Back Issue #128 Preview

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© the respective copyright holders. All Rights Reserved.

July 2021

No.128

$9.95 ™

BRONZE AGE TV TIE-INS ISSUE

Volume 1, Number 128 July 2021 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Mark Arnold Terry Austin Cary Bates BeachBumComics. blogspot.com

Douglas R. Kelly Paul Kupperberg Ed Lute Mike Main Ian Millsted BlogintoMystery.com John Francis Moore Richard Morgan Robert Brown Mario Morhain John Byrne Bill Mumy David Campiti The Museum of Ed Catto Jon B. Cooke and Uncut Funk Comic Book Artist Martin O’Hearn Alan Pinion Diversions of a Jim Salicrup Groovy Kind Alex Saviuk Kevin Dooley Scott Shaw!

Mark Evanier Merrie Spaeth Four-Color Joe Staton Shadows 2.0 Ty Templeton Stephan Friedt Steven Thompson Grand Comics Toni Torres Database Robert Greenberger TVObscurities.com Marv Wolfman Heritage Comics Auctions Holly Interlandi Dan Johnson

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BACKSEAT DRIVER: As Seen on TV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 A history-packed editorial exploring the parallel worlds of comic books and television BEYOND CAPES: Dark Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gold Key’s adaptation might as well have been called “Barnabas Collins Comics and Stories” FLASHBACK: Dell and Gold Key Tune In… and Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 The waning days of the traditional television tie-in comic book BACKSTAGE PASS: The Krofft Supershows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Comic books based upon puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft’s Saturday morning shows WHAT THE--?!: Hee Haw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Charlton Comics was pickin’ and grinnin’ over this cornpone TV variety series FLASHBACK: Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The de-evolution of the Saturday morning live-toon in comics BACKSTAGE PASS: Primus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Star Robert Brown and artist Joe Staton dive in to Charlton’s adaptation of this underwater-action show FLASHBACK: Emergency! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Bing-bong-buuuuzzzzz! Charlton’s adaptation of NBC’s rescue-hero show FLASHBACK: The Bionic Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Charlton’s short-lived spinoff of The Six Million Dollar Man WHAT THE--?!: Wonder Woman: Made in Argentina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 A little-known tie-in to the Lynda Carter-starring television hit BEYOND CAPES: V: The Comic Book Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 How the Visitors invaded DC Comics PRO2PRO: Jim Salicrup and Alex Saviuk on Sledge Hammer! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 The writer/artist team recall Marvel’s two-issue tough-cop TV tie-in FLASHBACK: Superboy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 DC’s tie-in to the four-season Salkind-produced syndicated TV show BEYOND CAPES: Lost in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Bill Mumy and David Campiti’s oral history of Innovation’s continuation of the sci-fi classic BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Reader reactions BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $90 Economy US, $137 International, $36 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover montage by Michael Kronenberg. TV series and characters © their respective copyright holders. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2021 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

by

Michael Eury

The Parallel Worlds of Comic Books and Television

Golden and Silver Age TV Tie-ins (top row) Standard’s Television Comics (#5, Feb. 1950) capitalized on the new entertainment medium. Dell’s Howdy Doody #1 (Jan. 1950) was the first TV tie-in comic. This I Love Lucy cover (Four Color #535, Feb. 1954) combined a photo and art. DC’s Sgt. Bilko’s Pvt. Doberman #1 (June–July 1958) featured a traditional comic-art cover, by Bob Oksner. (bottom row) My Favorite Martian #1 (Jan. 1964) added a boxed interior panel to its photo cover. Gold Key’s use of bright colors and geometric patterns brightened many of their ’60s covers, such as Bonanza #17 (Dec. 1965). Dell used a comic-photo cover mix on Dell’s Get Smart #1 (June 1966), with its word balloons. And many of Gold Key’s TV tie-ins opted for painted covers like this one by the prolific George Wilson on Time Tunnel #1 (Feb. 1967).

Howdy Doody © NBC. I Love Lucy and Sgt. Bilko © CBS. My Favorite Martian © MPC. Bonanza © NBC Universal. Get Smart © Paramount. Time Tunnel © 20th Century Television.

2 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue

When the contagion called television infected American households in the 1950s, other media cried foul. To critics and stuffed shirts it was a boob tube, a one-eyed monster that discouraged young and old alike from reading books, its vast wasteland of lowbrow content dumbing down the populace. Hollywood studios deemed it both a substandard storytelling form and a threat to their market, forbidding their contracted talent from taking on television roles. And as the ’80s song reminded us, video killed the radio star.

THE NIFTY ’50s

The proliferation of television certainly didn’t help the comic-book biz’s sales. The industry boom that started in the late 1930s—when coin-strapped Depression-era kids could get 64 pages of thrill-amoment excitement, all in color for a dime—had peaked by the postwar mid-’50s, in part because TV was bringing into the American living room the same type of larger-than-life cowboys and crime-crushers, and kooky cartoon and comedy favorites, that they

found in comic books… only on TV, the pictures moved and the Giants, Star Trek, and The Wild, Wild West. Dell and Gold Key Comics were the primary homes for such TV tie-ins, including numerous characters talked. For free (the cost of a TV set aside)!

So comics publishers began licensing popular television stars funny-animal and cartoon comic books based on animated series and properties, banking that their video visibility would equal as varied as Beany and Cecil, The Flintstones, Mister Magoo, The strong sales. During the Golden Age, comics had done the same Mighty Hercules, and Rocky and His Fiendish Friends [Bullwinkle]. Also with radio shows and movie personalities. Television tie-ins featured visible were Walt Disney’s and Warner Bros.’ cartoon stars, longtime either illustrated covers or photo covers, the latter becoming highly mainstays of comic books. Often TV tie-in titles would be produced desirable in the collector’s market today; occasionally the two were by creators whose artwork is familiar to superhero comic collectors, blended on a single cover, with a photo of a television series’ star such as Bob Oksner (Superman, Mary Marvel) on DC’s The Many juxtaposed against an illustrated background. The interiors, of Loves of Dobie Gillis, Jack Sparling (Eclipso, Green Lantern) drawing course, were always in the traditional comic-book format, its panels DC’s Bomba the Jungle Boy, Steve Ditko (Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor and word balloons featuring either adaptations of TV episodes or Strange) and Dick Giordano (Batman, the Human Target) doing Dell’s Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes, original adventures of the characters. and Jose Delbo (Wonder Woman) on Throughout the ’50s, numerous Dell’s The Monkees. Dan Spiegle, comic books based upon television noted during the BACK ISSUE era series were published (some under for his work on Eclipse’s Crossfire and Dell’s ongoing umbrella title Four DC’s Blackhawk, drew numerous Color), among them Howdy Doody, TV tie-in comics, including Maverick, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Jackie The Rifleman, Sea Hunt, and The Gleason and the Honeymooners, Green Hornet.

Captain Kangaroo, Crusader Rabbit, Harvey Comics, whose friendly Sgt. Bilko’s Pvt. Doberman, Our Miss ghosts and good little witches were Brooks, Circus Boy (featuring future widely viewed on TV animated Monkee Micky Dolenz), and Rin cartoons, embraced the impact of Tin Tin and Rusty. television starting in late 1959 by Conversely, the wildly successful revamping their cover graphics, Adventures of Superman TV series placing the company’s “H” corner brought a comic-book character logo inside the obvious shape to television; the show noted of TV screen. Most of Harvey’s in its closing credits that it was covers featured TV screen-shaped based upon characters appearing “bullets” along the left border in DC’s “Superman magazines.” spotlighting that title’s stars, clearly Also popular was TV’s The Lone signaling to readers that these Ranger, a series starring the Old were “as seen on TV” characters.

