Hey, it’s worth a thought!
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Debuting in 1974, First Edition (or 1st Edition, depending on your preference) was a series of tabloids that ran in parallel with DC’s main tabloid range Limited Collectors’ Edition. The idea was to make the first issues of various series available to the public in facsimile form—well, facsimile apart from the fairly considerable size difference. Although comics in the Golden Age were indeed larger than their mid-1970s counterparts, they weren’t anywhere near as large as the tabloids. Even so, there were reportedly cases of the tabloids being passed off as the real thing—fairly easy to do as beneath the dead giveaway card outer cover was another glossy cover that exactly mimicked the original.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the first oldie to get the treatment was the comic that featured Superman’s first appearance, the one that thereby launched an industry, Action Comics #1. As a facsimile of the original, it contains not just that legendary Superman debut by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, but also stories featuring the likes of ace reporter Scoop Scanlon, magician Zatara (whose loins later bore Zatanna-shaped fruit), and, er…, Sticky-Mitt Stimpson. A heady brew to be sure.
You might notice that in this ad, the logo is missing the “Famous” legend that was added to final published version. Which, I suppose, means that the title ought to be called Famous 1st Edition. As, the ad makes clear, later issues featured representations of the debuts of Batman, Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman. A late edition to the range—timed to coincide with the big movie—was the first issue of Superman. And that one was the only one I ever saw back then.
If only Action Comics #1 was still just $1800 eh?
Image ©2012 DC Comics
Fright #1, August 1975 (cover says June, indicia August)
“And Unto Dracula was Born a Son”
Script: Gary Friedrich
Art: Frank thorne
One dark night in Transylvania the locals are burning a witch at the stake. Dracula swoops down in the form of a bat and rescues her, flying her back to his castle. He attempts to drink her blood, but stops when he sees a familiar birthmark on her breast: it denotes that she is a relative!
The following morning, Dracula and his fourth cousin chat over breakfast. She is shocked that he is a vampire, and even more shocked when he decides he fancies her blood after all. She stops him by offering to allow him to father her child, on the condition that she isn’t turned. Dracula agrees, and the two share a passionate night together. Nine months later a son is born, but the woman—who doesn’t seem to warrant a name—defies Dracula by telling him she’s leaving; the boy must not be allowed to be tainted by Dracula’s curse. Angered, the Count pounces and sinks his fangs into her neck.
Weakened, but not yet undead, the woman flees the next morning with her son. She gives him to a woman bound for America on a ship, but as she waves goodbye Dracula arrives. Distraught, she throws herself onto a shard of wood. As he looks down on her corpse, Dracula swears that he will one day track down his son.
Seven years later, in Appalachia, the boy, now called Derek, has grown strong, but he wonders why his mother makes him sleep with a cross on his chest. Dracula arrives, but is chased away with a crucifix. Fearing for the boy’s safety, his foster mom puts him into a cellar, with his cross and a book, and seals him in by blowing up the entrance—and herself!—with a keg of gunpowder….
Some twenty years go by, and Derek is now a Columbia college professor going by the name of Adam Lucard (gettit?). The female students on his occult course find him quite distracting. Adam is now aware that he is Dracula’s son as he’s read the book his first foster mom left him (it seems he got another family after being dug out of the ground), and he still sleeps with a crucifix on his chest. Debbie Porter, one of his students, sneaks into his apartment one night. She goes to wake him with a kiss, but removes the cross first—big mistake!
Adam transforms into a crazed vampire, chomps on the girl’s neck, and flies off into the night as a bat. He spies another lone girl waiting outside for Debbie, and drinks her blood too. The police arrive and quickly deduce that there’s a vampire loose in the 19th Precinct.
At dawn, Adam awakes to see the carnage, but has no memory of the previous night’s events. As he stares at Debbie’s lifeless corpse on his bedroom floor he curses his lot. Aware that Debbie may now herself become a vampire, he wastes no time in whittling a stake and banging it through her heart.
He then breaks down and prays; asking the Lord if he should destroy himself, or “continue to live.. to work.. and teach…”
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“Welcome to My Nightmare” opines David Anthony Kraft in the editorial page. Indeed, Anthony. Indeed.
