Hey, it’s worth a thought!
Comments Off
So, we got Batman swinging heroically from a tree; Superman smashing mightily though a wall; Superboy and Krypto engaging—an admittedly tiny—dragon; while Wonder Woman is menaced by… some tentacles. How Freudian. Or, for those of a more recent bent, how anime. Anime is full of girls being attacked by tentacles. Still, nice to see the Aurora designers got a bit of bondage in there too: that fits in very well with practically all of the amazing Amazon’s pre-1960s career—and not a little subsequent to that!
These kind of kits were quite popular once upon a time. Though I never had any of these particular ones, I did have one based on Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and a couple of dinosaur/cavemen efforts. I’d imagine youngsters these days would be less than thrilled to receive these kits—not only are they wildly inanimate, they also need to be snapped and glued together first! I can see why the X-box might have more appeal, though they lack the heady, potentially brain-altering fumes of the model cement and paints.
Lovely artwork by Murphy Anderson.
Image ©2012 Aurora Plastics Corporation (if still applicable)
There are some wild origin stories in comics, but Toro’s is a particular highlight.
Android super-hero the Human Torch is flying along one day when suddenly he sees a young kid on fire! Zooming down to help, he finds the boy miraculously unharmed by the flames.
With an astounding degree of insight, the Torch asks the boy—who is called Toro—if he can now burst into flame at will. He can! Can he also fly? Giving it a go, Toro discovers that flight comes easily to him! Haleluja, a new super-hero is born. Happily, Toro is also an orphan and so the Torch can take him under his wing to be his sidekick without any of those difficult questions. Hey, it was the Golden Age, and all self-respecting Golden Age super-heroes had to have a sidekick.
The only other material we get on Toro’s origins is in brief flashback. When a train crashes Toro’s parents are caught in the conflagration. The distraught lad attempts to run into the flames to save them. Although he is unsuccessful, a passing couple are surprised to see the flames and near-molten metal haven’t harmed the boy. Realising that he now has no living relative in the world, the couple instantly adopt him so as to put him in their circus fire-eating act!! It was during said act that the accident the Human Torch was witness to at the start occurred.
So, you’re young Toro, you’ve just seen your mum and dad die horribly in a mangled wreck, and then you find yourself forced to swallow flaming torches on stage for a jeering crowd. Ah, the 1940s—the golden age of child welfare…
All from Human Torch #2, 1940. As I’m not made of money, I don’t actually own this comic in its original form. It is however readily available in reprint:
Images ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc
Supergirl #10, September-October 1974
“Death of a Prez!”
Script: Cary Bates
Art: Art Saaf and Vince Colletta
Linda Danvers is watching a TV broadcast of Prez Rickard’s speech at a supermarket where he calls for a reduction of food prices. Suddenly, Linda leaps up and takes to the sky as Supergirl. Arriving at the supermarket she disarms a man who was about to shoot Prez! As Prez thanks her, a small boy asks the teen President to fix his pocket watch—a gift from the boy’s father, who died in Vietnam. Prez—as you’ll no doubt remember from his inaugural issue—is very good with clocks, and soon gets the timepiece running.
Later, at an auction for antique clocks, Prez is again almost assassinated, this time by a bomb hidden behind a clock face. Once again Supergirl saves the day. Fearing that these attempts on his life mean that a plot is afoot, Supergirl offers to fly Prez back to the White House and he agrees.
Meanwhile, at a secret lab, some plotters are indeed plotting to do away with the President. However, everything so far has merely been bate to bring Supergirl and the President together: the fiends have devised a machine that can control the Maid of Might’s brain, and, with the aid of some magical mumbo jumbo and a voodoo doll, it does just that. As Supergirl is flying above the Empire State Building, she is overcome with a compulsion to drop Prez: “Great Krypton!” she cries, “It — It’s tearing at my brain… commanding me to — to kill you!”
As Supergirl dangles the President from the top of the mooring mast, a squadron of fighter jets are called in and start blasting away. Supergirl flies off, and instead drops Prez into a river from a great height!
The plotters gleefully rejoice at their success. Suddenly, their evil machine melts and Supergirl swoops in, knocking them all to the ground. As the police arrive, Supergirl reveals that “Prez” was merely a plastic replica—the real Prez is safe and sound in the Fortress of Solitude.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
A rare—well, unique!—guest appearance from Prez Rickard. Given that Supergirl is very definitely “in continuity” then we can infer that Prez Rickard was indeed the President of the United States in the mid-1970s DC universe, and his series can’t just be dismissed as an aberration. Well, I suppose this story can be considered the aberration, but what the heck…
It’s a short story—just 10-pages—but Cary Bates treats the character with some respect, and the art is the usual beautifully fluid fare from the pencil of Art Saaf.