West’s legendary masked man Harvey series such as TV Casper who originated in 1933 in radio and Company and Little Audrey TV adventures but soon galloped into Funtime fine-tuned their subjects’ other media, including no end of connections to the boob tube. comic-book publications including As with the George Reevesa spinoff starring his partner, Tonto. starring Superman series of the ’50s, During their TV runs, both Superman the ’60s sometimes turned to comic and Lone Ranger foresaw the advent characters for programming, none of color television and switched from more successfully than executive black and white to color during their producer William Dozier’s Batman, production in the ’50s, even though which took the world by storm in back in the day color TVs were rare early 1966—and spiked the sales and the vast majority of programs of DC’s Batman-starring titles as a were produced in black and white. result (Dozier’s The Green Hornet The television medium itself quickly followed; his pilots for Dick began to play a role in many comic Tracy and Wonder Woman failed books. Notable was DC Comics’ to be green-lighted). Occasional mystery-solver Roy Raymond, TV © TV Guide Magazine. Superman TM & © DC Comics. sight gags and verbal references Detective, who headlined a backup series originating in Detective Comics; in his comics feature, Raymond acknowledging the Batman TV show were inserted into random was the host of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not-like Impossible… But DC adventures, both Batman stories and non-Batman stories, True! television program. Also, TV as a brand became desirable to none more blatant (or wacky) than the cover story of 1966’s some comics publishers. DC’s Real Screen Comics, which started in Batman #183, where the Caped Crusader is apparently slacking 1945 as a vehicle for funnybook adventures of Columbia’s Screen off, watching himself on television. Later that year, the worlds of Gems animated shorts like The Fox and the Crow, retitled itself TV TV and comics collided again as real-life television host Allen Funt Screen Cartoons in 1959. Other publishers piggybacked onto the accidentally exposed Clark Kent’s Superman identity on the How is burgeoning medium to boost otherwise lackluster funny-animal and he going to get out of this? cover of Action Comics #345.

During the era of Batmania and camp humor, television listings humor product, such as Avon’s Television Puppet Show and Standard began to look like your local newsstand’s comic spin rack, with Comics’ Television Comics.

Filmation’s New Adventures of Superman cartoon (which also featured Superboy) garnering strong ratings on Saturday mornings THE SWINGIN’ ’60s Comic-book publishers continued to mine TV Guide and Nielsen and flash-in-the-pan, made-for-TV superheroes Captain Nice and ratings for titles throughout the 1960s. This might’ve been the Mr. Terrific soaring into primetime slots. CBS (home of Superman decade of campy crimefighters and the emergence of the Marvel and Mr. Terrific) in particular took notice of the popularity of Age of Comics, but television tie-ins proliferated alongside superhero superheroes when commissioning Hanna-Barbera Productions to series, among them Bonanza, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies, The create a spate of them for Saturday morning television, including Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Lucy Show, I Spy, The Invaders, Land of the Space Ghost, The Mighty Mightor, The Herculoids, and Birdman. DC’s Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

© the respective copyright holde rs.

peculiar companion to this trio of superheroes, the schoolroom-based sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.

During Charlton’s aforementioned temporary shutdown of 1976–1977, Marvel Comics, of all companies, reentered the kids-comic arena from which they had been absent for some time and acquired the Hanna-Barbera license. Four H-B titles launched Marvel’s initiative: Dynomutt, The Flintstones, ScoobyDoo, and Yogi Bear. The books’ cover graphics cited their source material by trapping the price and issue number inside a TV set shape; each cover included a border roster of headshots showcased inside a filmstrip design. A character-loaded Laff-A-Lympics title was added, plus various other publications including a short-lived TV Stars series with rotating features. Mark Evanier was the main creative force behind Marvel’s H-B product, which featured contributions from comic-book creators Paul Norris, Scott Shaw!, and Alex Toth, among others.

As Marvel’s market presence strengthened throughout the ’70s, beyond the Hanna-Barbera titles the House of Ideas acquired other media licenses for comic adaptations, pulling from the worlds of toys (Micronauts, ROM: Spaceknight), film (Star Wars and numerous one-shot movie adaptations), and, of course, television (Man from Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica).

Across the great pond, UK fans were privy to comic stories featuring both British and American television series in periodicals such as TV Action and Look-in as well as annuals with hefty page counts. It seemed that no matter where comic books were sold in the 1970s, there was no shortage of TV-inspired offerings.

THE BIG ’80s AND BEYOND

It was still business as usual with the comic book/ television synergy in the fall of 1979 when DC’s Pliable Pretzel was brought to Saturday morning TV by animation house Ruby-Spears in The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show (which featured live-action interstitials hosted by an actor portraying Plas), which ran a couple of seasons and ultimately gave the world Baby Plas. The show’s launch afforded DC

Mark Harris is All Wet! (left) An unused Gil Kane cover preliminary for the cover of Marvel’s Man from Atlantis #4 (May 1978), adapting the NBC adventure series. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (right) Considerable changes were made in what became the published Kane cover, inked by Tony DeZuniga. © NBCUniversal/Solow Production Company.

8 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue

by

Steven Thompson

A Soap Opera You Can Sink Your Teeth Into A portrait of Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.

Color print by Ken Bald, artist of the Dark Shadows newspaper strip.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Dark Shadows TM & © Dan Curtis Productions.

12 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue

“My name is Victoria Winters, and although I was initially the main character on Dark Shadows, I was gone from Collinwood and the entire series by the time the Gold Key comic book arrived on the scene in 1969.”

Producer Dan Curtis’ Dark Shadows had premiered on ABC television in 1966 as a daily soap opera, aimed at cashing in on the trend of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights-style gothic romances. Initially it had centered on Miss Winters, who arrives in a small fishing village in Maine as the new young governess to ten-year-old David Collins at Collinwood, “a house filled with strangeness and mystery.”

Critics in 1966 called Dark Shadows “television’s first continuing suspense drama,” and “exciting viewing for the young housewife.” Many of the initially released publicity shots for the daytime series featured young Victoria running away from the mysterious mansion on a hill, thus bringing to life a thousand mass market paperback covers then on display at the local Woolworth.

From the beginning, the daily television series was shot so quickly that it had no time for retakes or fancy editing.

What they shot was what you got, and the show became known for its jiggly props, chintzy special effects, doors that wouldn’t stay open or closed, and crewmen often seen in shots. There were so many of these bloopers that decades later they would be released on VHS tape.

You have to admit, it doesn’t really sound particularly conducive to being adapted into comic-book form. But that was all before the phenomenon hit. After Barnabas Collins returned to Collinwood, all bets were off.

The idea of a gothic TV soap may have been original, but it was not popular. Finishing in 13th place among other soaps in its first year, ABC gave the producers a limited period in which to up the show’s ratings or get the ax. According to legend, Dan Curtis decided to go out with a vampire story, and Barnabas Collins was created for a simple 13-week run.

He’d bite some people, then he’d be hunted down and staked or locked back in his coffin and the show would go off the air.

