Category: Nostalgia

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Golden Age Sandman Archives volume 1

Sandman Arc front
By Bert Christman, Gardner F. Fox, Creig Flessel, Chad Grothkopf, Ogden Whitney & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-0155-5

Probably created by and originally illustrated and scripted by multi-talented all-rounder Bert Christman (with the assistance of young scripting star Gardner Fox), The Sandman premiered in either Adventure Comics #40 July 1939 (two months after Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27) or two weeks earlier in New York World’s Fair Comics 1939, depending on which distribution records you choose to believe.

Intriguingly, the Dark Knight didn’t make the cut for the legendary commemorative comicbook and only appeared in New York World’s Fair Comics #2 in Summer 1940…

Head utterly obscured by a gas-mask and slouch hat; caped, business-suited millionaire adventurer Wesley Dodds was cut from the radio drama and pulp fiction mystery-man mould that had made The Shadow, Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, Phantom Detective, Black Bat, Spider, Avenger and so many more household names big hits of early mass-entertainment and periodical publication.

Wielding a sleeping-gas gun and haunting the night to hunt a host of killers, crooks and spies, he was eventually joined and accompanied by plucky paramour Dian Belmont, before gradually losing the readers’ interest and slipping from cover-spot to last feature in Adventure Comics, just as the shadowy, morally ambiguous avengers he emulated slipped from popularity in favour of more flamboyant and true-blue fictional fare.

This splendidly sturdy, moodily atmospheric Archive edition re-presents the landmark early appearances from both New York World’s Fair Comics, (1939 and 1940) and the rip-roaring exploits from Adventure Comics #40-59 – July 1939-February 1941 – a period when Detective Comics Incorporated frantically sought to follow up Superman and Batman with the Next Big Thing in Comicbooks…

Following an erudite appreciation from historian and comics all-star Jim Amash, the adventure begins here with the fast-paced thriller from the groundbreaking, pioneering comics premium New York World’s Fair Comics #1 as Christman & Fox introduced ‘Sandman at the World’s Fair’…

In those long-lost days, origins and back story were not nearly as important as action and spectacle so we’re quickly plunged into a fast-paced yarn as wealthy, rugged playboy scientist Dodds visits the global festival with the plans for a new ray-gun and encounters spies and a traitor within his own company. Already active as The Sandman -and sought by the cops for it – the vigilante quickly and beguilingly tracked down and dealt with the pre-war enemies of America…

Over in Adventure Comics #40, at about the same time, the cover-featured crusader was on hand to save kidnapped actress Vivian Dale when ‘The Tarantula Strikes’ (Christman & Fox) in a rousing romp reminiscent of the High Society hi-jinks of movie marvels the Saint, Falcon or Lone Wolf; prowling allies and rooftops, breaking into criminals’ lairs, rifling safes and dealing as much death as dream gas. He also had a unique calling card: sprinkled sand to proclaim and terrify wherever he had silently been and gone…

Christman wrote and drew many of the early thrillers such as #41’s ‘On the Waterfront’ wherein plucky reporter Janice Blue inadvertently stumbled into a dockside narcotics ring just as murderous seadog Captain Wing made a fateful takeover bid. Luckily for her the stealthy Sandman was already on the case…

Adventure #42 highlighted Christman’s love of aviation in ‘The Three Sandmen’ as Wes Dodds met up with a couple of his old Navy Flying Corps buddies to solve a string of murders. Somebody was rubbing out all the members of the old squadron…

Allen Bert Christman first came to public attention by following the near-mythic Noel Sickles on seminal newspaper strip Scorchy Smith. A dedicated patriot and flyer, Christman entered the Naval Air School in 1940 and joined Claire Lee Chennault’s 1st American Volunteer Group, known as the legendary fighter squadron the Flying Tigers.

These volunteers began fighting the Japanese in China long before America officially entered WWII on December 8th 1941, and Christman – officially designated a Colonel in the Chinese Air Force – used his artistic talents to personalise and decorate many of the  planes in his Flight.  He was shot down and died in horrific circumstances on January 23rd 1942.

Issue #43 featured his last official story as Dodds went on a South Seas flying vacation and became embroiled in an ‘Island Uprising’, spectacularly saving embattled white pearl hunters from natives enraged to fury by latter-day pirate Red Hatch…

In Adventure #44 (November 1939), Fox & Creig Flessel stepped into the breach left by Christman as ‘The Sandman Meets the Face’ found the playboy back in civilisation and aiding a down-and-out old friend against a mercurial disguise artist and mob boss terrorising the city. This splendid blood-&-thunder caper also saw the feature’s page count rise from six to ten as the Sandman finally found his lurking, moody metier…

‘The Golden Gusher’ (#45 by Fox & Flessel) was nightclub singer Gloria Gordon, threatened with kidnap or worse until the Master of Sleep intervened, whilst #46 ‘The Sandman Meets with Murder’ saw rising talent Ogden Whitney step into the artistic hot seat when the slaying of an old Dodds pal led into a deliciously convoluted murder-mystery involving beautiful twins, counterfeiting and a macabre cross-dressing killer…

A huge step in continuity occurred in #47 as District Attorney Belmont agreed to an unofficial truce with the Sandman following the assassination of a prominent banker. Simultaneously, Wesley Dodds caught a wily thief trying to crack his safe and became unwilling partner to the ‘Lady in Evening Clothes’ (Fox & Whitney) after she discovered his secret identity.

A celebrated cat-burglar, the sophisticated she-devil was plagued by not knowing who her parents were but happily went straight(ish) in return for Dodd’s pledge to help her…

Revealed as long-lost Dian Belmont she became a regular cast addition in #48 as ‘Death to the D.A.’ found her newly-restored father under threat from gangsters and far less obvious killers on a palatial island retreat after which ‘Common Cold – Uncommon Crime’ (#49 by Fox, Flessel & perhaps Chad Grothkopf on inks) found the mystery-man tracking killers who were eradicating the scientists who refused to hand over their cure for one of our most unforgiving ailments.

With a year gone by and global war looming, the “World of Tomorrow” exhibition was slowly closing but there was still time for New York World’s Fair Comics #2, where this time ‘Sandman Goes to the World’s Fair’ (by Fox & Grothkopf on pencils and inks) delivered a blistering crime caper wherein Wesley and Dian got stuck babysitting her maiden Aunt Agatha around the fair and were targeted by ambitious but exceedingly unwise kidnapper Slugger Slade…

In Adventure Comics #50 ‘Tuffy and Limpy’s Revenge Plot’, by Fox & Flessel, covered similar ground as a murderous campaign of apparently unrelated deaths eventually pointed to another scheme to get rid of the dauntless DA and led Sandman and Dian into a blockbusting battle against ruthless rogues, whilst in #51 (June 1940, by Fox & Flessel and previously reprinted elsewhere as ‘The Pawn Broker’) ‘The Van Leew Emeralds’ provided a fascinating detective mystery romp for the romantically inclined crimebusters to solve in fine style and double-quick time…

A burglary at the Belmont residence only netted a pair of gloves in #52’s ‘Wanted! Dead or Alive’ but inexorably led to a perplexing scavenger hunt with sinister overtones and a deadly pay-off when scandalous Claudia Norgan tried to frame her best gal-pal Dian for the Amber Apple Gang‘s crimes, after which in #53 ‘The Loan Sharks’ unwisely aroused the ire of the dynamic dream-maker when they graduated from simple leg-breaking to murder to enforce their demands. They almost ended the Sandman too before he finally got the better of them…

In issue #54 ‘The Case of the Kidnapped Heiress’ found Wes and Dian witnesses to a bold snatch-and-grab but their frenzied pursuit only resulted in both the DA’s daughter and millionairess Nana Martin being abducted together. Fury-filled and frantic, the Sandman tracked down the ransoming rogues only to find himself in the unexpected role of Cupid.

When the legendary jewel ‘The Star of Singapore’ was stolen in #55, the trail led to a ever increasing spiral of death and destruction until the Man of Dreams finally recovered it, whilst in the next issue ‘The Crook Who Knew the Sandman’s Identity’ (Fox, Flessel & Grothkopf) learned to his eternal regret that it just wasn’t so, thanks to some delightfully imaginative improvisation from Dian…

The mystery and general skulduggery gave way to world-threatening science fiction in #57 when the Sandman battled a mad scientist who had devised a deadly atom-smasher for blackmail and ‘To Hammer the Earth’, after which some macabre murders pointed the dream-team towards spies and killers profiting from ‘Orchids of Doom’, before this stylish selection of outré crime-thrillers concludes with Adventure #59’s ‘The Story of the Flaming Ruby’ as a cursed gem enabled a hypnotic horror to turn honest men into thieves and Dian into a mindless assassin…

Possessing a certain indefinable style and charm but definitely dwindling pizzazz, the feature was on the verge of being dropped when The Sandman abruptly switched to a skin-tight yellow-and-purple costume – complete with billowing cape for two issues – and gained a boy-sidekick, Sandy the Golden Boy (in Adventure Comics #69, December 1941, courtesy of Mort Weisinger & Paul Norris), presumably to emulate the overwhelmingly successful Batman and Captain America models currently reaping such big dividends. It didn’t help much at first but when Joe Simon & Jack Kirby came aboard with #72 that all spectacularly changed.

A semi-supernatural element and fascination with the world of dreams (revisited by S&K a decade later in their short-lived experimental suspense series The Strange World of Your Dreams) added a moody conceptual punch to equal the kinetic fury of their art, as Sandman and Sandy became literally the stuff of nightmares to the bizarre bandits and murderous mugs they stalked. Those spectacular but decidedly different adventures can be found in The Sandman by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby if you dare…

With covers by Sheldon Mayer, Jack Burnley and Flessel, these raw, wild and excessively engaging comics capers are actually some of the best but most neglected thrillers of the halcyon Golden Age. Modern tastes too have moved on and these yarns are probably far more in tune with contemporary mores, making this a truly unmissable treat for fans of mystery, murder and stylish intrigue…
© 1939, 1940, 1941, 2004 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Batman Archives volume 7

Bat Arc 7 bk
By Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Lew Sayre Schwartz, Win Mortimer, Jim Mooney, Charles Paris & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1493-7

Debuting a year after Superman, “The Bat-Man” (joined eventually by Robin, the Boy Wonder) cemented DC/National Comics as the market and conceptual leader of the burgeoning comicbook industry. Having established the parameters of the metahuman in their Man of Tomorrow, the physical mortal perfection and dashing derring-do of the strictly human-scaled adventures starring the Dynamic Duo rapidly became the swashbuckling benchmark by which all other four-colour crimebusters were judged.

By the time of the tales in this sublime seventh deluxe hardback compilation (collecting Batman’s cases from Detective Comics #136-154, cover-dates June 1948 – December 1949) the Gotham Gangbusters were one of the few superhero features to buck the declining trend that was slowly sounding the death knell for flamboyant costumed crusaders.

Just as “real life” headline-grabbers were overtaking sheer escapist fantasy, named creator Bob Kane was cutting back. Most of the work here is the fruit of unsung and uncredited super-stars Bill Finger and Dick Sprang – usually inked by the superb Charles Paris – and this period of more realist wonders saw the creation of one last great themed villain and the beginning of real life celebrity guest-stars as the re-emergence and dominance of tough, clever mobsters became the order of the day.

During these years the comics landscape would radically alter with masks and capes drowning under a tidal wave of business suits, Stetsons, space-ships, fighter-jets and tanks as genre tales of gangsters, cowboys, spacemen, ghosts and soldiers supplanted most mystery-men for nearly a decade – an entire comics-buying generation.

Some of these stories’ authors are still unknown to us, although most are correctly attributed to the transcendent Finger. My own humble guesses would be either Edmond Hamilton or Don Cameron – although Alvin Schwartz, David Vern Reed, Ed “France” Herron and Jack Schiff are also potential contributors at this time – but sadly, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever really know.

