TRULY GONE & FORGOTTEN : CAPTAIN MARVEL

Which is it, "hold still" or "split?" Make up your mind, man ...

Why, it’s Captain Marvel – and we all love Captain Marvel, don’t we? Sure we do – WHIZ radio! SHAZAM! Tawky Tawny! The Big Red Cheese! Loads of abject racism!

Of course, not even the original Captain Marvel is Captain Marvel any more, and this particular Captain Marvel – despite his red suit and magic word – is a character cut from whole different cloth. In fact, he’s cut from a whole bunch of different cloths, he’s the android Captain Marvel, and he makes like a banana!

Created by Carl Burgos (creator of the original Human Torch) and published by M.F.Enterprises for a trio of issues and a guest shot in a pair of all-villains book all put out in 1966, this Cap only lightly resembles the hero from who he’s borrowed his superheroic sobriquet. Rather than an orphaned street urchin whose magic fairy godfather bestows on him the powers of the gods, Cap-Two was an amnesiac Furby with cheap joints.

"Why did I say any of this? Who am I talking to?"

Cap debuts in a darkened house, suffering complete memory loss and setting quite a tone for his debut. As he paces the structure, bits and pieces of his memory return – an alien world! Brilliant scientists! A war against evil! His teeth falling out! Taking a test he didn’t prepare for and also he’s in his underwear! Some of those might just be anxiety dreams, actually.

As an aside, this may be Cap’s first blackout, but it’s not his last. The character has a particular predilection for losing consciousness; he might actually experience more blackouts than your average adult male Kennedy. You have to wonder how often  these happen off-panel, and how long it’ll be before it winds up in a Memento situation.

Blackouts aside, Cap’s mental meanderings take us to the alien world of his origin, where it’s revealed that he is – despite appearances – not a human but actually a “Human Robot.” This is, I think, the same thing basically as a “Meatless Burger” or non-alcoholic beer.

Built “for the good of man,” Cap proves his undeniable worth by immediately falling to bits.  Instructed by one of his creators to repeat after him, Marvel unquestionably obeys, uttering the word “SPLIT.” For his willingness to participate, he’s rewarded by having his arms and legs fall off.

Obediently uttering the followup incantation, “XAM,” Marvel finds himself spontaneously reattached to his disparate parts. "Hello again, toes!"

As a superhero, Marvel possesses a phenomenal intellect and possibly some telepathic powers, not to mention the ability of flight, super-strength, eyeballs that shoot both laser beams AND electric rays,  and general overall toughness, but this spontaneous on-command self-quartering is his top-of-the-list,  go-to ability.

"What's this? I tried to grab this guy's
dick, but he split into pieces!"

Primarily, according to his scientist overlords, the reason he can split is to "make repairs to your body..." (The hell?) and to - and this is a favorite of mine - "to prevent an attack from more than one person." That seems overly optimistic to me. "Blast, there's more than one person, but luckily fewer than four people, attacking me right now. Haha, the joke will be on them. HERE COME MY LIMBS!" Why not just use your laser-beam eyeballs?

"HERE COME MY LIMBS" would've been my first choice for Captain Marvel's battle cry, by the way.

Actually, Cap could dissect himself into a startling array, basically at every joint and then some. Every finger could split independently at the joint, the arm at the elbow, wrist and shoulder, his pelvis could detach, his legs split at the hip, knee and ankle .... heck, I suppose his toes could probably separate independently, too. Oh, and his head could fly around independently too, just like Sir William Gull at the end of From Hell. XAM!

Cap's got that "magic word" weakness of having a common term as his mantra. If I knew the guy, I would've abused it.

"Well, time for dessert Captain. Which would you prefer, salted liver with anchovy gravy or a banana split?"
"Um, the one that isn't the liver."
"You want the liver? No problem! Eat it all up!"
"No, I want the other one. The thing with the bananas"
"Say it Cap."
"Alright. I want ... the ... banana SPLIT (THUD)."

Shortly after building the Fallapart Boy Robot, the scientists of Cap's native world blow up, alongside everyone else. Non-chalantly rocketing to Earth (Says he, witnessing his planet's destruction "Now I'll have to find a new home." No kidding) Marvel falls into one of those aforementioned blackouts and is taken under the wing of an Earth boy.

"...and now I'm clearly in Hell."

M.F.Enterprises were surely aware of Cap's shared namesake, evidenced if only by the presence of Marvel's young ward. Introduced in the first story only as "Billy...from the USA,” he's later given the full name of Billy Baxton, a short hop-skip-and-jump from the original Marvel's identity of Billy Batson.

Marvel’s powers stem from a magic element he keeps in a disco medallion, an element known only as “X.” To be clear, it is not ChemicalX, Element X, Alloy X or even Cherry-flavored X-Pops, it is merely “X”.  You can clearly identify it because the medallion has a large, sans-serif “M” on it.

If this Captain Marvel is famous for anything more than juggling his body parts, then he’s famous for name theft – besides swiping his own nom de spandex from Fawcett’s famous flagship character, his foes include The Ray (aka The Bat), Plastic Man, Dr.Fate and a guy who resembles Crimebuster baddie Iron-Jaw. And then there’s a shrinking character named TinyMan and I just cannot believe MF didn’t swipe Doll Man’s then-unused alias.

On a final note, the first issue cover is one of the most catastrophic cover scenes in the history of the medium. Not only is young Billy tied to a dangerous machine, but that machine is clearly reading that it is ready to blow even as an electrical monster of some sort is rising from it and reaching towards Billy with scary lightning mitts, all the while he's surrounded by menacing alien robots with terrible facial hair while Captain Marvel bursts into the ship only seconds away from a raging wall of water under the baleful gaze of ANOTHER type of alien, armed, watching the events below unfold through the UFO's canopy while even MORE UFO's fly in the skies in the background. What, didn’t they have time to light Billy on FIRE, too?

GONE&FORGOTTEN REVISITED: CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS

"...the whole room probably smells of B.O. and wet spandex."

Say, what do you think of when you recall the Eighties? Big hair? Skinny ties? Family Ties? Awakening to strange, new urges while watching Van Halen's “Hot for Teacher” music video? Well not me, no sir! I think of MARVEL SUPER-HERO CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS! No, just kidding, I think of the Van Halen's “Hot for Teacher” video. Just like you.

Contest of Champions was Marvel's premiere Big Event Super-Hero All-Invitational Clusterfuck-slash-Gangbang long before Secret Wars and the all of the other Big Events which have basically become the de facto publishing schedule for both big companies anyway. If you want a vision of the future, imagine never not having superheroes fighting each other forever.

 Released in the Summer of 1982, the series was actually originally intended as a Marvel Treasury Edition which, for the folks who missed that particular era of publishing, was an oversized tabloid edition comic, largely passe come the early 1980s. They stood about half-as-high as your average comic book reader of the day, and if you had a stapler and enough patience you could build a treehouse fort out of them.

The Contest of Champions Treasury Edition was meant to coincide with the 1980 Olympics, which – for those of you who’re also weak on your Cold War playground politics – was taking place in Moscow and was boycotted by the USA along with about five dozen other countries, although I’m not sure what the effect was on their treasury-sized comics. For Marvel, at the very least, it meant that, as a promotional project, the book had very little to go on, and at worst might’ve seemed to have been rubbing salt in the geopolitical wounds.

"Flamboyant Atomic Samurai?"
Did he write his own intro?

