Out of the Vault – Shazam! #11

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Tony Frazier

Last week, I talked about Werner Roth, a guy I’d always thought of as the most boring artist ever. Turned out, when looking back, that I realized he wasn’t bad when he was working within his genre. He’d just never been much of a superhero guy, and unfortunately, when I discovered him, superheroes were where the money was.

I’ve been thinking about this more, lately, while rereading Steranko’s History of Comics, so here’s another, more extreme example.

As a kid, I hadn’t been much aware of the names in the credits. Comics were just comics, and I was young enough that I still didn’t really think about the people behind the brushstrokes. I wasn’t reading things that had been written and drawn by people; I was looking, more or less, into another reality, one that simply existed on the page.

That changed gradually, but one of the milestones was issue #152 of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, September 1972. The art in that issue, by Mike Sekowsky and Bob Oksner, was egregiously awful. Check this out.

The layout isn’t awful, but the stilted, clumsy figures are. But I had seen Sekowsky’s work before, in Justice League of America and in The New, Hunted Metal Men. It wasn’t great, but it usually looked better than this. So I figured, the thing that must be driving the art in this particular issue from “not very good” to “absolutely awful” must be due to that other person in the credits–Oksner.

And seriously, looking back at this issue now, the inks are wretched. They look horribly rushed. And instead of nice, deep, well-defined blacks, we get this horrible scritching everywhere it’s supposed to be dark  (except for that quite dynamic shadow under the flying Superman in panel two).

From that day on, in my mind, in any list of the worst of the worst comic book hack artists–a list that included names like Pat Boyette and Jose Delbo and Don Heck–Bob Oksner’s name would have to be near the top.

In later years, as I started to read more Marvel Comics, another name was added, one I’ve mentioned before: Vince Colletta. Colletta could be good sometimes, like in Captain Marvel #3 over Gene Colan’s pencils, but he could just as often go from mediocre to awful. When he was bad, as in this sequence of panels from Thor’s battle with Mangog in The Mighty Thor #156 (this was actually scanned from a giant-size Treasury Edition reprint, which is why I couldn’t fit the entire page width in the scanner), it was often as not the same thing that afflicted Oksner’s inks above, trying to define figures with dozens of skinny lines that just turned the drawing to fuzzy mush.

Look at that hand in panel 3. I know not everybody can be Joe Sinnott (and apparently Kirby had some issues with the way Sinnott inked his work sometimes), but Kirby’s art never looked slicker than those Fantastic Four issues they collaborated on, and something as spectacular as this Mangog story could really have used his skill with the brush.

So okay, let’s look now at the issue pictured up at the top, which would have hit the stands probably in December 1973. Notice that the title of the book is Shazam! (or perhaps With One Magic Word… SHAZAM! would be a better version). DC was not able to name the book after the character, because even though Marvel couldn’t claim exclusive rights to the Captain Marvel name (since the Fawcett character had predated theirs) they could apparently trademark it as a title.

The lead story in issue #11 is “The World’s Mightiest Dessert,” in which Billy Batson and his girlfriend Cissie Sommerly go to Doc Quartz’s drugstore for lunch.

No matter how much they eat, the dessert keeps growing out of control, like the proverbial Chicken Heart.

Billy changes to Captain Marvel, but even the World’s Mightiest Mortal can’t eat fast enough to keep up with it. He enlists the townspeople as emergency eaters, and even presses a couple of burglars into service, but the dessert keeps growing.

And then, he gets a brainstorm.

He fires up all the furnaces in town until the dessert melts and runs down into the sewers.

It’s a fun, effective seven pages, but here’s the thing: the story was inked by Vince Colletta and pencilled by Bob Oksner. See, I didn’t know this, but before I became a real comics reader, Oksner had been making his money drawing humor comics at DC, titles like Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope and Angel and the Ape. Oksner wasn’t a hack. He was a humor artist who was unfortunate enough to still be working when humor comics had fallen out of favor.

But when he was working in his genre, his work was solid. And Colletta’s inks here are a little sloppy, but not over-rendered and fuzzy as in his Kirby work. This is still the weakest story in the issue, artistically (the other two stories were by the incomparable Kurt Schaffenberger, and you’ll be seeing them at Christmastime), but it’s far from “worst hack who ever hacked” status.

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Super Movie Monday – X-Men, Part 2

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Tony Frazier

Continuing this week with the second chapter of our three-part look at Brian Singer’s X-Men from 2000.

When we left off, Logan–the ronin-like wandering cage fighter also known as Wolverine–had ended up in Professor Charles Egg-Saviour’s School for Gifted Youngsters (a school for mutants), along with teenage runaway Rogue. Professor X is worried about what his old friend and current opponent Magneto might be planning to do in response to a proposed piece of legislation requiring registration of all mutants.

That legislation is being co-sponsored by Senator Kelly, who gets into an official-looking helicopter with his assistant Henry Gyrich.

And once again, this is a throwaway reference to the comics. Henry Gyrich was an agent of the National Security Council who served as liaison to the Avengers in the 1970’s, forcing them to make security and line-up changes and even revoking their permissions from the government a couple of times, leaving them unable to use their communicators and Quinjet.

We never really learn what role he’s supposed to play here, because Gyrich is actually dead. And this person is a shapeshifter.

Her name is Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn). She kicks the crap out of Kelly with her nimble feet while her accomplice Toad (Ray Park) pilots the helicopter toward Magneto’s island fortress.

Meanwhile, Jean Grey has put Wolverine through a scanner and discovered that his bones are infused with an indestructible metal called adamantium, which combined with his regenerative powers make him virtually indestructible (and BTW, the pointy shoes they put Famke Janssen in make her feet look huuuuge). When Cyclops wonders why Magneto wants Wolverine, Professor X observes that it’s not proven that Wolverine was what he was after.

Senator Kelly comes to in Magneto’s fortress, strapped to a chair in front of a huge metal apparatus and surrounded by mutants (well, four). Magneto gloats a little, then gets in the apparatus and powers it with his own mutant energy. There’s a cool light show which engulfs everyone watching.

Jean Grey shows Logan to a bedroom where he can stay. When he asks where Jean sleeps, she says with Scott, and after a little flirting, right on cue, Cyclops shows up and warns Logan to stay away from Jean.

That night, Rogue hears Logan muttering in his sleep from down the hall. Logan’s having a nightmare about the experiments that were performed on him, and Singer manages to make them appropriately creepy without resorting to the jagged flash cuts that have become standard.

The sickly green and blue hues really sell the creepiness

Rogue comes into Logan’s room and tries to wake him, but still locked in the throes of the nightmare, Wolverine sits up and stabs Rogue with his claws.

So Rogue touches his cheek, knocking Wolverine out for the count and absorbing his healing ability long enough for her wounds to close up. Which is ironic, since she seemed so intimidated and he seemed so invulnerable at the club where she first met him; turns out, she’s just as dangerous. And everyone in the crowd that has gathered around Logan’s door knows it.

After a quick scene between Professor X and Wolverine just to make sure everybody in the audience knows what Rogue’s power is, we rejoin Senator Kelly in a prison cell in Magneto’s island fortress.  He discovers that with a little effort, he can squeeze between the bars over the window.

That’s right, he is now Senator Squishy, and that light show Magneto put him through is obviously some sort of mutation module. He not only squeezes through the bars, but when Sabretooth tries to pull him back in, his hand squishes right out of Sabretooth’s grip, allowing him to plummet into the ocean. Magneto traps Sabretooth in Kelly’s cell out of pique.

The next day, the senator walks out of the ocean onto a beach, looking very different–not just squishy, but with what look like gill slits down his back. And yes, to the right there, that hot dog vendor in the blue shirt, that’s your Stan Lee cameo for this picture.

The Senator sees a TV report about an upcoming U.N. Summit and steals some clothes. Nobody tries to stop him.

Back at Xavier’s school, Bobby tells Rogue that the Professor is furious that she used her powers against another mutant and that she should leave. His eyes flash yellow as she runs away from him. Hmmm, yellow ice? That can’t be good.

Meanwhile, Professor X is still trying to figure out what Magneto wants with Wolverine when Logan himself shows up. Rogue has gone missing. Professor X decides to use the Cerebro supercomputer to track her down. Cerebro had long been a fixture in the comics, but of course, the movie has to make it more spectacular by housing it inside a huge metal sphere.

Xavier locates Rogue at the train station and forbids Wolverine to go after her, since Magneto might be lying in wait for him. He dispatches Storm and Cyclops instead. But by the time they reach the garage to pick up a car, Cyclops notices his motorcycle is missing, and sure enough, Wolverine has stolen it.

And discovered the turbo boost button.

No matter how serious your superhero story might be, you need to have these moments of vicarious thrill, no matter how rote they seem.

Wolverine catches up to Rogue on the train and convinces her to go back to the school. And while I’m not thrilled with Anna Paquin’s performance in general, when Wolverine mentions how the Professor seems to want to help “people like us,” she gives him this look of pure infatuation that is perfect for the character and the moment.

In the train station, Storm asks the guy at the ticket booth about Rogue while Cyclops waits in the middle of the terminal. Storm is suddenly grabbed by Sabretooth, and when Cyclops tries to intervene, Toad uses his long prehensile tongue to steal Cyclops’s visor, sending his powers out of control.

While the fight is happening at the train station, meanwhile, the Bobby who is not Bobby changes shape to fool the retina scanners on Cerebro. It’s Mystique. She clips a vial of weird inky liquid into a fluid line, causing a dark cloud in the machine. That probably means something bad (she knows exactly how to sabotage it because Magneto helped build it).

