Hero-A-Go-Go

By Michael Eury

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

By Michael Eury 1

Dedication

To Adam West, the best Batman. Ever.

Writer and editor: Michael Eury Cover and book design: Scott Saavedra Proofreader: Rob Smentek Publisher: John Morrow TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • 919-449-0344 twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • April 2017 Printed in China ISBN 978-1-60549-073-1

Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixties © 2017 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing.

All rights reserved under international and Pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, Photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. All reproductions in this historical overview of comic books and popular culture are copyright by the respective copyright holders, and are used here strictly for historical purposes. Attempts have been made to properly attribute copyrights for use in this book; if you are a valid copyright-holder and have not been properly credited, please contact TwoMorrows so that this can be corrected in any future printings. The viewpoints expressed in the text are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TwoMorrows Publishing.

Abbott and Costello TM & © RKO General Inc., Jomar Productions Inc., and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Aqualad, Aquaman, the Atom, Batgirl, Batman, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, B’Wana Beast, Detective Comics, Dial H for Hero, Ding-A-Lings, Doll Man, Eclipso, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Inferior Five, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, King Faraday, the Maniaks, Mera, Metamorpho, Mr. Terrific, Peacemaker, Plastic Man, Robin the Boy Wonder, Sarge Steel, Shazam! (the original Captain Marvel), Showcase, Super-Hip, Superman, Swing with Scooter, Teen Beam, Teen Beat, Teen Titans, Ultra the Multi-Alien, Waverider, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman, and related characters TM & © DC Comics. Archie, the Archies, Captain Sprocket, Little Archie, the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., Pureheart the Powerful, the Shield, Steel Sterling, and related characters TM & © Archie Publications, Inc. Atom Ant, Birdman, Dino Boy, the Flintstones, Frankenstein, Jr., the Galaxy Trio, the Herculoids, the Impossibles, Jonny Quest, Mighty Mightor, Moby Dick, Samson and Goliath, Secret Squirrel, Shazzan, Space Ghost TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions. The Avengers, Captain America, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor, Millie the Model, Nick Fury, Not Brand Echh, Pussycat, Sgt. Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D., Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Avengers (John Steed and Emma Peel) TM & © ABC Television London. Batfink, Fearless Fly, Milton the Monster © Hal Seegar Productions. Beach Blanket Bingo, Sinbad Jr. TM & © AIP. The Beagles TM & © Total TeleVision. The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps. Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin. MAD logo TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc. Illustrations (pp 145, 146, and 147) © Don Martin. Photograph (p. 145) © Don Martin. Captain Nice, T.H.E. Cat TM & © NBC. Casper the Friendly Ghost, Fruitman, Lone Ranger and Tonto, Nightmare, Wendy TM & © DreamWorks Classics. Charlie Chan TM & © Fox Film Corp. Circus Boy TM & © Norbert Productions/Screen Gems. Cool McCool TM & © King Features. Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse TM & © Trans-Artists Productions. Cowboy in Africa, Flipper TM & © Ivan Tors Films, Inc. The Cowsills TM & © Cowsills-Stogel, Inc. Danger Man/ Secret Agent TM & © Independent Television Corporation (ITC). Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Doc Shadow and the Shadow TM & © Condé Nast Publications, Inc. Dynamo, Menthor, NoMan, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Undersea Agent TM & © Radiant Assets, LLC. Fearless Frank TM & © Trans American Films. The Fighting American, Fly Man, Sick Magazine, Young Jack Kennedy TM & © the Joe Simon estate. George of the Jungle, Super Chicken TM and © Bullwinkle Studios. Get Smart TM & © Home Box Office, Inc. The Great Society Comic Book, Bobman and Teddy TM & © D. J. Arneson and Tony Tallarico. The Green Hornet and Kato TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc. Hashimoto-San, Dinky Duck, The Mighty Heroes, Mighty Mouse, The Wild, Wild West TM & © CBS. Herbie the Fat Fury, Magicman, Nemesis TM & © Roger Broughton. I Spy TM & © 3F Productions. James Bond TM & © Danjaq and Eon Productions. Jet Dream, John Steele, Space Family Robinson TM & © Random House, Inc. King Kong, The Mighty Hercules, Roger Ramjet, Underdog TM & © Classic Media. Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC. MAD Magazine TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TM & © Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment. Mickey Mouse, the Phantom Blot, Super Goof TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc. The Misfits TM & © Wallace Wood Properties, LLC. Mission: Impossible TM & © Paramount Pictures. Mr. Terrific, The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado TM & © Universal Television/Universal Studios.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company. The Owl and Owl Girl TM & © Dynamite Characters, LLC. Rocket Robin Hood TM & © Centaur Distribution Corporation. Sad Sack, G.I. Juniors, Super Kids, and related characters TM & © Sad Sack, Inc. Sea Hunt TM & © United Artists Television. The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios Inc. Super 6, Super President TM & © DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Tarzan TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB), Inc. The Adventures of Bob Hope, The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, B-Man, Blast Off, Dracula (Dell), Fatman the Human Flying Saucer, Frankenstein (Dell), Go-Go, Jack Quick Frost, Jigsaw, Magic Agent, Miracles Inc., Pirana, Spyman, Super Green Beret, Superheroes (Dell), Super Luck, Teen-In, Tiffany Sinn, Tiger Boy, Tiger Girl, Tippy Teen, Werewolf (Dell) TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: Goin’ to a Go-Go

4

CHAPTER 1: Campfire

6

Eclipso............................................................................................................................................7 Superman and the Giant Cyclops..............................................................9 Magicman and Nemesis.........................................................................................12 The Teen Titans...............................................................................................................14 Metamorpho, the Element Man...................................................................17 AN INTERVIEW WITH RAMONA FRADON.........................21 Dial H for Hero....................................................................................................................23 Harvey Thrillers............................................................................................................... 25 Captain Action................................................................................................................31 Dell’s Monster Super-Heroes.........................................................................36 Palisades Park....................................................................................................................41 AN INTERVIEW WITH VINCE GARGIULO..........................43 Batman All Star Dairy Products................................................................45 Batman Mini-Comics.................................................................................................47 Super-Hero Paperbacks.......................................................................................50 Blackhawk, Junk-Heap Heroes ...................................................................60 Aquamania...........................................................................................................................63 B’Wana Beast................................................................................................................... 67

CHAPTER 2: Camptown Revivals

68

I.W. Super Comics.........................................................................................................69 The Shadow..........................................................................................................................71 Captain Marvel ................................................................................................................73 Doc Savage.........................................................................................................................77 The Spirit................................................................................................................................ 79 Fighting American.........................................................................................................81 Plastic Man .........................................................................................................................83 The Owl..................................................................................................................................... 87

CHAPTER 3: Campus Clowns

90

Jerry Lewis, One-Man Justice League.................................................91 Herbie the Fat Fury...................................................................................................98 Super Goof.........................................................................................................................100 Pureheart the Powerful & Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.........101 The Inferior Five............................................................................................................ 104 Go-Go.........................................................................................................................................110 The Mighty Heroes ...................................................................................................115 AN INTERVIEW WITH RALPH BAKSHI...............................118 Super Luck..........................................................................................................................125 Miracles, Inc. ......................................................................................................................126 Super Presidents ......................................................................................................128 AN INTERVIEW WITH TONY TALLARICO.......................136 The Nice–Terrific War.............................................................................................. 138

The Other Nice–Terrific War...........................................................................143 The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado.................................144 The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz .........................................145 AN INTERVIEW WITH DICK DeBARTOLO....................... 147 Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer....................................................... 148 Not Brand Echh..............................................................................................................151 Fruitman................................................................................................................................156 Sinistro, Boy Fiend....................................................................................................158 Fearless Frank................................................................................................................ 159 Captain Costello and Captain Splendid........................................160

CHAPTER 4: Camp Runamuck

162

Bondmania.......................................................................................................................... 163 Irwin Allen’s Fantastic Voyages ..............................................................174 AN INTERVIEW WITH BILL MUMY...................................... 178 Batmania...............................................................................................................................182 Jan and Dean Meet Batman ......................................................................190 AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN TORRENCE........................ 192 It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman........................................198 AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB HOLIDAY............................... 200 Tarzan, TV’s Most Famous Swinger...................................................205 The Green Hornet....................................................................................................206 Dick Tracy, Sixties Super-Cop...................................................................209 Wonder Woman TV Pilot....................................................................................212 Saturday Morning Super-Heroes.............................................................214 Hanna-Barbera Heroes.......................................................................................225 Filmation’s DC Super-Hero Cartoons...............................................237 Marvel Super-Hero Cartoons......................................................................239 America’s Best TV Comics............................................................................ 242

CHAPTER 5: Band Camp

244

Beatlemania.....................................................................................................................245 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE SINNOTT................................ 249 Swing with Scooter.................................................................................................251 Super-Hip.............................................................................................................................253 Surf’s Up!.............................................................................................................................255 Monkeemania and Comic Books............................................................257 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSE DELBO................................. 263 The Cowsills ...................................................................................................................265 The Archies .....................................................................................................................268 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................. 270 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................. 270 ABOUT THE AUTHOR...................................................................... 271

Introduction GOIN’ TO A GO-GO

How Real-World Crises Drove America Mod “What a terrible way to go-go.”

When actor Adam West first uttered those words I was introduced to Camp humor, although at the naïve age of eight I didn’t get the joke.

It was Thursday evening, January 13, 1966, and my parents and I had watched the conclusion of Adam West as Batman, autographed to the author at the 1994 San Diego Comic-Con. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

the premiere two-parter of ABC-TV’s Batman (Part One had aired the previous night). The Riddler’s gun moll, Molly (!), played to perfection by the buxom and curvaceous Jill St. John, had infiltrated the secret Batcave by flawlessly disguising herself as Robin, the Boy (!!) Wonder, and once her ruse was exposed she tumbled to her death into the cave’s Atomic Pile nuclear reactor. What a terrible way to go-go, indeed.

