in other baddies’ plans, and moreso even manages to identify old schoolchum Bruce under the Dark Knight Detective’s criminal disguise. The Eraser then goes on to prove he’s evolved beyond his limitless collegiate screw-ups by promptly unmasking in front of Bruce Wayne and pretty much ending his usefulness as a crime scene fixer. Whoops!

Helmet or no helmet, his skull has clearly been crushed. 

The whole thing ends with The Eraser trapping Bruce Wayne in a freezing death trap in order to pay him back for stealing the girl of his dreams during a Winter Carnival, a story as old as time. Not that Batman’s above twisting the knife – when Fiasco finds himself in prison, the Caped Crusader can’t resist gifting him with a giant eraser to remind him of his failure. Passive-Aggressive Batman!

If the story ends up reminding your humble editor of anything in particular, it’s of “Hush”, the high-profile Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee Batman arc which featured a childhood pal of Bruce Wayne’s returned to deal out the frustrations of a troubled childhood on the Dark Knight’s head. Consider this the prequel, won’t you?

That's A message, to be sure.


Thursday, January 9, 2014

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : TWILIGHT

It's a werewolf named Twilight, I just want you to know that I saw it and didn't make the jokes.

Marine Sergeant and former private detective Terry Gardener is assigned to bodyguard the visiting Slovic minister, but when a fortune teller is murdered by enemy agents, the victim’s pet parrot leads Terry into a costume shop where he encounters a fuzzy union suit with his name on it. Yes, it’s the same old story you've heard a hundred times, the oldest tale in the book, they should have been embarrassed to haul its dusty bones out of the corner for even one last hurrah.

You're going to spend your furlough in a mailbox?
Outside of his honed physical acumen, keen sleuthing skills and footed pajamas, “Twilight” possesses no notable super-powers. He continues to be aided, however, by the parrot “Snoopy”, who turns out to be one of those comic book parrots which can apparently understand English and reply in fully-formed sentences. If you ask him “Polly want a cracker?” you’re just as likely to hear by way of reply “Gosh, I’d love one, seriously, but I've been on a gluten-free thing lately? Like, my yoga teacher, Kelly, she says that she stopped eating gluten and her myopia disappeared? So I don’t know, plus I've been putting on a little pudge around the middle, you know, nothing serious but the holidays are coming up and I’m supposed to go to Troy’s place to meet his parents and, oh, you know what? One cracker won’t kill me. Okay, sure, I’d love a cracker, thanks, oh gosh, I guess I’m hitting the gym tomorrow!” as “Caw.”

The biggest question in regards to Twilight is: What is he supposed to be dressed as? With his brown fur, pointed ears, weird vestigial wings on the arms and luxurious flowing hair, he looks as much like a wig-wearing monkey or a crossdressing chupacabra as a mysterious avenger of the night. Is he a hesher werewolf? A willow-thin, glam-rock sasquatch? A sugar glider in the throes of a mid-life crisis? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

I dunno, but you definitely pulled one over on your tailor.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

GONE AND FORGOTTEN : THE PUA WHO NEGGED SUPERGIRL


The Girl of Steel’s solo adventures – in Adventure Comics and elsewhere – were an interesting (if typically, sad to say, unentertaining) mix of stock superhero story formula and lovelorn romance soap opera comic. The arguable bottom-line financial advantage of giving Supergirl a solo feature in a monthly book was, after all, that she attracted female readers to the Superman franchise, and by this point DC has established its mix of superhero/romance in the pages of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane – so, in brief, when romance reared its ugly head, embarrassment should follow.

Lacking a recurring beau, though, Supergirl ended up with a minor parade of single-issue lotharios and would-be paramours, including; a cursed centaur, a Phantom Zone criminal, a power-thieving super-mobster, some guy named Jeff who had a chili dog moustache (immediate disqualification), a hunky athlete who liked to disguise himself as a sea monster and rob yachts, a polka-dotted muppet who was secretly Mister Mxyzptlk and a seemingly perfect match in an alien boy hero who turned out to actually be a female hero using science to masquerade as a boy on her endemically anti-feminist world and neither lady ended up being “into it” (so pack up your deviantart portfolios, fellas, that question was answered) – among literally dozens more.

That first panel is nothing but sexts.
In Adventure Comics vol.1  No.388 and No.389 (Jan-Feb 1970), Supergirl (and her alter-ego of Linda Lee Danvers) ends up meeting KIMBOR, an intergalactic bad-boy who was freed from hard labor on a prison planetoid by Superman’s Coluan nemesis, Brainiac.

The baddie who bottled Kandor finds his mind turning more and more to Supergirl and, like the boy who yanks on his classmate’s hair in order to deal with the confusing emotions and urges of pre-adolescence, mistakes affection for aggression and decides to copy the head-turning, heart-throbbing Kimbor into an identical up-blowing, collateral-damage-making robot bomb with which to destroy Supergirl. (Kimbor manages to switch himself out with his robot duplicate in what’s meant to be a twist in the story but which ends up actually not accomplishing much except padding pages, so let’s not bother with it beyond this).