Meanwhile on the train, Magneto shows up and freezes Wolverine with a gesture since his skeleton is mostly metal. Wolverine says to take him, but let Rogue go. To which Magneto replies, “Whoever said we wanted you?”

As Sabretooth, Toad and Magneto are leaving with an unconscious Rogue, they are greeted by about a hundred cops and Professor X. The professor takes control of Toad and Sabetooth and tries to talk Magneto out of his plan, but Magneto responds by shooting one cop in the face.

He stops the bullet just a millimeter or so from the guy’s head, then threatens to do the same with all the cops. “I don’t think I can stop them all.” Xavier relents, and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants escapes.

Wolverine wants to quit the group to track down Rogue, but before he can leave, Senator Kelly shows up, looking much worse for wear. After hearing the senator’s story, the group figures out that Magneto plans to use his machine on the world diplomats showing up for the U.N. summit. The need to stop this from happening becomes even more dire when Senator Kelly devolves into a bag of mush and then pops open, spilling fluids across the floor.

The mutation machine kills, y’all. Even worse, Cyclops figures out that the machine isn’t all that kind to the person running it, either. It nearly killed Magneto when he used it on Senator Kelly. Therefore, he apparently plans to transfer his powers to Rogue and have her be the one killed when it has to mutate all those diplomats. This time, it’s personal!

Professor X uses Cerebro again to try to find Rogue. But the Black Blood of the Earth that Mystique injected into it zaps the Prof into a coma. While everyone else hovers worriedly over the Professor, Jean repairs Mystique’s sabotage and uses Cerebro, even though she is nowhere near powerful enough. The pain drives her to her knees, but when Cyclops finds her, she tells him that she knows where Magneto is going.

And we’ll get to that and the big climax next week. See you then.

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Out of the Vault – X-Men #77 & 96

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Tony Frazier

I mentioned in Monday’s recap of the first X-Men movie that the original X-Men had not been a huge hit in the comics. Here’s a look at why.

The issue in question is issue 77, featuring the story “When Titans Clash,” written by Roy Thomas, pencilled by Werner Roth and inked by John Tartaglione. And one measure of the group’s lack of popularity is that this story is actually a reprint from issue 29; at this point in the early 70’s, Marvel had given up on new X-Men stories and was just republishing their old work to keep the trademark in place.

Let’s take a look at the splash page to get our first hint at why the group was not taking off.

Okay, you say, but there’s nothing really awful about this. In fact, the artwork isn’t half-bad.  The anatomy is solid and everything looks pretty polished and professional. What it lacks is excitement. When I was younger I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about Werner Roth’s work; it was just dull. Looking at it now, though…

Look at that trio on the right, Scott Summers hanging back silently watching as Warren Worthington helps a very shapely Jean Grey on with her skates. That is good, solid work… for a romance comic. In fact, just before he got the X-Men gig, Roth had been drawing romance comics for DC.

So although his figures in action could be awkward and clumsy, as in this fight with Spider-Man from “Along Came a Spider” (reprinted in issue 83)…

Ask him to draw a panel of Jean staring pensively into space while she pines over Scott and he tore that shit up (from the reprinted story in issue #80, “Beware the Juggernaut, My Son”)!

But let’s get back to the story. You’ll notice that there are two guys in goofy sunglasses in the splash panel. The silent one is Scott Summers, a.k.a Cyclops. The other is Cal Rankin, who had joined the group a few issues earlier as Mimic. He could copy powers like Peter Petrelli from Heroes. Like the Super Skrull with the Fantastic Four, Mimic had all of the X-Men’s powers at once.

As everyone else is skating, Scott wanders off by himself to try an experiment. He thinks he may be gaining some conscious control over his powers, and so he decides to try taking off the special sunglasses he uses to keep his eyebeams from destroying everything in their path.

The experiment is a failure. Scott lays waste to the woods and vows that he must never let himself cut loose like this again. Unfortunately, Scott’s mishap has awakened a super-android which had been taking refuge under the hill, the Super-Adaptoid. Designed by A.I.M. to kill Captain America, the Super-Adaptoid could copy the powers of the super-heroes it fought. Right now, it possessed the powers of four of the Avengers: Captain America, Hawkeye, Goliath, and the Wasp.

Wandering out into the woods to see what all the commotion is about, the android runs into Bobby Drake, Iceman. He freezes the Super-Adaptoid solid and flees back to the mansion, where nobody believes his story (and within two panels, they have him believing he just imagined it, which, no).

They then get into a fight with Mimic, where he demonstrates he can use their powers as well as they can, even though his costume is both boring and ugly.

Mimic leaves in a huff, which is when the Super-Adaptoid (who pretended to be frozen so he could follow Bobby back to the others) decides to attack. He defeats the X-Men easily, which is another reason the book probably wasn’t doing so well. I have three reprinted issues from about this time (after Kirby left and before their first big costume change leading into Neal Adams’s brief run), and the X-Men lose fights in all three.

Let’s face it, the team just didn’t have any firepower. Beast was agile, but not especially strong. Angel was just a normal guy with wings. Not only was Jean Grey’s telekinesis relatively weak, but being a girl (written by a man in the late 60’s), she startled easily; you could derail her powers with a loud shout. Iceman seemed to have potential, but his ice was easily shattered and he was susceptible to heat.

And Cyclops… I mean, we were always being told how unimaginably destructive his eyebeams were, but they never actually did anything useful. Spider-Man dodged ’em, Mimic blocked them with his own eyebeams, Super-Adaptoid deflected them with his shield, Magneto blocked them with his force field, Blob and Juggernaut just shrugged them off. For all his supposed power, Cyclops was about as useful as Mr. Furious in a fight.

Luckily for the X-Men, Mimic forgets his keys or something and comes back in time to save them from being destroyed. And now, in what is otherwise a pretty silly throwaway story, we get the neat conceptual twist: X-Men vs. Avengers, as performed by mimics.

Mimic manages to win by using Professor X’s telepathy to convince the Super-Adaptoid to copy his powers. Since he couldn’t mimic the Avengers’s powers from the Super-Adaptoid, he figures it would be bad if the transfer is attempted the other way around. And he’s right; they both end up losing the powers they’ve copied.

So between the boring art (good for romance, not so good for super-heroics), the silly scripting and the fact that the X-Men couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag, the book never got very popular.

For contrast now, let’s look at one of the early books in the run of the new X-Men, which began the group’s rise to popularity. “Night of the Demon”–written by Chris Claremont, pencilled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Sam Grainger–was first published in X-Men #96 (though appropriately, the scans in this post were taken from a reprint titled Classic X-Men #4; I sold my run of X-Men when I was desperate for money in the late 80’s).

The X-Men have just returned from their first adventure as a new team (not counting the giant-size special that introduced them). While the rest of the team trains in the Danger Room, Cyclops wanders off into the woods alone to angst over the death of a new member: Thunderbird, who was killed while trying to keep Count Nefaria from escaping his secret mountain headquarters in a fighter jet (actually, Claremont killed him off because he didn’t fill any role in the group that someone else didn’t already fill better–Colossus was just as strong but cooler-looking, Wolverine had an even worse attitude, and Storm, as a black woman, had the minority angle covered).

Scott lays waste to the woods and vows that he must never let himself cut loose like this again (again). Unfortunately, Scott’s mishap has broken open a strange stone cairn covered with mystic symbols that no one from the school has ever noticed before.

So while the other X-Men are all arguing with Wolverine over the fact that he’s a loose cannon, Scott comes crashing through the wall and warns them that bad mojo is coming in the form of a demon named Kierrok. Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler all pound on it, but he shrugs them off.

And then…

I love how taken aback Scott is there. This was an incredibly significant moment, because before this, Wolverine had just been that dude in the silly yellow costume flailing his claws around ineffectually. Colossus, Storm and Nightcrawler, having all been created especially for the team, had been getting the spotlight for the previous couple of issues. This was the first time that we were seeing that there was more to Wolverine than a silly costume and a chip on his shoulder. It would take John Byrne’s run to really turn Wolverine into a star, but this was the moment that started it all.

Unfortunately, Kierrok can regenerate (and given how much regeneration has turned into a central facet of Wolverine’s character, it’s funny just how surprised he is when someone else can do it, too). So Professor X decides to read his mind to find a weakness, and we get one of Dave Cockrum’s patented psychedelic panels…

That reminds me of this one from Superboy Starring the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Professor X realizes the only way to beat Kierrok is to close the broken cairn, so he sends Storm out to do the job, which is how we learn that Storm is claustrophobic.

Luckily, it’s the awesome kind of claustrophobia that lets you save the world by blasting the cairn with lightning to seal it, and not the sucky kind that makes you freeze up and be dragged down to eternal torment in hell, so there is that. Kierrok disappears and the world is safe, for now (actually forever AFAIK, because Kierrok was kind of a misfire that Claremont decided not to revisit).

So from suspiciously similar beginnings, we have completely different stories. The newer story doesn’t have the neat conceptual twist that the older story does, but instead of romance-comic soap-operatic pining, it reveals two of our characters’ troubled pasts and hints at the greater awesomeness to come. And the art is much more dynamic and exciting.

Hope you enjoyed. Join us Monday for more of Brian Singer’s cinematic take on the X-Men.

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State of the Site, January 2013

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Tony Frazier

So I know the posting has been a little sporadic around here lately, but I’d like to give you a little heads-up as to what’s been going on and what the future may bring.

I’m basically been flying in circles while I tried to decide which way to go with this site. Here’s the thing: when I started this website four years ago, I was having trouble selling my work, partly because it didn’t fit established categories– part comedy, part action, with superheroes which didn’t fit neatly into either the established science-fiction or fantasy genres. I made a few short story sales, but it was slow going.

