Super Sunday IV: Elliot S. Maggin's "Superman: Last Son of Krypton"

Once again, in somewhat of an annual tradition, while the vast majority of the nation focuses its attention on some sort of big sporting event or something like  that, we hear at Gutter Talk HQ turn our attention to telling readers of this blog about a classic tale of the Man of Steel.  This time out, our subject is not one of the character's comic book exploits, but one of his early ventures into the realm of prose novels. 

Regardless of outward appearances, despite the fact that it uses the  film's crystalline Superman logo, notwithstanding the picture of Christopher Reeve in his Superman costume on the cover, and setting aside the sixteen pages of black and white photos from the movie embedded in the center of the book, Elliot S. Maggin's 1978 novel Superman: Last Son of Krypton is not an adaptation of the then newly released Superman: The Movie.  Rather,  it is an original tale set in a rough approximation of DC's Bronze Age Earth-One continuity and reflects pretty accurately Superman as he was appearing in the comics of the day, many of them, not coincidentally, also written by Maggin.  As had been the case for several years in his comics titles, Superman, in his secret identity of Clark Kent, works not as a mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper but as anchor for the WGBS six o'clock news and fairly recent additions to the supporting cast Steve Lombard and Morgan Edge figure prominently in the story alongside old standbys Lois Lane, Perry White and Jimmy Olson.

It has been said that the advantage that comics had over film, especially in the pre-CGI days when this novel was published, is that they could portray things that were beyond the scope of special effects technology.  Comics, especially in the Bronze Age, had their own limitations, however.  One was space.  A typical single issue of the day contained a mere seventeen pages of story, and, at least at DC, single issue stories, or at least stories no more than two or three issues in length, were still the norm.  Words and pictures, of course, take more room to tell the same events than words alone, thus far more story could be conveyed in a 238 page novel, allowing Maggin to tell an epic, cosmic science fiction adventure story on a scale previously unattempted in any Superman comic.

Maggin peppers the novel with many of his signature themes and tropes.  The author's admiration of Albert Einstein is well known among comics fans and the renowned physicist, though never actually identified, is a major character in the novel as well as a main motivating factor in the plot.  The Guardians of the Galaxy, from Green Lantern, make an appearance, and in a nod to the classic Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams "Hard Traveling Heroes" era of the book, the exiled Guardian known as the "Old Timer" shows up.  Part of his purpose in the story is to give voice to another of Maggin's favorite themes as he, in  disguise as a human sociologist being  interviewed by Lois Lane for a TV talk show, warns of the possible negative effects of Superman's presence on Earth on human evolution, echoing Maggin's earlier short comics story "Must There Be A Superman?"

The novel begins begins with a retelling of Superman's origin, but with a new spin.  Prior to baby Kal-El's arrival on Earth, a probe carrying a message from Jor-El visits Einstein, who, as "the most highly developed intellect" on Earth, is entreated by the Kryptonian to take in and raise his son.  Instead, the aged scientist travels to Smallville, Kansas, near where Kal-El's rocket is to land, and chooses a local couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent, whom he deems suitable to give the Kryptonian child a good upbringing.  Through the ruse of selling the Kents a new tractor, he maneuvers the couple into position to discover the child from the stars upon his arrival. 

The novel then moves to the present day, as Superman's arch-enemy Lex Luthor makes plans to steal a document left behind by the now late Professor Einstein and sealed in a vault for the last quarter century.  Einstein, it turns out, is a personal hero of the criminal scientist, and it is speculated that the document may contain one last scientific breakthrough.  

Lex makes off with the document, but it is, in turn, stolen from him by an alien named Towbee on behalf of the Master, not the Doctor Who villain but the ruler of the planet Oric in the Vega system.  After meeting with the Old Timer, Superman recruits Luthor to journey with him to Oric and aid him in retrieving the Einstein papers.  Once on Oric, the unlikely allies discover a plan by the Master to make himself ruler of his section of the galaxy, after he has, by manipulating black holes, physically separated that arm of the galaxy from the rest of the rest of the Milky Way, thus putting him out of the Guardians' jurisdiction and beyond the reach of the Green Lantern Corps.

One of the best things about the book is Maggin's exploration of the character of Lex Luthor, who emerges as much more than simply a two dimensional mad scientist.  Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Maggin introduces flashbacks to Clark Kent and Lex Luthor's childhood days in Smallville.  He expands the story of how Luthor came to hate Superboy, giving the future villain a more emotionally resonant and realistic reason for his emnity toward the hero than simple vanity over the loss of his hair.  Superboy, in his attempt to save Luthor's life, in Maggin's account not only causes the permanent loss of Luthor's hair, but destroys his greatest experiment as well. 

I've wondered recently how come someone supposedly as smart as Luthor never figured out that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person, especially since he knew both of them back in Smallville.  After all, both Clark and Superman are about the same age, each left Smallvile at the same time, and then showed up in Metropolis at pretty much exactly the same time.  It really doesn't take a scientific genius, as Luthor purports to be, to put two and two together and come up with something other than mere coincidence. 

Okay, digression over, let's wrap up this post.

While Superman: Last Son of Krypton is dressed up as a novelization of the first Superman movie, it is, in my opinion at least, something even better; the ultimate Superman epic from one of the character's premier writers. 

Here are some links to sites where you can get other opinions and perspectives on today's topic (and maybe even buy a copy):

The Bronze Age of Blogs

Too Busy Thinking About My Comics

Adherents.com

Superman Homepage

PGP

Goodreads

Amazon.com

Preview: Green Lantern Sector 2814 Volume 3

It always amused me, during the period in which Hal Jordan, the second DC character to bear the name Green Lantern, was spending a decade dead for tax purposes, to hear or read self professed fans of the character decry how badly DC had treated Hal and demand his resurrection and reinstatement as Green Lantern.  Where, I could not help but wonder, were these supposedly die-hard fans during the twenty five years between 1970 and 1994 when Hal Jordan seemed incapable of supporting a solo series for more than a handful of months?  During that period, lagging sales inevitably would lead the writers and editors of the book to desperate measures to revive interest in the book and lure in new readers.  That quarter century saw Hal saddled with a co-star, replaced as Green Lantern, made part of an Earth bound team of Green Lanterns, forced to share his title with the rotating adventures of  Earth's two other Green Lanterns, replaced again and ultimately killed off.  These ploys met with varying degrees of success.  Let's not forget that during this time, his magazine was canceled twice.