My parents howled. And I scowled, thinking them nuts for finding humor in such a tragic event.

But Mom and Dad were savvy enough to get what the third-grade me was missing: that Batman was riddled with puns and exaggerated scenarios that were outrageous, but played straight, with tongue planted so firmly in cheek that it probably induced mouth ulcers. With Batman, the daft became deft thanks to the typewriter of madcap screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who, at the behest of executive 4

producer William Dozier, nimbly straddled the line between crafting an adventure show for kids and a farce for adults.

Batman was an instant cultural phenomenon.

Relative unknowns became stars, millions of dollars were made, and imitators popped out of nowhere.

Batman so deeply affected children that many of them were inspired to become comic-book professionals, animators, or lifelong toy and comic collectors.

But since TV’s Batman strayed from the Darknight Detective’s original “creature of the night” interpretation, there were many who argued that the show truly was a terrible way to go-go. Dozier’s Batman has been blamed for sullying the character, ruining the comic-book industry, and programming lazy journalists to preface any article about comics culture with POW!s and ZOWIE!s. The “blame Batman” game even permeated DC Comics, Batman’s publisher, which for decades almost disavowed the very television show that had, in 1966, defibrillated its comic-book sales.

Yet Batman did not create the so-called “Camp” culture of the Sixties. Camp was well in vogue by the time Adam West and Burt Ward first slipped into tights as TV’s Dynamic Duo. Two years before Batman, writer/activist Susan Sontag very famously addressed the flourishing Camp movement by penning her essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” where she wrote, “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’.” Camp had been going on for generations, from burlesque shows to screwball comedies, but the Sixties claimed it as the art form for the decade. It was a time when kitschy paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and big-eyed waifs adorned galleries. When the mod fashions of Carnaby Street invaded Main Street. When it seemed like almost everyone was goin’ to a go-go.

TV’s Batman also cannot be blamed for the camping-up of comic books—many comics were quite campy before Bill Dozier and Lorenzo Semple came along, thank you very much. A year before Batman hit the airwaves, you could find the Caped Crusader hoisting a suicide-bombing gorilla (“The Living Beast-Bomb”) over his head, à la Atlas. Such unconventional frolics weren’t the sole domain of Batman. Around the same time, DC Comics published preposterous stories featuring children tossing a weakling Superman around like a beanbag, Lois Lane being wooed by a grotesque interdimensional monster, Jimmy Olsen making Superman beg for mercy in a wrestling ring, the Flash being outraced by a tricycle-peddling Trickster, Wonder Girl battling a creature that looked as if it were made of pancake batter, and a man on trial before an insect jury. Elsewhere on the comics racks, Blue Beetle was battling the ridiculous Praying Mantis-Man, freckle-faced high-schooler Archie Andrews was a jungle hero rescuing Betty Cooper from a hungry lion, and teeny-

bopper Ponytail was Twisting with the Frankenstein Monster.

No, Batman did not create the Camp movement of the Sixties. Yet Batman was its zenith, its very poster child. And from my perspective, it was a wonderful way to go-go.

Just as Batman, the hero, arrived in the nick of time to rescue his peppy partner from a nefarious fiend’s deathtrap, Batman, the TV series, arrived in the nick of time to rescue a beleaguered nation from a turbulent decade.

The Sixties were a tumultuous time. The Cold War’s icy fingers teetered over a nuclear button, and paranoid Americans nervously looked over their shoulders fearing the worst, teaching their children to Duck and Cover while plastering municipal buildings with Fallout Shelter signs. The U.S. president was assassinated—before an audience—and the same fate befell his alleged murderer. African Americans were brutalized for peacefully resisting a culture of oppression and inequality, and communities were in flames during violent race riots. Young men barely able to shave were shipped away to die in a sweltering jungle on the other side of the world, and the protests of those in opposition to this war often turned to bloodshed. As the decade wound down, two very good men who dreamt of a better tomorrow were cut down within mere months of each other.

Kids like me knew this stuff was going on. We couldn’t help but see it on the nightly news, in the newspapers, and on the covers of magazines. Yet we, as children, enjoyed an escapist popular culture where silly super-heroes, surfing, swinging spies, kooky castaways, and yeah-yeah-yeahing fab foursomes offered a security blanket guaranteed to

deflect any frightening real-world headline. This was my childhood.

For every nightmare I had about a political assassination or a napalm-burned Vietnamese girl, my campy comic books, crimefighters, and culture brought me welcomed solace.

Hero-A-Go-Go embraces what I call the Camp Age, the era when spies liked their wars cold and women warm, when good guys beat bad guys with a pun and a punch. There’s no exact moment when the Camp Age commenced, no single movie or comic book or TV show or cartoon one can cite, but the 1968 cancellation of TV’s Batman was the beginning of its end. The Silver Age of Comics and the Camp Age aren’t interchangeable, although the latter was an outgrowth of the former. Somewhere along the way during the super-hero renaissance of the early Silver Age, comic-book writers attempting to replicate Stan Lee’s vitality at the up-and-coming Marvel Comics instead played it so over-the-top that their efforts made drag-queen stage shows seem restrained.

The TV and music industries caught this fever, joining comicdom’s mad, mad, mad rush to produce material to satiate a growing demand. What we got during the Camp Age was a hodgepodge of standup comedians moonlighting as crime-crushers, shaggyhaired singing heartthrobs and goofballs swaying a generation of girls and boys, and a Batman who could shake a mean cape.

Fifty years after I first gasped at Molly’s Batcave demise, I’m no longer the wide-eyed, impressionable boy whose life was altered by the viewing of a colorful television program. Or am I? I’ve faced my share of adversities, from career calamities to medical mishaps to lost loved ones, but through it all have maintained a positive attitude. That I attribute to my “babysitters”—the heroes, icons, role models, father and mother figures, and entertainers provided to me by the comic books, television, and music of my childhood. If you’re inclined to read a book titled Hero-A-Go-Go, chances are these were your babysitters, too. Much of what they did was unbelievable or foolish, but they took our minds off of how scary the real world could be and brought a smile to our faces. These are the stars of Hero-A-GoGo: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixties, and their stories unfold in the collection of essays that follow.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s go-go!

Michael Eury

Concord, North Carolina August 2016

A pop artinfluenced comic-book cover from 1966. Cover art by Dan DeCarlo.

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

LEFT: Realworld unrest such as this 1967 antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., made the Camp culture a welcomed diversion.

LBJ library photo by Frank Wolfe.

5

Chapter 1

CAMPFIRE Uh-oh ... Now I know how toothpaste feels! YEEOW!

Detail and dialogue from The Brave and the Bold #68. TM & (C) DC Comics.

HAW! I’ll squeeze the elemental juice out of you, fella!

THE SUPER-HERO EXPLOSION ECLIPSO

Split personality!

Gordon vs.

Eclipso on the Toth-drawn House of Secrets #67 cover.

Let’s get this out of the way from the get-go: Eclipso scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. In 1966, I had just started buying comics at age eight when the “Hero and Villain in One Man!” was winding down his original three-year blip of fame. As I scoured the racks searching for Batman funnybooks, I’d avert my eyes when stumbling across those issues of House of Secrets starring Eclipso. As drawn by Jack Sparling, Eclipso was horrifying, with his pointy demon ears, blue half-moon face, and swollen-lipped evil snarl.

But I scared easily back then. Bette Davis gave me nightmares (those were her What Ever Happened to

TM & © DC Comics.

Hero and Villain in One Man

Baby Jane? years, when her makeup was gruesomely applied like Herman Munster’s).

Who was Eclipso? Created by writer Bob Haney and artist Lee Elias, this high-concept character— “Hero and Villain in One Man!”—debuted in issue #61 (July–Aug. 1963) of House of Secrets, one of DC Comics’ eerie anthologies. His premiere only garnered a headshot inset at the bottom of the comic’s cover, with HOS’ Mark Merlin considered a better draw for the spotlight. But over time Eclipso would… yes, eclipse the other stars of the book (Merlin and, later, Prince Ra-Man) to become House of Secrets’ dominant cover feature.

Issue #61’s inaugural tale, “Eclipso, the Genius Who Fought Himself,” introduces solar-energy scientist Dr. Bruce Gordon, the feature’s hero who would also become its villain. While studying an eclipse of the sun on an island sinisterly named Diablo, Gordon is scratched by an uncanny black diamond wielded by a loco jungle shaman named Mophir. From that moment on, Gordon becomes a modern-day Jekyll

LEFT: Original Jack Sparling art, with monsters galore, from HOS #80.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

7

An eyepopping “team-up” in Brave and Bold #64. Cover by Gil Kane.

TM & © DC Comics.

Jack Sparling.

TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: How to handle a temperamental heiress, Sixties-style.

From B&B #64.

TM & © DC Comics.

8

and Hyde during each eclipse. An eerie shadow casts across part of Gordon’s face, triggering his transformation into the super-villain Eclipso, a repugnant ogre in violetand-black dance togs who emits energy blasts whenever he holds the black diamond to his “eclipsed” eye.

Imagine, a super-villain starring in his own series! In 1963! Naturally, with the puritans at the Comics Code Authority enforcing the rules, Eclipso always had to be defeated, but instead of incarceration, Eclipso would be vanquished—actually, he’d vanish, until the next eclipse (which conveniently would occur in the next issue). And a mere camera flashbulb could defeat him… really. Light was his nemesis. Professor Simon Bennett, Gordon’s colleague, and the professor’s daughter, Mona, Gordon’s main squeeze, employed everything from lamps to photon light bursts to send Eclipso running home with his tail between his legs.

Actually, between Gordon’s legs. Eclipso’s chief adversary was himself—his alter ego, Bruce Gordon.

