Super Friends #11: Never Mind Joker's Boner, Here's The ...

It’s pretty clear to me that E.Nelson Bridwell looked at his 1976 assignment to write the companion comic to the popular Super Friends Saturday Morning Cartoon as one fuck of an opportunity. He extrapolated on the premise of the team, worked in references to contemporary continuity in the DC comics universe proper, and featured guest appearances not only from other DC heroes but the occasional oblique cameo from a Marvel character or three. Bridwell also introduced a long-running storyline pitting the Super Friends against an evil mastermind, created what may be the first international and multi-ethnic team of super heroes by the way of the Global Guardians, and created an extensive backstory and developing story arc for Wendy, Marvin and the Wonder Twins. Oh, and also this:



Yes, Superman. You. Uh. You blew that job. One might actually call it a … well, they’d just call it that is what, Superman.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Dingbats of Danger Street

Note: As with many things, the temperance of time has mellowed my feelings towards the Dingbats of Danger Street (This article's several years old, I believe it's circa 1999 or 2000). They've grown on me in some reluctant fashion, so you can take some (but not all, mind you) of my vitriol with a certain grain of salt. Also, as time has passed I HAVE managed to find artifacts of Kirby verbally bashing Lee, in some uncertain and frankly uncomfortably angry terms. It's a shame, no one wants to see their childhood idols at each others' throats, but it's simply unreasonable to expect a human being to keep all their frustration bottled up forever. Aw well. It doesn't do much to diminish my respect for either of those men ...

Anyway, the article ...


Hey! I'm Red Raven, and I keep bob-bob-bobbin' along! I honestly don't know what I - and about a zillion other forgettable Golden Age characters - would have done if it weren't for Roy Thomas. He brought me back from my sole appearance in my very short-lived 40's self-titled book - and what kid wouldn't fall all over himself to plop down ten cents for the magic and adventure that the title "Red Raven Comics" promises - for a Marvel Premiere story featuring the Liberty Legion! We were such a force for good that we were led by Bucky! A sixteen year old kid!

Anyway, speaking of sixteen year old kids, let me introduce you to four guys too young to drown their sorrows in the Comic-Book Loser Afterlife Bar and Grill (Happy Hour every Tuesday from four to eight, karaoke every Wednesday)...

Oh, I've been wanting to do these fellas for the longest time. I've always been a fan of Kirby's sensawunda boy's adventures, like the Newsboy Legion, and - as I'm sure you've figured - I love really crap comics. And Look! Both at once!

Yeah, I'm hard on this book, but it's pretty indefensible. First off, even though Joe Simon brought us the Outsiders, he did have a great hand at team books back when he and Kirby were an item. Unfortunately, Simon was nowhere near this project when it was green-lighted. Secondly, the book really lacks a clear focus as far as story and characterization - hell, even consistency what with super-villains bounding and leaping and passing gas (and all this without Kilgore Trout penning a word) in the center of an urban slum. So, not only is this not exactly Fantastic Four, I perceive it gets partially derailed by a sort of abortive Stan Lee parody.

The situation between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby really is a bit nebulous, even to the most dedicated insider (which
I am certainly not. And neither are you, so shaddup). Whereas they had a very final split, it was never a very vocal one, at least on behalf of the Man and the King.

By some records, it was a hateful parting between the two old collaborators, but you'd be hard-pressed to find either of them saying a bad word towards the other. Stan has never failed to praise Kirby, and the King's always looked
ahead; he had little to say about past slights, and always an excitement about the future.

The Stan/Jack split plays a big role in this story because of the character, Jumpin' Jack, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lee. Course, I didn't see much of Lee in the character beyond his Stan 'stache and his Marvel-like moniker, except for an occasional quote that seemed to swipe a little at Lee. Like this one, sparing us any more of Jack's "quotes."

Lest the anal legions come pouring over the ramparts at the omission, I will take a moment to mention Kirby's piercing and flamboyant Stan Lee parody, Funky Flashman. A staple of the Mister Miracle books, Flashman was at once both a model of base human desires used in contrast to the godly
concerns and morality of the New Gods, and an exaggerated caricature of Stan Lee. Blustering, bombastic, deceptive, short-sighted and glory-hogging, Flashman was a constant thorn in the side of the messianic and ever-patient Scott
Free, as well as to Kirby's common clay everyman (and alter-ego, perhaps?) Oberon.

But, as Flashman's schemes wore on, he inevitably ended up (reluctantly, of course) benefitting the common good. Likewise, though he was a well known con man and thief, Oberon and Free tolerated him time and time again. In fact, as I do maintain that Oberon was Kirby's "voice" in these books, just as Flashman represented Lee's, and Miracle constantly kept a peace between the two of them which inevitably resulted in Flashman's humiliation and Oberon's humbling. And then they'd start it all over again. And since Miracle represented the unfettered spirit of man, and he was the peacekeeper between the two of them ... well, what does this say about Kirby's feelings for the Man?

I know a lot of you are disappointed that this review isn't mean yet, but COME ON, we're talking about the KING here!

Alright, anyway, back to the Dingbats.

"Look out for these lovable dum-dums." I didn't write that. "Their parents don't want them! Their friends don't want them! Society doesn't want them!" Heck, I don't want them, but here they are!

I hope you got all the characterization you wanted out of that prelude, cause that's all there was. From those opening words, the comic goes on to present an unconvincing series of idiosyncrasies and unmotivated character traits.

We start with ... "I'm Good Looks! -- Know why I'm laughin'? 'Cuz in a minute there'll be NUTHIN' to laugh about." And boom, that's about it for Good Looks. He doesn't even get the screen time that Tommy got in the Newsboy Legion. Or Proty got in the Super-Pet Legion.

Looks is backed up by the team brute, Krunch, who shops for belts at the same place Thor does.

Then there's the team nut ball, Bananas, who I THINK is supposed to be telling jokes and wise-cracking throughout the book, but nothing he says really makes sense. "Flap off," he tells adult
authority figure Det.Mullins, "Yer jail needs a sweepin'." Uh, okay. And then there's Non-Fat.

Okay, I don't really get what Non-Fat's role is supposed to be, except maybe he's the team anal-retentive or anorexic or something, and I've got NO idea how that fits into the classic team dynamic (Mister Fantastic, The Human Torch and Karen Carpenter? Rocky, Prof, Red and Callista Flockheart?). His shtick is that he has this hot dog, and he's not letting go of it. Nope. Alright. Oh, but he's gonn eat it too. And he's skinny. And his name is Non-Fat, but hot dogs are pretty much ALL fat.

And and and Non-Fat is pretty clearly MEANT to be black, but instead turns up white through out the entire book (for that matter, I suppose Bananas is supposed to be Asian, judging from his gross caricature. At least he didn't end up with the bright yellow skin so common to Asian characters in the Seventies). I'm not sure if the coloring choice was an editorial edict or a simple mistake, but the effects are eerie; Non-Fat is deeply and reflectively shaded, huge oily pools of blackness stick to his hands and face. And you know, that'd work fine with your usual black character from the Seventies (Black Lightning, Luke Cage, etc), but on a white guy it's WEIRD.

I mean, if I'm wrong, let me know, but why does Non-Fat gets his ridiculous hat in a twist when he hears someone call him "boy?" And why does Krunch warn Bananas not to let Non-Fat call him "Snow White?" It's so puzzling.

So the character concept is weak, and Non-Fat is all about food but he's incredibly skinny, and beyond that, they're all colossal fuckups and have no personality. And somehow they get involved in industrial espionage and capture two super-villains, but I'm not denying you a thing by skipping the content of the story.

But how about this edgy, youth-oriented slang? "We don't want to be hassled..." and "they're hassled by weird characters..." and "Man, reading this book was a real hassle." Also, you have to love that this obviously kids-oriented book starreda group of kids who'd named themselves "Dingbats," a term which, at the time, was only in popular use by middle-age, white Irish-American blue collar television icon Archie Bunker.

Plus, overall, what seems like the majority of the book is given over to the lame storylines involving industrial espionage, the super-villainous threat of Jumpin' Jack and the Gasser, and Det. Mullins either doing the traditional tough-guy comic cop routine or pondering the fates and psyches of the Dingbats, rather than the Dingbats themselves. And in case you didn't catch that, I said there was a super-villain called "The Gasser." THE - GASSER. Let me spell that for you, jee-ay-double-ess-eee-ar, GASSER! One who gasses!

The Next Issue box asked for folks to write in if they wanted to hear the "tragic stories" of the Dingbats. And I'd like to offer a deep and heartfelt thanks to everyone who failed to write in. I liked the Green Team better.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Superboy Spectacular 1980

Note: This article was written back when Smallville was in its first season, just to give you some probably-not-necessary background. The only difference it made was that I was not yet aware that Kristen Kreuk is an actress only in the same regards that Hitler is some sort of cuddly bunny, and as an actress actually resembled something less like an actress and more like a horrible odor that clings to your curtains and you don't know where it came from but you spray and spray with Febreze and it never gets any better so you replace the curtains finally and the smell lingers on and then it turns out that it's a dead raccoon in the heating vent. Seriously, she is not very good.

Anyway, the article ...


Yo, is it warm in here or is it just me? Anyway, I'm the Man O'Metal as I'm sure you could probably have deduced from my very metal-appearing blue skin and my flaming shoulder which just SCREAMS "metal." Yes, ever since I fell into a vat of molten metal, I've been encased in metal and on fire ... pretty much like would happen to ANYone who fell into a vat of metal. Difference is, I can still wear pants, breathe, and survive.

But neverminding what appears to be the most insane and haphazardly put together Man of Steel, here's a Man of Steel in the making, plus his dog of steel and planet of idiocies. Was that mean? It might just be that MY EFFING SHOULDER'S ON FIRE! Yow! It makes me testy!

What with the WB Network's upcoming "Smallville" TV show, I thought it appropriate to take a look at the kind of young Clark Kent we frankly will never see again. Back before every young Superman had to have a six pack that'd take top honors at the Arnold Classic, doe eyes, artistically tousled hair, and a pouty mug hanging from a set of cheekbones that'd make Linda Evangelista weep, we had a very earnest, round-faced farmkid in a set of fancy pajamas. And a six pack that'd take top honors at the Arnold Classic - jesus, you'd think with all the times Clark visited the "ol swimming hole" with Lana and the kids from Smallville High, they might've noticed that their pet bookworm was built like Lee Haney, only mildly paler.

Anyway, I was recently able to get my hands on a
Superboy Spectacular from 1980, which overall reads like "Superboy's Most Embarrassing Home Videos" - seven "classic" stories, one of which was a brand new fable letting us in on YET ANOTHER chance meeting of the teenage Clark Kent and teenage Bruce Wayne before their adult super-careers. These two kept meeting long before forming the World's Finest team, and each meeting was a triumphant exercise in stupidity, pretty much.

I should stop and point out here that my affection for the superman Family is unchecked: I love me some Superman. I love me some Krypto. I love me some Nightwing and Flamebird, some Supercar, some Bottle City of Kandor and, to a degree that worries my wife greatly, I love me some Supergirl. But Lord,
some of these stories.

The opening tale, for instance, relates the oft-flashed-back-to origin of Superman's costume, which was called during his Superbaby days (I kid not) his super-playsuit. That's right, Superman isn't flying around in his pajamas, he's not flying around in his underwear ... no, folks, he's flying around in the playclothes he wore as a toddler and which were woven from his swaddling blankets. Inspired personally, I now wear footed fuzzy pajamas to the office.

Some people say the Crisis On Infinite Earths was a bad thing, what with decades of admittedly haphazardly assembled canon taking a fucking savage beating in the name of revisionism. Personally, I think that when you've got a secret origin for your UNDERWEAR, you're criminally overwritten anyway. Like, I'm pretty sure the St.John's Bay jeans currently shielding my chair seat from the unfettered superpowers of my ass just came off an
assembly line in Botswana. I don't need to know how the threads were individually unravelled in order to appreciate that these are pretty nice pants.

One of the best parts of these old Superbaby stories, besides the infant Superman's charmingly retarded personal twist on baby speak - "This am not ice cream cone! Me sad! Waaaaah!" - was that Ma and Pa Kent honestly called him "Superbaby." Occasionally "Clark," sometimes "Son," probably - off-panel - they may have called him "Oh please stop beating me with your super fists, I'm sorry I said you couldn't have a cookie before bedtime," but predominantly they refer to their bundle of pride and joy as "Superbaby." I don't know what to make of that, but I think I would have gotten a little bit of a kick out of it if my parents had called me "Humble G&F Editor Baby," myself.

Second story in this tome introduces one of my favorite Superboy villains, the "Kryptonite Kid," and his immensely more brilliant partner ... "KRYPTONITE DOG!" If the odds of Superboy's pet
dog making it to Earth from his random path through space were already long, add to it the factor of a criminal from another planet being sent into space on a deadly experimental mission where he AND THE BULLDOG THEY SENT WITH HIM fly through a kryptonite cloud and gain amazing powers and then go to Earth to fight boy-on-boy and dog-on-dog with Earth's Mightiest Teen ...
in the Silver Age DC Universe, it's about a two-to-one chance. Odds are even in an 80-page giant.

Kryptonite Dog is pretty much the most cruel and amazing villain EVER in the Superman rogues gallery - yes, even more so than Zha-Vam, Terra Man and the Puzzler COMBINED. Don't believe me? Well, dig this ... At one point he maliciously lures Krypto to a tasty pile of bones which he then TURNS INTO KRYPTONITE BONES for NO other reason than to rub it in Krypto's face. He doesn't even fight Krypto, or try to kill him or whatever. He just teases him for not having any tasty bones. Wow! That's some complex motivation for a freaking bulldog, kryptonite or no.

The whole thing ends with Superboy and Krypto getting their impervious asses saved by Master Mxyzptlk, the teen version of ... man, if you can't figure out who he's the teen version of, me changing one freaking vowel in his name isn't going to help.

The absolute winner of this collection is a clumsy and inarticulate "Life On Krypton" story where Superboy uses some kind of mind ray device to recall his infant memories of his home planet. What we learn is that life on Krypton is nothing but a series of unconnected and unconscienably stupid vignettes, and that "Me want ice cream" is still retarded baby speak, even on a world light years away.

Actually, the highlight of this epic adventure into rambling pointlessness is Jor-El's FIRST accidental launching of Krypto into the icy grip of certain death deep in space. That's right folks, Krypton's greatest scientist doomed his boy's favorite pet not ONCE, but twice! The greatest mind on Krypton, folks. Personally, I think maybe Jor-El was just getting tired of finding his anti-grav slippers chewed down the atomic generator, or 'accidents' all over the Phantom Zone controls. Kal-El would've come home from space-school one astro-day to find science-dad saying "We gave Krypto to a family of cosmic farmers, son. He'll be happier there ..." and then a couple days later Kal-El notices Krypto's collar in the garbage on the curb. "Me want dog him no at space farm ice cream! WAAaah! Gargle!" he'd bellow, typically.

Not-yet-Superbaby's mom Lara is so incensed at Jor'el's attempted canicide, she actually LEAVES Jor-El. Why this gave me such inordinate pleasure, I cannot say, but on some levels it seems to me she probably should've seen the writing on the wall when Jor-El was firing every living creature he could get his hands on into space. "He might have a mean streak," I'm sure she found herself thinking on occasion.

So she ups and takes baby Kal with her, and to help keep his mind off their current troubles - you know, his dog is dead, his dad's fucking insane, the planet is doomed - she takes her beloved boy on a tour of Krypton's recreational marvels, ending in what I THINK is supposed to be comical mischief on the part of Kal-El, but really just comes off as pointless stupidity that filled ten pages the same way a stopped toiler can fill a bathroom. At a "robot showroom," Kal accidentally gets locked inside a robot and almost chokes
to death on robot farts, or whatever was going on. Then mom send Baby Kal on an underwater rocket into the midst of a battle between sea monsters. Maybe to teach him not to climb inside any more damn robots.

But oh, the finest moment occurs when Kal visits the "Hall Of Worlds," where donning a cape and rocket pack, he zooms around among the exhibits of life on other worlds, including a life-size diorama featuring - you guessed it, because you can sense stupidity as well as I can - Kal's future adoptive parents, complete with name tags. Awesome. Good lord.

Getting back to the Crisis On Infinite Earths, briefly, is there even the most die-hard fan out there who honestly thinks it benefits anyone to keep that kind of nonsense in continuity? That kind of nonsense is what precipitates ... bitter and profanity-laden articles like this one. Let's stop the cycle
of hate.

Anyway, more stupidity keeps abounding until Jor-El's public humiliation inspires Lara to return to her man, while along the way Kal inadvertently saves Krypto from endless decades trapped in the cold, unforgiving void. Until the next time it happens.

The next half of the comic wraps up with some pretty standard classic tales from a number of Superboy's creative eras, beginning with one where Superboy rather graphically demonstrates to the town of Smallville why he shouldn't be asked to compete in high school sports like football - in not so many words, but rather eloquently spoken after atomizing a tackle dummy in his demonstration of his gridiron skills, Superboy seems to tell the crowd of hicks: "I'd fucking kill everyone."

Then there's Superboy on a "To Tell The Truth" type panel show, and fighting ANOTHER damn Kryptonian - Last Son of Krypton my ASS, the only Kryptonians who didn't escape that planet's destruction were ones who'd deliberately been tied down to the planet's core, and shot in the fucking face before the explosion. It all ends with the aforementioned meeting of teen Clark and teen Bruce Wayne, one of the small legion of meetings between Superboy and the teen versions of his Justice League pals - remembering that Hal Jordan, Aquaman, and Oliver Queen ALSO met Clark as teens, and so did Lois Lane, Braniac, and for all I know, me.

In closing, though, I leave you with this: Best wishes from Superboy and his friends. You know, like Mxyzptlk, and the Kryptonite Kid who, earlier in that very issue, was trying to kill superboy to death via the loss of his life. Here, he warmly places a hand on Pete Ross' shoulder and smiles
gently. Ah, how time has tendered us all.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Super-Heroes versus Super-Gorillas

I'm the FACE! Cut off your nose to spite me, that's my dare to you!

Okay, that was the worst joke I could think of right away, but get this, here's an even WORSE joke: Criminals were afraid of me! Yes, that's right, they feared me because my face was horrible and green and awful and obviously a mask, really. Rah! There, I scared you, too, didn't I? Time to give up that life of crime, if I can say so myself.

I like to think I provide an important lesson to all would-be superheroes out there, and that's that you don't need laser beam eyeballs or super strength or a belt full of fancy gadgets to be a REAL Hero ... all you really need, deep down ... is a gift certificate to Spencer's at their post-Halloween clearance sale.

DC Super Special #16 - this thing is the BIBLE of Super-Heroes Battling Super-Gorillas! Which, I realize is a statement dependent on the bible being a book about how monkeys come from space and they conquer us or kidnap our women or solve crimes, in the best of circumstances. Maybe it is about that, like I have time to read the Bible when I've got all these super-ape comics lying around.

"Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas" is a collection of four classic struggles between the forces of justice and the forces of apes. Now, this'll help me cover a good assortment of some classic simian characters who've graced DC's roster over the last sixty years, but it's barely the tip of the huge, hairy iceberg. For instance, it leaves out that gorilla who was made an honorary Marine sergeant in one of DC's
war books. Or Detective Chimp, who was a smart monkey who'd solve crimes his idiot owner would neglect. (Every episode, hewould attribute Detective Chimp's amazing discoveries to pure chance. "By pure luck, Bobo has accidentally mixed the precise chemicals necesary to make this invisible ink visible again!" ... "Bobo's clumsy antics have caused this diary to fall open to a precise
page which describes a likely motive for the murder" ... "Bobo's comical monkeyshines have linked the DNA evidence to the accused and invalidated his alibi, and his monkey chattering sounds enough like testimony to convict the accused for a hundred years!").

And then there's Monsieur Mallah, an enemy of the Doom Patrol, and Congorilla, who was a pal of Congo Bill (Like Arctic Ice Cap Carl would hang out with Arctic Ice Capybara - used that joke before, sorry), and Beppo the super-monkey who shouldn't hold his breath expecting a revamp like Krypto got, plus SO many more. But patience, we have time, and we have more than enough to deal with here.

The book opens with the classic Batman tale "Batman Battles The Living Beast Bomb," which is a title that honestly makes the reader ask some important questions, right?

Scrawny scientist Walter Hewitt creates a device which gives him animal powers (animals have powers?), but it all goes wrong when a gorilla he's shooting radiation at for the purpose of gaining APE STRENGTH ends up getting Hewitt's intelligence instead, AS - WELL - AS mental powers which he uses to command Hewitt to steal things. Like ... whatever a gorilla would want to steal, I guess. Bugs. Bananas. Tricycles.

So anyway, the gorilla invents a bomb that will destroy Gotham City, but not him (they don't explain how) and he wears it like a belt ... or a fanny pack, really ... and fights Batman as the bomb ticks down, and Batman knocks out the gorilla, and then it turns out the bomb slows down the farther away from earth it is (again, don't know why or how), so Batman military presses the big gorilla until the bomb runs out.

Many many many stupid things here. Usually, it's Superman who forgets that he has super powers, Batman and Robin are always right on the spot with whatever gadget they need from their belts. This time, they forget they have belts, and spend some time being amazed that their shorts stay up.

See, Robin shows up to help Batman keep this creature up in the air, and Robin decides to help by ... lying on his back and putting his feet in the air. No, Robin, not now! There's this stupid frigging tree RIGHT IN THE SHOT during most of the fight between Batman and the evil gorilla scientist mental power genius bomb beast, and at no point do Robin or Batman figure out it'd be easier to tie one end of a Batrope to the gorilla, the other to the Batmobile, throw the rope over
a tree branch and pulley him up above the ground. I am so not the world's greatest detective, and I got that!

The next story is "Wonder Woman -
Gorilla," which I guess is what the liberated amazon's name would be if she married Mr.Martin Gorilla. The whole story takes place on Amazon Island, and if you don't think they're
awful concerned about men setting foot on their island home, then you just don't know amazons!

I am so fucking puzzled by this story. I'll keep it short: Space Gorillas come to Earth to get mates, but not gorilla mates! No, human mates! Human
women mates! Why? Because they're unique! So the king of the space gorillas turns Wonder Woman into a gorilla girl, changes her back because he liked her better as a human girl, then changes himself into a human guy with his changing-people ray so he can be a unique mate to Wonder Woman's unique not-being-a-girl-gorilla status, and then Wonder Woman kicks him in the nuts and yanks his underwear up his crack.

Of course, here's why I'm puzzled. They value uniqueness. Human girls are unique. They have a ray that changes gorillas into apes and back again. Solution: Get some damn girl gorillas and make them human. The end. I am matchmaker to space gorillas.

Onto a Flash story featuring the "Reign of the Super-Gorilla," starring probably the most succesful gorilla-character in DC's history, the Super-Gorilla Grodd
(That is, by the way, his official villain name: Super-Gorilla Grodd. Imagine how screwed the Man of Steel's secret identity would be if he was required to call himself Super-Man Clark Kent - used that joke before once as well, sorry again)

This story hinges on the fact that Grodd escapes from jail (and the human body he was stuck in - don't ask), returns to Gorilla City (a super advanced
scientific community of hyper-intelligent gorillas hidden in the depths of Africa), where he sees a beautiful young gorilla girl and falls instantly in love. Learning that she's engaged to his arch-enemy Solovar, KING of the hyper intelligent gorillas, he creates a ray that makes himself incredibly likable, thereby stealing Solovar's throne of power, his fiancee, and eventually, the wills of the people in Flash's hometown of Central City where he intends to run for Mayor in a bid to control the world.

Look at that, not one intentional joke in the above paragraph, and see how it still ends up sounding?

Superman fights Titano, the super-ape, in a closing story they had to call "Titano, the Super-Ape," because of a bizarre policy at DC in the 1960's, where every fucking story had to have the name of the villain, the hero's hometown city, or the adjective "Super-" in it somewhere. Like, "The Mirror
Master's Two-Sided Crimes" or "The King of Gotham City" or "Lex Luthor's Super-Plot to Destroy Metropolis." And so on.

I'll spare you the specifics of the story, like how Superman once again cuts off the super-blood-pressure to his super-brain so he can super-be a super-fucking moron and cause great tragedy to befall Metropolis (in this case, by bringing Titano to modern-day Earth from the prehistoric era to which he had been banished), and instead pose this important question: How did Titano get to be a gorilla?

The origin of Titano is that he was a famous chimpanzee who did stage shows (this was the Fifties - chimps could be famous. It's perfectly reasonable that a succesful, well-to-do businessman
could come sweeping into his gentleman's club with a pair of tickets in his hand, just beaming with glee, and when one of his fellows puts down his brandy to ask what the tickets were for, the lucky man could reply happily "I got two tcikets to see the famous Toto the performing Chimpanzee. Then all his welathy, soecity friends would congratulate him on his good luck, and quietly form a seething ball of jealousy and resentment that they'd drown in cheap alcohol and mistresses. Like I say, the Fifties...). For some reason, the government decides to rocket him into space, possibly so as to test the effects of weightlessness on celebrities, paving the way for James Garner, Clint Eastwood and Donald Sutherland to return to space in 2000's smash hit, Space Cowboys, now available on VHS and DVD, check your local retailers. Space Cowboys - Boys will be boys! A Warner Brothers film, directed by Clint Eastwood.

In his hapless orbit, Toto withnesses a meteor of PURE URANIUM crash into a meteor of PURE KRYPTONITE, causing a STARTLING change in him when his capsule safely returns to Earth (and by the way, did you notice that Jor-El, Superman's father from a highly advanced civilization on a futuristic world, was basically incapable of safely sending a living creature into space without its orbit going haywire, meanwhile we "backwards" humans get Toto back, never minding a near-hit collision. Jor-El so tore through his test animals, including the poor, traumatized Beppo, that he resorted to using his SON'S BELOVED PET DOG as a test animal for his rockets! Yo, Jor-El! The ex-nazis the US government smuggled to White Sands figured it out! Here's to your super-advanced technology!)

Anyway, Toto returns to Earth where he undergoes that aforementioned STARTLING
transformation - to wit, he grows to a King Kong size. Now, here's my question - how'd he become a gorilla? Gorillas are not just bigger versions of
chimpanzees, they're a whole different species! It's like, you know Colossal Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes? Or Black Goliath? When they grow big, they become big humans, NOT giant marmosets, or koalas, or some dopey shit.
How'd Toto's transformation hop the species barrier? Questions abound, readers,
questions abound ...

Okay, also, this very story breaks the rules of physics it established by itself: To wit, Superman, at one point, flies up in a lead suit to fight Titano (The big ape has super-eyes of kryptonite ray shooting, in case I hadn't mentioned that before). Supes flies so fast that the air friction reduces the lead suit to slag. However, earlier, they flash back to Superman throwing Titano so fast the the ape "travelled through the time barrier," which is presumably much faster than it would take to melt lead. Haha. That bit about sending Titano through time was probably just the story Superman told everybody, like how your mom probably told you that your dog went to
a nice farm while you were away at Summer camp.

I have the original comic where the Titano story appeared, as an aside (all these stories in the special were reprints). Neat thing about it is a backup story where Superman dresses up in a devil costume to scare some criminals out of their nefarious plans. Personally, I'd just put my index fingers through the boss criminal's temple, boom, I bet the other crooks'd be pretty much scared out of a life of crime. Anyway, the important thing is that Superman took full advantage of his makeshift Halloween costume to create a devil motif ... i.e., skull cap, sissy Van Dyke, red leotard and cape ... Oh man. And he kept using his fantastic powers to do stuff like create smoke effects, and pretend to become invisible. This was in the stead of using his tremendous super powers to punch everyone unconcious and fly the crooks to jail.

Nothing to do with Super-Gorillas, just a weird aside ...

•Grodd's Got Gas!
•Jesus Christ, Lois! You're right! Why this observation deserves an exclamation ...

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Strange Sports

Splish splash, I've been taking a bath ... a BATH of JUSTICE, that is! I'm Hydroman, the hero who came in convenient buckets for easy carrying!Yes, I fought crime with an arsenal of super-powers as impressive as --- turning to WATER! Yes, DANGEROUS, CRIMINAL-STOPPING water! I could HOP OUT of GLASSES and SOAK criminals ... with JUSTICE! I could drench their shirts and ruin their suede jackets ... with SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY! And if my ability to convert my body into water wasn't enough, I also had ... these nice red shorts! Yes, and also, the spectral power of my boyto- ... partner, Rainbow Boy! So look out evil, you're about to get WET and SHINED UPON ... BY JUSTICE!

Well, folks, what we're looking at here comes to us from the pages of DC Super Special #10, and in this case, I'm pretty sure they mean "special" the
same way the Special Olympics and Seanbaby do. I don't even feel qualified to determine if this was a good or bad comic ... I'm still stuck in the "what the hell were they thinking" phase ...

The short version of this comic is "Super-Villains challenge Super-Heroes to a baseball game." The long version begins with "Ah, I KNEW you wouldn't be satisfied with the short version..."

To elaborate, the scene opens on Golden Age villains and long-time spouses Huntress and Sportsmaster in a ... let's call it "heated" ... discussion about their future career paths. Huntress is considering a switch to the side of good, because "good always wins." After beating her against the side of a doorframe with a tennis racquet, Sportsmaster convinces her to give him the opportunity to prove her wrong by, of all things, challenging the combined forces of good in the universe to nine innings of America's pasttime.

And so they kidnap nine super-heroes and villains and a stadium full of baseball fans. Way to start that path of moral righteousness. I still don't get why the first thing the heroes did after the game wasn't throwing Huntress' tuckus in the pokey for fifty-thousand-plus counts of
kidnapping. Ah well, my rational mind and the trouble it gets me into ...

Luckily, it's easy to kidnap them all, as the opposing forces of good and evil are engaging in several spots of conflict around the globe ... at charity sporting events. Nice theme. The villains encounter the heroes by chance at a variety of sporting events, an exercise which eats up a half dozen pages of story and already bores me to death.

Green Arrow, Batman and Black Canary are all together at a charity bowling event, and say that one to yourself a few
dozen times before you figure out why a pair of billionaires would sponsor the national game of Wisconsin retirees (No hate mail, please, I bowl too. I'm just saying ...). Additionally, among the other sports-themed events attended by the heroes, Kid Flash and Robin are naturally to be found at the horse track. Of course. What sport is more "with it" among the hip kids of today than horse racing? Nothing, that's what. And if you don't believe me, check out X-Treme Horse Racing over on ESPN 2. It'll be on at about 3:15 Wednesday morning.

We catch up with Superman playing with himself ... I'm sorry, I mean "playing A GAME OF TENNIS with himself," using super-speed to cover both sides of the court. What was the Seventies' fascination with drawing the super-heroes playing fucking tennis against themselves? "Look, Flash is running so quickly that he's playing a GAME of TENNIS against HIMSELF!" Great. I can do that too, assuming I have a brick wall handy.

Back to it, Sportsmaster and his confused wife assemble the assorted heroes and villains together in a purloined baseball stadium, give them the low down on the moral dilemma at stake, and make with the "play ball." Uncle Sam plays umpire for the good guys, Amazo for the bad guys, all on Lex Luthor's recommendation. Sure, trust Lex.

This is one of those stories where Superman forgets he has every super power ever plus five more you never heard of, and they're all jacked up on creatine and atomic energy. He keeps getting defeated by the villains' superior "logic." He poses to Sportsmaster the very question I'D ask, namely, why the heroes should bother to play when they could just whompass on the villains. Sportsmaster replies that he and Huntress will see to it that the sixty-six thousand hostages in the sports arena will be kept there "forever," by some undefined and ambiguous
means. Superman sort of shrugs and grabs a pitcher's glove.

Here's a little peek into the alternate universe where
I wrote the script to this comic:

PAGE SEVEN

Sportsmaster: Now super-heroes, you will play a game of BASEBALL against our combined villainy! We picked first, you can have Tattooed Man if you want. He's only good for far right field.

Tattooed Man: Hey, shut up, matey!

Superman: And what if we don't play along with your little game?

Sportsmaster: Why, my wife will see to it that these sixty-six thousand baseball
fans stay here for all ETERNITY!

Superman: Hm. Actually, how about I just use my heat vision to tattoo pictures of genitals on your foreheads, and all these nice people can leave through the big doors. (SFX:"BZow!")

So the game begins, and we're treated to what feels like seventy million pages of indecipherable baseball action courtesy of veteran artist Dick Dillin. And if you thought super-heroes looked gay already, try to picture them playing baseball in their little costumes. It's about as gay as two men having sex with each other, and THAT'S PRETTY GAY!

Eventually, the rule about not using your powers gets thrown out the window, and both sides start to slip in a little magic, elasticity, and sharp arrows piercing your braincase. Mind you, even though the basic tenet of the game - not being allowed to use your powers - has broken down, they still CONTINUE TO PLAY THE GAME! It occurs to me that if Luthor is throwing you a cybernetically enhanced red solar baseball stuffed full of Kryptonite bees, you probably have carte blanche to beat him to death with that Louisville Slugger in yer mitts. Why not? It's against the rules? So is using microwave beams to explode Kid Flash's intestines, but does that stop Matter Master? Probably not, I frankly don't remember ... the book gets all hazy around this point.

In one of my favorite scenes in the book, Plastic Man successfully disguises himself as Wonder Woman's magic lasso. Even as a kid, reading this, I remember thinking:

(A) Way to go, Plas!
(B) How did Wonder Woman not notice Plastic Man replacing her lasso right
on her hip?
(C) Why is Plas glowing? Well, as I think about it, rubbing up against Wonder Woman's satin, star-spangled fanny would probably illuminate even the most stoic among us.

Anyway, the thing ends with the heroes winning, and I guess Huntress becomes a super-hero, or not, and I fall asleep. Oh, and the cap to this tale is a
full page of text describing play-by-play action of the baseball game. Fascinating stuff. Lots of questionable editorial decisions (I suspect they worked all of this out on one of those plastic-and-cardboard ball-bearing
tabletop baseball games they used to make in the Seventies. My dad and I
used to play that game, only we never found ourselves flicking the lever and saying "Okay, this one is Doctor Polaris batting southpaw against Superman.")

There are things like Batman taking a walk, and useless-for-shit-all characters like Tattooed Man making dramatic short-stop plays against WONDER WOMAN, who could still hit a grounder like a total girl and end up ripping your
arm off and atomizing your hand if you try to catch that thing. Oh, and "Superman flies out to left field?" What? What about "Superman drills the ball through Chronos' ribcage?"

And we're OUT!

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Green Team

Alright, hey there, howsit going? I'm thinking of a number between one and ten ... hey, good one! I'm a Kryptonian Thought-Beast, a pretty popular bogie-beast who made it into a lot of the Silver Age Superman stories. On my native Krypton, I and my race evolved the incredibly handy facility of having our primitive, reptilian thoughts broadcast on a big screen on our heads. Which usually meant the creature we were about to eat saw a picture on my viewscreen of my thinking about eating them. So all our prey knew when we were going to eat them. Well, they saw it on the viewscreen and also we were charging at them, roaring, with our tooth-filled maws wide open, so if they couldn't guess what was going to happen, then the screen would fill in the blanks for them.

In any case, we went extinct when the Kryptonian humans taught us the game of poker. I guess they could see right through us. We gambled into bankruptcy and then had to hock our screens for cash. Many of us died impoverished, a Sony black-and-white 7" portable TV strapped to our foreheads with duct tape...

Great Day, it's the bookend boy team from First issue Special, the Green Team! They're a foursome of Richie Rich wannabes and ... oh yeah, they suck!

The book opens with Abdul Smith, a poor black shoeshine boy who desperately wants to join a club (considering the shabby treatment he receives from Whitey in this book, may I suggest the Black Panthers? How about the Nation of Islam?). Anyway, for some reason he wants to join the Green Team (among others), but falls somewhat short of their patently exclusivist "million-dollar gross worth" limitation. In fact, Abdul's only got thirty-two bucks, and an apparent brain injury that forces him into this neurotic obsession with joining some damn group.

Luckily, stupid comic book coincidence jumps to his rescue; depositing his weeks' earnings (five whole bucks! He should show that to the Fast Willie Jackson gang!), a creepy bank teller accidentally enters the deposit as $500,00.00 (happens to me all the time. You?). Shining shoes at the tock
Exchange, Abdul shows a broker his checkbook, and soon finds himself the owner of some fast-rising Aerospace stock, earning him enough money to meet the Green Team's million-dollar height requirement even after the bank corrected the mistake (for which they probably fined Abdul's checking account twenty bucks, too). So, Abdul brings his million-dollar bankbook along to join the Team, only they kick him out for being black.
No no, I kid, he gets in for some reason, and then is promptly shoved to the backdrop of every discussion, action scene and plot point (even crammed in the corner of the cover, as if a last minute addition). Once his little human interest story is done, Abdul becomes persona non-grata in the Team. I can only imagine that the mere addition of Abdul to the team was a concession of the part of the writer to editorial concerns for ethnic representation.

I don't even know why Abdul would want to have anything to do with the Green Team anyway, considering how poorly the other team members treat him during the course of the book.

The other members consist of The Commodore (Shipping Tycoon), a femmy little twerp in a yachting uniform, and J.P.Houston (Oil Magnate), a gangly cowboy-regalia-bedecked Texan with an obnoxiously feathered hairdo. These two are pretty much the stars of the book, as they get the choice lines and the prime roles in the adventure. Or maybe it just seems that way compared to how Abdul gets shoved to the back of every scene and how one-dimensional the last team member is played...

He's Cecil Sunbeam, the Starmaker, and he's GAY GAY GAY! Or at least, really annoying and effeminate and flamboyant ... Like Elton John, Paul Lynde or Rip Taylor, so you see my reasoning. Sunbeam is a Hollywood producer/director for the "Now" Generation ... which is, these days, the "Then" Generation. We initially catch up with him diving two-fisted
into his remake of "Merchant of Venice," showing his street-gang cast first-hand how to throw down during a rumble (all the while under the approving leer of his disturbingly criminal-looking adult assistant). I've heard Oliver Stone does the same thing.

Halfway through the book, the cast established, the adventure beings. Well, actually, the adventure
was foreshadowed on the splash panel with the words of Missy, the Green Team's secretary, announcing "Professor Dinkle is here with a model of his GREAT AMERICAN PLEASURE MACHINE." Fuck! That really disturbs me. Any guy named "Dinkle" with a "Pleasure Machine," well, I don't need to see that shit.