So I decided to try to find an audience for Digger on-line, first as a webcomic (which lasted about four months), then by serializing my novel Hero Go Home with one chapter a week, and then by trying the daily serial fiction experiment of Run, Digger, Run.

The webcomic never found any audience, and though I did gain some loyal readers with each of the serialized stories, the audience never got very large. I tried bringing in more traffic by transferring my weekly Out of the Vault and Super Movie Monday features from my previous blog, They Stole Frazier’s Brain, but while I do get more traffic from those pages, none of it really translates into readers for my fiction.

Which means I’m not selling any books, which is how I was hoping to make money. So here I am with a new book project in mind, and I have to decide–do I convert this into a more traditional author blog with sporadic posts while I write my new book with an eye toward traditional publishing, or do I try to push harder with different content, or (considering I have to pay for hosting every month) do I shut down the site altogether and go back to my free blog?

The thing is, I had a lot of plans for the site that got kind of derailed by the pressures of daily posting and never got fully implemented, and in the last couple of months, some other ideas and opportunities have come up.

What kind of ideas and opportunities? How about a redesigned site with new graphics? Branded merchandise like coffee mugs and hats? What about podcasts or even video features? Run, Digger, Run released as a novel, or as an e-book that can be read as a regular novel or in the original daily episode format (with the text cleaned up, of course)? What about Digger short fiction every month or so, along with teasers from the novel in progress? And this is kind of out there, but possible: how about a set of plastic minifigs of the Phoenix Phront?

The problem is, this kind of stuff takes a lot of time and more importantly, attention. Those have been in short supply this past year, and it’s getting harder to justify expending the amount of money and effort I have been for the kinds of results I’ve been getting so far.

But I’m thinking I will give it one more year. Pursuant to that, you’re going to see a new look rolling out over the next few weeks.  And if you give me some feedback on a few questions, I would really appreciate it.

I have not been happy with the font color on the site. At one time I had it fixed, but when I switched back from the dark site after Halloween, the font color got reset, and I’m just now getting it set to a darker, more readable color. But how did you like the dark look over Halloween? Would you like to see that as a permanent feature, or do you prefer it the way it is?

My next book project is not a Digger-verse superhero novel, and I don’t think I’ll be posting the entire thing on-line here the way I have in the past. But there are some options. I could post samples and teasers as the book is being written, for example. I could offer Advanced Reader Access in exchange for donations, letting you see the chapters as they’re finished. Would anyone be willing to pay for that, and how much?

If you remember the chapter heading illustrations I did each week for Hero Go Home, would you be interested in a prestige edition of the book with those illustrations (or similar ones) in full color on every chapter? How much would you be willing to pay for such a book?

I know the navigation on the site is incomplete, and I have some plans to fix it. Is there one specific thing you have a hard time finding that I could make easier?

What do you think about podcasts, or video? What sorts of things would you like to see or hear? Do you enjoy the annual Halloween radio dramas? Would you be interested in more of that, say, the Captain Zero series alluded to in Run, Digger, Run?

Is there anything I’m not offering here that you want and would be willing to pay for? A specific product, like coffee cups, for instance? What about audiobooks?

Is there anything I’m not offering here that you are not willing to pay for, but would bring you back more frequently or would make you spend more time on the site (a Digger-verse wiki, for example)?

Your feedback on any or all of these questions would be most welcome. Thank you and have a happy New Year.

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Super Movie Monday – X-Men

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Tony Frazier

To start off the new year, let’s start a new series: the X-Men.

The Uncanny X-Men were introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963. They had two basic gimmicks to set them apart from other heroes: number one, they were teenagers in a superhero school, and number two, they were mutants (or as Stan Lee put it in his book Son of Origins, “people with something x-tra”). They didn’t get their powers from suits of armor or magic sticks or accidental exposure to cosmic rays or gamma rays or radioactive spiders. Like Lady Gaga, they were just born that way.

They were not a huge hit at first. But in 1975, writer Len Wein teamed with artist Dave Cockrum to introduce a new team of X-Men in a giant size special, whose adventures continued in their revived monthly book written by Chris Claremont. And that was when the book started to turn into the overwhelming, industry-altering juggernaut it later became.

Still, the thing that was risky about X-Men when Brian Singer decided to adapt it into a movie for 20th Century Fox was simply that general audiences weren’t likely to know who the X-Men were. They were not cultural icons in the way that Superman or Batman or even Spider-Man were. So turning these guys into a summer tentpole action picture, especially when super-heroes might be considered box-office poison after the twin flops Batman and Robin and Mystery Men, was a pretty ballsy move.

The film opens with a very subtle blink-and-you’ll- miss-it moment, as the ‘x’ at the end of “20th Century Fox” fades out just a bit slower than everything else. And that subtlety is one of the things that helped make X-Men a success.

After a brief opening title sequence explaining what mutants are, we are taken to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The guards perform the routine move of separating a young teen from his parents. Unfortunately for them, this teen is anything but routine.

As he reaches for his mother, he drags four grown men with him, until he is knocked out by a buttstock to the head. But he leaves behind one seriously mangled metal gate.

Flash forward 60 years or so to find teenaged Marie (Anna Paquin) flirting with her boyfriend as she describes going on an epic roadtrip up to Alaska after she graduates high school. But the flirting turns to terror when she kisses him, and suddenly…

It’s an icky effect that still works pretty well, although the CGI effects really show their age throughout the movie. Her boyfriend collapses with a seizure, and as Marie screams that it wasn’t her fault, we head off to Washington D.C. and a Senate hearing in progress. Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), an expert on mutants, is speaking against a proposed “Mutant Registration Act” that is supported by the grandstanding blowhard Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison).

In the comics, Jean Grey was a founding member of the X-Men under the name Marvel Girl, while Senator Robert Kelly sponsored the Mutant Control Act and was a central figure in the “Days of Future Past” storyline (which started Claremont’s obsession with convoluted time-travel storylines and drove me away from the series). And that’s one of the things that Singer does well in this movie, packing it with in-jokes and references to the comics without making it incomprehensible to an audience that doesn’t know all the references.

On the other hand, this is one of those rare moments when the movie loses all pretense at subtlety, having Senator Kelly wave a list of “known mutants” in a facsimile of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s infamous “known Communists” speech. And thus we are to gather that Senator Kelly is a very bad man, cold-hearted and mean-spirited, despite the fact that his concerns are not entirely misplaced.

Meanwhile, as the hearing continues, we see a bald man in wheelchair leave in pursuit of a mysterious grey-haired man. These two men will become the leaders of their respective sides in the coming conflict. Professor Charles Xavier, played by Patrick Stewart…

And let me take a moment to voice a personal pet peeve. I understand that the reason everybody in the movie pronounces Xavier “Ex-avier” instead of the proper way, with the ‘x’ sounded as a ‘z,’ is to facilitate the shortening of his name to the appropriately superheroic Professor X. But I grind my teeth every time I hear it. Every single time.

And Eric Lensherr, soon to be revealed as Magneto, played by Ian McKellen.

And here in these last few images, we see some of the things the film does really well. The images are all carefully framed and beautifully lit. And the performances, especially McKellen’s, are very good.

Eric hints darkly at his plans to react to the mutant hysteria and warns Charles to stay out of his way. Meanwhile in Canada, Marie has decided to take her trip to the Great White North a little early. She ends up in this rowdy dive in the middle of a shantytown, with a big fighting cage in the middle of it. And the current king of the cage is a fierce-looking dude called the Wolverine, played with nicely understated intensity by Hugh Jackman.

One of the locals steps in to fight him, and though he seems to have the upper hand at first, when the Wolverine deigns to fight back, he dismantles his opponent easily.

Later, a broke and starving Marie is eyeing both the tip jar and Wolverine with equal trepidation, when the guy Wolverine fought demands his money back. When he doesn’t get it, he makes the mistake of bringing a knife to a, um, superpower fight.

This moment is an homage to a bit in the John Byrne run of the comic in which Wolverine uses his two outside claws to bracket the guy’s head, then asks if he wants to “go for three.” The moment is interrupted when the bartender pulls out a shotgun, which doesn’t do him much good. Wolverine slashes it in two, then leaves the bar. Marie goes after him.

Wolverine drives away, then stops the truck. He goes back to the trailer holding his motorcycle, sniffing, and finds Marie hidden under a tarp. After a bit of bluster, he lets her into his cab. They begin a tentative friendship, where she at first calls herself Rogue, and he reveals that his real name is Logan.

Their moment of bonding is cut short when a tree slams into the front of the truck, sending Logan flying out through the windshield. He recovers quickly, his cuts closing before Rogue’s eyes, but then he is pounded into unconsciousness by a huge fanged dude who roars like a tiger.

Rogue, meanwhile, in a bit of intricately constructed suspense, is trapped in the burning camper with an about-to-explode propane tank behind her and this monster dude in front of her. Until these two show up, accompanied by a mysterious sudden blizzard.

The bad guy flees, and Logan and Marie are saved before the camper explodes. The savage dude shows up in some sort of underground headquarters, where he tells Eric that he failed to retrieve his target (in a nice detail, Magneto has a Newton’s Cradle on his desk that consists of five hovering balls with no means of support other than his own powers). Eric clenches Wolverine’s dogtags in his hand as he asks where the target is.

Wolverine is meanwhile unconscious on a table in some advanced medical facility. We see Dr. Jean Grey examine him and use telekinesis to grab a vial.

Once again, this is carefully calibrated to introduce her powers to an audience unfamiliar with the X-Men while not insulting the fans who know her with a lot of unnecessary exposition. Logan comes to as the needle pierces his arm, throws Jean aside and runs out of the room into a bizarre high-tech corridor where he finds leather jumpsuits in display cases and is pursued by whispering voices.