Instead, C-of-C was reimagined as a self-proclaimed innovation called a “Limited Series.” An editorial blurb in the back of the first issue celebrated Marvel’s apparent ingenuity at having developed, for the first time in history, a new type of comic series which only ran a “finite” number of issues. This is as opposed to those comics which are running an infinite number of issues. I wonder who they’ll get for art chores of Fantastic Four # 115,576,986,193,000,000,000 … it’s an anniversary issue after all!

Never mind that Marvel was actually picking up the scraps. Competitor DC Comics had already done the mini-series as early as 1979, when Contest of Champions was still earmarked for a format only slightly smaller than the side of a shed. For the record, DC had managed to shove World of Krypton, The Krypton Chronicles, The Phantom Zone, The Untold Legend of Batman and Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes out the door before C-of-C debuted, although I guess to be fair those were billed as “mini-series.” Worlds of difference

Contest of Champions comes to u courtesy of the Dudley Boys of early Eighties comic writing: Steven Grant, Bill Mantlo and cruiserweight underdog Mark Greunwald, whom I assume did all the heavy lifting on keeping the superheroes properly categorized. That’s a lot of cooks for one stew, but outside of comics’ premiere obsessive-compulsive collector of spandex oddities Roy Thomas, I can’t think of many writers I’d be happier to have in the saddle.

The premise of the book involved a high-stakes competition staged between cosmic entities The Grandmaster and Marvel’s skull-headed Death figure, using the superheroes of planet Earth in a worldwide game of Capture the Flag.

Appropriately for the original Olympic-theme of the book, when we join the heroes it’s to catch the Avengers in the middle of a regularly-scheduled workout. Wonder man lifts weights, Cap and Beast and performing acrobatics, and Iron Man and the Vision are jogging, for no reason at all because one of those guys is in a highly advanced suit of technological armor which does all of his work for him and the other guy is a tireless android. So. I dunno, enjoy your run, guys. Maybe they’re doing it to raise Breast Cancer Awareness.

Across the globe, other superheroes are teleported away from their meals, workouts and general downtime (which, hey, not unlike what happened to the DC heroes in their Strange Sports baseball game, recently mentioned, as a matter of fact), and deposited in the Grandmaster’s Cosmic Game Dome – renamed OfficeMax Arena back in ’08 – in such a way that it apparently really hurt The Falcon’s feelings.

Oh hey c'mon little Falcon guy, it'll be all right.

Before the action gets underway, we’re treated to several pages of characters walking around and introducing themselves to the readers by way of awkwardly wedging their names into every sentence. It goes a little something like this:

Captain America: “IRON MAN, what's happened?”

Iron Man: “I don't know, CAPTAIN AMERICA. THE VISION and I were going to ask MACHINE MAN if he knew!”

Vanguard: “DARKSTAR, URSA MAJOR and I, VANGUARD, of the SOVIET SUPER SOLIDERS would also like to know! Let's ask our friends IKARIS and FIREBIRD!”

Ant-Man: “Sure, NAMOR, SPIDER-WOMAN, HAWKEYE, DR.STRANGE and THE THING were just asking SASQUATCH, RED WOLF, THE TEXAS TWISTER, BROTHER VOODOO and the pre-natal POWER PACK if they had any ideas!”

Iron Man: “And what was their answer ANT-MAN? Or didn't even REED RICHARDS of the FANTASTIC FOUR know?”

Thundra: “I, Thundra, have mighty strength greater than any man's!”

All: (pause)

Thundra: “Uhh … oh, such as THOR, STINGRAY, or … shit, I dunno, THE PROWLER! That guy, in the cape, whoever he is! That's the Prowler, right? Sorry guys.”

Exeunt

Ultimately, Hulk neglects to go apeshit and kill anyone in the crowd, and the meet-and-greet settles down. Grandmaster and Darth Vader spill the rules, which are that each of them will pick twelve representatives from the gathered heroes of Earth who will compete against one another in contests to locate the four segments of some big damn magic space-globe. Four segments. So they’ll be playing for the best … three out of four, I guess, and in the case of a tie, it comes down to dodgeball.

Oh, would you two just
fuck already?

ROUND ONE:
The Grandmaster’s team of Daredevil, Darkstar and an Australian aboriginal superhero named Talisman face off against “The Unknown”s team of Iron Fist, Sunfire and Invisible Woman.

If it’s a competition for whose internal dialogue doesn’t have a stop button, points go to Daredevil, who muses throughout the story that he's no longer in the space arena, Darkstar's a young woman, Sunfire's taking off, having people around confuses his radar sense, he's blind, he HAS radar sense, it's cold in the arctic, his dad was a boxer, the ice confuses his radar sense, the ice no longer confuses his radar sense, the water confuses his radar sense, SOMETHING confuses his radar sense, he has to concentrate, the prize is being lifted from his hands, and SHUT UP DAREDEVIL!

At least he gets the first segment, though. WINNER: GAMEMASTER

ROUND TWO:
We’re in an unnamed Old West ghost town (possibly Scottsdale, if we mean “culturally”) where the Grandmaster’s team is She-Hulk, an armored hero named El Conquistador, and Captain Britain in his incredibly ugly, awesome original costume, while Hoody McSpooky’s team is Iron Man, the Arabian Knight and Israel’s number one superhero, Sabra.

Naturally, Sabra and the Knight get into a little snit here, because of the historical enmity between Israel and, uh, whatever Arabic nation the Knight is supposed to be from, given that everything about him is clearly Persian. Anyway.

This chapter’s a hotbed of political and social issues, with regional confrontations ruling the battle between Sabra, Britain and the Knight, with Sabra, She-Hulk and Iron Man musing on male chauvinism. For its eight-year old audience, this must have been a heady political scenario. Also, it's killing a couple panels before someone gets zapped by mind lasers POW POW BAWOOOM!!!

Despite being everyone’s least favorite partner, the Arabian Knight grabs the next segment and it’s WINNER: UNKNOWN (aka Death).

This image is disturbingly erotic.

ROUND THREE:
Somewhere on an Asian steppe or something, the Grandmaster’s team of the Thing, Wolverine and French idiot Le Peregrine face off against the Unknown’s Vanguard, Black Panther and Angel. It goes to the team with Wolverine, I call it, there, let’s just watch wrestling instead.

The Grandmaster, the cosmic embodiment of gamesmanship, had all of Earth’s heroes at his disposal and he ended up choosing Peregrine, whose power is flight. I assume his opponent picking Angel is just taking the piss. If your only requirement for a player is “Flight,” then you literally have pretty much every superhero ever at your disposal, and they’ve all got additional powers beyond “Has Batroc the Leaper’s cellphone number of speed dial.”

Anyway, Ben Grimm wrecks a Chinese landmark so it’s WINNER: GRANDMASTER.

ROUND FOUR:
Lastly, Captain America, tastefully named German hero Blitzkrieg and Alpha Flight’s Sasquatch represent the Grandmaster in an Amazonian confrontation with the Unknown’s team of Storm, Shamrock and China’s The Collective Man. Collective Man, for you fans of state-controlled birth allowance facts, has a really amusing power for a Chinese national - he's actually five identical quintuplets who can merge into one being. My guess is, you're a set of Chinese quintuplets, you LEARN to merge into one solitary baby boy FAST.

Again, Grandmaster is a brilliant tactician but he sent the furry hero whose thick coat makes him suitable for arctic conditions to the Amazon rainforest. Anyway, there’s a cute scene where Blitzkrieg pretends not to recognize what South America looks like. OPA SENT PHOTOS, HERMANN.