If I make a joke about Brian Wood right now, is it libel? 
Adopting the Earth-identity of Kimberly O’Ryan - because having frat boys exclaim “That’s a GIRL’S NAME!” was essential to Brainiac’s convoluted plan – Kimbor zeroes in on Supergirl in both of her identities. Intent on using his inescapable charms to destroy the Maid of Steel by basically being a huge, sexist asshole to her all the time, Kimbor’s in great company with at least a couple of 2013’s most notorious comics professionals and half the guys at Cons in general.

Kimbor’s hot-and-cold running abuse proves effective, with both Linda and Supergirl falling over themselves to gain Kimbor’s non-existent approval. In fact, Kimbor seems to be following, letter-for-letter, the steps recommended in the Pick-Up Artist Community, despite having debuted in a comic some twenty-five years older than the movement (Brainiac’s from space, maybe in space they’ve already figured out peacocking).

It's uncalled for to cap off this much inane bullshit with a pun.
So Kimbor “Approaches” (Step 1, visiting the Stanhope Supergirl Fan Club where Linda is hanging out because of some weird ego issues which this story kind of underlines), “Raises status” (Step 2, by savagely negging the poor girl), and then speeds up through Step 4, “Establish Physical Contact” by trying to get her blown up.

Kimbor’s negging largely consists of outright abuse and insults, sometimes violent arguments, he even hauls Linda in front of a speeding car so that she gets splashed with mud, right after he sticks her with an expensive dinner tab. The champions of the PUA technique are guys with names like “Mystery” and “Style”, so they already sound like third-string supervillains … late Nineties villains, mind you, but who knows, maybe these guys are the modern-day Legion of Doom, providing the Legion of Doom headquarters blares Smashmouth and reeks of Axe.

"You're going to jail for treating women exactly like comic books taught you to treat them!"

Ultimately, when Kimbor dumps Supergirl, the action turns a little convoluted as it begins to justify the cover illustration; Supergirl takes Kimbor to outer space, inside a giant fake space-dragon, shows him a garden of stone statues, reveals that those are all her ex-boyfriends and she turns them to stone to punish them for breaking her heart, starts to turn Kimbor to stone, whereupon Brainiac reveals himself for some reason I dunno, and then Supergirl admits that the last four pages of nonsense was, indeed, nonsense and just hauls Kimbor to Earth jail for being a dick. A blow against the patriarchy if ever there were one!

Luckily, it appears Kimbor learned his lesson, or at least so it seems from this open letter apology he made a few years later:
First and foremost and without any conditions I would like to formally and publicly apologize for offending a fellow comic book character.
I am also sorry because if I had realized my failed attempt at humor had offended Supergirl in the moment that I made those statements, I would have certainly apologized in then and not have left her to feel victimized in the hours and days that followed.
I am particularly saddened because I was completely blown away by not only her talent as a superhero, but more importantly by the fact she was using her talent to speak so openly and freely about her own life experiences and how they informed the superhero that she is today. 
Finally I am sorry that my presence on the planet caused her experience to be anything other than a celebration of her work. Supergirl deserved more than that.
Seems legit! 

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE: BAT-APE!




Batman No.114 March 1958 – THE BAT-APE
The Caped Crusader is almost as well known for his crime-fighting team-ups as he is his own accomplishments and accolades – there’s his long-running partnership with Superman, his allies in the Justice League and the Outsiders, a few Bat-Women, Bat-Girls, a Bat-Dog or two, and a parade of toned, taut-bodied young men dressed in stylized Peter Pan costumes which one can only describe as being an underage assortment of Michael Jacksonian proportions.

However, even with a Bat-Cow currently swelling his Bat-ranks, nothing quite compares to Batman’s gorilla sidekick, MOGO THE BAT-APE.

When a box office robbery occurs while the circus’ star trained ape MOGO goes berserk on a raised platform, Batman and Robin begin to suspect some sort of complicated deception was engineered to frame the ape’s trainer. It’s not a long-shot, recent advances in DNA technology have ended with more than eighty percent of all ape trainers’ prison sentences being commuted owing to newly uncovered evidence, you know. This is why I oppose the death penalty for ape trainers.

The grateful ape tracks the Dynamic Duo back to the Bat-Cave, which seems like a major security concern and makes me wonder how come none of Batman’s Rogues Gallery ever managed to locate the joint. Think of the criminal sideline you could generate, just hiring out gorillas to track down superheroes’ headquarters – or maybe that’s why all those ape trainers were in jail in the first place.

Rather than shooting the ape dead in order to protect his crimefighting secret, Batman allows Mogo to dress up in a spare Bat-mask and Bat-Cape and join him and his young partner as they attempt to gather evidence to clear Mogo’s master. Considering the thousands of hours Robin put into training, this gorilla getting to help them fight crime on his first night out must have felt left him feeling like a complete dick.

Never mind Dick Grayson getting passed over for cultist nutjob Azrael, I like to imagine it was Mogo who succeeded Batman during the Knightfall story arc of the Nineties. APE FALL.





Popular Posts