By Jerry Siegel, Paul Reinman & various (Red Circle Productions/Archie Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-87979-414-6
If you like your superheroes grim, gritty and ultra-serious you won’t like what follows, but honestly in the final analysis it’s not Chekhov or Shakespeare, just people in tights hitting each other, so why not lighten up and have a little fun…?
In the early days of the US comicbook biz, just after Superman and Batman ushered in a new genre of storytelling, a rash of publishers jumped onto the bandwagon and made their own bids for cash and glory. Many thrived and many more didn’t, relished only as trivia by sad old duffers like me. Some few made it to an amorphous middle-ground: not forgotten, but certainly not household names either…
MLJ were one of the quickest outfits to manufacture a mystery-man pantheon, following the spectacular successes of the Man of Tomorrow and Darknight Detective with their own small but inspirational pantheon of gaudily clad crusaders.
Beginning in November 1939 (one month after a little game-changer entitled Marvel Comics #1) with Blue Ribbon Comics #1 the MLJ content comprised a standard blend of two-fisted adventure strips, prose pieces and gag panels before, from #2 on, costumed heroes joined the mix.
The company rapidly followed up with Top-Notch and Pep Comics. …
However, after only a few years Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John Goldwater (hence MLJ) spotted a gap in the blossoming market and in December 1941 nudged aside their masked heroes and action strips to make room for a far less imposing hero; an “average teen†who would have ordinary adventures like the readers, but with triumphs, romance and slapstick emphasised.
Pep #22 (December 1941) featured a gap-toothed, freckle-faced, red-headed goof who took his lead from the popular Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney. Goldwater developed the concept of a youthful everyman protagonist, tasking writer Vic Bloom and artist Bob Montana with the job of making it work. The 6-page tale introduced Archie Andrews and pretty girl-next-door Betty Cooper and his unconventional best friend and confidante Jughead Jones in a small-town utopia called Riverdale.
The feature was an instant hit and by the winter of 1942 had won its own title. Archie Comics #1 was the company’s first solo-star magazine and with it began a gradual transformation of the entire company. With the introduction of rich, raven-haired Veronica Lodge, all the pieces were in play for the comicbook industry’s second Genuine Phenomenon (as influential, if not so all-pervasive, as Superman)…
By 1946 the kids had taken over, and MLJ renamed itself Archie Comics; retiring its heroic characters years before the end of the Golden Age and becoming, to all intents and purposes, a publisher of family comedies. Its success, like Superman’s, changed the content of every other publisher’s titles, and led to a multi-media industry including TV shows, movies, and a chain of restaurants. In the swinging sixties the pop hit “Sugar, Sugar†(a tune from their animated show) became a global smash: their wholesome garage band The Archies has been a fixture of the comics ever since.
Nonetheless the company had by this stage blazed through a rather impressive legion of costumed champions – such as The Shield; America’s first patriotic superhero who predated Captain America by 13 months.
A select core of these lost titans would communally form the backbone of numerous future superhero revivals, most notably during the “High-Campâ€, “Marvel Explosionâ€, “Batmania†frenzied mid-60’s…
Archie Comics had tentatively tried a few new characters (Lancelot Strong: The Shield, The Fly and The Jaguar) when DC began bringing back masked mystery men in the late 1950’s with a modicum of success, and used the titles to cautiously revive some of their Golden Age stable in the early 1960s.
However, it wasn’t until superheroes became a Swinging Sixties global craze, fuelled as much by Marvel’s unstoppable rise as the Batman TV sensation, that the company committed to a full return of costumed craziness, albeit by what seemed to be mere slavish imitation…
They simply couldn’t take the venture seriously though and failed – or perhaps refused – to imbue the revitalised champions with drama and integrity to match the superficial zanyness. I suspect they just didn’t want to.
As harmless adventures for the younger audience the efforts of their “Radio Comics†imprint manifested a manic excitement and uniquely explosive charisma of their own, with the hyperbolic scripting of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel touching just the right note at exactly the right moment for a generation of kids…
It all began when The Fly (originally created by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby) was renamed Fly-Man to milk the growing camp craze and began incorporating mini-revivals of forgotten heroes such as Shield, Comet and Black Hood in his highly imitative pages.
With the addition of already-well-established sidekick Fly-Girl, an oddly engaging, viable team was formed and for a couple of truly crazy years the company proceeded to rollout their entire defunct pantheon for an exotic effusion of multicoloured mayhem before fading back into obscurity…
Here, then, is a deliciously indulgent slice of sheer backward-looking bluster and bravado from 2003 when the House of Wholesome Fun compiled a selection of Silver Age appearances into a brace of slim – and still mostly overlooked – compilations.
The Mighty Crusaders: Origin of a Super-Team collects the three tenuous team-ups from Fly-Man #31-33 (May- July 1965) plus the first issue of spin-off Mighty Crusaders (November 1965) which finally launched the extremely quarrelsome champions as an official squad of evil eradicators…
The wacky wonderment begins with a history lesson and loving appreciation in a ‘Foreword by Michael Uslan and Robert Klein’ before those first eccentric inklings of a new sensation are re-revealed in Fly-Man #31.