This issue was intended to go on sale at the same time as Prez #4, but a paper shortage bumped it, and several other titles, off the schedule, and it finally appeared a good six months later—by which time Prez’s own title had long since ceased to be.
As far as widely-published works go, this was the last appearance of Joe Simon’s teen President. But there was one more oddity to go before the Seventies were finished with him…
Images ©2012 DC Comics
Haunted Love #8, March 1975
An eerie Don Newton painting graces the cover of this anthology consisting of three romantic tales with a Gothic flavour. By this time, Charlton was well and truly on its own in its pursuit of this niche genre.
The first story, “Killer Wolves” by Pete Morisi, is aptly named, as it concerns the strange goings on following the deaths of three German villagers. Wolves are blamed, and the stolid Karl Wogner is dispatched to track down the pack. He finds a nightie-clad young lady being harassed by wolves and shoos them away. The girl is hysterical and amnesiac, but over the coming weeks a bond develops between her and Wogner as she recovers. However, the mysterious circumstances of her arrival have aroused suspicions amongst the villagers, and some of them determine to kill her. She flees with Wogner into the night, where, in the icy snow, she remembers who she is. The wolves weren’t attacking her; they were protecting her. The truth dawns: she is a werewolf, and as she’s scratched Wogner, he is too! He accepts this happily, and, as wolves, the pair wander off together.
“A Date With Yesterday” concerns Lilian, a young woman out of step with modern life. Having grown up with spinster aunts she has no true notion of how the world works, and views everything with trepidation. One day she is mugged, but a policeman appears to help her. He’s garbed in a very old-fashioned manner, and reveals himself to be a ghost of some kind. Lilian is pleased to have such a protector. Later she dreams about life in simpler times, where she meets Officer Boland—the same policeman she saw earlier. Over the next few days she researches the past, and finds a photo of Boland in front of her house in 1901. The next evening she is attacked again, and, once more, the ghost of Boland protects her. He instructs her to wish very hard, and, as she does so, she is transported back to 1901, where she can live the rest of her life with the handsome—and very real—Officer Boland. This whimsy was by Joe Gill and Sanho Kim.
Finally, Joe Gill, Charles Nicholas and Wayne Howard tell how “A Woman Cries”. Calvin Robb has promised never to love again after being betrayed. He lives alone in a big house on a cliff top, where he suddenly comes across a young lady crying in his living room. He demands to know why she’s in his house, but she turns the question back at him: why is he in her house? At first he dismisses her as a dream, but Calvin comes to realise that the woman is Edith Atherton, who lost her fiance at sea in 1798—hence the crying. His investigations reveal that Edith’s lover was actually a cheat, and as he reads the scoundrel’s diary, Edith appears in ghostly form. Calvin is unafraid, and, as she realises that her tears have been wasted on a bigamist, Edith becomes real. She and Calvin kiss, and the the betrayed lovers finally find peace in each other’s arms.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Some nice stuff here. Pete Morisi—who was a full-time policeman by day, drawing comics in his “spare” time—had a somewhat dated style, but it was extremely solid and came from the same newspaper strip tradition as Milton Caniff and Frank Robbins. He was a good story-teller and had an unusual touch with panel layouts. The werewolf story he provides here is a bit silly—the girl never gets a name: she’s just referred to as “Girl” throughout, even when people are addressing her!—but just about works thanks to the art.
You’ll have noticed that the other two tales have essentially the same story: a girl moves through time to find romance: Lilian goes back to 1901, while Edith moves forward in time by casting off her ghostly form. Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return was published in early 1975 (later filmed as Somewhere in Time), and, as it too features a romance that spans the centuries and a hero who wishes himself back in time, something must’ve been in the air. Still, it’s all diverting fare for the soppy ol’ romantics amongst us.
The target audience for these comics was very definitely female, as shown by the ads if nothing else:
You didn’t get ads for sanitary products in Superman comics, oh no. Alas for poor Brian there: doing his best proto-John Travolta impression blissfully unaware that he ain’t getting lucky tonight!
Image ©2012 the copyright holder
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