He ducks into an elevator and emerges into a lushly appointed mansion with teenagers running through the halls. More whispering voices manipulate him into an office where he encounters Professor X teaching a class to some teenagers. The Professor tells him that Marie is safe and introduces the people who saved him–Ororo Munro, also known as Storm, and Scott Summers, Cyclops. Wolverine is not impressed.

We then enter the painful exposition portion of the movie, where Xavier tells Logan about Eric/Magneto, about the history of the school and its purpose, to teach mutants to control their abilities so that they can live in harmony with mankind.

During this bit, we get a brief tour of the grounds (with a look at the X-Men’s stealth plane) and we see Rogue in class with her fellow students, just about all of whom are (in another bit of throwaway brilliance) characters from the comics, whether they are named or not. For instance, here we see Rogue with Jubilee and Kitty Pryde.

Kitty does get a moment to demonstrate her powers in Xavier’s office (she is also referenced, though not by name, in Kelly’s Senate floor speech), but Jubilee is a complete mystery. Unless you read the comics and recognized her yellow outfit, you wouldn’t have any idea who she was or what she could do.

Rogue also gets a flirty introduction to earnest young Bobby Drake, who makes her a rose out of ice. Awww…

As Xavier finishes telling Logan all the stuff the audience needs to know about the backstory, he offers Logan a deal: stay long enough for Xavier to figure out why Magneto tried to have him kidnapped, and in exchange, Xavier will try to penetrate Logan’s amnesia. He has no idea of anything that happened more than 15 years ago.

And that’s where we’ll leave it until next week. I was going to try to do this in two weeks, but I have too many screen caps, so I’m splitting it into three (this also has the advantage of giving me more time to gather the rest of the X-movies I don’t have yet).

See you next time.

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Out of the Vault – Batman #247

Posted on December 29, 2012 by Tony Frazier

So with New Year’s coming up, as well as Christmas just past, here’s a combined issue of Batman to enjoy. Batman #247, dated Feb. 1973, bucks the trend of its fellow DC Comics of the period with long main features followed by short back-up tales.  Instead, this issue begins with a short 6-pager titled “Merry Christmas,” by Denny O’ Neil and illustrated by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano.

Irv Novick was one of those DC guys, talented but unspectacular. In general during the 60’s and 70’s (at least to me), Marvel may have had the energy, but DC had the superior artists. Sure, Marvel had John Buscema and John Romita, with talented inkers like Sinnott and Giacoia, but once you got past that, their bench was really thin, filled with dudes like Sal Buscema and George Tuska and Don Heck and Rich Buckler and inkers like Vince Colletta.

DC, on the other hand, was the home of Neal Adams and Jim Aparo and Russ Heath and Joe Kubert (father of Andy and Adam and founder of the Kubert School), as well as the Swan/Anderson team on Superman. And their second-tier guys, like Dick Dillin and Irv Novick and Bob Brown, could draw circles around Tuska and Heck. Which is not to mention the freelancers who bounced back and forth between the two companies, like Infantino and Andru/Esposito and Kane.

The story opens with a man and a woman carrying a newborn child, seeking shelter from a snowstorm (cause this is a Christmas story, after all). Unfortunately, they’ve picked the wrong house to seek shelter in, because the homeowner is being held hostage by crook Chimp Manners, who has stolen a vial of top secret experimental nerve gas. But before he can kill the intruders, he is interrupted by Batman, who found Manners’s crashed helicopter and deduced he would hole up in the nearest available shelter.

Unfortunately, Manners pulls out the vial of gas, and unlike Captain America, Batman isn’t willing to risk the vial being opened. Instead, he surrenders to Manners, who orders everyone out of the house at gunpoint.  He plans to hole up in the house a while, and he doesn’t want their dead bodies stinking up the place. But before he can pull the trigger…

Batman decks Manners and recovers the vial, and the homeowner (an amateur astronomer) informs Batman that the mysterious flash was in fact a star that suddenly flared for no reason. One Christmas miracle made to order, which leads into our second story, “…And a Deadly New Year,” which takes up the rest of the book. This one is also written by O’Neil, with Giordano doing both the pencilling and inking this time.

It starts literally moments after the previous story, as Batman drags Manners to his Batmobile for delivery to jail. Only on the way back to Gotham, the Batmobile is run off the road by a truck carrying Christmas trees, and we see that, for this one story anyway, Batman is not driving a generically sporty black car, but is in fact driving a real-world model, a Ford Mustang Mach 1.

With Manners dragging on the handcuff, Batman is overpowered by the thugs, and Manners makes his escape, along with the vial and Manners’s mysterious employer. The unconscious Batman is left alive however, and still masked, because, well, that would turn this into a completely different kind of story. To add insult to injury, they steal Batman’s car (on the plus side, there are at least 6 of them, so they’re very uncomfortable).

When Batman comes to, he checks the abandoned truck for clues and finds an invitation to a New Year’s Eve Gala at Gotham’s Citytop Room. He returns to the city, where Commissioner Gordon tells him someone has made a terrorist threat: unless Boss Halstrom is released from prison by midnight on New Year’s Eve, they will release the gas in the city, killing thousands if not millions (Manners earlier said the vial could kill half the city).

Problem is, they can’t release Halstrom even if they wanted to. He has just had a heart attack and died in prison, which the terrorist is sure to consider just a ruse (take that, all you serial and comic book heroes whose plans revolve around planting fake newspaper stories).

So Batman calls in Alfred and Robin, and gives them assignments: Robin is supposed to find out who in the police department leaked the news of Batman’s route back to the city, and Alfred is to look for connections between Boss Halstrom and the guests at the New Year’s Eve gala. Batman, meanwhile, visits Dr. Harris Blaine, a scientist he worked with during his battle with Ra’s Al Ghul. Blaine can tell him little about the nerve gas, except it’s super potent and might smell like violets.

Batman’s next stop, disguised as thug Matches Malone, is an underworld hangout where he finds Chimp Manners regaling another thug with the story of how he beat the Batman. Batman offers some editorial comment with his fist, and Chimp shoots out the lights. And then…

Say what you will about the relative merits of Marvel and DC during the 70’s, but this sequence of panels is a perfect example of what DC did well that Marvel didn’t even attempt. Marvel was all about big, colorful conflicts. Even when they brought in groups like the Maggia, their mob bosses tended to be cartoonish figures like Hammerhead and the Kingpin (in his Spider-Man days). Marvel didn’t–couldn’t–do this kind of street-level noir until Frank Miller took over Daredevil: The Man Without Fear in the 80’s.

Manners is dead, shot by his buddy, so Batman’s search for Manners’s boss has come to a literal dead end. Robin, meanwhile, finds an abandoned wiretap in police headquarters, with no clues as to who put it there. It’s up to Alfred to find the crucial clue. Three millionaires set to attend the party have all recently received mysterious payments from an unknown source. Batman deduces that one of them must have been paid off by Boss Halstrom to secure his release.

But which one?

There’s no way to find out, and no time to evacuate the city, especially given the panic that will ensue. So Batman plans a sting, which requires Robin to give up on parties with his college friends to mix up chemicals in the Batcave. On New Year’s Eve, Bruce Wayne attends the gala (now described as being in the Skytop Room), where he sits with the three suspects, waiting for the ball to drop.

Batman isn’t just a master of detection and combat, he’s a master quick-change artist as well, changing out of his tux in into his Batman suit in seconds without anybody even noticing. Batman deduces from Ennet’s glance toward the window that the vial is out there, and sure enough, it’s attached to the ball that is even now dropping toward the crowd below. Batman rides the ball down and dismantles the gas bomb with only seconds to spare. Happy New Year!

All in all, it’s a decent enough story, pretty typical for a Batman story from the 70’s. Batman works alone; Robin is an older teen who helps out when needed, but otherwise seems to be his own man. Batman is tough and smart, but not even close to invincible. And he mainly fights street-level criminals, not costumed super-powered masterminds. Even his own colorful Rogues Gallery appears only occasionally. This is not the Batman of the movies, with the right bizarre gadget always at hand, or Frank Miller’s Batman, the master strategist who always knows how to exploit every situation. He gets beat up, he adjusts, he triumphs.

I think other creators have done really good variations on Batman since, but I’ve got to say, I have a soft spot in my heart for this Batman.

Happy New Year.

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Holiday Movie Monday – Santa Claus (1959)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Tony Frazier

If you’ll remember before I skipped last week, I had been revisiting lost treasures of my childhood: movies I had been intrigued by the commercials for, but never seen, or movies I had seen part of, but not the whole thing. This week’s featured movie is a slightly different beast–a movie I know I saw in its entirety, more than once, but in later years came to think I was misremembering it, because it was too bizarre.

Turns out I was remembering it just fine.

Santa Claus was produced in Mexico in the late 1950’s and then dubbed and released to America in 1960 by independent producer K. Gordon Murray. Back in the days before multiplexes and wide 1000+ screen releases, it wasn’t unusual to see small independent releases show up for a weekend or two, then disappear. Santa Claus came out every year or two at Christmastime, grabbed as many dollars as it could from parents looking to dump their kids off for a couple of hours so they could get stuff done, and then disappeared until next time. The movie was pretty bad, so repeat business wasn’t a real option.

But like comic books in those days, the way Santa Claus was able to make money (and according to Wikipedia, it made a lot of money) was that by the time it came back around, for every kid who’d aged out of the target range, there were 1.4 kids who’d aged into it. And once they got into the theater, they were in for a boring, but surreal ride.

The movie opens with a narrator (apparently Murray himself) telling us about Santa Claus, who lives in a magical castle in space, floating above the North Pole. And yes, we actually see three space castles floating up there.