Not that it matters much anyway, Dinkle reappears a little later demoted from Professor to "Mister," and no longer bearing his Great American Pleasure
machine but rather a scale model of a proposed North Pole colony built with insulating french fries .... I kid not ... Instead, Professor APPLE appears out of nowhere with the Great American Pleasure machine, but then again that doesn't matter much either because Professor Apple completely disappears after introducing the damn thing and then never reappears.

During the construction, Broadway producer David D.Merritt gathers together an evil marching band to destroy the G.A.P., as it'll drive all entertainers out of business what with its ability to deliver pleasure. Next, they go after the high-class hookers!

This threat prompts the boys to dress up in their Action Andrew Jackson gear, fancy little green Dickies with four combination-locked pockets used to carry CASH MONEY! Like these guys never heard of a gold card ... Each member carries about a quarter million dollars on them at all times, and then use them for such daring and innovative escape-plans as ... throwing it all on a roof and then running away! (this is true). I think this is their secret plan to immediately divest Abdul of his million-dollars so they can kick him out and get back to telling jokes like "What would you call the Flintstones if they were black?" "Haw haw, good one Cecil!"

They're also armed with a completely unimaginative set of accessories, including the keys to the locks which protect their various fortunes, and a tickertape watch which reads out news flashes for each of them. I get that on CNN.com, myself.

I'm glad this thing ended. Pretty much the only adventure I'd wanna see the Green Team participate in ever again would be a story where the Dingbats
of Danger Street kill them with shivs.

During the course of the story, they actually advertised themselves with massive billboards reading:"WANTED - Adventurous boys to join the GREEN TEAM" and then by way of small print, "Must Have A Million Dollars" all of which sounds suspiciously like a really transparent NAMBLA scheme. "Clean-Limbed boys wanted for big, exciting adventure. Must have million dollars, be willing to travel to Thailand. Orphans with no kin preferred."

Oh, here's some more text from other billboards scattered throughout the issue ... "Boy Millionaires seek ACTION!" ... "One Million Dollars (or more) Available for thrilling ACTION projects requiring participation of adventurous boys" and finally, my personal favorite, "MONEY for THRILLS! ... We Pay for Play!"

There's a poorly-thought-out text piece in the back
which explores the backstory of the Green Team, and which doesn't clarify a single thing about the characters or their motivation. Supposedly, the Green Team was founded by P.T.Green, formerly a poor boy from New York's lower east side who, as an adult, made it big and rich. Upon amassing his fortune, the adult Green thinks back on the hard life he and his pals had in the mean streets, rumbling with other kid gangs to protect their turf. He decides he wants to form a gang of his own to make up for the hardships he endured, so he inexplicably founds a gentleman's social club.

Disappointed with the turnout of rich, old white guys (he was expecting what, precisely, from a Millionaire's Club? Street Fights? The Jets and Sharks?), he founds ANOTHER group, this time an adventurer's group for millionaire teenagers. Fucking what? Millionaire teenagers already HAVE their own groups. They're called "Kennedys." Why Green, in his nostalgic pique, didn't provide some sort of funds for underprivileged kids living in the same slums where he grew up, but instead created an organization for kids who already had every advantage possible is totally beyond me. I can't tell if Simon was going for social commentary again, or if he's just an idiot.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Outsiders

H-A-! I am JIGSAW, and MAN am I ever DIS-TUR-BING! I was one of Harvey's attempts to cash in on the super-hero craze that followed the Batman TV show, and Good Lord, was that a weird group. There was me - the man whose limbs were barely attached - and Bee-Man and his giant bees, and Magicman who would stop fighting crime in the middle of a battle to teach magic tricks ... there were more, but kids your age probably wouldn't know them. Every now and again, you can catch them hanging out at Boat Shows, still trying to buddy up to Adam West or peek down Elvira's cleavage It's sad. Personally, I'm glad I was able to break into gay porn.

Alright, let's check out this month's Gone & Forgotten...

Nope, not the one with Batman and Metamorpho and Black Lightning and everybody ... neither is it Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. Hell, it's not even Matt Dillon or that weird, white, bumpy thing Alfred Pennyworth changed into for those coupla issues of Batman back in the Fifties. Nooo, it's ... something else altogether.

First Issue Special was DC's 1970's answer to Showcase, the rotating feature book of the Sixties which introduced Green Lantern and Flash and a passel of other DC staples. I don't think ANY First Issue Special alumni made it past their feature appearance, least of all this messy group.

Outsiders comes from the same folks who brought you Prez, Joe Simon and Jerry Grandetti, though what they were trying to accomplish in the way of social commentary - if anything - is vague at best.

The cover of the book may be my favorite part, as it was apparently handed to Ernie Colon WITHOUT giving him any reference to the characters appearing inside the book. Besides Doctor Goodie's hair going cropped and platinum blonde, the silhouettes for the Outsiders represent five figures we don't even come CLOSE to seeing inside the book.

The story itself is told recursively -- it begins at the denouement, then proceeds to the climax and resolution, THEN goes back and gives us a prelude (complete with expositionary flashback) and catches right back up with the denouement. This is handy, inasmuch as since the story loops itself, it's a closed system and implies that IT'LL NEVER BE CONTINUED IN ANY FASHION ANYWHERE EVER! YAY!

The premise goes something like this: Doctor Goodie, the world's greatest ... doctor. Doctor of what, I dunno. Anyway, he's asked to accompany an astronaut on an important trip into deep space, to identify the source of myterious lasers which can cure cancer. I don't write this stuff, folks.

Anyway, the space vessel crashes, the aliens save Doctor Goodie and perform reconstructive surgery on him ... but since they've never seen a human being, monitored the plentiful television broadcasts bouncing around space, caught Voyager's act or have advanced enough technology to do what reconstructive anatomists do every day on good, old, primitive backwards Earth ... they make him look like a guy from that one Twilight Zone episode where the pretty
lady goes through plastic surgery to look like a frog person. You remember that one, right? Right.

So, to get over his terrible disfigurement, Goodie wears a plastic mask and performs amazing surgery by day (with the aid of the
alien-implanted cybernetic nervous system), and by night, removes his mask and joins his adopted menagerie of a family as ... Doctor Scary.

It's somewhere between the X-Men and Big Daddy Roth.

We're introduced to the gang by a "theme song" in the splash panel, "Hang in there Billy, it's us, it's us...we're the Outsiders!Lizard Johnny, the Amazing Ronnie, Hairy Larry, Ol' Doc Scary & Mighty Mary" Plus Harry Carey and Cheri O'Teri.

Billy, by the way, is an orphaned freak with a tremendously tough and huge head. I would be too, but Mom and Dad are alive and kicking to this day.

---

One of the great injustices of the early days of Gone&Forgotten was that the Fast Willie Jackson article - one of the favorites, according to the survey results so far - was posted without any graphics In order to better illustrate this fine document, we bring you ... The Fast Willie Jackson Chronicles:

• Jamar and Jo-Jo trade the infamous banter regarding the existence of a mythical currency that white men call "A five-dollar bill."

• "The fat on your head." that sounds grotesque.

• It's just lately that I found out black is beautiful.

• Jabar in a full-page strip - "The One and Only." What exactly is the message of this book again?

• Can you dig it, disembodied head of the white kid who doesn't appear in the book?

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: I, Krypto

"Hi, this is a very special and very different edition of Gone & Forgotten. Instead of reviewing some lousy comic, we're going to look back on the career of a beloved comic book institution, Krypto the Super-Dog! And the Super-Dog Family! Woof!

"I'm Kolli, Krypto's super-sweetheart. Don't sweat it if you don't remember me. Shortly after my only appearance, I was run over by Braniac's spaceship. Nonetheless, before my untimely demise, I did scatter Krypto's illegitimate pups all over the inhabited cosmos, so next time your space shuttle finds itself humped by super-powered dogs, you know what's going on.

"In any case, please enjoy reminiscing with some of Krypto's greatest friends and enemies - as if a dog could have friends and enemies - and try not to think about how we're all dead now."

"I am King Krypto, and I sentence you all to DEATH!"

Hello visitors, I am Krypto, greatest of the Super-pets because I was Superman's favorite, and because Streaky and Comet aren't even really Kryptonian and Proty is a pile of snot! Ha ha! I am not only super-powerful, but also much smarter than any normal dog. Notice, for instance, that I have no desire to cram my nose into your crotch as a form of greeting. I am beyond that. Also, I do not eat feces or ruin the carpet. Only bad dogs would do that. I am not a bad dog. Krypto is a good dog.

"I am Swifty, one of about a billion super dogs who, over the course of the fifties and sixties, usurped Superboy's affections for Krypto and replaced him as a partner. I know we usually all turned out to be robots or Krypto in disguise, but still, if I were Krypto I wouldn't put up with Superboy's shit. You know what I mean?"

"And I am Destructo, who was Lex Luthor's pet dog! I was given super-powers so that I could help my master open a can of whoop-ass on Superboy and Super-Dog. Back in the Sixties, every one of Superboy's foes seemed to have a dog. Kryptonite Kid had the Kryptonite Bulldog there. I'm sure there would've been more villain dogs, but frankly, Superboy only HAD maybe two or three villains. Most of the time, he used his incredible super human strength to beat the hell out of penny ante gangsters and con men."

"I am Kryptonite Dog,
and I like to eat beef jerky
and fart noxious Kryptonite
fart clouds everywhere."

"Raaaagh! Me am Bizarro Krypto! Me make mess on carpet! Me eat own feces! Me hump all legs! Woof woof! Me am barking loud all night! Me am apeshit crazy!"

"Grr! Naff off Bizarro Krypto! I fucking hate you!"

OOooh. Who could I be? Am I a be-yooo-tiful lady dog? HAHA!
No! I am Krypto! I flew through a Red Kryptonite comet once and, for forty-eight hours, was changed intoa beautiful collie dog. The master's girlfriend said I was so pretty. She petted me and gave me treats. She said I was the lovingest most special doggie in the universe. Even my master thought I was beautiful. He brushed my fur and threw many balls for me to chase.

Then the Red K wore off. "Surprise!" I said. "It is me, the beautiful dog you loved so much was me, plain old Krypto! Now you see that you only loved what is special inside of me!" They hugged me and said they liked me the way I was. Then they went off together and I was left alone for several hours.

"This is another of my ingenious
disguises. I am secretly a dog,
but look, I am wearing glasses!"

Begorrah! I am Tail Terrier, Captain and chairman of the Space Canine Patrol Agency, a team of intergalactic, telepathic crimefighting dogs who made Krypto a member back in the Sixties. Every member was required to have a super-power; for instance, I possessed an infinitely elastic, malleable, prehensile tail I could use to lasso crooks. Krypto, by comparison, could flash fry us or stomp us into nothing with his mighty paws. We didn't mess with Krypto.

"By dame ib Tusky Husky, adb by bib toobh ib ubeful for obening dings. Bib Dob! Bib Dob! Bow Wow Wow!"
Other members of the team included Chameleon Collie, who could change his shape, Mammoth Mutt, who could inflate to a huge size and thereby become an easy target. There was also Precognitive Pup whose freakish head turned translucent and gave us views of the future. And lest I forget, there was also Paw Pooch, Hot Dog, Tusky Husky and Snoop Dogg.

We'd meet in our galactic clubhouse and bark out our pledge: "Big Dog Big
Dog, Bow Wow Wow. We'll Stop Evil, Now Now Now!" Then we'd keep yapping and howling for half an hour or so. Mark Waid can't ever remember our anthem correctly. We mock him for it. I, personally, have dropped poopy on his house on more than one occasion, laughing heartily as we veer our hyper-dimensional cruiser through his rosebushes and do donuts on his lawn.

Our biggest enemies were these rogue, sentient cats who kept trying to feed us tainted hot dogs. It was a mess. A lot of them were the pets of Kryptonian villains who'd been condemned to the Phantom Zone - I mean, I sort of don't blame them for turning to evil! They get eternally banished to a twilight dimension of terror just because they happen to be the pet cats of criminals. Sometimes I think it's a blessing that Krypton exploded.

"You take that back or I'll KILL YOU! I'll KILL YOU!"

Then there's us, the Legion of Super-Pets. Here's a picture of us on the Celebrity Super-Pets edition of Jeopardy. Me? I'm Comet, Supergirl's pet horse who secretly used to be a human male, and I won the game when I bet it all on "Super-Pets who've claimed SuperGirl's maidenhead"

Besides me, Beppo the Super-Monkey is also a member. Beppo was sent into space on an experimental rocket built by Jor-El. Just like Krypto, the freaking thing got lost and
he wandered through space for a bunch of decades. Freaking Jor-El. To say it was traumatic is to put too kind a face on it. Poor little monkey used to chew on his own dried feces and weep violently, haunted by terrifying dreams of endless blackness. Anyway, Beppo's put it all behind him. Of course, Beppo pretty much blew his mind on peyote during the Seventies when he moved to New Mexico to "find himself."

"I figure surviving begins with healing,
and healing begins with forgiveness.
I forgive you Jor-El. Sob."

There was also Streaky the Super-Cat, who was kind of a fraud, but he was also a freaking wild man so we kept him around for the parties. Streaky got his super-powers from something called "Kryptonite-X," which SuperGirl "accidentally" slipped into a ball of yarn for him to play with. He only kept his powers for a little while, so after they'd wear off we'd make him go do the beer runs.

Then there was this little ball of shit named Proty. We kept him around for laughs. What a feeb.

Over the years, we've had a number of great adventures, but mostly we flew to the 30th century and beat up on the Legion of Super-Heroes a lot. Hahaha. "No, no, Braniac 5, we were being mentally controlled!" HAHAHAHA. Oh yeah, and Bee Boy applied for membership once. Streaky made him swim out to the pier with a candle in his thorax. Those were wild times.

"Okay, okay, that's enough already."

These were my fantastic adventures. There were so many folks I couldn't find the time or space to mention, or for that matter, the inclination. There was my pal Ed Lacy, a retired Police Detective who palled around with me when I was playing the role of a professional stuntdog named "Jocko." Most of Ed's relatives were junkies on the run from the law. We had to keep finding them and saving them. I'm guessing that this was because Ed was a black comic book character and, therefore, family of junkies. Comic book logic. It makes sense to some folk.

"This is a drawing I made of Proty. He is stinky poop."

Also, at the same time, there was this lady movie star dog I was trying to get close to. "Chelsea." Stuck up little bitch - literally. Moses couldn't part her legs, I swear.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Ma and Pa Kent, my master's adoptive parents and the kindly couple whose rugs I so often ruined over the course of a lifetime. I will always remember MA Kent as the woman who would sneak me pieces of lunchmeat off the counter. I'll always remember Pa Kent as the man who would pass wind and blame it on me. Also, these two created my absolutely excellent secret identity of "Spot" or some damn thing, which they created
by spilling paint on my back. They meant well. But honestly.

"Fuck you! Fuck you and die
you fucking stupid cat! I hate you!"

THE END! ARF!

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Prez

November is Election Month, and in honor of it, may we present a special edition of G&F featuring

Yes, Prez! From the mind of Joe "You're Getting Paid To Draw, Jack, Not Erase"
Simon himself.

Yes, Joe Simon, the man who, in collaboration with Jack Kirby back in the 1940's, brought us Captain America.

Yes, Captain America, the comic book hero who paved the way for patriotic super-men of all shapes and sizes - including red turtlenecked teens. Believe it or not.

Joe put together the ballad of Prez with art assist from Jerry Grandenetti, an appropriately unpolished artist for what was certainly a hastily-constructed concept (later adopted and made into a triumphantly allegorical tale by Sandman author Neil Gaiman). The story of "The Man From Steadfast" goes like this:

Gimme a P!

Prez Rickard is a youngster in the way-side town of Steadfast, a small community in the boondocks where Prez heads the local drag-racing club in his 'sweet ride,' The Lollipop, while he ponders political futures and frets about local timepieces.

You see, Steadfast is famous for its clocks - thousands of them, everywhere, in every nook and cranny, each one unique - especially in regards to their accuracy. According to the text in the first issue, it takes more than half-an-hour for all the clocks to finish chiming the top of the hour.

Now two unrelated locomotives move towards each other on the inexorable tracks of destiny. While Prez is taking it upon himself to fix all the clocks in Steadfast so that they chime right, Congress has passed laws giving 18-year olds the vote, and allowing 21-year olds to hold all public offices.


You blockhead.

Enter Boss Smiley, Charlie Brown lookalike gone bad. A greed-monger of the first degree, political thug, polluter, breaker of men's souls and, oh, TOTALLY MISSHAPEN FREAK! Smiley has designs on high political power, and sees the naive Prez Rickard as his tool. He co-opts Prez (who is riding high on a wave of publicity following his town-wide clock repair job) as his own personal pocket candidate for Senator of ... whatever the heck state Steadfast is supposed to be in.

The clueless young Prez does as he is told, his eyes filled with senatorial stars, until he gets wised up and hepped to the deal by go-go Native American Eagle Free. Turning his back on Smiley, Prez nails his former benefactor to the wall and - riding the newly appointed teen vote and the publicity high of ruining the infamous Smiley - finds himself whisked into the White House! While there, Prez becomes an ambassador for peace, love, understanding, and fighting vampires.

No, seriously....

Gimme a R!

I personally LIKE the premise of Prez, and apparently I ain't the only one; award-winning author Neil Gaiman recruited guest artist Mike (Madman) Allred to do a Prez retrospective in Gaiman's critically acclaimed DC/Vertigo book The Sandman (issue #54, The Golden Boy). Sadly, outside of Gaiman's work (and possibly the Ed Brubaker one-shot "sequel" to Gaiman's story) the premise was subsequently underfed.

Given that it was 1972, Prez (then 21) was a child of the Sixties, of the love and peace generation. Appropriately, he became an ambassador of said virtues, much to the chagrin of the establishment which saw him as an upstart, unworthy of the office granted him, and a danger to their precious status quo. And yet, Prez was often foolish, naive, downright childish and simple, and carried with him a bag of spite and paranoia for the older politicians who surrounded him.

So what had we here? A unique everyman champion of a generation that broke all the rules, an indictment of a bloated political system, or a cruel parody of an earnest but often errant youth movement? All in all, it was a very different type of patriotic super-hero than Simon - or anyone else - had given us before.


Gimme an E!

Well, anyway, it's all irrelevant, as the series couldn't have been more brutally cheapened and used than if Boss Smiley himself was writing it. (Some notes on Boss Smiley, by the way: The Prez stories were written much in the same vein as Simon and Kirby's Fighting American - highly tongue-in-cheek, often misshapen villains representing vast political and social movements across the land. Well, sorta ... cause while Boss Smiley may have been the symbol of the shallow, ugly America of the early Seventies, I don't know what Dracula and Bobby Fisher represented).

Yes, while Prez jetted around the world bringing relief to put upon nations, he also had to fend off the violent advances of the NATION OF TRANSYLVANIA which threatened to send a HORDE OF RABIES-INFECTED VAMPIRE BATS down upon our heads! Yes, and then there was the insane, costumed CHESS-PLAYERS from the Soviet Union who used robot chess-pieces to commit terrible crimes!

Prez was assisted in his ludicrous adventures by the aforementioned Eagle Free, now Director of the FBI, and by his gargantuan vice-president Martha (no last name given).