Following an effulgent and educational Foreword from industry insider and historian Jim Amash, the drama commences in ‘The Dead Man’s Chest!’ (from Detective #136, with Sprang inking his own pencils) as Gotham Museum trustee Bruce Wayne examined a 17th century pirate map and recognised his own handwriting disclosing the route to Henry Morgan‘s buried treasure! Soon the millionaire and his ward Dick Grayson were consulting time travel pioneer Professor Carter Nichols and whirling back to the age of buccaneers to solve an incredible mystery in stunning style…

The most popular villain of this period was still the Joker and in #137 the Harlequin of Hate again attempted to dumbfound the Dynamic Duo: this time with the perpetration of ‘The Rebus Crimes!’, and Charles Paris inking the scintillating Sprang on a tour de force of comics crime-busting.

The Mountebank of Mirth was back in the very next issue forcing scientist Walter Timmins to commit ‘The Invisible Crimes!’ and running Joker wild until Batman finally crushed his scheme, after which #139’s ‘The Crimes of Jade!’ found the Gotham Guardians infiltrating the city’s exotic Chinatown district in search of bandit/smugglers and an apparently oriental mastermind.

Detective Comics #140 introduced ‘The Riddler!’ (Finger, Sprang & Paris) as cheating carnival con-man Edward Nigma took his obsession with puzzles to a perilous extreme by becoming a costumed criminal and matching wits with the brilliant Batman in a contest that threatened to set the entire city ablaze.

It was back to basics in #141 as ‘Gallery of Public Heroes!’ (illustrated by Bob Kane’s protégé and ghost Lew Sayre Schwartz & the ever-appealing Paris) revealed how Public Enemy Blackie Nason tried to expose and eliminate all undercover cops through his gang of insidious investigators. His biggest target and eventual downfall was that undisputed master of disguise Batman…

Riddler returned in #142, fomenting chaos with ‘Crime’s Puzzle Contest!’ (Sprang & Paris) until the Team Supreme scuppered his hidden scheme to plunder a treasure of the ages, whilst in #143 the crazed crime spree of a tobacconist utterly obsessed with smoking paraphernalia and all forms of pipes blew up in the face of ‘The Pied Piper of Peril!’ (art by Jim Mooney & Paris).

The late 1940’s saw the first slow rise of media-fuelled celebrity culture and fast fading fads and #144 featured a popular bandleader and radio/movie star in ‘Kay Kyser’s Mystery Broadcast!’ by Sprang &Paris. The popular entertainer (just Google Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge to learn more) was touring in Gotham when a ruthless killer forcibly insinuated himself into his band – forcing the musical sharpie to seek help from Batman and Robin by the most convoluted means imaginable…

‘Robin, the Boy Failure!’ in #145 saw the torrid teen suffer a work-related injury and temporary amnesia, and even after recovery the kid had no memory of his alter ego. Confidence shattered, his mentor took extraordinary steps to effect a full recovery to fighting fettle for the lad, just in time to find that ‘Three’s a Crime’ (another all-Sprang extravaganza) when small-time hood and inveterate gambler Carl C. Cave graduated to big-time crime after seemingly discovering his own unbeatable lucky number…

Undersea adventure and a close brush with death was the result of the Dynamic Duo intruding in the domain of costumed pirate ‘Tiger Shark!’ (Sprang & Paris) in #147, but the fishy felon’s alter ego held a shocking secret for socialite Bruce Wayne, after which bold science fiction thrills resulted from #148’s ‘The Experiment of Professor Zero’ (Finger, Sprang & Paris) as a peek into Batman’s crime casebook and trophy room revealed how a mad scientist almost reduced the Gotham Guardians to fatal insignificance with a shrinking gimmick…

The Joker crashed back into action in #149 undertaking another potty plot to plunder the city with ‘The Sound-Effect Crimes!’ (Finger & Sprang), whilst in #150 ‘The Ghost of Gotham City!’ (Paris inks) seemed to see judge and jury hunted by the spirit of a wrongly convicted man they had sent to the electric chair. The phantom’s short reign of terror only ended after the Dark Knight unravelled an incredible truth…

With eye-catching, flamboyant villains in decline, creators were compelled to concoct clever stories such as #151’s (all Sprang) delight wherein a string of close calls and rescues of businessmen revealed a character saving lives and collecting promises of future reciprocation in ‘I.O.U. My Life!’ The reasons behind Ben Kole‘s peculiar predilection were both chilling and spellbindingly complex…

An even more devious Detective tale featured in #152 as ‘The Goblin of Gotham City!’ (with art from Sayre Schwartz & Paris) temporarily halted his campaign of crime after photographer Vicki Vale took a photo which threatened to expose his secret. Unfortunately nobody, including Batman, knew exactly what they had, even after the villain began ruthlessly rubbing out anyone who had seen the snap…

Fantastic fantasy informed #153 as an incredible invention enabled the Caped Crusader to become ‘The Flying Batman!’ (Sprang & Paris), but the phenomenal exploits of the new Dark Knight had a pitifully prosaic explanation, after which this superb seventh deluxe hardback compilation concludes with the ‘The Underground Railroad of Crime!’ (#154 and drawn by Sayre Schwartz & Paris) wherein an impossible series of escapes from State Prison led an undercover Batman to an ingenious and perfidious program of extortion and plunder as well as the welcome redemption of a hopeless career criminal…

With glorious covers by Sprang, Bob Kane, Win Mortimer, Jim Mooney and Charles Paris, this is another superb package of timeless masterpieces from a crucial yet long-neglected period which saw a careful repositioning and reformatting of the heroes, as publishers cautiously toned down all things bombastic, macabre and outlandish in favour of a wide variety of mundane mobsters and petty criminals, clever mysteries and personally challenging situations – although there was always some room for the most irrepressibly popular favourites such as Penguin and The Joker.

Thrilling, dazzling and spectacularly swashbuckling, this action-packed compendium provides another perfect snapshot of the Batman’s amazing range from moody avenger to suave swashbuckler to sophisticated Devil-May-Care Detective, in tales which have never lost their edge or their power to enthral and enrapture. Moreover, these sublimely sturdy Archive Editions are without doubt the most luxuriously satisfying way to enjoy them over and over again.
© 1948, 1949, 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Wonder Woman Archives volume 4

WW arc 4 front
By Charles Moulton (William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter) (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-4012-0145-8

Wonder Woman was conceived by polygraph pioneer William Moulton Marston and illustrated by Harry G. Peter in a calculated attempt to offer girls a positive and forceful role model and, on Editor M.C. Gaines’ part, sell funnybooks.

The Princess of Paradise debuted as a special feature in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), before springing into her own series and the cover-spot of new anthology title Sensation Comics a month later. An astonishing instant hit, the Amazing Amazon quickly won her own eponymous supplemental title in late Spring of that year (cover-dated Summer 1942).

Once upon a time on a hidden island of immortal super-women, American aviator Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence crashed to Earth. Near death, he was nursed back to health by young and impressionable Princess Diana.

Fearing her growing obsession with the creature from a long-forgotten and madly violent world, her mother Queen Hippolyte revealed the hidden history of the Amazons: how they were seduced and betrayed by men but rescued by the goddess Aphrodite on condition that they isolated themselves from the rest of the world and devoted their eternal lives to becoming ideal, perfect creatures.

However when goddesses Athena and Aphrodite subsequently instructed Hippolyte to send an Amazon back with the American to fight for global freedom and liberty, Diana overcame all other candidates and became their emissary – Wonder Woman.

On arriving in America she bought the identity and credentials of lovelorn Army nurse Diana Prince, elegantly allowing the Amazon to be close to Steve whilst enabling the heartsick medic to join her own fiancé in South America. Soon Diana also gained a position with Army Intelligence as secretary to General Darnell, ensuring she would always be able to watch over her beloved. She little suspected that, although the painfully shallow Steve only had eyes for the dazzling Amazon superwoman, the General had fallen for the mousy but superbly competent Lieutenant Prince…

Using the nom de plume Charles Moulton, Marston (with some help in later years from assistant Joye Murchison) scripted almost all of the Amazing Amazon’s many and fabulous adventures until his death in 1947, whereupon Robert Kanigher took over the writer’s role. Venerable veteran illustrator and co-creator H.G. Peter performed the same feat, limning practically every titanic tale until his own death in 1958.

This fourth lavishly deluxe full-colour hardback edition collects the increasingly fanciful and intoxicating adventures from Wonder Woman #8-9 and Sensation Comics #25-32 spanning cover-dates January to August 1944. After an appreciative Foreword from comics journalist and historian Maggie Thompson who outlines the landmarks and catalogues the achievements of the Amazing Amazon, the war-woven epics and imaginatively inspirational dramas begin with Sensation #25 and the ‘Adventure of the Kidnapers of Astral Spirits’ as Diana Prince witnesses a murder. However the killer was asleep at home in bed at the time and soon more impossible killings occur, drawing Wonder Woman into an incredible adventure beyond the Walls of Sleep into uncanny realms where even her gifts are useless and only determination and rational deduction can save the day…

Far less outré but no less deadly was the menace of ‘The Masquerader’ who replaced the Amazing Amazon in #26, following an unshakeable prophecy which saw the champion of Love and Freedom murdered by merciless racketeer Duke Dalgan. It took the covert intervention of Aphrodite and a Girl’s Best Friend to thwart that dire fate, but Diana never knew just who took her place…

When the Amazon, Etta Candy, her sorority Holliday Girls and former convict Gay Frollik resolved to raise a billion dollars for ‘The Fun Foundation’, they never expected their most trusted advisor to turn against them, but his greed led to his downfall and the clearing of a framed woman’s name in Sensation #27, after which Wonder Woman #8 offered another novel-length triumph of groundbreaking adventure.

The drama opened with ‘Queen Clea’s Tournament of Death’ as Steve, on an undercover mission, was snatched by a giant barbarian woman. Hot on his trail, Diana discovered her beau a captive of undersea Amazons from lost Atlantis, living in colossal caverns below the oceans.

Diana soon found herself embroiled in a brutal civil war battling the forces of usurping conqueror Clea of belligerent state Venturia and trying to restore the rightful ruler Eeras to peaceful, beleaguered Aurania. Should she fail, Clea intended to invade the upper world, looking for husky men like Steve to replace the depleted, worn-out puny males of her own realm…

After restoring order in Atlantis, the Amazon returned to her military job and civilian identity until a little girl begged for aid in finding her missing father. Closer investigation revealed that Clea’s forces had been capturing sailors and airmen but with the rebel queen imprisoned as ‘The Girl with the Iron Mask’, who could the leader of the raids possibly be?

After another fearsome subterranean clash the status quo was re-established, but when Diana later met a huge a powerful student at Holliday College she realised that the adventure was still not over as ‘The Captive Queen’ infiltrates Paradise Island and captures both Wonder Woman and Eeras’ wayward daughter Octavia.

Even after defeating her ponderous perpetual foe the action doesn’t end for the Princess of Power as her return to the land beneath the sea is interrupted by another revolution.