But Dark Shadows didn’t exist in a vacuum. Concurrent with the series was the peak period of the monster revival, which had seen magazines such as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fantastic Monsters, and Castle of Frankenstein introducing young readers and teens to the classic Universal monster films and reviving interest in such actors as Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and the late Bela Lugosi.

Those monster-loving kids and teens got word that fangs were being seen on afternoon TV and started rushing home from school to watch Dark Shadows. Jonathan Frid, the Canadian actor who portrayed Barnabas, began to appear on not just talk shows but also children’s shows. He and some of the men on the show posed topless in magazines for teen girls like Tiger Beat and 16. Before you knew it, there were games, toys, glow-in-the-dark models, a long series of paperback novels, and two feature film adaptations. By that point, comic books seemed a perfectly logical tie-in.

Unfortunately, neither Marvel nor DC were in a position to license the property. The Comics Code Authority, since the mid-1950s, had expressly stated: “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism (sic) are prohibited.” The only mainstream comic-book companies that did not subscribe to the Code were Dell—then on its last legs— and Gold Key (Western Publishing), a family-friendly comics publisher then absolutely thriving with licensed properties.

In his introduction to the 2010 reprints from Hermes Press, writer Dr. Jeff Thompson (no relation) acknowledges that the authorship of the Dark Shadows series is partially unknown.

He quotes Gold Key’s East Coast editor Wally Green as writing, in a letter from when the comic was still coming out, “We have used several writers so far. A couple ran dry after some good stories. One or two never really did get the hang of it.”

Portrait of a Vampire (top) Gold Key Comics’ Dark Shadows #1 (Mar. 1969), featuring a photo cover starring Jonathan Frid. (bottom) Barnabas is cover-featured on this 1970 Gold Key Dark Shadows digest. © Dan Curtis Productions.

Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue • BACK ISSUE • 13

whom she describes as “terrific,” and began picking up assignments. Her first assignments were for Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery. “I supported myself for two years in New York City while being a ‘real writer,’” she says. She says it all came easily to her. She just let her imagination run wild and turned in full scripts, going so far as to describe for the artists—with whom she never had any contact—what the pictures should look like.

After she had proven her reliability, Green assigned Spaeth to Dark Shadows. When asked if she had been a fan of the TV series, she enthusiastically offers, “Of course!” As for the comics assignment, she says, “They were best because Gold Key paid by the page and instead of a six-page [story], Dark Shadows was 25 pages! Two a month paid my rent!”

Although convinced she still has records of which specific issues she worked on, she has not been able to locate them as of this point. In fact, although she knows she was always paid the full amount, she says she can’t be certain that her scripts weren’t turned over to “a more seasoned writer” to dialogue. She was, as she put it, “low man on the totem pole.”

Comics historian Martin O’Hearn believes that the Dark Shadows stories Merrie Spaeth wrote are most likely in the early issues, currently attributed—perhaps incorrectly— to Don Arneson. O’Hearn says, “The only issue that I know of Arneson’s specifically mentioning is #1—about having to write the epilogue at the last minute to fill in when it was decided to run the book without advertising.”

Editor Green, in a 1986 interview, stated that Dark Shadows had originally been planned as a quarterly title, with advertising, but that someone higher-up decided it would be a one-shot, “…which meant, under the laws, that we could not put advertising in it. We were suddenly faced with six blank pages.”

He contacted Arneson, and “we decided to try tacking an epilogue onto this story. I asked him to do it; he said he’d give it a try. It’s kind of a tall order because when you figure… he’s written here a story with a very definite ending to it and here I come along and ask him to tack on a six-page coda.” In the end, though, Green felt that it worked. “It didn’t seem like too much of an afterthought,” he said, “even though it was. “It looked like an integral part of the whole story.”

Don (D. J.) Arneson was a prolific writer/editor who was almost always uncredited throughout his comics career although he did get credit—on the covers, yet—for the infamous Great Society and Bobman and Teddy “adult” political satire comic books from 1966.

Arneson is also known to have co-created (with artist Tony Tallarico) the first African-American comic-book character with his own title—Lobo, a black cowboy with two issues from Dell in 1965–1966. What is not known is how many—and which—issues of Dark Shadows he wrote beyond the first one.

One anomaly that we know Arneson wrote is Gold Key’s Dark Shadows Story Magazine # 1 (June 1970), essentially a 144-page pulp-style magazine, with a text story written in the style of the comic and featuring a number of single-color illustrations by Joe Certa, artist on the comic. Both Arneson and Certa are credited here for the first and only time on any Dark Shadows project.

That ad-free first comic book (Mar. 1969), though, with the epilogue pages, came out costing a quarter at a time when most comic books had just jumped to 15 cents, but it also came—as did various Gold Key titles around that same time—with a full-color fold-out poster, in this case of Barnabas Collins.

That first issue makes a nod to series continuity in that the witch, Angelique, is referred to as Cassandra Collins, a name the character was using on TV as the

new bride of Roger Collins around the time this story would have been written. (Inexplicably, Cassandra is depicted as a long-haired redhead in this first issue and, as Angelique, in later issues as well. On the air, Lara Parker was known for her stylish mountain of piled blonde hair as Angelique and wore a small, darker wig when masquerading as Cassandra.) Similarly, there’s a one-panel flashback showing Barnabas walling up Reverend Trask, another event from the daily serial. The story’s plot, in fact, involves two young men and a girl searching for information on Trask, and Barnabas and Angelique attempting to prevent them from finding it.

Soon enough it became obvious that there was simply no way to keep up and all attempts at tying in to the TV continuity were dropped beyond the basic characterizations: Barnabas Collins was a vampire, Quentin Collins a werewolf (albeit the least hirsute werewolf ever in a comic book), Angelique a witch, and the rest just showed up as the story required.

In this case, in spite of the show’s large and varied cast of characters, “the rest” here consisted of a pareddown group of regulars that only included Roger Collins, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Dr. Julia Hoffman, and Professor Stokes. After his TV introduction and subsequent teen idol popularity, Quentin Collins was added without explanation, although he was

The Wonderful Mr. Wilson Really, is there anyone out there who doesn’t love those extraordinary Gold Key painted covers by George Wilson? Here’s his original cover painting for Dark Shadows #11 (Nov. 1971), courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Dan Curtis Productions.

Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue • BACK ISSUE • 15

At one time the top comics publisher, Dell’s comics line was fading away by the early 1970s. The industry was changing during what we now call the Bronze Age of Comics, with newsstand presence eroding for old-time four-color “funnybooks.” Comics were also experiencing maturation and sophistication of subject matter, a far cry from the much-bandied wholesomeness banner that Dell had so proudly waved. In the 1980s, Western Publishing’s Gold Key Comics similarly discontinued its comics line. The era of the photo cover TV tie-in comic book was no more.

This article will present a brief survey of the final TV tie-ins produced by those venerable companies. One series, Gold Key’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, is worthy of a deeper examination than is presented here and will be covered at length in a future edition of BACK ISSUE.

THE END OF A DYNASTY: DELL’S LAST TV COMICS THE MOD SQUAD

by

Michael Eury

© CBS Television Distribution.

#1 (June 1969)–8 (Apr. 1971) (Note: Issue #7 reprints #1, and issue #8 reprints #2.)

