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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 8, 2015 23:12:02 GMT -5
I was in Indiana for a few days and I came across a comic book store that had several boxes of beat-up "reading copies" and I came across some weird stuff. The price was right. I believe I'll unveil them one at a time. This one was so weird I can't believe I've never heard of it in a discussion of batpoop crazy comics of the early 1970s: Superboy #183 March 1972 Kal-El's rocketship crashes in the Congo instead of Kansas, and Superbaby is raised by gorillas. Yup. The cover is a bit misleading because he's only Superbaby for two panels. He grows into Superboy, fights and kills a giant python, makes a costume out of the cloth from the wreckage of the rocket and speaks ape language. Then evil animal trappers show up. They have kryptonite somehow. There is a beautiful blonde woman who becomes his ally. Yadda yadda yadda. Art by Bob Brown and Murphy Anderson. Yup! Bob Brown never looked better! Also, a very dumb Legion story with Princess Projectra and Shadow Lass wearing some severely ugly-ass costumes. Inked by Vince Colletta. Not his best work, but the Colletta art is the least of this story's problems. And an old Superboy reprint that I haven't read yet. Lana Lang becomes Gravity Girl. From the basic premise, I assume it must be one of the masterpieces of the Silver Age ... but isn't every Superboy story a masterpiece of the Silver Age when Lana Lang is around?
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Post by Icctrombone on Nov 9, 2015 5:24:01 GMT -5
I was in Indiana for a few days and I came across a comic book store that had several boxes of beat-up "reading copies" and I came across some weird stuff. The price was right. I believe I'll unveil them one at a time. This one was so weird I can't believe I've never heard of it in a discussion of batpoop crazy comics of the early 1970s: Superboy #183 March 1972 Kal-El's rocketship crashes in the Congo instead of Kansas, and Superbaby is raised by gorillas. Yup. The cover is a bit misleading because he's only Superbaby for two panels. He grows into Superboy, fights and kills a giant python, makes a costume out of the cloth from the wreckage of the rocket and speaks ape language. Then evil animal trappers show up. They have kryptonite somehow. There is a beautiful blonde woman who becomes his ally. Yadda yadda yadda. Art by Bob Brown and Murphy Anderson. Yup! Bob Brown never looked better! I find it interesting that DC had to create an entire line imprint in the 90's to publish imaginary stories ( The Elseworlds line) when they used to periodically just throw them into their regular titles back in the day. Maybe that's when they really took their continuity seriously, or tried to.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 9, 2015 13:08:07 GMT -5
I was in Indiana for a few days and I came across a comic book store that had several boxes of beat-up "reading copies" and I came across some weird stuff. The price was right. I believe I'll unveil them one at a time. This one was so weird I can't believe I've never heard of it in a discussion of batpoop crazy comics of the early 1970s: Superboy #183 March 1972 Kal-El's rocketship crashes in the Congo instead of Kansas, and Superbaby is raised by gorillas. Yup. The cover is a bit misleading because he's only Superbaby for two panels. He grows into Superboy, fights and kills a giant python, makes a costume out of the cloth from the wreckage of the rocket and speaks ape language. Then evil animal trappers show up. They have kryptonite somehow. There is a beautiful blonde woman who becomes his ally. Yadda yadda yadda. Art by Bob Brown and Murphy Anderson. Yup! Bob Brown never looked better! I find it interesting that DC had to create an entire line imprint in the 90's to publish imaginary stories ( The Elseworlds line) when they used to periodically just throw them into their regular titles back in the day. Maybe that's when they really took their continuity seriously, or tried to. ...or the anal retentive reverence for continuity had taken over fandom and the customer base by the 90s so publishing fun stories out of continuity in the regular line of books pissed off the customers because they felt they weren't being taken seriously by the publishers...? But do it in a separate imprint and you don't offend the continuity fetish-and it's only gotten worse in the years since then among those consumers. It's not the publishers that started taking continuity too seriously and putting comics on that path...they were reacting to what was happening among the customer base. -M
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 9, 2015 15:43:38 GMT -5