Cover of GL 200 by Walt Simonson, which will serve as the TPB's cover

I mention this because, besides just wanting to get that off my chest, I recently learned that this coming December DC will be releasing Green Lantern: Sector 2814 Volume 3, the third (obviously) in a series of trade paperbacks collecting issues of Green Lantern from the mid-1980's tenures of writers Len Wein and Steve Englehart, including the first time Hal was replaced, that time by his designated back-up, John Stewart.  The issues to be reprinted in this third volume (#194 through #200) include those that crossed over with DC's universe changing Crisis On Infinite Earths limited series, which Englehart used to set up yet another major change in the title's, and Hal's, status quo.  Effectively, these also constitute the final seven issues of the Silver Age Green Lantern title, as the new direction brought with it a new name for the comic as of #201, with the book's second cancellation to follow within two years.
These issues are also significant for re-introducing Guy Gardner and beginning his evolution into the arrogant jerk soon to be a mainstay of Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis' Justice League, and for containing, in what Englehart contends was merely a throwaway line of dialogue in #200, the seeds of DC's third major crossover event (after Crisis and Legends), Millennium.
Green Lantern, I believe, tied in more closely to the events of Crisis On Infinite Earths than any other book not set on Earth 2.  This only makes sense, since the backstory of the Crisis, as related by Harbinger in Crisis #7, is deeply rooted in the Green Lantern mythology.  However, these stories are not so closely tied to Crisis that they cannot be enjoyed on their own.  A comprehensive knowledge of the history of the Guardians and the Green Lantern Corps wouldn't hurt, though Englehart does a pretty good job of fairly unobtrusively filling in the reader on what he needs to know to understand the current proceedings.
The stories in this volume begin with the then current Green Lantern of Earth, John Stewart, being recruited by Harbinger to go off and fight the forces of the Anti-Monitor.  On Oa, home of John's bosses, the Guardians of the Universe, a rift has developed among the immortals as to how to deal with the Crisis.  The main body of little blue guys has decided to stand back and do nothing.  If the Multiverse is meant to end, they reason, then so be it.  On the other hand, a more proactive rogue faction of Guardians decide to take the fight to the Anti-Monitor.  To this end, they bring Guy Gardner, now somewhat brain damaged, out of the coma that he had been in since the latter days of Denny O'Neil's run on the title and bring him to Oa.  As they bestow a ring and power battery upon Gardner, a wave of anti-matter sent by the Anti-Monitor kills all but one of them. (This actually occurs in Crisis #9) The surviving rogue Guardian dispatches Guy to gather up a team of villains including the Shark, Goldface, Sonar and Hector Hammond to destroy the white spot on the black moon of the planet Qward in the Anti-Matter Universe from which the Anti-Monitor arose in hopes of destroying the villain. 
Meanwhile, what with the woman he quit the Green Lantern Corps for, Carol Ferris, having turned into Star Sapphire permanently and gone off to live with Zamorans, the alien Amazons who transformed her, as their queen, Hal Jordan is beginning to regret giving up his power ring.  He is soon recruited by the last surviving rogue Guardian and given a new ring so that he may accompany Guy and his team on their mission.
Then Sinestro shows up. He convinces John that Gardner and Hal have to be stopped, as their mission would cause more harm than good.  John flies off to Oa to get help from the Guardians and the rest of the Green Lantern Corps.  It turns out that Sinestro's offer of an alliance was merely a ruse to get John to take him to Oa so that he could get his revenge on the Guardians. However, after Sinestro is defeated, the Central Power Battery, which powers all the Green Lantern power rings, speaks to the assembled Guardians and Green Lanterns through the person of Tomar Re, Green Lantern of the planet Xudar and the first alien GL that Hal, and thus Green Lantern readers, ever encountered.  The battery reveals that Sinestro was right, and Gardner and company must indeed be prevented from succeeding in their quest.  Thus, the entire Corps heads off to the Anti-Matter Universe to confront Guy, Hal and their team of villains.
After the ensuing battle has ended and the Crisis is over, Hal Jordan is reinstated as a Green Lantern, and the Corps gathers on Oa to hear an announcement from the Guardians that will change the Corps forever...or at least until subsequent writer Gerard Jones reversed the change in the next volume of Green Lantern a few years down the line.

I have read Green Lantern #'s 194 to 200 several dozen times since I first bought them back in 1985.  They are some of my favorite Green Lantern stories, featuring some of Englehart's best writing and the usual beautiful art job from Joe Staton. Many great artists have worked on the various volumes of Green Lantern over the last half century, from Gil Kane to Neal Adams, Mike Grell, Dave Gibbons, Pat Broderick, Mark Bright, Darryl Banks, Doug Manke, and many more, but to my mind, Staton remains THE definitive GL artist. Sector 2814 Volume 3 is definitely something that any Green Lantern fan should want to read, and makes a nice companion volume to Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Welcome To The 21st Century--X-Men: Days of Future Past

In my post a couple of months ago on Superman #300, I wrote:

"It's amusing to read speculative stories like this one from a vantage point several years beyond the 'futuristic' setting of the tale."

For this post, I'm going to examine one possible future posited in a very famous comics story line from the vantage point of the very year that said future is meant to be taking place.

Now, as I look around and compare my real world surroundings to the world shown in this story, I can't help but think, "Where are the mutant death camps?  By God, we were promised mutant death camps by now! And what about the giant killer robots who are supposed to have the whole world on the brink of nuclear armageddon?  Where are they?"

As you may have surmised, the vision of the future of which I speak is the post apocalyptic horror posited by Chris Claremont and John Byrne as the future of the Marvel Universe in the classic tale "Days of Future, Past" from Uncanny X-Men #'s 141 and 142.  As I realized when I was re-reading my Essential  X-Men collections earlier this year, the futuristic portions of this story take place in 2013, the very year that we find ourselves in the midst of at this very moment. The fact that the next X-Men movie is apparently based on this storyline provides yet another reason to give these two issues another look.

Of course, "Days" was in no way ever meant to be a vision of our future here in what is somewhat cynically, at times, referred to as "the real world", unlike other works of futuristic speculation such as, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It has long been my contention that, at the time that film was made, the not too distant future posited in the movie was well within our grasp.  If the American space program had continued at the pace that put men on the moon less than a decade from the time that President John F. Kennedy made such a feat a priority, we no doubt could have had commercial space flight and a lunar colony by 1999, as seen in the film, and a manned vessel approaching the outskirts of the Jovian system just two short years later.  "Days of Future Past", on the other hand, is Claremont and Byrne's vision of the fantasy world known as the Marvel Universe, based not on "real world" trends, but on the stories they themselves had been telling in Uncanny for the previous three years.

Its a good bet that even if you've not read Uncanny X-Men #'s 141 and 142, or any of the many reprintings thereof, you nonetheless know at least the bare bones outline of the story.  This is, after all, one of the most well known, well regarded and influential tales ever published in the super-hero genre.  Still, I'll pause here for a brief recap for the benefit of those suffering the early stages of Alzheimer's or experiencing a momentary brain fart, or maybe even an actual non-comics reader who stumbled upon this post while searching for something else that they were actually interested in.
Uncanny #141begins by thrusting the reader without explanation at first into the world of 2013 and the ruins of New York City where we meet older versions of several of the X-Men plotting what is obviously a desperate and last ditch effort to avert a threatened nuclear war. We eventually learn that in 1980, the "present" as of the time of this story's initial publication, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants had assassinated anti-mutant presidential candidate Senator Robert Kelly, leading to a backlash against mutants that gave rise to anti-mutant legislation and  the creation by the U.S. government of an army of Sentinels charged with the elimination of the "mutant menace."
Eventually the Sentinels took over the country, wiping out mutants and non-mutant super-powered humans alike, and confining the few survivors to detention camps.  By the time we join this scenario, the Sentinels are ready to spread their anti-mutant reign of terror beyond the borders of the United States and the other nations of the world are likewise prepared to prevent this by any means necessary, including the use of nuclear weapons.   In order to prevent Armageddon, the remaining X-Men; Kate (a.k.a. Kitty) Pryde, Colossus, Storm and Wolverine, joined by Johnny Storm Franklin Richards and a young mutant telepath named Rachel; come up with one of those plans that only make sense to comic book characters and readers.  With Rachel's help, they send the mind of the adult Kate Pryde into the body of her teenaged self, Kitty Pride, a.k.a. Sprite, in order to stop the Brotherhood from killing Kelly and starting the whole mess in the first place.
Besides providing the launching point for many future X-Men plotlines, "Days of Future Past" introduced, in a cameo, Rachel Summers, and laid the groundwork for Claremont's future attempts to rehabiliate Magneto, as he joins the surviving X-Men in hatching their ridiculous scheme.
Essentially, "Days of Future Past" is the swan song of the Claremont-Byrne collaboration on Uncanny X-Men.  The issue after "Days" conclusion, #143, a Christmas story further spotlighting Kitty Pryde, was Byrne's last.  Unlike other creative teams that I'm sure we could all think of, Claremont-Byrne went out on a high note.  The whole of 1980 was a banner year for them.  That 12 month period saw the publication of not just "Days of Future Past", but another of the most famous, best loved and most influential super-hero epics ever, "The Dark Phoenix Saga." 
Of the two, Byrne faired better following the dissolution of his partnership with Claremont.  He would go on to an acclaimed run on Fantastic Four, a brief but influential run on The Incredible Hulk, and a move to DC to revamp the Superman line of comics before the decade was over.  Claremont would continue to write Uncanny X-Men for another decade, and while those stories were good, the book's glory days were behind it.

What DC Expects People To Pay Good Money For In October

Following in the well worn footsteps of  fellow comics bloggers J. Caleb Mozzocco and Tom Bondurant, I now present my take on some of the items that DC Comics will be shipping out to your friendly neighborhood comics shop in October that look even halfway interesting or worth checking out.

The list of things that could possibly entice me to buy an Aquaman comic is very, very short.  The credit line "written by John Ostrander," however, would most definitely be up near the top.  One of comics' finest writers returns, if only briefly, to the company where he did most of his best work with October's Aquaman Annual #1.  According to Bondurant, if sales of this issue warrant, it could lead to an ongoing series featuring Aquaman's former teammates The Others.  If so, DC could do a lot worse than let Ostrander stick around to write it.
Earth 2 #16 may be the last issue of the series I buy.  Its writer James Robinson's swan song, and my decision to continue with the book will rest entirely on whose name replaces his in the credit box.

