Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The 60's Harvey Superheroes

A-Hem. "Bwa-hahahahahaha!" Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I do ... for I am the Shadow! No, seriously, I am ... knock it off!

Like a lot of characters, I made a comeback during the flood of Batman popularity in the mid-1960's. The costume was part of the package deal. Hey, stop laughing, Archie comics really treated me well.

What? What!? Archie is a perfectly respectable publication for super heroes to appear in. I mean, they have the Shield, the Jaguar ... um ... look, I'll be honest, by the time the 60's ran around, I really torn through my vast personal empire. I was lucky to get this gig. And at least I wasn't as bad off as these guys...

Back to the mid-1960's, we find another comic book company putting together a hasty super-hero line in order to cash in on the success of the campy Batman tv show.

What's a real shame is that Harvey didn't break out its already existing stable of characters in the persons of Shock Gibson, Stuntman or Hollywood's "Glamorous Detective Star," The Black Cat. There were, additionally, another two dozen or so Golden Age Harvey superheroes including the Red Devil, the Zebra (I kid not) and one of my personal favorites, Pat Parker - War Nurse, none of whom made it to Harvey's silver age enterprise.

Undoubtedly, legal hurdles kept them off the roster. At this point, Harvey is very successful publishing its Richie Rich, Casper, Sad Sack titles, among spin-offs and others. It was probably easier for Harvey to create all-new characters rather than revive their admittedly successful World War II-era roster ... even if the new characters were big balls of suck.

Bee-Man has absolutely got to take the cake. Billed as one of the two main features in Double-Dare Adventures (On the cover of which he famously admonishes army men "We double-dare you to resist the attacking bees!"), he's actually a completely insane villain rather than a hero of any sort.

It all begins when Barry E.Eames - and note the clever comic book logic acronym of his name, there - is attacked by giant insects from outer space. Somehow, Barry finds himself imbued with bizarre "bee-like" tendencies. Eventually he is captured by a race of super-advanced aliens who tell him that, because of the stinging assault of the alien bees,
he is, like them, a super-advanced bee alien. However, he cannot be trusted to keep the super-advanced bee alien population a secret, so he is confined to the limits of their futuristic space base. Then he wakes up in the middle of the desert and solemnly swears to never do more than a single dry ounce of 'shrooms ever again

No, seriously, he immediately escapes the civilization (therefore kind of putting a lie on how advanced they're supposed to be) and begins to rampage Earth, stealing gold to hide in his "Honey Pot" home - and also stealing honey, because a mouthful of the sticky stuff returns him to full powers whenever he begins to wane.

There's a confusing, kind of insane text piece immediately following Bee-Man's origin tale where we theoretically learn more about his motivation. "My worthy deeds will force all Earthlings to surrender to my SUPERIOR WORLD. Many of your great scientists have predicted that ONE DAY INSECTS WILL RULE THE EARTH. You laughed and called them crazy, but I shall prove them RIGHT. The day is not far away when INSECTS WILL INDEED RULE THE HUMANS OF THE EARTH. You will become our slaves and solve many of our problems
- one of which is labor. The entire human race, what is left of it, that is, will become SLAVES TO MY RACE. You will fulfill the duties of our 'worker bees.' You will become MY SLAVES. Any questions?"

No, you pretty much covered the prurient points. This is
like the best paranoiac raving the internet has to offer, only thirty years earlier! Harvey, you were ahead of your time.

Bee shares the book with the Glowing Gladiator, who is actually the President and head Troubleshooter of Adventure Unlimited, Harry Barker. AU's job is to "fulfill unusual requests," which leads Barker to go off and find the Amulet of Hannibal on behalf of the mysterious and evil Mr.Destiny.

Falling into a deep pit, Barker is met by the ghost of Hannibal himself, who grants him a golden raiment in which to garb himself and golden weapons with which to uphold the cause of justice. Actually, it's Hannibal's own stuff, and this leads to perhaps the most unique scene in any comic in history as Hannibal actually undresses and hands his clothes to Barker while describing their functionality. "And the underwear of Hannibal keeps the bollocks of Hannibal from hitting the side of the shower stall. Wear them in pride."

The only thing that bothers me about the otherwise unremarkable Glowing Gladiator is that they keep calling his costume "Golden," but it's pretty plainly Red and Blue. It's red and blue! Gaddamit, people!

Following a couple of minor features, including a Kirby short story, we meet the "MagicMaster." I'm actually not certain who the Magicmaster is, to be perfectly honest. See, there's a magician who gets killed, and it's actually kind of likely that he is indeed the Magicmaster of the story's title. But then, there's his kid, who has learned all his dad's misdirection and prestidigitation, so he might be MagicMaster. But then there's this blue-skinned genie (not Robin Williams, though) who knows REAL magic, and he PROBABLY is the Magicmaster, but I just don't know. God, what a boring story.

