Random trivia question: what item of US currency, currently in circulation, prominently depicts the face of a historical figure with the initials J.B.C. on its front?

4. The Headmen



If there's one thing I like almost as much as a good story, it's a good puzzle, and Marvel offered up an enticing one when Steve Gerber introduced this bizarre trio (expanded to a quartet as of the above issue): all of these memorably bizarre villains had appeared in the same Marvel comic in the previous year. That should have been easy; how could you miss a blob of a man with shrunken bones, a human with a gorilla body from the neck down, and a mystic?! (Well, Chondu, the mystic, wasn't all that memorable at this stage, but Gerber was going to mess him up real good in the issues to follow?

I wish I could say I solved that puzzle, but I didn't, because it turned out that all these guys had appeared in a recent reprint comic, one that I did sometimes buy, but this issue of which I had passed up:




Brilliant and devious of Steve Gerber to mine obscure Atlas horror comics to turn the unfortunate souls in a horror anthology into leading villains in a superhero book! It was a harbinger of one of the aspects of mainstream comics I loved in the 80's and 90's: digging up the forgotten characters, the wild ideas, the one-shot shorts and giving them a boost to bring them back into the comics universe. I was hooked on THE DEFENDERS from my first issue, #4, riding that book to the bitter end, but it was never as good as it was when Gerber and Sal Buscema were in charge. The Headmen were just so, so "Defenders" material, it's hard to imagine them being introduced anywhere else. And I dug the theme that united them: something weird involving their head:

Arthur Nagan, a guy whose head was transplanted onto an ape body by a tribe of gorillas
Chondu, a mystic who soon finds his brain transplanted into an ongoing series of stranger and stranger bodies
Jerry Morgan, who developed a means of shrinking himself like Hank Pym, but found that his bones didn't come back to their full size, leaving him with a prominently deflated head
Ruby Thursday, a woman with a "head" that is a globe of "organic circuitry" capable of many strange abilities

Monstrous, diverse, thematically connected, and, for the time, exclusive to my favorite (non)team, The Headmen are an unforgettable team of super-villains that easily make it into my top echelon for this Christmas celebration.

And since I take any opportunity to bring up my favorite obscure writer from the 20th Century, Harry Stephen Keeler introduced the world to the concept of a human brain in a gorilla body in his bizarre masterpiece, Sing Sing Nights, from which three motion pictures were adapted: Sing Sing Nights, The Mysterious Mr. Wong (which shaxper is surely familiar with, as it starred Bela Lugosi!) and, without giving Keeler any credit, The Monster and the Girl, which adapted the Gorilla's Brain segment of Keeler's novel in addition to the framing content Keeler used to link three of his outrageous short stories into a unified structure. (I played a part in bringing one of Keeler's unpublished novels, Strange Journey, to print, by transcribing scan's of Keeler's typewritten pages into Word!)

5. Dr. Doom and the Sub-Mariner



My first complete series review thread here, Bad Tidings, was devoted to Marvel's mid-70's series, SUPER-VILLAIN TEAM-UP, so how could I not include the leads of that uneven-but-never-uninteresting run here in this year's CCC?

You may well argue, as did readers of the day, that Namor didn't merit "super-villain" status, but there's no arguing against the logo, people! Doctor Doom was one of my favorite villains early on. I think my first exposure to him was in MARVEL TRIPLE ACTION #4, the cover logo of which promoted Doom (along with the Thing and the Silver Surfer) as one of the three leads, rather than the Fantastic Four, from whose comic the interior was reprinted. But I've established the significance of logo several times already this year, so even if Doom's billing here wasn't quite as formal as I'd like, it counted in my 12-year-old mind.

Namor took a lot longer to grow on me, but he would eventually become one of my favorite Marvel characters, which he remains to this day. The pairing of these two as a highly unstable but menacing team made sense to me, both of them royalty dealing with tragic circumstances. What I found most fascinating was that unlike more carefully calculated teams, this pairing forced together very similar personalities rather than intentionally contrasting ones. Both were haughty, boastful, aggressive men, who should have been in opposition according to their nature, constantly trying to get the upper hand on one another, but men of honor, in their own way, bound by oath, obligated to the letter of their pact. Yes, it was better in concept than in execution, which we could say about many of this year's entries, but in comics, an intriguing concept can often make up for a flawed production, and for me, S-V T-U did just that, thanks to this memorable and menacing match-up!

It seems way too late to be the case, but the first I can recall is The Flash, in WORLD'S FINEST 198, November 1970. Other characters from the Weisinger editorial wing like Aquaman and Green Arrow showed up as guests (not really team-up partners) here and there before that, but I think Mort kept Superman as isolated as possible, allowing him only in JLA, and not using anyone else's characters in his own subline of Superman Family books. When Mort left, Julius Schwartz took over WF and immediately brought in his boy, The Flash for the first non-Batman/Robin team-up.