Justice League 3000 #1 offers up yet another reunion of the classic Justice League International creative team of Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire (Attorneys at Law--sorry couldn't resist.)  However, I'm not expecting a JLI style BWAH-HA-HA fest, as there seems precious little room for that brand of irreverent humor in the New 52.  This title replaces Legion of Super-Heroes and involves the members of the Justice League seemingly thrown into the far future.

I thought Damian Wayne was dead.  Apparently, he gets better by October when the first issue of the six part mini-series Damian: Son of Batman ships.

Adventures of Superman #6 is a decided "NO!", at least in these parts.  The issue is written by J.T. Krul, and regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my longstanding and passionate contempt for everything the man has ever written.

Green Arrow Volume I: Hunter's Moon collects at long last the first six issues, comprising three two part story lines, of Oliver Queen's first ongoing series written by Mike Grell, with art by Ed Hannigan, Dick Giordano and Frank McLaughlin.  Even though I am one of the world's biggest GA fans, I won't be buying this.  You see, sometime during the two and a half decades that it took DC to deem these stories suitable for reprinting, I went ahead and aquired the contents of this book in individual issue form.  (And I picked them up Packrat Comics for a buck apiece, thus paying less than half what DC is asking for the collection.) Still, the fact that this book exists after all this time makes me happy.  I certainly hope future volumes are in the offing. 

Meanwhile, in issue #24 of the ongoing Green Arrow series, writer Jeff Lemire introduces the New 52 incarnation of Grell creation Shado.

Speaking of Green Arrow, he and ladylove Black Canary also show up this month as guest stars in the trade paperback The Joker: Clown Prince of Crime, reprinting for the first time the entire nine issues of Joker's eponymous series from 1975.  This is another one I'll be leaving on the shelf.  I've read about half of the issues to be reprinted here, and despite a laundry list of top talents of the day that includes Dennis O'Neil, Martin Pasko and Elliot S! Maggin on the writing side, and Ernie Chan, Irv Novick, Dick Giordano and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez at the drawing board, those stories just weren't very good at all.

 Ever since the publication of Sandman #1 a quarter century ago, series writer Neil Gaiman has assured us that there's more to the story of Morpheus' capture by Roderick Burgess than we were shown in that issue.  In years' since Sandman #75 rolled off the presses, he has repeatedly assured us that someday he would share that tale with us.  Someday has come, just in time for the Silver anniversary of Sandman #1's publication, as the first issue of The Sandman: Overture, a six issue mini-series that finally lifts the veil of secrecy that has long shrouded the events that weakened the Dream King sufficiently to allow Burgess' spell to entrap him, comes to comic shops in October.  The only question in my mind is whether I wait for the collection or buy it in installments.  I guess that really depends on just how excited I am about new Sandman material after all this time.   My gut reaction is to wait for the trade.  We'll see how I feel, and how much disposable income I have, in October.

As I said above, whether or not I actually purchase any of the above comics depends on a combination of my mood and my financial well-being.  However, I'm highly likely to tell you all about whatever I do purchase on this blog when the time comes.

Hey, Guys! Can I Play, Too! (X-Men #117)

In the past couple of weeks, two blogs that I follow on a regular basis, Bronze Age Babies and Comics Bronze Age, have run reviews of X-Men #117, so I'd thought I'd join in the fun and take a crack at it myself. I've got two copies of this story on my bookshelves.  One is in the first volume of Essential X-Men and the other is in a pocket sized mass market paperback in the "Marvel Illustrated Books" line that reprints this issue and Giant Size X-Men #1.  For this review, I chose to read the story from the Essential volume, as that was closest to the experience of reading the original comic.

I love those old mass market paperback reprint comics, and have a small but growing collection of them.  My one regret from my excursion to Gem City Comic Con is that I had to leave a few of these that I needed for my collection lying on the dealer's table because it was late on Sunday afternoon and I only had so much money left and I wanted to pick up those Bloom County collections that  were on sale for half price at another dealer's  table.  Still, as much as I love the mass market paperback comics, they really aren't the ideal way to read a comic.  Due to the smaller page size, and to keep the panels readable, one page of a comic is spread out over two or three pages of the book.  Panels are rearranged, shrunk, sometimes cut in half, and often omitted altogether to make the story fit.  I originally read Fantastic Four #31 in this format and, until I reread in Essential Fantastic Four Volume 2, I had no idea the Avengers appeared in the story because their cameo was omitted completely.  I have seen some that just shrink the whole page down and run it otherwise unaltered, but that makes those comics much harder to  read, especially for my aging eyeballs.

So, I was meant to be talking about X-Men #117, wasn't I?

Since I had the Essential reprint, I decided to start reading with #111 in order to place #117 in context.  The story is, after all, more or less an epilogue to the series of stories that began with #111.  It begins with Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast of the original X-Men, on leave from the Avengers and searching for the missing new X-Men.  He finds them working in a circus, having been hypnotized by their old foe Mesmero into forgetting who they are.  No sooner do they escape from Mesmero's influence than they are captured by none other  than Magneto who has defeated Mesmero.  Magneto holds the team prisoner in his base beneath a volcano in Antarctica.  Yes, some villains have hide outs in the Antarctic, and some have secret lairs in volcanoes, but Magneto is so bad-ass that he had both at once.

Our heroes escape from Magneto, but during the climactic battle Magneto's Antarctic volcano HQ is destroyed.  Hank and Jean Grey are separated from the rest of the team.  Hank and Jean make their way back to the Xavier  Institute, while Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Banshee end up in the Savage Land.  Each group assumes that the other died in the explosion of Magneto's lair.  

In the Savage Land, the X-Men battle their old foe Sauron, then team with Sauron's human self, Karl Lykos, and Ka-Zar to battle Garokk the Petrified Man and his high priestess Zaladane.  

Leaving the Savage Land by boat, the X-Men encounter a storm, and that's where "Psi War" in #117 picks up.

Believe it or not, all that took place in only six issues.  (Of course, Bob Haney could have squeezed all that into just one issue.)

As "Psi War" begins, the tempest tossed mutants are rescued by the crew of a Japanese ship.  The ship's on a secret mission, so the X-Men are forbidden from attempting to contact Professor X.  Thus, back in the states, the Professor, Jean, and the Shi'ar majestrix Lilandra still believe the team to be dead.  Jean decides to leave the school and get on her life, and Lilandra is trying to convince Charles to fly off to deep space with her.  Charles, meanwhile, is quite understandably feeling a bit melancholy as he reflects back on events in his past that eventually led him to form the X-Men.  

After getting out of the Army and being dumped by Moira MacTaggart, Charles had found himself wandering around Europe and eventually ending up in Cairo.  Its there, after having his pocket picked by the young Ororo, a.k.a. Storm, that he encounters his very first honest to goodness evil mutant. Amahl Farouk hits Xavier with a brain blast to get his attention, leading Charles to a seedy saloon where the two meet face to face.

After rejecting Farouk's offer to join him, Charles battles the evil telepath on the psychic plane.  Things look bad for Charles for awhile, but eventually he reaches a new mastery of his own psychic powers that allows him to defeat Farouk.
Back in the present, after telling his tale to Lilandra, Charles decides to take her up on her offer and accompany her back to the Shi'ar homeworld.