A very silly piece of Gothic-tinged nonsense from Atlas Comics, this. The story is utterly daft: I have no idea why young Derek’s foster mother suddenly decides, quite out of the blue, to blow herself up, nor why his next family—who just happened to find him in a hole in the ground—happily believed that he was a vampire and had to sleep with a crucifix. For that matter, wasn’t the whole point at the beginning that the boy’s mother wanted to ensure that he wasn’t cursed with vampirism, hence her getting him the hell out of Transylvania as quickly as she could? And as Dracula seems to have no trouble in tracking the lad down, one wonders why he waited seven years to do it—and then didn’t bother him again for a another couple of decades…
Still, Frank Throne’s art suits the material well, and he turns in a far better job than the script deserved. Not long after this, Thorne was wowing them with his work on Red Sonja over at Marvel.
If you like Hammer movies, you’ll find this mildly entertaining. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.
There were no further issues of Fright, and the Son of Dracula was consigned to the scrapheap.
Cover by Frank Thorne.
Image ©2012 the copyright holder
Prez #4, February-March 1974
“Vampire in the White House”
Script: Joe Simon
Pencils: Jerry Grandenetti
Inks: Creig Flessel
Prez Rickard is in the Republic of Moravia, where he is publicly thanked for the US aid that has enabled the building of a new canal. Finally the Moravians will be able to irrigate their crops and “bathe [their] bodies.”
Back in the White House, Prez receives an unexpected visitor: a werewolf! The teen orders the army to capture it, but it proves too difficult and the struggle goes on all through the early hours until the sun rises and the wolfman transforms back into a human. He is the ambassador of Transylvania, the country that neighbours Moravia, and he feels the US has done Transylvania a great wrong: the Moravian canal has emptied the country’s lakes and reservoirs. Prez says that the canal must stay. The wolfman then declares war on the US by the authority of his boss: Count Dracula the First!
A crisis meeting in Washington reveals that Transylvania is a country of the living dead, against which the army knows of no defence. That night, as Prez sleeps, Count Dracula himself appears—he was carried into the White House inside the case of the wolfman. Now he wheels himself around on a cart using his hands for propulsion as his legs are strapped beneath him. He leaps onto Prez’s bed, but Eagle Free suddenly appears to save the day.
Dracula reveals that he has been left crippled by all the stakings he’s suffered over the centuries, but he remains indestructible. He throttles Prez, but Eagle Free flashes a sign of the hooked cross, and Dracula flees, his wheels clickety-clacking on the floor tiles.
The next morning the Moravian ambassador tells Prez of Dracula’s plot, “a plot so horrible that it defies belief!” It seems that the lord of the undead has infected bats with rabies and is intent on flying a plane to release the deadly cargo over the capitol! If unstopped, thousands of Americans will die! Prez addresses a session of Congress, but no one believes his story—and his opponents call for a federal investigation of his administration. While Prez is forced to play politics, Eagle Free suggests a suicide attack.
Prez laughs at this, knowing that the military won’t listen to him, but Eagle Free says that he doesn’t need planes, just birds. Across the Potomac river, the pair visit the FBI chief’s teepee. There, Eagle Free performs a sacred ceremony for the birds he has lined up, and sends them on their way. “It’s uncanny they way you’re able to communicate with the wild creatures,” says Prez as the birds fly high into the sky. They intercept Dracula’s aeroplane just as it approaches America’s shoreline, swarming into the craft’s air intake—”SPLAT! CRUNCH!—and the plane falls into the sea.
Back at the White House, Prez celebrates Dracula’s defeat. However, Eagle Free ponders an uneasy question: “If Transylvania surrenders, do we send American dollars to build her up again, as we have done with our vanquished throughout history?”
Prez shudders…
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The sight of a crippled Dracula wheeling himself by his hands all around the White House is disturbing and memorable. I wonder if Simon had recently seen the film The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on TV, as it features a similarly afflicted soldier.