Captain America manages to get outsmarted by Irish mutant Shamrock, so that’s definitely not getting written down in the diary. With that, the Unknown’s team grabs its second piece of the Cosmic Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and so it’s a tie game OR as the caption explains, “GRANDMASTER -3 UNKNOWN -1 “ fucking what hold on?

Apparently it’s important to let the Grandmaster win, despite the fact that the game should have ended in a tie, or possibly Hulk and the Thing had a farting contest for a tiebreaker, I dunno. The end result is that the Grandmaster wins, his brother is returned to life and sent off to be played by Benicio Del Toro, and then Death claims Grandmaster’s life in return. The heroes react to this by letting it happen, possibly because they were completely arguing about the scores.

"I am, 'ow do you say, 'a feeb''!"

COSTUME DRAMA - SPIDER-MANY

Truth in advertising: I did not gasp once at the fate of Colonel John Jameson! USAF!

Marvel’s costumed web-swinger is presently being surrounded by a throng of his interdimensional lookalikes courtesy of something called a “Spider-Verse,” one of those limitless comics events which establishes that the scope and range of God’s limitless shore of reality is a swirling cacophony of endless possibilities but it only primarily manifests itself as your favorite superhero wearing a different pair of socks.

Spider-Man, of course, has always proven replicable, spawning not only a plethora of like-powered, spider-themed baddies and a dozen or so assorted Spider-Women and Spider-Girls, but selves from different time periods and what basically amounts to a Muppet version, being Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham.

But more than that, Spider-Man has been replicated across the Marvel multiverse in a very early issue of the original run of What If (No.7, “What If Someone ELSE Besides Spider-Man Had Been Bitten by the Radioactive Spider,” February 1978) wherein not only do members of his supporting cast acquire Peter Parker’s spider-powers, they also get uninspired knockoffs of the Spider-Man uniform of their very own!

You can't tell because of how the panel is framed.

First out of the gate is Peter Parker’s jock nemesis Flash (ah-ahh!) Thompson, a character who has enjoyed a turn as a genuine Spider-Man-themed superhero in mainstream continuity as “Agent Venom.” Prior to that – and on another universe’s Earth, I suppose it’s fair to mention – Flash shoves Parker out of his coveted front-row seat at the science exhibition where Parker had historically received his powers, receiving the fateful bite himself.

If Flash (ah-ahh!) were half the aggro dickhead he’d typically been portrayed as in comics, then a spider-powered Flash (ah-ahh!) would probably have just graduated to murder. What happens instead is he walks straight through Spider-Man’s origin up to and including the red-and-blue spider-costume (snatched from a costume shop, which implies that Peter Parker swiped someone’s intellectual property when he designed his outfit).

Making sure to leave his flowing red locks visible from the top of his mask, Flash (ah-ahh) exerts his intellect and creativity to their fullest,  dubbing himself “Captain Spider.” Speaking of intellect, whatever his other virtues, Thompson  lacks the smarts needed to make web-shooters, which is why he ends up splattered on the ground after a fight with the Vulture.

In a slightly less fatal vein is the adventure of Marvel’s original Spider-Girl. Testing credulity and coincidence by having J.Jonah Jameson and his secretary Betty Brant showing up at the same science experiment as Parker long before they met, the second story gives spider-powers to Peter’s future flame. With the two colluding on a costumed identity and a crimefighting career, Betty gains the benefit of Parker’s patented web-shooters. Unfortunately, she also suffers his ability to pick names and his skills as a costume designer (Betty does the sewing, but … well …)

Imagine your favorite super-hero's head on a half-naked
woman's body. Imagine Batman. The Hulk. Imagine it.

Debuting as “Spider-Girl,” Betty’s look is a one-piece swimsuit accessorized with Spider-Man’s boots, gloves and mask. Somehow, webs stretch from the sides of her torso to her naked arms, but I’m already upset enough about the weird look involved with her Spider-Man head and basically naked boobs. No comic character has ever simultaneously so resembled their own Internet Rules 63 AND 34 before now. (Extra points for a panel wherein shutterbug Peter Parker, collecting staged photos of Spider-Girl in action, leeringly enthuses about the extra cash publisher Jameson will pay for the photos considering the, uh, “leg art angle.” Parker, that’s your genderbent equivalent from a parallel universe! She’s practically your SISTER!)

(It’s worth mentioning that, with Roy Thomas at the conceptual helm of this story, Betty’s costumed identity is apparently a conscious call-back to a little-known Golden Age heroine named Spider-Lady, who sported webshooters and wall-crawling without Spider-Man’s tremendous strength, mirrored here by the fact that Betty doesn’t like to use her physical powers for fear of hurting someone. I mention all this just to keep from getting pilloried in the comments,  yes I know who Spider-Lady is, she’s in the book)

Ultimately, coincidence retains its death grip on Spider-Girl’s career, as she too manages to fail to save Peter’s uncle from a murderous burglar. She even throws her costume in a trashcan in the famous Spider-Man No More model, which is cast into the best context ever as Peter stares back thoughtfully at the costume. Yes Peter, perhaps you can adopt the mantle of Spider-Girl! It’s 2014 and the gender binary is a lie, be who you want to be!

Lastly, the third tale involves sometimes-wolf-headed-space-god John Jameson, astronaut son of publisher J.Jonah Jameson, being bitten by the dad-gummed spider and developing super-powers which – in this ironic universe – his father chooses to exploit for publicity and acclaim.  Don’t worry, irony always works out well.

It's GRRRREAAAT!

Adopting the name “Spider-Jameson, the Super-Astronaut,” the high-flying hero outpaces his inevitable Japanese knockoff by coming up with a more unwieldy name than they ever could. “Super-Space Creampuff Magic Gem Girl Spider-Astronaut … aw fuck it, I give up,” cries the frustrated Japanese anime producer, “Let the Americans have him.”

Jameson’s shy on web-shooters but he picks up a jet pack, so as to better emulate a spider’s ability to fly at rocket-like speeds. Turns out the absence of Spidey’s trademark gimmick spells doom for Spider-Jameson, just as it did for Spider-Flash (ah ahh!) though, as he ends up underneath a plummeting space capsule and snuffs it.

Apparently the finale to all three episodes is the same – Peter Parker keeps the radioactive spider to study later, and manages to extract a juice from it which gives him spider-powers, letting him pick up his own mantle. I’m sure that’s a first, it’s like Red Son for Spider-Man except fewer commies and nothing gets put in a bottle.

As a neat addendum to the issue, the letters page runs a few dozen possible What If stories past the readers, asking for their feedback on which ones will make the cut for future issues. A few do indeed make it in later – Jane Foster becoming Thor, Rick Jones becomes the Hulk, the 1950s Avengers, everyone knows Daredevil is blind. There are also a surprising number of Howard the Duck related ones, including “What if a human being fell into Howard the Duck’s world” and “Howard the Duck joined the Avengers” which never came to fruition.

Possibly the one which amused me most was “What if … Nova was a girl?” which I cannot read without imagining a voice of unconscionable terror screaming it like a warning. Then again, there’s also this one:

Well, they’d fuck. 

TRULY GONE & FORGOTTEN : THE TANDY COMPUTER WHIZ KIDS

Yeah, a good blowjob has that effect on a lot of guys.

Superman’s performed his fair share of weird duets in his lengthy career, not the least of which include pairing up with such varied entities as He-Man, the Quik Bunny, Muhammad Ali, Jerry Lewis, Aliens, the Terminator, Orson Welles and a shoe store mascot named “Tim.”

Also among Superman’s long list of other-corporate co-conspirators were Alec and Shanna, the RADIO SHACK WHIZ KIDS!