After the breakneck pace of the previous six issues, this flashback tale provides a bit of a breather before things get hectic again when the X-Men arrive in Japan next issue and face off against Moses Magnum.  "Psi War" is an excellent single issue tale that really marks the beginning, in a way, of Chris Claremont's decade and a half of fleshing out the characters of the X-Men and  turning them into believable, real seeming people.  One way he did that throughout his tenure on the title was, as with this issue, by fleshing their pasts.  He shows the characteristic Marvel respect for Continuity (that capital "C" was originally a typo, but I realized that its kind of appropriate for the Marvel Universe's approach to the subject) by acknowleding an earlier tale of Professor X's past from X-Men #20, Roy Thomas' first issue as writer, and building on that without in any way contradicting it.
The entire run of issues I mentioned above, from #111 onward, are the work of two creators, Claremont and penciler and co-plotter John Byrne, at the height of their talents working together to produce some of the finest comics of the Bronze Age.  Byrne had begun drawing the book with #108 and #111 was the first where he is credited as co-plotter.  However, I'm guessing he was perhaps co-plotting from the get-go, as #109 features the first appearance of Byrne created character James Hudson, called Weapon Alpha in that issue, though he would later be known as Vindicator and eventually Guardian.  Byrne certainly hit the ground running on X-Men, and the quality of the stories improves one hundred percent as soon as he's on the book.  In fact, when I pick up Essential X-Men Volume I, I usually skip right to #108, despite the fact that its the conclusion of a two-parter.  
The late Dave Cockrum gets my respect for reviving X-Men from five years of reprint limbo (despite what is generally reported, the title was never actually "cancelled",until just last year that is.  Marvel just stopped producing new material for it for half a decade yet continued to publish it  containing reprints of the older stories.)  with writers Len Wein and Claremont, and co-creating and designing the new characters introduced in Giant Size X-Men #1.  However, to be frank, I've never been a really big fan of his work.  There's nothing really wrong with it.  He's a competent and professional artist.  It's merely a matter of personal preference.  His art just doesn't appeal to me for some reason. 
Claremont, meanwhile,  spurred on to new heights by his collaboration with Byrne, really hit his stride as a writer with this story arc.  The conventional wisdom is that X-Men has never been as good as during the Claremont/Byrne era, and I tend to agree with the CW in this case.
So, now that I've done my take on X-Men #117, I'm throwing down the gauntlet to any other comics blogger who wants to take up the challenge.  Who's going to be next?

Carmine Infantino (1925-2013)

I'd been outside smoking and returned to my apartment to hear Carmine Infantino being talked about on All Things Considered.  Unfortunately, it turned out that the reason Infantino was being mentioned on the NPR news program is that he died yesterday at the age of 87.

Born in 1925, Infantino began working in the comics industry while still in high school.  His greatest impact came in the 1950s through to the 70s.  In 1956, he co-created with writer Robert Kanigher a new version of the DC's moribund super-hero The Flash.  The revamped character's debut in Showcase #4 is widely considered the event which initiated the Silver Age.  

When the Flash was given his own title soon after, Infantino continued delineating the speedster's adventures until 1967.  Late in his career, he would return to illustrate the final five years of the Flash's comic.  Overall,  between his two stints on the title, Infantino ended up drawing fully half of the character's Silver and Bronze Age adventures.

Infantino's first go-round on Flash ended when he got "kicked upstairs" in 1967,  becoming first DC's first artistic director, then editorial director and finally publisher.  He stepped down as publisher in 1976 and returned to freelancing.

It was as editorial director in 1970 that Infantino helped to bring to a close the very Silver Age he had kicked off with the first Flash story  when he lured Jack Kirby away from Marvel over to DC to create his Fourth World titles.  Many people, myself among them, consider Kirby's defection to signal the beginning of the Bronze Age.

In addition to The Flash, Infantino is best known for drawing Adam Strange and the Elongated Man, initiating the "New Look" Batman in the mid-60s, and a run on Marvel's Star Wars comic.  He also drew the very first Deadman story.

A more complete account of Infantino's career and a full list of his artistic credits can be found at the Comic Book Database.

Gem City Report

As I arrived back at the Sunday Comix table in the last hour of the Gem City Comic Con on Sunday carrying my latest, and final, purchase--volume four of The Complete Bloom County Library as well as the complete Outland and Opus volumes, all aquired for $20, or half cover price, each--Canada Keck quipped, "So, do you have enough Bloom County?"

"No," I chirped ('cause sometimes I do chirp), "They didn't have volume five."

So, while my collection of the collected works of Berkely Breathed remains incomplete, with Complete Bloom County LIbrary Volume 5 being the final remaining piece of that puzzle yet to fall into place, I did manage to complete my run of Prez.  I located reasonably priced copies of #'s 1and 3, the issues I was missing, and went ahead and picked up a new copy of #4 as mine was in such bad condition that it really wasn't even much good for a reading copy.  I've been planning to write about Prez sometime here in the near future, and now I'll be able to give a more complete overview of the series and actually know what I'm talking about.  You may not believe it, but I do ocassionally like to know what I'm talking about.
Some of the other Bronze Age books I picked up this weekend, and which I may end up writing about here, include:

• Hercules Unbound #'s 1, 2 and 4 (I already had a copy of #3) I've been considering doing a series on the many collaborations between writer Gerry Conway and artist Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.  In addition to this series, these include Atari Force, Cinder and Ashe, as well as various Superman and Batman stories.
• Green Lantern/Green Arrow #113--I mentioned in an earlier post a  December 1978 DC house ad spotlighting four holiday themed issues  released that month.  I now have every book mentioned in that ad.  I also have several other Christmas themed Green Lantern books, so you might just see a "Green Christmas" this December.
• DC's first and only issue of Sherlock Holmes, featuring adaptations of the Arthur Conan Doyle short stories "The Final Problem," in which Holmes is killed off, and "The Adventure of the Empty House," in which he returns, written by Denny O'Neil and drawn by E.R. Cruz with a cover by Walt Simonson.
• Three issues of DC Special including #11, entitled "Beware...The Monsters Are Coming Here!", #17 from 1975, which contains several Green Lantern reprints, apparently testing the waters for the revival of the character's series that occurred the following years, and #16's "Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas."  Seriously, how could I pass that last one up?  I do have a rep to uphold, after all, and I'm sure there are some people who might be surprised I didn't already have a copy of that one.
• Mystery in Space #111---the first issue of the short-lived late seventies  revival of the classic SF title, featuring a great "silent" story drawn by master storyteller Jim Aparo
• Welcome Back, Kotter #3--I've probably already said all I have to say about this issue on this blog in my overview of the series as a whole and my tribute to the career of Tony Isabella, who wrote this one, which, now that I think about it, may be the first thing I ever read by him.  I just wanted to have a copy and I'm looking forward to reading it again after several decades.

There were only a couple of items that I was really looking for at the show.  I found the Green Lantern/Green Arrow issue, but was frustrated by the fact that out of the dozens of dealers and thousands, hell, possibly millions, of comics gathered in the E.J. Nutter Center on the campus of Dayton's Wright State University, there was apparently not one single copy of Steve Ditko's Shade, The Changing Man #6.  I encountered at least one copy of every other issue of the series except the one I need to complete my collection.

When I wasn't searching in vain for a copy of Shade #6, I spent some time behind the table of Columbus cartoonist group Sunday Comix, where I helped Canada tell people who wandered up all about the group and describe the books by our various members that were on display.  I even managed to sell a couple of my books collecting my Wasted Potential comic strip.  That brought in four dollars, which really didn't do much to offset what I spent over the course of the weekend.  Still, I consider it all money well spent.

As  with every mainstream comic convention, there were many people dressed as their favorite characters.  I saw several Robins, an overweight Captain America, a Dr. Fate and Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash.  Canada got a picture of me posing with Ambush Bug.  As soon as she sends me a copy, I'll share it with you.

There were also a couple of my favorite artists on the guest list whom I was eager to meet. I learned something very important about one of them.  Which is that Howard Chaykin does not care what I think of him.

Or you, for that matter, I'm sure.

I know this because he told me so.

When I reported this to Mike Carroll back at the Sunday Comix table on Saturday, Mike's immediate response was, "Did you try to pay him a compliment?"  As it happens, that's exactly what I did.

When I walked up to his table, Chaykin was already engaged in a conversation with a fan.  As he signed the two books I presented (yes, two--more about that later), he was saying that he considered himself probably the least talented of his generation of comics artists.  At that point I interjected with, "You're probably the only one who would say that."  This is what caused him to respond with, "Well, I don't care what you think about me. Its not my business to care about that." He went on to give an assessment of his progress as an artist.  He characterized his work during the 1970's as "shit."  He said that he didn't do work he considered decent until after "woodshedding" by doing other things such as painted book covers before returning to comics with American Flagg! He went on to say that he makes up for what he considers a deficit of talent with hard work.  

While I wouldn't exactly say call Chaykin's early work "shit," I would agree that his art on Monark Moonstalker and Star Wars, and his writing on the former, is far surpassed in quality by his post Flagg output.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea here.  He wasn't mean or angry and he wasn't yelling at me.  This wasn't a repeat of the Aragones incident from Mid-Ohio Con 1996. (I may tell you about that someday--or I may not.)  He was simply giving an honest, if well rehearsed, self assessment.