This time the ineffectual Atlantean men had used the constant distractions and American modern weapons to enslave the women, making the sub-sea empire a brutal, domineering patriarchy…

But not for long, as Diana and Steve led a brilliant counter-offensive…

In Sensation Comics #28 ‘The Malice of the Green Imps’ offered a welcome dose of metaphysical suspense as jealous thought and impulses were made manifest and drove gangsters and even good folks to attack the recently opened Fun Foundation Clinics sponsored by Diana and Gay Frollik, after which #29 saw another Amazon in Man’s World in the ‘Adventure of the Escaped Prisoner’. After imprisoning gambling racketeer and blackmailer Mimi on the Amazon’s prison island, Wonder Woman was unaware that the harridan’s subsequent escape also brought confused and naively curious fellow warrior Mala to New York where she quickly fell in with the wrong crowd…

Marston’s psychiatric background provided yet another weirdly eccentric psychic scenario in #30’s ‘The Blue Spirit Mystery’ as Steve, Etta Candy and Diana investigated Anton Unreal, a mystic and mentalist who offered to send his client to the heavenly Fourth Dimension – for a large fee, of course…

Unfortunately – although a crook – Unreal was no charlatan and the “ascended ones” certainly found themselves in a realm utterly unearthly, but definitely no paradise until Steve and Diana followed and took matters into their own immaterial hands…

Wonder Woman #9 saw the origins of one of the Amazon’s most radical foes and bizarre adventures. ‘Evolution Goes Haywire’ began with zoo gorilla Giganta stealing Steve’s little niece before the Amazon effected a rescue, after which crazy scientist Professor Zool used his experimental Hyper-Atomic Evolutionizer to transform the hirsute simian into an gorgeous 8-foot tall Junoesque human beauty. Sadly the artificial Amazon retained her bestial instincts and, battling Wonder Woman, managed to damage Zool’s machine, resulting in the entire region being devolved back to the days of cavemen and dinosaurs…

With even Diana converted to barbarism it was an uphill struggle to rerun the rise to culture and civilisation sufficiently to achieve a primitive Golden Age in ‘The Freed Captive’, but eventually the twisted time-travel tale took them back to where they had started, even if only after ‘Wonder Woman vs. Achilles’ – a deranged diversion to save her own mother and people from male oppression by the legendary warrior king…

Sensation Comics #31, by contrast, offered delicious whimsy and biting social commentary when the Princess of Power visited ‘Grown-Down Land’. When a wealthy socialite mother neglected her children the tykes ran away and almost died. Rescued by Wonder Woman, they told her of a dream world far better and happier than reality and next morning, when the kids can’t be awoken from a deep sleep, Diana realises they have chosen to stay in their topsy-turvy imaginary country. However when she enters their dream she finds genuine peril of a most unexpected kind…

This glorious tome of treasures then concludes with #32’s ‘The Crime Combine’ as Wonder Woman finds herself at the top of the American underworld’s hit-list. To scotch the scheme Diana asks fully reformed ex-Nazi and trainee Amazon Baroness Paula von Gunther to leave ParadiseIsland and infiltrate the hierarchy of hate, but it quickly seems that the temptations of Man’s World and allure of evil have seduced the villainess back to her wicked ways…

Seen through modern eyes there’s a lot that might be disturbing in theses old comics classics, such as the plentiful examples of apparent bondage, or racial stereotypes from bull-headed Germans to caricatured African Americans, but there’s also a vast amount of truly groundbreaking comics innovation.

The skilfully concocted dramas and incredibly imaginative story-elements are drawn from hugely disparate and often gratifyingly sophisticated sources, but the creators never forget they’re in the business of entertaining as well as edifying the young. There’s huge amounts of action, suspense, contemporary reflection and loads of laughs to be found here, and always the message is: girls are as good as boys and can even be better if they want to…

Wonder Woman influenced the entire nascent superhero genre as much as Superman or Batman and we’re all the richer for it. Even better, this exemplary book of past delights is a triumph of exotic, baroque, beguiling and uniquely exciting adventure, and these Golden Age exploits of the World’s Most Marvellous Warrior Maiden are timeless, pivotal classics in the development of the medium and still offer astounding amounts of fun and thrills for anyone interested in a grand nostalgic read.
© 1944, 2003 DC Comics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Plastic Man Archives volume 3


By Jack Cole (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-847-0

As recounted by Playboy‘s Cartoon Editor Michelle Urry in her Foreword to this third beguiling Deluxe Archive collection, Jack Cole was one of the most uniquely gifted talents of America’s Golden Age of Comics.

Before moving into the magazine and gag markets he originated landmark tales in horror, true crime, war, adventure and especially superhero comicbooks, and his incredible humour-hero Plastic Man remains an unsurpassed benchmark of screwball costumed hi-jinks: frequently copied but never equalled.

In 1954 Cole quit comics for mature cartooning, becoming a household name when his brilliant watercolour gags and stunningly saucy pictures began running in Playboy from the fifth edition. Cole eventually moved into the lofty realms of newspaper strips and, in May 1958, achieved his life-long ambition by launching a syndicated newspaper strip, the domestic comedy Betsy and Me.

On August 13th 1958, at the moment of his greatest success he took his own life. The reasons remain unknown.

Without doubt – and despite other triumphal comicbook innovations such as Silver Streak, Daredevil, The Claw, Death Patrol, Midnight, Quicksilver, The Barker, The Comet and a uniquely twisted take on the crime and horror genres – Cole’s greatest creation and contribution was the zany Malleable Marvel who quickly grew from a minor back-up character into one of the most memorable and popular heroes of the era. “Plas” was the wondrously perfect fantastic embodiment of the sheer energy, verve and creativity of an era when anything went and comics-makers were prepared to try out every outlandish idea…

Eel O’Brian was a brilliant career criminal wounded during a factory robbery, soaked by a vat of spilled acid and callously abandoned by his thieving buddies. Left for dead, he was saved by a monk who nursed him back to health and proved to the hardened thug that the world was not just filled with brutes and vicious chisellers after a fast buck.

His entire outlook altered and now blessed with incredible malleability, Eel resolved to put his new powers to use: cleaning up the scum he used to run with.

Creating a costumed alter ego he began a stormy association with the New York City cops before being recruited as a most special agent of the FBI…

He soon picked up the most unforgettable comedy sidekick in comics history. Woozy Winks was a dopey indolent slob and utterly amoral pickpocket who accidentally saved a wizard’s life and was gifted in return with a gift of invulnerability: all the forces of nature would henceforth protect him from injury or death – if said forces felt like it.

After failing to halt the unlikely superman’s impossible crime spree, Plas appealed to his sentimentality and better nature and, once Woozy tearfully repented, was compelled to keep him around in case he strayed again. The oaf was slavishly loyal but perpetually sliding back into his old habits…

Equal parts Artful Dodger and Mr. Micawber, with the verbal skills and intellect of Lou Costello’s screen persona or the over-filled potato sack he resembled, Winks was the perfect foil for Plastic Man: a lazy, greedy, ethically challenged reprobate with perennially sticky fingers who got all the best lines, possessed an inexplicable charm and had a habit of finding trouble. It was the ideal marriage of inconvenience…

This lavish, full-colour hardback barely contains the exuberant exploits of the premier polymorph from Police Comics #31-39 and Plastic Man #2 stretching from June 1944 to February 1945, and opens with an outrageous examination of current affairs as the chameleonic cop investigated ‘The Mangler’s Slaughter Clinic’ wherein fit and healthy draft-dodgers could go to get brutalised, broken and guaranteed unfit for active duty. The biggest mistake these canny crooks made was kidnapping Woozy and trying their limb-busting procedures on a man(ish) protected by the forces of nature …

Police Comics #32 then detailed ‘The La Cucaracha Caper’ wherein ultra-efficient Plas was forcibly sent on vacation to give the cops and FBI a break and some time to process all the crooks the Ductile Detective had corralled. What no-one expected was that the last gangsters left un-nabbed would also head south of the border to escape their nemesis and Plas and Woozy found far more than Sun, Senoritas and Bullfights in the sleepy Mexican resort…

In #33’s ‘Deathtrap for Plastic Man’ a crazed saboteur stretched our hero’s resources and reason in his mad mission destroy a vital prototype plane for the most implausible of reasons before Plastic Man #2 (August 1944) offered a quartet of brilliant yarns, beginning with ‘The Gay Nineties Nightmare’, wherein Plas and Woozy trailed the worst rats in the underworld to a hidden corner of America where they couldn’t be touched.

No Place, USA, due to clerical errors, had been left off all official maps and withdrawn from the Union in a huff in the 1890s. The FBI couldn’t enforce justice there but maybe two good men – or one and Woozy – could…

Satire was replaced by outrageous slapstick as mild-mannered Elmer Body became ‘The Man Who Could Switch Bodies’, using his newfound gift to experience all the joys and thrills his dull life had denied him. When Plas realised he couldn’t catch or hold the identity thief, all he could do was offer better candidates for possession…

In hot pursuit of Fargo Freddie the stretchable sleuth accidentally chased the killer into a Mexican volcano. Thinking the case closed the hero headed home but was unaware that a miraculous circumstance had transformed his target into The Lava Man’, whose resultant revenge rampage set the nation ablaze until Plas resorted to brains and not bouncy brawn. The issue closed with tale of urban horror as Plas and Woozy were dispatched to a quiet little town where everybody had been driven crazy – even the medics and FBI agents sent in to investigate ‘Coroner’s Corners’…

Police Comics #34 introduce a well-meaning if screwball campaigner determined to end Plas’ maltreatment of malefactors by organising ‘Serena Sloop’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Criminals’, although the old biddy’s philanthropy took a big hit after she actually met some of the crooks she championed, whilst ‘The Confession of Froggy Fink’ in #35 threatened to tear the entire underworld apart, if Plas got hold of it before the many concerned members of the mastermind’s gang did. Cue frantic chases, and lots of double-dealing back-stabbing violence…

In #36 a gang of brutal thieves hid out in the isolated, idyllic paradise of ‘Dr. Brann’s Health Clinic’ turning the unprofitable resort into a citadel of crime until Plas and Woozy decided to take a rest cure themselves, after which ‘Love Comes to Woozy’ offered the unlikely sight of a sultry seductive siren falling for the wildly unappealing Mr. Winks just as the corpulent crime-crusher and his boss were closing in on a gang stealing widows’ and veterans’ welfare cheques…

The big bosses of criminality had finally had enough by #38, offering ‘One Million Dollars for Plastic Man’s Death’. They also included top criminologist Professor Zwerling on their shopping list but even he was too much for the horde of would-be assassins and even diminutive murder mastermind Rocky Goober soon found his reach far exceeded his grasp…

This classic collection then concludes with a riotous rollercoaster romp as ‘His Lordship Woozy Winks’ is improbably tapped as the lost heir to a fancy British estate. Of course Bladau Castle boasts a murderous ghost and rather more prosaic elements determined to ensure the owlish oaf doesn’t inherit…

Always exciting, breathtakingly original, thrilling, funny, scary and still visually intoxicating over seventy years later, Jack Cole’s Plastic Man is a truly unique creation that has only grown in stature and appeal. This is a magical comics experience fans would be crazy to deny themselves.
© 1944, 1945, 2001 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Marvel Masterworks volume 36: Golden Age Marvel Comics 1-4


By Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Paul Gustavson, Ben Thompson & others (Marvel)
ISBN: 0-7851-1624-9

Whereas a vast percentage of DC’s Golden Age archive is still readily readable today, a great deal of  Marvel Comics’ Timely and Atlas output is, for most modern tastes, dated and quite often painfully strident – maybe even offensive to 21st century eyes and sensibilities.

Nevertheless, I’d rather have the raw historical form rather than any bowdlerised or censored reworking and even in their most jingoistic and populist excesses there are usually individual nuggets of gold amidst the shocking or – horror of horrors – badly crafted yarns from the House of Ideas’ antediluvian antecedents.

Moreover, there’s quite a lot to be said for putting the material in lavish and expensive hardbound volumes for those early comic adventures and I must admit that when they were good the individual efforts were very good indeed.

Marvel took quite some time before producing expensive deluxe volumes featuring their earliest comic adventures and this collection of the first four issues of the anthology title which started it all for Timely/Marvel/Red Circle/Atlas (before eventually settling on Marvel Comics), despite re-presenting some of the most revered adventures of the Golden Age, clearly shows why.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh and hyper-critical: I have to admit that there’s a lot of material here that I spent much of my early life lusting after. I am however a complete comics nut with broad tastes and flexible standards. There are shameful horrors and truly pitiful examples of the medium lurking in my dusty comics boxes. I am not a new, casual or particularly discriminating punter.