This counterculture cop show, which premiered on ABC on September 24, 1968, was part of the diet of social awareness many of us grew up on, with other staples including the film Billy Jack and Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ awardwinning Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic. Executiveproduced by Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling, The Mod Squad featured a trio of troubled young people—a rich white rabble-rouser, a black activist, and an aimless flower child—and recruited them for undercover work tackling topics that were plaguing society, from poverty to drug-running to racism. Part of a new trend of programs prominently featuring an AfricanAmerican star, The Mod Squad enjoyed a 124-episode, fiveseason run (scoring in Nielsen’s top 25 during three of those seasons) and lots of merchandising. Its legacy endured, inspiring a 1979 TV reunion movie and a 1999 film reboot.

Of the final Dell TV tie-ins surveyed here, The Mod Squad was certainly the jewel in the publisher’s crown. It perfectly captured the attitude of the television show (just imagine Austin Powers reading aloud issue #1’s cover blurb of “Danger is their bag!!”), and the stories’ gritty environs, combined with its streetsmart young characters and action, adapted nicely to comics.

Serviceably illustrated by Jose Delbo (possibly working over scripts by D. J. Arneson), each Dell Mod Squad issue featured two stories per issue, with the type of plots you’d see on the TV show: drug smuggling, stolen cars, rigged boxing bouts, plane hijackings, etc.

During the TV show’s original run, The Mod Squad was lampooned in comic-book form in MAD and Marvel’s Spoof.

Fonz Faces Front Original cover art to Gold Key’s Happy Days #5 (Nov. 1979), by Art Saaf, the title’s only issue not featuring a photo cover. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Happy Days © Paramount Television.

Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue • BACK ISSUE • 19

THE BRADY BUNCH

© Paramount Television.

#1 (Feb. 1970)–2 (May 1970)

Mod and Groovy

Mod Squad © CBS Television Distribution. Binky TM & © DC Comics. Brady Bunch © Paramount Television.

THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE’S FATHER

#1 (Jan. 1970)–2 (May 1970)

© MGM Television.

(top) Linc is recruited in Dell’s Mod Squad #1.

Art by Jose Delbo. (center) Teen fave Barry “Greg Brady” Williams drops in on DC’s Binky #78 in 1971. (bottom) From 1976, The Brady Bunch Kite Fun Book.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady…” Some of us know the lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme better than we do the National Anthem. From Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, The Brady Bunch, the iconic sitcom about a blended family, kicked off its five-season, 117-episode run on ABC-TV on September 12, 1969, airing its last new episode on March 8, 1974. The Bradys’ dog Tiger may have mysteriously disappeared after the first season, but the show itself never went away, immediately moving into syndication, followed by an animated cartoon and numerous continuations and movies (see RetroFan #10 for a full listing). The Brady Bunch might very well be television’s most rebooted series ever!

As such, it’s mind-blowing to consider that this TV classic inspired only a mere two issues of a comic book. Released early into the show’s first season, Dell’s Brady Bunch featured four eight-page stories per issue, delightfully drawn by Jose Delbo (with practical approximations of stars Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, and fellow cast), with the same sort of wholesome, canned-laughter-type humor you’d find on screen. It would’ve been fun to have witnessed this series blossom, allowing its characters and their storylines to grow along with its child actors (affording us an eventual Johnny Bravo cover, perhaps) instead of sputtering to a halt after its oh, so brief run.

Did you know that one of the Brady kids made a DC Comics appearance?

Greg Brady himself, actor Barry Williams, was featured in a one-page personality profile in the teen title Binky #78 (Apr.–May 1971), then going through its Archie clone phase (see BACK ISSUE #107). Bizarrely, the single image of the handsome young heartthrob was manipulated to the point of being non-recognizable.

A final Brady comic was issued by Western Publishing in 1976. The Brady Bunch Kite Book, a half-sized promo comic about kite safety, also featured Reddy Kilowatt and was distributed by major utility companies.

The creative team of The Brady Bunch Kite Book is unknown, although cartoonist/comics historian/all-around swell guy Scott Shaw! offers this conjecture: “Looks like Bill Zeigler [art] to me. As for the writer, Don Christensen or Vick Lockman would be my guess.”

“People let me tell you about my best friend…”

Many BACK ISSUE readers probably remember this show’s bouncy theme song by Harry Nilsson— which I’ve just earwormed into your head for the rest of the day—more so than any of the show’s episodes. Based upon a 1963 movie rom-com that adapted Mark Toby’s 1961 novel of the same name, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father was about a precocious young boy’s matchmaking attempts to guide his widowed father down the aisle once again… although as the show progressed its plots began to instead favor the deep bond between its father and son.

With Brandon Cruz stepping into the title role originally played by Ronny Howard on screen, Courtship, with future Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby as the dad-you-wish-you-had, ran three seasons and 73 episodes, from September 17, 1969 through March 1, 1972. (Fun but useless trivia: Bixby’s character was Tom Corbett, not to be confused with the fictional Space Cadet and real-life former Pennsylvania governor of the same name.)

Writer D. J. Arneson, one of Dell’s powerhouses and a Dell editor, and artist Carl Pfeufer, produced the two Courtship comic issues, each featuring multiple short stories. While the premise of Eddie’s matchmaking was occasionally present in the stories, the comic generally meandered into routine kid’s story terrain, with tales of struggling with grades and trips to the circus not reflecting the charm brought to the TV series by its amiable stars.

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Sid and Marty Krofft got their start as puppeteers, with Sid, the older brother by eight years, getting his start on the Vaudeville stage and later with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus during the 1940s. His initial show, “The Unusual Artistry of Sid Krofft,” was eventually performed around the world.

By the 1950s, the brothers started working together, and in 1957 debuted a more adult puppet show called Les Poupées de Paris, which was a success for the brothers throughout the 1960s. Many of the puppets included were modeled after popular celebrities of the day including Judy Garland and Sammy Davis, Jr. The show was popular enough to warrant a soundtrack album as well, as exclusive performances at many World’s Fairs, including the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, and the 1968 San Antonio HemisFair. The main character of the HemisFair was a dragon character named Luthor, which Sid and Marty later retooled into the character better known as H. R. Pufnstuf.

But before Pufnstuf became a show, HannaBarbera Productions contacted Sid and Marty and asked them if they could design some character costumes for a new live-action Saturday morning TV series, loosely based upon The Monkees and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The show was originally christened The Banana Bunch, but after some issues with some other group with that name, the show and the group became The Banana Splits.

Terence H. Winkless, in his book From the Inside: My Life As Bingo of the Banana Splits, explained the

Mark Arnold

situation with the costumes for the show: “The costumes were lying in the middle of the room, still in their dry-cleaning bags. Lying on top of one another, it was not easy to make anything of them other than their color. It was quite a mountain of cloth, about four feet high and a 4x6 heaping rectangle. I’m not going to pretend that I can remember who took out which costume and put it on, but I can say that in just a few minutes, we determined who would be which character.

My brother Danny became the lion (Drooper) because its costume was the tallest. My brother Jeff took the green dog (Fleegle), maybe because it was kind of a chartreuse color that had always given him a hard time (all three of my brothers are color blind). That left me with the orange one, a gorilla named Bingo.

The fourth was an elephant named Snorky. Snorky was not played by a brother. Hanna-Barbera hired from within, and brought in a guy named Jimmy Dove. It was a promotion from the Xerox room.”

