Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Amazing Wah-zoo
"Steve Engerhalt, I kirr you!"
"Oh sure, it's offensive to have a Chinese character reverse her 'r's and 'l's, but it's not offensive to dress some woman up in peekaboo spandex hootchie outfits? I'm one of the New Guardians, my name's Gloss, and judging by how our writer Steve Englehart scripted the rest of my international cast of colleagues, I'm lucky I don't pronounce my name 'Guh-RAWSss.'"
"You have no idea what this team was like. We were supposed to be the next step in human enlightenment, and yet we were nothing more than a mishmosh of cultural stereotypes performing an unconvincing series of super-heroic acts while mewling like attention-starved teenagers. I hated every second of it. I mean, I didn't go to Julliard for THIS!"
"We had a white South African who was, naturally, a hard-line bigot; we had an Australian aborigine who couldn't talk about anything except her stupid 'Dreamtime;' our Japanese guy become a human microchip, our Jamaican member just wanted to lay back and groove all day long and - oh, get this - we had a flaming homosexual Brazilian guy whose superhero name was 'Extrano' ... that's Spanish for 'strange,' or 'odd,' or ... 'QUEER!' QUEER for God's Sake! We had a gay superhero whose name translated as QUEER!"
"Me? I was a Maoist from the People's Republic of China. I had the personality of cardboard. And thanks to artist Joe Staton, I also had thighs like vats of cottage cheese. Thanks Joe."
"Anyway, I think we're all supposed to be dead or something. AIDS. I seem to remember we all contracted it during a 'very special issue' of our comic. The only TRULY 'very special issue' there ever was of the New Guardians was the one where we got cancelled. It'll never get better than that."
The Amazing Wahzoo!
Okay, real short one this month due to Gloss' ranting.
We're back with Solson Publications, this time featuring a title destined to shake a generation to its very core ... an epic which spawned a legend ... the very book wherein Rich Buckler got his kid a job. Yes, it's the ever-so-inappropriately-superlativated THE AMAZING WAHZOO.
This book was a ... what's the word ... it's on the tip of my tongue ... oh, yes, it was a "humor" book. With a wit as keen and sharp as Curly Howard's fat ass, Amazing Wahzoo sought to lampoon traditional comic book super-heroes, comic fandom and day-to-day living. Also, it kind of ripped off Weird Science and it sucked.
The story centers around little Howard Philip Wasnuski (remember aspiring writers; A character with a Polish-American name is by definition a sad sack nebbish) , a sexless geek who dreams of one day being a great writer. His aspirations are good-naturedly supported by his buff, manly pal Michael Flagherty - whom we met a few months back hosting the Captain America section - and crassly tolerated by his lumbering oaf of a father and tupperware-sniffing ninny of a mother.
Anyway, there's a power surge which explosively ejects a REAL-LIFE SUPERHERO out of Howard's Radio Shack Tandy1000 (Inexplicably replete with the sound effect "Epp Epp Epp," which sounds less like a computer and more like a bicycle with cards in its spokes). Howard crams the diminutive, punked-out cartoon midget into his closet, at first, and then his friend Michael's garage. Meanwhile, the deluded Wahzoo, unaware of the bizarre events transpiring, protests loudly at his rough treatment and postulates at great volume about the superheroic duties awaiting him.
And then the book's over and we're all glad.
Solson is such a freaking footnote in the grand scheme of the universe's publishing schedule, let me just clarify a couple of other points real quick-like. Solson's Samurai the 13th sucked. Solson's Reagan's Raiders sucked. Solson's New Talent Search sucked. Solson sucked. Still sucks. Like nursing babies. Like zit-guns. Like Larry Storch trying to appeal to a young, hip crowd by wearing a canary-yellow cravat while hosting "Make Me Laugh." Like Charybdis. Like a Hoover.
Solson is still around, still inextricably linked to Rich Buckler, and these days largely producing a series of how-to books of questionable quality. With titles like "How To Draw Sexy Witches, Wenches and Vampires" and "Hot Bodies Pose File: Women," even the normally restrained Bud Plant can't help but editorialize. To wit: "Rather simplistic with some rather silly comments, these may be more interesting for the sexy pictures than for the actual instruction" and "Although cover-priced $19.95, this is little more than an extra-thick, oversized b&w comic ... don't expect the equivalent of a $20 book, because this is a quicky, grossly overpriced production."
Oh, one more thing about the Amazing Wahzoo. It ended with Star-King. Thank you.
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