I say well well rehearsed because I did get a certain sense of deja vu as I listened to him.  I seemed to remember having read the same sentiments from him in one interview or another in the comics press.  This is perfectly understandable, of course.  Anyone who is in the public eye and has made numerous public appearances and been interviewed multiple times must encounter the same questions over and over again.  The answers to these questions rarely change, so its natural that the responses begin to sound rehearsed after awhile.  

Based on having read a few interviews with him, I found Mr. Chaykin to be exactly what I expected.  He was gracious, if somewhat gruff; self-assured and self-confident but definitely not arrogant; secure in his sense of self, and opinionated and not afraid to share those opinions.  At 62 years of age, though he doesn't look it, I suppose he's old enough to be described as curmudgeonly, though I imagine he wouldn't like it if I did so, so I won't. 

Before I shook his hand and told him it had been a pleasure to meet him before heading back to the Sunday Comix table, Chaykin mentioned that he was currently working as hard as ever.  He is apparently booked up through next year.  He might have mentioned what those projects are if I'd stuck around for a few more seconds, but whatever they may be, I look forward to seeing them. 

By the way, I mentioned above that I got Mr. Chaykin to sign two comics, even though I said earlier that I was only going to present him with one book.  However, Joe Staton was also a guest at Gem City, and someone else I was eager to meet.  While browsing Green Lantern issues on the Comic Book Data Base, I remembered that I possessed a comic on which both Staton and Chaykin had worked.  Green Lantern #196 contains interior art by Staton with a cover featuring a striking image of Guy Gardner by Chaykin.  The remnants of fanboy within me just couldn't resist getting both of their signatures on one book.  It'll be a perfect reminder of a great weekend.

Joe Staton was considerably less argumentative than Chaykin when I told him how much I enjoyed his art on Dick Tracy.  If you haven't read Tracy since he and writer Mike Curtis took over, I highly recommend that you do so.  The Curtis/Staton run have breathed new life into the feature.  In my opinion, this is the best Tracy has been since the early days of Max Allan Collins' tenure when it was drawn by the late Rick Fletcher. 
Staton was there promoting Calling Dick Tracy Volume I, an upcoming e-book from Rabbit Hole Comics collecting approximately the first year of his Tracy run.  I asked if there was going to be a print edition, and Joe said that there might be if the digital version performs well.
In conclusion, I want to publicly and effusively thank SPACE promoter Bob Corby for everything, and I do mean everything.  He sponsored the table for Sunday Comix that got me into the con, drove me down to Dayton on Saturday morning and back the next day, let me crash in his hotel room Saturday night and generally made a wonderful weekend possible. 

THE GLORY DAYS OF THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD: Bob Haney, Jim Aparo, Murray Boltinoff and B&B #'s 98-131 (Conclusion)

(For the edification of those who may have missed my last post, I shall reiterate the explanation and history of this two-part series of posts as it appeared previously: The following long--for a blog post, at least--piece was written a couple of years ago for Jim Main's fanzine Comic Fan.  Shortly after I submitted it, however, Jim decided to suspend publication of CF in order to concentrate on comic books.  Thus, other than the select few trusted friends whom I sent copies to for proofreading and kibitzing, this masterpiece of comics history and journalism has gone regrettably unread.  Until now, that is.  Due to the aforementioned length of the article, I found a natural breakpoint about halfway through and split it up into two posts.  Part one can be read by going here.)

Now let's take a closer look at some of the individual stories that made the Haney/Boltinoff/Aparo B&B era so great. 

THE GLORY DAYS OF THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD: Bob Haney, Jim Aparo, Murray Boltinoff and B&B #'s 98-131 (Part One)

(The following long--for a blog post, at least--piece was written a couple of years ago for Jim Main's fanzine Comic Fan.  Shortly after I submitted it, however, Jim decided to suspend publication of CF in order to concentrate on comic books.  Thus, other than the select few trusted friends whom I sent copies to for proofreading and kibitzing, this masterpiece of comics history and journalism has gone regrettably unread.  Until now, that is.  Due to the aforementioned length of the article, I found a natural breakpoint about halfway through and split it up into two posts.  The conclusion will appear here in a day or so.)

In the December 2004 edition of BACK ISSUE magazine, editor Michael Eury called THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD (B&B) the most influential comic book put out by DC during the Silver and Bronze Ages. While Eury admits that his claim may be somewhat overblown, the evidence that he offers to support his theorem, in the form of a listing of important characters and concepts that first saw the light of day in B&B, is nonetheless compelling.

Stuff I'll Probably Be Throwing My Money Away On Next Month

Last week I wrote that I'll probably be picking up Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill in February to see how Len Wein and Steve Rude flesh out the story of one of the more minor characters from Watchmen.  Well, while preparing for that post, I took a peek at what else DC was offering up for sale next month, and I thought I'd share with you some preliminary impressions of a couple of items that will most likely be finding themselves a home in my comics boxes or on my bookshelves.  

Another book that I've written about previously that I'm planning to get is Hellblazer #300, which brings to a close the Vertigo imprint's longest running title and last remaining of the six existing books that formed the original core of the line on its launch in 1993.  As I've speculated on numerous previous occasions, the loss of the adventures of John Constantine to mainstream New 52 line combined with the forthcoming resignation of founding editor Karen Berger seem to bode ill for the future of Vertigo.

Then there are the two ongoing comics that I have been purchasing regularly since their debuts eighteen and ten months ago, respectively.  The first is Action Comics, though #17 may be the last issue of that title for me, as it marks the end of the story line begun by Grant Morrison in #1 and the writers departure from the title.  I've only read one comic by incoming writer Andy Diggle, but I did like it, so maybe I'll give his run a couple of issues to see how it goes.  That's a decision I'll put off until March, however.

Next up is Earth 2.  While the book hasn't been quite as good since the plot actually kicked in as it was for the first couple issues when writer James Robinson was setting up his alternate world and introducing the major and minor characters, its still one of the best super-hero comics I've read from DC in quite some time.  This issue also promises the introduction of the New 52 version of Dr. Fate, which I'm sort of curious to see.

I have made no secret on this blog of my longstanding and slightly unnatural love for Oliver Queen, a.k.a. the Green Arrow.  Because of this, I desperately want the character's eponymous monthly comic to be good.  However, in its New 52 incarnation, the closest Green Arrow has come to anything that I might want to read on a sustained basis were the three issues written by Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens.  DC, I'm sure, wants Green Arrow to be worth reading as well, which is the best spin I can put on the fact that in February the book is getting its fifth creative team in the year and a half since the New 52 relaunch.  

The new writer is Jeff Lemire.  I've not read anything he's written previous, but I've yet to find a reviewer who's had anything all that bad to say about any of it.  As I did with Ann Nocenti before him, I plan to give Lemire one story line to impress me.  

Another reason I'll be picking up up Green Arrow #17 is that I'm somewhat intrigued by the the actual text of the solicitation, which reads:

"As Ollie struggles to come to terms with the loss of his fortune, his company and his heritage, he discovers a shocking truth about his father that ties to his time stranded on an island before he became Green Arrow."

The second part of that sentence seems to indicate that Lemire, most likely at the direction of DC management, is planning to move the book in a direction more in line with the story of the CW's TV series Arrow.  I have mixed feelings about that, as, while the show is not really bad at all, I'm not overly fond of it, however, if DC really wants fans of the series to sample the comics, then I suppose its not such a dumb move.  

It's the first part of the description that has really piqued my interest, though.  I've always preferred poor Ollie to rich Ollie, partly because that's how I first encountered the character, but mostly because its in that era that the best Green Arrow stories were told.

Above, I mentioned having read only one comic by Andy Diggle and having liked it.  Well, that comic was Green Arrow: Year One.  Based on that mini-series, I'm thinking that once Lemire moves on, and given this books track record that will probably happen sooner than later, DC should give Diggle a shot at writing GA's exploits on a regular basis.  While I liked Year One, at the time I read it I sort of consigned it to an alternate history or something like that, despite it being the new "official" version of GA's history, because I couldn't quite see the Oliver Queen depicted therein becoming the character I'd been reading for the past few decades.  However, I can see him becoming the New 52 Green Arrow, thus making Diggle a natural to continue his adventures in the monthly book.