(Bob Haney admitted in a 1997 interview with Michael Catron that the character’s name was a Batman gag, borrowed from Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon.) Gordon would concoct ways to thwart Eclipso, while Eclipso despised his goody-two-shoes alter ego—sort of like the Incredible Hulk hating “puny Banner,” but with a better vocabulary.

After Lee Elias rather tepidly illustrated the first two Eclipso stories, the amazing Alex Toth became the Eclipso artist for five beautifully drawn installments, beginning with issue #63. He was replaced by the feature’s last artist, Jack Sparling, beginning with HOS #68. Sparling, a journeyman with a scratchy art style, was surprisingly in fine form on Eclipso; his loose linework was well suited for the unconventional appearance of the character and the peculiar creatures that populated Haney’s scripts. Yet Eclipso was doomed to fail.

The feature’s high concept quickly ran dry, his eclipse-triggered transformations were generally contrived, and between his vulnerability (Boo! I’ve got a flashlight!) and his detachment from the main DC Universe, Eclipso never seemed like much of a

threat. And to make matters worse, Haney never cared much for the Eclipso feature—his heart just wasn’t in it.

As Eclipso’s series was winding down in 1966 (it ended with the cancellation of House of Secrets with issue #80), the “Hero and Villain in One Man!” was discovered by a new readership. It started with The Brave and the Bold #64, which presented a “teamup” titled “Batman versus Eclipso.” This issue, which went on sale just before the January 12, 1966 premiere of ABC-TV’s Batman, is noteworthy for several reasons: It co-starred a hero and a villain, a revolutionary concept at the time.

It offered Bob Haney, writer of both B&B and the Eclipso feature, a chance to give his strange B-level (make that C-level) star a shared limelight with an A-lister.

It featured Batman spanking an heiress (not the Caped Crusader’s primary mode of discipline, but, hey, it was the Sixties).

And finally, it added Eclipso to the roster of Batman’s rogues’ gallery—albeit briefly. While this B&B issue wasn’t enough to sustain Eclipso’s regular series for much longer, kids buying Batman merchandise from coloring books to frame tray puzzles would find a rather benign Eclipso battling the Masked Manhunter and his youthful ally, Robin, the Boy Wonder. Many fans who are familiar with Eclipso’s comic-book legacy are unaware of his appearances in Batman merchandising.

Some of those fans became comics professionals and, years later, began working the kinks out of the character, making Eclipso more formidable and believable. Eclipso returned in the Seventies to battle the Justice League and the Metal Men, then came back in the Eighties for a metaphysical tussle with the Phantom Stranger. I had gotten over my fear of Eclipso in 1992 when, as a DC Comics editor, I codeveloped a reimagining of the villain in the crossover Eclipso: The Darkness Within. (On its first issue cover, we added a glued “black” plastic diamond over Eclipso’s sinisterly squinting eye. This gimmick was clever

SUPERMAN AND THE GIANT CYCLOPS A Whacked-Out Wax Exhibit

Part of growing up is the crushing discovery that sometimes, advertisements stretch the truth. Other times, they flat-out lie.

You’d think that Sixties comic books, which paraded their wholesomeness by plastering the Mompleasing Comics Code Authority seal of approval on their covers, would be immune to such swindles.

But amid their four-color pages existed the most shameless examples of advertising’s sliding scale of honesty, from the X-Ray Specs that provided no voyeuristic peek through fabric whatsoever to the Sea Monkeys that could not, in fact, be trained as pets.

Those charlatans! How dare they deceive children??

The mightiest of super-heroes, Superman himself, exposed his vulnerability to false advertising in 1964 when he loaned his very name and image to one of the Sixties’ greatest let-downs: the “Superman and the Giant Cyclops” attraction at the World’s Fair.

The bar of anticipation was hoisted to stratospheric highs by the fair itself, an astonishing Space Age wonderland that was 1964’s second biggest American invasion (after the Beatles). Engulfing 650

LEFT: Eclipso, Bat-villain, as seen in a frame tray puzzle, coloring book (back cover shown), and a card from a Batman card game, all from 1966.

TM & © DC Comics.

The DC Comics house ad of 1964, promising a wax museum thrill.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

at the time but later hated when collectors realized the diamond made it tough to bag and board the issue without damaging the comic in front of it.) And since then Eclipso, like comic books themselves, has gotten darker and meaner.

But for those of us who lived during the Camp Age, we’ll always think of Eclipso as the moon-faced menace who’d duck when you’d turn on your front porch light.

9

The Unisphere dominates this 1962 poster produced by U.S. Steel to promote the fair. © 1962 U.S. Steel.

Marvel’s Millie the Model #124 and Dell’s The Flintstones at the New York World’s Fair were among the 1964 comic books taking place at the fair.

Millie the Model © Marvel Characters, Inc. Flintstones © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

10

acres in Flushing, Queens, New York, and attracting over 51 million visitors from across the globe during its two-year run, the World’s Fair promised “Peace through understanding,” a motto exemplified by the Unisphere, the fair’s iconic steel replica of Earth that towered twelve stories tall. Comic books caught fair fever, including Marvel’s Millie the Model, who set her hairsprayed hopes on becoming Miss World’s Fair. The hype even reached the Stone Age, with the Flintstones yabba-dabba-doing the Time Warp to drop in for a World’s Fair visit.

“Come to the World’s Fair!” screamed a full-page DC Comics house ad of 1964, its flashy Ira Schnapp calligraphy beaconing every comics-reading kid from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, to Walter’s International Wax Museum exhibit. Leaping from the

pages of a Mort Weisinger-edited Superman comic was the Man of Steel, punching Cyclops in the jaw in an exhilarating illustration by Superman artist supreme Curt Swan and inker Sheldon Moldoff. The ad included a coupon allowing children under twelve years of age to see this sensation for the discounted price of forty cents.

The coupon specified that children must be accompanied by an adult. Those adults were called upon to calm their kiddies’ crying jags after having their little hearts broken by what could very well be the cheesiest wax exhibit ever.

Cyclops wasn’t the brutish behemoth as rendered by Swan and Moldoff. He was instead a hirsute, near-naked weirdo whose swollen nipples stared at you and took your eyes off his own signature orb. Superman bore no resemblance to Swan’s classic version, nor TV Superman George Reeves, and was in desperate need of a shave. A conspicuous web of wires dangled Superman from the ceiling, creating the illusion of flight only for the most naïve or nearsighted fairgoer. The only thrill on display here was provided by the damsel in distress, a wax beauty whose slightly exposed slip attracted ogles from any boy frustrated by the dashed dreams of X-Ray Specs.

“Superman and the Giant Cyclops” might have wowed them between pig races and Tilt-a-Whirl rides at the County Fair, but at the World’s Fair, you expected a better show.

Well, at least you got a cool Curt Swan Superman vs. Cyclops pin-up for your bedroom.

The horror!

The World’s Fair’s Superman and the Giant Cyclops wax exhibit, revealed!

Photos courtesy of Bob Burns. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

11

Nemesis (detail from the cover of Adventures into the Unknown #154) and Magicman (detail from the cover of Forbidden Worlds #126).

Art by Kurt Schaffenberger.

MAGICMAN AND NEMESIS

The Siegfried and Roy of the Camp Age

TM & © Roger Broughton.

Magicman’s daddy, Cagliostro.

Chic Stone’s Nemesis, on the cover of Adventures into the Unknown #167.

TM & © Roger Broughton.

12

The Sixties’ race to overpopulate comic-book racks with super-heroes created more wrong turns than a drunken taxi driver. Among them: the Siegfried and Roy of the Camp Age, Magicman and Nemesis.

They were the product of American Comics Group (ACG), known for its long-running supernatural anthologies Adventures into the Unknown, which began in 1948, and Forbidden Worlds, which began in 1951 and gave birth to the cult favorite Herbie. In the mid-Sixties, their editor, Richard A. Hughes, acquiesced to reader and market demands and created the super-heroes Magicman, who took over Forbidden Worlds with issue #125 (Jan.–Feb. 1965),

and Nemesis, the cover-featured star of Adventures into the Unknown beginning with issue #154 (Feb. 1965). Conceptually, both characters were a better fit for their anthologies than, say, Martian Manhunter or Dial H for Hero were for DC’s House of Mystery.

Magicman and Nemesis were rooted in the occult, both had creepy origins… …and both had the most embarrassing costumes this side of Captain Nice. As comics historian Don Thompson wrote in his essay “OK, Axis, Here We Come” in the 1970 book All in Color for a Dime, Magicman and Nemesis were “a couple of limpwristed super-heroes” who were “costumed as if for ballet.”

Magicman’s bare arms, peek-a-boo chest, and pixie boots so undermined his masculinity that they made his turban look like a beauty shop towel wrap. And the barelegged Nemesis was emasculated by striped briefs and a hood that looked better suited for a Forties screen diva. Soft costume colors (lime for Magicman, powder blue for Nemesis) didn’t help their virility, either.

They were nicely drawn, however, particularly on their covers, most of which were done by German immigrant Kurt Schaffenberger, a goat herderturned-comic artist who dazzled Golden Age readers with his work on Fawcett Comics’ Captain Marvel

adventures. By the Sixties he was in the employ of Superman editor Mort Weisinger as the chief artist of DC’s Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, but moonlighted for ACG, frequently using a number of pseudonyms (Jay Kafka and Lou Wahl, or by signing his work as “Pete Costanza,” Kurt’s former Fawcett colleague whose artwork could be found inside ACG books) to avoid the watchful eye and scornful wrath of Mort.

In Forbidden Worlds #125, writer Hughes (as Zev Zimmer) and artist Pete Costanza (for real) reveal that Magicman is the immortal son of Italian sorcerer and voyager Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, whose 18th-Century antics inspired storytellers from novelist Alexandre Dumas to Wonder Woman TV screenwriter S. S. Schweitzer.