The Banana Splits, as with most Hanna-Barbera properties during the 1960s, had its own comic-book series published by Western Publishing through its Gold Key line. Eight issues were published from 1969 to 1971, as well as a March of Comics giveaway in 1971. All feature photo covers depicting the colorful animal costumes that the Banana Splits wore as designed by Sid and Marty Krofft. The comic books are credited to Don R. Christensen as the writer and Jack Manning as the artist.

Christensen worked for almost every classic animation studio as an animator before transitioning

Krofft Komics (left) Gold Key’s Banana Splits #1 (June 1969), the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning live-action show developed in conjunction with Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. (center) Charlton’s Bugaloos #1 (Sept. 1971).

Cover art by Frank Roberge. (right) Kaptain Kool and the Kongs, Bigfoot and Wildboy, and more Krofft kraziness on the photo cover of GK’s Krofft Supershow #1 (Apr. 1978).

All © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions, except Banana Splits © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

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Kornpone Komedy Original donkey cel from Format Films’ animated sequences for television’s Hee Haw. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Hee Haw © Gaylord Program Services, Inc.

Mark Arnold

In 1967, two semi-popular comedians hosted a special that featured a rapid-fire series of jokes and gags, many dating back to the days of vaudeville. It seemed like an idea destined to fail as the jokes were sometimes ancient chestnut groaners that many had heard multiple times before, but the special presented these well-worn jokes in such a unique and colorful way that the show became an immediate hit, and ultimately it was rewarded a weekly TV series.

That series was called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, or Laugh-In, for short. The show was popular enough to last six seasons through 1973.

It was also popular enough to launch a spinoff series called Letters to Laugh-In, a huge line of merchandise such as lunchboxes, wastebaskets, and toys, plus books, a comic strip, and a monthly magazine. Strangely, there never was a Laugh-In comic book.

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Flash forward to 1969. Laugh-In is firmly on top of the ratings, and another show that also debuted in 1967 is also doing well, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. However, after two years of back and forth between the Smothers Brothers and CBS censors, CBS pulled the plug on the Comedy Hour in June 1969 and replaced it with a simpler and harmless show for the summer months. It was called Hee Haw. Hee Haw was created by Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth, two Canadian writers and producers who admitted being inspired by Laugh-In to create their show. Laugh-In creator George Schlatter felt that Hee Haw directly stole his idea, but both shows have a common origin from vaudeville and other stage performances that told both corny and bawdy jokes.

Thrilling spy stories in the James Bond fashion! Adventures with exotic locales spanning the globe! Short, action-packed adventures interspersed with sidesplitting gags and humor.

How could this not be the one of the greatest TV adaptations ever to come to comics?

Well…. the cherry on top of this madcap banana split is the fact that all the characters are chimpanzees. And that’s the unique brilliance and the ultimate madness of Gold Key’s Lancelot Link. Secret Chimp comic.

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THE BANANA DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE

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Ed Catto

Lancelot Link can trace his lineage back to two comedy writers, Mike Marmer and Stan Burns. They were longtime comedy veterans, having collaborated early in their careers on The Knickerbocker Beer Show, a 40-minute (!) 1950s comedy show that would later morph into The Steve Allen Show.

They prospered, contributing to shows like The Smothers Brothers, The Flip Wilson Show, and Get Smart. [Editor’s note: Among his many other credits, Marmer went on to be a contributing writer to 1979’s Legends of the SuperHeroes live-action specials, which teamed Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin with other DC superheroes (see BI #25 for the story).]

And at the end of the ’60s, America was still going bananas over the “spy craze.” James Bond and a plethora of imitators had successfully infiltrated cinema, paperbacks, and TV. Even the spy parody Marmer and Burns contributed to, Get Smart, would run five seasons.

One can only imagine how Marmer and Burns’ conversation with network executives must have gone.

From today’s vantage point, it seems inconceivable that a pitch meeting was as simple as, “Let’s do a spy parody for Saturday morning… but with monkeys!”

ABC’s Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp debuted in September of 1970. Episodes were broken up into two distinct ten-minute segments. Lancelot Link was an hour long and included old Warner Bros. cartoon shorts from the desperate last years of their old animation division.

Lancelot Link was rerun again the following year as a part of ABC’s Saturday morning lineup, but this time in a halfhour format. This trimmed-down version was how it was presented in syndication.

Lancelot Link sparked several licensed products, including a coloring book, a View-Master set, two lunchboxes, Ben Cooper Halloween Costumes, and then, in 1971, a wonky eight-issue Gold Key comic series.

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

The comics, like the show, were an insane jumble of monkeys, hackneyed humor, and over-the-top goofiness thrown together into a delicious comic-book banana crème pie.

The Lancelot Link comic adapted the “characters” as faithfully as possible. Each character was essentially a spy trope with which the nation, including children, had quickly become familiar. The heroes included:

Chimps vs. C.H.U.M.P. Gold Key’s Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp #1 (May 1971), one of the defining moments of the Bronze Age of Comics. (No, I made that up.

Still, it’s a cool comic.) © ABC.

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Landing a role in a television show, for most actors, is cause for celebration.

On occasion, an actor is surprised to have gotten a part, but will run with the role and make it their own. And then there’s the rare instance of an actor wondering why he or she has been cast as a certain character, assuming that others would be more suited to the job than they are.

Robert Brown falls into that last category. Following a successful turn as the character Jason Bolt in the ABC-TV series Here Come the Brides, Brown found himself cast as the lead character in a new underwater action show created by Ivan Tors and scheduled to debut in Fall 1971.

Primus focused on the adventures of Carter Primus, an oceanographer, scuba diver, and all-around underwater adventurer. “The casting on Primus was a surprise, because I was not that sort of boy,” Brown tells BACK ISSUE. “I wasn’t an athlete and I hadn’t done anything like that.”

Now 93 and enjoying retirement in California, the actor at least was no stranger to the water, having served in the United States Navy in the Pacific in World War II. He later met and became friends with William Shatner, a guy that Brown says had a Primus-like background.

“Honestly, Shatner was the one who was a good athlete… he enjoyed diving and so forth. So he was a good guy to be around!”

Brown may not have had experience with diving, but he’d done some swimming in his time. “My father was a butler, an Englishman from London. He worked as a butler to wealthy American aristocrats. In the summers, I lived at these great estates where he worked, in Bar Harbor, Maine. They had great swimming pools [on the estates], and I swam there.” Stand-ins did most of the underwater scenes for Primus, and Brown says he felt like a fish out of water, so to speak. “It was as though I had to play, for example, Hamlet, but I didn’t speak English. It was that strange a life. I’ve had other parts that I wasn’t really suited for, but I was a nice-looking guy and I had good experience with various roles. I was lucky to have the job, but I never felt comfortable in the role at all.”

He may not have settled into the part, but his run as Carter Primus is remembered fondly by fans of the genre. The show’s premise undoubtedly was familiar ground for producer Ivan Tors, who had covered the waterfront during the 1960s as the producer of such shows as Sea Hunt, The Aquanauts, and Flipper. Primus premiered as a first-run syndicated series in September 1971, and Carter Primus and his team— assistants Toni Hyden, played by Eva Renzi, and Charlie Kingman, played

by Will Kuluva—got to work troubleshooting underwater installations, fighting bad guys, and generally enjoying Key West, Florida, and the Bahamas, where the series was shot. The show depicted the team being hired to render services ranging from thwarting a ring of international thieves intent on stealing priceless jewels from an island museum, to salvaging a sunken—but still very much live and dangerous—torpedo before it can fall into the hands of enemy agents.