"It's gonna take about an hour to warm up, tho."

Technically, they were actually either the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids or the TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids, since that was the brand they were shilling. Nonetheless, Radio Shack was the friendly corporate entity who provided the free promotional comics, published by the kind folks at Archie on those weekends when they weren’t letting the Spire Comics crew crash at the printing plant.

The Whiz Kids were the product of the fine folks at Tandy and an almost terminal lack of imagination, being as they were a pair of unremarkable middle-class school kids who utilized the awesome computing power of the TRS-80 (not an inexpensive purchase back in its debut, despite its informal nickname being “Trash-80”) to solve crime and keep off of drugs and possibly foil arms smugglers ‘n shit. Lots of bad stuff going down at Radio Shack, you don’t want to go there alone at night. Or ever, generally.

The Whiz Kids formally teamed up with Superman on three, free occasions, dragging Wonder Woman and Supergirl along on a couple of those adventures, the titles of which were: The Computers That Saved Metropolis, Victory By Computer and The Computer Masters of Metropolis. These books typically depicted Alec and Shanna using their youthful genius and the processing power of the TRS-80 to aid Superman is predicting and preventing disasters caused by big-league super villains like Major Disaster and Lex Luthor, or beating them outright! It’s hard to consider Luthor a threat once he’s defeated by two kids who still live on the suburban side of puberty. I guess he’s vulnerable to cassette drives and screen burns.

I personally cannot accept that Superman genuinely benefits from the assistance of a pair of pre-teen desk jockeys and their oversized graphing calculator-slash-paperweight. Even I can calculate square roots faster than a TRS-80, what’s Superman supposed to use it for, smashing Toyman over the head with it?

"No, kids, that's all right, I've only done this about a billion times."

The Whiz Kids also had their own run of solo comics, unsupported by superheroic help, which were titled:

The Whiz Kids: The Computer Trap
The Whiz Kids: The Computer That Said No To Drugs
The Whiz Kids: News By Computer Foils Kidnappers
The Whiz Kids: OK Computer
The Whiz Kids: The Answer To A Riddle
The Whiz Kids: Fit To Win
The Whiz Kids: A Deadly Choice
The Whiz Kids: Safeguarding the Environment
The Whiz Kids: The Order of the Phoenix
The Whiz Kids XXX: Not The Tandy Computer Whiz Kids

Wait a minute, one of the ones I didn't make up ... did they really have a book titled “A Deadly Choice?” How high are the fucking stakes of personal home computing? Also, it’s charming that any computer company would stump for environmental protection, especially at the book’s release in 1991, since your average disposed home computer leaks about five hundred gallons of weaponized rat cancer into the groundwater every hour, according to a book I made up.

Misandry is real!

Alec and Shanna also have an uncredited appearance, more or less, in the pages of an actual, factual Superman comic, the rights issues of which I bet have fucked up that issue’s chance of ever being reprinted. Superman vol.1 No.358 (April 1981, a little after the Whiz Kids’ initial outing with the Man of Steel) tells the tale of Clark Kent boring the tar out of Alec, Shanna and their classmates during a power outage, relating the story of the time Superman fought a guy who looked like a cross between a dandelion and a leather daddy.

Anyway, by the time the internet came around and computers were finally useful (porn), Alec and Shanna probably would have been all grown up. If we relaunched them today, Shanna would probably be a Glasshole advocating for Googleocracy and Alec’ll have a YouTube channel with more than 1500 hours rebutting Anita Sarkeesian - so let’s all thank the power of computing!

GONE&FORGOTTEN REVISITED : SUPERBOY SPECTACULAR 1980

"Solve-It-Yourself" really sounds like they're passing the buck.

I’ve said it before and I stand by it: For your bizarre comics dollar, you can’t get a much better value than your average Silver Age Superboy story. A fine testament to this reality is the heavily reprint-laden Superboy Spectacular No.1, released in 1980 but packed with classic stories and single page cutaways like Sal Amendola’s famous Map of Krypton,” a guide to four whole different types of Kryptonite (even in 1980 they had more than that, but maybe they just weren’t obsessed with it, fella), and a cutaway of the Kent Family home where you can try to make a good guess where Superboy hid out when he wanted to go masturbate. I say it’s in his secret closet full of robot lookalikes!

Reading like "Superboy's Most Embarrassing Home Videos", the eight stories in this volume managed to include yet another instance of teenaged Clark Kent meeting teenaged Bruce Wayne, which was a thing lazy writers have had happen to the two of them about once every three or four years since they started teaming up. They couldn’t have met this often if they were the only two people with Grindr on the entire planet.

However you cut it, this is negligent parenting.

PART ONE: THE ORIGIN OF SUPERBOY’S SUPER-COSTUME
Some people have argued that the Crisis on Infinite Earths – a year-long mega-event intended to streamline DC’s then-fifty years of densely packed canon – was unnecessary. Speaking personally, when your flagship character has a secret origin for his underwear, then it’s time to wipe the slate clean and invite some new stories.

The opening tale, for instance, relates the origin of Superman’s costume – dubbed, during his Superbaby days, as his “Super-playsuit.” Yes, Superman isn’t flying around in his pajamas, he’s not flying around in his underwear – he’s flying around in the playclothes he wore as a toddler, woven from his swaddling blankets. Inspired, I have chosen to wear footie pajamas everywhere I go now.

Weirdly, considering that Superboy’s uniform is a one-of-a-kind article of clothing, and that the Boy of Steel would be fecked without it, he’s super-willing to show off exactly how “indestructible” it is – showing off to the rubes in Smallville, he dives into an open vat of acid and stands amidst a bonfire just to prove that you can’t tug on his cape – well, wait, some lions tug on his cape. Smallville has a lot of neat stuff lying around, acid, lions ...

What would he have done if the suit couldn’t stand up to this abuse, though? Trade it in for a pair of Dickies overalls? Wear Kryptonian armor? Go buck naked? Listen, they’re all dumb answers.

Unrelated to the origin of his super-suit (in brief: It’s from Krypton and doesn’t suck) one of the best parts of these old stories with Superbaby in it besides trying to parse his brain-addled babyspeak is that Ma and Pa Kent actually call him “Superbaby.” Sometimes they call him “Clark,” occasionally “Son,” but for the most part “Superbaby.” The kid mut have self-esteem oozing out of his pores.

Worrisome dreams of kryptonite bodies.

PART TWO: THE DREAMS OF DOOM!
The second story introduces one of my favorite Superboy villains- the Kryptonite Kid, a juvenile delinquent from space who uses a kryptonite-irradiated body to harass the Boy of Steel. Immensely more interesting though is the Kid’s partner, KRYPTONITE DOG. If the odds of Superboy's pet dog making it to Earth from his random path through space were already long, add to it the factor of a criminal from another planet being sent into space on a deadly experimental mission where he AND THE BULLDOG THEY SENT WITH HIM fly through a kryptonite cloud and gain amazing powers and then go to Earth to fight boy-on-boy and dog-on-dog with Earth's Mightiest Teen … in the Silver Age DC Universe, it's about a two-to-one chance. Odds are even in an 80-page giant.

Kryptonite Dog (Let’s call him “Kryptonito”) possesses depths of cruelty unrealized even among Superman’s rogus gallery. At one point, merely to fuck with the Dog of Tomorrow, he maliciously lures Krypto to a giant pile of tasty bones and then, just before Krypto can sink his teeth into them, raybeams them so that they turn into kryptonite! He doesn’t start a fight with Krypto, he doesn’t try to kill him – he just basically treats him like a jackass. That’s a complex layer of malevolence for a bulldog, kryptonite or no.