Magicman had eschewed daddy’s black magic for generations, vagabonding across the globe, until joining the U.S. Army as Tom Cargill, seeing combat in Vietnam. The death of his Army buddy inspires Tom to use his mystical powers for Viet Congcrushing, so he cobbles together his super-hero threads from a theatrical stash (did he leave the U.S.O. an I.O.U.?) and as Magicman takes on those Commies with enchanted bolts, illusion-casting, super-strength, and elemental manipulation.

In Adventures into the Unknown #154, writer Hughes (as Shane O’Shea) and Pete Costanza (him again) reimagine DC’s the Spectre into Nemesis.

Nemesis is actually Federal agent Steve Flint, who dies in a hit orchestrated by Goratti, a mob boss he’s pursuing. Waking up in the Great Beyond (a.k.a. the Unknown), Flint encounters afterlife bureaucracy and is scheduled for purgatory until his final judgment can take place. He appeals to the Grim Reaper to send him back to finish his mission, and the Reaper re-creates Steve Flint into Nemesis. Like the Spectre, Nemesis can do just about anything—fly, grow to a towering giant, become a phantom, and take an evil person’s life as a spirit of vengeance, as he does with the mobster who had him killed.

After a few topical stories set in the ’Nam, Magicman’s feature fizzled, with the hero encountering run-of-the-mill menaces such as the Wizard of Science and his robot dogs, ghost pirates, a giant ape, and ring of art thieves led by the Artful Dodger. The mega-mighty Nemesis’ feature similarly degenerated, with the hero tackling ho-hum threats such as a crook with a freeze ray, an octopus, and a grizzly bear. There were a couple of standout stories during the characters’ short careers: Magicman and Nemesis joined the superhero Fat Fury as the Three Musketeers in Herbie #14 (Dec. 1965–Jan. 1966), and Magicman and Nemesis were duped into a fistfight by a villain named Ichabod Potter in Forbidden Worlds #136 (July 1966). The art on both strips was solid, with Costanza launching both features but being replaced on Nemesis by Chic Stone. Stone “Kirby-ed”

Nemesis by drawing the hero as more muscular and by lowering his hood.

But there was little magic in Magicman and nothing to fear from Nemesis. After eventually being demoted from their cover-starring statuses, both characters disappeared two years after their debuts: Magicman’s feature ended in Forbidden Worlds #141 (Jan.–Feb. 1967), and Nemesis said good-bye with Adventures into the Unknown #170 (Feb. 1967). Later in 1967, ACG stopped publishing comics.

Magicman and Nemesis have since appeared in reprints, most notably deluxe hardcover Archive editions from Dark Horse Comics. Should they be revived in new adventures, my magic wish would be for new costumes.

Magicman vs.

Nemesis!

LEFT: Ogden Whitney’s cover to Herbie #14.

RIGHT: Kurt Schaffenberger’s cover to Forbidden Worlds #136.

TM & © Roger Broughton.

Original cover art by “Pete Costanza” (Kurt Schaffenberger) for Magicman’s first appearance, Forbidden Worlds #125.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Roger Broughton.

13

THE TEEN TITANS

Bob Haney’s Fab Four

LEFT: Robin and Kid Flash split from super-squares Batman and Flash in the first TT story

by Haney and Premiani.

RIGHT: The three-way team-up that started DC’s crazy teen scene! B&B #54 cover

by Bruno Premiani.

TM & © DC Comics.

14

Super-hero teams are traditionally forged in the fires of conflict—alien invasions, monsters, super-villain alliances, and sinister sentient robots have been known to draw costumed crimefighters together.

But a different type of conflict united the superkids who would become known as the Teen Titans: the Generation Gap. If Stan Lee was the Beat Generation poet for Marvel Comics, then DC Comics’ World’s Oldest Teenager was Bob Haney. A World War II veteran, Haney started writing comic books in the late Forties, and after working for several publishers had hunkered down at DC by the Sixties. He was pushing forty when he came up with the Teen Titans idea for editor George Kashdan in response to DC’s desire for a new team book, on the heels of the success of Justice League of America and other super-teams.

“I said let’s do the junior members and let’s put them all together,” Haney told Les Daniels in 1995. Despite his status as a member of the Greatest Generation, Bob felt a kinship with the Young Generation, residing in the mecca for grooviness, Woodstock, and even scuffling with the Fuzz during Sixties protest marches. Although Haney realized that the times, they were a’changing, he still viewed those times not through the optimistic eyes of youth but through the perspective of an empathic “uncle” who really tried to “get it,” but never quite could. Couple that with the fact that the company buying his scripts, National Periodical Publications, Inc., was The Man, producing kid lit from their ivory towers in the naked city (“My audience was still the twelve-year-old kid in Ohio,” Haney said), so Bob’s efforts to sound hip often sounded hokey.

Still, that’s part of the charm of the Camp Age Teen Titans. The JLA had their cliques (Superman

and Batman, Flash and Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman) and the Fantastic Four had their family dysfunction, but the TTs had a swingin’ time when they got together, from coquettish Wonder Girl’s rock-and-rolling in the Titans HQ to the group’s playful nicknames for each other (like “Twinkletoes” for Kid Flash and “Gillhead” for Aqualad). Plus, the Titans were the super-hero equivalent of a pimplyfaced Dear Abby, responding to teens’ cries for help.

Hey, hey, with the Monkees, you never knew where they’d be found, but with the Titans, you could call them to come to your town.

And that’s how three of DC’s Fab Four first got together—they were invited. The Hatton Corners Teen Club wrote letters to a trio of super-hero sidekicks— Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad—imploring them to mediate a dispute that had placed their once-peaceful hamlet under the curfew of Mayor Corliss, who was kowtowing to anxiety-ridden adults fed up with the town’s “teen-age problem”—their demand for a new clubhouse. As luck, or contrivance, would have it, the three junior heroes arrive in Hatton Corners at exactly the same time and meet. At the town hall, the mayor informs the young heroes that his very son has led those “nervy” kids on a strike, and that they’ve disappeared from town. Robin is shown a note that he is told was written by the teens:

All us cats decided to skip

Until adults to the music get hip!

Build a new clubhouse!

Hatton Corner Teens Having spent years in the tutelage of Batman, the World’s Greatest Detective, Robin smells something fishy (no, not Aqualad). He pulls the other young heroes aside and declares, “No teen-ager would use the word ‘music’ in a hip language message… they’d use ‘jive’!” Of course!! Mayor Corliss and his fellow adults were too square to catch this! So the Boy Wonder, Kid Flash, and Aqualad team up to investigate the teens’ disappearance and encounter Mr. Twister, an elemental supervillain with an old grudge against Hatton Corners.

It’s super-heroes versus a supervillain, the end result conveniently bridging the town’s Generation Gap. This Bob Haney-scripted story, drawn by Doom Patrol artist Bruno Premiani, appeared

B&B #60 added Wonder Girl and the “Teen Titans” name, while Showcase #59—with its swingin’ cover copy!— was the TTs’ final tryout.

Covers by Nick Cardy.

TM & © DC Comics.

in DC’s team-up title, The Brave and the Bold, in issue #54 (June–July 1964). Premiani’s art was gorgeous, but it had one flaw: He drew Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad as boys, just a tad too young to warrant the autonomy they were receiving by running around without their mentors.

A year later, the young heroes were back, this time with a fourth member—Wonder Girl—and a team brand—the Teen Titans. In B&B #60 (June–July 1965), the Titans are summoned to the town of Midville, at the urgent call of Tommy Holmes, the town’s teen “mayor for a day.” It turns out Midville is under siege by the Astounding Separated Man, a freaky giant who can split his body parts for simultaneous attacks— and who just may secretly be Tommy’s ne’er-do-well daddio. Later that year, the Titans reassembled for a final tryout in Showcase #59 (Nov.–Dec. 1965). That story involves the Titans’ attempt to clear the name of a hot music group, the Flips, who appear to be a band of super-criminals… or are they?

Joining Haney on the second and third Titans tryouts was the artist who would long be associated with the group, Nick Cardy. “In 1965 I started drawing the Teen Titans, just when the country was beginning to be rattled by war demonstrations, riots, rebellion, and drugs,” Cardy wrote in his Foreword to DC’s 2003 The Teen Titans Archives vol. 1. “I have to confess that now, almost forty years later [in 2003], there is not much that stands out to me about working on the title.”

While he considered it to be merely one of his assignments, Cardy gave The Teen Titans a distinc-

tive appearance. He made the Fab Four look like teenagers (and Wonder Girl, a sexy one at that), not children, maintaining their youthful vigor while clearly anchoring them in puberty. “One thing I do recall was that I enjoyed the challenge of drawing more youthful characters,” Cardy wrote. “Instead of the usual muscular adult figures that were featured in almost every other comic book of the time, the Titans were not much more than children, and that was something different for me.”

The Camp Age was revving into high gear on November 18, 1965, when Teen Titans #1 hit the stands. The kids “just couldn’t wait to start their own mag!” yelled the burst above their logo. However, there was no “No. 1” to be found on the cover, since in ’65 the prevailing wisdom at DC dictated that news dealers regarded start-up titles as risky business and preferred long-running, established commodities. In that issue, the Titans are mobilized not by troubled teens, but by the Peace Corps, being dispatched to South America to help build a school and a dam, there confronting “The Beast-God of Xochatan!”

And so, with their bimonthly title in full swing, the Teen Titans had adventures with a caveboy (#2), a “demon dragster” named Ding-Dong Daddy (#3), guest-star Speedy, the Boy Bowman (#4), a mysterious young super-villain called the Ant (#5), the Doom Patrol’s Beast Boy (#6), and so on. Their stories often started in their secret HQ, with the kids goofing off (Kid Flash is reading a Metamorpho comic in issue #5!) while team leader Robin reads aloud a letter asking for their help. Unlike the petulant Marvel heroes,

Bob Haney.