Showcase #42 January-February 1963 When I went into the very messy comic book/gaming shop in Anderson, Indiana, and started rummaging through the $3 boxes full of comics from the 1960s and 1970s, one of the first beat-up, ragged, spine-split, coupon-missing comics I looked at was also the first one I had to have. Showcase #42, presenting Tommy Tomorrow of the Planeteers, was just too irresistible. There's a line of dudes getting fitted for mind-slave helmets. The guy in front of Tommy (also a Planeteer, plus he has blue skin) is getting the helmet placed on his head. And Tommy is fretting: "They're turning Lon into one of their mind-slaves – and I'm next!" Oh my God! How are they going to get out of this! Not that I'm that big a fan of Tommy Tomorrow. I've read a few Tommy Tomorrow stories here and there. I think there was one in DC's "Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told" compilation. I remember the Jim Mooney art. I don't remember the story at all. But it's an issue of Showcase! I can't believe I've never owned an issue of Showcase (except for one of the Power Girl issues from the 1970s)! Showcase was awesome! Maybe the Silver Age didn't start in Showcase (my vote is for the first appearance of the Martian Manhunter) but you can't deny that Showcase was the heart of the early Silver Age. Flash and Green Lantern and Atom all got their Silver Age debuts in Showcase. Not to mention the Lois Lane tryouts and the first appearances of The Metal Men, both of which were launched into their own magazines after their Showcase tryout runs. And then there's The Challengers of the Unknown, Rip Hunter, Cave Carson, the second Teen Titans, the Inferior Five and I don't know what-all. I think it must have been wonderful to read comics in the 1950s and early 1960s, to walk to the drug store or the newsstand, to be looking forward to Weisinger Superman, Schiff Batman and whatever else you liked, but also to wonder what ding-dong comic-book craziness might be in Showcase! Aquaman! The Space Ranger! Enemy Ace! The Sea Devils! Frogmen! James Bond! The Comic Book Database lists most of the credits as unknown. The writer is probably somebody like Gardner Fox or John Broome. Maybe somebody who knows the writing styles of the DC writers could make a guess? But the first page is signed by Lee Elias. The art is pretty good! Elias was a pretty good draftsman. I doubt I would have guessed Elias if it wasn't signed. (Since the Comic Book Database doesn't identify the artist, is this a scoop? A CCF exclusive!) The story starts with Tommy Tomorrow and a bunch of other Planeteer cadets on a rocket ship taking them to be assigned to their new duties after graduation. Tommy's buddy Lon (he's the guy with blue skin on the cover) is a bit of an obnoxious ass, bragging about how his father (the head of the Venusian Planeteers) will pull strings and get the best assignments for Lon and his buddy Tommy. It doesn't work out that way. Lon's father assigns them to the mining station on Pluto. He felt obligated to give his son the most boring assignment available because his son had just been too obnoxious about his connections. (So, the exact opposite of the Texas Air National Guard.) So within a few pages, Tommy and Lon are investigating a space bird, and the Planeteer authorities are making fun of them and reprimanding them for making things up. Of course, it turns out to be real, catapulting Tommy and Lon into 25 pages of Unlikely Space Shenanigans. Geez Louise! You should see the flying space cat! I laughed out loud. A gem like this one is why I pick up random comic books from the 1960s when the price is right. This panel isn't from Showcase #42. I just thought we needed another illustration of Tommy and his buddies.
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 9, 2015 21:39:29 GMT -5
Arnold Drake of Doom Patrol fame scripted the Tommy Tomorrow issues of Showcase. They were meant to update the character for a new generation of readers with different sensibilities and expectations, much as Schwartz had done with Flash, Green Lantern etc. Hence the new origin, new costume* and new supporting cast. They are frankly the only Tommy stories I've ever actually enjoyed reading, mostly because I dig Lee Elias so much.
Cei-U! I summon the bright new Tomorrow!
* To this day, I think grown men in shorts look stupid as hell.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2015 4:34:12 GMT -5
Just read the Superman: Blood of My Ancestors One Shot by Gil Kane, Steven Grant, John Buscema and Kevin Nowlan from 2003. Plotted by Kane, the present sequences are pencilled by Kane and the historical sequences by Buscema, dialogue by Grant and all of it inked by Nowlan. Superman fights an memory eating alien and discovers race memories of his line in the figure of El the lead int he flashbacks, but if you look at Buscema's drawings, Superman is descended from.... Conan. Big John is an all time great but at this point he can't even put the effort in to distinguish his long time subject character renderings from a new character he is designing for another company. The Kane art really outshines the Buscema stuff here. Nowlan adds some details but most of the Buscema stuff is blank or bland backgrounds and the same poses he had used over and over again for years. I was excited when I bought this to see the talent involved, but very disappointed with the overall execution. -M
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Post by Icctrombone on Nov 10, 2015 5:10:23 GMT -5
Buscema was probably fighting Cancer at the time of this book. I have to track this book down.