Hi – I’m Win and I actually adore old comics…

After a rather shaky start in 1936, the invention of Superman paved the way for explosive expansion and saved the fledgling comicbook industry. By 1939 the new kids on the block were in a frantic flurry of creative frenzy and every publisher was trying to make and own the Next Big Thing. The Goodman pulp fiction outfit leapt into the new marketplace and scored big with their initial offering Marvel Comics: released late in the year before inexplicably switching to the marginally less euphonious Marvel Mystery Comics with the second issue.

During the early days ofAmerica’s Golden Age, novel ideas, raw ambition and sheer exuberance could take you far and, as most alternative means of entertainment escapism for kids were severely limited, it just wasn’t that hard to make a go of it as a comicbook publisher. Combine that with a creative work-force which kept being drafted, and it’s clear to see why low and declining standards of story and art didn’t greatly affect month-to-month sales during the years of World War II.

However once hostilities ceased a cascade-decline in super-hero strips began almost as soon as GI boots hit US soil again. Those innocent kids had seen a lot and wanted something more than brashness, naivety and breakneck pace from their funnybooks now…

Both The Human Torch and Sub-Mariner quickly won immediate favour with the burgeoning, fickle readership but the rest of the stories were soon acknowledged to be pure filler material and thus subject to immediate replacement. Still, two out of seven was pretty good: Action and Detective Comics only had the one super-star apiece…

Another holdover from the pre-comics phase of the company was a predilection to treat the instalments as serial chapters; always promising more and better if you’d just come back next month…

Before the years was out the “Big Two” would clash; frequently and repeatedly battling like elemental gods in the skies above the city…

Goodman seemed to favour and push Ka-Zar and The Angel: characters that devolved from his own stable of pulp genre stars. Sadly neither the generic jungle adventures of the company’s premiere Tarzan knockoff or the thud-and-blunder “Crime-busting Rogue” potboilers – which owed so much to Charteris’ iconic Saint – just didn’t appeal to kids as much as the graphic histrionics of the anarchic Fire and Water anti-heroes when transformed into comic strips…

An editorial policy of rapid expansion was quickly adopted: release a new book filled with whatever the art and script monkeys of the comics “shop” (freelance creative types who packaged material on spec for publishing houses: Martin Goodman bought all his product from Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies Inc.) dreamed up, keep the popular hits and disregard everything else.

Timely Comics – or Red Circle- as the company occasionally called itself, had a huge turnover of characters who only made one or two appearances before vanishing, never to be seen again until variously modern revivals or recreations produced new improved versions of characters such as Angel, Ka-Zar or Electro.

After a knowledgeable and informative – although perhaps tad apologist – introduction by Golden Age Guru Roy Thomas, the hot-dogging begins with the landmark Marvel Comics #1 which sported a cover by pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul introducing to the gasping populace Carl Burgos’ landmark conception of ‘The Human Torch’ …

The Fiery Fury led off the parade of wonderment, bursting into life as a malfunctioning humanoid devised by Professor Phineas Horton. Igniting into an uncontrollable blazing fireball whenever exposed to air, the artificial innocent was consigned to entombment in concrete but escaped to accidentally imperil the metropolis until it/he fell into the hands of a gangster named Sardo.

When the crook’s attempts to use the android as a terror weapon dramatically backfired the hapless newborn was left a misunderstood fugitive – like a modern day Frankenstein’s monster. Even his creator only saw the creation as a means of making filthy money…

The opening episode of ‘The Angel’, by Paul Gustavson, owed a criminally large debt to the 1938 Louis Hayward film The Saint in New York. Although dressed like a superhero, the do-gooder was a blend of Charteris’s iconic well-intentioned scoundrel and The Lone Wolf (Louis Vance’s urbane two-fisted hero who was the subject of 8 books and 24 b-movies between 1917 and 1949), but the four-colour paladin’s foes soon tended towards only the spooky, the ghoulish and the just plain demented.

He also seemed able to cast a giant shadows in the shape of an angel. Not the greatest aid to cleaning up the scum of the Earth but he seemed to manage in this initial enterprise where he is asked to clean up New York: then suffering from the deadly depredations of a crime syndicate dubbed ‘the Six Big Men’…

Appalling reproduced in this volume, ‘The Sub-Mariner’ by Bill Everett, was actually an expanded reprint of a beautiful black and white strip from Motion Picture Funnies.  Prince Namor was the scion of an aquatic race that lived under the South Pole. These advanced folk had been decimated by American mineral exploration a generation previously, and the Sub-Mariner’s mother Fen had been dispatched to spy upon the invaders. She had gotten too close, falling pregnant by one of the interlopers, and twenty years later her son was an amphibious mutant superman determined to exact revenge on the air-breathers – which he promptly began by attacking New York City…

Cowboy Jim Gardley was framed by ruthless cattle-baron Cal Brunder and found the only way to secure a measure of justice was to become ‘The Masked Raider’, dispensing six-gun law. Al Anders’ Lone Ranger riff was competent but uninspired, lasting until the twelfth issue of Marvel Mystery.

Offering a complete thrill, ‘Jungle Terror’, by Tohm Dixon, followed gentlemen explorers Ken Masters and Tim Roberts (visually based on Caniff’s Pat Ryan and Terry Lee) battling savages in the Amazon to find cursed diamonds before a brief prose vignette – a staple of early comics – recounted a racing car drama of ‘Burning Rubber’ by Ray Gill, before the aforementioned ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw Ben Thompson adroitly adapt Bob Byrd’s pulp novel King of Fang and Claw to strip form. In the first part South African diamond miner John Rand and his wife crashed their plane into the Belgian Congo where their son David grew up amidst jungle splendour and became brother to the King of Lions Zar. An idyllic life was only marred years later when murderous explorer Paul De Kraft killed old John, leaving young David to seek vengeance as the mighty brother of lions…

Behind a Claire Moe Angel cover, the abruptly re-titled Marvel Mystery Comics #2 (December 1939) again offered ‘The Human Torch’ by Burgos, wherein the fiery fugitive had attained a degree of sophistication and control before stumbling onto a murderous racing car racket where gangster Blackie Ross ensured his drivers always won by strafing other contestants from an airplane, until the big-hearted, outraged Torch stepped in…

Gustavson then despatched ‘The Angel’ to Hong Kong to save museum researcher Jane Framan from falling victim to a curse.

This time the dangers of the Lost Temple of Alano proved to be caused by greedy men not magical spirits, whilst ‘The Sub-Mariner’ himself was the threat in Everett’s second chapter as the Marine Marvel went berserk in a city powerhouse before showing his true colours by chivalrously saving a pretty girl caught in a conflagration.

‘The Masked Raider’ by Anders broke up an entire lost town of outlaws, after which the debuting ‘American Ace’ by Paul Lauretta (clearly patterned on Roy Crane’s soldier of fortune Wash Tubbs) found Yankee aviator Perry Wade flying straight into danger when the woman who caused the Great War returned to start WWII by attacking innocent European nations with her hidden armies…

‘The Angel’ then starred in an implausible, jingoistic prose yarn by David C. Cooke illustrated by Moe, single-handedly downing a strafing ‘Death-Bird Squadron’ before Thompson introduced fresh perils – including a marauding malicious ape named Chaka to plague young David in more ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’.

Marvel Mystery Comics #3 (January 1940 and sporting an Angel cover by Alex Schomburg) saw ‘The Human Torch’ slowly evolving into a recognisable superhero series as he battled a ruthless entrepreneur trying to secure the formula for a super-explosive so that he could sell it to Martians, whilst ‘The Angel’ battled a bloodthirsty death-cult sacrificing young women, before ‘The Sub-Mariner’ took a huge leap in quality after policewoman Betty Dean entrapped and then successfully reasoned with the intractably belligerent sub-sea invader.

With global war looming ever closer, opinions and themes were constantly shifting andEverettreacted brilliantly by turning Namor into a protector of all civilians at sea: spectacularly preying on any war-like nation sinking innocent shipping. Naturally, even before America officially joined the fray, that meant mostly Nazis got their subs and destroyers demolished at the antihero’s sinewy hands…

When gold and oil where discovered under ranch land, ‘The Masked Raider’ stepped in to stop greedy killers from driving off the settlers in a timeless tale of western justice, but current events overtook the ‘American Ace’, who faded out after this tale of Blitzkrieg bombings, in a picturesque Ruritanian nation. Even Cooke & Everett’s text thriller ‘Siegfried Suicide’ was naming and shaming the Axis directly now in a yarn where a lone yank saved a bunch of French soldiers from German atrocity, but under African skies the ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw the boy hero rescue his animal friends from a well-meaning zoo hunter in a yarn which revealed hints of a Jungle Book style congress of animals…

The final inclusion in this volume – Marvel Mystery Comics #4, February 1940 – has a Schomburg cover depicting Sub-Mariner smashing a Nazi U-Boat leading into another Burgos epic for ‘The Human Torch’ wherein the android gains a secret identity as Jim Hammond and returns to New York to battle a criminal genius terrorising the city with warriors cloaked in deadly, sub-zero ‘Green Flame’.

‘The Angel’ too was in the Big Apple, grappling with a small-time hood who had manipulated a monstrous hyper-thyroid case named ‘Butch the Giant’ – impervious to pain and able to punch through brick walls – into being his slavish meal ticket, whilst ‘The Sub-Mariner Goes to War’ saw the passionate Prince return to his Polar people and rally them and their advanced technology into a taskforce to enforce his Pax Namor upon the surface world’s assorted war mongers…

Even by its own low standards, ‘The Masked Raider’ tale of claim-jumping was far from exemplary, but prose crime puzzler ‘Warning Enough’ (by Cooke & H. Ramsey) was a rather enthralling change of pace tale.

‘Electro, the Marvel of the Age’ by Steve Dahlman, introduced the brilliant Professor Philo Zog who constructed a wonder robot and then formed a secret society of undercover operatives who sought out uncanny crimes and great injustices for the automaton to fix. The first case involved retrieving a kidnapped child actress…

Another debut was ‘Ferret, Mystery Detective’ by Stockbridge Winslow & Irwin Hasen, which saw the eponymous crime writer and his faithful assistants solve the case of a corpse dropped on the authors doorstep, before the increasingly impressive ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw the return of the despised De Kraft and the beginning (but not the end: that’s frustratingly left to the next issue and volume) of the jungle lord’s just vengeance…

Despite all the problems I’ve whinged about, I’m constantly delighted with this substantial chronicle, warts and all, but I can fully understand why anyone other than a life-long comics or Marvel fan would baulk at the steep price-tag in these days of grim austerity, with a wealth of better quality and more highly regarded comics collections available. Nevertheless, value is one thing and worth another and the sheer vibrant, ingenious rollercoaster rush and vitality of the material, even more than its historical merit, is just so overwhelming that if you like this sort of thing you’ll love this sort of thing. Although the stories might be of variable quality and probably not to the tastes of modern fans, for devotees of super-heroes, aficionados of historical works and true Marvel Zombies there’s still lots to offer here.

As always, in the end, it’s up to you…
© 1939, 1940, 2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Plastic Man Archives volume 2


By Jack Cole (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-621-4

Jack Cole was one of the most uniquely gifted talents of American Comics’ Golden Age, crafting landmark tales in horror, true crime, war, adventure and especially superhero genres. His incredible humour-hero Plastic Man remains an unsurpassed benchmark of screwball costumed hi-jinks: frequently copied but never equalled. In 1954 Cole quit comics for gag and glamour cartooning, becoming a household name when his brilliant watercolour gags and stunningly saucy pictures began running in Playboy with the fifth issue. Cole eventually moved into the lofty realms of newspaper strips and, in May 1958, achieved his life-long ambition by launching a syndicated newspaper strip, the domestic comedy Betsy and Me.

OnAugust 13th 1958, at the moment of his greatest success he took his own life. The reasons remain unknown.