Photo by Mike W. Barr.

15

Hot rods, evil mods, and biker bods!

TM & © DC Comics.

When Fab Fours collide!

Check out Haney’s Beatles’ reference in Teen Titans #8. Original art

by Irv Novick and Jack Abel.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

16

the Titans enjoyed each other’s company, despite their frisky chitchat and minor disagreements over such matters as new recording artists like issue #7’s Holley Hip (Kid Flash says, “That guy leaves me chilly!

He’s just too much!”; Wonder Girl counters, “He’s a dreamboat!”). Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Wonder Girl even kept their egos in check during the height of Batmania, when Robin’s name crowded his teammates’ on TT covers in ’66 and early ’67.

Haney tried his best to be trendy with his Titans tales, and at times succeeded, such as with Teen Titans #7 (Jan.–Feb. 1967), which raided Carnaby Street for the fashionable felon, the Mad Mod. Other times, he was a beat behind the trend, such as with the motorcycling menaces the Scorcher (TT #10) and Captain Rumble (TT #15), who seemed better suited for the era of Marlon Brando’s 1953 movie The Wild One than comic books of ’67 and ’68 (to Cardy’s credit, though, Titans #10 showed Robin wheeling on his version of a Vespa).

As with most things Haney, the Titans didn’t always act the way they did in their host magazines.

TT’s Robin let his hair down a bit more when out of Batman’s shadow and Kid Flash was a little edgier.

But the big continuity conundrum was Haney’s and editor Kashdan’s insertion of Wonder Girl into the cast (not that they had a lot of teen heroines to choose from at the time). Originally Wonder Girl was a Silver Age add-on to the Wonder Woman mythos, in adventures featuring the Amazing Amazon as a teen (similarly, there were Wonder Tot stories with Wonder Woman as a toddler). Wonder Woman writer/ editor Robert Kanigher later backpedalled and returned the heroine to her Golden Age, molded-fromclay roots and tried to explain away Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot, only to be confounded by Teen Titans’ successful use of Wonder Girl as a character. Before long, Teen Titans was the book where Wonder Girl, as Donna Troy, was developed into a character in her own right.

Filmation Associates produced three sevenminute Teen Titans animated shorts in 1967, shown in rotation with other DC heroes’ adventures on the hour-long program The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure on CBS. Since Robin’s rights were tied up with the Batman live-action show, Green Arrow’s

METAMORPHO, THE ELEMENT MAN The Fab Freak’s Fleeting Fame

sidekick Speedy, an occasional guest in DC’s Teen Titans, rounded out the cast (curiously, GA himself did not appear in Filmation’s cartoons, although at one time he was under development). The stories,

by Kashdan and Haney, bristled with the teen-speak of the comic but fell prey to the pitfall of extraterrestrial menaces, the generic type which appeared in so many of Filmation’s DC cartoons. Voicing the Titans were Jerry Dexter as Aqualad (a carryover from the Aquaman episodes), Tommy Cook as Kid Flash, Julie Bennett as Wonder Girl, and future One Day At a Time co-star Pat Harrington, Jr. as Speedy.

As the Camp Age ended, the Teen Titans continued in their bimonthly DC title, with various writers and artists struggling to find a new direction for the group. The Titans gave up their powers and costumes and became pacifists, renewed their super-heroics, got cancelled, got revived, and got cancelled again, before an immensely successful 1980 revival by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez as The New Teen Titans, which helped revitalize a sagging DC and put new members Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven on the map. In more recent times, the Titans’ have starred in a franchise of DC Comics titles as well as several animated projects, elevating their status on the pop-culture radar. For those of us who loved our years at Camp, however, if they’re not calling each other “Wonder Doll” and “Speedy-o,” they’re not the Teen Titans!

You’ve gotta hand it to soldier of fortune Rex Mason—the guy’s got guts. Swaggering through Indonesian bogs and forbidden pyramids like a Sunday afternoon stroll through the park, Rex could teach Hal Jordan and Matt Murdock a thing or two about fearlessness. No man intimidated him, from a witch doctor with the power to shrink humans, to a jealous, conniving caveman who wants him dead, to a blowhard billionaire who considers him a pawn. And once he was transformed into the Fab Freak of 1000-and-1 Changes, Mason—better known as Metamorpho, the Element Man—was the first super-hero with the nerve to tell the Justice League to stuff it. Most people wouldn’t step outside of the house if they looked like Metamorpho­—especially while wearing only midnight-blue Fruit of the Looms (held into place by an “M”-buckle belt). But this offbeat monster-hero, who longed to be human again but whose devil-may-care bravado kept him from succumbing to the pity parties routinely hosted by Marvel’s Ben Grimm, chose to use his uncanny powers of elemental transmutation as a crimefighter—and he got the girl, filthy-rich socialite Sapphire Stagg, who, unlike the Thing’s Alicia Masters, could actually see what a freakshow she’d hooked up with!

Writer Bob Haney created Metamorpho after a brainstorming session where DC Comics editor George Kashdan suggested he come up with a hero that could undergo chemical changes.

To visualize the character Kashdan recruited the remarkable Ramona Fradon, at the time one of the few women

LEFT: Images from a Filmation Teen Titans cartoon repurposed into comics form, from 1999’s Teen Titans (Lost) Annual #1 replica edition.

TM & © DC Comics.

DC’s “Fab Freak of 1000-and-1 Changes” got his start here, in The Brave and the Bold #57. Cover

by Ramona Fradon.

TM & © DC Comics.

17

Metamania starts here—in Metamorpho’s own mag!

TM & © DC Comics.

18

artists to brave the He-Man Woman Haters haven of funnybooks, and thus began the adventures of an extraordinary super-hero that would soon spawn a legion of “Metamaniacs.”

DC’s Element Man looked like no other superhero (well, at least until a year later, when the evenweirder Ultra, the Multi-Alien ripped a page from his fashion playbook). The only thing about Metamorpho’s appearance that marched in step with the costumed heroes of his day was his patented super-hero briefs and monogram belt. He was bald—not Lex Luthor or Professor X hairless, but more like the Mummy with his chalky head and ghostly, ghastly visage. He rejected the primary colors so popular during the Silver Age for the unusual hues a kid would dig out of the back of a box of crayons. He wasn’t limited to just one superpower—he could shape-shift and, as Rex said in his origin story after discovering his abilities—“will myself into different chemical forms!” With the various textures of his bizarre body, Metamorpho almost looked three-dimensional. He had a sassy attitude that seemed more suited for a Marvel comic, he was funny and had a blast with his life despite his horrific appearance, and just like those beatniks and beach bums that kids saw on TV, Metamorpho didn’t wear shoes! His supporting cast was almost as peculiar as the star: wild-haired Simon Stagg, partmanipulative mogul, part-mad scientist; Stagg’s gorgeous daughter Sapphire, a self-absorbed jetsetter who spiced up the series with sex appeal; and Simon’s lurking, lovesick manservant Java, a Neanderthal snatched out of suspended animation by the adventurer Rex Mason, who returned the favor by constantly conspiring against Metamorpho in competition for Sapphire’s heart. Haney and Fradon tossed the Universal Monsters, the Addams Family, Marvel’s super-heroes with problems, a kid’s chemistry set, a box of Crayolas, and counterculture coolness into a comic-book blender, and out popped the Element Man! Metamorpho premiered in The Brave and the Bold #57 (Dec. 1964–Jan. 1965), which went on sale on October 29, 1964, and a follow-up story in the next issue, B&B #58. A few months after this pair of tryouts, he was awarded his own bimonthly title.

For years, longtime DC fans have been puzzled as to why Metamorpho was launched in B&B instead of Showcase, the publisher’s main vehicle for newconcept experiments—especially since B&B had recently replaced its previous tryout formula with super-hero team-ups beginning with issue #50.

Comics historians Michael Uslan (also the executive producer of the Batman films) and Robert Klein (cofounder of the Grand Comics Database) blame it on

another hero of the Camp Age, G.I. Joe. Hasbro’s articulated action figure (read: doll for boys) was the darling of the 1964 Toy Fair, prompting DC to rush into production a two-issue G.I. Joe tryout (sneakily repackaging a hodgepodge of DC war reprints under new covers). Uslan and Klein wrote in their Foreword to The Brave and the Bold Team-Up Archives, vol. 1 (2005, DC Comics): “Our best guess is that Hasbro made a deal with DC to publish these two G.I. Joe tie-in comic books, and the schedule was demanding. The books were thrown into Showcase at the last minute, bumping the two slated issues of Metamorpho.” In those days DC rarely rushed a character into its own book without a few tryout issues, so instead of launching Metamorpho in a self-titled series, the Brave & Bold team-ups were bumped for two issues to roll out the new hero—besides, B&B was a comfortable fit for the quirky new character, since Bob Haney was on board as that title’s team-up scribe.

Had DC’s higher-ups possessed Rex Mason’s gumption, however, they would have originally launched the Element Man in his own book, because response to the two-issue B&B tryout quickly led to Metamorpho #1 (cover-dated July–Aug. 1965, hitting newsstands on May 27, 1965). Joining DC’s growing roster of weirdo-hero books (Challengers of the Unknown, Doom Patrol, Metal Men), Metamorpho was in a league all its own, thanks to Haney’s tongue-in-cheek dialogue and outlandish plots and Fradon’s (inked by Charles Paris) imaginative, detailed realizations of the playful lunacy spewing out of Haney’s typewriter. Stan Lee reportedly was so impressed with Metamorpho that he offered Bob Haney a chance to write for Mighty Marvel, which Haney turned down.