Along the way, the viewer is introduced to Primus’ oceanographic inventions and devices, many of which are used for ocean rescues and other types of missions. The stories told on the show were imaginative, the underwater photography was as sharp as anything seen on television up until that time, and Robert Brown did excellent work in the title role, even if he doesn’t see it as a high-water mark in his career. “I’m lucky to have survived it! I was a lucky young man who made a living in a role that didn’t fit.”

The show’s decision makers may or may not have agreed. But either way, they gave Primus the hook in spring 1972, after 26 episodes.

TV’s Latest Smash Makes a Charlton Splash Charlton Comics went the photo cover route for the first four issues of Primus, showing series star Robert Brown in various poses. Unless otherwise noted, all art scans accompanying this article are courtesy of Douglas R. Kelly.

Primus © Ivan Tors Productions.

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Douglas R. Kelly

HELP IS ON THE WAY

Staton to the Rescue (left) The cover of issue #1 (June 1976) of Emergency! got the Joe Staton acrylic and marker treatment. (right) The pick of the litter among the covers for Emergency!: Joe hit it out of the park with this cover for issue #2! Unless otherwise noted, all art scans accompanying this article are courtesy of Doug Kelly. © NBCUniversal.

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Bing-bong-buuuuuuzzzzzzzzz.

“Squad 51, motorcycle accident with injuries… 11822 North Hillside, cross-street Vernon…time out 14:27.”

“Squad 51, KMG 365.”

If reading that didn’t give you a chill down your spine, either you’re dead or you didn’t spend an hour a week tuning in to the NBC television series Emergency! from 1972 to 1977. Created by television legend Jack Webb, with Harold Jack Bloom and R. A. Cinader, Emergency! made television history by being the first series to realistically depict fire and rescue operations in the United States, an approach used by Webb on his police shows Dragnet and Adam-12.

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Douglas R. Kelly

For those of us raised on Emergency!, that familiar triple buzz alarm and accompanying call from the dispatcher is etched into our psyches.

The show revolved around two operations in Los Angeles County, California: Fire Station 51 and Rampart General Hospital. Paramedics Roy DeSoto, played by Kevin Tighe, and John Gage, played by Randolph Mantooth, work with the firefighters at Station 51 as they handle calls involving everything from treating injuries at fire scenes to rescuing people stranded in deep canyons or 100 feet in the air on construction cranes. While many of the calls on which the team goes out involve serious—as in life and death—situations, others are of a lighter tone, sometimes bordering on the wacky. In the Season Five episode “The Election” an artist

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Dewey Cassell

World Famous Heroine A stunning portrait of Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers

by Arnaldo Putzu.

Original cover art from the UK publication Look-in (Jan. 14, 1978), courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Bionic Woman © NBCUniversal.

When you have your first child, you take dozens of photographs of them doing every little thing, including sleeping, enough to try the patience of your closest relatives and best of friends. And then when you have your second child, you find the difference is not arithmetic but exponential, and you take far fewer photographs, because you are just trying to survive. If you should have a third child, there will likely be no record of them at all. It’s not that you are playing favorites or love the first child more, it’s just a matter of having to divide your once undivided attention.

This rather unconventional analogy explains, at least in part and in a roundabout way, the history of the Charlton comic book, The Bionic Woman. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We should start with the firstborn child.

Martin Caidin wrote a novel titled Cyborg in 1972 that served as the basis for the television show The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as Steve Austin and Richard Anderson as Oscar Goldman, head of the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), a fictitious division of the United States Department of

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State. In 1975, during the second season, the show introduced the character Jaime Sommers, a love interest of Steve Austin played by Lindsay Wagner, who is severely injured during a sky-diving accident.

Austin convinces Goldman and OSI to save her life by repairing her injuries with bionics similar to his own. Sommers receives two bionic legs, one bionic arm, and a bionic ear. (The Jaime Sommers character is not in the Caidin novel.)

The concept was well received by viewers and the following year, Wagner got her own television series, The Bionic Woman. In the spinoff show, Sommers becomes a schoolteacher at an Air Force base in Ojai, California, while taking on missions for OSI. Like its older brother, the show was a hit.

And as with most hit shows, there was no shortage of merchandising. There was a Bionic Woman board game, a Bionic Woman lunch box, Bionic Woman action figures and accessories, Bionic Woman trading cards, and, of course, a Bionic Woman comic book.

Charlton Comics was not new to publishing comic books based on licensed properties. Prior titles included The Partridge Family and Space: 1999. “The Charlton News” article in issue #4 of The Charlton Bullseye in-house fanzine revealed, “Charlton has just signed a contract with Universal Studios for the comic book efforts of two of their top-rated television shows, The Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency!

Each of these will have a four-color presentation, and a black and white format.”

The first issue of The Six Million Dollar Man comic book was cover-dated June 1976 (on sale March 11, 1976). The Bionic Woman comic book followed much later, on July 1, 1977, cover-dated October 1977. Both titles were supposed to be bimonthly, but the publishing was sporadic. (The second issue of The Bionic Woman was cover-dated February 1978.) Jack Sparling illustrated all the covers and interior stories for the Bionic Woman series, drawing likenesses of the actors with mixed success. The writer of The Bionic Woman stories is uncertain, but may have been Joe Gill.

The debut issue of The Bionic Woman includes two comic stories, the first involving a kidnapping of one of her students and the second requiring Jaime to pose as a flight attendant to thwart a murder.

In the latter story, Oscar Goldman has Dr. Rudy Wells reduce Jaime’s bionic powers to “Stage I,” the abilities of a normal person, to lessen the chance of someone learning about her bionics, but it puts Jaime at risk on the mission. This was an idea also explored on the television show, and there was an episode in which Jaime posed as a flight attendant. In general, however, the stories appearing in the comic book were new, not based directly on television episodes. (The Bionic Dog never appears in the comic book.) The first issue also includes a two-page text piece recapping her origin from the television series, and pointing out the spelling of her first name—Jaime—is correct, although ironically it would be misspelled in later issues. The comic book also provided a different definition of the acronym OSI, calling it the Office of Strategic Intelligence.

We Can Rebuild Her, We Can Make Her Stronger (top) Photo of Lindsay Wagner, from The Six Million Dollar Man magazine #1 (July 1976). Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. (bottom) From the Heritage archives, original Jack Sparling artwork to the cover of Charlton’s Bionic Woman #1 (Oct. 1977). (inset) The published version. © NBCUniversal.

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Wonder Woman © DC Comics.

At 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 31, 1977, Wonder Woman made its debut on Argentina’s TV channel 13. And beginning on September 8, the series was transmitted every Thursday at 9. The series immediately captured the absolute attention of the public, not only of young women who finally could identify with a superheroine, but also of very young boys captured by the rhythm of her adventures and older viewers by the great acting skills of its protagonist, Lynda Carter, forever Wonder Woman. Carter was accompanied on her adventures by a rather inconsequential Major Steve Trevor, played by Lyle Waggoner.

In our country, Wonder Woman was known only by the Mexican name “Marvila” from the comics of the Novaro Publishing House and by the animated cartoons of the Super Friends. So little known was she that before the release, it was promoted as Superwoman, the female version of Superman.