Without doubt – and despite his other comicbook innovations and triumphs such as Silver Streak, Daredevil, The Claw, Death Patrol, Midnight, Quicksilver, The Barker and The Comet as well as through a uniquely twisted take on the crime and horror genres – Cole’s greatest creation was the zany, malleable Plastic Man who quickly grew from a minor back-up character into one of the most memorable and popular heroes of the Golden Age. “Plas” was the wondrously perfect fantastic embodiment of the sheer energy, verve and creativity of an era when anything went and comics-makers were prepared to try out every outlandish idea…

This second superbly lavish full-colour deluxe hardback reprints Plastic Man #1 and the cover-featured lead tales from Police Comics #21-30, covering August 1943 to May 1944 and sees, after a convivial commentary in the Foreword by author, strip writer and historian Ron Goulart, the Stretchable Sleuth’s meteoric rise, fully converting from hilariously edgy benevolent rogue to malleable super straight man as his comedy relief sidekick increasingly stole the show in a series of explosive exploits which shaped the early industry every inch as much as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or the “Shazam” shouting Captain Marvel…

Eel O’Brian was a career criminal wounded during a factory robbery, soaked by a vat of spilled acid and callously abandoned by his thieving buddies. Crawling away to die, O’Brian was found by a monk who nursed him back to health and proved to the hardened thug that the world was not just filled with brutes and vicious chisellers after a fast buck.

His entire outlook altered and, gifted with incredible malleability (he surmises it was the chemical bath mingling with his bullet wounds), Eel resolved to put his new powers to use in cleaning up the scum he used to run with.

Creating a costumed alter ego he began a stormy association with theNew York Citycops before being recruited as a most special agent of the FBI…

Shortages and government rationing were gripping the country at this time. For publishers it was lack of paper that particularly plagued and Plastic Man #1 was released (a Summer 1943 cover-date) through a subsidiary company Vital Books, rather than as a straight addition to Quality Comics’ prestigious line of stars.

Irrespective of the name on the masthead, the mammoth 64 page tome offered a quartet of stunning tales of humour, heroic hi-jinks and horror, beginning with cover-featured ‘The Game of Death’ in which Plas and his inimitable, often unwanted assistant set upon the trail of an engrossing mystery and incredible threat posed by a rich man’s gambling club which concealed a sadistic death cult using games of chance to recruit victims …and new disciples…

Said assistant Woozy Winks was an indolent slob, paltry pickpocket, utterly venal yet slavishly loyal oaf who accidentally saved a wizard’s life and was gifted in return with a gift of invulnerability: all the forces of nature would henceforth protect him from injury or death – if said forces felt like it.

After failing to halt the thief’s impossible crime spree, Plas appealed to his sentimentality and better nature and, once Woozy tearfully repented, was compelled to keep him around in case he strayed again…

Winks – equal parts Artful Dodger and Mr. Micawber, with the verbal skills and intellect of Lou Costello’s screen persona or the over-filled potato sack he resembled – was the perfect foil for Plastic Man: a lazy, greedy, ethically challenged reprobate with perennially sticky fingers who got all the best lines, possessed an inexplicable charm and had a habit of finding trouble. It was the perfect marriage of inconvenience…

In ‘Now You See it, Now You Don’t’ the rotund rogue got involved with a goofy Professor and became the greedy owner of an invisibility spray. He wanted to sell it to the Army but Japanese spies captured both the formula and Plastic Man, and dispatched them toTokyo for disposal.

Of course this simply allowed the Man of a Thousand Shapes to deliver such a sound and vicariously joyful thrashing to the Dishonourable Sons of Nippon that it must have had every American kid who saw it jumping for joy.

Cole then touched the heartstrings with the tragic tale of ‘Willie McGoon, Dope’ as a hulking yet gentle simpleton disfigured by neighbourhood kids became the embittered pawn of a career criminal. The duo’s terrifying crime-wave paralysed the city until Plas and Woozy stepped in.

The stunning solo package closed with ‘Go West Young Plastic Man, Go West’ after Woozy bought a gold mine from a guy in a bar and greedily galloped to Tecos Gulch to make his fortune. By the time Plas arrived to save him from his folly the corpulent clown had been framed for rustling and murder…

Police Comics #21 featured conspiracy by a financial cabal attempting to corner the travel and shipping routes of the nation. Only one man could counter the impending monopoly but he was missing, seduced by the prognostications of a circus fortune teller. If Plas couldn’t rescue Sylvester Smirk from ‘The Menace of Serpina’ the entire country would grind to a standstill…

In #22, ‘The Eyes Have It!’ pitted Plas and Woozy against a child-trafficking human horror dubbed The Sphinx who was exercising all his resources to regain possession of a little mute boy who had seen too much, whilst #23’s purportedly supernatural thriller saw the Stretchable Sleuth prove ‘The Ghost Train’ to be no such thing, but only a scam by a shareholder trying to buy up a rail line the Government needed to acquire for vital war work.

A rash of tire thefts (also severely rationed during war time) in Police #24 had a sinister purpose as gangsters and a mad scientist joined forces to synthesise evil knock-offs of their greatest enemy in ‘The Hundred Plastic Men’ after which Woozy again stole the show – and sundry other items – when his addiction to mystery stories led him and Plastic Man on a deadly chase to discover the culprit and cause of ‘The Rare Edition Murders’ in #25.

Over and above his artistic virtuosity, Jack Cole was an astonishing adept writer. His regular 15-page adventures were always packed with clever, innovative notions, sophisticated character shtick and far more complex plots than any of his competitors. In #26’s ‘Body, Mind and Soul’ he starts with Plas’ FBI boss discovering his shady past, and builds on it as the exposed O’Brian agrees to a take on three impossible cases to prove he really has reformed. From there it’s all rollercoaster action as the Pliable Paladin rounds up brutish Slugger Crott, ferrets out the true identity of the city’s smartest mob boss and ends the depredations of a tragically cursed werewolf…

The rotund rascal again took centre stage – and even the cover – in #27 as ‘Woozy Winks, Juror’ hilariously endangered the very nature and sacred process of jurisprudence after being excluded from jury duty. After all, he only had a small criminal record and the impish imbecile was determined to serve so when a sharp operator gave him a few tips Woozy was so grateful that he…

The star-struck schmuck dominated again in #28 as Hollywoodcalled and the Flexible Fed agreed to star in a film. However with Mr. Winks as his manager it was inevitable that ‘Plastic Man – the Movie’ would start with intrigue, sex and murder but as usual end as a furious fun-filled fiasco.

The trail of America’s biggest tax-evader drew Plastic Man to ‘Death in Derlin’s Castle’ as the FBI’s Odd Couple followed the absence of money to an historic pile and a nefarious scheme with moody movie echoes of Citizen Kane and The Cat and the Canary, before this sublime Archive selection ceases with the outrageously odd and supremely surreal ‘Blinky Winks and Gooie Louie’ from Police Comics #30.

Plas and Woozy are drawn into incredible peril when ruthless butter-leggers begin supplying illicit spreads to the city’s dairy-deprived (rationing again) denizens. Even dedicated crime-busters like Woozy found it hard to resist the lure of the lard and when the creamy trail unfortunately led to Woozy’s uncle Blinky justice had to be done. Of course there was always lots of hard-to-find food to be found on a farm but that was just a happy coincidence…

Always exciting, breathtakingly original, thrilling, funny, scary and still visually intoxicating seventy years later, Jack Cole’s Plastic Man is a truly unique creation that has only grown in stature and appeal. This is a magical, unique comics experience fans would be crazy to deny themselves.
© 1943, 1944, 2000 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Superman Archives volume 7


By Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Don Cameron, Bill Finger, Ed Dobrotka, George Roussos, Sam Citron, Ira Yarbrough, Wayne Boring, Fred Ray & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1051-9

It’s almost incontrovertible: the American comicbook industry – if it existed at all – would have been an utterly unrecognisable thing without Superman. His unprecedented invention and adoption by a desperate and joy-starved generation quite literally gave birth to a genre if not an actual art form.

Spawning an impossible army of imitators and variations, within three years of his 1938 debut, the intoxicating blend of eye-popping action and social wish-fulfilment which hallmarked the early Man of Steel had grown to encompass cops-and-robbers crime-busting, socially reforming dramas, science fiction, fantasy, whimsical comedy and, once the war in Europe and the East embroiled America, patriotic relevance for a host of gods, heroes and monsters, all dedicated to profit through exuberant, eye-popping excess and vigorous dashing derring-do.

In comicbook terms at least Superman was master of the world, having already utterly changed the shape of the fledgling industry. There was the phenomenally popular newspaper strip, a thrice-weekly radio serial, games, toys, as much global syndication as the war would allow and the perennially re-run Fleischer studio’s astounding animated cartoons.

Despite all the years tat have passed since then, I – and so many others – still believe that superhero comics were never more apt or effective than when they were whole-heartedly combating the agents of Fascism (and yes by heck, even the dirty, doggone, Reds-Under-the-Beds Commies, who took their place in the 1960s too!) with explosive, improbable excitement and mysterious masked marvel men.

The most evocative and breathtaking moments of the genre seem to come when those gaudy gladiators soundly thrashed – and please forgive the offensive contemporary colloquialism – “Nips and Nazis”. However, even in those long-ago dark days, comics creators were wise enough to augment their tales of espionage and invasion with a range of gentler, more whimsical four-colour fare. By the time of the tales in this stunning seventh Superman coterie of classics – collecting #25-29 (November/December 1943 to July/August 1944) of the Man of Tomorrow’s solo title – the intense apprehension of the early war years had been replaced with eager anticipation of tyranny’s forces were being rolled back on every Front.

Superman was the premier, vibrant, vital role model whose startling abilities and take-charge, can-do attitude had won the hearts of the public at home and the troops across the war-torn world. Now, although the shooting was far from over, the stirring, morale-boosting covers were being phased out in favour of gentler and even purely comedic themes. After an informative Foreword: Siegel, Shuster & Associates by author and historian Ron Goulart (offering commentary and scrupulously detailing the working secrets of the Superman Studio at that troubled time), the only cover by Jack Burnley in this book shows Superman teaching kids to draw, before the quartet of thrillers behind that front image commenced with a full-on patriotic call to arms.

‘The Man Superman Refused to Help!’ by Jerry Siegel, Ira Yarbrough & George Roussos exposed the American Nazi Party – dubbed the “101% Americanism Society” – whilst offering a rousing tale of social injustice as an American war hero is wrongly implicated in the fascists’ scheme… until the Man of Steel investigated.

This is followed by a much reprinted and deservedly lauded patriotic classic.

‘I Sustain the Wings!’ by Mort Weisinger & Fred Ray, was created in conjunction with the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command under Major General Walter R. Weaver and designed to boost enlistment in the maintenance services of the military. In it Clark Kent attends a Technical Training Command school as part of the Daily Planet’s attempt to address a shortfall in vital services recruitment – a genuine problem at this time in our real world – but still finds time to delightfully play cupid to a love-struck kid who really wants to be a hot shot pilot not a mere “grease monkey”…

Siegel, co-creator Joe Shuster & Yarbrough then gloriously bit the hand that fed them by spoofing the budding superhero genre with the ‘King of the Comic Books’ as a disenchanted cartoonist is taught to value the worth of his mighty creation Geezer. Good thing too, as Adolf Hitler, totally fed up with being lampooned by the strip, had dispatched his best assassins to shut up the Verdammte artist for goot – sorry – good…

The issue ended with an exceptional crime thriller by Bill Finger, Ed Dobrotka & Roussos wherein the Metropolis Marvel tangled with ‘Hi-Jack – Jackal of Crime!’: an arrogant maniac determined to make a lasting name in the annals of villainy. But, as was so often the case, there was far more to the mastermind than first appeared…

Wayne Boring & Roussos provided a stunning anti-Nazi cover for #26 with the Man of Might giving the enemy propaganda minister a sound slapping, before ‘The Super Stunt Man!’ (Finger, Shuster, Yarbrough & Roussos) saw the Kryptonian Crimebuster restore the nerve, prospects and humour of a disgraced circus daredevil, whilst in ‘Comedians’ Holiday!’ by Don Cameron & Yarbrough, an aging vaudevillian film troupe gets a boost and new lease on life when Lois and Clark investigate their manager – a shady cove named J. Wilbur Wolfingham.