6. Luthor and Brainiac



Quite honestly, I'm surprised by this team being on my list, but once it occurred to me it kept sticking around. I'm not a huge Silver Age Superman fan, but I'm almost always entertained by any of those stories, and reprints from that era were a big component of my early comics reading. Whenever this duo teamed up, the stories stuck with me, leaving me with permanent impressions of specific Curt Swan--always Curt Swan!--panels and splashes. The team almost always elevated a standard Superman story, and that makes it deserving of my high esteem.

Given how ridiculously overpowered Superman was, it makes sense that the most promising avenue towards defeating him is brain power, and with Luthor and Brainiac, you're doubling up with two villains whose primary "power" is intelligence. But the pair don't feel superfluous to each other, even in the limited characterizations of the Silver Age. Brainiac must have had the edge in raw intellect, and he had the advantage of countless alien technologies available to him. But these two tended to be more cooperative than competitive in pursuing their goals, something we'd expect of super-intelligent beings. While I can enjoy a good double-cross, it's not something that's in my nature, so I like villains smart enough to see the wisdom in not backstabbing each other.

As an AI, Brainiac showed a lot more emotion in the Silver Age than he did in more robotic--that admittedly cooler looking!--later years, but Luthor always seemed to be the more emotionally driven, bringing a critical human venality to the team-ups. Of the two characters, I admit a much greater fondness for Brainiac, right down to those freaky looking interconnected lights on his scalp, but Luthor's never better than when he's got the superintelligent android from Colu as his partner!

7. The Terrible 5



The version of Captain Marvel presenting this troop of trademark transgressors was the star of the first superhero comic I ever remember reading and owning, so while it's largely the nostalgic call-back to my roots that earns them their spot here, this comic is fascinating in ways beyond any run-of-the-mill picking from 1966 would be.

Myron Fass, of M.F. Enterprises, chose to start his superhero comics line by appropriating what he figured to be defunct trademarks, starting with a biggie, Captain Marvel, the body-splitting robot in a hideous magenta onesie. Riding the camp wave behind tv's Batman, Fass must have concluded that the colorful villains were as big a draw as the caped crusaders, so he quickly spun off this title from the ongoing CAPTAIN MARVEL, highlighting several of the villains already established along with a few new ones. It's really just another issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL, and it includes a recap of Marv's origin and powers for the new readers he hoped would be drawn in by this cringingly non-euphonious title.

Fass had, apparently, already been put on warning from DC's lawyers, since the former "Plasticman" was redubbed "Elasticman" as of this issue. That didn't stop him from introducing his own "Dr. Fate", though. The "Dr. Doom" listed on the cover is "Prof. Doom" inside, but I wouldn't assume that Marvel Comics had come calling just yet; more likely, they didn't want two "doctors" in the book. "Tinyman" is Doll Man under a different name, "Atom-Jaw" is essentially Iron Jaw from BOY COMICS.

While Prof. Doom only appears in a solo encounter against Marvel, the Terrible Four Out of Five do get together in the rest of the book, although Tinyman quickly bows out of the action, flirting with becoming a superhero himself, as will be seen in later issues.

But the Terrible Three Out of Five finally get together. Of course, they're still outnumbered by the hero who can split into as many independent parts as there are joints in the human body, and as the big CCA stamp on the cover demands, all of them face justice in the end. The following (final) issue had a different "Terrible Five", apparently including the now-heroic Tinyman, or else Fass was confident that the readership of this stuff couldn't count that high. That time, the villains included the Ray (formerly the Bat, who had trampled on both Batman's trademark name and visual representation), the Destroyer (a better name for a villain than the then-defunct Marvel superhero, I must admit, Tarzac, who is not a jungle lord but instead a third-rate Sub-Mariner), and Big Max and his Ghost Patrol; apparently Fass had a nice collection of Golden Age comics from which to loot names! None of them teamed up this time around, so it may be pushing things to call "the Terrible 5" a true team, but hey, the logo counts for a lot with me, as I've already established!

I'm not trying to convince anyone that these are gems that anyone else would love. I've got a soft spot for this Captain Marvel, and I get a kick out of the jaw-droppingly bad comics that littered the stands over the decades. So here they are!

9. The Un-Men



SWAMP THING was the first DC series I got in on from issue 1, and I loved it. Issue 2 brought forth the unforgettable Un-Men. I've seen a zillion horror stories about mad scientists and their "unspeakably obscene" creations, but I don't think anyone ever rendered that description as accurately as Berni Wrightson--these lab-grown abominations were truly freaky, disturbing, unsettling things, and I was mesmerized by this army of distortions, each a drastically different variation on a mix-and-match human form. And decades later, someone else recognized this concept as one worth building an entire series on, with a 13-issue run at Vertigo:



Here, a core group of the originals were given distinctive personas, distinguishing them from the horde-like bunch that probably would have skirted the constraints of this year's contest. Monsters were what drew me into comics, and I don't think any other comics monsters ever satisfied my appetite for the horrific quite like these creepy creatures did. Once you see a head-on-a-hand, you never forget it!