The whole thing begins with Superboy and Krypto (who not only sleep in the same bed, but sleep in their uniforms, which … you know, do they ever wash these things? Superboy is a teenager, after all …) sharing the same dream. Yes, they dream of BROADWAY – or, more specifically, of Kryptonite Kid and Kryptonito murdering them. ON BROADWAY!

It ends with Superboy and Krypto getting their invulnerable tuchuses hauled out of the Kryptonite fire by Master Mxyzptlk, the teenaged version of … I dunno, Terra-Man I think? They’ve otherwise hidden it so well in their clever rubric.

Kryptonian robo-nannies shake your baby with science!

PART THREE: LIFE ON KRYPTON
There’s nothing quite so engaging as a teenaged boy who’s already started writing his autobiography, but I suppose we can give Superboy the benefit of the doubt that it won’t include any excruciating attempts at poetry. What it does include, however, is his recollections of life on Krypton as recalled from his memory as an infant, assisted by a high-tech Kryptonian mind-reading device which resembles a desk lamp frotting with a chess lock.

“Even if my child’s mind didn’t understand all the words I heard then,” explains Superboy scoldingly to his adopted mother, “I’ll know their meaning now!” Superboy does not understand the subjective experience, pass it on.

What we learn about life on Krypton is that it was apparently little more than a series of disconnected and unconscionably stupid vignettes, punctuated by meaningless cruelty. Between encounters with the child-rearing technology of Krypton – not the least surprising is a crib with built-in child-catching net, in case baby topples over the side, which I can think of at least a half-dozen more super-scientific ways to prevent – we learn the story of Krypto’s first experience with almost dying in the vacuum of space at Jor-El’s hands.

Superboy’s evidently animal-hating father had originally used his son’s beloved pet as a test pilot for an experimental rocket, which is how Krypto managed to get to Earth in the first place. Here, we learn that Jor-El accidentally doomed Krypto to die in a space rocket on an earlier occasion too (it works out in the end). Jor-El might just get off on killing animals, frankly. No wonder the Science Council didn’t accept him at his word about the destruction of Krypton. “He’s just trying to get us into his death-rockets,” I’m sure they whispered, “The sick freak.”

Not-yet-Superbaby's mom Lara is so incensed at Jor'el's attempted canicide, she actually leaves her husband and takes baby Kal-El on a tour of the planet’s stupidest wonders. Why this gave me such inordinate pleasure, I cannot say, but on some level it seems to me that she probably should've seen the writing on the wall when Jor-El was firing every living creature he could get his hands on into space. "He might have a mean streak," I'm sure she found herself thinking on occasion.

For the record, the wonders of Krypton include a robot showcase, an undersea roller coaster, a scale-model of Smallville including robots depicting Superboy’s future foster parents buh-wha, and also a celebration of Krypton’s birthday because their scientists actually figured out what day of the week their planet was created. Good heavens, Krypton was a Young Earth Creationism society! No wonder they didn’t see it coming.

The next two stories are a little slim on content, so in brief:

Nothing gets the message across
quite like fucking a car to pieces.

PART FOUR: THE ONE-MAN TEAM
Besides being the title of a very confusing porno, this story involves Superboy demonstrating in a graphic fashion why he shouldn’t be playing on the Smallville football team, despite popular request. Eloquently expressed in a wordless manner, Superboy atomizes a tackling dummy with a shoulder block as if to say “Clearly I’d murder the other players, you idiots, let me go back to fighting aliens.”

These Friday Night Lights towns, there’s just nothing more important than the ballgame, huh?

PART FIVE: THE THREE SECRET IDENTITIES OF SUPERBOY
Superboy ends up on a “To Tell The Truth” style panel game. He tells the truth. Scripted by Silver Age architect Otto Binder of whom it can now fairly be said “They can’t all be winners, folks.”

PART SIX: THE MAN WHO DESTROYED KRYPTON
Last Son of Krypton, my ass. One of Clark’s teachers turns out to be a Kryptonian criminal in disguise, Klax-Ar, who wears a gigantic “K” on his shirt and I assume is, therefore, basically Krypton’s Jughead. Even at this point, so many Kryptonians had survived the planet’s destruction that I’m pretty sure the only Kryptonians who actually perished in the blast had been tied to the planet’s surface and shot directly in the face prior to the explosion.

"Years ago, when you were a babe..."

Klax-Ar claims to be the man who actually destroyed Krypton, but it turns out he’s just a big fat liar who I guess he figured he could make those claims because who’s around to contradict him? All the other Kryptonians are dead except Superboy and he was a baby back then, they don’t even have any archived copies of Kryptonian Wikipedia lying around to fact-check! And even if they did, he probably went in and edited the entry on “Kryptonians who destroyed the planet” as well as “Kryptonian World-Destroyers Born in New Jersey” and “Fictional Characters with Talking Animal Sidekicks” because he’s incensed that Puss in Boots is considered Shrek’s sidekick; he’s his own character, dammit!

In the end, Superboy discovers Klax-Ar’s deception and also his kind-of predatory plan to abduct Superboy and suck all the super-powers out of him, which just serves as a reminder of super-stranger danger in prehistoric Smallville.

PART SEVEN: THE PUZZLE OF THE DISAPPEARING PITCHER
That's a magic trick, right?

"Batboy" indeed.

The only non-reprint story in this volume is of a variety of story that I’ve always hated and certainly wish would just die already, being the “Superheroes meet when the superheroes are still kids and haven’t really become superheroes yet.” If you parse from that sentence that the Smallville TV series was a bit of a drag for me, you nailed it.

In this case, young Clark Kent meets young Bruce Wayne on the site of a Little League baseball championship between the Smallville Sabertooths and the Gotham Greyhounds. Kids, that is canon, have your comical tee-shirts made up pronto.

Superboy managed to eke out a small legion of meetings with other adult superheroes during their teen years, including Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen and Aquaman, not to mention that he’d met Lois Lane, Perry White and even a baby Jimmy Olsen, and possibly also me for all I know.

In closing, though, I leave you with this: Best wishes from Superboy and his friends. You know, like Mxyzptlk, and the Kryptonite Kid who, earlier in that very issue, was trying to kill Superboy to death via the loss of his life. Here, he warmly places a hand on Pete Ross' shoulder and smiles gently. Ah, how time has tendered us all.

The murder is behind them now.

BATMAN LEADS AN INTERESTING LIFE - THE LORD OF BATMANOR

Swingin' around like that is just punishing innocent people who choose that moment to look up.

The recent referendum for Scottish independence resulted in a narrow but decisive “No” vote, which is a real shame since I’m pretty sure Scotland could have walked away with Batman in the arrangement.

That brave young boy.

As ”The Lord of Batmanor” (Detective Comics vol.1 No.195, August 1953), the Dark Knight Detective picks up a third identity – not only is he a crimefighter and a multimillionaire, he’s also a Scottish Lord. When the last of the McLaughlie line passes away, he leaves the familial castle to Batman as an incentive to right a centuries-old slander against the family name.

Because of the constant truck of coincidence which typifies comics, know that the castle in question is bedeviled nightly by bats and known locally, therefore, as Batmanor, which I think was the original title of Downton Abbey. Imagine that, all the downstairs staff is the Outsiders, serving the Bat-Family upstairs, in celluloid collars. Geo-Force getting in trouble with Alfred because he’s a shitty butler, then inhaling sharply on a cigarette he dashes off to fumble with one of the new footmen. It writes itself.