The scurvy scoundrel – a magnificent pastiche of W. C. Fields as an utterly heartless Mr. Micawber – would return over and over again to bedevil honest folk and greedy saps…

Andy Hoops was a no-good kid capitalising on an honest man’s tale of woe. When he blackmailed the Action Ace, ‘Superman’s Master!’ (by Siegel, Yarbrough & Roussos) tragically overstepped the mark and too late learned a very final lesson in decency, whilst ‘The Quicksilver Kid!’ (Cameron, Sam Citron & Roussos) pitted Superman against a revived and utterly amoral god Mercury who only wanted a little fun and exercise, but couldn’t handle their persistent alien protector…

Boring & Roussos depicted Superman cheekily teaching Lois to type on the cover of #27, whilst Cameron & Dobrotka produced all the interior wonders beginning the murderous Toyman‘s roguish return to bedevil honest citizens of Metropolis with ‘The Palace of Perilous Play!’ – a novelty arcade with perilous purpose. It wasn’t Superman-proof though…

Stuck in the woods pursuing a story, Lois and Clark met old lumberjacks and heard what happened after legendary logger Paul Bunyan met the Man of Steel in ‘When Giants Meet!’ after which, safely back in civilisation, Superman came to the aid of hayseed farmer Hiram Pardee who came to Metropolis to collect his millionaire inheritance and fell foul of shysters and brigands in the ‘Robber’s Roost!’ before ‘Dear Diary’ blended the journal-keeping habits of ambitious financier Randall Rocksell, gang-boss and conman Goldie Gates and Lois Lane in a heart-warming cautionary tale of greed and redemption, courtesy of a uniquely Kryptonian brand of problem-solving…

The cover of Superman #28 (May/June 1944) saw Boring & Stan Kaye combine to comedically compare the Metropolis Marvel with mythical monoliths Hercules and Atlas whilst the interior opened with the return of a certain swindling charlatan in ‘Lambs versus Wolfingham!’ (Cameron, Yarbrough & Roussos) which saw Clark, his alter ego and Lois save a town of sheepherders from the unscrupulous land-grabbing attentions of the roguish reprobate, simultaneously dispensing a hard lesson in business ethics to the shameless schemer, whilst Sam Citron pencilled ‘The Golden Galleons!’ in which a model-building competition in the Daily Planet led to bullying, cheating, skulduggery and even attempted murder amongst the poorest faction of Metropolitan society…

Scripted by an anonymous author and fully realised by Roussos, ‘Be a Magician – Turn Waste Paper into War Weapons!’ offered sage patriotic public service advice to the readership before Cameron & Dobrotka inaugurated a radical new series with ‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter: The Suicidal Swain’.

In those turbulent times the interpretation of the plucky news-hen was far less derogatory than the post-war sneaky minx of the 1950s and 1960s. Lois might have been ambitious and life-threateningly precipitate but it was always to advance her own career, help underdogs and put bad guys away, not trap a man into marriage.

This premier 4-page vignette offered a breathless, fast-paced screwball comedy-thriller wherein the canny lass fails to talk a crazed jumper down from a ledge but still saves his life in a far more flamboyant manner, reaping the just reward of a front page headline.

The issue the ended with ‘Stand-In for Hercules!’ by Siegel, Yarbrough & Roussos, in which Superman travelled back to Ancient Greece to help out a dying scientist and ended up carrying out a dozen good deeds for an ailing legend. Of course the tale had a solidly humorous basis and a sneaky sting included…

Issue #29’s cover was a peacefully patriotic one as Boring & Roussos showed Lois entertaining “her Supermen” – a Soldier, Sailor and Marine – after which malign mischief-maker The Prankster became ‘The Wizard of Wishes!’, exploiting people’s dreams for personal profit until Superman put his foot down in a classy thriller by Cameron & Dobrotka.

Bill Finger then scripted ‘The Tycoon of Crime!‘ for Dobrotka, in which the Action Ace tackled a retired and very bored businessman who turned gangster to alleviate his ennui and managed to mass market villainy after he hypnotised the Man of Steel, after which

‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter: The Bakery Counterfeiters’ by Cameron, Dobrotka & Roussos, found the peerless newshound turn her demotion to the women’s cookery pages into another blockbusting scoop.

This convivial collection then concludes with a cleverly moving yarn by Joe Samachson & Dobrotka wherein Clark is mistaken for a missing heir and incurs the wrath of a host of greedy, frustrated relatives eager to get rid of ‘The Pride of the Kents’…

As fresh and thrilling now as they ever were, these endlessly re-readable epics are perfectly situated in these glorious hardback Archive Editions; a worthy, long-lasting vehicle for the greatest and most influential comics stories the art form has ever produced.

So what are you waiting for…?
© 1943, 1944, 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Wonder Woman Archives volume 3


By Charles Moulton (William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter) with Frank Godwin (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-814-4

Wonder Woman was conceived by polygraph pioneer William Moulton Marston and illustrated by Harry G. Peter in an attempt to offer girls a positive and forceful role model. She debuted as a special feature in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), before springing into her own series and the cover-spot of new anthology title Sensation Comics a month later. An instant hit the Amazing Amazon quickly won her own eponymous supplemental title in late Spring of that year (cover-dated Summer 1942).

Once upon a time on a hidden island of immortal super-women, American aviator Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence crashed to Earth. Near death, he was nursed back to health by young and impressionable Princess Diana.

Fearing her growing obsession with the creature from a long-forgotten and madly violent world, her mother Queen Hippolyte revealed the hidden history of the Amazons: how they were seduced and betrayed by men but rescued by the goddess Aphrodite on condition that they isolated themselves from the rest of the world and devoted their eternal lives to becoming ideal, perfect creatures.

However when goddesses Athena and Aphrodite subsequently instructed Hippolyte to send an Amazon back with the American to fight for global freedom and liberty, Diana overcame all other candidates and became their emissary – Wonder Woman.

On arriving in Americashe bought the identity and credentials of lovelorn Army nurse Diana Prince, elegantly allowing the Amazon to be close to Steve whilst enabling the heartsick medic to join her own fiancé in South America. Soon Diana also gained a position with Army Intelligence as secretary to General Darnell, ensuring she would always be able to watch over her beloved. She little suspected that, although the painfully shallow Steve only had eyes for the dazzling Amazon superwoman, the General had fallen for the mousy but superbly competent Lieutenant Prince…

Using the nom de plume Charles Moulton, Marston (with some help in later years from assistant Joye Murchison) scripted almost all of the Amazing Amazon’s many and fabulous adventures until his death in 1947, whereupon Robert Kanigher took over the writer’s role. Venerable veteran illustrator and co-creator H.G. Peter performed the same feat, limning practically every titanic tale until his own death in 1958. A couple of the very rare exceptions appear in this volume…

This third superbly luxurious full-colour deluxe hardback edition collects her every groundbreaking adventure from Wonder Woman #5-7 and Sensation Comics #18-24 from June-December 1943, and commences, after an appreciative Foreword from comics historian Les Daniels, with ‘The Secret City of the Incas’ from Sensation #18, illustrated by the superbly talented classical artist Frank Godwin, in which the Princess of Power rescued a lost Inca tribe from a despotic theocracy and ancient greed whilst in #19 (Godwin again)‘The Unbound Amazon’ responded to a little boy’s letter and stumbled onto big trouble in the far north woods. Of course Diana knew little Bobby from the Adventure of the Talking Lion (as seen in the previous Archive edition) and with wicked Nazi spy Mavis on the loose wasn’t about to take any chances.

This terrific thriller is notable for the revelation that if an Amazon removed her Bracelets of Submission she turned into a raving, uncontrolled engine of sheer destruction…

H. G. Peter drew the vast entirety of Wonder Woman #5 (June/July 1943), which presented an interlinked epic in the ‘Battle for Womanhood’ as war-god Mars (who instigated the World War from his HQ on the distant red planet through his earthly pawns Hitler,  Mussolini and Hirohito) returned to plague humanity. This time he enlisted the aid of a brilliant but deformed and demented misogynistic psychologist with psychic powers. The tormented Dr. Psycho used his talents to marry and dominate a medium named Marva, using her abilities to form ectoplasmic bodies as he sought to enslave every woman in the world.

Happily Wonder Woman countered his gods-sponsored schemes, after which prominent sidekicks ‘Etta Candy and her Holliday Girls’ comedically crushed a burglary before ‘Mars Invades the Moon’ returned to the overarching tale when the frustrated war-god was ousted by the Duke of Deception.

In attempting to take over the Moon – home of peace-loving goddess Diana – Mars made the biggest error of his eternal life as the Amazing Amazon led a spectacular rescue mission which resulted in the invaders’ utter rout.

The issue then concluded with ‘The Return of Dr. Psycho’ who had escaped prison and again perpetrated a series of ghastly attacks on America’s security and the freedom of women everywhere until the Holliday Girls and their demi-divine mentor stepped in…

Sensation #20 was also by Peter – who was slowly coming to grips with the increased extra workload of the explosively popular 64-page Wonder Woman series every three months – and ‘The Girl with the Gun’ saw Diana Prince investigate sabotage at a munitions factory and the murder of a General at WAACs training base Camp Doe. To the Amazon’s complete surprise the culprit appeared to be Marva Psycho, but there was far more going on than at first appeared…

Godwin handled the art for #21 as Steve and Diana tracked down insidious traitor the American Adolf as he conducted a murderous ‘War Against Society’ whilst issue #6 – another all-Peter extravaganza – introduced another macabre foe in ‘Wonder Woman and the Cheetah’.

Marston’s psychiatric background provided yet another deeply disturbed antagonist in the form of sugar sweet debutante Priscilla Rich who shared her own body with a jealously narcissistic, savage feline counterpart dedicated to murder and robbery. The Cheetah framed the Amazing Amazon and almost destroyed Steve, Etta and the Holliday girls before Wonder Woman finally quashed her wild rampages.

It wasn’t for long as the Cheetah returned to mastermind an espionage-for-profit ring in ‘The Adventure of the Beauty Club’ which resulted in the Perfect Princess being captured by Japan’s High Command before spectacularly busting loose for a final confrontation in ‘The Conquest of Paradise’. Here the Feline Fury infiltrated the home of the Amazons and almost irretrievably poisoned the minds of the super women sequestered there…

By this time Peter was fully adapted to his new schedule and in Sensation Comics #22 took the psychological dramas to new heights when a cured Priscilla Rich was seemingly attacked by her manifested evil self  after the Cheetah stole America’s latest weapon ‘The Secret Submarine’…

In issue #23 the creators tackled school bullying and women in the workplace as production line staff were increasingly stricken by ‘War Laugh Mania’. Only one of the problems was being promulgated by Nazi spies though…

It was back to straight action in #24 as ‘The Adventure of the Pilotless Plane’ saw Steve abducted by Japanese agents whilst investigating a new gas weapon which prevented US aircraft from flying. The vile villains had nothing that could stop Wonder Woman from smashing them and freeing him however, and the status quo was fully restored for the last saga in this lavish hardcover collection.

Wonder Woman #7 offered an optimistic view of the future in a fantastic fantasy tale ‘The Adventure of the Life Vitamin’ wherein America in the year 3000AD revealed a paradisiacal world ruled by a very familiar female President where a miracle supplement had expanded longevity to such an extent that Steve, Etta and all Diana’s friends were still thriving.