Lastly, there's Crisis On Multiple Earths Volume 6, the latest in the series of trade paperback collections of the meetings of Earth One's Justice League and their counterparts in Earth Two's Justice Society that were an annual tradition in the pages of Justice League of America from 1963 until 1985 and the merging of all of DC's alternate worlds in Crisis On Infinite Earths.  These have always been some of my favorite comics of the Silver and Bronze Ages and, quite naturally, I already possess the first five volumes in the series.  The latest edition covers the years 1981 to 1983 and includes the first of the JLA/JSA "crossovers" to actually crossover into another title, winding its way through three issues of Justice League and two issues of the World War II set JSA book All-Star Squadron, thus making it the longest of the JLA/JSA team-ups. 

Compared to amount of new comics that I buy most months, that's actually quite a long list I've compiled above, and I'm sure I'll be writing about at least one or two of them here in the future.

MORE Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery

Before we totally put the Halloween season and our focus on old horror comics to rest for now, there's one more issue of Gold Key's Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery that I'd like to spotlight here.  Its an issue from the last year of the title's run, #91, and features a nicely eerie painted cover with the wonderfully ominous tagline "Mr. Monster wants a playmate--to destroy!"

The accompanying story, entitled simply"Mr. Monster", which leads off the issue, is probably the best story in the four issues of this series that I dug out of the clearance boxes at Half-Price Books.  That's not to say, however, that its actually good, merely that it rises ever so slightly above the book's usual low standard.  

The story begins with young Billy Harrison requesting a new doll for his upcoming birthday because he claims that his beloved clown doll, Corky, is lonely and needs a friend.  The next day his father encounters a Geppetto look-alike street vendor selling hand-made dolls and purchases an ape doll wearing a tuxedo and top hat and carrying a cane that the old man calls Mr. Monster.  As Billy's dad is heading off, Geppetto tells him that "If you want my doll to live for your child, your child must love him."  Dad brushes him off with a brusque "Sure! Thanks a lot, pal!" and hurries to get the hell away from the creepy old coot.
By the way, I find it interesting that, even though the protagonist of the story is a boy, the unnamed writer makes no apology for referring to Corky and Mr. Monster as "dolls."
Sure enough, when he is presented with the new doll, Billy instantly falls in love with it.  Mr. Monster soon repays that love by using his "magic cane" to destroy Billy's train set, much to Billy's delight.  His parents dismiss Billy's claim that it was the doll who caused the destruction, at least until they hear him breaking up Billy's toy lighthouse while the kid is staying over at a friend's house.  The next day, after Billy arrives home, Mom, who'd earlier expressed some uneasiness over Mr. Monster's life-like appearance, catches the animated ape doll in the act of whacking on poor old Corky with his "magic cane."  This assault causes Billy's love for Mr. Monster to turn instantly to loathing, as he tells the doll that "I never want to see you again!" The withdrawal of Billy's affection causes Mr. Monster to revert to a harmless, lifeless toy, which Mr. and Mrs. Harrison lock up in a trunk in their attic.  "However," Karloff intones in the last panel, "you can bet the Harrisons do peek into the trunk every once in a while just to be sure!"

Though it ultimately fails completely to be even remotely disturbing, "Mr. Monster" at least has the potential within it to be scary.  After all, the premise of a child's toy come to murderous life has provided fodder for several successful spooky stories over the years.  I seem to remember an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a killer clown doll menaces Telly Savalas.  Then, of course, there's the entire Child's Play franchise.   "Mr. Monster", however, fails to invoke any terror at all since, in the end, it is only other toys that feel the sting of the toy ape's magic cane, and not Billy himself or his somewhat clueless parents.  Mr. Monster himself never looks as menacing in the actual story as he does in the cover painting. 
If "Mr. Monster", as I said above, manages to infinitesimally transcend Tales of Mystery's somewhat degraded definition of horror, the remaining stories in the issue, on the other hand, fail to clear even that low bar.  Honestly, they're really barely worth mentioning, but I'll give you a quick rundown of each nonetheless.
"A Drop of Water" tells the story of young boy who, while looking through his microscope, discovers a microscopic creature resembling some sort of demonic frog in, what else, a drop of water.  Foolishly, little Jimmy decides to experiment with various chemicals from his chemistry set in an attempt to make the creature grow.  Succeeding beyond his wildest expections, he dumps the immense monster into a local lake, giving rise to legends of a Lock Ness type monster living there.
You know, I've often lamented that my synopses of stories on this blog tend to make them sound worse than they actually are, but in the case of "A Drop of Water", the story is so lame that I really think the opposite is true this time.
"Dial-A-Monster" attempts to play on fears of technological advancement in an era when the 8-track tape was the state of the art in recording technology by a freak accident caused by a storm in turn cause a giant energy monster to emerge from a fax machine,  here referred to a "telecopier,"  instead of the intended message.  However, once the message the creature is attempting to convey is deciphered, it simply fades away. 
Finally, "Tit for Tat" has an old lady conjuring up demons to intimidate her feline hating landlord after he threatens to have her many cats hauled away to an animal shelter.  Once again, that brief description might make make the story sound better than it actually is, but in reality its the weakest tale in a mostly pretty weak issue.
Still in all, I suppose that for "Mr. Monster" alone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #91 is at least worth the twenty five cents that I paid for it.

Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery

Like their Star Trek comic, Gold Key's Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery is another TV show adaptation that far outlived not only its source material, but its star as well.  The series began life as Boris Karloff Thriller, and was based on Thriller, the short lived horror anthology hosted by Karloff, that aired on NBC from 1960 to 1962.  Gold Key was a little late to the game with their adaptation, which debuted with an issue sporting an October 1962 cover date, which means it probably hit the spinner racks in either July or August, when the final episode of the TV show had been televised the previous April.  Nonetheless, the comic continued, becoming Tales of Mystery with #3 and lasting until 1980, publishing a grand total of 97 issues.  

Each issue featured four short stories, with Karloff, as he had on TV, appearing at the beginning of each tale to give a short introduction.  However, unlike the TV show, he reappeared at the end of the stories to deliver a punchline, in the tradition of such comic book horror hosts as The Crypt Keeper and his many imitators.  Like some of those other horror comic hosts, Karloff would often be drawn in a costume reflecting the story he was introducing, such as a sombrero for a story set in Mexico or ancient Egyptian headgear for a story about a pharaoh's tomb or a caveman's loincloth for a story involving dinosaurs, whereas on TV he basically wore the same drab black suit every week. Even though Karloff died in 1969, the Gold Key series still bore his name and his avatar continued his hosting duties for the entirety of the comics' run. 

A little while ago, I came across a quartet of issues from relatively late in the run in one of the clearance boxes at the North High branch of Half-Price Books priced at a quarter apiece and promptly scooped them up.  

The stories are pretty tame, even by the standards of Bronze age horror.  At that time, even though the Comics Code had been somewhat relaxed at the beginning of the 1970's to allow depictions of "classic" monsters such as vampires, mummies and werewolves, bringing about a wave of horror titles that included Tomb of Dracula and Swamp Thing, it was still restrictive enough to prevent any so-called horror comic from being truly horrible.  Despite the fact that Gold Key comics did not carry the Code's stamp of approval, they still adhered to its tenets.  Thus, there is nothing in any of these comics that would give any but the most sensitive of children any sleepless nights.

Since I recently posted about the exhibit at Wild Goose Creative of art from the Sunday Comix anthology A Bowl Full of Happiness, which featured comics inspired by the ads for Sea Monkeys that used to run in comics from the Silver and Bronze Ages, I'm going to spotlight an issue from late 1975, #65, which cover featured a tale entitled "The Mail-Order Monster," also clearly inspired by those same ads.

"The Mail-Order Monster" is the third story in the issue.  The lead story is "The Pharaoh's Zoo" in which two archeologists uncover the long buried site of Pthager, the "summer residence of the Pharoahs" and the eponymous Pharoah's zoo, which houses a collection of mythological beasts such as Cerberus and the Phoenix who are held in suspended animation until awakened by the modern day interlopers.  

The second story is "No Thing Is My Enemy."  A young boy plants mysterious seeds borne to Earth by a meteorite that crashes near his isolated farm that quickly grow into an intelligent creature that the boy mistakenly takes to be hostile.

At last we come to the cover story, "The Mail-Order Monster." Young Bobby Ryder sends away for "Sea Monster" eggs, which he attempts to conceal from his parents, who have commanded him to stop ordering so much crap through the mail.  However, it soon becomes impossible to keep his purchase a secret when one of the eggs, apparently planted among the others by aliens as an "experiment", grows into a gigantic silly looking lobster monster. 