The bimonthly Metamorpho series was a modest hit, and with the burgeoning super-hero craze the Element Man quickly achieved star status. As “the current super-hero sensation” he was offered Justice League membership in Justice League of America #42 (Feb. 1966), where his “astonishing reply” was also the story’s title: “Metamorpho Says—No!” The Element Man’s reason for declining the invitation was, as written by JLA scribe Gardner Fox, the only writer other than Bob Haney to script Metamorpho during the Camp Age: “You fellas just gotta understand that I don’t like being Metamorpho! I just want to get back to my old self, Rex Mason!” Fox’s dialogue for the Element Man was stiffer than Haney’s, and with JLA editor’s Julius Schwartz’s penchant for sciencefiction plots, the quirky Metamorpho might have been mishandled had he accepted a chair in the JLA’s Secret Sanctuary.

Metamorpho made an even bigger splash throughout 1966, the Year of the Campy Super-Hero.

Metamorpho added a letters page, with fan mail answered by the Element Man himself. In addition to his own magazine he appeared in two Haney-scripted Brave & Bold team-ups, headlining the first (#66) with co-stars the Metal Men, and pairing off with Batman

Take this League and lump it!

LEFT: Justice League of America #42.

RIGHT: At story’s end, Metamorpho becomes a stand-by member.

TM & © DC Comics.

in the second (#68). B&B #68 stands as one of the pinnacles of the High Camp movement, exploiting Batmania with its inclusion of three nefarious fiends from Batman’s rogues’ gallery—the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler—and borrowing a character from the House of Ideas by transforming Batman into Bat-Hulk. That year, Metamorpho was also among the DC characters drawn by Wally Wood in Topps’ Comic Book Foldees funny-picture collectible cards.

Metamorpho was also immortalized in song.

Yes, song. You could only imagine what was on the minds of the studio musicians who recorded the twangy beach/guitar tune “Metamorpho (the Element Man)” in 1966, with lyrics like, “This is the story of the Element Man”/“Starts out in old Egypt land,” and a chorus that double-chanted the hero’s name (hey, a gig’s a gig!). The song, released by Tifton Records along with a narrated Metamorpho adventure, was re-released by Power Records in the Seventies and can be heard on the Internet (word of warning: It’s catchy and kooky, but you won’t be able to get it out of your head for days). Also, in the world of Tifton Records, Metamorpho said “Yes” to the Justice

League, as he was one of the heroes in its Justice League tune in the LP Songs and Stories About the Justice League of America.

And then there was the Metamorpho TV cartoon.

Actually, there wasn’t the Metamorpho TV cartoon. Or was there?

With the 1966 spurt of Meta-merchandising, the Element Man was one of a handful of DC heroes gobbled up for development for television animation—and judging from the wackiness leaping from each vibrant page of DC’s Metamorpho comic, the character was perfect for the cartoon medium, especially with color television then becoming commonplace. A DC house ad touted Metamorpho as one of several DC stars coming to TV in the Fall of 1966. That didn’t happen, but several years later, in a 1970 Brave & Bold letters column, Bob Haney wrote that Metamorpho’s origin was produced as an animated pilot, “an adventure that was put on film for a TV series, but shelved when some super-heroes went out of style on the tot tube.” Many years later, he shared a similar story in an interview. Metamaniacs like yours truly and Mark Waid searched for physical evidence of the Metamorpho cartoon’s existence—even model sheets— but our quests were fruitless.

In the 2012 book Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation by Lou Scheimer with Andy Mangels, the TV animation producer of the Camp Age’s DC super-hero cartoons remarked, “I don’t think we ever did [produce a Metamorpho pilot],” explaining, “Pilots were very expensive, and the chances were that maybe you couldn’t sell it, and then what were you going to do with the damn thing?”

While it’s easy to assume that Haney—who freelanced as a writer for Filmation’s DC cartoons—was referring to a Filmation Metamorpho pilot, it might have been produced by a different party, if one is to

Metamerchandise!

LEFT: Singalong with Rex. RIGHT: Wally Wood’s version of the Element Man, on a Comic Book Foldee.

TM & © DC Comics.

19

The infamous 1966 ad announcing the Metamorpho cartoon that wasn’t.

TM & © DC Comics.

believe what was reported in a 1966 Variety blurb. There it was announced that “Manhattan film distrib[utor] and video consultant for McCall’s mag” Steve Krantz—the man who brought several Camp Age super-heroes to television, as you’ll read in Chapter 4—had nabbed the animation rights for Metamorpho, as well as the Atom, the Sea Devils, and “Mystery in Space” (it’s unclear if that show was to star that sci-fi anthology’s Ultra the Multi-Alien or another character or characters), as well as SpiderMan. Krantz brought five Marvel characters to the small screen in 1966’s Marvel Super-Heroes, then Spidey beginning in 1967, but none of his purported DC projects materialized. The Atom is particularly

The unusual Element Girl, as seen in Metamorpho #13. Cover by Sal Trapani.

TM & © DC Comics.

puzzling, since Filmation did indeed produce Atom shorts as part of its DC Saturday morning packages.

Was Krantz speaking prematurely, or did his studio actually produce a Metamorpho pilot that has yet to be uncovered by fans? With all parties involved being deceased, we’ll probably never know. Blue Blazes!

The biggest loss for Metamaniacs wasn’t the TV cartoon, but the original artist. Ramona Fradon left the feature after the Element Man’s sixth adventure, Metamorpho #4. Haney soldiered on, with penciler Joe Orlando taking over with issue #5, followed by 20

Sal Trapani, signing on with Metamorpho #7. Most of Metamorpho’s younger readers didn’t catch on to the artist change, though, since Charles Paris was anchored as inker (through issue #15) to maintain a consistency with the earlier Fradon look. Sales soon began to decline after Fradon’s departure, and Haney, questioning his take on the character, tilted the tone deeper into over-the-top Camp humor, throwing nutty menaces like Doc Dread and Stingaree at the Chemical Crusader and introducing the hero’s female counterpart, Element Girl. But sales continued to slump. Was this the result of the air fizzling out of the Camp Hero balloon? Years later, Haney reported that he discovered that DC’s head honcho Irwin Donenfeld had increased Metamorpho’s print run after its initial success, thereby cutting into its sell-through when there simply weren’t enough readers to sustain the larger numbers. Haney wasn’t happy. The title ran out of steam in January of 1968, with Jack Sparling stepping in to illustrate the final issue, #17, its story cryptically titled “Last Mile for an Element Man.” There was no indication inside that this was the final chapter of the Metamorpho saga, confusing devoted young Metamaniacs (like me!) who kept looking for Metamorpho #18, then finally giving up and moving on to other things (including our homework).

Haney never gave up on his favorite creation, however. With editor Murray Boltinoff he revived Metamorpho in 1972 in a Batman team-up in Brave & Bold #102, illustrated by Jim Aparo. This was followed by a Metamorpho back-up feature in Action Comics as well as guest-appearances in B&B, JLA, and World’s Finest. While Metamaniacs applauded the Element Man’s return, Haney adopted a seriocomic tone with the feature in the Seventies and it wasn’t quite like going home again, for the writer or for his readers. By the time the original team of Haney and Fradon reunited for a Metamorpho tryout in 1975’s 1st Issue Special #3, the magic was gone.

The Element Man, like Haney, also soldiered on, without his creators, as a cast member of Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo’s Batman and the Outsiders book. Metamorpho was later absorbed into the greater DC Universe, finally joining the comic-book Justice League and eventually appearing in animation in Justice League Unlimited and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Still, the Element Man’s brief flash of stardom during the Camp Age remains his glory days. Holy Hannah!

Special thanks to Steven Thompson for uncovering the Krantz Variety clipping.

THE OTHER WOMAN IN METAMORPHO’S LIFE An Interview with Ramona Fradon

Ramona Fradon entered the comic-book industry in the Fifties, at a time when few women worked in the business, drawing the Aquaman feature in Adventure Comics for an unbroken run of ten years. After a hiatus she returned to co-create Metamorpho with Bob Haney, designing the Element Man’s unique (and bizarre) appearance and his memorable supporting cast. In the years since, Ramona has dazzled readers as one of the few cartoonists to do justice to Jack Cole’s Pliable Pretzel, Plastic Man, and earned a new generation of fans as the artist of DC Comics’ Super Friends title.

This extremely versatile illustrator, a 2006 Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame inductee, has also drawn comic strips (following creator Dale Messick on Brenda Starr for an impressive fifteenyear stint) and children’s books.

But to Camp Agers, Ramona Fradon is the Metamorpho artist.

hero series and he thought my drawing would be just right for the character he had in mind.

My first inclination was to say no, but when he described the goofy plotline I was intrigued and agreed to design the characters and do the first four episodes to get the series launched.

What was it about the character that you found as an incentive to return to comics?

I love to exaggerate, and Bob’s characters were wonderfully exaggerated popular stereotypes that I thought I could have fun with. It’s no secret that I don’t enjoy drawing super-heroes, and it’s because they are so straight and so serious and so lacking in identity except for their individual powers and the costumes they wear. In Metamorpho, there was a humorously dysfunctional set of characters that interacted in ridiculous and improbable ways.

After a long run on Aquaman, you’d dropped out of comics for a few years before launching Metamorpho in 1964. What were you doing during that?

I spent my time raising my little girl and working intermittently on a couple of children’s books. I actually revised and finished one recently and it’s selling on Amazon. It’s called The Dinosaur That Got Tired of Being Extinct.

In designing Metamorpho, did you go through variations for his appearance, or did you have a clear vision of what he should look like from the get-go?

I muddled around with capes and masks and other conventional super-hero costumes, but Metamorpho wasn’t conventional and none of them suited him. I finally decided that, since his body was always changing into different forms, clothing would get in his way, so I put him in shorts with the necessary insignia and left it at that.

How did George Kashdan recruit you back to DC to do Metamorpho?

George called me one day and said he had an idea for a super-

But he did briefly wear a costume in his third appearance (Metamorpho #1)…

If I remember correctly, for awhile he dressed up as a normal person

Interview conducted in September 2015.

when he and Sapphire went out, and maybe he was at a costume ball in that one story.