Meanwhile, this highlands-and-heathers tale also writes itself, inasmuch as it descends a checklist of old Scottish tropes for Batman to encounter: there’s a haunted castle, of course, and an appearance by a Loch Ness Monster (who, inevitably, turns out to be a robot submersible used for nefarious purposes by a local crook) and copious use of bagpipes being confused for the screams of the dying, apparently.

There are no words.

What the story does have going for it is Batman in a kilt, which is an image I’ll take with me to the grave or, at the very least, to a long nap. I’m sorry that none of the assorted teams of international Batmen ever included a Scottish Batman, because at the very least the idea of a Utility Sporran has immediate appeal, as does Batman calling the Joker “a right bawheed” and the Riddler “A feckin cant.” Also, providing he was Glaswegian, it would have been delightful to see Batman even try to pronounce the crimes of “murder” or mention that he’d responded to a “burglar alarm” ...

As for the temporary lord of Batmanor, Batman’s job is to uncover the lost “royal gold” which the McLaughlie clan was meant to have delivered to the king, but bollixed it up. That’s British for “fucked.”

Actually, an even-cursory glance at Scottish history didn’t seem in the cards during the plotting session, since the gold is only ever intended for “the king” so as to fight “the wars.” In fact, the gold was supposed to have been lost 400 years ago, during which time … well, listen, I’m no expert on Scottish history, but if we’re strict about the “400 years” and assume there’s little-to-no rounding of the number going on, then the gold was intended for King James around the time of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. See, this blog is good for something!

Ultimately, the gold is found, having been melted into clock weights and set up in the nearby clocktower, a hiding place also discovered by fake detective and actual American gangster “Smoothy” Mathers, whose gimmick was his addiction to the healthful, satisfying flavor of smoothies, probably.

I’ll get pilloried in comments if I don’t mention that Alan Grant and Frank Quitely revisited the essential premise of the story in a 1998 graphic novel, Batman: The Scottish Connection, but that one didn’t end with Robin gleefully torturing Batman with bagpipe music, so I consider it inferior at every level.

...and that's when Batman dumped Robin into the Atlantic from 60,000 feet up.

TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN FOES : THE MUMMER

Not to be confused with "Superboy Gets a Hummer!" which is a specialty video you can find online.

Ironically, when it comes to Superman’s many rogues, the ones who've proven to have the longest shelf-life aren't the world-beaters and weightlifters, but rather the soft, breakable ones who ought to fold like a house of cards or pop like a bounce-house the size of the sun under the slightest pressure from the Pinky of Steel. Never mind that Superman could turn Toyman, The Prankster and even Lex Luthor into gristle piñatas with a determined eyebrow flex, they've still managed to build the longest rivalries with the Last Son of Krypton.

Of course, not every unpowered villain makes a legacy – “Squishable” alone does not a legend make.

Superboy isn’t much different, and one of his first super-foes is a “mischievous mountebank of menace” (comic book writers used to get paid by the alliteration) known as “The Mummer,” a frustrated entertainer who turns crooked, like Wesley Snipes only with more knee-socks and fewer tax problems.

You can wait forever, son, he died in there.

Apparently some sort of 17th century fop-comic, the Mummer’s big gimmick involves utilizing a trio of increasingly smaller “dummies” – actually sophisticated robots of his own invention – who aid him in his crimes. You would think he could just sell the robots to make his fortune, but robots are a dime-a-dozen in the Earth of the Silver Age. You comb robots out of your beard in the morning, there are stone age tribes yet undiscovered by Western civilization on the Silver Age Earth which have their own robots. You get two robots in a box of Cap’n Crunch as a prize, and you’d probably throw one of ‘em away.

The Mummer’s tremendous pride encourages him to challenge Superboy to a contest of wits as a means to truly launch his criminal career, aided by a Superboy robot of his own invention – which is also his downfall, as Superboy reprograms it to just fuck the poor idiot up. The Mummer quits thereafter, his legacy preserved only in an annual parade held in Philadelphia every New Years.

ROADS TO REGRETTABILITY : PLAY BALL!

Roads to Regrettability: Sports-based Superheroes
The League of Regrettable Heroes – soon to be published by Quirk Books and written by yours truly – features write-ups on 100 of comicdom’s weirdest, most unfortunate, most misunderstood and flat-out strangest  superheroes. The book debuts June 2, 2015, so in the meantime let’s discuss the many paths a character can take on the road to regrettability. By its very nature, sports produces few winners and many losers. In that way, it’s pretty similar to the world of superheroes, and even moreso when it comes to that least-likely of all costumed crimefighters, the sports-based superhero!

I don't even feel I gotta mention Stan
Lee's NHL Superheroes ...

Probably the most famous superheroes based on a sporting theme is simultaneously one of the most famous superheroes, full stop, although that arguably has as much to do with distancing himself from the athletic origins of his gimmick as anything else. The Silver Surfer debuted in 1966, around the same time during which Surf Culture itself was first making its mark on the American coast. Decked out in silver shorts and riding his famous board, the similarities between the Surfer and the surfers ends there – his history has unfortunately been bereft of surfer lingo and technique. Not once has the surfer yelled “Sweet curl, brah, let’s hang ten.”

Archer superheroes have also had a lot of success (particularly at DC Comics, where they number more than a few), although it’s historically been necessary for them to trick out their arrows with gimmick heads – like knockout gas, nets, boxing gloves and handcuffs, or in other words, “Things that work just fine when not attached to arrows.”

Marvel Comics has enjoyed a wide array of sports-based superheroes, not discounting more than a few pro-wrestlers-turned-costumed-crimefighter and, in the case of Ben Grimm, a.k.a. The Thing and a pre-heroic Spider-Man, the other way around. Among their stable has included Triathalon, Team America and additional motorcycle stuntmen like the Human Fly, Ghost Rider and Stuntmaster, skateboarding superheroes like Night Thrasher and El Guapo, and an entire federation of super-powered wrestlers including D(emolition) Man. Lastly, of course, there’s boxing superhero Battling Bantam, whose costume was designed to resemble a bantam rooster, because why not get them coming and going? Also, another blog already used the gag of calling him “Cockfight.” Oh well, you snooze you lose.

Of the most arguably notorious sports-themed superheroes, Marvel continues its tradition with NFL Superpro, a former football player decked out in a super-football uniform whose creator Fabian Nicieza famously admitted to creating solely for the free football tickets.

Worse yet then NFL Superpro, though, is Neal Adams’ Skateman, created for Pacific Comics and evidently originally intended to serve as a spokesman for a line of rollerskates. What company would have been all that eager to embrace a public-facing persona who was himself a shell-shocked Vietnam vet whose closest friends and lovers are murdered by the mafia and so he leaves a bloody trail of vengeance and racial slurs in his wake is a damn good question. Unsurprisingly, they’ve never claimed credit for the character who starred in what is widely believed to be the worst mainstream comic ever produced. I dunno, the only bad publicity is no publicity, right?

And then, of course, there’s Puck.

90 FROM THE 90s : PART SIX

Heroes Reborn
A cursory viewing of The Lion King will provide you with the fundamental understanding of the Circle of Life, which is probably the best way to explain the phenomenon of Heroes Reborn, Marvel’s attempt to glom onto the success of Image Comics which had, itself, been formed by creative talent who’d been routinely overlooked and underappreciated by Marvel. Marvel takes young talent and makes them strong on the milk of X-Men spinoffs, the young artists go out and plant the seeds of aborted four-issue miniseries and company launches, and then return to nourish the ailing parent by allowing them to consume their sloughed-off carapace after a biological process called “moulting” wherein they shed their skin by rubbing it off on sharp rocks.