As previously stated, Jerry Siegel provided baroquely bizarre, verbally florid scripts, deftly parodying contemporary storytelling memes of both Marvel and National/DC: plenty of pace, lots of fighting, a whirlwind of characters and increasingly outrageous expository dialogue.
The artist was veteran illustrator Paul Reinman who had been drawing comics since the dawning moments of the Golden Age. His credits included Green Lantern, Sargon the Sorcerer, Atom, Starman and Wildcat.
He drew The Whizzer, Sub-Mariner and Human Torch at Timely and for MLJ he produced strips in Blue Ribbon Comics, Hangman, Jackpot, Shield-Wizard, Top-Notch and Zip Comics on such early stars as Black Hood, the Hangman and the Wizard. He even found time to illustrate the Tarzan syndicated newspaper comic strip.
Reinman excelled at short genre tales for Atlas in the 1950s and became a key inker for Jack Kirby on the Hulk, Avengers and X-Men as the King irrevocably reshaped the nature of comics storytelling in the early 1960s.
Here he used all that Fights ‘n’ Tights experience to depict ‘The Fly-Man’s Partners in Peril’ as criminal mastermind The Spider (nee Spider Spry) broke out of jail to attack his old enemy, only to have all his cunning traps spoiled by alien-equipped tech-master The Comet and, in second chapter ‘Battle of the Super-Heroes’, by The Shield and man of mystery Black Hood (whose irrepressible sidekick at this time was a miraculous robotic horse dubbed “Nightmareâ€)…
Caustically christening his foes The Mighty Crusaders, the villain attempted to ensnare them all in ‘The Wicked Web of the Wily Spider!’ but ultimately failed in his plot. The story ended with the heroes hotly debating whether they should formally amalgamate and swearing that whatever occurred they would never call themselves by the name The Spider had coined…
Two months later they were back in Fly-Man #32 to battle an incredible psionic dictator from long-sunken Atlantis. With Fly-Girl adding glamour but unable to quell the boys’ argumentative natures, the still un-designated team clashed with the many monstrous manifestations of ‘Eterno the Tyrant’ before confronting the time-tossed terror and banishing him to trans-dimensional doom…
One final try-out appeared in Fly-Man #33 (September 1965) as boisterous bickering boiled over into outright internecine warfare between ‘Fly-Man’s Treacherous Team-Mates’, all ably assisted by the evil efforts of vile villain The Destructor.
The sort-of team had been recently joined by two further veteran heroes climbing back into the superhero saddle, but both The Hangman and The Wizard subsequently succumbed to rapacious greed as the Fly Guys gathered billions in confiscated loot; trying to steal the ill-gotten gains for themselves…
Finally in November 1965 Mighty Crusaders #1 premiered (by Siegel & Reinman with a little inking assistance from Joe Giella or perhaps Frank Giacoia?).
‘The Mighty Crusaders vs. the Brain Emperor’ saw the heroes bowing to the inevitable after a team of incredible aliens attacked at the bilious bidding of an extraterrestrial megamind who could enslave the most determined of individuals with the slightest wrinkling of his see-through brow. However the mental myrmidon was no match for the teamwork of Earth’s most experienced crime-crushers…
Also included in this captivating chronicle is a splendidly strange cover gallery by Reinman.
The heroes all but vanished in 1967 but impressively resurfaced in the 1980s (albeit as a straight dramatic iteration) under the company’s Red Circle imprint but again failed to catch a big enough share of the reading public’s attention.
Archie let them lie fallow – except for occasional revivals and intermittent guest-shots in regular Archie titles – until 1991, when the company licensed its heroes to superhero specialists DC Comics for a magically fun, all-ages iteration (and where’s that star-studded trade paperback collection, huh?!).
Impact Comics was a vibrant, engaging and fun all-ages rethink that really should have been a huge hit but was again incomprehensibly unsuccessful…
When the line folded in 1993 the characters returned to limbo until the company called for one more collaborative crack at the big time in 2008, briefly incorporating Mighty Crusaders & Co into DC’s own maturely angst-ridden and stridently dark continuity – with the usual overwhelming lack of success.
In 2012 Archie began reinventing their superhero credentials with a series of online adventures under the aegis of a revived Red Circle subdivision, beginning with a second generation of The Mighty Crusaders (reinforced by traditional monthly print versions six months later) and latterly The Fox: new costumed capers emphasising fun and action which were equally welcoming to inveterate fanboys and eager newcomers alike, so there’s still hope for the crazy gang to make good…
Jerry Siegel’s irreverent, anarchic pastiche of Marvel Comics’ house-style, utilising Archie’s aged pantheon of superheroes is one of the daftest and most entertaining moments of superhero history, and the sentiment and style of these tales has become the basis of much of modern kids animation, from Powerpuff Girls to Batman: Brave and the Bold to Despicable Me. That tells me these yarns urgently need to be reissued because at last the world is finally ready for them…
Weird, wild and utterly over the top! This is the perfect book for jaded veterans or wide-eyed neophytes in love with the very concept of costumed heroes…
© 1965, 2003 Archie Comics Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.