He and Sapphire really got around.

Did you also choose his body’s colors?

No. Metamorpho is not only colorful, he’s textured. What elements are the four quadrants of his body supposed to represent?

Well, they are supposed to represent the four elements, earth, fire, air, and water, but I have to admit they look more like wood, metal, maybe water, and some horrible form of acne on his upper left side.

Where on Earth did you get the inspiration for Simon Stagg’s hairstyle?

I guess I was thinking of a mixture of old pictures of Southern

Ramona Fradon.

An undated recreation of B&B #57’s cover, autographed by artist Ramona Fradon.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Love conquers all!

An undated sketch of lovebirds Rex and Sapphire.

record sleeve art?

No. I miss out on all the goodies.

Did you have any input into Bob Haney’s Metamorpho scripts?

Yes, in the sense that my drawings gave him new ideas about the characters and the consequent atmosphere of the stories.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics.

Was Metamorpho a fun series to draw? What were its biggest pleasures?

I loved drawing the characters as they interacted, I loved Bob’s audacity in making his freakish creation a romantic hero, and since the characters were mine, I loved acting through them as they followed Bob’s goofy direction.

gentlemen or 19th-Century politicians and robber barons.

Metamorpho was one of several DC heroes who had songs recorded about them in 1966.

Did you draw the Metamorpho Headshots helped clue in new readers to the Metamorpho cast. Original Fradon/Paris art to the splash page of issue #2.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: One big happy family?

Not really.

Undated pencil illo of the Metamorpho cast.

Metamorpho TM & © DC Comics.

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And its biggest problems?

The biggest problem was that it was a lot of work and my daughter was only five and needed more of my time.

Were you happy with Charles Paris’ inking of your work?

Yes. I thought he did a great job and added to the energetic look of the stories.

Why did you leave Metamorpho after issue #4?

I left for the same reason as the time before. I wanted to have more time to be with my child.

Did you regret the decision once you had left and Metamorpho became a hit?

No. Did George Kashdan or anyone else at DC attempt to lure you back to Metamorpho during its original run?

Yes. I had no idea the feature had taken off and was surprised when I was offered a considerable raise to stay.

You and Bob Haney reunited in 1975 for a Metamorpho tryout story in 1st Issue Special #3.

What are your impressions of this reunion and this story?

Bob and I thought it would be fun to do another one, but it wasn’t the Sixties anymore. Times had changed and so had we, and it didn’t go anywhere.

DIAL H FOR HERO

Robby discovers the H-dial in House of Mystery #156,

by Wood/ Mooney/Schiff.

The Sockamagee Saga of Robby Reed

TM & © DC Comics.

Billy Batson, eat your heart out. Your magic word might transform you into the World’s Mightiest Mortal, but Robby Reed’s remarkable rotary can turn him into any one of 1,000 super-heroes. Pretty cool, huh?

It’s enough to make a guy squeal, “Sockamagee!”

“Sockamagee”?? During the Swinging Sixties, when kids were Watusi-ing and Frug-ing to electric guitar bands, when girls’ hemlines (and their fathers’ blood pressures) were rapidly rising, who in the world would think that any with-it teenager would say “Sockamagee”?

Jack Schiff, that’s who. A mainstay at DC since the Golden Age, Schiff was looking for a way to revitalize his House of Mystery title. In HOM #156 (Jan. 1966), the editor, along with writer Dave Wood and artist Jim Mooney, introduced “The Most Original Character in Comic History!”—Robby Reed, the kid who could Dial H for Hero!

In an effort to connect with the average schoolboy reading DC’s comics, Schiff, who co-plotted each story with writer Wood, based Robby’s adventures in Anytown, U.S.A., in this case bucolic Littleville, “a small rural community,” as it’s described in the first Dial H story. Robby is a well-groomed,

courteous science whiz who wears glasses. He’s always mindful of his grandfather (Gramps), is never negligent of his chores, and obediently heeds housekeeper Miss Millie, bounding away from his backyard chemistry lab when called to supper. Robby enjoys wholesome pastimes such as soap-box derby with his clean-cut Caucasian friends, who communicate with their own, special language—you know how those kids today talk!—like “Gosh,” “Jeepers Creepers,” and Robby’s pet phrase, “Sockamagee.”

Jack Schiff’s vision of American youth in Dial H for Hero was straight out of the segregated Eisenhower Era, a byproduct of the years he spent penning the wholesome one-page public service announcements that peppered most of DC’s books in the early Sixties. Problem was, by the time Dial H premiered on November 18, 1965, bobbysox were out and go-go boots were in. Even the series’ title had two strikes against it: It was a nod to an early-Fifties mystery classic, and premiered during a time when the world was transitioning from rotary-dial to push-button telephones.

But for those willing to Dial C for Camp—and I’m one of them!—Dial H for Hero’s time warp is part of its charm. The concept was Schiff’s updating of the original Captain Marvel’s wish-fulfillment angle, with the added wrinkle of unpredictability: Each time Robby’s index finger spun an “H,” he—and readers—never knew what would happen next. Would Robby become the towering Giantboy, the soaring Cometeer, or the burrowing Mole? The freakish Human Starfish, the dizzying Hypno-Man, or the terrific toddler Mighty

Jim Mooney.

Courtesy of Alter Ego.

LEFT: Three heroes down, 997 to go: Robby Reed’s first superhero transformations, in the first Dial H for Hero story.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Splash page original art from the second Dial H adventure in HOM #157.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Different dialers: A bad guy Dials V for Villain in House of Mystery #158, while Robby’s girlfriend Dials H for Heroine in issue #169.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Moppet? Or even Plastic Man, in DC’s revival of that Golden Age great?

Littleville was a Norman Rockwell painting invaded by plots from The Outer Limits. For a small town, it was ground zero for crime syndicates, supervillains, and giant robots. Luckily, Robby was there, dialing “H,” magically transforming into one of a long line of “mystery super-heroes” that popped up to save the day.

Robby’s life changed in House of Mystery #156 when a bizarre battering machine attacking one of Littleville’s chemical plants crumbles the ledge he’s standing on. He plummets into a cave, where he discovers a strange device resembling a rotary dial, inscribed with “cryptic writing.” Being a boy brainiac, he deciphers the language and follows its instructions: “…It says… dial the letters, H-E-R-O… that spells hero! Is it possible…? I’m going to give it a try!”

He instantly becomes Giantboy, conveniently just as a radio broadcast announces a troubled plane near the Littleville Airport (in addition to its chemical plants, Littleville is also an airline hub). It’s Giantboy to the rescue! After bringing the aircraft to a safe landing, Giantboy retreats to Robby’s lab, follows the dial’s instructions by dialing O-R-E-H (“hero” in reverse), and reverts to his Robby form—just in time for dinner! And thus, the formula for Dial H for Hero is established—and we’re only on page 9 of the first adventure (Robby’s stories averaged 14–15 pages).

Robby’s super-hero transformations were all over the place—the super-genius Future-Man, the cosmic Gemini Twins, the aquatic Zip Tide, the teleporting Astroman—each teeming with Robby’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. Littleville attracted no shortage of crime cartels and super-villains, the Thunderbolt Gang, the Siren Gang, the Clay Gang, the Wizard of Light, Roban the Monster-Maker, Baron Bug, and Dr. Cyclops among them. Ably bringing to life this revolving door of super-characters was the astonishing Jim Mooney, best known as the artist of the Supergirl series in Action Comics. As the artist confessed to interviewer Jim Amash in Alter Ego #133 (June 2015), the task was exhausting: “‘Dial H’ was a whole new ball game.

I mean, boy, that took a lot of work.… Tremendous. But it was challenging. I added an awful lot of that stuff myself. They would say, ‘Do a particular character.’ Sometimes the writer would say what they wanted as far as the uniform was concerned, but most of the time I just made it up totally.”

With its heavy rotation of super-heroes, Dial H for Hero’s originality became its downfall. With an average of three characters per story, the concept quickly became repetitive. By the third outing (HOM #158), a bad guy

was dialing V for Villain, and in issue #169, Robby’s girlfriend Suzy got a chance to Dial H for Heroine, becoming Gem Girl. For its creative team, the series’ pace whirled faster than Baron Buzz-Saw’s blades.

Dial H for Hero was editor Jack Schiff’s last hurrah; he retired from DC in 1967 and was replaced on House of Mystery with issue #169 by editor George Kashdan (whose days at DC were also numbered, but that’s a different story). Jim Mooney left with issue #170, followed by Frank Springer on #171 and 172. The final Dial H story, written by the series’ stalwart Dave Wood and drawn by Charles Nicholas and Sal Trapani, appeared in House of Mystery #173 (Mar.–Apr. 1968).

“Revolt of the H-Dial!” featured Robby’s dial turning him evil, a clear indication that the series had run its course. House of Mystery returned to its roots as a horror anthology with the next issue.

That wasn’t the end of Dial H for Hero, however.

Robby Reed, as Plastic Man, fought the real Plastic Man in 1976. Marv Wolfman and Carmine Infantino revamped Dial H for Hero in 1981 with the Katy Keane-like angle of reader-contributed super-identities for its two teen stars, Chris King and Vicki Grant.

And ignoring the fact that no one other than the oldest of grandmothers has “dialed” a telephone in decades, since 2003 DC Comics has twice revived and updated the concept, with various people discovering that super-heroics carry a heavy burden.

But what of Robby Reed? Since 2009, he’s teamed up with Batman in the comics and on television in the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and he was an inspiration for the popular TV cartoon Ben 10. Pretty impressive for a kid from Littleville. It’s enough to make a guy squeal, “Sockamagee!”