Messing with continuity buffs for years to come, Prez even makes an appearance in Supergirl Comics in which he not only co-starred with the Maid of Might, but was also identified as the current President in DC Continuity. Natch'ly, the story is largely ignored in terms of Pre-Crisis canon.


Gimme a Z!

Let's see, what else stands out during Prez's brief period in office? There was the renaming of Air Force One to "The FreeBee." There's an assassination attempt on Prez's life which instead claims that of a lookalike's ... and no one seems to care. Sigh. Prez ran a grand total of four issues, plus a fifth which was completed but never published outside of DC's in-house Cancelled Comics Cavalcade (printed and distributed solely to creators and price guide guru Robert Overstreet, merely for purposes of copyright retention). Add to this is the apocryphal Supergirl appearance, the two Vertigo books, and his brief stint as a reserve member of the Champions.

No, I made that last part up. Prez never even rated a "Whatever Happened To ..." feature in the back of DC Comics Presents.

On one final note, let's take a moment to REALLY consider the full implications of Prez Rickard's term of office; If puffy, hound-faced, pudgy Bill Clinton seems to be swimming in a pool of endless poon, imagine the quantity and quality of nubile young girl intern-meat a blonde, Midwestern twenty-something woulda had on stock. Viva Prez! Viva the U! S! A!



Stupid Kite-Eating Tree!

• Prez plays well with others
• Prez sticks it to Boss Smiley
• They're Here! The Deadly Chessmen!
• Eagle Free has eliminated the glass ceiling. And everything else, too.
• As far as origins go, it's not exactly "Rocketed from a doomed planet..."
• Prez could stand to learn some respect for native cultures
• If Prez keeps it up, he's gonna get a swat to the face.
• Damn that electrical energy!
• Prez and Hillary are burning the Whitewa---I mean, he and Eagle Free are looking for incriminating evidence of Smiley's misdeeds.
• A big damn Prez seal, for whatever misdeeds you care to apply it.

"Then there was Prez, a husky, handsome blond like a freckled boxer, meticulously
wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape and the collar
falling back and the tie undone for exact sharpness and casualness, sweating
and hitching up his horn and writhing into it, and a tone just like Lester
Young himself. "You see, man, Prez has the technical anxieties of a money-making
musician, he's the only one who's well dressed, see him grow worried when
he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry
and just blow and blow--the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music
is all he cares about. He's an artist. He's teaching young Prez the boxer.
Now the others dig!!"

-Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Who's Who #10.5

My pal Leonard Pierce runs a daily writing log under the heading of the Ludic Log, which includes a once-a-week, issue-by-issue overview of DC's original Who's Who series.

When Leonard took a week off to celebrate 'our nation's birthday' (Could we possibly conceive an even more precious phrase to describe Independence Day? Did the movie ruin it for us or something?) in San Francisco, I stepped in to write his Who's Who entry, pulling an issue wholesale outta my ass. Enjoy!

---

What with Leonard out of town and apparently too much of a little girl to risk writing a daily log while raging drunk and waist-deep in America's national center of steamy man-love -- listen, some men fear these changes, some men embrace them; me, my valedictorian speech was delivered soused and pinned beneath a stranger whose real name was probably not actually 'Cody' -- I wanted to step in and give the DC Who's Who retrospective a shot. While drunk. And man-humping.

But of course, any idiot can (and does) write a standard review of Who's Who entries. Where I'm going -- and taking you with me -- is the Who's Who that SHOULD have been. To a comics history guru like me, some of the choices made for inclusion versus exception were simply astonishing, so I want to write my own definitive directory to the DC universe otherwise left forgotten. Meet

Who's Who #10.5, the notional issue!

You don't need me to cover the glaring omissions in any given issue of Who's Who, not when 1986 America's faithful army of anal-retentive nerds were there to angrily do it in the truncated lettercol inside each issue's front cover. But then again, you don't really need Who's Who in the first place, you're just going to get it, is all.




And now try new Egg-Fu-Beaters, with no chorestelorrrllrlll ....
EGG-FU. Sometimes I ponder whether Wonder Woman was actually selling enough to survive, or if DC kept it around only to diffuse the potential feminist backlash against not having a predominant female superhero. (Then again, Marvel's never had a major female superstar in a long-running title, which is why scary nerds prefer Marvel.) In any case, I have a hard time believing her sales saved her star-spangled ass if only because every supporting element in her book has been so lame, particularly her villains. She's a page out of Greek mythology, right? So she should have an endless stream of half-human monstrosities and angry demigods to battle when she's not spurning the advances of an amorous Apollo or sowing a field of dragon's teeth or sparring with bronze warriors. There's nothing short of a thousand menaces, puzzles or quests on her plate, but instead she gets this: A sixty-foot tall Communist Chinese egg with a handlebar moustache. That, and the over-amorous space gorillas that one time.





I'm gonna r-r-r-rub ya out, see? R-r-r-r-r-rub ya out!
ERASER. This was a legitimate Batman villain who dressed like a pencil: pink rubber hat, yellow striped suit, pointy shoes. In a world where Kite-Man gets included in Who's Who but this guy doesn't, I don't believe there's justice. I mean, the Ten-Eyed Man got an entry and that guy was a Man-Bat villain! MAN-BAT! How many degrees of separation from respectability could they tolerate in these entries?

GENERALISSIMO GOG. A disgraced military figure of the diminutive Mediterranean nation of Offalia, Generalissimo Demmy Gog (oh ho, ho ho) and the five ragtag soldiers which make up the country 's "Dirty Half Dozen" its sole military force attack a hipster-slang-slinging Justice League in hopes of conquering America. This was one of those stories written by Denny O'Neil when he forgot he was writing one of DC's flagship series and instead thought he was still writing Herbie the Fat Fuck. Oh, wait, I mean 'Fury'. No, wait, I meant 'Fuck'.

GOODY RICKLES. The goody-goody brother of Don Rickles, who appeared in Jimmy Olsen during the Kirby run. Amazing.

ITTY. This is Green Lantern's flower/snail sidekick-pet. It sat on GL's shoulder while he had adventures in space. I believe it was introduced during the period where Georgia O'Keefe was drawing the book. (As an aside, I just realized yesterday that its name was 'Itty' as in 'Itty Bitty', not just as in 'it' with a modifier.




Get them off me, GET THEM OFF ME!!

JULIUS SCHWARTZ. No denizen of 'Earth Prime' (I prefer a nice fatty cut of Earth myself, maybe an Earth loin or a nice Earth roast) has made more appearances in DC comics than this editorial icon. Also, here's a Julius Schwartz story I saw on the bus at San Diego: Julie steps on at the Sheraton, wearing a Dark Knight t-shirt and slacks. Some kid yells "Hi Julie", and Schwartz turns to him, looks him up and down, and angrily snaps "I don't know YOU!" Then he sat down. MAN JULIE!

LARA. Jor-el got an entry. Superman had a mother too, you fucks.




I'm STILL better dressed than Shade, the Changing Man.
ODD MAN. You've seen this guy in the late-70's DC full-page ads: patchwork suit, one red eye, one yellow eye, polka dot tie, striped pants, checkered jacket, ALLLLL the colors of the rainbow. Steve Ditko character. Oh yeah, now you remember...

PINKY. Mister Scarlet's sidekick. I'm familiar with the legal problems which kept most of the Fawcett-purchased characters out of Who's Who as well as other DC titles, but the fact is that DC's lawyers should've fought extra hard if only to include the one sidekick whose secret identity was gayer by far than 'Speedy', 'Robin' and 'Sandy the Golden Boy'. If you had a kid sidekick superhero whose name actually had the words "Lubed-Up Pleasure Toy" in it, it still wouldn't be quite as irredeemably gay as 'Pinky'.

PREZ. This is bullshit. This is major, major bullshit. Even if Prez's omission was actually tackled in the letters page of the very issue in which he should have appeared, and even if there was "heated discussion" about it, I still call bullshit. Someone deserves a gut-punch for this, and I swear, even if it was Archie Goodwin, I'm gonna dig him up and do it. How much of a total bunch of assholes do you think DC editorial felt when, years later, Neil Gaiman turned Prez into the most amazing single issue of a comic in years? Anyway, Prez's cut has me so upset, I'm not even going to be able to stir up the muster to mention The Green Team...




Wonder Nerd powers -- ACTIVATE!
RADIO SHACK WHIZ KIDS. Alex and Shanna, I think. I honestly don't particularly know, or care. In the matter of whether I should use valuable space in my memory for pictures of naked women, phone numbers, or the names of the Radio Shack Whiz Kids, I think you know what wins out. In any case, these two were computer geniuses who used Radio Shack's TRS-80 model computer to assist Superman in solving crimes and fighting menaces which were particularly vulnerable to cassette drives and screen burns. I can't accept that Superman could benefit from a pair of teenage desk jockeys and their oversized calculator-slash-paperweight. Even I can process square roots faster than a TRS-80, what's Superman going to do with one, smash Luthor across the noggin with it?

SENTINELS. I'm assuming DC got the rights to these guys along with all the other Charlton heroes. This was a trio of beatniks who gained super-powers from something and then fought something, and their names were Helio and something and something. But here's the good part: their civilian identities were as a folk trio, their ouevre was songs about how the world is doomed, and they actually had partial lyrics to one of their songs which went: "The Doomsday Dirge/the doubters we'll purge " Whoa! Watch out Kingston Trio!

SUPERBABY. If there's one thing you have to give Superman, it's that he's made great strides in overcoming his childhood speech impediment. It's also possible that his rocket might've landed harder than we thought, and the poor little fella got his noggin well-shook. Two versions of Superman got Who's Who entries: the Golden Age fella and the Byrne revamp. This means that not only was Superman's rich career as a boy generally ignored, but all those years he spent as an autistic force of nature were left undocumented in the cold post-Crisis world

SUPERMAN JR. How they could overlook this guy, Superman's only legitimate claim to a kid sidekick (not counting Supergirl, although let's face it, Clark pretty much abandoned that jailbait in some one-horse town and hightailed it back to the big city)? Superman Jr. was the son of a scientist who gave the kid super-powers before up and keeling over. Then Superman adopted him and, like all good adoptive parents, changed the kid's name. Now do you miss your dead daddy? Oh, and later, Superman Jr. died. I bet there's an acre of upturned earth behind the Fortress of Solitude containing the unmarked graves of dozens of Superboys and Supergirls.




As you look at this image, keep in mind that this is the internet and that's a cartoon turtle. And this means that someone - somewhere - is probably masturbating to it as we speak.
TERRIFIC WHATZIT. DC's first funny animal superhero, dressed up like the Golden Age Flash BUT WAS A TURTLE, GET IT? Also, as I think about it, they left out Super-Turtle too, BUT INCLUDED SEPARATE ENTRIES FOR EVERY MEMBER OF THE ZOO CREW! Let me see if I get this straight the Metal Men, the Blackhawks, and the Inferior Five have team entries...but every member of the Zoo Crew got their own entry. Even Little Cheese. Mmn. Mm-hmn.

T'OMM JONZZ. Insert your own Tom Jones song title in here, but come back in time for this piece of info: Martian Manhunter's little brother. I ain't kidding. His little kid brother made it to Earth. His little kid brother's name was T'omm. I think and/or hope he died at some point.





Me want ice cream nyargh fart GAAAARGLE!
WONDER TOT. This is Wonder Woman when she was small and retarded. Getting back to WW's horrible lameness, another of her poorer elements was her persistent Artemis-come-lateliness in terms of comic book accoutrements. Lo-o-o-ong after Batman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and the Flash had teen sidekicks, Wonder Woman gets Wonder Girl. Lo-o-o-ong after Superman devalues himself as Superbaby, we get Wonder Tot. These stories had lots of Wonder Tot fighting a giant sea monster and gargling out gems like "Tee-hee, me play with smiley fish!" You know the drill. Wonder Tot also had a genie. I wish you could witness the angry paroxysm I undergo everytime I type that. "Wonder Tot also had a genie WHAT THE FUCK!"

This is coming out a little thin for an issue of Who's Who, so I'm going to round this up with some DC super-heroes I just made up

CHALLENGERS OF THE KNOWN. Four rough-and-tumble adventurers Randy, Specs, Doodles and Veronica dedicate their lives to seeking thrills and action among the well-established paths trod before them. When last seen, the Challs were on a mission to ride every Six Flags roller-coaster without getting sick!

LEGION OF FUCKS. Cashing in on the inherent hipness of the racially and economically oppressed underclasses so often represented in the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group of over-privileged thirtieth-century kids form their OWN super-hero clubhouse. Represented by such stalwart costumed figures as Trustfundicon and the Living Kennedy, the LoF dedicates themselves to throwing killer bashes and getting that blonde bitch so drunk she don't know if she's got it coming or going, yeee-ah! Once a year, the Legion of Fucks stage a membership drive, at which they systemically turn away many Jews and blacks.

MADONNA-WHORE. This complex super-villainess repeatedly torments Wonder Woman, causing the amazing Amazon to come to grips with her coquetteish dismissal of Steve Trevor's affection, the dichotomy between her over-feminized costume and overtly masculine physique, and the fact that she's a fucking enormous undersexed Amazon in star-spangled bondage gear who could rip a phone book in half with a kegel.

QUEEF. This mischevious fifth-dimensional imp who idolizes the Black Canary (II) often appears in a stylized version of her role model's costume to aid the Canary with her magic. As time passes, Queef's self-image begins to deteriorate as she realizes she doesn't possess Canary's hourglass figure. After several weeks of crash dieting, bulimia and radical plastic surgery, Queef falls into a profound depression. Following a girl-to-girl talk on the beauty of full-figured women, an obviously uncomfortable Black Canary suggests Queef may try wearing darker colors, and should consider sweat pants. Queef vanishes into a quart of chocolate ice cream and is never seen again.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Karate Kid

"Dr.Venom bade me welcome you to this edition of Gone and Forgotten..."

"I am Jena, villainous lackey with a heart of gold and possible love interest for the hero of the eponymous and godawful story STAR-KING, the backup feature from Amazing Wahoo. I only appeared in the last three panels of the story, and even then I was so strung out on cheap talcum-cut cocaine that I barely remember it at all.

Hell, most of the Eighties are a total blur. I started off as Doctor Venom's receptionist, back when he ran an orthodontics practice in Burbank. We ended up in bed together, and he got me all swept up in his dreams of super-villainy, but he abandoned me on the movie set in Italy where we were doing "Star-King." I kinda let myself go wild, there - did a coupla spreads in European skin mags, ran heroin through the Netherlands. I'm going to night school now, and I've rejoined the Baptist church. I'm trying to find a man who doesn't drink or yell at me."

"Well, enough about me...There's a new comic to review ..."

...except Karate Kid (awww). From DC's on-again-off-again attempts of the Seventies, here's what I believe to be the only comic book featuring a kung-fu artist from the future ... though I expect to be proven wrong.

Our Karate Kid is actually Val Armorr, a citizen of 30th-Century Earth and a member of DC's perennial fan-favorite team book, the Legion of Super-Heroes. Feeling his "powers" don't quite match up to the earth-shattering abilities of his allies -- and how could he compare to super-powered teens who make "zap," "bam," "pow," and "bzzzz" noises with such relative ease -- he hops a Time Bubble and heads for an era where his intensive training in assorted martial arts could be put to better use.

The Boxer Rebellion!

No no, I kid. He goes to (naturally) 20th century Earth* where - instead of having to match up to human-powerhouses like Mon-El, genius intellects like Braniac 5 and energy wielding wonders like Sun Boy - he merely has to compete in the same arena with human-powerhouses like Superman, genius intellects like Batman, and energy-wielding wonders like Firestorm, the Nuclear Man.

Despite his timely themes, the Kid actually predates the martial arts craze that raged through comics in the mid-Seventies; he is far less contemporaneous with Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon than he is with Bruce Lee's Kato ... Karate Kid first appeared in Adventure Comics' Legion feature back in the Sixties.

However, Lee's seminal Enter the Dragon debuts in 1973 and by 1974 martial arts comic books are beginning to flood the market. As Marvel (and several 'upstart' companies) start to find a sufficiently profitable cult success with martial arts-themed books like Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu, DC promotes Karate Kid to his own title while creating another equally short-lived kung-fu book, Richard Dragon.

Karate Kid sure did try, and there's a few things I enjoyed about it. Like a number of DC's short-lived Seventies titles, the Kid got to test his skills out on perennial bad guys Neo-Nazis - in this case, the thinly-disguised snappy dressers in bright red costumes, the NuRike (One-half the calories of a regular Reich)!

Also - and this is wholly the effect of artists Ric Estrada (no, not that Ric Estrada) and Joe Staton - Val's New York is a cartoony, desolate landscape or surreal proportions. Buildings are terrific monoliths in an indeterminate distance, often lonely pillars against a red background unmarked by similar towers and buildings. And the splash panel of issue two is a dreamy Eisner-esque ... well, sort of, I guess ... liquid landscape that peels itself right off the page and into a Riverdance performance. It's bizarre. I kinda like it.

And although the splash page of the second issue promised "Martial Arts Action like you've never seen before!" it actually delivered Martial Arts diagramming like you've never seen before. Perhaps taking its lead from DC's long tradition of adding "scientific facts" to its stories (Anyone here remember "Flash Facts?" or those Planetary Science bits they used to run in Mystery In Space?), KK:the book doesn't actually so much show the martial arts action as it does an occasional diorama explaining the action

*Seems whenever a Legionnaire gets a mini-series, it's to introduce him to modern day 20th century Earth. Valor (nee Mon-El) started off as a twentieth century hero, and although his fan base was created in the pages of the futuristic Legion of Super-Heroes, his series placed Valor in the early Nineties. Cosmic Boy's mid-Eighties miniseries had him travel to then-modern-day America, and Timber Wolf - in a miniseries which ran shortly after Valor's - ends up in San Francisco, also modern day.

• Martial Arts Mayhem At Its Mightiest!
• Karate Comments? They couldn't come up with a better name?

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: When The Legion Was Innocent

When the Legion was young and innocent

Whoa whoa whoa, Mon-El, who the hell was talking about Hitler?

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Christmas With The Super-Heroes

The first ever audio Gone&Forgotten comes to you courtesy of a plainly horrible holiday offering which comes screaming from the heart of the Seventies - Christmas With The Super-Heroes.


Every Christmas with the Super Heroes starts out as smiles and gifts, but after a few holiday scotches, Robin's demanding a divorce from Batman, Superman's crying on the patio and Wonder Woman's locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of wine.



Man, good times.

If you grew up in the Seventies, or even the Eighties, you probably had a couple of these albums yourself, either the stand-alone albums or the ones which came with a horribly written comic attached to the sleeve. The art was usually stock, if I remember.

Nowadays, I have more than a dozen of these things - far more than I ever had as a kid, and this includes Reflections Of A Rock Super-Hero, which was this mixed-genre rock concept album that caused you to die of horribleness anew with each track. Then Stan Lee would do a spoken segment, and you'd be soothed back to life, only to be brutally killed again by the NEXT goddamn caterwauling. For more accurate description of this album, please see Dante's Inferno.

But back to this album, what we have are three Christmas-themed stories featuring the Kennedies of DC Comics, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Appropriately, they all deal with traditional seasonal themes, such as Santa Claus, charity, and nuclear missiles killing the merry fuck out of everything. HO HO HO!