Sadly some old throwbacks still yearned for the days when women were second-class citizens subservient to males which meant there was still work for the Amazing Amazon to do…

‘America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow’ continued the wry but wholesome sex war with Steve going undercover with the rebel forces uncovering a startling threat in ‘The Secret Weapon’ before the focus returned to the present and a far more intimate crisis for wilful child Gerta whose mother Paula (fully reformed ex-Nazi Baroness Paula von Gunther) was forced to deal with a ‘Demon of the Depths’.

But was that the evil octopus at the bottom of the paddling pool or her daughter’s dangerously anti-authoritarian attitudes…?

Far too much has been made of supposed subtexts and imagery of bondage and submission in these early tales – and yes, there really are a lot of scenes with girls tied up, chained or about to be whipped – but I still don’t care. Whatever Marston and Peters might have intended, the plain truth is that the skilfully innovative dramas and incredibly imaginative story-elements influenced the entire nascent superhero genre as much as Superman or Batman, and we’re all the richer for it.

This sterling deluxe book of nostalgic delights is a marvel of exotic, baroque, beguiling and uniquely exciting wonder and these Golden Age adventures of the World’s Most Fabulous female are timeless, pivotal classics in the development of comicbooks and still provide astounding amounts of fun and thrills for anyone interested in a grand nostalgic read.
© 1943, 2002 DC Comics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Golden Age Spectre Archives volume 1


By Jerry Siegel & Bernard Baily with various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-955-3

The Spectre is one of the oldest characters in DC’s vast stable of characters, created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily in 1940 and debuting with a 2-part origin epic in More Fun Comics #52 and 53 where he was the first superhero to star in the previously all-genres adventure anthology. For a few years the Ghostly Guardian reigned supreme in the title with flamboyant and eerily eccentric supernatural thrillers, but gradually slipped from popularity as firstly Dr. Fate and successively Johnny Quick, Aquaman, Green Arrow and finally Superboy turned up to steal the show. By the time of his last appearance the Spectre had been reduced to a foil for his own comedic sidekick Percival Popp, the Super-Cop…

Just like Siegel’s other iconic creation, the Dark Man suffered from a basic design flaw: he was just too darn powerful. Unlike the vigorously vital and earthy early Superman however, the ethereal champion of justice was already dead, so he couldn’t be logically or dramatically imperilled. Of course in those far-off early days that wasn’t nearly as important as sheer spectacle: grabbing the reader’s utter attention and keeping it stoked to a fantastic fever pitch. This the Grim Ghost could do with ease and always-increasing intensity.

Re-presenting the first 19 eerie episodes and following a fulsome Foreword from pre-eminent Comics historian Dr. Jerry Bails, detailing the state of play within the budding marketplace during those last months of the 1930s, the arcane action commences in this stunning full-colour deluxe hardback with ‘The Spectre: Introduction’ from More Fun Comics #52 (February 1940).

This wasn’t the actual title: like so many strips of those early days, most stories didn’t have individual titles and many have been only retroactively designated for collections such as this.

The Ghostly Guardian was only barely glimpsed in this initial instalment. Instead the action rested upon Jim Corrigan, a hard-bitten police detective, who was about to marry rich heiress Clarice Winston when they were abducted by mobster Gat Benson. Stuffed into a barrel of cement and pitched off a pier, Corrigan died and went to his eternal reward. Almost…

Rather than finding Paradise and peace, Corrigan’s spirit was accosted by a glowing light and disembodied voice which, over his strident protests, ordered him return to Earth to fight crime and evil until all vestiges of them were gone…

Standing on the seabed and looking at his own corpse, Corrigan began his mission by going after his own killers…

In #53 ‘The Spectre Strikes’ found the furious revenant swiftly, mercilessly and horrifically ending his murderers and saving Clarice, before calling off the engagement and moving out of the digs he shared with fellow cop and best friend Wayne Grant. After all, a cold, dead man has no need for the living…

The origin ends with Corrigan implausibly sewing himself a green and white costume and swearing to eradicate all crime…

Splendidly daft, this two-part yarn is one of the darkest and most memorable origins in comicbook history and the feature only got better with each issue as the bitter, increasingly isolated lawman swiftly grew into most overwhelmingly powerful hero of the Golden Age.

In MFC #54 the Supernatural Sentinel tackled ‘The Spiritualist’, a murderous medium and unscrupulous charlatan who almost killed Clarice and forever ended the Spectre’s hopes for eternal rest, after which #55 introduced ‘Zor’: a ghost of far greater vintage and power, dedicated to promulgating evil on Earth. He too menaced Clarice and only the intervention of the Heavenly Voice and a quick upgrade in phantasmal power enabled The Spectre to overcome the malign menace.

More Fun Comics #56 was the first to feature Howard Sherman’s Dr. Fate on the cover but the Spectre was still the big attraction even if  the merely mundane bandits and blackmailers instigating ‘Terror at Lytell’s’ were no match for the ever-inventive wrathful wraith. Far more serious was ‘The Return of Zor’ in #57, as the horrific haunt returned from beyond to frame Corrigan for murder and again endanger the girl Jim dared not love…

An embezzler turned to murder as ‘The Arsonist’ in #58, but was no match for the cop – let alone his eldritch alter ego – whilst ‘The Fur Hi-Jackers’ actually succeeded in killing the cop yet were still brought to the Spectre’s unique brand of justice.

In #60 ‘The Menace of Xnon’ found a super-scientist using incredible inventions to frame the ghost and even menace his ethereal existence, prompting The Voice to again increase its servant’s power – this time by giving The Spectre the all-powerful Ring of Life – but not before the Ghostly Guardian had been branded Public Enemy No. 1.

With Corrigan now ordered to arrest his spectral other self on sight, #61 (another Dr. Fate cover) featured ‘The Golden Curse Deaths’ wherein prominent citizens were dying from a scientific terror with a deadly Midas Touch, after which ‘The Mad Creation of Professor Fenton’ pitted the Phantom Protector against a roving, ravaging disembodied mutant super-brain…

In #63 a kill-crazy racketeer got his just deserts in the electric chair only to return and personally execute ‘Trigger Daniels’ Death Curse’ on all who had opposed him in life. Happily The Spectre proved to be more than his match but ‘The Ghost of Elmer Watson’ was a far harder foe to face. Murdered by mobsters who had also nearly killed Corrigan’s only friend Wayne Grant, the remnant of the vengeful dead man refused to listen to The Spectre’s brand of reason and its dreadful depredations had to be dealt with in fearsome fashion…

‘Dr. Mephisto’ was a spiritualist who utilised an uncanny blue flame for crime in #65, after which the Ghostly Guardian battled horrendous monsters called forth from ‘The World Within the Paintings’ probably written by the series’ first guest writer – Gardner Fox – before Siegel returned with ‘The Incredible Robberies’ which found the phantom policeman battling deadly mystic Deeja Kathoon to the death and beyond…

With MFC #68 The Spectre finally lost his protracted cover battle to Dr. Fate even though, inside, the ‘Menace of the Dark Planet’ featured a fabulously telling tale of Earthbound Spirit against alien invasion by life-leeching Little Green Men, before in #69 ‘The Strangler’ murders led Corrigan into an improbable case with an impossible killer…

This first fearful tome terminates with issue #70 and ‘The Crimson Circle Mystery Society’ in which a sinister cult employed a merciless phantasmal psychic agent named Bandar to carry out its deadly schemes…

Still a mighty force of fun and fearful entertainment, The Spectre’s Glory Days – and Nights – were waning and more credible champions were coming to the fore. He would be one of the first casualties of the post-War decline in mystery men and not be seen again until the Silver Age 1960’s…

Moreover, when he did return to comics, the previously omnipotent ghost was given strict limits and as he continued to evolve through various returns, refits and reboots The Spectre was finally transmogrified into a tormented mortal soul bonded inescapably to the actual embodiment of the biblical Wrath of God. Revamped and revived in perpetuity, revealed to be the Spirit of Vengeance wedded to a human conscience, Jim Corrigan was finally laid to rest in the 1990s and Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan replaced him. Returning to basics in recent years, the latest host is murdered Gotham City cop Crispus Allen.

They’re all worth tracking down and exhuming: spooky comic champions who have never failed to deliver an enthralling, haunted hero rollercoaster – or is that Ghost Train? – of thrills and chills.
© 1940, 1941, 2003 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Showcase Presents Superman Family volume 2


By Otto Binder, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-812-4

During the 1950s and early 1960s in America, being different was a bad thing. Conformity was sacrosanct, even in comicbooks, and everybody and thing was meant to keep to its assigned and intended role.

For the Superman family and cast that meant a highly strictured code of conduct and parameters: Daily Planet Editor Perry White was a stern, shouty elder statesman with a heart of gold, Cub Reporter Jimmy Olsen was a brave and impulsive, unseasoned fool – with a heart of gold – and plucky News-hen Lois Lane was brash, nosy, impetuous and unscrupulous in her obsession to marry Superman although she too was – deep down – another possessor of an Auric aorta.

Yet somehow even with these mandates in place the talented writers and artists assigned to detail their wholesomely uncanny exploits managed to craft tales both beguiling and breathtakingly memorable and usually as funny as they were exciting.

This second cunningly combined chronologically complete compendium collects the affable, all-ages tales from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #23-34 (September 1957-January 1959), Lois’s second tryout issue  from Showcase #10 (September/October 1957) as well as Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #1-7 (March/April 1958-February 1959) and promptly commences with the Man of Steel’s Go-To Guy and the three tales which comprised issue #23 of his solo title, illustrated as almost always by the wonderful Curt Swan & Ray Burnley. ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Two Super-Pals’ was the first of three scripts by the irrepressible Otto Binder and described how our lad gained an other-dimensional Genie as another faithful Super-Friend. Of course with sinister radium bandits plaguing Metropolis there was more to the cosmic companion than met the eye…

This was followed by ‘Jimmy Olsen, the Bearded Boy’ wherein boastful hubris and a magic potion inflicted runaway whiskers on many Daily Planet staff – even ClarkKent – prompting many face-saving secret feats from the identity conscious Man of Tomorrow. As Jimmy’s series progressed, one of the most popular plot-themes (and most fondly remembered and referenced today by most Baby-Boomer fans) was the unlucky lad’s appalling talent for being warped, mutated and physically manipulated by fate, aliens, magic, mad science and even his friends… a fate which frequently befell Lois too although Jimmy got a lot less marriage proposals from aliens, murderers of monsters…

The boy’s bits then concluded with ‘The Adventures of Private Olsen’ wherein the Cub Reporter was assigned to write articles on Army life and – with Superman’s assistance – taught an unscrupulous drill sergeant a much-needed lesson…

When Lois Lane – arguably the oldest supporting character/star in the Superman mythology if not DC universe – finally received her own shot at a solo title, it was very much on the terms of the times. I must shamefacedly admit to a deep, nostalgic affection for her bright and breezy, fantastically fun adventures, but as a free-thinking, (nominally) adult liberal of the 21st century I’m often simultaneously shocked nowadays at the jolly, patronising, patriarchally misogynistic attitudes underpinning too many of the stories.