You may be wondering exactly where space castles fit into Santa’s narrative. Well, here’s the deal. From what I’ve read on the web, Santa wasn’t really a thing in Mexico. The elaborate details of the Santa myth–the North Pole, the elves, the reindeer–are apparently a distinctly American development. So although director and co-writer Rene Cardona knew the broad outlines of Santa–jolly fat man in a red suit who delivers toys on Christmas Eve–he relied on his own imagination to fill in a lot of the blanks. And at that time–between the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the first manned space launch in 1961–space was on everybody’s minds.

For instance, moments after we’re introduced to Santa (who laughs a little too damn much), we are given a sort of tour of his toy factory, staffed by children from around the world. First, we see kids from “Africa,” dressed in loincloths with bones tied in their hair, dancing to drums (as Santa mimes playing the organ). Then we’re introduced to kids from various nations like Russia, England and “the Orient,” who all sing songs in their native languages.

But not Christmas songs. The English kids sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” the American kids (who are not only tone-deaf but also dressed as cowboys) sing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and the Mexican kids sing “La Cucaracha.” This part of the movie is virtually unwatchable, the camera locked and static, the kids frozen in place for the most part, the singing tuneless, and it continues for over nine minutes! That’s like a tenth of the movie spent on singing even worse than Burt Reynolds’s in  At Long Last Love.

After the singing finally ends, one of the kids bring Santa a toy he made, a toy devil. Santa’s a little disturbed by the imagery, and as the kid demonstrates the way it spins, suddenly we’re in Hell, watching a devil dance.

Yes, this is really happening. Other devils join in, when suddenly, the number is interrupted by the booming voice of Lucifer, who orders the devil, named Pitch, to Earth to thwart Santa Claus’s mission of goodwill. If Pitch fails, he will be forced to eat ice cream.

So Pitch heads for Earth to corrupt all the Earth’s children, although like Godzilla and Tokyo, Pitch seems to confine his activities to Mexico City. Both Santa and Pitch have their eyes on a distinct group of kids–rich little Billy, who only wants his parents to pay attention to him, poor little Lupita, who only wants a doll, and three little punks whom Pitch convinces to turn against Santa.

Santa and his child assistants watch the Earth through a viewing device that consists of an eye on a stalk. It bears a disturbing resemblance to the alien devices in War of the Worlds, which was released in 1953, six years before this movie was made.

There is also a control console that looks like a creepy human face, with moving lips that can repeat what is being said on Earth.

Santa watches as little Lupita attempts to steal a doll from a street vendor by unobtrusively sticking it underneath her sweater.

The little girl playing Lupita is cute, but spends the entire movie in this wide-eyed daze. Eventually, even though Pitch tempts her as hard as he can, Lupita decides not to steal the doll and returns it. Santa is pleased.

Then he looks in on little Billy, who is dreaming about coming down to the living room and finding two giant presents that contain his parents. But the blue lighting with harsh spotlights on the parents’ faces, as well as the giant coffin-like boxes, make Billy’s parents look kind of like zombies.

Next Santa goes back to look in on Lupita again, and these people are poor. They live in one room, with a bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Another light hangs over Lupita’s father’s workbench, but it is shaded by a cone of newspaper. They’re poor.

Pitch tries once more to corrupt Lupita by making her dream about a dozen giant dolls coming to life and dancing around her in a field of fog. The girl playing Lupita looks a little terrified to be at the center of the action.

Small wonder that Lupita refuses when the dolls demand she steal them. I would, too.

Lupita wakes from the dream and tells her mom about it. Mom tearfully recommends that they pray for help from Santa, even though her face shows that she knows Lupita will end up with nothing. Which is stupid, because while she’s saying this, she is sewing on an old sewing machine in their one little room. Mom could sew together a stuffed doll for Lupita easily. Lupita says she will write Santa a letter asking for two little dolls, and give one to Baby Jesus.

Then we get a letter-writing sequence, as kids around the world write letters to Santa, which end up being dumped in the incinerator at the post office. However, instead of being burned, the letters are carried up to space in the updraft, where they rain onto Santa like a huge pile of tribbles from a quadrotriticale bin.

Santa reads three of the letters. One he drops into a slot marked with “telling the truth” or “honest” or something (I don’t read Spanish). Another (written by one of the three punks working for Pitch) he drops into the “liar” slot for future punishment. And one, asking for a baby brother,  get dropped into a slot marked “stork” (who lives in Paris, BTW–City of Love, donchaknow).

Now it’s finally time to get ready to go.  Santa does a little last-second spot-reducing with one of those vibrating weight-reducing belts, then checks himself in one of his test chimneys to make sure he fits. Then he visits his assistant, Merlin the Magician.

Say what? Yeah, apparently the reason nobody sees Santa coming or going is that he drugs them into unconsciousness with magic powder. Merlin mixes up the drugs in a radioactive urn, and also gives Santa a flower which makes him invisible when he smells it. Santa gets all the good drugs.

Next he visits the Key Man (in the English version–he’s apparently actually Vulcan, God of Smiths), who gives him a magic key that will open any lock in the world.

Cause that’s what this movie really needed, a little shirtless hairy beefcake for the mommies. Thus properly armed and equipped, Santa supervises the loading of his sleigh for the night’s trip. But first, he has to wind up the reindeer.

Cause seriously, where were they going to get reindeer in Mexico? The deer begin to twitch and shoot steam out their nostrils like Bio Booster Armor Guyver.

Okay, maybe not that extreme, but I’m desperately trying to inject some excitement into this thing. The kids load the packages onto the sleigh, and Santa mentions that he has to hurry, because he can only make the trip to Earth and back during that one night, and if he gets trapped, he’ll have nothing to eat. In Santa’s castle, they only eat pastries, while on Earth, they eat animals and plants and smoke and alcohol (the best line in the movie, right there). One of the Russian kids suggests (in Russian, which is a nice touch in the movie as well–the foreign kids speak in their own tongues, but Santa still understands them, like C-3PO and R2-D2) that Santa replace the reindeer with modern spacecraft, but Santa dismisses the idea that he use “Spootniks” to get around.

So Santa’s on his way, and evil devil Pitch is right there to stop him. “First stop, Mexico City!” says the narrator. Pitch begins his assault of evil by moving a chimney so Santa can’t go down it. But  Santa has the magic door opening key, so he just goes in the front door (and drugs the kids who hear him with magic dust, prompting him to make this really creepy smile).

Then Santa visits Billy’s house, where he drugs a sleeping Billy into waking, but believing it’s all a dream or something. Billy clutches his boot and asks if Santa loves him. Santa tells Billy that his parents still love him, they just don’t show it. Then he visits the fancy restaurant where Billy’s parents are celebrating, and gives them a couple of smoking cocktails meant to make them remember what’s really important. The mom is all, like, “Oh yeah, we have a kid. We should visit him,” and Billy’s story ends happily, at least for now.

Pitch’s next gambit is to appear inside a house and use his fiery breath to make the fire too hot to come down. Then he blows on the doorknob to make it super-hot.

This and the wind-up reindeer bit are the two parts I remembered from my childhood that led me to search this out, actually. Anyway, Santa sneaks in through a window and fires a toy missile that sticks in Pitch’s butt like a big tranquilizer dart. But Pitch gets the last laugh; after he fails to steal the sleigh, he secretly cuts a hole in Santa’s bag of drug powder, causing him to lose both it and the flower.

Meanwhile, the three punk kids who were recruited by Pitch fail in their attempt to kidnap Santa like those three creepy monster kids in Nightmare Before Christmas and end up going home to find their shoes full of coal. Pitch, frustrated by their failure, sets them to fighting amongst themselves.

Now comes the big finale, where Santa, entering a large estate, encounters a bulldog named Dante (pronounced by Pitch to rhyme with “shanty”). Pitch sets the dog loose, and Santa, without his dust or flower, is forced into a tree. Pitch then has the homeowners call the police and the fire department. His evil scheme: with dawn approaching, Santa will not only be exposed, but will also be trapped on Earth at sunrise, and without sufficient pastry, will starve to death. That’s if they don’t just shoot him as a prowler. Evil.

But Santa manages to shout loud enough for the kids in the space castle to hear him. They fetch Merlin, who helps Santa escape (and during the conversation, one kid mentions that Santa has already been to Asia, Europe and Australia, and is on his last stop in Mexico–remember when the narrator said Mexico was the first stop? This movie lies!) Pitch is foiled. Santa says he has one last stop to make.

Lupita’s dad returns home, having not found a job all night, when Lupita wakes up and says Santa spoke to her in her dream and delivered a doll. He left it just outside. Lupita’s mom tries to tell her it was just a dream, but Lupita runs to the door, opens it and brings in this ginormous doll that’s almost as big as she is.

Lupita’s mom crosses herself and they say a prayer of thanks to Santa as he flies back into space.

And that’s the end. Alternately weird and boring, it makes me wonder what a 1950’s Japanese Santa Claus movie would have looked like. I shudder to think of it, but not in an entirely bad way.

Have a Merry Christmas and let’s all look forward to next year.

Oh yeah, if you really must, you can watch the film on-line here. There will be commercials to relieve the boredom.

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Out of the Vault – Justice League of America #110

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Tony Frazier

Sorry for the late update (and the missed update last week), but not only has it been hard to find a good Christmas story to cover, but the holidays in general tend to screw with my mind. I have so much less free time than usual, and even when I am free, the pressure of all the things I have to do just fuzzes my mind out so that I can’t concentrate on anything.

But I can’t just let the holiday go by without a comic, so here you go: Justice League of America #110, the April 1974 issue that apparently came out just before Christmas 1973, written by Len Wein with art by Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano. I won’t actually be covering the entire issue, because as you can see from the cover above, it was a 100-page Super-Spectacular (costing only 50 cents).