Superman starts us off with "Light Up The Tree, Mister President," which is fun to sing along to "Turn Me On Mister Dead Man" or "What's the Frequency, Kenneth." Jimmy Olsen kicks off the scene, interviewing folks - like this excitable fella from the Pacific Northwest - at the site of the annual Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the lawn of the White House.

Little does Jimmy know that a crazy-ass mad scientist-type has rigged up what is probably the least rational doomsday plan in the history of everything. A kidnapped Jimmy has the plan explained to him - via a series of images on television screens, very helpful for those of us LISTENING TO A RECORD, MAN! - by apocalyptically-obsessed madman genius Thurston Killgore, who probably wouldn't be half the menace he is had he been born "Ted" to Ira and Dianne Shelby.

In a flashback, we hear the once-respected Killgore addressing Congress with a program I believe he called "Operation Enduring Killing Everyone On Earth With Nuclear Bombs Until America Is All That's Left," and not to go all political here but I SWEAR some of the stuff he's bellowing sounds like it came straight from a Rumsfield press conference. Naturally, Congress would NEVER go along with any plan which involved America launching pre-emptive strikes on another country with weapons of mass destruction - right? Right - so they lock Killgore up in the nut pokey and forget about him.

But he comes back with a plan for revenge, based on the following logic - he wants the world to die in nuclear fire, right? Right. But the only man who can launch America's arsenal of nuclear weapons - in this story, that's FIVE - is the President, via the special button in his office. But Killgore has RIGGED the button which lights the Christmas Tree on the White House lawn so that IT launches the missiles when the President lights the tree! AND it explodes one that's hidden in the tree itself! It's DEVIOUS, and only about NINETY-PERCENT RETARDED, since you figure that if he could rig this freaking button to launch the missiles, he could go ahead and do it himself.

Only in comic books are the words "Evil Genius" and "Downs Syndrome" pretty much synonmous.

Fast forward to the end, Superman wins. Beats him up or something. NOW, two things stand out for me in this story. First off, at the same time that Jimmy Olsen is covering the tree lighting ceremony and Lois and Clark are watching Jimmy on WGBS' live feed, the United Nations is unanimously passing a worldwide resolve to ban all nuclear weapons forever. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the news business, myself ... in fact, I don't even watch television news, or read a newspaper, or in fact know HOW to read OR write, and instead rely on shouting at the keyboard in order to create these articles, BUT ... it seems to me that I'd have at least ONE of my three top reporters assigned to COVER THE GADDAMN UNITED NATIONS BANNING ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS! I don't care HOW pretty the lights are, man ...


There's no image here because bandwidth is more precious than gold, and these sound files take up enough space. Sorry, folks.

Second thing which stands out is a constant for this album - the sound effects. For some reason, the foley on this thing is flat-out bizarre, particularly when anyone takes a walk. Check out, for instance, this scene where Superman inquires as to the whereabouts of Jimmy Olsen and, upon receiving a clue, dashes across the quad in his brand new cordurouy pants.

Moving on to the Batman story - "The Christmas Carol Caper," this is where the album gets sort of ... unsettling. I was never the world's biggest fan of Batman, and maybe I'm not as hep to the mythos of the guy as some of you out there, but upon listening to this recording I feel I can say with some certainty: THIS IS NOT BATMAN!

Batman is an avenger of the night, a dark and brooding figure, and even at his worst a campy fat man with a stick up his ass. He is not a laid-back bon vivant with a song in his heart and singing telegrams coming in on his telephone! I'm not even 100% convinced that Batman should be answering his own phone, but I DO know for sure that Batman would NEVER say "HOW NICE!" or "SING AWAY", never mind ONE AFTER THE OTHER!!

This story starts off with Batman and Robin chilling at the Batpad on a quiet, crime-free Christmas Eve when the ... ugh ... when the PHONE RINGS AND BATMAN ANSWERS IT and it turns out to be A SINGING TELEGRAM ... OF DOOM!

Now, what I know of Gotham City villains is that they each have their own theme, right? Joker uses comedy-related stuff, Two-Face gets double-gimmicks, Riddler riddles, Penguin gets the arctic, umbrellas and birds, because who else will, right? Well, here's a little known fact - all OTHER non-gimmick Gotham villains are required to either sing or have Christmas related motifs. No, it's true! Why else would both the threatening voice on the phone sing a menacing version of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" while Rodney The Red Nosed Hitman (I ain't kidding folks) fires away, singing "Deck Them All With A M3 Volley," just before Batman and Robin are almost run down by Maxy the Minstrel Man and Sammy the Southside Santa?

Seriously, the attempted hit-and-run is all Batman's fault, anyway. I'll let him explain, and I'll let you shudder at Batman singing a merry tune...

All this ends at the Southside Mission, where the famous Dr.John - probably not the one you're thinking of - manages his home for rehabilitated hobos. Secretly, one of these hobos is a terrible criminal who's there to kill Batman, which I think everyone should have expected because he refused to sing Christmas Carols with the other hobos. Or, actually, he probably wasn't able to, since I don't think there were more than three voice actors doing this whole record. You could barely afford to have someone interrupt ...

The berserk-ass foley continues to meet my highest expectations. I sincerely wish I had the room to post this whole fourteen minute adventure, as some of this should not be missed - the sound the Batarang makes as it whizzes in midair - that being a sound not unlike slide whistles in a washing machine - or all the hobos' endless Christmas Caroling - ACTION PACKED! At the very least, I can share this much with you - Batman and Robin getting around Gotham via tap-dancing bat-ponies. Sorry Madam!

This all ends with Wonder Woman in "The Prisoner Of Christmas Island." This is probably the least of all three stories, cause whereas Batman's was sort of disturbing and insane and Superman's story was just flat-out retarded, Wonder Woman's story is only sort of obtuse.

Or hey, maybe it's me, I never quite 'got' Wonder Woman anyway. I mean, most other superheroes have a theme by which they abide, you know, Superman is 'Super,' Batman has a bat costume and bat-themed gadgets, Spider-Man has spider powers and Captain America is all about America, and so on. But with Wonder Woman, she's a little harder to define. Right off the bat, she's a patriotic polytheist from Sorority Island, not to mention being a D-Cup golem with a golden bikechain which makes you tell the truth, and who splits her free time between chucking bullets off her wristwatch and talking telepathically to her imaginary airplane. Danant danant dant danant!! WONDERRR WOMAAAAN!

Wonder, indeed.


Thanks to that sound clip and years of idle internet surfing, this is pretty much what Wonder Woman looks like to me, in my mind.

Still, I don't think it's me. Dig this: Wonder Woman's story begins with an Ex-Nazi quisling kidnapping Santa Claus from his North Pole toystore on the orders of the legendary Valkyrie, Brunnhilde. This is a devious plan of the war god Ares, who is introduced to us while arguing with Aphrodite. Meanwhile on Earth, the President enlists Wonder Woman to save Christmas while news agencies around the world report of Santa Claus' sudden absence and orphans cry themselves to sleep at the prospect of a Christmasless winter. So, it's up to our heroine to return the jolly old elf in time to make his yuletide rounds or else the Third Reich rises again, and JUMPING JESUS ORANGUTAN, PEOPLE!! Confusing or not, all I know is that's a lot of myths, archetypes and cliches to pack into a fifteen minute adventure!!

At least they talk pretty in this one. Either that, or the narrator is practicing his sibilants.

Naturally, Wonder Woman comes out on top in this adventure - keep the dirty joke to yourself, friends. Nonetheless, her victory is amazing to me. Sure, in the comic book world, most supervillains may be Downsies, but even the greatest superhero has a greater-than-even chance of being a total 'Tard. Take, for instance, Wonder Woman's musings on geography. I think she means it figuratively. Or, in any case, I can't help but find the way she says this ... oddly arousing. If I start writing erotic fanfic, please stab me in the eye with an icepick, please. Thanks.

Not to be left out, Wonder Woman also gets saddled with profoundly puzzling foley. Specifically, she's off to go cheer up the orphans - presumably by eating a straw hat. And that's what Christmas means to me, CRONCH CRONCH!

---

Transcriptions of the audio files ....

• ... this excitable fella from the Pacific Northwest ...
  Jimmy Olsen: I'm Jimmy Olsen, WGBS TV, can I talk to you for a minute?
  Man: Sure.
  Jimmy Olsen: How do you like Washington?
  Man: GREAT!
  Jimmy Olsen: What do you think of that tree up there?
  Man: FANTASTIC! I'M FROM OREGON!
  
• ... dashes across the quad in his brand new cordurouy pants. ...
  Superman: Did you see where he went?
  Man: Last we saw, he went over to that van over there.
  Superman: Oh, the WGBS Mobile Unit. Thanks. (SFX: Cordurouy pants on the move!)
  
• ... ONE AFTER THE OTHER!! ...
  (Phone rings)
  Batman: I'll get it. Hello?
  Voice: Hello. Is this Batman?
  Batman: Yes.
  Voice: I have a singing telegram for ya!
  Batman: How nice, sing away!
  
• ... Rodney The Red Nosed Hitman ...
  (SFX: Bullet ricocheting)
  Batman: Nyah, missed again Rodney! Ready or not, here I come!
  
• ... explain, ...
  Robin: Don't you think it would be better to go the rest of the way by Batmobile?
  Batman: Oh, I don't think so. With Rudy in jail, we shouldn't have any more trouble. Aaaand it's such a nice, clear night for walking. (Singing and apparently tap dancing) Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh, da da da da deee, doooo...
  
• ... tap-dancing bat-ponies. ...
  Batman: Now!
  (SFX: Tap dancing ponies kicking up a storm)
  Batman: GOTCHA!
  Old Lady: AAAAAAH!
  Batman: Oh, I'm so sorry madam ...
• ... talk pretty ...
  Narrator: And like a grey-black ghost, her massive engines purring softly in the murky depths, the powerful sub sails silently South with its precious cargo ...
  
• ... Wonder Woman's musings on geography. ...
  Wonder Woman: The ocean is so large and that island so small!
  
• ... eating a straw hat. ...
  Wonder Woman: I'll do my best to cheer them up. (SFX Crunching taps...)

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Greatest Comic Book Cover of All Time!

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Adventures of Jimmy Olsen Vol.2

So, a few weeks back I picked up my copy of Jack Kirby's Jimmy Olsen Vol 2 - a fantastic book, hands down, for fans of the King of Comics. Jimmy Olsen is possibly my favorite of Kirby's Fourth World books, if just because the imagination behind it was absolutely unbridled, plus it's got that irascible Newsboy Legion tied up in the mix, an they're my fav'rits.

Anywez, with all that said, there's really nothing in here that matches the peak of the Volume One saga, which had to be where Don Rickle's goody two-shoes identical twin popped up in the middle of the debut of Darkseid and the war between New Genesis and Apokolips. The start-off story of this volume, tho, beats all your asses with a stick. To wit:

Jimmy and Clark Kent find themselfs embroiled in the machinations of Count Dragorin, a pasty-faced wampyr who's on a quest for the renegade genius of genetic thinktank Project Cadmus, the mad scientist Dabney Donovan. In tow of the chalk-white Count is a movie-molded wolfman and a passel of like-likenessed famous monsters of filmland.

Their story? Well, dig this: Dabney Donovan is obsessed with creating artificial life. In a fit of questionable pique, Donovan creates Dragorin and all the other residents of their homeworld, Transilvane. Their homeworld, you may ask? Donovan has his own planet on which to make life?

Why yes, yes he does. It's in his basement.

Take THAT, Grant Morrison and your johnny-come-lately The Filth! Kirby has Donovan creating a miniature planet, populated by microscopic lifeforms consisting of an "atomic liquid" structure which casts itself into finalized forms - in this case, movie monsters - sheerly by the persistent use of visual stimuli and suggestion. Donovan ensures that his bacteria-sized beings turn into Universal theme park characters by showing non-stop monster movies against the atmosphere of Transilvane, via those floating movie projectors you're seeing in the picture up there.

To summarize: Amorphic subatomic artificial beings were turned into B-Movie monster clones by a mad scientist who showed late night horror flicks into the upper atmosphere of their schoolbus-sized home planet, accessible by the door at the back of the kitchen. Oh, and I forgot, they transport themselves to the exterior world by special space-travelling size-changing coffins.

Superman gets involved by saving the Transilvane-ites from Donovan's "Demon Dog," a pesticide-spewing robot gargoyle scheduled to spit death on the tiny creatures of Transilvane at the hour of midnight. I know, how could I NOT get a scan of that? I guess I'M the REAL monster here ...

Superman, natch, saves them, but both he and Jimmy muse upon the injustice of the Transvilane-ites tiny, ghastly, cinema verite (ho ho). Superman, of cuss, has a plan, and that plan is to show a new movie into the atmosphere of the planet, resulting in ...

...CREATING A TINY PLANET FULL OF HIGH-STEPPING, ALL-SINGIN', ALL-DANCIN', ROOTIN'-TOOTIN' COWPOKE MONSTERS!!!! Holy shit, AND THIS IS WHERE THE STORY ENDS!!!

Man, so, Transilvahoma. How you can read comics and not love the hell out of Jack Kirby, I'll never understand.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Amazing Moments Gleaned From One of the 100-Pg mid-70's DC Comics: Part 1

Amazing Moments Gleaned From One of the 100-Pg mid-70's DC Comics: Part 1

Shazam #16

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: PSA Comics

The cookie elves have asked the circus
freak to tell you to stay off drugs.

I think I'm speaking without exaggeration when I say that the ONLY reason anyone in my generation stayed off drugs, in school, away from cigarettes, well-fed and unmolested was thanks to the tireless efforts of the Teen Titans. Barred their intervention, I would have been left to the woefully inadequate admonitions of “Bad Dudes,” most likely ending up neither a winner nor bad enough to rescue President Ronnie.

Spider-Man is totally raising the fuck out
of your awareness about the dangers of bull-riding.

Thank you, trend towards major publishers issuing special edition Public Service Announcement comic books to little kids! You kept me out of prison and off the streets, off drugs and high on life! In fact, I don't even live above ground anymore, I have a sub-basement hovel filled to the ceiling with stacks of newpapers and jars of my own urine. I'd throw the stuff out, but Spider-Man once told me that bad men were trying to touch my swimsuit area, and I'm afraid to walk outside to the garbage can on the curb.

To fill you in on my self-indulgent rambling, DC and Marvel (among other publishers) have always been eager to lend their character to comics with charitable aims. The Teen Titans starred in a trio of anti-drug comics, Spider-Man (with Power Pack and - holy fifth-string characters! - Skids and Rusty from X-Factor) and the Hulk have both warned kids about assorted stranger danger, and Superman, Batman and the X-Men have all made their stand against famine in Africa (bravely opposing the intimidating pro-famine-in-Africa lobby). Even the Radio Shack Whiz Kids got in on the act, turning the tremendous processing power of the TRS-80 to the problem of inner-city drug use. I think they solved it, too, I should double-check that issue. I believe the resulting equation recommended hugs, rather than drugs...

"Hi there, nice to meet you, we're Power
Pa -- HOLY JESUS, KID!"

So now we're on the same page, and that page probably includes a pudgy white kid in a striped shirt crying while Spider-Man holds his shoulders and says “Tommy, you have to understand that it's not your fault!” I'm sure you got your hands on these yourself, somehow, either via a well-meaning adult authority figure who likes to say “I think these kids consider me to be pretty 'cool'” and make air quotes when he says it, OR you swiped a copy from the library and read 'em with your delinquent friends while you lit up.

Originally, this article was going to try and be a comprehensive overview of ALL the major PSA comics, but I ran into two problems. First off, if you think I'm going to make fun of a comic book about molested kids, you're nuts. What the hell kind of captions am I supposed to slap together for THAT? “Hey retard, did your daddy touch you? Haha, FAG!” If you're feeling so all-fired giddy, why don't you write up a couple hurtful paragraphs, blog it, and then sit back and watch the hate mail roll in. I get more than enough vitriol for just not liking Secret Wars II ...

For a South American anti-landmine comic,
Wonder Woman was re-costumed in a more
modest fashion. I'm amused by the idea that
kids couldn't learn about landmine safety if
they were otherwise confronted with Wonder
Woman's Amazon rack.

(Still, I would've loved to fit a “Touched by The Angel” joke in here somewhere. Ah well ...)

The second problem is that there are about a million of these things. I honestly thought there weren't more than half-a-dozen. As I hunted down copies after copies and documentation of these books, I began to wonder how so many kids could still be sniffing glue and starving in Africa. I mean, fuck, how many times do you have to be TOLD, junkies? The Living Legend of World War II is not used to repeating himself!

Even Storm and Luke Cage got to do one, although they take a back-seat to Spider-Man in their PSA comic about the dangers of smoking (Hell, they barely even got on the cover, first time around). Actually, looking at it a little more objectively, I believe the comic is less about smoking hazards and more about how Marvel doesn't have any prominent black characters who can stand on their own merits. Unlike DC, who has that guy who's the fourth or fifth most popular Green Lantern, and then also there's Spawn, who I was surprised to discover was black under the shadows, the mask and the facial scarring. JESUS, how deep do you feel like burying the brother, McFarlane?

Sorry, I'm getting off track here ...

Fun fact: Spider-Man stars in more of
these things than anyone else. Which is
why he tackles such bullshit topics as
"Literacy," a topic no comic book has any
damn right addressing.

Although their hearts are largely in the right place, I never felt these comics were a good idea. Beside the fact that half-naked vigilantes who routinely beat the tar out of mental patients in fetish gear are probably not the IDEAL spokespersons for a sane, safe, law-abiding existence – although, I could be wrong. Perhaps those anti-drug seminars they used to hold in our high school auditorium would have packed more of an impact if the attending officers had been decked out in Mardi Gras beads and bike shorts, and hauled in a wino to pummel – superhero comics are notorious for reducing even the most complex problems into black-and-white matters.

Super-heroes thrive on the morality play, which makes super-hero comics particularly well-suited to warning kids against the hazards of trying to conquer the world. As far as pinning drug abuse or worldwide famine on an individual super-villain or monster goes, I'm not so assured.

It's already a pretty spurious premise that any PSA comic is going to spark a turnaround in any of the serious issues they address, which is why the stated purpose of these books is to inform and raise awareness. Problem is, are we really raising awareness of an issue by blaming its cause solely on some mythical villain?

This poster promotes a Superman comic
which raises awareness about land mine
safety. Any joke I can make here about land
mine safety is pretty much talking shit from
a guy who lives in a country NOT COVERED
WITH LANDMINES!

(I'll take a parenthetical aside here for a moment to fill you in on a peccadillo of mine, before it rears its ugly head. Both the X-Men and the Superman-Batman team appeared in comics benefiting African famine relief charities. One was titled “Heroes Against Hunger” and the other was called “Heroes For Hope,” and no matter how often I remind myself, I keep switching those up to make “Heroes for Hunger” and “Heroes Against Hope.” Happens consistently. This is the same berserk mental twitch which makes me call any of the Star Wars sequels – assuming for some reason I feel compelled to precede it with its episode number and whatnot – as “Star Trek,” and why I constantly, unconsciously call those films “Star Trek: The Phantom Planet” and “Star Trek: Night of the Clones.” HONESTAGOD!)