Yes, I’m fully aware that the series was intended for young readers at a time when “dizzy dames” like Lucille Ball or Doris Day played to the popular American gestalt stereotype of Woman as jealous minx, silly goose, diffident wife and brood-hungry nester, but to ask kids to seriously accept that intelligent, courageous, ambitious, ethical and highly capable females would drop everything they’d worked hard for to lie, cheat, inveigle, manipulate and entrap a man just so that they could cook pot-roast and change super-diapers is just plain crazy and tantamount to child abuse. They’re great, great comics but still…

I’m just saying…

Showcase #10 (September/October 1957) was the second and final try-out appearance – all illustrated by Wayne Boring & Stan Kaye – for Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane and opened with ‘The Jilting of Superman’ by Binder, wherein the Action Ace almost fell for a most ancient ploy when Lois pretended to marry another man to make the alien oaf realise what she meant to him…

‘The Sightless Lois Lane’ written by Jerry Coleman told how a nuclear accident temporarily blinded the journalist, and how her sudden, unexpected recovery almost exposed Clark Kent‘s secret when he callously changed to Superman in front of the “sightless” lass, after which Binder delightfully detailed the contents of ‘The Forbidden Box from Krypton’: a cache of devices dug up by a Smallville archaeologist originally packed by Jor-El and intended to aid the infant Superbaby on Earth. Of course when Lois opened the chest all she saw was a way to become as powerful as the Man of Steel and soon became addicted to being a super-champion in her own right…

The Jaded Journo launched into her own title scant months later, clearly offering exactly what the reading public wanted…

Jimmy Olsen #24 featured another trio of top tales from Binder, Swan & Burnley beginning with ‘The Superman Hall of Trophies’ which found a Kryptonite-paralysed Metropolis Marvel trapped in a museum and rescued by the brave boy reporter, whilst ‘The Gorilla Reporter’ saw the poor sap briefly brain-swapped with a mighty (confused) Great Ape before Superman again had to divert attention from his exposure-threatened alter ego by convincing the world at large that Jimmy was ‘The Luckiest Boy in the World’…

Issue #25 as ever by Binder, Swan & Burnley, featured ‘The Secret of the Superman Dummies’ wherein a trip to a magic show resulted in Jimmy being inescapably handcuffed to the last man in the world Superman dared to approach, ‘The Second Superboy’ saw the poor kid accidentally rocketed to an alien world where he gained incredible abilities – courtesy of resident absent-minded genius Professor Potter – and ‘The Day There Was No Jimmy Olsen’ offered a tantalising hoax and mystery which ended with an unexpected promotion for the pluckily ingenious boy…

He began #26 subjected to inexplicable bouts of deadly mass fluctuations as ‘The World’s ‘Heavyweight’ Champ’ before the newly appointed ‘Jimmy Olsen, Foreign Correspondent’ uncovered a sinister scheme to defraud the Ruritanian Kingdom of Hoxana.  Back home however he had to again undergo a well-intentioned con from his best pal after he saw Clark flying and subsequently – inadvertently – himself became ‘The Birdboy of Metropolis’…

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #1 (March/April #1958) at last arrived sporting three stunning yarns illustrated by sleek, slick Kurt Schaffenberger whose distinctive art-style would quickly become synonymous with the reporter. Everything kicked off with ‘The Bombshell of the Boulevards’ (scripted by Leo Dorfman) wherein she donned a blonde wig to deceitfully secure aHollywood interview and soon provoked a death-duel between rival enflamed suitors. Of course it was only another scheme by Superman and Jimmy to teach her a lesson in journalistic ethics. Good thing reporters are so much less unscrupulous these days…

During this Silver Age period with Superman a solid gold sensation of the newly ascendant television phenomenon, many stories were draped in the wholesome trappings of Tinseltown – even more so than most of celebrity-obsessed America. It didn’t hurt that editor Whitney Ellsworth was a part-time screenwriter, script editor and producer as well as National DC’sHollywood point man.

Otto Binder then reunited with his old Captain Marvel collaborator for ‘Lois Lane, Super-Chef’ as Lois disastrously tried to master home cooking in her latest scheme to get the Man of Steel to propose, whilst in ‘The Witch of Metropolis’ a science assignment went horrifically awry and transformed her into a wizened old hag every time the sun set…

JO #27 opened with ‘The Boy from Mars’ wherein the reporter got his own lesson in integrity after trying to create a circulation-boosting hoax, and another in the perils of pride and over-confidence after messing up ‘A Date with Miss Metropolis’ before the issue ended with a riotous battle with his own evil duplicate after Professor Potter accidentally created ‘The Outlaw Jimmy Olsen’: all courtesy of Binder, Swan & Burnley.

Ever so slowly a more mature tone was developing in the Cub’s adventures. In #28’s ‘The Spendthrift and the Miser’ an alien gift from Superman caused wildly manic mood swings whilst an accidental time-trip impossibly revealed that Jimmy was destined to become ‘The Boy who Killed Superman’ whilst in ‘The Human Skyscraper’ another botched Potter product enlarged the kid to monumental, city-endangering size.

In the second Lois Lanecomicbook she was apparently appalled to uncover ‘Superman’s Secret Sweetheart’ (uncredited here but possibly Bill Finger?), but was in fact on her very best mettle helping a bullied college girl fight back against her mean sorority sisters, after which Binder recounted how Tinseltown improbably called and the reporter became – eventually – an extremely high maintenance actress in ‘Lois Lane in Hollywood’…

‘Superman’s Forbidden Room’ then closed proceedings with a cruel hoax playing on her well-publicised infatuation, but this time it wasn’t the Man of Tomorrow doing the fooling and the stakes had never been higher in a moody thriller illustrated by Boring & Kaye and probably written by Jerry Coleman.

In Jimmy Olsen #29 the usually adept reporter hit a monumental writer’s block whilst working on a novel, but ‘The Superman Book that Couldn’t be Finished’ eventually was – with a little hands-on Kryptonian help – whilst in ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Super-Pet’ the Cub Reporter was adopted by super-hound Krypto in his twilight years – and was instrumental in rejuvenating the Dog of Steel for a new generation. ‘The Amazing Spectacles of Doctor X’ then ended the issue with a clever thriller as Jimmy appropriated goggles which could see the future and glimpsed something he wished he hadn’t…

‘The Rainbow Superman’ by Binder & Schaffenberger, opened Lois Lane #3 and saw the News-hen at her very worst as a cosmic accident made the Man of Tomorrow an ambulatory spectrum and she set about trying to see if Clark too glowed, whilst ‘The Man who was Clark Kent’s Double’ (scripted by Coleman, as was the final tale here) broke her heart after she again proved too nosy for her own good. ‘Lois Lane and the Babe of Steel’ then gave her a terrifying glimpse of her dreams come true when Superman traded temporal places with his toddler self and caused all manner of problems for the capable bachelorette…

In JO #30 ‘The Son of Superman’, Binder, Swan & Burnley jerked our tears when an attempt by the Kryptonian to adopt the reporter went tragically wrong after which they proved equally adept at creating mystery and tension as criminals schemed to destroy Jimmy by making him ‘The Cub who Cried Wolf’. ‘Superman’s Greatest Enemy’ – with Dick Sprang standing in for Curt Swan – then revealed how the naïve lad fell for a crook’s scam but had enough smarts to turn the tables…

Binder & Schaffenberger opened LL #4 with a well-meaning Jimmy using hypnotism to get Clark to propose to Lois, utterly unaware who he was actually using those gimmicks on, catastrophically leading to ‘The Super-Courtship of Lois Lane’…

Times have changed, but when Coleman scripted ‘Lois Lane, Working Girl’ he was simply referring to her being challenged to undertake a job in manual labour, so shame on you. Alvin Schwartz then crafted a canny conundrum in ‘Annie Oakley Gets her (Super)man’ for Boring & Kaye to illustrate, as a riding accident out West caused Lois to believe she was the legendary cowgirl sharpshooter whilst hunting some very nasty gangsters with very real guns…

Jimmy Olsen #31 highlighted the now mythic tale of ‘The E-L-A-S-T-I-C Lad’ (Binder, Swan & Burnley) wherein Superman was ultimately responsible for the reporter gaining stretching powers after leaving a chest of alien artefacts with the nosy, accident-prone kid, whilst in ‘The Mad Hatter of Metropolis’ the power of suggestion convinced the kid that he could imitate the feats of famous folks simply by donning their characteristic chapeaus before ‘The Boy who Hoaxed Superman’ saw the lad attempt to get a pay raise by pretending to leave for the future. It didn’t work, and everybody seemed to prefer the replacement Perry hired who was, of course, Jimmy in disguise…

In #32 Professor Potter’s latest chemical concoction made Jimmy look like Pinocchio but did give him ‘The Super Nose for News’ whilst an uncanny concatenation of crazy circumstances turned the sensibly staid Man of Tomorrow into ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Superman’ every time the reporter masquerading as a pop star twanged his old guitar, and ‘The Jimmy Olsen from Jupiter’ (by Alvin Schwartz) revealed how aliens mutated the Cub Reporter into one of their scaly selves, complete with extremely useful mind-reading abilities, much to Superman’s chagrin…

‘Superman’s Greatest Sacrifice’ by Robert Bernstein & Schaffenberger led in Lois Lane #5, as the journalist met her millionaire double and seemingly lost her beloved Metropolis Marvel to her, whilst in ‘The Girl of 100 Costumes’ the canny lass tried to use a myriad of new looks to catch his attention, in an uncredited story drawn by Al Plastino. It was back to silly usual in Binder & Schaffenberger’s ‘The Fattest Girl in Metropolis’;  a plant growth ray accidentally super-sized the vain but valiant reporter. Imagine her reaction when she found out that Superman had deliberately expanded her dimensions… for good and solid reasons, of course…

Binder, Swan & Burnley were in sparkling form in JO #33, starting with ‘Legends that Came to Life’, wherein a nuclear accident animated the strangest foes from fairytales and only Jimmy, not his mighty mentor, could save the day, whilst in ‘The Lady-Killer from Metropolis’ a classic case of boyish arrogance and girlish gossip led to the boy reporter briefly becoming the sexiest thing in Hollywood. The horror and hilarity was capped with ‘The Human Flame-Thrower!’ as Potter’s latest experiment caused Jimmy the worst case of high-octane halitosis in history…

Coleman, Boring & Kaye opened LL #6 with ‘The Amazing Superman Junior’ as yet another attempt to teach Lois a lesson backfired on the pompous Man of Steel and she brought in a mysterious kid to show the Kryptonian what it felt like…

This was followed by a brace of tales by Bill Finger & Schaffenberger, starting with ‘Lois Lane… Convict’ which saw seemingly saw the reporter take a bribe from gangster Baldy Pate and pay a terrible price, whilst in ‘Lieutenant Lois Lane, U.S. Army’ she and Clark joined the military for a story only to have the – temporary – rank turn her into a man-hating bully. Surely some mistake, no…?

‘Superman’s Pal of Steel’ by Binder, Swan & Burnley, opened the last Jimmy Olsen issue in this marvellous monochrome collection as another secret identity-preserving scheme took a bizarre turn after the boy reporter genuinely gained an incredible power. Alvin Schwartz then wrote ‘The Underworld Journal’ which saw the kid inherit his own newspaper and swiftly go off the journalistic rails before Potter’s newest invention turned Jimmy’s clunky old kit into ‘The Most Amazing Camera in the World’ (Binder) – and a deadly danger to Superman’s greatest secret…

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #7 closes out this volume with three more mixed-message masterpieces beginning with ‘Lois Lane’s Kiss of Death’ (by Bernstein & Schaffenberger), wherein a canny conman tried to fool the reporter into botching her biggest crime exposé. Schwartz then had Lois use hypnotism to wash her heroic obsession out of her mind in ‘When Lois Lane Forgot Superman’.

Illustrated by Boring & Kaye, the tale took an unlikely turn when she then turned her passionate, unfulfilled attentions on poor Clark, after which Lana Lang fully entered the Man of Steel’s modern mythology. When Lois took in the destitute, down-at-heel lass who once held the Boy of Steel’s heart, she seemingly allowed her to also become ‘The Girl who Stole Superman’ in a tense and clever tale from Coleman and Schaffenberger…

These spin-off support series were highly popular top-sellers for more than two decades; blending action, adventure, broad, wacky comedy, fantasy and science fiction in the gently addictive manner scripter Binder and artist Schaffenberger had perfected at Fawcett Comics on the magnificent Marvel Family.

As well as containing some of the most delightful episodes of the pre angst-drenched, cosmically catastrophic DC, these fun, thrilling and yes, occasionally deeply moving, all-ages stories also perfectly depict the changing mores and tastes which reshaped comics from the safe 1950s to the seditious, rebellious 1970s, all the while keeping to the prime directive of the industry – “keep them entertained and keep them wanting more”.

I certainly do…
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