While there are no credits on any of the stories in this issue, the Comic Book Data Base lists Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez as one of the pencillers.  Garcia-Lopez is one of my favorite artists and, based on my familiarity with his style, its rather obvious to me that his contribution is to the issues final story, "Don't Put It On Paper," though it is obviously some of his earliest work. The story tells the tale of  Professor Mendez, who travels to the remote village of the Xota Indians in Mexico to create an alphabet for their previously unwritten language.  However, when he writes down the natives' word for the devil, he inadvertently summons forth the demon.

While the stories are by no means great, or even all that good, for that matter, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery still provides a healthy dose of decidedly campy fun.  Much of that comes from seeing the cartoon Karloff cavorting costumed as the Sphinx or in a space helmut or as a stereotypical Mexican peasant.  (The caveman outfit I alluded to earlier is in a later issue.)  A good chunk of the series has recently been collected in hardcover by Dark Horse as the Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery Archives.  However, these reprints only go as far as #41, and do not include the issue discussed above. Still, I'll bet there's plenty of similarly fun and silly stories contained in those six volumes.

Marvel Graphic Novel #4: The Coming of the New Mutants and the Beginning of the End of the Bronze Age

While the Bronze Age is generally considered to have ended  with the publication of Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1985, certain avatars of the new age began to appear as soon as the early 1980's.  One such was Frank Miller's initial run on Daredevil, which presaged the darker tone of the so called "Modern Age" of comics.  Another was Marvel Graphic Novel #4, introducing the New Mutants and heralding the transformation of the X-Men from a single comic into a "franchise". 

It strikes me that the cover price of $4.95 was a bit much for a 48 page comic in 1982, even if that comic was bigger than the standard monthly periodical and printed on nicer paper.  The contents don't really seem to merit this "deluxe" treatment and price tag.  "Renewal" is a fairly standared and somewhat formulaic super-team origin.  We are introduced to each of the five future members of the team that would come to be known as the New Mutants as they discover their mutant gifts, as well as their mutual foe, a rogue member of the Hellfire Club named Donald Pierce who seeks to destroy them.  Then the scene shifts to the Xavier Academy, where Charles Xavier, also known as Professor X, believing the X-Men to be dead, is reluctant to expose any more young mutants to that kind of danger.  Convinced by his old friend Moira McTaggert of the continuing relevance of his vision of peace and friendship between mutants and humans, Chuck overcomes his doubts and sets about uniting these aforementioned young mutants to defeat Pierce.  He then convinces them to stay on at his school so that he can teach them to control their newfound mutant abilities and use them for the benefit of all mankind.

Chris Claremont's typically dialogue and caption heavy script is fairly routine and by the numbers while the art by Bob McCleod is pretty representative of the Marvel house style at the time under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter.  In short, other than the format,  this is a fairly typical Marvel comic of the era, and while it might not have been quite worth five bucks thirty years ago, the two dollars I paid for it at Half Price Books a couple of months ago seems like a pretty good deal.

THIS Is The Best You Got? Seriously?!?

It has often been observed that prior to John Byrne's 1986 revamp of the character, Superman had become so ridiculously powerful that it was difficult for the writers to come up with credible challenges for him.  To me, that sounds like a lame excuse for churning out mediocre stories.  Still, I suppose there is some truth to it. If Superman #299 is any indication, it certainly seems to have been nigh impossible for Silver and Bronze Age writers to come up with decent villains for him to fight.

"The Double-Or-Nothing Life of Superman" was written by Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin and drawn, it pretty much goes without saying as we are talking about 1970's Superman here, by Curt Swan with inks by Bob Oksner. It is the concluding chapter of a four part epic (that should probably be in quotes) centered around the machinations of Clark Kent's mysterious neighbor, Mr. Xavier.  It turns out that Mr. Xavier is really Xviar, an agent of an unnamed alien planet referred to only as "Homeworld" which plans to destroy the Earth in order to make way for a hyperspace by-pass, because, of course, "by-passes have to be built."  

That is not just a random Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy allusion that I threw in just for the heck of it.  It's the actual plot of the story.  Ok, so Bates and Maggin don't call it a "hyperspace by-pass".  Instead, its a "teleportation route", but the basic effect is the same. 

Anyway, as part of his plan to use Superman's powers to destroy the planet, Xviar rounds up Superman's "9 Deadliest Foes".  There's a panel early in the issue where the villains are all convened in Clark Kent's apartment before being dispersed to the far corners of the globe by Xviar. (Funny that none of them questioned why they were summoned to that particular apartment and put two and two together to deduce that Clark Kent just might be Superman.)

Those gathered include:

1. Lex Luthor
2. Brainiac
3. The Parasite
4. Terra-Man
5. The Toyman
6. The Prankster
7. Mr. Mxyzptlk
8. The Kryptonite Man
9. Amalak

This bunch of clowns are Superman's deadliest foes?

Seriously?  

Ok, Luthor, the Parasite and Brainiac I can buy. They are legitimate bad asses. The rest, however, are kind of lame.  Who's even heard of Amalak?  If he was really one of the Man of Steel's "deadliest foes," how come he didn't rate even half a page in Who's Who?  Furthermore, I've never really thought of Mxyzptlk as a "fearsome super-villain" but as more of a pain in the tuchus.

And why only nine? Was Superman's Rogue's Gallery really so weak that Bates and Maggin couldn't even muster a top ten?  

If they were having a lame villain convention, maybe they should have invited Whirlicane, so named because he is "dual master of whirlwind and hurricane!" as he tells us in #303.  I don't think Blackrock had been created yet, but he would have fit right in with this pack of losers.  The same goes for the Purple Pile-Driver. (No. I did not just make him up.)

You might be wondering why Bizarro and Metallo didn't make the scene.  Without asking Bates or Maggin, I cannot account for Bizarro's absence.  Metallo, on the other hand, was at the time spending a few years dead for tax purposes.  (That, by the way, IS a Hitchhiker's reference.  More specifically, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.)

Actually, the original Metallo would remain dead. About a year later, Martin Pasko would create a new Metallo, the brother of the first one.  He also brought back from comics limbo Titano the Super-Ape, who would have fit right in with crowd listed above, though he might not have fit into Clark's apartment.  

Living In The Past (Action Comics #463)

Perhaps, as has been theorized, a nation still reeling from the upheavals of the 1960's and the trauma of Watergate was desperately seeking a reason to feel good about itself.  Perhaps it was a natural and predictable expression of some inborn American tendency toward hype, excess and spectacle.  Perhaps the occasion actually warranted all the hooplah.  

Whatever the deeper reasons, in the summer of 1976, as the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence neared, the United States of America was a country in the full grip of "Bicentennial Fever."

Everyone wanted in on the gig, including the nation's oldest publisher of comic books.  That's only fitting, of course.  By the mid-70's, DC Comic's flagship character, Superman, had become as widely recognized a symbol of "truth, justice and the American Way," as the intro to his 1950's TV series put it, as Old Glory and Apple Pie. Somehow seeing a drawing of the Man of Steel standing alongside the Founding Fathers at the signing of the Declaration didn't seem all that odd.