In the X-Men:Heroes Against Hope book, the mutant heroes ultimately discover that the famine in drought-struck Ethiopia was being caused (or at least exacerbated) by this alien monster who fed on human suffering. OH, SO HE'S THE GUY! Gut him out hollow, would you Wolverine, and let's get back to punching the Toad in the phiz.

Take, for instance, the well-intentioned Captain Awareness comic, which is certainly trying its hardest for a very worthwhile cause. However, as the tale within the pages unfolds, it turns out that incidents of rape are actually caused by a big smoky monster which possesses men's bodies and makes them do bad things. Whereas I appreciate the sentiment that my gender as a whole is so inherently pure of heart and free of ill will that it takes an all-powerful ethereal being of gross malevolence to turn even the most sociopathic brute into a rapist, I DON'T THINK THAT'S REALLY THE PROBLEM!

"Jesus kids, I'M FLYIN' HERE!"

This trend is sort of endemic to the super-hero genre as a whole, which often makes villains out of 'embodiments' of emotional or metaphysical states, as well as the occasional elemental and whatever the heck it was Speedball was supposed to be in relation to kinetic energy. OH WAIT, why the hell didn't SPEEDBALL DO AN ANTI-DRUG COMIC? That's automatic GOLD, Marvel! “Don't do me, kids, I'll ruin your life. Say no to me.” IT'S GENIUS!

So the super-hero universes abound with what tend to appear to be normal folk in fright masks and aerobics gear, but who are secretly the universal depository of all the universe's sense of sorrow, hate, apathy, anger, bigotry, what have you. Now me, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding heart tree-hugging Leftist, but even I support executing THESE fucks. “So, this is the universal embodiment of all hate in the universe? There'd be no hate without him, am I getting this right? Okay, pardon me, Punisher, may I borrow this?” Boom, problem solved. And here I thought it took a deep understanding of the nature of man and his role in a wide and unresponsive universe to salve the wounds of the human condition, when all you really have to do is beat the guy in the Danskins to death with a crowbar.

Believe it or not, this book is about minorities
in the engineering field. Who are building
enormous, terrifying Tyrranosaurotons, or
something. I agree that this issue needs more awareness.

At least none of these books had the paucity of good taste to create an anthropomorphic embodiment of child molestation. Not that you really have to, since Marvel's currently doing a pretty good job of BEING that themselves. (Don't believe me? Hey, when was the last time you saw an eight-year old girl with a gargantuan rack and pillowy pudenda? Try X-Men:Phoenix. Like your eroticized juveniles a little more photo-realistic? No Trouble at all! And then there is, of course, the latest mutant title, X-Ploitation of Minors! Marvel! Because NAMBLA only lets you hump little boys!)

Which makes it a shame that the PSA comic trend has died down, or at least seriously put the brakes on in the last ten years. Because we sure could use a comic warning kids to stay away from anything Marvel president Bill Jemas has a hand in ... ironically, in fact, I think reading any single issue of Marville will pretty much take care of that right out of the gate.

(Hey, here's some fun: So far, not counting this one, there are nineteen paragraphs in this article. Guess how many of them will generate an angry piece of hate mail. Whatever you guess, it's two less than actually will.)

Bonus Image (I ran out of room in the article): Here to teach you about bicycle safety, it's Spider-Man and Ghost Rider. You know, Ghost Rider. The self-immolated guy with no skin whose motorcycle is on fire. That guy. He's here to teach you about wearing kneepads.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Superman 2001

SUPERMAN 2001

COCK-BLOCKED!

Personally, I can't even remember what Superman was really doing in 2001. For all I can remember of the last fifteen years of mucking about they've done with the big guy, he was either dead, revived, reincarnated, mulleted, electrified, split in two, evil, emotionless, cloned, too big, too small, stuck in the past, stuck in the future, crazy, mind-controlled, married, divorced, over-powered, de-powered, wearing a funny hat, getting his ass kicked by Batman, learning to snorkel in the Bahamas, eating marzipan cakes in a locked bathroom and weeping, or possibly all of the above at once.

As an aside, if you ask me what has defined Superman over the last fifteen years, I honestly would have to reply "I have no idea what's going on with him from day to day." And it's true - back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, it didn't matter HOW alternate a future or HOW imaginary a story to which we were being treated, Superman was Superman. They had some stories which featured his descendant in the 24th century or something, and it basically looked like Superman with a weak chin and a Hitler haircut. If we went to a parallel world where Superman was a villain, he wore a little black mask along with his regular costume. Since the Crisis, Superman's changing costumes, powers and appearance at the drop of the hat. I blame the action figure market.

See? See how his skin reflects the laser?
Check it out. You see yet? I'll keep doing it, see?

But hey, that's beside the point! We're going back to the Golden (or, actually, Bronze) Age of 1976! More specifically, we're going back to Superman #300, the self-proclaimed "tricentennial" issue of Superman - My, he's come far since 1676 - and an imaginary tale which moved the Superman mythos up a few decades.

"Just imagine," the cover begs of us, "The MAN OF STEEL coming to Earth as a Baby TODAY -- -- and growing up in the world of TOMORROW!" (i.e. several years ago). Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin provide the writing and Curt Swan and Bob Oksner do the drawing on what is actually a very good story of the era - which doesn't mean it's free from silliness, oh no. Oh no no. God bless it.

I'm sorry, I meant to say "Me
am rocket zoom bang double
Ice Cream Cone GARGLE FAAAAART!!!"

The story opens with the same, familiar stirrings of the traditional super-origins. Jor-El - Superman's father and evidently Krypton's worst public speaker - responds to Krypton's violent dissolution by packing up baby Kal-El in more fabric than all three of Michael Jackson's kids combined, and shoving him in an atomic dildo headed straight for Earth. And so far, even with my overwhelming shame at the cheap Michael Jackson joke, nothing much different from the traditional here.

Now here's where the story gets ALL FUTURISTIC AND ULTRA-MODERN NOW, JUST YOU WAIT!

Soviet and American radar pick up the trace of Superbaby's cosmic bunting, and make a mad dash to beat one another to the oceanic crash site. After an I'm-not-kidding and totally-awesome action sequence, the ship is claimed by mustachioed Special Secret Operative Agent or something Lt.Thomas Clark! Hey, waitaminnit, CLARK? You don't suppose...

The ship is taken back to a secret government bunker where scientists attempt to blast baby Kal-El's face right off, there's some super-toddler hijinx, and for ONCE goddamn Superbaby can actually speak proper English and not that insane Bizarro-shit he used to go on about. "Me am shoot in rocket boom space eat cosmic bang-bang happy double cake ice cream cone WAAAAAAH!" Oh no, this time it's speaking every language on Earth fluently and knowing syntax, and where's the fun in that, I ask you?

Awww, I love you too, little French Superbaby!

Also, I think it puts the finger on Ma and Pa Kent for not hooking Superbaby on Phonics the first time around.

Superbaby is code-named "Skyboy" and raised by the U.S.Military, so you know he's going to grow up completely straight in the head, right folks? Eventually, news of his existence leaks out, causing a terrible increase in Cold War tensions. This is capitalized upon by an unnamed third-world country whose flamboyant and middle-aged major-domos have world conquest on the mind. They arrange some computerized tomfoolery which makes the US and USSR believe that the other country is launching a nuclear attack, believing that in the ruined aftermath, they'll be able to pick up the pieces and take over. Enjoy your glowing hunk of scorched soil, gentlemen, you're both assholes.

Oh, and did I mention that this brief US/USSR exchange happens in 1990? We were so young, once.

By 2001, Milton-Bradley's boardgame favorite takes on a scope of horrifying
proportions. C-17? YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIPS, IMPERIALIST DOG!

Anyway, "Skyboy" takes it on himself to stop every nuclear missile and space laser in existence, then following the death of his military mentor - General Kent Garret HOLD IT, KENT? OH. MY. GOD! That's AMAZING! - disappears into an anonymous existence, which takes us into the futuristic world of the twenty-first century.

Now, no offense intended to these guys - many of whom are my artistic heroes - but Seventies' comic book artists had no business drawing the future. Most of these guys barely knew what the present looked like, for crying out loud.

Swan's always been one of DC's exceptions when it came to a modern look, though, and he was damn good at giving his characters contemporary fashion and style. I think the problem came to him - in this story specifically - when he was called on to design a future world of advanced technology, BUT not render it in such a way that it looked exactly like the future of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

So now he has to achieve a delicate balance of ju-u-u-ust the right moderation and tweaks and finesse and nuance and - oh, I'll shut up, it looks like the Legion of Super-heroes future. Except they didn't call everything "Cosma-Ice Cream" and "Super-Clothing," and that everyone's wearing three-layered pantsuits instead of really ugly Underoos with their home planet printed on the jerkin, or whatever. The Cosma-Jerkin. Fucking future.

Some of you may be too young to recall, but this actually IS what the internet was like back in 2001...

There's no greater comedy dollar than the "What did they think the future would look like wayyy back in the past" comedy dollar. Or "Comedo-Cred" or "Econo-Humor-Unit" or whatever. Cosma-comedy-dollar. In any case, let's take a look at ... THE STARTLING WORLD OF THE FUTURE!

For one thing, we're no longer watching television, but Tri-Vision! Which I think means that the future is offering us a triple dose of Univison, and that Mexican show where all those forty-five year old guys and tanned super-models dress in ridiculous school uniforms and pretend to be in grade school. Sadly, for my household, we only watch El Clon and CMLL/AAA, so we're screwed.

Siegfried and Roy 2001, evil foreign putzes.

A thousand Cosma-points for accurate predictions to Bates and Maggin though. Clark no longer is a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper or even broadcasting giant WGBS, but is an anchorman for a "24-hour news network" made possible by the "around the world ... huge communications linkup."

The prediction of the cable news scene here didn't actually tell us whether Clark was working for any PARTICULAR news network, but since he wasn't obscured behind the scrolling equivalent of a James Joyce novel OR was gleefully muckraking with a smarmy political slant, I figured it wasn't CNN or Fox News. Judging by the fact that Clark is filmed in a full body shot and is DEAD-FUCKING-BORING, it's either E! or MSNBC. Your choice.

Another accurate prediction made by the Bates/Maggin team was that there'd be a frothy mocha available on every street corner. Or MOKA, sorry, let me get my notes straight as we get back to the story.

The aforementioned gaudy third-world nation, still helmed by what appears to be an elderly gay couple, strikes upon a brilliant plan, assuming that you're judging brilliance by comic book standards. On New Year's Eve, 2001, they send a four-armed android to perch on the clock above Times Square and declare that he his-own-bad-self was not only responsible for saving the world from total destruction back in 1990, but that he now demands their allegiance. Oh, and that his allies Frappe and Latte would be joining him shortly.

WERE! YOU! LISTENING?!

Amazingly, the world BELIEVES HIM, right off the bat. Gullible fools. Is that too harsh, you ask? Hell, I'm just quoting the MAN! Superman reads the dupes of Earth the fucking riot act while he turns MOKA into styrofoam peanuts.

ctually, his outright verbal abuse is meant to inspire folks to not look to 'heroes and false gods' for the answer to their problems, which Metropolis' citizens adhere to by erecting a ginormous Superman statue in the middle of Times Square.

As for the fashion nightmare that WAS whatever retirement home-turned-third world nation it was, they had their plans foiled AGAIN by Superman, and thus ... quit, I guess. I dunno, they didn't follow up on it.

Frankly, they're not the worst villains I've seen in Seventies' comics - In a SHAZAM! I was reading recently, Captain Marvel repulsed a world-conquering effort by a bunch of guys who lived in a city suspended by wires above a mountain chasm. Turns out if you, I dunno, cut a few of the wires supporting their nation, they tend to calm down. At least Future-Siegfried and Cosma-Roy had the good sense to quit while they were ahead, in the world of 2001 ...

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #208

Over the weekend, I was reading a copy of Superboy (and the Legion of Super-Heroes) #208, one of those giant-size comics loaded with reprints. They had a story in the very back titled something like "The Evil Hand of the Luck Lords," which is about as obtuse a title as humanly possible, really.

Anyway, it's actually an above-average story for the era, and the Curt Swan art is some top-of-the-game stuff, hands down. The story centers around the often luckless Legionnaires - trust me, even the X-Men take a back seat to the Legion, in terms of hardship and loss. Members keep dying, losing body parts, getting abducted or going nuts, it's fucking endless - suddenly getting clued into some universal trend of good and bad luck of which they're sure they must be part.

Adolescent thoughts began to wander as to the ineffable mysteries of the universe, and specifically as to whether members may have brought bad luck on themselves by making unintended, unlucky portents. For instance, just before Lightning Lad went on to single-handedly fight the skyscraper-sized atomic whale monster from space which claimed his right arm, he stepped on a planetoid with his left foot, and of course that's why he probably barely escaped with his life from a monster that's like twelve Hulks riding Godzilla. BAD LUCK!

Anyway, where I'm going with this: There's a scene where the assorted bad-luck Legionnaires get together and commiserate about their respective problems, and they think to bring visual aids. Seriously, check this out:

Duo Damsel thought to bring three statues of herself, to teach the kids at home about basic math. What's really killing me is Bouncing Boy, who lost his super-bouncing ability (I'm not making this up) and chooses to showcase the fact by bringing a photo of his formerly fat ass. I fucking love this. He looks like the futuristic Jared. (Also, check out Star Boy looking forlornly at his show-and-tell item. "I -- I brought this interesting rock I found.")

Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel are at it again, here on the cover.

At least Duo Damsel's is some sort of memorial to her dead triplet self, I really don't think Bouncing Boy needs to remind everyone how fat he used to be. "Hey guys, remember when you left me at that buffet because I was face-down in the egg salad and I couldn't hear you shouting at me to get my lard butt into the minivan already? Remember? I brought a picture!"

So anyway, at some point, Lightning Lad decides to seek out the mythical Luck Lords on his own, making this declaration:

But when we look at the Legionnaires he actually chooses to take with him, notice who's missing:

Hey, Duo Damsel's there! And all she has is the power to be most guys' fantasy! Why did Bouncing Boy get left out? I suspect several key panels were left out of the story for editorial reasons. I have recreated them as I suspect they must have originally been penned:

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Camera-Smashin'!

Camera-Smashin'!

I swear, the greatest thing to happen to comics this year is the DC Showcase Presents line (or as I like to call it, the DC Strange World's Brave and House of Finest Showcase Mystery and the Bold Presents Adventures Blue Ribbon Digest, or failing that, DC Essentials), the book series which not only brought us the entire original Metamorpho run in all of its glory, but just recently produced the Jimmy Olsen collection (under the somewhat confusing "Superman Family" banner, meaning I guess I'm waiting a long time for Nightwing & Flamebird stories, or that arc where Krypto saved a guy's nephew from drugs).

If nothing else, I finally got to read the backstory on this panel I'm sure most of us caught via SuperDickery - Jimmy Olsen descended upon by what is surely his nemesis, a robot trained specifically to smash his camera. This robot must have seen Jimmy coming from a mile away.

Still, I found the overall story a little flat - Jimmy and Clark visit a strange island yet populated with dinosaurs seeking a reclusive scientist who seeks to protect his island's secrecy by making sure all cameras are smashed by well-trained robots. Also, this guy can build (and train!) robots but he writes on their chests with a sharpie. He cuts corners.

Anyway, in the long run, I was inclined to make what I felt was a more satisfying explanation. It goes like this:


Excelsior! Now where's my No-Prize?

(PS - This is one of those rare occasions where I pimp the ol' Cafepress shop; want to warn the world that you're a robot who will smash the hell out of their camera? It's only fair if you do.)

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Superman Meets the Quik Bunny

This is slightly better than this one other cross-promotional
book that I own, Superman Meets The Press.

In lieu of the other prominent 1980's food-mascot-teaming-with-super-hero comic I'd WANTED to review – that being Frank Millers Kool-Aid Noir “The Dark Knight Returns, OH YEAH!” – I bring you instead what I think can only be accurately described as “a depressing newsprint abortion,” Superman Meets The Quik Bunny.

"By Rao, I am choking this down and it tastes
bitter, as bitter as ashes ..."

It must be said, before we go on, this kind of thing offends me - and I'm not easy to offend, when it comes to comics. I sat through Hal Jordan going from essential icon of the DC Universe to crazy nutball in the world's ugliest metal tuxedo to a dead guy to a dead guy in footed pajamas, and all the time I just chuckled like Fred MacMurray and thought "Boy, are they going to have to eat a lot of shit to bring this guy back to the status quo in ten years."

I sat through Jim Starlin's THE END, this Summer's event of choice for Marvel Comics, in which EVERY SUPER HERO IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE DIES … AT LEAST THREE TIMES! And I just laughed. A lot. I mean a really whole lot.

I know, it's some kind of
goddamned Moon Man
language ... aw, fuck it,
let's bomb his shit all up
in this piece.

So seriously, it takes a Secret Wars 2 or an IronJaw to drive me nuts, and yet the mere mention of a cross-promotional team up between Superman and some international chemical conglomerate food-hucking mascot sends me into a tizzy. You know why? Because SUPERMAN'S A LEAD CHARACTER, BABY! And my proof: Superman Peanut Butter!

Superman ain't here to help sell your chocolatey-ass milk, rabbit! Superman makes his OWN chocolate milk, and he does it out of space dust and magic wishes! You ain't got NOTHING on imaginary potential Superman Milk, fool! GO HOME, RABBIT! GO HOME!

This opus to brand collisions and paean to the phrase “Quik Thinking” is brought to us by writer Mike Carlin and artists Carmine Infantino and Dick Giordano. Because, of course, who else would? For the record, in their respective times, both Infantino and Giordano arguably each held the post of “Most powerful individual at DC Comics.” I bet that made them cry a little, as they put the final artistic flourishes on a bedraggled rabbit twisting its ears in orgasmic delight while it sucked back what appeared to be beige motor oil.

Right, Quik thinking, got it, very funny.

And also, seriously, I hope you don't get sick of “Quik Thinking.” Seriously.

The story starts commonly enough, what with Superman chasing down an antisocial stage magician in pajamas. In this case, it's Flash baddie The Weather Wizard, whose costume – green bodysuit, flared collar, pixie boots, golden sash – helps him cut a figure slightly less intimidating than the Quik Bunny hisself.

It's like some junior version of the Ethnic Super Friends, only everyone's wearing pants.

While the Wizard is pouring torrential rain down on the city of Metropolis, four plucky kid geniuses are busily constructing a super-robot treehouse off in the suburbs somewhere. The multicultural and gender-balanced Quik Qlub – That's Ronnie, Patty, Maureen and Miguel, which sounds like a Protestant family of three and their gardener – apparently do all this at the behest of their manic mentor, the Quik Bunny, who rushes in once all the hard-work is finished and turns on the TV. Yes, they have a TV in their treehouse. Patty built it. She's a genius.

Jesus, Ronnie, could you be any less cool?

Chancing upon a newscast of Superman's life-and-death battle against moisture and a fey Mister Greenjeans, the Quik Qlub begin to fear for Superman's safety – possibly because they're idiots, or maybe they have Weather Wizard confused with a black hole or God – and rush off in their transforming magic clubhouse to offer assistance. And chocolate milk.