As silly as it appears on the surface, the story asks some difficult political questions about US foreign policy, which was disturbing some people even forty years ago. However, Simon is keen to point out that the US often does a lot of good in the world, once again, perhaps, a case of the writer wanting to have his cake and eat it. And, remember, Joe Simon at the time was not some young student keen to score political points, he was 60 years old—Prez, despite appearances to the contrary, is quite a radical comic. Simon just hides the politics in knockabout silliness, in much the same way that Gene Roddenberry used the trappings of science fiction to covertly comment on concerns of the day in Star Trek. Which is not to say that Prez is a great comic—it’s not—but Simon was at least making an effort to say something meaningful. Surely one can’t miss the intent behind a flock of doves sacrificing themselves to save a nation…
The artistic pairing of old Simon buddies Grandenetti and Flessel is not a pretty one, their styles clashing awkwardly. The storytelling shines through, however, proving that one doesn’t actually have to be particularly gifted artistically in order to make good comics. The whole Prez/Dracula sequence is a masterclass in panel composition and layout.
So, that was that for the Prez. Failing to set the world alight, this fourth issue was the last.
Well, the last to see print anyway…
Images #2012 DC Comics
Captain America #193, January 1976
“The Madbomb Screamer in the Brain!”
Script: Jack Kirby
Pencils: Jack Kirby
Inks: Frank Giacoia
Cap and his pal the Falcon are enjoying a bit of downtime horsing around in the kitchen. Suddenly both heroes are overcome with a powerful urge to murder the other. Soon, even Falcon’s girlfriend Leila joins in, waving a knife around threateningly. Luckily the heroes are made of stern stuff and quickly recover their senses, but outside pandemonium reigns as the streets explode with violence and gunfire.
Cap leaps out into the fray and is almost beaten by an angry mob. He sees a small device and, as he approaches, it affects his sanity. Sheer instinct drives him on and he shatters the device with his shield. Calm returns, but the scene around him is one of utter devastation.
A SHIELD agent arrives and tells Cap and the Falcon about a conspiracy that threatens the US in this bi-centennial year: a conspiracy that centres on technology called a Madbomb that induces mass hysteria. The heroes are taken to a secret base at “an unknown destination”. There, they are subjected to a bizarre—not to say deadly—series of tests, including gas, missiles, a room where the walls close in on them, and, finally, assault by a gang of thugs. Having survived all this, and thereby proven themselves to be the real deal, they are greeted by Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is so impressed by the duo that he insists they call him “Henny”!
Kissinger explains that there have been past Madbombs: the first, called “peanut” destroyed a small town; a larger one, named “dumpling”, put paid to River City and its population of 200,000. Now, the National Security Advisor informs them, their job is to find the next Madbomb. The Falcon is concerned that the next device might be a large as a piano and could cause untold chaos. Kissinger looks worried as he hands them a photograph that has been obtained by a spy.
Code named “Big Daddy”, the next Madbomb is as big as a house—and has been designed to do no no less than destroy the United States..!!!
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After a number of years in the relative wilderness of DC comics, Jack Kirby came back to Marvel in late-1975. It wasn’t exactly a triumphant return, but he produced some great comics in his time there. One of the things that enticed him back was the chance to write and draw his signature creation, Captain America, comics’ premier symbol of US patriotism, during the year of the American bi-centennial celebrations. In one of the most amazing coincidences in comics history, Captain America #200 was on the stands during the crucial month of July 1976. How they managed that, I dunno—it’s almost like it was planned all along!
Anyway, back ti the start of the run. The cover is one of Jack’s best. It’s a fabulous image of Cap, and showcases Kirby’s dynamism and exaggeration to its very best effect. Kirby didn’t actually have a clue how the human body is really put together, but he knew how to make it look good—and, in comics, that’s more important. Once, when asked where he learned anatomy and musculature, he replied that he just made up his own muscle groups. And why not, when the result looks this good?
One interesting factoid: the Cap figure was originally drawn as a 3-D experiment. John Romita seemingly inked it on several pieces of acetate, one for each “level” of the 3-D image. So, the fist, say, was inked on one sheet, the forearm on a second, the bicep on a third, etc. These would then have had a range of red/blue separations to create the illusion of depth when viewed through special eye-wear. Ultimately the experiment came to nought and the image was used as a cover instead.
