Stumbo, the Giant Racist

I consider myself something of an aficionado of the L-for-R transposition in fictionalized Chinese and Japanese speech. It's a time-honored gag, and whether it's used obliviously for the simple comedic flair of incomprehensibility, or manipulated in the masterful hands of a young Benny Hill, one thing is for sure: It's pretty darn racist.

Rather than dragging out any thousands of Blackhawks or Crimson Avenger panels with which to offend, I bring you what may be the single most egregious use of the transposition, courtesy of an old Harvey Comics story in which Stumbo the Giant has misplaced his diminutive duchy Tinytown, and searches for it in - amidst other places - a hollowed-out mountain where he sometimes keeps stuff. You know, like living beings.



FACT: THERE'S NOT EVEN AN R IN "STUMBO,"SO WHAT THE FUCK STLUMBO???

The Red Blazer! Zooom!

I have a new favorite superhero, another “Red-“ prefixed Golden Ager who is supplanting the place originally held in my heart by Quality Comics' The Red Bee (“He fights crime with the power of – a BEE! Just one! Which lives in his belt!"). My new guy is The Red Blazer, late of Harvey Comics back in their pre-Richie Rich days of Glamorous Detective Stars, girl commandoes and other utter superheroic bugshittery.

I like the Red Blazer for two reasons: First off, no matter how tacky a red blazer might actually be, it's nothing compared to the collection of Cirque de Soleil castoffs which ended up in this cat's hope chest, to wit:



Secondly, there is his origin story, which conveniently occurs in his first appearance (Harvey's Pocket Comics #1) The origin story serves an important purpose in comics – besides providing motivation for the character, it gives context to whatever it is the holy hell this guy in short pants and a Lone Ranger mask is doing shooting fire from his buttcheeks. Context is valuable. It keeps credulity from being sprained worse than a girl scientist's heel in a 1960s monster movie.

The Red Blazer's story starts in the wide open plains of Wyoming where one Doctor Morgan is returning from his sold-out forty year tour of Mars. Morgan is returning by way of an enormous spaceship that must have had cowpokes and ranchers across three states shitting themselves with a force so profound that it could be emblazoned over the archway entrances to many better universities.

Accompanying Morgan is his Martian assistant Kagah, who embraces the beauty of the vast, awe-inspiring prairie by promptly kicking the bucket on his first lungful of Earth atmosphere.



Doctor Morgan takes it upon himself to bury his beloved assistant, which is when random cowpoke Jack Dawson stumbles upon the scene. The cowboy code – and I know this, you may not know this, this is something I know – clearly states that anytime you find a stranger in the middle of the plains burying a dude, you just take him at his word that it was an accident. If you're trying for your “No Body, No Evidence" merit badge, you be an extra good scout and help the guy with his burying. According to the license plates, Wyoming is the “Thousands of Dudes Buried In Unmarked Graves" state.



Dawson's apparent absence of guile also leads him to unquestioningly accept the what I believe to be the utterly insane ramblings of Doctor Morgan, who fills Dawson's ears with some nonsense about returning from space with special magic technology to help mankind be more awesome. This is in spite of having just offed a guy. He must be a hell of a public speaker, this Doctor Morgan.

Morgan goes on to reward Dawson for all his help and faith by slipping him a roofie and stuffing him in the trunk of his intergalactic pedo van.



Dawson awakes, alone, in Liberace's swimsuit, apparently on a cot in the boiler room of Doctor Morgan's spaceship – oh, which Morgan set on automatic pilot and sent hurtling into the path of some space rays. A trustworthy sort, this Doctor Morgan.

The radiation bath – and I'll bet a million dollars that wasn't the only bath Dawson got when he was unconscious – not only gives him the fashion sense of a mime smurf but also the power of “ASTRO-PYRO RAYS." And possibly a rash. The Astro-Pyro rays not only improve Dawson's cornpoke dialect but knock him up the evolutionary ladder “a few pegs," making him “the perfect man." The perfect man wouldn't wear his collar up, I know this for a fact.



From there, the story takes the usual Golden Age vigilante track – Red Blazer declares a war on crime, employs a probably-unnecessary level of brutality, terrorizes some hoboes and generally just kills a whole bunch of fuckers without ever so much as looking back. At the end of the story, Doctor Morgan – whom we last saw wandering off into the empty plains of Wyoming in no particular direction – suddenly shows up on a video monitor to gleefully congratulate his mutated research subject on orphaning all kinds of kids. Go Red Blazer! I like to think that during his off-screen time, Doctor Morgan was off exposing more Martian housemaids and butlers to Earth atmosphere and watching them drop like flies. I bet he found it funny, and still laughs when he thinks of fields of freshly upturned, bumpy earth stretching out as far as the eye can see …

Speed Comics #35 (Not to be confused with Uppers Adventures or Tales of the Amphetamine)

I’ve spent the last few years divesting myself of my gargantuan comics collection – I’ve dropped from 15,000 comics to eleven, so you know I’m serious. If I ever did take up collecting again, though, I think I’d have to make the theme of my collection Comic Book Covers Where Whoa Damn Too Much Shit Is Going On Seriously Now.




What I don’t get about this cover is what the Girl Commando down in the bottom right hand corner is doing with that rifle. Was she trying to break the winch? Because if she did, you know, *bloop* goes the Black Cat right into the acid. “Like I even care,” I imagine her saying, “Bitch dresses like a whore.” *smash*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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