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 10, 2015 18:56:52 GMT -5
House of Secrets #64 January-February 1964 I've never owned an issue of House of Secrets before. I didn’t read very many non-super-hero comics and I don't remember liking the DC anthology horror comics that much (even though I had a lot of pre-hero Marvel monster comics like Tales of Suspense and I also had a few of the 1970s reprints, like early issues of Fear and Where Monster Roam). I’ve come around a little and I read one of the Showcase Presents volumes, but I can’t remember if it was House of Secrets or House of Mystery. House of Secrets #64 reminded me of Tales of Suspense or Tales to Astonish more than anything. I'm talking about the late 1960s for these comics, when the Hulk and the Sub-Mariner shared Tales to Astonish. Because House of Secrets contains two ongoing series! (Neither one, by the way, is anywhere nearly as iconic as Sub-Mariner or Hulk.) The first story is Mark Merlin, who seems to be a very affable chap who helps people who are having mystical troubles. It made me think of the old radio show Box 13, only with Alan Ladd having magic experience. Mark Merlin wears a business suit and lives in a place called Mystery Hill and travels around with a girl named Elsa who gets jealous when the client is a cute girl. So they go to Pennsylvania, where the barns are all painted with glyphs to protect everybody from hexes. And the client is a cute girl. Her ancestor was hexed in the 1600s by a witch, a scholar of the black arts and an Indian shaman named Black Moon. Every first-born child in her family dies on his or her 25th birthday because of the hex … and the client turns 25 tomorrow! Anyway, Mark Merlin detaches the hex from the girl and transfers it to himself. And he is attacked one by one by the spirits of the practitioners who cast the original hex. I have to admit that the way they are defeated is actually pretty clever. This is the first time I've ever read a Mark Merlin story. Not bad! I was entertained. The Comics Book Database draws a blank on the credits, and I don’t even have a guess for the writer. I think I can see "Meskin" scrawled on the splash page, and the figures do show a little of that Meskin rubberiness, so I’m guessing Mort Meskin was the penciller. The Comic Book Database says Bob Brown drew the cover, so I thought he might have inked the story, but after closer inspection, I think that unlikely. Sometimes the inking looks like Alex Toth (who drew the second feature) and sometimes it puts me more in mind of Paul Reinman or Art Torres. So I don't know. I threw out some names. The second story features Eclipso! Written by Bob Haney! Art by Alex Toth! Way back when I was first reading comics, I recall we had some issues of World's Finest lying around, and there were some Eclipso reprints in some of them. But I can't say I was ever a fan. But I think I could come to like this series if I picked up a few more issues. Toth is great. And Haney is a comic-book-writing god! I don't know how he maintained that balancing act – entertaining as heck on one hand, goofy, bonkers, totally mad on the other – for so many decades. Here's the lowdown on Eclipso for the uninitiated. This is from memory, so pardon me if I mess up a detail or two. He was a professor named Bruce Gordon who somehow picked up a psychic stowaway – an evil purple-and-black-clad entity named Eclipso. He had an eclipse-shaped blue shadow across his face. Whenever there was an eclipse, Bruce Gordon's body would be taken over by Eclipso and he would return to his evil plans. (I’m a bit unsure as to what Eclipso's endgame was. A lot of the time he just seemed to be mean and nasty just to be mean and nasty, with no real point to it.) So all Bruce had to do was stay away from eclipses. Well, something always goes wrong and he ends up in the part of DC-Earth where there was an eclipse that day. (Six times a year because House of Secrets was bi-monthly.) In #64, the plane is hi-jacked and they are taken to a country in Latin America. And there's a giant conquistador robot (which seems to be a weird Bob Haney trope), an escaped Nazi war criminal (so many were still alive and kicking in genre entertainment in the 1960s. Hundreds!), and a giant stork. Kind of silly, but it's vintage Haney, with all the inventiveness and WTH moments you expect from the Haneyverse.
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 10, 2015 18:58:49 GMT -5
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 10, 2015 19:57:39 GMT -5
Arnold Drake (who, him again?) scripted at least the later Mark Merlin stories, including the one in HoS #64. And Meskin inked his own pencils. He only signed those '60s stories he did full art for.
Cei-U! I summon the answers!
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 10, 2015 20:26:24 GMT -5
Arnold Drake (who, him again?) scripted at least the later Mark Merlin stories, including the one in HoS #64. And Meskin inked his own pencils. He only signed those '60s stories he did full art for. Cei-U! I summon the answers! Thanks again, Cei-U! Tomorrow: Lois Lane #92!
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 10, 2015 20:36:03 GMT -5
I just went and looked at the Comic Book Database to find out which Eclipso story I read as a kid in a reprint in World's Finest. It's World's Finest #228 (I recognize the cover) and I haven't seen it since about 1980 or earlier.