The Super-Spectaculars were a fixture at DC in those days, attempting to counter Marvel’s growing market share by offering more pages per product. The way they managed to afford it was by filling most of the book with reprints. Most would have only one new story, and that one was often pretty short, followed by 4 or 5 Golden and Silver Age reprints. This Super-Spectacular was different, in that it not only had a full 20-page lead story, but it only had two back-up stories–a multi-part Justice Society adventure from 1948 titled “The Plight of a Nation!” and the multi-part JLA adventure “Z As in Zatanna–and Zero Hour!” But since neither of them were Christmas stories, I’m only going to concentrate on the lead feature, “The Man Who Murdered Santa Claus!”

Batman and Superman meet to attend a charity function with a man dressed as Santa Claus, when he is killed by a bomb.

Hmm… Not only is his costume not singed in the least, but there’s a piece of paper in his hand that is similarly not singed at all. You’d think the blast would have damaged it at least a little. It’s almost as though the note was placed there after he was killed.

But neither Batman nor Superman see anyone, and Batman, the World’s Greatest Detective(TM) (not) ignores that piece of evidence (to be fair, so does the script–I think it’s just artistic carelessness). Instead, the two heroes use their Justice League communicators to summon their fellow heroes, most of whom are too busy enjoying their vacations to notice the summons. Red Tornado, Green Arrow and Black Canary all respond, however. And then there’s this guy.

If your first introduction to Green Lantern was the brilliant Justice League animated series, then you may not know that John Stewart started out as a substitute Green Lantern. He was part of a rash of Black Second-String Substitute Heroes introduced during the 1970’s by both Marvel and DC, a group that also included James Rhodes (the Black Second-String Iron Man) and Bill Foster (the Black Second-String Goliath, known as Black Goliath).

Anyway, after a couple of pages in which the other JLA members get over their initial distrust of Black Substitute Green Lantern (or BS Green Lantern, if you will), they all head off to St. Louis, which Batman has deduced from the note is where the bomb will go off. BS Green Lantern uses his ring to enchant the key so that it will glow when it gets close to the lock it is supposed to open, and then Red Tornado uses his super-speed to carry the key through the entire city (yes, Superman could probably do it faster, but you have to give the other heroes something to do).

Red Tornado gets a hit from an abandoned tenement, so the heroes gather outside. Before they can enter, they are accosted by urchins begging for spare change as if this were a Dickens story (although to be fair, New York in the 1970’s was so dysfunctional that begging street urchins may have been a regular fixture). BS Green Lantern wants to use his ring to give the kids food or something, but Green Arrow stops him by telling him the Guardians of OA won’t allow him to use the ring like that. Yes, the ultra-liberal, anti-establishment Ollie Queen, that Green Arrow.

The heroes enter the tenement and…

Yes, that’s right. They all fall in, including the three who can fly, although that last panel sort of explains why it might have happened to Superman, at least. Under the radiation of a red sun, Superman becomes just a normal person. Still doesn’t explain BS Green Lantern and Red Tornado falling in, though.

Superman volunteers to be the one to take one for the team. They fling him up into the miniature red sun, which explodes, vaporizing him. The next death trap involves a calliope spewing poison gas (yellow gas, so BS Green Lantern is once more helpless to stop it). Black Canary sacrifices herself for the team this time, at which the mysterious person running the deathtraps reports to his supervisor, the master villain behind this month’s plot. His name is The Key. You’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of him; they can’t all be Lex Luthor.

Successive deathtraps involve giant Christmas tree balls which claim Batman and Green Arrow, and giant tin soldiers (yellow) which overwhelm BS Green Lantern and Red Tornado, the final two Leaguers. However, at the last moment, they fall through a secret door into a secret tunnel.

Meanwhile, the Key is gloating over his victory (the camera angle having obscured the last-second escape). He then recounts what has happened between his last appearance in JLA #63 and now.

So that thing on his head is actually permanent and not just a goofy hat? Also, I think it’s funny that he calls the judge who ruled in his favor “too lenient.” Anyway, as he’s gloating, all of the Leaguers appear, having all been saved mysteriously at the last moment. Who saved them? Why, the Key’s chief technician, Key-Man #1, who is revealed to be The Phantom Stranger.

But The Key decides that he will have the last laugh by setting off the bomb and destroying part of the city. He activates a force field to keep the heroes from stopping him (a yellow force field, natch) and dives into a secret escape tunnel. The Justice Leaguers use the remaining moments before the explosion to evacuate the neighborhood and then…

I remember as a kid thinking that solution was pretty cheap on two levels. Number one, BS Green Lantern had certainly done a good deed, but he’d had to do some real legal hair-splitting to justify it, which I didn’t look for in a hero. Heroes did what they did because it was the right thing to do. Running in semantic circles to justify it after the fact seemed weaselly and small.

Also, the way he instantly and effortlessly not only erased the consequences, but improved on the initial situation, made the rest of the story a waste of time. After all, if the bomb’s detonation actually made things better (by giving BS Green Lantern an excuse to improve the tenements), then why had they spent 13 pages trying to stop it?

But it’s not over yet. There’s another page still to go…

Holy crap, that’s a hideous costume. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it much more now. It’s the striped tights which get to me. But notice that in 1974, the generic “Happy Holidays” had not yet penetrated the culture, so that in the final panel, you have Superman breaking the fourth wall and wishing all of us (like I wish all of you) a Merry Christmas.

Tomorrow’s Super Movie Monday may actually come out on Tuesday, since it is a Christmas movie. And after that, who knows?

***

Oh yeah, before I forget, one more thing. You’ll notice that this story pays a lot of attention to Green Lantern,  both spending a full page setting up John Stewart’s inclusion and having every death trap save one feature yellow perils so that the ring doesn’t work. A glance at the credits in the splash page above includes a “special thanks to Green Lantern fan Duffy Vohland.”

I didn’t recognize the name, but I got curious, wondering if he had become one of the well-known mega-fans like T.M. Maple. So I looked him up and found several references to him, not as a fan, but as a pro. He became an artist at Marvel briefly, before dying young in 1982.

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Super Movie Monday – Return of the Vampire

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Tony Frazier

Once again, we continue with the lost treasures of my youth, this time with Columbia’s Return of the Vampire from 1943. I don’t know whether I’m getting nostalgic because I turned 50, or if I just didn’t get enough Halloween this year (weird, since at around October 15, I was feeling pretty tired of Halloween stuff), but here it is.

This is one of those movies.

People who came of age after 1980 or so won’t have nearly as many of these as kids of my generation, so here’s the deal. It’s 1969, and you’re flipping through the channels, wondering if anything good’s on–doesn’t take long, because there are only four channels–and you come upon this movie, and there’s a werewolf. Cool. And the werewolf is some sort of henchman to Bela Lugosi in a tux and cape, obviously Dracula. Except nobody calls him Dracula, and instead of Prof. Van Helsing, there’s this imperious British woman playing an organ who very calmly stands up to him and drives him away.

So you sit there mezmerized as the rest of the movie plays out, because you’ve seen all the Universal monsters, but now there’s this Dracula-that’s-not-Dracula that’s even cooler than those other movies, because there’s not only vampire and werewolf, but also bombs.

And it’s like there’s this whole other universe, maybe, of cool-ass monster movies you’ve never seen where the people aren’t cowering or fleeing, but fighting the monsters toe-to-toe, like Batman, and you want to see more, only you don’t even know what the name of this movie is, because you came in toward the end, and you can’t find the TV Guide. You have to wait until it shows again, only it never does. So it becomes this thing you tell your friends about over the years, this cool movie that you only got to see a part of, and you don’t know the title. You start to doubt that you’re even remembering it correctly, until one day, 30 years later, somebody finally knows the movie you’re talking about.

One of those.

The movie opens with a block of text over footage of a man in a cape menacing a frightened woman.

The sentence is incomplete, because the next thing you see on screen is the title, which completes the thought. It’s like the movie feels the need to blurb itself before it starts.

The story opens on a fog-shrouded cemetery in England in 1918 and doesn’t waste any time with mysterious omens or any of that clap-trap. Right up front, we see a man with his face covered in fur who enters a crypt. A coffin opens, and a man gets out, obviously a vampire. The wolfman is the vampire’s servant and spy; his name is Andreas, and he obviously likes his job.

So the vampire decides to head out and do his business, and even though we know who it is because of the one-sheet outside the theater (or the pic on the cover of the DVD box, if you will), the movie plays coy with his identity, only showing him from behind. He spreads his cape as if to transform into a bat, but only disappears into the fog.

The one thing conspicuously missing from this vampire movie is any sign of a bat. Part of me wants to write that off to a low budget, but then I think of the bats in the Universal movies, those awful flopping puppets on wires, and I think that maybe they deliberately chose to forego the bats so as not to dilute the air of menace and mystery with obvious fakery.

Meanwhile, we track in on a mansion in a nicely executed miniature shot where we meet Dr. Jane Ainsley and her mentor, Professor Walter Saunders. Dr. Ainsley runs a small clinic where she has been presented with an unusual case: a woman with all the symptoms of anemia, but her blood is perfectly normal. Before they can get too far into the case, two kids burst into the lab: Ainsley’s son John and Saunders’s granddaughter Nicki.

The two are obviously good friends. After the kids are sent to bed, Saunders and Ainsley visit the patient, who is babbling and sensitive to light.

Notice the way her eyes are dilated. Saunders mentions it in relation to her being under some kind of hypnosis, and the effect is suitably creepy. Also, on her neck you can barely make out the discreet fang marks. Like all of the 30’s vampire movies, there are never any fangs on display nor any blood, just the subtle tiny pinpricks on the neck.