That is the image that graces the splash page of Action Comics #463, DC's contribution to the celebration of America's 200th birthday.  "Die Now, Live Later," written by Cary Bates and drawn by Curt Swan and Tex Blaisdell, is actually the concluding chapter of a four part story.  However, you don't need to have read the previous three installments to get a clear picture of what's going on in this issue.  I never have and I really don't feel the need to.  Bates does such a good job of laying out the story so far that reading the previous issues seems kind of redundant.  
Of course, before he does that, Bates lets us wonder just what the heck is going on for a page or five.   After that splash page I mentioned before, which depicts a scene that doesn't actually occur in the story, we see Clark reporting for work.  However, he's reporting to Ben Franklin at the Pennsylvania Gazette, and the assignment he receives is to cover the signing of Declaration of Independence later that day, July 4, 1776.
As is often the case with super-heroes trapped several centuries in the past, Clark has no memory of his life as Superman in the 20th century or of his extraordinary powers.   Gradually, however, his powers begin to manifest themselves, such as when he instinctively acts to subdue a ruanaway horse, and every time he looks in a mirror he sees not the colonial garb that everyone else sees, but his Superman costume.
This is where Bates breaks in to tell us what's really up.  You see, it turns out that Superman's "deadliest foe," a weird looking, white skinned, red haired alien named Karb-Brak, the amazing palindromic man, has exiled Superman in the far reaches of history so that he can survive.  Karb-Brak ended up on Earth after being forced to leave his home planet, a place where everyone has super-powers, because he happens to be fatally allergic to people with super-powers.  He thought he could live out his life in peace here, but he seems to have been about the only person in the whole Milky Way galaxy who'd never heard of Superman.  Desperate to survive, Karb-Brak uses his multi-purpose Psi-Machine to erase Superman's memory, send him back to the past, and cause everyone there to see not his super-suit but typical attire of the period, unless they happen to be looking in a mirror.  The amazing Psi-Machine also allows Karb-Brak to see into the past and check up on how Superman is doing.
It's too bad that with all the other things it was capable of, the Psi-Machine wasn't able to remove Superman's powers, especially his power to travel through time.  After Clark suddenly finds himself seeing through the walls of Independence Hall, he regains his memory just in time to foil a plot by British spies to steal the Declaration of Independence before it can be signed.
With America's future thus secured, Superman returns to 1976 Metropolis to do battle with Karb-Brak, who "dies" as a result of his contact with the Man of Steel.   Superman takes the clinically dead alien to his Fortress of Solitude where he cures Karb-Brak's fatal allergy, then revives him.  ( Thus the story's title "Die Now, Live Later.")  Then Superman uses Karb-Brak's own Psi-Machine to force him to use his shape changing powers to assume human form and forget that he's an alien.  The story ends with Clark Kent sitting on a city bus next to construction worker Andrew Meda.  (Oh, I forgot to mention that Karb-Brak was from the Andromeda galaxy.  Get it?)
While the story is certainly fun and enjoyable, with great art by Swan (especially his crazy design for Karb-Brak),  when you stop and think about it plot holes that you could fly the Death Star through become glaringly apparent.  If Karb-Brak is allergic to super-powers, yet possesses super-powers himself, how come he isn't allergic to himself?  Why does sending Superman to the past seem to alleviate his fatal allergy?  What about Supergirl and the dozens of other super-powered beings running around the DC Universe by 1976?  And why, once he's cured Karb-Brak, doesn't Superman send him to his own planet rather than force him to stay on Earth disguised as a human?  After all, as Bates tells us in a caption during his recap, Karb-Brak isn't actually evil.  It was only his will to survive that brought him into conflict with Superman in the first place.
This, of course, simply proves what I've said many times.  With super-hero stories, especially a lot of Bronze Age DC comics, its best not to think about them too much and just enjoy for them for what they are.  What Action Comics #463 is happens to be a pretty good Superman story and a fun salute to America's Bicentennial.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today--Nixon, Kirby, the Great Disaster and the End of the 60s

It was forty years ago this very morning that the 1960's ended. 

Allow me to clarify that seemingly chronologically challenged assertion.

You see, I vaguely recall having read something in Reader's Digest many years past about the concept of "sociological decades", measured not by calendar years but by the duration of the social trends that come to define the decade in the mass consciousness.  Thus, the 1960's began when shots rang out from the Book Depository in Dallas, Texas in late November of 1963 and ended, by my reckoning at least, on a late spring night in Washington, D.C. when five men, later revealed to  be in the employ of the Committee To Re-Elect The President, were apprehended in the act of breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment building.  

In Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, "The slow-rising central horror of 'Watergate' is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it."
Yet the human animal is not especially noted for the ability to learn from its mistakes. We tend to either learn nothing, or worse, gradually forget what we learned when the crisis passes. Worse yet, we will learn all the wrong lessons and forget them eventually nonetheless.  In the Watergate scenario, the case appears to be a sad combination of the latter two pathways.  Any half-hearted attempts by a Congress newly emboldened in the aftermath of Nixon's downfall to rein in the power of the executive branch and make it more accountable to the legislature and the American people have long since fallen by the wayside.  During the first dozen years of the 21st century, this proud nation has drifted farther in the direction of a so-called "imperial presidency" than that poor doomed bastard Nixon ever dared dream even in his most megalomaniacal moments.  The only executive power that Congress in recent memory has seemed interest in curbing is his power to get a blowjob from a starstruck intern in the Oval Office while simultaneously talking on the phone to the President of Russia.

When I was casting about in my mind for some way to tie the remembrance of Watergate and  reflection on its legacy that I wanted to inflict on the blogosphere on this unhappy anniversary to comics, I remembered Kamandi #15.  I dug it out of one of the nearly dozen boxes of old comics piled precariously in the corner of my bedroom closet, but didn't actually get around to rereading it until I'd already composed the first portion of this post.  Thus, I was actually pleasantly surprised to discover that with only a minimum of rhetorical sleight of hand I could bend my analysis of the issue to fit the themes of the first part of this post.

Like many comics scribes of the Bronze Age, KIrby, when acting as his own writer, plundered liberally from the prevailing pop culture and current events to fuel his mad masterpieces.  The Kamandi series itself, set in a future world after something called the Great Disaster, when intelligent animals rule and the  remnants of the once proud human race  are reduced to mere pets, or worse, seems little more than Kirby's take on the Planet of the Apes concept, with not just apes, but bears, tigers and even snakes among the ruling class.  Thus, the idea that Kirby would use Watergate as fodder for a comic book story comes as little surprise to anyone who really knows what they're talking about.  In early 1974, when this comic would have been appearing on the nation's newsstands, Watergate consumed a very thick slice of the American zeitgeist.
At last we arrive at the story itself, which picks up pretty much where the previous issue left off.  In order to save Kamandi's life, Tuftan, the Tiger Prince, has apparently made a mysterious bargain with the department store owning snake Mr. Sacker.
In fulfillment of the pact, Tuftan and his Tiger Troops, accompanied by Kamandi and the dog scientist Dr. Canus, ride off toward the fabled mythical city of Washington, D.C. in pursuit of the legendary Watergate tapes.  Its not made clear why exactly Sacker wants them, though his emporium is filled with pre-Disaster artifacts looted from the ruins of human civilization and it is likely that he wishes them to be but one more item offered for sale to wealthy collectors of antiques and curios.
After a long hard ride, Tuftan and his party arrive at a place called "Stake Out" on the outskirts of the legendary city.  I assume that "Stake Out" is meant to be what remains of some real life locale in our nation's capital, but I can't tell exactly what is supposed to represent.  As the troops settle in to explore the place, Tuftan and Canus soon find themselves abducted by a troop of gun toting apes who take them to the headquarters of their arcane cult in the ruins of the Capitol building.
Soon, the two captives are taken to the "hearings," a bizarre ritual that mocks the Senate Watergate hearings which were taking place on national TV at the time that Kirby would have been writing and drawing this issue.  There they are confronted by a panel of apes who "indict" them for "planning to steal the sacred Watergate tapes--the voices of the Spirits!"  For this, Tuftan and Canus are sentenced to death by means of a strange weapon that uses soundwaves to kill.
Kamandi and Tuftan's Tiger Troops arrive, as the cavalry always does in tales like this, in the nick of time to rescue their prince and the scientist.  After defeating the apes, the tigers dismantle the sound weapon to discover the very Watergate tapes they had come there in search of used as the source of the machine's deadly sound waves.  Canus attempts to play one of the tapes, but it breaks after playing only a snippet of what I assume is meant to be Nixon's voice saying, "I want to make this perfectly clear--".   Tuftan decrees that Canus should not bother to mend the tape, for, as Kamandi observes, "It doesn't mean much--NOW--".
Kamandi #15 is not one of Kirby's best works.  In his greatest stories, the events move at such a frantic pace that questions like my above query as to why Sacker wanted the cursed Watergate tapes in the first place would never have occurred to me until long after I'd finished reading.  Here, though, that lapse in logic threatens to derail the whole endeavor, but doesn't quite bring it down completely.  Nonetheless, the tale serves the purposes of this post well enough.  For the apes who worship the spirits of Watergate have learned from the affair, but the lessons they have absorbed are quite obviously the wrong ones.  They endlessly and pointlessly rehearse the charade of "hearings" again and again in the manner of subsequent Congressmen who seem to think that the way to make a name for themselves is to uncover any little hint of scandal, motivated not by altruism  or patriotism or a quest for the truth, but by self-aggrandizement or simple, mean spirited vengeance.
Ultimately, in the wake of Iran-Contra, the Clinton Impeachment and the depradations of the George W. Bush administration, we must every now and then take time to remember the lessons, if any, has our country learned from the Watergate scandal and  ask ourselves whether they are the right ones.