While Marvel was willing to allow Image’s most opportunistic creators to helm the relaunch of their old-school core titles – Avengers, Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man and Captain America – they weren’t willing to completely hand over the franchises sight unseen. An in-continuity gimmick involving a super-powerful psychic menace named Onslaught sent the affected heroes to another dimension (inside the mind of Franklin Richards, the FF’s all-powerful pet boy) where they could enjoy a year of gritted teeth and lazy cross-hatching before being cleanly returned to the primary continuity, unchanged, in the event that the stunt failed. Guess if it did.

Batman/Hellboy/Starman
Among the multitude of inter-company crossovers throughout the 1990s, the most unexpected probably came in the form of DC’s stalwart cash cow Batman, their recent and critically celebrated alterna-hipster super-hero sensation Starman and Hellboy. Obviously the actual team-up was that of James Robinson, then then-hot writer of Starman, and Hellboy’s creator Mike Mignola, who handled the art chores. In that sense, the superfluous member of the team is likely Batman, as Robinson’s Starman was effectively a creator-owned character in every sense except the legal (although the fact that the book was probably banking on Mignola’s previous association with the character in Gotham By Gaslight probably didn’t hurt).

Still, the Bat sells books, as Rob Liefeld once infamously pointed out, so he provided a bit of a safety net for the unlikely team-up. Unfortunately, excepting the Madman/Superman crossover, no other creator-owned Dark Horse titles made the jump, which is a shame because we never got Usagi Yojimbo meeting Captain Carrot or Hitman Vs Concrete.

Embedded Trading Cards on the Cover / Bagged with cards
The rush to stay at the head of the pack in the crowded marketplace of the 90s meant that comics had to become more than merely stories on paper between flimsy covers. The value of a comic was artificially inflated by the gimmick cover, which became a standout issue merely by the virtue of its oddity. Giveaways naturally became the next obvious idea, as something similar had been the staple of magazines and other publications for years – Heck, I still have my Captain Britain boomerang.

Trading cards had inexplicably become the next hot collectible of the marketplace following comics, certainly favored by manufacturers for their relatively low cost and shipping-convenient size. Naturally, the partnership was inevitable, simultaneously leading to the rise of the Polybagged comic – better to preserve your pairing of card and comic, and to help add to that swirling plastic mass in the Pacific Ocean.

Embedded cards were the next obvious step, with the X-Books attaching holographic cards directly to the covers of their Fatal Attractions event (you know it as the time Wolverine’s adamantium was sucked out of his body, albeit not in a sexy way). Me, I’ll always prefer the plain old ploybagged trading card, if only for the prestige. I still carry my Mister T and the T-Force card in my wallet and remain offended that it’s not considered valid currency at Starbucks or ID at border crossings and the Post Office.

Ragman
When Ragman debuted in the 1970s, it was a short-run of a street-level costumed vigilante who’d ended up largely unembraced by the fans. It did develop a cult following, though, and among the cult evolved an interesting shared idea – that Ragman, despite being portrayed as Irish-American Rory Regan, was Jewish. Something in the portrayal of the character and his father in their trade as literal ragmen – buyers and sellers of junk and discarded goods, we give them shows on TLC these days – via the renderings of Joe Kubert and the Nestor Redondo studios evoked the idea (even though the editorial team famously tried to quash it in the lettercol) and the fandom held onto it for twenty subsequent years.

Revived in the 1990s by the super-team of Giffen, Fleming and Helfer (with Pat Broderick on art), the post-Crisis Ragman was recreated as explicitly Jewish. In fact, crazy amounts of Jewish, like ten pounds of Jewish in a five pound sack. His cup of Jewishness runneth over. What had been implied by the original scenario and inferred by the audience became a giant Jewish neon sign – all of a sudden, Rory Regan acquired a kvetching Yiddish rabbi, a golem for an adversary and a suit of possessed scraps of fabric somehow related to kabbalistic magic.

The 1990s were a good time for multi-ethnic characters and characters of color to find a place on the racks, but this incarnation of Ragman was unfortunately representative of how the urge to do the right thing and represent diversity created, effectively, multicultural cartoons devoid of nuance.

The update ultimately worked for the character, making him at the very least one of those prominent C-Listers whom you can find milling about the background of crowd scenes during the big Summer crossovers. It sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but that’s actually a pretty big step-up for this guy.

Preacher
In the pre-Jon Stewart days of The Daily Show, during what we can accurately call, with little exaggeration, ”The period of time when Craig Kilborn was the host,” guest and comedian Janeane Garofalo ended up giving comic books a bit of a big shout-out when she mentioned that she read Preacher.  She did it a bit of a disservice, in my memory, originally calling it a comic book then recanting “Well, it’s not really a comic book, it’s actually a graphic novel” when it’s still technically and practically a comic book, but that’s a battle for idiots so ::drops the mic::

Preacher was certainly a comic engineered for the self-proclaimed badass. As arguably Vertigo’s second biggest original title behind Sandman, it shared some of the same shortcomings and strengths – It was pretty clear that author Ennis’ vision for the title wasn’t fixed at the start and otherwise important plot elements just withered on the vine, the short stories were far superior to the overall tale, and characters were often there merely for set dressing or to pass the time between main character plot points. But then someone would kick a cowboy boot through a biker’s jaw and say “fuck”.

The title’s reliance on language, shock and excess was simultaneously a strength and a weakness, providing some of the book’s most memorable moments and its most absolute cop-out endings. What it did have going for it, inarguably, is it was absolutely the only book of its kind on the racks. That is, until Vertigo and other companies started shoveling cash at Ennis to make fifteen more titles in his chosen oeuvre of “A Pope with epilepsy wanking off a Hitler lookalike over a shitting dog”.

TRULY GONE & FORGOTTEN : FAST WILLIE JACKSON

Who's that white guy above the logo? 

Of the legions of lookalikes which popped up following the immediate success of teenage comic book wunderkind Archie Andrews, none could claim to be quite as COOL, BAD, FAST and TOGETHER as the absolutely singular BROTHER AND SISTERS OF MOCITY USA – namely, Fast Willie Jackson and his pals!

A product of Fitzgerald Publishing – and, in fact, of FP publisher Bertram Fitzgerald, who co-created the crew of characters along with a very likely pseudonymous Henry Scarpelli – Fast Willie was the company’s sole entry into the teen humor market. I almost said “soul entry” there, because I’d bet that’s how the endeavor would have been described on Good Times.

Fitzgerald Pubs was best known for a series of historical titles – under the banned of Golden Legacy – which examined via comics the otherwise little-publicized history of African-American culture. Fast Willie made for a natural extension of the company’s apparent mission, creating a welcoming branch of comics for the young black reader, whose visual representation on the racks was typically limited to one or two black characters riding shotgun in someone else’s book. Fast Willie has its flaws in a strictly critical sense, but you can’t fault it for trying to break down a barrier which, frankly, remains in place to this day.

If you skim it instead of reading it closely, these two are having a very different conversation.

The team’s titular Archie-alike, Fast Willie Jackson, shared a lot in common with his carrot-topped Caucasian colleague. Besides being a continually broke, girl-crazy pleasure-seeker with a good heart (if slightly less than the quickest wit), he’s also got a pretty familiar crew hanging around. Jo-Jo plays Jughead to Willie’s Archie, which is a phrase that sounds like an innuendo but you’d need a chart to define how. Slow-witted Hannibal is the crew’s Moose, while their Reggie is a showboating, self-impressed and flamboyant Frankie Johnson. There’s not enough room in the book for both a Betty AND a Veronica, so the sole object of the communal affections of the male cast is Dee Dee Wilson. Lotta work going into these surnames.