The hook of the thing was that Jimmy, the kid, and Shamarah, the genie, used to help each other get out of dangerous situations, Jimmy with his tricks and Magicmaster with his ... um ... magic. Oh, and Jimmy would occasionally hijack the story to bring us how-to tutorials on doing simple magic tricks. I can now make a key disappear into nothingness. _I_ AM MAGICMASTER!

Jack Q (The Q is for Quick) Frost was this amazingly lame secret-agent super hero - I love this - had the ability to shoot ice from his hands AS WELL AS was armed with a gun that shot ice. What? He can shoot ice from his hands, but they also gave him a gun that does the same thing. That's like giving you or me a gun with a boxing glove on a spring over the barrel.

Actually, JQF answers that particular question for his inquiring public. "That is my ice pellet gun, fellows. I use it when I must send my ice pellets great distances. It is also more accurate." You suck, Jack Quick Frost.

SpyMan is most famous for being what is likely the earliest Jim Steranko work on any comic. Like Jack Q Frost, Spyman fought the forces of evil with his robot hand. For our edification, we're given numerous cross-sections and product descriptions for the robot hand - it's got the rudimentary laser, the communications equipment, the camera, 32M of RAM and 4 gigs of storage, but it doesn't have a floppy disk drive. But I've heard the customers really like the color selection.

Over in Unearthly Spectacular, fans were
promised the appearance of the uperheroic Tiger-Boy from Twilight. Nestled in the midst of a bunch of pretty terrible short sci-fi "shock ending" pulp tales was a story called "Will Power," featuring a boy (Paul Canfield) who had incredible powers. From infancy, he was mentally and physically superior to humans. As time passed, he developed incredible powers which included letting him travel anywhere in the universe instantaneously, changing shape,
rearranging matter on a molecular level, reversing gravity, levitating shit and so on. At the very end of the story he turns into a tiger with a human head - once - and then announces his desire to take over the world!

His parents then reveal that they are from Jupiter, where everyone has these amazing abilities, so maybe Paul oughtta shut up about being so great and everything all the time.

And then he's mowing the lawn. And that's the end of the story. The Hell? No superheroic adventure, no identity chosen, no mission to fight crime - in fact, Paul's parents put the kibosh on his powers and that's the end, pretty much ... Harvey! You suck!

There's more - like Miracles Inc, the Man In Black Called Fate and the Three ocketeers - but I wanted to end on the best Harvey characters ever.

Colonel Gary Jason of the U.S.Space Force is a victim of the most traditional unfortunate circumstance to occur in comic book space travel. Crashing in space, he's rescued by aliens who then proceed to rebuild his body from its shattered components. Not being familiar with human anatomy, they hook him up with synthetic tendons that allow Jason to stretch, twist and elongate himself in the most disturbing way ever - with plates of his flesh "floating" on the elasticized tendons. The is Jigsaw. God, he's disturbing.

To make it up to him, the aliens hook Jason up with an alien guide - the beak-faced Si-Krell - and encourage him to go traipse about the universe, representing Earth in unique events like the Interplanetary Olympics.

What amazes me is that - well, you'd think that if you had your entire body rebuilt to resemble Stretch Armstrong, you'd eventually develop a sense of humor about the situation ... isn't that traditional with comic book stretchers? Not with Col.Jason, who deadpans his way from wonder of the galaxy to
awe-inspiring alien horde with little more than a legless, himpering zinger on his lips. He's a square, a straight, he's downright dullsville daddio. And this was supposed to appeal to the camp Batman audience.

But never mind that, here's the Man from S.R.A.M., my all-time absolute favorite from this run of characters. The Man from S.R.A.M. is, in actuality, a cop from planet Mars ... see, that's S.R.A.M. spelled backwards ... who comes to Earth to capture a deadly agent of F.I.N.K. ... that's the Fiendish Interplanetary Nasty Killers ... and generally just acts altogether Yllis ... which is Silly spelled backwards!

For some reason, the Man keeps reversing words in his dialogue, then pausing to tell us what it means the right ways around. And he fights a tentacled alien horror by turning himself into a lemon and squirting it in the eye. And he flies either in his OFU - Object Flying Upsidedown - or on his UFOR - Unbeatable Flying Oriental Rug. And he turns a klieg light into a giant pink feather so when the alien hits him in the head with it, it doesn't hurt. And when a director says "We're going to shoot 'Man from Mars,'" the Man from S.R.A.M. pulls a gun and says "Me? No you won't, chum!" HAHA! Man from S.R.A.M., you so Crazy! I meanm, "Yzarc!" I love you, Man from S.R.A.M.

But not the rest of Harvey's Heroes. They knits.