During the 1960s, it was also customary in Argentina to publish comics based upon TV characters. In the beginning, these were comic books about TV Westerns such as Maverick, Cheyenne, and The Law of the Gun. During the 1970s, Mo-Pa-Sa Publishing House was issuing Kung Fu, The Pink Panther, and Astro Boy, comic books made entirely in Argentina and without paying any royalties.

It was so that in October of 1977, the first issue of Wonder Woman (“Mujer Maravilla”) was born under the “Vivepry” seal (which was later changed to “Editorial Olimpo,” fake Mo-Pa-Sa editorial names), under the prolific pen of Jorge Morhain and the excellent brush of his brother, mario morhain cartoonist Mario Morhain. The Agencia NOVA. Vivepry label hid in its acronym the name of Violini, Vecchio, and Prystupa, cartoonists who collaborated regularly in Mo-Pa-Sa magazines.

According to Mario Morhain: “I will tell you that it was common practice to change the name of the publisher to avoid lawsuits for trademark infringements.”

Curiously, neither Jorge nor Mario was a regular reader of the original DC Comics Wonder Woman comic books, but together they made a very good, free adaptation of the series.

The stories were 20 pages long. They used such familiar elements

All the World’s Waiting for You Portrait of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, illustrated in 2017 by Mario Morhain.

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

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To n i To r r e s

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Ed Lute

On Sunday, May 1, 1983, television viewers were treated to special visitors when they tuned into the first episode of NBC’s science-fiction miniseries titled simply V. Spaceships started appearing above major cities all over the planet Earth. As viewers soon learned, these ships were filled with humanlike aliens that said they wanted our help to save their planet. The aliens were called the Visitors.

However, there was more to be seen than meets the eye. Underneath the Visitors’ human-like skin, they were a carnivorous reptilian race that wanted to steal the Earth’s water and use humans as food.

Although a resistance movement was organized to help stop the Visitors, the second and final episode of the miniseries ended with the Visitors having almost complete control of the planet.

Kenneth Johnson, the creator/writer/director of V, wanted to tell a story of the dangers of Nazisim.

With this miniseries, he was able to do so in the guise of science fiction. The uniforms and insignia that the Visitors wore were reminiscent of Nazi garb.

Science fiction has always been a prime spot to tell challenging and even difficult stories that couldn’t be told elsewhere. This miniseries was no exception.

V proved to be very successful and garnered a second miniseries, V: The Final Battle, which premiered the following year. The sequel miniseries also proved to be popular and an ongoing television series titled V (but often referred to as V: The Series) was ordered by NBC. Although popular, the ongoing series didn’t draw the audience numbers in that the two miniseries did and was cancelled after only one season, with a final scripted episode never even being filmed. The ongoing series suffered from budget cuts, leading to the reuse of footage from both miniseries and limitations on some special effects such as the Visitors’ distinctive vocal renderings. Kenneth Johnson was only minimally involved with V: The Final Battle and wasn’t involved at all with the regular series.

Despite the ongoing series’ drop in the ratings, fans wanted more of the Visitors. DC Comics was happy to oblige. V the comic-book series ran for 18 issues from 1985 to 1986.

V: THE COMIC BOOK SERIES

It wasn’t until the ongoing V television series was announced that DC Comics became involved with the franchise. Original V comic editor Marv Wolfman recounts to BACK ISSUE, “I loved the

V is for (Unwelcome) Visitors Gripping covers for issues of DC Comics’ V tie-in, for (top) #1 (Feb. 1985) and 2, with cover art by Eduardo Barreto, and (bottom) #5 (June 1985), with cover art by Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar, and 6, with cover art by Rich Buckler and Romeo Tanghal.

V © Warner Bros.

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With Friends Like These… (left) Astounding original cover art

by Barreto for V #1. (right) Artist Tony DeZuniga blows up stuff reeeeeal good on his cover to V #3 (Apr. 1985).

Original art scans courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Warner Bros.

original TV [miniseries] as well as the follow-up. with the ongoing television series. Red Dust, first Because I did, once the show was announced, introduced in V: The Final Battle, was a bacterium I pitched the idea of doing an adaptation to DC. deadly to the Visitors. Since the Red Dust wasn’t I thought the show would last a year or two and effective in warm climates, the Visitors and the we could do a short-run comic that would be well resistance fighters set up Los Angeles as a neutral done. Then, once the show started to fade and sales ground. This was the status quo for both the ongoing television show and the comic. started to go south, we’d cancel the book.

Issue #1 (Feb. 1985) took place after the I think the idea of doing intentionally first few episodes of the television series. short-run comics is a good one.”

It introduced the major players and the DC wasn’t totally on board from setup for the series. Issues #2 (Mar. the get-go but had faith in the 1985) and 3 (Apr. 1985) featured legendary comic writer/editor. “DC Donovan, Parrish, Willie, and other wasn’t sure about it, but they trusted resistance fighters crash-landing in me and gave me the go ahead,” Silver Springs, a town that helped Wolfman recounts. “I assigned it to the Visitors to procure spring water [writer] Cary Bates. I thought he did in exchange for medical services for a great job.” their elderly.

The comic featured the major Since the comic-book series players from the television series wasn’t encumbered by the TV including Visitor leaders Diana and marv wolfman series’ budget cuts, DC gave the Lydia and resistance fighters Mike Visitors jet packs and also featured Donovan, Julie Parrish, Ham Tyler, Chris Farber, and Visitor-turned-resistance-fighter the resistance fighters using a vocasimulator (also Willie. Robin Maxwell and her daughter Elizabeth referred to as a voca-simulator) to emulate the (a.k.a. the Starchild, the offspring of a human and aliens’ voices, something that the regular series a Visitor), plus Elias Taylor and others, appeared as didn’t do for budgetary reasons. The second issue well. The Fifth Column, a secret Visitor organization featured the Visitors using flying platforms that that sympathizes with the humans, also played a probably wouldn’t have been in the budget for the miniseries but fit in perfectly with the comic-book prominent role in the comic.

The comic was developed to run concurrently medium.

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Stephan Friedt

Trust Him, He Knows What He’s Doing David Rasche as Sledge Hammer in a publicity photo for the two-season tough-cop spoof. © Alan Spencer Productions, Inc.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” according to Charles Caleb Colton in his 1820 book Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words. Add a little satire, and you might have the beginnings of a successful TV series.

Get Smart (1965–1970) with Don Adams imitated the James Bond movies spy craze. Get Smart gave the genre a comedic spin by adding a touch of Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther detective movies, under the guidance of comedic writing masters Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–1968) with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum [see RetroFan #15] brought the James Bond spy gimmick to TV with a more serious intent… most of the time.

The Police Squad! (1982) TV series and The Naked Gun (1988–1994) movie series starring Leslie Nielsen were comedic imitations of the gritty police procedural dramas on TV like M Squad (1957–1960) with Lee

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Marvin and Felony Squad (1966–1969) with Howard Duff. Police Squad/Naked Gun was another in a long line of comedies from childhood friends and successful trio of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams.

Television’s Sledge Hammer! (1986–1988), starring David Rasche, imitated the tough-cop genre of movies epitomized by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise and the dramatic TV show Hunter (1984–1991) with Fred Dryer.