And guess what? It's the story from House of Secrets #64. I've read this story before and didn't remember it!
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 12, 2015 0:49:21 GMT -5
Lois Lane, Superman's Girlfriend #92 May 1969 Geez Louise! Look at that cover! One of the better Lois Lane covers? It's Neal Adams and Curt Swan. Awesome! Anybody who has read many of my CCF comments knows how much I love goofy comic books, especially Silly Silver-Age Shenanigans. And Lois Lane is one of my favorite series! I only have about twelve issues, scattered from 1968 to 1974, and I’ve a read a bunch in various reprints, and I know I can count on Lois to serve up the silly, along with a heaping helping of strange transformations, midget gangsters, convoluted misunderstandings and Pat Boone. The Kurt Schaffenberger art doesn't hurt a bit! So, yeah, I love the Silver Age, but sometimes … yeah, sometimes I read a story that just doesn't cut the mustard. Something that strains even my high level of tolerance for stupid comic-book stuff. Especially DC at the end of the Silver Age, 1968, 1969 and 1970. One bad issue of Justice League after another! Superman stories that assail the senses! Make it stop! I sure don't expect that from Lois Lane though. Especially with a cover like the one for #92! Lois has been turned into a centaur! And Superman laments that it can't be reversed! And it's Neal Adams! But Geez Louise! This is bad! The art by Curt Swan and Mike Esposito is merely adequate. The story is by E. Nelson Bridwell, who was apparently not having a good day. Briefly, Lois is in the Southwest covering a story about an artificial comet devised by the U.S. government for experiments. Superman is involved. The comet causes Comet the Super-Horse to turn into his human identity, Biron. He becomes a magician at the hotel where Lois is staying. They fall in love. Biron tells Lois that he is a super-horse, but they can't get married because he doesn't know when he might turn into a horse again. (I have to admit that it is kind of funny the way Lois just accepts Biron's story with nary a blink. I wonder if she told him about the time she had amnesia and became the leader of a leopard pack? Top that, Biron!) He tries to contact Circe in the past with a spell Circe gave him for emergencies. He doesn't get Circe, but the evil sorcerer Malador manages to reach through the centuries with a spell that turns Lois into a horse! So she's only a centaur for a few panels when she is turning into a horse and when she turns back into a human. (Oh, darn, I gave away the ending!) That's a big problem with the story. I find Lois as a centaur a fascinating idea, and with a writer like Bob Haney – who really knew how to keep the crazy under control – Centaur Lois could have been a charming story no matter how silly it got. Centaur Lois is pretty awesome. Horse Lois is just a horse with neurotic thought balloons. Anyway, Biron doesn't know Lois has become a horse. They’re both wandering the Southwest, Lois (as a horse) saves Biron when he's attacked by wolves, Biron changes into a horse again, Biron and Lois meet as horses and frolic in the desert and have adventures for a few pages, they save Superman from a green-K meteor and he changes Lois back to a human after seeing the reflection of Circe in the Stream of Time. And somehow she has clothes on. Back at her hotel, she wonders if she'll ever see Biron again … Only time will tell! I rather hope not. Reading through it again to write this synopsis has made it grow on me a little bit. I don't understand that! I hated it a few days ago when I first read it. Maybe I feel sorry for it? It seriously lacks all but the smallest amount of charm that these stories usually have for me. Maybe if I liked Comet a little bit more? There's something about Comet that's kind of hilarious, but a little goes a long way with this fellow. He really should never appear outside of Supergirl stories. He's no Krypto, that's for sure! In the house ad for the next issue of Adventure, Ultra Boy, Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy are about to turn the corner to find a dinosaur chewing on Superboy's cape. I'd much rather read that! Still, you have to admit. That is a nice Centaur Lois cover by Neal Adams!
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,946
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Post by Crimebuster on Nov 12, 2015 12:07:14 GMT -5
Lois falls in love with a horse. Therefore, all your arguments are invalid.
A horse that's secretly in love with Supergirl! It's the weirdest love triangle in comics: two women and a horse. Who knew DC had such a pro-bestiality agenda?
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 12, 2015 17:34:00 GMT -5
Lois falls in love with a horse. Therefore, all your arguments are invalid. I really can't argue with that. My 12 year old nephew was combing through the same boxes and he got to this before I did: He doesn't read very many comics but he likes Supergirl. For his birthday last year, I got him an issue of Action Comics, an all-Supergirl 80-Page Giant. The one with the origin of Streaky the Super-Cat! (We all love Streaky around here.) So he bought Supergirl #8 for $2. I read the story. It's hilarious! I find early 1970s DC to be very hit and miss, but this one was definitely a hit!
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