Luckily, Superman enjoys a long tradition of humoring pathetic, weak-ass fucks who try to join him on adventures. “Sure, Robin, you mutt! Let's you and me stop Braniac!” and “I can stop Mordru .. er, but only if Triplicate Girl and, um, hey, Invisible Kid come along! Seriously, I won't be able to do it withoutcha, you crazy guys!” So with gentle but firm rebuffs, Superman slows down long enough to be visible to the human eye and lets the Quik Qlub tag along.

Right, we GET it, thanks.

I suspect this inclination on Superman's part is half fatherly good nature, and half that he knows the Weather Wizard couldn't even beat the Quik Bunny. And he's RIGHT!

So while the Weather Wizard is throwing hurricanes and tornadoes around the nation's capital - his strategy, by the way, is apparently that if he throws enough tornadoes at Washington D.C., he'll be allowed to run the place. Wh ... what? - and making it snow in Egypt and what-have-you, the Quik Qlub follow around in their big happy schoolbus of delight while solving mazes and word puzzles and whatnot along the way.

If there's a paucity of content in some high school history text, possibly, yes.

Whereas it's pretty enlightening stuff - I, for one, learned that the easiest path to the Great Wall of China is via the Canals of Venice - I sort of ended up confused. Then again, it's my own fault, as I'd decided earlier on to deliberately make-believe I was reading a sequel to that Superman/He-Man team-up promo comic, and I kept waiting for Quik Bunny to make with the Sword of Eternia and Battlecat and so on ...

The whole story wraps up in China, where Weather Wizard's been making it hail, and oh man, the Chinese hate hail. Seriously. They must, otherwise WHY WOULD HE DO IT?

Amazingly - or actually NOT amazingly really, if you think about it - the Weather Wizard is outgunned and outclassed by the Quik Bunny, who quickly fashions a lightning-attracting Quik Bunny metal decoy, and sets it up on the edge of the Great Wall. When the Weather Wizard zaps it with electricity, thinking he's striking the Quik Bunny himself, he instead ... somehow gets walloped himself, I think. The science seems to wear a little thin on the inner thigh around this point of the story, but from what I gather, the Weather Wizard is kind of a puss and then he's dead and thank you Quik Choclate Mouthwash, you've saved something from the forces of whatever!

OKAY. WE GET IT.

Then it's back to the Qlubhouse and all its horrible, dark secrets for a celebratory chug of powdered chalk dust and a hearty Kryptonian backslap, bringing to an end another exciting occasion wherein Superman slowed down long enough to let nitwits like the Quik Qlub, the Radio Shack Whiz Kids or Jimmy Olsen fart around and let super-criminals go on massive sprees of destruction and mayhem. I like me some Superman, no doubt, but I think the guy's priorities are a little screwed ...

Well, I'm thinking you're the devil ...

Bonus Images!

• I can never say this enough - Just because this is the internet, you KNOW that someone is masturbating to this image.


• It's always about YOU, isn't it?


• Here's a Superman for you to color! Seriously! Come on! I fucking dare you!

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Wonder Woman #211

I'm dragging out one of these 1970's 100-pg giants from DC, big four-color tomes which are eternal sources of joy in my life. Seriously, just looking at the cover on one of these babies cheers me up, whether it's the beloved chock-full-of-reprints Shazams or even the I've-never-even-read-it Unexpected (What's in that book, anyway? 'I picked up the fishbowl and – WHOA, there was a hundred dollar bill under it!'). I don't know if it's the hard-to-find reprints or the delightfully jumbled cover design or the striking, gate-like letterhead or just how much better a hundred-page book feels than a 22-page pamphlet (or whatever the current cynical appellation for regular old comic books happens to be), BUT I LOVE 'EM!

The gay jokes are getting pretty played out
on my end, folks, so I'll let you run with this
one yourselves.

That being said, though, I'm reviewing Wonder Woman #211 here and it makes me want to switch to the hard drugs.

I suppose I should get this out of the way first: I hate Wonder Woman and I'm sorry she has the vote! I've sort of documented my reasons in other forae, but chief among what I think of as Wonder Woman's many faults as a character is that she just seems sort of sloppily applied.

She's a mythical amazon, but she ends up fighting giant communist eggs and amorous space gorillas, or something called Mouse Man which was apparently a dude in a yellow mouse costume complete with fuzzy ears and nose. She's a character from Greek legend who wears an American ensemble. And, you know, whenever they ran out of story ideas, they just swiped whatever just happened in Superman last month.

Worst of all is continuity. I understand that Robert Khaniger's era as editor was the worst for this particular fetish for the past, but it kind of doesn't get any better anywhere else. In fact, the storylines are slapped on here so sloppily that I'm taking it upon myself to rate each stories' inconsistencies via a powerful, text-based Continuity-Meter. The internet is a wonderful thing.

"I came to WIN!

Even as we tear into this, I don't want to sell her short, because Wonder Woman is actually a very complex character. I say this because her shoes have an origin. In fact, everything she owns has a freaking origin, as revealed in this 100-pg Spectacular documenting How Amazons Shop.

I also like to think of this issue as the Volcano versus Iceberg 100-pg Spectacular! I have never SEEN so much hot (or cold) Volcano-on-Iceberg action in my short life! I'm going to try and keep track of that, too. Not like I did with the Contest of Champions scores and all ...

Story by story, let's go:

Sur-r-r-re you will!

Maniacs of Mercury – If you read enough Wonder Woman, you'll notice that some themes start to develop. For instance, there's the eternal 'Men from a world once fairly balanced between the genders suddenly get a wild hair and oppress all their women, and also Wonder Woman if they can.' The rider to this is usually 'Then Wonder Woman beats them and gives women ALL the power on the planet, and the women say 'Oh boy, we'll TOTALLY be fair in ruling over the men' which you know is total bullshit.'

Which is what the first story in this book is about, as I'm sure you figured. The fun all starts with Wonder Woman and her superhuman sorority sisters collecting cosmic matter from inside the safety of the invisible jet, via BASKETS ON STICKS! If it's any more logical, the sticks are VERY LONG. Oh, but from their coloring, I believe the baskets are also invisible. I imagine that must help.

Anyway, some classic nonsense occurs which draws the invisible jet into a collision course with the sun, which freaks out the Amazons because apparently they don't have a problem floating through the freezing, airless void with the windows open and their diaphanous togas on, but god forbid it gets HOT.

Rather than sizzle alive, the ladies end up on the planet Mercury, ruled by the cruel King Celerito (trans: 'Little Celery') who – along with his doughty, carrot-topped male cohorts – have conquered and enslaved their once-equal female cohorts. They did this by tricking them into doffing their super-powered sandals and going barefoot. I think that might be a metaphor.

After trying to kill Wonder Woman with a forklift (Olé! Actually, I'm lying, it was a steam-shovel), Celerito is handily overthrown by the Amazing Amazon and stomped to death by his planet's women like in the ending to the Stepford Wives.

Continuity Meter: According to the dial, we're only hovering at 'stupid'
Volcanos vs Icebergs: 0-0

This is ... This is ... Someone spent a LONG time
working out the perspective for this shot. I SIDE
WITH QUEEN ATOMIA!

Mystery of the Atom World – Wonder Woman sure swears a lot.

Here's the Wonder Woman drinking game: Every time she exclaims 'Suffering Sappho,' 'Merciful Minerva' or 'Great Hera,' you take a shot. By page 5, you'll be on your ass. Heck, on the third page of this story, she busts out all three in three consecutive panels! Language, Wonder Woman, language!

Anyway, I'd probably be swearing too if I were caught in this boner of a story. Wonder Woman discovers a sub-atomic world ruled by the evil Queen Atomia, who would have been here sooner except it took SO LONG to think up a name for her!

Inside the magenta-skinned tyrant's realm, we discover that protons are actually tiny, cruel women and neutrons are equally tiny (but not cruel) blue robots. Electrons are apes I think, and the strong and magnetic forces of the universe are actually midgets and lobsters. Beyond that, it gets a little theological for me, and all I can really say for sure is that Amazons are in serious need of a physics lesson.

Wonder Woman, your ... your foot is swearing
vengenace. Does this happen a lot?

So Queen Atomia somehow shrinks our gaily-garbed golem into pint-size, along with a handful of her Amazon amigas, and transports them to her miniature kingdom with the plan of turning Wonder Woman into a 'super-powered proton' which will be sent back into our world and wreck stuff. Rather than a life of subatomic servitude, Wonder Woman THINKS REALLY HARD and it makes the blue neutron robots go nertz and smash up the evil kingdom. Adults wrote this story, try to keep that in mind.

Continuity Meter: In the early coupla captions for the story, we're told that Wonder Woman is investigating the site of an atomic bomb test in the middle of the Pacific. However, Wonder Woman is (a) wearing a spacesuit, (b) is crawling down a barren crater and (c) is doing all this against a backdrop of stars. On the following page, an upward-rocketing Wonder Woman flies up into a clear-blue sky.

I'm no scientist, but either two different stories collided violently, someone changed the script after the first pages were drawn, or that brief bump almost broke the needle on the Continuity Meter ...

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 0-0, but the Volcano threatened to eat the Iceberg's children at a press conference.

How can you tell? IT'S INVISIBLE!

The Origin of the Amazon Plane –This one starts with the notorious Waterfront Gang making a 'fortress' out of a carnival Ferris Wheel. Which is to say that they were sitting in the cars and shooting wildly. I'm not really sure what their plan was, or who put it together, BUT GIVE THAT GUY A RAISE!

As a point of order, a Ferris Wheel makes for a lousy fortress. For one thing, it's pretty much wide-open, no matter how much you hunker down in the seat. Secondly, no matter how fast you're traveling, anyone chasing you can just draw a bead from the cotton candy machine and plug you between verses of 'Let Me Call You Sweetheart' on the mechanical pipe organ. This being said, this Waterfront Gang pretty much has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

No small surprise then that Wonder Woman up-ends the wheel-bound owlhoots and drops them off – criminal carnival attraction and all – in the local penitentiary. My mental image of this is hundreds of hardened convicts getting really excited that they now have rides! I bet they have to trade cigarettes for tickets, though.

All this mildly retarded hullabaloo leads Diana to reminisce about the origins of her invisible robot plane, because you don't think she pushed the thing to jail, do you? (Also, Invisible Robot Plane is only one adjective short of being the next big internet fetish. Farm, that's the adjective it needs, Invisible Robot FARM planes' ... HOT TEENAGE Invisible Robot Farm Planes ...)

The mood ... is about ... to change!

Anyway. Wonder Woman is sent by her mom, the reigning MILF of Fantasy File Island, on a series of Byzantine quests to recover the three pieces of her amazing invisible robot plane. Invisible TELEPATHIC robot plane! She finds the cockpit (for the first time in her life) tangled in the carnivorous leaves of an man-eating, undersea plant, which raises the question of how exactly a plant develops a taste for human beings when it's at the bottom of the freaking sea (Answer: Amazon dopes and their never-ending pearl diving for invisible telepathic robot farm hot teenage virgin planes etc etc).

Directed by engraved instructions upon the body of the plane segment (Was ... was the lettering invisible? How did she read it?), Wonder Woman then retrieves another segment from the bowers of an electric tree - I guess trees can do that - and then the bowels of an active volcano, which brings us to the first round of VOLCANO VERSUS ICEBERG – in which Diana uses the iceberg as a toboggan to retrieve the tail section. And maybe the black box, explaining exactly how the hell the thing got into this situation in the first place. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean invisible black box ...

Anyway, It's a good thing she won her invisible plane, because otherwise she would have had to settle for an odorless go-cart.

Continuity Meter: Compared to the other stories, this one reads like the World Almanac.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-0, Iceberg just didn't have the stamina.

Athena makes exceptions for total tools.

Wonder Girl Amazon Teenager –I've read this one a few times, and I still can't tell if it's about Wonder Woman as a teenager or Wonder Woman's teenage sidekick Wonder Girl. I mean, I know it SAYS it's about Wonder Woman about a teenager, but if that's true then the story is FIVE HUNDRED TIMES MORE RETARDED THAN IF IT WASN'T ... and it was already pretty retarded.

Teenage Diana and Hippolyta – Wonder Woman's slender Nordic mother from the Greek Myths - are watching the GROWN-UP Diana performing super-deeds as Wonder Woman via some big-ass HDTV which sees into the future. You follow that so far? If not, you'll want to start diagramming the rest of this.

Teenage Diana grows envious of her grown-up self's awesome costume, and so begs her mother to let her have one of her own. Because you don't get nothing for free on Amazon Island, it's decided that (surprise) Diana has to perform THREE DANGEROUS FEATS to earn the right to wear a costume of her own.

Accompanied by useless tool Ronno the merboy, Wonder Girl has to tangle with, among other things, a 'cannibal clam.' Technically speaking, a cannibal clam is just a clam which eats other clams. Frankly, it doesn't sound that menacing. Worse for Diana are the mythological Roc, a big swordfish and – oh, hey, VOLCANO!

In the end, Diana has a star-spangled skirt, an eagle-emblazoned blouse and a magic lasso apparently similar- but not indentical-to her modern day lariat. Oh, and unfortunately, Ronno the merboy found out where she lives and he watches her from the shrubs sometimes when she undresses to shower.

Mostly what I learned from this story is
that Amazons have a Suggestion Box,
for crying out loud.

As an aside, and being a Superman fan myself, I like to pretend that Ronno is actually the awkward, emotionally immature younger version of Ronal, the sonofabitch merman doctor who stole Lori Lemaris from Superman. I know he ain't, mind you, but I just feel for those big, blocky Wayne Boring Supermans who used to pine along the bay.

Continuity Meter: After this story, the Continuity Meter began crying and told me it's never known love.

Even disregarding the is-she-or-isn't-she dilemma with the dual Wonder Girls (and my thanks go out to this hearty fellow who's taken it upon himself to take a stab at explaning Wonder Woman's berserk-ass teenage incarnation-slash-sidekick paradox), I'm surprised this story didn't set the Meter on fire.

One of the integral elements of Wonder Woman's origin is that she competed in an immense tournament for the right to be the Amazons' ambassador to Man's World, and furthermore that she did so ANONYMOUSLY and AGAINST HER MOTHER'S WISHES. And yet, here's Diana and Momma Hipp cheerfully gazing into the star-spangled, invisible jet-setting future of our little lady tyro.

So, basically, Hippolyta is really good at faking surprise, this is what I've learned.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: Still 1-0, this was sort of a team-up between Wonder Woman and Volcano. Volcano was better written.

Dunh-dunh-dunnnnh!

Winning of Wonder Woman's Tiara – Does every single article of her clothing have an origin (For the answer to that, skip ahead to the next-to-last entry)?

Here's the skinny – Wonder Woman's tiara, which she explains is the symbol of her status as princess among the Amazons, goes up for grabs! See, apparently, she also must compete against all the other Amazons for the right to wear the tiara. Which symbolizes her status as princess. And she's a princess cause her mom's the queen. And the tiara is symbol of that. But ... she ... could not have ... princess.

Anyway. Heaven forfend this should turn into yet another story where Wonder Woman undergoes three tremendous trials in order to pad out her wardrobe, oh no. No, in THIS story, Wonder Woman undergoes three tremendous trials AFTER also participating in a bunch on athletic competitions with the other Amazons. And she has to do this EVER DAMN YEAR! You think taxes are bad ...

In addition to the suggestion box, Amazons also have competing newspapers.

In the end, against all odds AND after dousing a volcano with an iceberg, Wonder Woman gets her tiara back. This seems to me like a lot of work to get back something you had when the whole mess started.

Continuity Meter: I swear, I don't even know anymore.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-1, it's sudden death!

Wonder Tot and Mister Genie – I've said it before and I'll say it again, I can hardly express how much I hate Wonder Tot and Mister Genie. This is a hatred for the ages, and it burns so bright that I would frankly make a better villain for Wonder Woman than, say, I dunno ... Angle Man. The guy who was really into angles. I don't even know anymore.

Oh good, now he's dancing. This just gets better and better.

Anyway, this is one of those horrible Wonder Tot stories starring the apple-cheeked Amazonette committing acts of marauding mischief on an unsuspecting world. This time around, it actually leads up to the origin of Mister Genie, which is as good a reason as any to declare DC Comics a part of the Axis of Evil.

Wonder Tot gets 'banged' out of bed ... I'm not kidding ... by a strong gale, and then surfs the currents for awhile, ending up on an island of golden apple trees (Golden Apples on trees, that is to say...) protected by a serious-ass dragon who is not there to play around with your ass. GO DRAGON! I'm with you!

Unfortunately for my sense of good taste, the mighty sprite flings the dragon to kingdom come (Seriously, look for him in book three, page seventeen*) and then floats off to find a strange desert island, where a treasure chest captures her attention. Opening it, she frees the poor, belabored Mister Genie from millennia of imprisonment, only to find the genie to be a wrathful entity who intends to imprison his liberator for an equal amount of time.

Besides being an apt metaphor for our current troubles in the Middle East, Mister Genie's strict 'Imprison Wonder Tot Forever' policy really appeals to me.

Gosh, she sure is adorable ... DIE! DIE! DIE A
THOUSAND DEATHS! DIE!

Sadly, he's a dope, and falls for a little ventriloquism. Wonder Tot lives, and she and Genie become best pals, chasing down a distant star to use as a clasp Wonder Tot's beret. I hope it collapses her noggin. Or, alternatively, I hope anonymous space aliens come out of nowhere and shoot at them, WHICH DOES HAPPEN. I additionally hope they enter some time anomaly which causes Wonder Tot to grow up into Wonder Woman, though I don't know why, and also that actually doesn't happen, and then she goes back to normal.

Hopefully, you now see why I hate this stuff.

Lastly, Wonder Tots sound delicious.

*Dumbest joke I have ever made.

Continuity Meter: Remember during the confusing Wonder Girl story, I mentioned that one of Wonder Woman's integral origin elements was that her mother didn't know her own daughter was competing in the trials to become the Amazon's ambassador to Man's World?

Okay, well, in THIS story, someone needs to explain to me what the hell's going on when even her OWN MOTHER calls baby Wonder Woman 'Wonder Tot.' WONDER TOT. That strangely seems to imply some knowledge of her daughter's future career, which she really shouldn't know. Meh.

Also fucking up my Christmas is the fact that baby Wonder Tot has a golden lasso already. Once again referring to the above Wonder Girl story, the lasso is one of the objects for which teenage Diana must quest. Maybe she lost her old one. Maybe Wonder Tot's was the Fisher-Price 'My First Lasso' or something. I dunno. Anyway. Retarded.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-1. Still. I'm running out of jokes for this.

Secrets of Wonder Woman's Sandals – Boy, just like a woman to have an origin for her shoes, am I right fellas? C'mon, back me up here, this guy knows what I'm talking about, this guy here. Hey, nice tie fella, someone guess your weight?

Seriously though, it's starting to get ridiculous. You think there's a secret origin of Wonder Woman's magical Amazon underwear coming down the pike? Did she have to endure three mythological challenges in order to get her Ortho-Tricyclene refilled? WHAT MANNER OF BEAST DID YOU DEFEAT IN ORDER TO GET THAT HILARIOUS REFRIGERATOR MAGNET, WONDER WOMAN?

Or maybe I could just wear my New Balances, mother.

So Diana is brought barefoot to stand before her mother, the Queen, who sets her daughter out on a challenge to get some damn shoes on. Good thinking, Hippolyta, she's gonna catch a cold running around like that.