Sledge Hammer! was created and guided by Alan Spencer, who at 15 was one of the youngest writers to join the Writers Guild of America. Influenced by his friends Marty Feldman and Andy Kaufman, both of whom he lost in a short span of time, Spencer vowed to do unconventional work in their honor, starting with Sledge Hammer!

At the age of 16, Alan wrote a screenplay for Sledge Hammer! When the fourth Dirty Harry movie,

LOOK! UP ON THE TV SCREEN!

I still remember anxiously awaiting the start of the new television season back in the fall of 1988. As a sciencefiction fan, I was really excited that year because the success and popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season opened the door for a whole flood of new genre-based shows making their debuts in syndication on local television stations across America. Number one at the top of the list of shows I was most excited for was Superboy. As it turned out, a strike by the Writer’s Guild of America delayed the start of the new television season, for many shows by about two months. As fate would have it, the producers of Superboy, the father-son team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind, had signed an Interim Agreement, which meant they agreed to the terms the WGA demanded and that allowed the show to get a jump on all the other programs that debuted that year.

Superboy would last four seasons and 100 episodes, a very respectable run at the time for both a series based on a comic book and a show airing in syndication. In the wake of the Superboy launch, DC Comics decided to produce a comic book tie-in. Running for 22 issues (cover-dated from Feb. 1990 to Feb. 1992), Superboy: The Comic Book, changed to The Adventures of Superboy with #11 (Dec. 1990) to reflect the television series’ name change of the same, stands out as one of the best produced and most successful tie-in books DC Comics based on one of their properties. Set in the continuity of the television series, the Superboy comic book produced some fun stories and was able to build on this unique and different take on the Superman mythos.

IN THE BEGINNING…

The man responsible for writing the bulk of Superboy: The Comic Book was John Francis Moore, 12 issues in total.

“In 1989, I shared an apartment with Art Thibert, who was inking one of the Superman books that Mike Carlin edited,” Moore relates to BACK ISSUE. “In pre-cell phone days, Art and I shared a landline, so I got to know john francis moore Mike a little bit just by answering the phone when he called for Art. Mike Facebook. may not remember, but I had met him a few years earlier when I worked as Howard Chaykin’s assistant.

He, Carl Potts, and Steve Oliff had come by Howard’s LA home studio while Howard was doing The Shadow for DC. I was looking for work and Mike said he was taking pitches for the Superboy TV comic. I liked the idea of writing a non-DC continuity Superboy and put together

Kev and Ty’s Temple of Superboy Covers One of the joys of the Superboy TV tie-in series was their cover art, 20 (of 22 total) of which were penciled by Kevin Maguire and inked

by Ty Templeton (issue #1 featured a photo cover, and #13’s cover was penciled by Paris Cullins and inked by Templeton). Behold!

TM & © DC Comics.

62 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age TV Tie-ins Issue

by

Dan Johnson

“I regret that I never met Mooney or Swan while I was a couple story ideas. Mike liked them, which resulted in me writing about a dozen issues for him. I don’t think working on the book,” says Moore. “I introduced myself to Jim Mooney at [San Diego] Comic-Con a few Mike was initially looking for a single writer for the years later. His wife looked at me suspiciously book, but it worked out for me, and was a when I said I wrote Superboy comics he had great first solo assignment at DC.” worked on, until I explained I wrote the Another creator who was on the book 1989 Superboy TV comic.” from the beginning, and who stayed with it until the end, was inker Ty Templeton. His path to working on the SWAN SONG book opened up after another project After the first eight issues of Superboy: at DC Comics hit a bumpy patch.

The Comic Book, Curt Swan came in “I was originally hired at DC to draw to do the bulk of the final issues of a miniseries spun off from the Blue Devil the series, ten issues in total, including book, and when it fell through, DC of#9–12 (Oct. 1990–Jan. 1991), #14–17 fered me a bit of inking work to keep (Mar.–June 1991) and the final issue, me busy, since my original job offer #22 (Feb. 1992). He would also wasn’t there anymore,” says Templeton. return for The Adventures of Superboy ty templeton “I started inking Booster Gold with Dan Special (June 1992). “Curt Swan was Jurgens and meshed with him rather Gage Skidmore. “my” Superman artist growing up,” well. As Dan moved over to the Superman office, I kind of says Kupperberg. “[He was] the main artist on the went with him, and started inking him on The Adventures of Superman. Once I was under Mike Carlin’s office, I started inking tons of Superman stuff, over everybody there. The Superboy book was part of inking in the Superman office, and when it came up, I was delighted.”

From Syndication to Comic Shops Superboy #1 (Feb. 1990) featured a photo cover starring Gerard Christopher as the Teen of Steel and Stacy Haiduk as Lana Lang.

TM & © DC Comics.

LEGENDS AT WORK

One of the great things about Superboy: The Comic Book was that the book enlisted two pencilers who were both familiar with the Superman Family: Jim Mooney and later, Curt Swan. “I was excited to work with Jim Mooney and Curt Swan,” says John Moore about the men who brought his stories to life. “I was a huge fan of Mooney’s ’70s Marvel work on Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown, and Curt Swan’s Superman is the iconic Superman. I was working Marvel-style (plot-pencils-script), and it was a pleasure seeing their penciled pages because they were such consummate storytellers. I was a novice, learning my craft on the book, and they made the stories so much better with IF YOU PREVIEW, their skillENJOYED and craft.THIS I [also] loved Ty Templeton’s work CLICK THE TO ORDER on both JimLINK Mooney and CurtTHIS Swan’s pencils, so let ISSUE ORI DIGITAL me IN sayPRINT publicly, loved his FORMAT! inkwork on the book. He absolutely made both Jim and Curt’s pencils sing.”

“OH, MR . MOONEY!”

Jim Mooney started on Superboy: The Comic Book as its first regular penciler and did the first eight issues.

He would return to work on issues #18–20 (July–Oct. 1991). He didn’t get much of a chance to interact with his co-creators. “Jim Mooney [drew my second Superboy story for this series], which was a great thrill for me,” says Paul Kupperberg, one of the fill-in writers who contributed to Superboy towards the end of its run. “I grew up on Mooney’s work, especially on the 1960s Supergirl strip in Action Comics, which was one of my favorite strips at the time. But there was zero interaction between me and the artists on these stories, BACK #128 which was the ISSUE way that generation of comic creators BRONZE AGE TV TIE-INS! TV-to-comic adaptations of the ’70s worked: Writer turns in the script to the to ’90s, including Bionic Woman, Dark Shadows, Emergency, H. editor and the R. Pufnstuf, Haw, Lost Space (with Primus If the writer and editorHee gives theinscript toBILL theMUMY), penciler. (with ROBERT BROWN), Hammer, Superboy, and shouldn’t be any the editor haveSledge done their jobs, V,there others! Featuring BALD, BATES, CAMPITI, EVANIER, JOHN reason for the artist to need to talk to anybody, and if FRANCIS MOORE, SALICRUP, SAVIUK, SPARLING, STATON, WOLFMAN, and more! he does, it’s probably going to be the editor, the boss.”

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95to interact with Mooney Templeton had more reason (Digital Edition) $4.99 than anyone outside of the editorial department, but https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_54&products_id=1619 never received that opportunity. “I didn’t get a chance to interact with Jim at all, didn’t even talk on the phone,” recalls Templeton. “I’m not sure why that was, but with Jim, I got the pages, inked ’em, and sent ’em back, thrilled to death to be working with a legend.”

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