The woman screams at someone no one else can see and dies. Saunders is disturbed and stays up all night doing research.

The illustration is obviously of Bela Lugosi, and the book is titled The Supernatural and Its Manifestations. The next day, Saunders tells Ainsley about the author Armand Tesla and, after examining the marks on the dead victim’s neck, declares that she was the victim of a vampire.

Ainsley scoffs at the idea, until they discover young Nicki unresponsive in her bed, with the same marks on her neck. Saunders gives Nicki an emergency transfusion, and then, following the instructions in Tesla’s book, they search the local cemeteries until they find the vampire’s coffin. To reassure Ainsley that they’re not about to commit simple murder, Saunders uses a mirror to show Ainsley the reflection.

Simple, but effective. They drive an iron spike (it looks like a really big straight pin) through the vampire’s heart. Andreas appears and tries to stop them, but as the spike hits home, Andreas collapses and turns human, the vampire’s hold on him broken. Ainsley immediately takes pity on Andreas and demands that they help him.

22 years later, Sir Frederick Fleet of Scotland Yard closes a manuscript by Saunders describing the whole affair. Apparently, Saunders has recently died and the manuscript has been discovered among his belongings.

Fleet argues with an older Dr. Ainsley, now addressed as “Lady Jane,” that the story cannot possibly be true. Ainsley not only confirms it, but adds that the vampire they killed was none other than Armand Tesla himself, who had apparently been twisted by his own research or something. Fleet grimly states that if the incident actually happened, she may be an accessory to murder. He demands they exhume the body for examination. Lady Jane returns home, where she meets her son John and his fiancee, Nicki.

Lady Jane tells John privately about the events of 1918, which Nicki does not remember and which they have kept hidden from her. Lady Jane worries that Nicki may not handle it well if she learns the truth. They are interrupted by air raid sirens as Nazi planes make a bombing run.

Later, two comedy relief workmen enter the cemetery to rebury the bodies that have been unearthed by the bombing. They are startled to discover one with an iron spike through his chest.

They figure the spike is shrapnel and pull it out so they can get the coffin closed (which makes you wonder how Ainsley and Saunders had closed the coffin when they buried him before). The body gasps as the spike is removed, so the workmen hurriedly close the casket and bury it.

But not apparently in its original spot. When Lady Jane and Sir Frederick arrive to exhume Tesla’s body, all they find is a crater. Sir Frederick decides to let the matter drop, since there’s no murder without a body.

Later that night, Lady Jane sends Andreas (who has recovered from the trauma of being a mind-controlled werewolf and since become her assistant in the clinic) off to meet up with a German scientist who has defected to England. Andreas is to meet the boat he’s secretly arriving on and give Dr. Hugo Bruckner his new identification papers.

However, on the way, Andreas hears a mysterious voice in the forest and is confronted by a face from his past, and the movie finally reveals the face of Armand Tesla (which is no revelation since we saw the illustration in the book earlier).

For a guy who has been buried with a stake in his heart, Tesla seems to know everything that’s been going on pretty well. He says, in fact, that he caused Saunders’s recent death through a curse, and will now take revenge on Lady Jane and her loved ones with Andreas’s help. Andreas is defiant, saying Tesla no longer has power over him, but Tesla overcomes his will, and Andreas transforms once more into his wolfman form.

And this is one fascinating thing about the film; it takes a very rationalistic approach to the supernatural. There’s nothing about vampirism being a curse spread from one vampire to another, or lycanthropy being a curse cast by magic gypsies. “Tesla’s morbid thirst for knowledge turned upon him” is all the explanation we get for how he became what he was. Andreas is turned by the force of Tesla’s will, and the victim’s state in the beginning was compared to hypnosis. It’s as if all the manifestations of the supernatural come down to the force of the human mind. More on this later.

Andreas kills Bruckner and his companion and gives his identification to Tesla. Tesla then shows up at a party Lady Jane is giving. When he meets grown-up Nicki, he gives her the heavy, heavy rape eyes as he kisses her hand, and she seems fascinated by him. Later on, we see her furtively looking across the room at him as he is holding forth on the powers of hypnosis. “Control the mind, and you control the body,” he says as she looks at him like she’s got a body in mind that he should be controlling.

Lady Jane gives “Bruckner” a tour of her lab, and though the lore about a vampire having to be invited in is never mentioned, she does say that he should assume he has free run of all the buildings on the grounds, which he accepts with a smile.

Later that night, Nicki is summoned from her bed by Tesla’s mental command. Nina Foch, who plays Nicki, looks really good in her nightgown, and apparently director Lew Landers agreed, because she’s going to spend pretty much the rest of the movie in it. You know what else Lew Landers apparently likes? Fog. Lots of it, even indoors, like Dr. Ainsley’s lab.

Apparently, Tesla just takes it with him wherever, like Pig-Pen from Peanuts. Tesla gloats that he will make Nicki his bride and take her back to Rumania with him to live forever, but first, “There are many things I will make you do for me.” I’ll bet there are.

The next morning, Nicki has been bitten. Lady Jane, having been to this rodeo before, immediately rolls up her sleeve for an emergency transfusion (blood type not being as much of a thing in the 40’s, I guess). She then tracks down the men who reburied Tesla’s body, and is not surprised when the spot they lead her to is an empty hole in the ground.

Back at the mansion, John is getting ready for his first concert (he’s a conductor for an orchestra)  when Nicki enters his room looking sultry and hungry. She can’t stop staring at his throat, and as she moves in to kiss him (and possibly more) we see Tesla glaring in through the window. When Lady Jane discovers John unconscious with bite marks on his neck, she realizes things are getting personal.

Meanwhile, Sir Frederick has his suspicions about Andreas, and details a couple of men to follow him, and one of them is a familiar face.

William Austin, who not only appeared as Alfred in the Columbia serial Batman, but also seems to have inspired Alfred’s modern look. In fact, this movie was released the same year as Batman.

The two men attempt to detain Andreas, but he wolfs out and gets away. But he drops a parcel containing laundry for Dr. Bruckner, who just so happens to also be on Sir Frederick’s radar. You see, Sir Frederick was given a description of Bruckner as a balding, heavyset man in his 60’s who walks with a limp, none of which apply to the current fellow posing as Bruckner.

So he and Lady Jane go to Bruckner’s rooms, where they discover the mirror turned to the wall. Lady Jane realizes that Bruckner is actually Tesla (although why she never recognized him as the man they staked is beyond me–it was dark, and it was 22 years ago, but you think you’d remember that). When Lady Jane and Sir Frederick confront Andreas, they discover his hand is covered with fur. He taunts them, then flees.

Lady Jane goes to Nicki’s bedside to comfort her. Nicki knows that John was hurt and fears that she did it, though she can’t remember. When she tries to get up and go to him, Lady Jane stops her. And full-on gropes her boob in the process.

And it would be easy to dismiss this as a simple mistake, only instead of immediately moving her hand, Frieda Inescourt kind of walks her fingers up to a safe spot on Nina Foch’s shoulder, turning an accidental grope into a kind of caress. Not saying Frieda Inescourt was a lesbian, just saying Nina Foch was pretty hot in her own way, and it wouldn’t surprise me if everyone on set was feeling it. Also, credit Nina Foch with this: she never breaks character, even a little bit, which is why they were able to save time and money by foregoing a second take.

Lady Jane formulates a plan. She asks to borrow Nicki’s cross and orders the maid to leave Nicki alone in the room. When next we see the cross, it’s protecting John. So the plan involves keeping her son safe while leaving her son’s fiancee defenseless. Lady Jane can be kind of ruthless.

The next scene is the one that stuck in my memory all those years. Lady Jane sits calmly playing the organ, and Tesla appears beside her. He gloats that he will take away everything she loves–Andreas is under his thrall, and Nicki, and John. He will take Nicki away as his bride, but first, he will have her kill John.

Lady Jane replies that she knows he’s bluffing. Nicki didn’t bite John; Tesla did. And as for Andreas, Lady Jane says he still has good in his soul, “good that I have placed there” (she said modestly). Nicki and John and Andreas will be saved, because Tesla is evil, and evil must always lose to “faith and goodness.” And with that, she rips aside the sheet music to reveal a cross-shaped light that shines on Tesla.

He stumbles away and vanishes in a puff of smoke. Damn, Lady Jane turned her organ into a vampire-killing machine!

But once again, there is an oddly rationalistic tone to the confrontation. Despite the Christian iconography, there is never any reference to God or a higher power in reference to the battle between Good(ness) and Evil. Goodness comes not from God, but from the human heart, and Lady Jane has made Andreas good through the force of her own caring. In a movie with Christian overtones, her prideful statement that she had placed good in Andreas’s heart would be hubris. In this movie, it’s simple fact.

Once Tesla vanishes, Lady Jane slumps and almost faints, which in any other movie might make you roll your eyes and say, “Oh yeah, the woman has to swoon.” But remember, Tesla dominates people through the force of his will, so that even though the conversation may have seemed calm, another battle was going on under the surface. At least, that’s my interpretation.

Sir Frederick arrives just in time to see Tesla disappear. He argues that he’s done with Lady Jane’s delays. He is going to take action. As they talk, Nicki comes down the stairs, answering Tesla’s mental summons. Sir Frederick wants to stop her, but Lady Jane forbids it. Nicki must lead them to Tesla’s coffin so he can be killed once and for all. “My way or none at all,” she says to the head of Scotland Yard, and he backs right down and follows her lead. This woman is made of iron.