High on my list of personally hilarious moments is when Diana – again, I mention that she's barefoot – ponders aloud as to what accroutement exactly her mother implies is missing from her ensemble. Just a thought, honey: Shoes. You're not Doc Manhattan, you know.

Hippolyta takes Diana to an Amazonian telephone wire, over which a pair of diminutive sandals has been flung. I'm not kidding about the diminutive part, they're teeny-tiny, for rilla. The Queen then explains that these sandals are magic sandals which reflect upon the courageous deeds of their owners, and grow appropriately. This is called 'the hard sell.'

I guess I'm not following this. Apparently, the shoes grow in size every time the wearer (assuming she can wear them, I suppose. You need ti-i-i-i-iny feets indeed) performs some marvelous deed. Wonder Woman's been around for, like, sixty years or something, and I'm thinking a week's worth of battering Egg-Fu senseless with his own handlebar mustache would be sufficient to get those things to proper size. By now, they ought to look like clown shoes, and require a passel of smaller amazons to carry.

Maybe it's a comment on how freaking lame Wonder Woman's villains are, how it's gonna take years for those sandals to grow. In any case, she wears boots now, I think that explains everything.

So-o-o-o anyway, immediately upon hearing the caveat associated with her crime-fighting bunny slippers, Wonder Woman – I say this with all due respect – promptly begins bitching loudly about how long it's going to take for some catastrophe to come along and require her delicate touch of justice. At which point a volcano explodes under Amazon Island. Happy Birthday, Diana.

So Wonder Woman saves the island, resulting in one shoe getting all big and the other staying tiny. Please keep in mind that this is the emotional crux of the story, whether or not the shoes get big. It's very dramatic.

In the end, Wonder Woman whups ass on some other menace, I specifically forget what it was, and then her sandals are normal size. This one had me on the edge of my seat, worrying that her footwear might be uncomfortably small. It was the thrill of a generation, these freaking sandals.

What sticks with me in this story is the possible moral dilemma inherent in deed-relative morphing shoe sizes, that being a situation where you'd avoid doing good deeds just because your shoes are finally broken in. I mean, if you had to protect an island from an undersea volcano just to make your shoes fit, don't you think you'd let a kid get run down by a bus in order to keep 'em there?

Continuity Meter: Okay, not precisely continuity, but rather a large contradiction in the premise of the story. Wonder Woman's told that she can't go be the Amazon Champion of Man's World until she has her magic shoes, but how else is she supposed to go perform courageous deeds? Ah, to hell with it, let's bring in volcano.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: Iceberg on a technicality, the volcano's mistake was fighting a war on two fronts, just like Hitler.

The Mirage-Mirrors - This one ends with an ALL-NEW story, which makes it EXTRA ALL-STUPID, which I suppose is fine. Fine for Wonder Woman, fine for the era, fine for comic books, how smart do we really want these things to be in the first place?

Sorry baby, NO FAT CHICKS!

Remembering that Wonder Woman is a mythological Greek champion imbued with the might and power of a half-dozen gods of legend and who has entered the modern world in order to fight for the rights and freedoms of all people under glorious equality, you won't be surprised to find out that she spends most of this story chasing men and looking like a fat balloon.

The brief of it is that Diana, man-crazy and predatory, is dying for some attention from otherwise-lovestruck Col. Steve Trevor, who won't stop blabbing about Wonder Woman's pulchitrudinous patriotic package. Abashed by her alter-ego attracting more affection than her dowdy done-under day disguise, our Amazon princess does what any ditzy dame from a sixties sitcom would do and goes blubbering off to momma for some adroit advice.

Man, how does Stan Lee DO that?

Anyway, Hippolyta - leader of a nation of self-sufficient Amazon warriors whose legendary escapades predate the birth of Christ - fills her daughter in on a sneaky, passive-aggressive little manipulation of her own making. BE PROUD, WARRIOR WOMAN! Seriously, I'll spare you the stupidity – particularly since Comicon Pulse covered it straight - but suffice it to say that Hercules was better off.

On Momma's advice, Wonder Woman turns up the flirt on Col.Steve, accompanying him to a seaside carnival. Okay. Little does Steve know, though, that Diana has rigged up a series of magic funhouse mirrors around the joint. Trust me, this is all an important part of the plan.

Judging from Superman's mighty creepy leer, I'm guessing he has other plans too...

The magic mirrors transform Wonder Woman first into an elongated, giraffe-necked freako, and then into an ovoid mass of feminine blubber. STILL PART OF THE PLAN!

After foiling an overcomplicated carnival-robbing scheme of the Angle Man – again, that's the guy who really likes angles, and in this case, obtuse and overwrought angles which make everything really difficult when all you really needed was to approach the ticket counter with a gun, ahem – Wonder Woman returns to normal, only to find Steve REPULSED BY HER FLESH! STILL! PART! OF! THE! PLAN!

Apparently hungry for woman, ANY woman, Steve rounds a corner at full tilt and almost mows down Wonder Woman in her civilian identity of Diana Prince. Practically tripping over his own engorged rod, he begs for a date, only to have Diana reveal that she's already got a date with Superman. Who's right there. Meaning Trevor not only lost his erection, he lost it so fast that it sucked his testicles up his spinal column. Lesson learned. I guess.

And there it is. At the end of these eight million stories, each one weighing in at forty-five thousand pages, I can honestly say that my opinion of Wonder Woman has changed completely. I thoroughly hate her now. I'm standing over the burning ruins of the Continuity Meter and canceling my order for the Volcano vs Iceberg PPV, and just weeping softly while remembering how I had to endure three terrific trials to buy these steel-toe boots of mine down at Target.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Five Other Identities of Superman

I'm a big fan of Superman, a huge fan. I'm Godzilla-sized, on top of the Goodyear Blimp, eating large sandwiches. BIG, is what I'm saying. That being said, though, as much as I love the character, I have something of a shit list for the handful of stories – numbering no more than a few thousand, at the outside – that I absolutely loathe.

As a Superman fan, you have to take the absurdity and outright stupidity in stride. The fact of the matter is that, whatever your intentions going in, you're going to have to endure the occasional "Outer Space Buccaneer and her magic space dogs" or "Superman fights the Viet Cong" story, it's just going to happen.

Although it's innocuous enough, what follows is probably my least favorite Superman story of all time: The Five Other Identities of Superman. I hate it. It's ridiculous without the charm of other similar stories, pedantic without the po-faced sincerity, and also I swear to God there's a photo of artist Al Plastino striking a two-year old child in the face with a hot waffle iron in-between inking panels on this thing. SWEAR TO GOD (Note: Seriously!¹).

The only copy I have of this story is in one of those awe-inspiring DC Digest reprint volumes they used to put out in the early Eighties, alongside a bunch of other stories that ought to give this one a run for its money – Superman pretends to be a genie, Superman pretends to be a bum, yar yar yar – but for some reason, this one in particular gets up my knickers with cleats on. I'm guessing it has something to do with my general fatigue over the origin story of Superman – it's a story that was so thoroughly padded out during the Silver Age with asides and distractions that Superman should have been forty-eight and balding when he arrived on Earth. Oh wait, I forgot, one of these stories established that he was actually a hundred years old when he got to Earth, BUT THAT'S FOR ANOTHER TIME! On to this barker!

The used spaceship dealership is totally wrecked!

The whole shebang begins with Superman flying over the ocean on patrol - keeping an eye out for Brainiac skinny-dipping or Metallo raping a whale, I guess - when Green Arrow starts taking potshots at him with a siren arrow from about five miles away, to judge by the panel. When Superman flies to the island – presumably to whip Arrow's ass, I guess – he finds his pals in the Justice League gadding it up on the beach.

It kind of looks like they're there for Superman's intervention, but instead they're presenting to him a tape recording sent to Earth by Jor-El which Aquaman found in some sub-oceanic rental return bin. After EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES are spent explaining how the thing got to Earth, it's revealed that Jor-El was really into fanfic, and he's used some hopped-up computer program to create cheap-looking syndicated adventure shows based on "What if I totally sent my son to other planets instead of Earth? Would it be stupid?" I can answer that one with a Magic Eightball and no more than three tries, but let's you and I keep going…

"Let's eat him!"

I'm almost proud of them for getting this first one out of the way, as it's so irredeemably stupid. Had I been the editor, I would have saved it for the end, so as to punctuate my shame-fueled suicide. The story here is that Superman ends up on Xann, planet of giants where he's no bigger than, dare I say it – AN ATOM? Or a crayon, I guess, actually. A dinner roll, a novelty keychain. He's tiny.

So yeah, he grows up on this planet where the rest of the population blithely acknowledges a perfectly-formed grown adult who's all of six inches tall. They are SO blasé about the whole affair, as a matter of fact, that when terroristd later abduct a number of townspeople and hold them hostage in a distant citadel AND a six-inch tall flying man with super-strength saves them and defeats the bad guys, NO ONE SUSPECTS HIS TRUE IDENTITY. He's all walking around in his street clothes, "Why does no one ever see Kal-El and Birdman in the same room? Aw, no, Kal-El is too meek to be BIRDMAN!" Honestly.

A Ntann-Goat? As opposed to what?

Next, Jor-El dials up Kal-El's life on Planet Valair, which - despite sounding like a seriously cut-rate airline out of Mexico City or something – is actually a planet where all life is completely underwater. Superman ends up as some sort of cut-rate Aquaman, IF YOU CAN IMAGINE SUCH AN INDIGNITY.

Then it's to Ntann, which Jor-El describes as a backwards world and which I'd have to agree because they're obviously illiterate. Someone let the deaf kid with the harelip name the planet, evidently.

Anyway, because they're so primitive, Superman ends up becoming a cut-rate Green Arrow, and similarly on the eternally benighted planet Saruun, he becomes "The Diro," an unpowered costumed lawman wearing a costume resembling the Batman's and bearing a name resembling something that very cruel seventh-graders call unpopular kids.

"And he appears to be comfortable with allowing young Kal-El
to suckle at his man-teat, as is the way of us Kryptonians."

Of all these possible – and incredibly stupid – futures for baby Kal-El's eventual planetary zipcode, Saruun and the faux-Batman kick disappoint me the most. I was hoping Saruun would be a world where people's parents were always getting shot and folks were always swearing vengeance and also everyone had a fancy belt. "Nice belt," you'd say to a stranger, and he'd reply "Thanks, it shoots fire."

Last planet is Gangor (oy), which is exactly like Earth by way of Leave It To Beaver, except that it has a red sun and gravity so powerful that Eddie Haskell would have been compressed into a liquefied mass of blood and powdered bone. What really matters, though, is that baby Kal-El gets adopted by a scientist who shoots him in the head with a magic ray gun and now Kal-El can run super-fast. PS – He runs so fast, he manages escape velocity and dies in space. I hope we've all learned something from this story.

Jor-El only hates this possible future because
there's not enough senseless torture involved.

Anyway, Jor-El eventually checks Earth, verifies that his son will wear pajamas all day and have some sort of killer allergy to rocks, and since Jor-El is a big torture aficionado (and he'd already run out of monkeys and dogs to shoot into space), that sounded okay to him. Thus, he saved his son from being (in order) small, wet, technologically backwards, beating people's asses, and asphyxiating. Also, at the end of the story, this adds absolutely bupkiss to the Superman mythos or the understanding of it, and we're basically back where we started, except everyone in the Justice league feels really pretty much replaceable and will probably resent Superman for it from here on out.

I truly hate this story, like I hate most of the stories which extrapolate on the days leading up to the destruction of Krypton, for two reasons; the first is that it doesn't add anything to the character or the atmosphere, it just always ends up "A bunch on unbelievably wrong-headed things happened for a long time and then everyone on Krypton died but this kid didn't and now he's Superman, the end." Congratulations, we've done a lap.

You just needed Aquaman to explain something to you. Don't you feel dirty?

The second reason is because I have a damn near photographic memory for these stories, and whenever I read one I can't help but build this visual timeline of Krypton's pre-destruction days. If we take into account all the test animals Jor-El sent to their seeming, lonely deaths, and the invention of the Phantom Zone Projector and all the criminals who had to be sentenced and sent away, and the alien visitors in numbers beyond counting, and all the other errata and pointless sidetracking and, in the end, Superman's father must have had about fifteen years to try and build a fleet of rocketships to save everyone on Krypton. And yet …

Not only was he Krypton's greatest scientist and worst public speaker, he was its biggest procrastinator.

Anyway, on a whole other topic, there's another story in this book where Superboy gets infected with some crazy super-virus and has to dress up in a totally airtight super-immune mummy wrapping from head-to-toe. Lana creeps up on his secret identity, in the meantime, but Superboy takes care of that problem by letting a COUPLE of the germs with which he's infected get onto Lana (at super-speed, make your own joke about how they were transferred), and thereby causing her to suffer enough brain damage that she develops a brief period of amnesia. Hm. He gave her super-roofies. And to think, this was thirty or thiry-five years before Identity Crisis.

This story, by contrast to the other story, is pretty great because they ran out of pages to tell the conclusion and instead just wrapped it up in a single panel. It's so efficient, I don't know why they don't just do that for every comic ever. "Lex Luthor tried to kill Superman, but he didn't, and now it is … THE END."

¹ No.

Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Reader-Submitted Legion Costumes

Reader-Submitted Legion Costumes

Adventure Comics #403 - besides being a giant-size issue reprinting several of the Legion of Super-Heroes' most dizzingly improbable escapades (complete with editorial footnotes gamely attempting to make sense of the mess - these poor old cats would've had heart attacks if they'd had to ride herd on Zero Hour ...) - showcases one of my favorite (and long forgotten) features in old school comics: COSTUMES SUBMITTED BY READERS! These things almost ALWAYS suck!

It's hard to do wrong by the Legion of Superheroes, a team of fashion-challenged tyros who often resorted to writing their names on their shirts, like it was a really retarded space camp. Also, right out of the gate, you've got to beat waist-bearing belly-covering cuts, flared shoulders, short pants with patriot boots and copious pinkness.

Possibly making it worse, the costumes actually got used (See Superboy #183) and at least two of them were used long-term.

We start off with Duo Damsel, who wears a bisected orange-and-purple costume which advertises her love of Nerds candies. When she activates her sole power - which is to say, when there's MORE THAN ONE normal human being where once there was, you know, ONLY one previously - "One of me wears purple," as she explains, "while the OTHER wears orange." This is a costume consciously designed to rub in her face the fact that her THIRD body is dead, dead, dead ...

Paul Decker of Oconomowoc predicts the whims and tendencies of an entire internet subculture by hypersexualizing Phantom Girl. Or, to some perspectives, he crammed her into really unflattering Frederick's of Hollywood fashions. Either way, I really like slowly pronouncing Oconomowoc in my head every time I have to type it.

I'm not sure if it's the stockings or the absurdly gigantic disco medallion I adore more. All I DO know is that this is comics, and so that goddamn medallion would have been stuffed with crime-fighting gadgets and space cameras and nutrition pills and so on. I mean, if Daredevil's cane had a radio transmitter and speed jammed in the handle, this 30th-century eyesore's bound to have a flat HDTV screen, a couch and a butterfly vibrator.

"Light Lass here..." to bring you an in-flight magazine! Here's Ayla Ranzz during her brief stint as the Legion Cruiser's first and only flight attendant. She made the peanuts float! I know that doesn't sound like much, but you really had to be there.

Sockitome, Sacagawea. How do YOU like this way out costume? I kind of don't, a lot!

I guess we're uncovering the greatest flaw with the Legion of Super-Heroes as a concept, endemic to its very nature - how do you create a believable world of the distant future, without defying contemporary concepts of modern fashion, style and design sensibility. Well, I'm sure that requires a complicated explanation, but I know for a fact that at least part of the equation is DON'T MAKE NONE OF THEM A GODDAMN HIPPY!

It's great that Shrinking Violet goes from the character too timid to speak up to being the character who goes on for hours about why brown rice is better than white rice and never stops quoting the Bhagavad-Gita.

Cosmic Boy in uniform looks a lot like Cosmic Boy in forgetting to wear his shoes and shorts. Cosmic Boy cannot win. You remember his first costume, right? The one that included a bubble-helmet and his name on the chest, all compounded by the fact that his original super-power was MAGNETIC EYES OF SUPER POWER which meant you could blind him with a drawerful of forks. Then he got stuck in some stiff-collared dealie which was, I'm pretty sure, the 30th-century equivalent of a sweater vest, AND THEN HE WORE A SWEATER VEST! No joke! Some super black chest-baring short-pants-and-vest combination that ... that ... Jeezy creezy. WITH GLOVES, he wore it!

To me, Cosmic Boy is eternally the guy who "just never gets it." I think this costume sums it up nicely. "Hey guys, this is GREAT, isn't it? My aunt made it for me!"

Here, Karate Kid displays his great affection for Spanish-language pop band Mano Negra. 'Nuff said.

"Someone who calls himself 'Master O'," starts Ultra Boy, "Is cruising for a fucking bruising. Seriously, I'm fucking coming for you!"

No, this is just what he's thinking, to be sure. Was this monstrosity ever used? And ... and if so, WHY? Apparently Master O "dreamed up" the outfit, which is why Master O needs to be taking his medication. Still, if you put an overcoat on Ultra Boy, bam, you've got a true-to-life Jim Lee costume design right there.

Here's Shadow Lass, wearing a "futuristic fashion," which is probably true because it'll be a long time before this eyesore comes into style. Unless you're on the world of Gor, I suppose. Or you're James T.Kirk, in which case this is honey-bait. I also love the comic book design mentality where, when you're composing a costume with one primary color being dominant, you highlight the damn thing with its opposite. Blue and orange? Yeah, that's fantastic!

Here's irony for you: Princess Projectra's costume, what's that look like to you? If you say "The Animated series Supergirl," bam, well done. Also, get out more.

But yeah, it's fantastic that this ghastly design from the heart of the Seventies reassembles itself in the early nineties as, you know, fashionable girl-positive styles. Oh ho.

"I'm Lightning Lad, and Barbara Jean Scott of San Antonio, Tex., thought I should have a more casual uniform." Uh-huh. Look, nothing says "Stick up your ass" like a leisure suit. And one with a cape, no less!

Paul Decker - he designed the Phantom Girl costume - ALSO designed a couple costumes for the Legion of Substitute Heroes! Like this one for Night Girl, which can now be seen on many strippers these days. Paul Decker is truly fantastic. I kind of hope he has a website. (It's not too much of stretch to assume that they're talking about the same Paul Decker here, are they? Matter-Eater Lad/Element Lad slash fanfiction, erotic Phantom Girl and Night Girl art ... HOW WAS THIS GUY THE INTERNET BEFORE THEY INVENTED THE INTERNET??? )

Paul also designed this Chlorophyll Kid costume. You know what I have to say about it? NOT ENOUGH SKIN!

Also, his belt has pouches to hold seeds. That sounds dirty.

And we wrap up with the costume Saturn Girl wears to PTA meetings.

If it gets too hot, I take off my pants. Saturn Girl and I have a lot in common.

Superman, You Are An Idiot

Lest I neglect to take my bumps where my bumps are due, and acknowledging that I am a Superman fan to the exclusion of just about all others, I do like to think that I am able to make note of when my guy acts like a damn fool and deserves a sock to the super-snoot. To wit, this panel from Kurt Busiek's and Geoff Johns' One Year Later relaunch of the Superman cast:




Superman, my dear fellow ... you are an idiot.