The story of the hunt for the Madbomb, and the conspiracy behind its creation, was to run all the way through to #200. It’s one of Kirby’s longest sustained narratives, and serves as a nice showcase for Cap and his patriotic fervor. Of, course, by 1976, the post-Nixon US was growing suspicious of the kind of patriotism that Cap embraced, and the character had gone through much soul searching under the typewriter of Steve Englehart. Kirby was having none of that, and insisted that “his” Cap had no self doubts. Interestingly, Kirby’s approach may well have been the right one in the long-term—Englehart’s work now looks horribly dated, despite its classic status. Time marches on, but Kirby’s work, cleaving to no particular political period, has a timeless quality. His art here is stronger than anything he’d been doing at DC for the last few years, indicating, perhaps, his excitement to finally be free of the company that had crushed his Fourth World dreams.
The whole Madbomb saga has been collected several times, and can currently be found in an expensive Omnibus or, in black and white, a cheaper Essential volume.
Images ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc
The Grim Ghost #3, July 1975
“He is… The Grim Ghost”
Script: Tony Isabella
Art: Ernie Colón
The Grim Ghost stops a pair of thugs mugging an old lady. A demonic figure appears and saves the goons from their Hell-bound journey, garbing them in weird, super-hero type gear. The demon is a horned cyclops called Brimstone, and he seeks nothing less than the downfall of Satan himself!
The Ghost travels to Hell and finds bodies strewn around and all in disarray. Satan comes over to chat, and tells our hero that Brimstone—”an ambitious sort”—is responsible for the carnage. Not being very good at warfare, and unable to visit Earth personally, Satan tasks the Ghost with stopping Brimstone. “Isn’t that somewhat akin to facing a cannon with a musket?” he asks, not unreasonably. In response, Satan grants the Ghost extra powers and a helper in the form of Lady Sarah Braddock. Her heaving bosoms are the big news here—well, those, and the fact that she was the heartless wench who had Matthew Dunsinane hanged!
The extremely odd couple return to Earth and chill out at Dunsinane’s mansion. He stays in his 18th Century gear, but she dresses in typical 1970s fashion, with her heaving bosoms still to the fore. A ring on the doorbell heralds a visit from Jaqueline Marten, whom you’ll recall from issue #2. She reveals that her father, the police commissioner, is being held responsible for the “escape” of the Magruder Boys, his tale of a highwayman-style figure carting them off impressing no one.
Braddock takes over Marten’s body, and she and the Grim Ghost embark on a mysterious mission. Returning, the pair are attacked by the two goons from the beginning of this issue. The Ghost is knocked cold, and Braddock—in Marten’s body remember—is dragged off. As the Ghost comes to, Braddock throws a vial at the goons and they cry out in agony, transforming back into regular clothing. The Ghost shoots ‘em with his pistol and they’re dispatched to Hell. It turns out that the vial contains holy water, something that only the body of the human Jaquie Marten could handle.
Brimstone appears and attacks. The Ghost shoots him, to no avail. Then he recalls the chat he had with Satan, and uses his new powers to invade Brimstone’s mind. He shows Brimstone that Satan has ensured that if he is destroyed by any of his flock, they will perish too. Unable to take this revelation, Brimstone fades away in a flash of Hellfire.
Braddock leaves Marten’s body and wanders away while the Ghost takes the unconscious commissioner’s daughter home, pondering “How can a ghost fall in love?”
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The spectacular cover is by Russ Heath, and is far and away the best artwork in this comic. It doesn’t have a great deal to do with what happens inside, but what the heck.
New writer Tony Isabella bring some much-needed continuity to the book, and you get the feeling he was really going somewhere—with seeds planted for long-term plotting, and threads pulled in from previous issues. In all, a promising start. Sadly, it was all for naught, as this was the last issue, but full marks to Tony for giving it the old college try. The main plot itself is exciting and works well, though the denouement is a bit sloppy. One could ask why that ol’ joker Satan went to all the bother, if he knew he was never in real danger. Still, never mind, it’s very readable.
Ernie Colón’s art is not very strong this issue. It looks extremely rushed, and the first few pages don’t look like his work at all!He went on the much better things.
So, that was The Grim Ghost. All in all, a not bad Atlas Comic. If you fancy a taste of what Atlas could offer at its best, you could do worse than check out any issue of this trio.
Image ©2012 the copyright holder