They follow Nicki to the old Priory Cemetery, where they encounter Tesla and Andreas just as the air raid sirens are sounding. Sir Frederick shoots Andreas, but Lady Jane tells him not to shoot again. Before anything else can happen, a Nazi bomb hits nearby, sending Sir Frederick and Lady Jane to cover. The wounded Andreas picks up an unconscious Nicki and takes her to the abandoned church basement that is Tesla’s new home.

Andreas begs Tesla to heal his wound, but Tesla coldly tells him he is no longer needed and orders him into the corner to die. As Tesla is preparing a coffin for Nicki by scattering dirt in it (the vampire must sleep on his or her “native soil”), Andreas discovers a crucifix in the dirt. He stares at it, and Tesla’s domination is broken. Andreas becomes human again.

He uses the cross to drive Tesla away from Nicki and onto the stairs as another bomb hits. When Andreas comes to, Tesla is still unconscious, and daylight is visible above. Andreas drags Tesla up the stairs and into the daylight. He grabs an iron spike and a brick. Tesla, weakened by the sunlight, cannot resist. Andreas kills Tesla with the spike before succumbing to his gunshot wound.

Nicki watches in horror as Tesla’s face begins to melt.

When Lady Jane and Sir Frederick arrive, they find emergency personnel and Nicki on a stretcher. Lady Jane rushes to her, and it pretty much happens again.

Nina Foch projected a kind of cold image on screen, but Frieda couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Meanwhile, Sir Frederick discovers all that is left of Armand Tesla (and Bela Lugosi’s career).

Lugosi’s biggest role after this would be reprising his role as Dracula opposite Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Otherwise, it would be a long slide into drug addiction and Ed Wood’s circle of oddballs.

When I found the DVD of this, I watched it with some trepidation. So many times, the things we loved as a kid don’t age well. But I still actually like this. It’s obviously a rip-off of the Universal films–Lugosi is just playing Dracula with the serial numbers filed off, and the scene with the dying victim is apparently taken almost word-for-word from Dracula’s Daughter–but it has such a different flavor, with the modern setting and rationalistic approach toward the supernatural. The talking werewolf is cool, people fighting back instead of cowering is cool, the skeptic  and the believer teaming up to fight the evil is cool. It’s like watching a 1940’s episode of X-Files. Only, you know, without the black cancer oil.

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Out of the Vault – Border Worlds

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Tony Frazier

Last week, I discussed Don Simpson’s superhero parody, Megaton Man, which initially ran for 10 issues in the mid-80’s from Kitchen Sink. Starting with issue #6,  Simpson introduced a back-up feature to Megaton Man, a straight science-fiction adventure titled Border Worlds.

Understand, this was really breaking the mold in some ways.  Usually, the back-up feature was in roughly the same genre as the lead feature–comedy with comedy, adventure with adventure. Sometimes you would have a funny back-up feature with a straight adventure lead, but I can’t think of another example of a comedy lead feature with a straight back-up, especially something as cerebral and slow-moving as Border Worlds.

Border Worlds takes place on the space station Chrysalis in the Arcameon system, on the edges of known human space. Jenny Woodlore loses her job on Earth and, having no other prospects, accepts the invitation of her brother, Frank Skylore (he changed his name because ‘Woodlore’ sounded too Earthbound) to come work for him. When she arrives, she learns that Frank is in a dire situation; he is a useless drunk, and his space hauling company has no customers and only one working ship.

Scratch that. Make that no working ships, since he lent his good one to notorious scofflaw Rory Smash, who got it blown up with himself inside.

In this initial episode, Simpson draws Jenny as a kind of generically attractive woman and her brother Frank as a flat-headed Neanderthal. He also uses the odd format of four wide panels stacked atop each other for every page but one.

Jenny finds out Frank has been using money from an inheritance to keep his business afloat. However, half of the money (which is now gone) was technically Jenny’s, so Jenny decides to take over the business to recoup her losses. First order of business: retrieve Rory Smash’s infamous space hot-rod and use it to set up a taxi service between the planets in the system and Chrysalis.

One of their most prominent passengers is Dr. Beecher, who designed Chrysalis. He has been summoned back to the station from his retirement, because certain station personnel are worried that Chrysalis’s orbit is deteriorating. The station has only a few months left before it is destroyed. In the meantime, Lt. Pinsen of station security believes Rory Smash faked his own death, so she decides to go after the hot rod. End of back-ups.

Before we get to the regular series, I want to note two features of the back-ups that would be staples of the series. Number one, not much happens in those first 5 episodes. There’s a lot of set-up, with little pay-off.

And number two, Simpson was never able to settle into a groove. He was always trying to find his style. The four-panel stacked grid was abandoned after the initial episode. Characters evolved. Jenny’s face would grow thinner, with a long straight nose and a cleft chin, while Frank would become less caveman comedy relief, more ruggedly handsome male lead. The fifth episode is entirely narrated from Pinsen’s memoirs.

Megaton Man ended with issue #10, and the next month, Border Worlds debuted as its own book with the cover above. But opening up the issue was an odd experience, because this seemed like a very different book.

It was black-and-white, for one thing, beautifully rendered. That chiaroscuro effect would be continued for much of the series, predating Frank Miller’s Sin City by almost 5 years. Also, that nude shot on the opening splash page meant that the story had moved in a more adult direction. Although it seems disingenuous to call it a splash page, because as it turned out, the entire book is full of very large images. Instead of laying out the book a page at a time, the book is laid out in two-page spreads, with panels very often crossing the gutter.

The large images give the book a larger-than-life feel, but they also cause the story to move very slowly, since there are never more than 5 panels per two pages. Pinsen shuts down Jenny’s business, Jenny remembers having a brief affair with Dr. Beecher, and Pinsen reveals to her superiors that Rory Smash may still be alive.

Issue 2 finally introduces a little action to the plot, as two scientists attempt to flee Earth and are pursued by security forces. There is a lot of exposition delivered during a skyspeeder chase and fight in which Simpson lets his inner Kirby have a little fun.

Also notice the typical two-page layout here. The two scientists, a brother and sister, flee to Chrysalis, where they are supposed to be ferried to a planet by Rory Smash. Instead, they find Jenny, who decides to defy Pinsen and use the hot rod to run the errand, not knowing the system’s entire contingent of Earth’s fleet is looking to stop them (they’re carrying a secret of vital importance).

In issue 3, the group begins their attempt to flee the station, and Simpson has decided to experiment with the rendering. Instead of the lush flowing brushwork of the first issue, or his usual Kurtzman-esque feathering, he does a lot of cross-hatching reminiscent of European artists like  Jose Ortiz. And notice the space suits here; instead of the heavy blacks we’re used to, they’re now open outlines filled with Moebius-style canoodling.

In issue 4, Jenny and friends are forced to hide in the giant defunct engines of Chrysalis, pursued by Pinsen. Meanwhile, Dr. Beecher decides to help save Chrysalis from its impending doom, possibly by repairing and reactivating the engines. However, in issue 5, he meets resistance from Arcameon’s governor, who looks amazingly like a chimp.

In issue 6, the fugitives discover a hidden community of criminals and rebels living in the engines, and Simpson decides to abandon the lush two-page spreads for a rigid four-panel square grid, with the exception of a couple of splash panels and double-page spreads.

At least until issue 7, where the two-page layouts continue. Instead, Simpson is now setting aside his lush, dark ink renderings with occasional zip, and using duotone to create the impression of depth. He also uses a more manga-like approach, with several large establishing shots conveying the environment, making this slow-moving story even more leisurely.

Issue 7 teased the next issue, which was due in October 1987. It never came out. But then almost three years later, in 1990, an issue came out titled Border Worlds: Marooned, which numbered itself Volume 2, Number 1. Also, the cover no longer stated “MATURE READERS,” but now said “ADULTS ONLY.”

The first eleven pages seemed to be drawn soon after issue 7. The layout had changed once again, from two-page layouts back to conventional single-page layouts, but without the rigid grids Simpson had experimented with in the first back-up and issue 6. But the characters look mostly the same, and Simpson is still using the duotone board.

And then, on page 12, out of nowhere, we get a multiple-page sex scene between Jenny and fugitive Drake Revell, with explicit penetration (this issue was published in the same timeframe that Simpson published Wendy Whitebread: Undercover Slut with Eros Comix under the pseudonym Anton Drek, so sex was on his mind).

And after that brief interlude, it’s like years have gone by. The duotone is suddenly gone, and the characters all begin to look weird, distorted and off-model, as if Simpson has forgotten how to draw them. The layouts undergo a change as well, with characters and objects now frequently overlapping the panel borders, which doesn’t happen at all before page 20, but happens on almost every page thereafter.

The issue ends with the fugitives betrayed. The scientists are taken into custody by Lt. Pinsen, while Rory Smash (who is indeed still alive) makes off with his hot rod. Jenny and her brother are abandoned in the underground. Jenny manages to make her way to the surface to ask Dr. Beecher to intercede for Drake, only to discover that Beecher–so far unsuccessful in his attempts to save the station–has left.

And that was it. Although the editorial on the inside front cover promised that Simpson would continue the story at irregular intervals, no more issues ever appeared. Simpson instead retreated back to the safe haven of Megaton Man and other hero parodies before leaving comics altogether.

And on the one hand, it’s too bad, because like D’Arc Tangent, the story was a rare piece of serious science-fiction with adult characters in an industry full of shallow action stories starring overgrown children (and I say that with love).

But on the other hand, it was obvious that Simpson seemed to be in over his head and never really got comfortable enough with the story to just let it flow. With every issue, there always seemed to be a sense of “this is pretty good, but when is it going to kick into high gear and get really good?” And it would have been really disappointing to get to the end and never see that potential realized.

Posted in Out of the Vault | Tagged , | 2 Comments