Antagonists in the story come by way of assorted figures of authority, although only one of them happens to be a good, old-fashioned white devil: Officer Flagg, a dim-witted patrolman referred to as “The Man” and whose constant harassment of the kids in the cast isn’t quite as funny in a post-Ferguson world.

There’s a Pop (Jose Martinez) who runs the local soda shoppe, and a fortune teller named Sister Zola who’s apparently a con artist, and a couple other minor characters (I’m dying to know who Ms.Jane Fronda, portrayed in a subscription ad, is but I only have two issues) but the elephant in the room is Jabar.

Misandry is real!

A young afro-centric militant and, despite his antagonism, a member of the gang, Jabar’s portrayed either as the goat or an annoyance, and pinning down the reason is really tough. This book was published in 1976, and a portrayal of a black radical as a loon, a bore and a dope in the pages of an African-American publisher’s multicultural ensemble piece while other characters are celebrated who you might arguably describe as politically and socially apathetic is, uh, weird. Particularly given that the rest of the FP line celebrated black agitators who upset the status quo.

In a group shot (from the aforementioned subscription ad), even the book’s heavies are portrayed as calmly and cheerily congregating together, except for Jabar, whose sweating-and-shaking figure is contorted into comedic rage. Legitimately weird choice, this.

Excepting the portrayal of the book’s sole non-conformative character, Fast Willie’s other main problem is … it’s not great? Like a lot of the teen humor books which surfaced in the wake of Archie’s passing, there’s a few jokes about fashion, some hanging out at the malt shop and bouncing off one’s feet after being made the butt of a joke, but not a lot else going for it.

Still, it’s hard to resent Fast Willie Jackson for its failings, when something not unlike it would provide a welcome change to a comics rack which is only just beginning to become a little less monochromatic.

Seriously, I'm dying to know what the deal is with Jane Fronda.

GONE&FORGOTTEN REVISITED: STRANGE SPORTS

A good general rule when surfing the internet is to avoid any website which advertises "Strange Sports"

DC Comics had been trafficking in the “Strange Sports” genre for a while – primarily stories about haunted joggers and empty uniforms that won their own games, kids who get magic powers from space and become Olympic level athletes overnight, the 1969 Mets, you know, whimsical things like that. By the time DC Super-Special No.10 rolled around, though, “The Mystery of the Headless Golf Champ” or whatever gave way to its natural successor, a bunch of super-heroes and super-villains playing a moderately competent baseball game against one another with conditional ethics at stake!

Baseball being a game of statistics, it’s appropriate that DC’s Answer Man Bob Rozakis pens the tale, with JLA regular Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin illustrating, since the story had the general air of the annual JLA/JSA crossover. I say that in the sense that the idea was much more thrilling than the execution. Then again, these things are intended for eight-year olds. What are we even doing here? We’re all grown-ups, let’s go get drinks and mortgages.

Our story begins in the warm, golden setting of the supervillain suburbs where nefarious husband and wife crook-team, The Sportsmaster (he’s a master of … SPORTS!) and The Huntress (Being a tiger-striped bad girl, rather than the purple-bedecked Bat-belle of recent years), dubbed here “Mr. and Mrs. Menace,” beat the holy living shit out of each other. Ah, domestic violence. Is there anything quite so romantic as a guy in a mask waling eight kinds of tar out of a woman dressed like Daniel Striped Tiger? It must be Springtime.

It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf  for Super-Villains

The issue of contention is that the Huntress has evidently been reading the comics she appears in, and has come to the conclusion that – since heroes always win and villains always lose – she’ll become a superhero! After knocking her into the side of a doorframe with a solid steel tennis racquet, Sportsmaster convinces her to give him the opportunity to prove her wrong. His tactic: challenging the forces of good and evil to nine solid innings of America’s pastime.

This involves kidnapping two full teams’ worth of heroes and villains, plus a stadium full of onlookers, so Huntress’ theoretical career as a good guy is launching a little wobbly.

Appropriately enough, many of the super-heroes and their foes happen to be at sporting events when their abductions take place. Green Arrow, Black Canary and Batman are attending a bowling championship, as billionaires tend to do, while Kid Flash and Robin are playing the ponies. Good habits begin young, kids. Speaking of good habits, Superman’s busy playing (tennis) with himself in front of millions watching at home in the television audience, because that’s what super-heroes did in the 1970s: They played tennis against themselves. So what, so can I, where’s a brick wall? Sign me up for the Justice League.

The teams are comprised of Superman (P), Batman (C), Plastic Man (1B, literally), Wonder Woman (2B), Green Arrow (3B), Kid Flash (SS), Robin (LF), The Huntress (CF) and what can’t Black Canary (RF) catch? On the villains’ side, it’s Sportsmaster (P), The Joker (C), Felix Faust (1B), Matter Master (2B), Dr.Polaris (3B), Tattooed Man (SS), Weather Wizard (LF), Lex Luthor (CF), and Chronos (RF), with Uncle Sam and Amazo playing Umpire. It’s difficult to imagine them putting together a comic like this now, because the villains woulda been too busy trying to rape second base and stab the field through their backs to mount any sort of reasonable offense.

Either the play-by-play of this game (reprinted on the final page of the issue) was generated by one of those table-top baseball simulators you play with pachinko balls (I had one!) or this is one of those scenarios where Superman forgets that he has every super-power ever plus five more you never heard of before, all jacked up on Creatine and atomic energy. The splash panel of the book shows Superman serving a genuine award-winning curve at the Joker and the fact that it doesn’t end with the Clown Prince of Crime screaming, suddenly armless, as powdered ash and cork rain down in a fine mist, mingling with the blood, is frankly shocking.

Robin always gets picked last for a reason.

The heroes take very little convincing to take part in the game, given that they’re held in place by only a vague threat. Somehow, reveals Sportsmaster, the 60,000+ fans in attendance will be trapped in the stadium forever if the superheroes fail to participate. “All right” says Superman, inexplicably picking up a glove instead of using heat vision to tattoo a picture of genitals on Sportsmaster’s exposed forehead and throwing him into orbit around the sun, “Sounds good to me, PLAY BALL!”

Naturally, the game begins under the rules that super-powers are illegal, but this is already a pretty boring book so we’re not making any friends in the readership by leaving the powers out of it. Of course, once the villains start breaking the rules, and the heroes follow suit, what’s the point of the exercise again?

In one of my favorite scenes in the book, Plastic Man successfully disguises himself as Wonder Woman's magic lasso. Even as a kid, reading this, I remember thinking:
(A) Way to go, Plas!
(B) How did Wonder Woman not notice Plastic Man replacing her lasso right on her hip?
(C) Why is Plas glowing? Well, as I think about it, rubbing up against Wonder Woman's satin, star-spangled fanny would probably illuminate even the most stoic among us.

The superheroes win, naturally, squeaking by at 11-10 which I guess means Huntress is a superhero now? Except for the matter of 60,000 accessory counts of kidnapping, I suppose. I guess we’ll see her own starring in her own book in … any second now … wait for it … these things take time, now.

It’s probably for the best that Huntress gives up any pretensions towards villainy, anyway, because if this story teaches us anything it’s that she and her sinister spouse apparently all along possessed a device capable of teleporting superheroes anywhere on the face of the Earth and they only just now decided to use it to play baseball.

And just your reminder that Plastic Man's superpower is the grossest of them all.