DIAL F FOR FLASH During Dial H for Hero’s original House of Mystery run, cross-title continuity was rarely practiced in DC series. In HOM #172, news of earthquakes in Central City prompts Robby Reed to think, “But a super-hero should be there, to help with rescue operations!” Uh, Robby, ever hear of the Flash? In the very next issue, Robby tangles with the Speed Boys.

That same name was used for a group of fleet-footed felons in a 1966 Brave and Bold team-up between Batman and the Flash.

But Dial H outraced the Flash in the use of a super-villain name that would eventually become part of Flash lore. In 1967’s HOM #167, Robby, as Balloon Boy, Muscle Man, and Radar-Sonar Man, battles the “prismatic plunderer” called the Rainbow Raider. Thirteen years later, The Flash #286 would introduce a new Rainbow Raider.

HARVEY THRILLERS Joe Simon’s Comic-Book Jigsaw

In 1965, Harvey Comics, purveyor of Casper the Friendly Ghost wholesomeness, “wanted to capitalize on the renewed success of the DC and Marvel super-hero titles,” remarked Joe Simon—one of the architects of the Golden Age—in his autobiography, Joe Simon: My Life in Comics (Titan Books, 2011).

“We did them under the umbrella of Harvey Thrillers,” a defibrillation of Harvey’s previous attempt to branch out beyond kids comics, the Simon-supervised Thrill Adventure line, which ran from the mid-Fifties through the early Sixties.

Harvey’s publishing policy was to unveil new series during the summer months, when industry wisdom dictated that sales would spike due to school hiatuses and increased leisure time for kids. And so, on July 15, 1965, four one-shots—a mixture of reprints, unpublished Fifties stories, and new material— were tested under the Harvey Thrillers imprint, each bearing an October cover date: Blast-Off #1 (featuring inventoried Jack Kirby/Al Williamson “3 Rocketeers” stories and other material), Thrill-ORama #1 (featuring Bob Powell’s Phantom Stranger-ish Fifties character “The Man in Black,” rebranded as “The Man in Black Called Fate”), Unearthly Spectaculars #1 (a sci-fi collection of previously unpublished stories by Doug Wildey and Angelo Torres), and a rebooted Thrill Adventure title, Warfront #36 (headlined by Dynamite Joe, “The Blast-Crazy Marine”). Only Unearthly Spectaculars’ cover-featured Tiger Boy could

B-Man, Jack Q. Frost, and Pirana © the respective copyright holder.

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Trial logos for the 1965 Harvey Thrillers launch.

Courtesy of Heritage. © 1965 Harvey Entertainment.

From the first wave of Harvey Thrillers: Original Jack Sparling art to a rejected version of Unearthly Spectaculars #1’s cover, and the published version, premiering Tiger Boy. Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

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be considered a super-hero, although it’s unlikely its sloppily sketched Jack Sparling cover attracted any readers of Amazing Spider-Man. The Harvey Thriller logo featured a concentric circle emitting from the center of a giant “H,” designed to create a hypnotic effect. Graphically, it succeeded, but creatively, in the popart-obsessed year of 1965 it looked as dated as The Twilight Zone’s opening. So did the comics themselves, which relied upon a passé lexicon (Thrill-O-Rama, for example, evoked a particularly Fifties vibe).

Eleven months later, on June 15, 1966, Harvey Thrillers returned, and this time, editor Simon took a cue from his competition and dumped the old-style graphics. The Harvey logo was retooled, the words “Harvey Thriller” inside a giant “H” which was framed by a bold, black, TV-screen shape. The upper-left corners were similar to the corner boxes of Marvel’s titles, featuring a miniature shot of the comic’s star.

Three Harvey super-hero books shipped on that date, all cover-dated September 1966: Jigsaw #1, Spyman #1, and Thrill-O-Rama #2 featuring Pirana; a few weeks later, Dynamite Joe was back in a revived Warfront. For the next few months, additions were made to the Harvey Thrillers line: the revivals Fighting

American #1 and The Spirit #1 came in July, (see Chapter 2), and September saw the debuts of Double-Dare Adventures #1 starring B-Man and Unearthly Spectaculars #2 starring Jack Q. Frost.

While the books’ indicia credited Leon Harvey as editor, that job was handled by Joe Simon, who also created most of Harvey’s new super-heroes.

Let’s take a closer look at the Harvey Thriller super-heroes:

JIGSAW This “Man of a Thousand Parts” was essentially Plastic Man with a jigsaw-puzzle body. But instead of the imaginative Jack Cole Plas or even the punpacked Arnold Drake Plas, Jigsaw was the Bob Haney/Brave and Bold whiny Plas, crippled by selfpity over his peculiar plight. Jigsaw is actually space explorer Colonel Gary Jason, whose capsule is sucked into a maelstrom that nearly kills him. Luckily, he is patched together by Si-Krell, a super-intelligent alien who has a secret base on Earth’s Moon. At first, Jason isn’t thrilled by his Jigsaw makeover and routinely complains.

The jury’s out on the identity of the Jigsaw writer, although some sources credit Otto Binder. Artist Tony Tallarico, who drew the two published issues of Jigsaw, doesn’t remember for sure but suspects it might have been the book’s editor: “I don’t know. I think Joe Simon did [it],” Tallarico told me in September

Picking up the pieces: From the unpublished Jigsaw #3, original art for Joe Simon’s cover and Tony Tallarico’s page 1.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

2015. The illustrator got the Jigsaw gig after developing a working relationship with Joe on Simon’s MAD copycat, Sick. “When [Simon] sold a bunch of ideas to Harvey, he called to see if I was interested. I said, ‘Yeah, that would be fun to do.’”

The Jigsaw comic book was conceived with the title Big Hero Adventures. On the covers, that name appeared as a subhead above the Jigsaw logo, but proof of the book’s intended title can be found at the end of Jigsaw #1’s two-page Super Luck back-up (see Chapter 3), which ended with a blurb calling him “BIG HERO’s favorite little hero.”

Jigsaw’s back-up stories sparkled. Issue #1’s “The Boys from Up There!” was a twist-ending shocker lusciously drawn by Reed Crandall. Issue #2’s “The Man from S.R.A.M.” (that’s “Mars” backwards) by Otto Binder and Carl Pfeufer was a nicely executed takeoff of DC’s early “Manhunter from Mars” (Martian Manhunter) stories as a spy spoof, its hero employing super-powers and wacky weapons (like his U.F.O.R., or Unbeatable Flying Oriental Rug, to fly around on) in his mystery solving.

Jigsaw ended with issue #2 (Dec. 1966), although a third issue was in the works.

SPYMAN Like Simon’s other Harvey heroes, Spyman followed a pattern popular in comic books during its day: a fusion of spies and super-heroes. Simon discussed the creation of the character in his autobiography:

“He was inspired by the spy craze of the 1960s, with movies like James Bond and television shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I drew two of the covers, and we had stories by George Tuska, Dick Ayers, and Bill Draut. A new kid from Reading, Pennsylvania, came out to my studio and showed me some samples of his work. He was a sign painter as well as a magician. He drove up in a Cadillac, and when he opened the trunk it was full of comic books. I liked his samples, and he helped me develop Spyman. But he wasn’t the lead artist, and I don’t think he was comfortable with that. His name was Jim Steranko, and shortly after that he made a big place at Marvel, working over Kirby layouts.” Contrary to Simon’s “helped me develop” remark, Steranko stated in a 1970 interview that he created Spyman and sold the concept along with two others (Gladiator and Sorcerer, renamed the Glowing Gladiator and Magicmaster by Simon) to editor Simon and Harvey Comics.

“America’s Number One Spy-Smasher” is actually Johnny Chance, one of the Liberty Agents, a network of operatives in red-and-blue tights. In his origin, Chance loses his left hand when disarming an atomic bomb, and is outfitted with a “fantastic electro-robot hand” designed by Steranko; its functions include X-rays, a magnet, and a black-light ray. (Editor Simon’s campy cover copy for Spyman #1 issues this advisory: “Warning to Civilians—Never!

Never! Never touch a radio-active bomb! There is only one electro-robot hand on hand!”) Spyman’s first mission pits him against the Whisperer, a green-hooded mole who has infiltrated Liberty’s

Joe Simon. © Joe Simon estate.

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LEFT: Production proof of original art for Spyman #1’s cover. Art by George Tuska; the Spyman hand cutaway was drawn by Jim Steranko.

RIGHT: The cancellation of Thrill-O-Rama deprived us of this one!

Unpublished Jack Sparling cover art to issue #4.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

headquarters. Steranko set the pace for the series with his first-issue script, penciled by George Tuska.

Two more issues of Spyman followed. In issue #2, written by Steranko and illustrated by Dick Ayers, Spyman and his hand struggled against the Evil Eye Society, fronted by a Mysterio-looking bad guy who fired blasts from his giant-eyeball head. Issue #3, written by Otto Binder and drawn by Bill Draut, featured Spyman’s conflict with a super-computer called the Id Machine. Of all of the Harvey Thriller superhero comics, Spyman was the standout, not only for its significance as being Steranko’s first comic-book project but also for its quality in presentation (despite its round-robin art teams).

Conversely, Spyman’s back-ups were a random selection of whatever Joe Simon had to shove into the book: issue #1’s amateurish secret agent riff “Eye Spy (Agent #00 1/4) and His Gal Friday Jane Blond (Operative #38-22-36),” issue #2’s fear-the-future feature “Robolink,” and issue #3’s rock-n-roll superhero spoof “Campy Champ” (see Chapter 5). As with Jigsaw’s “Big Hero Adventures” header, Spyman’s logo was dressed with the title “Top Secret Adventures,” the series’ original title.

PIRANA There seems to be an unwritten law requiring every comic-book universe to have its token oceanic superhero, not surprising for a world that’s predominantly 28

water. For Harvey, it was Pirana (an “accepted South America spelling” of “piranha,” we’re told in a footnote of the hero’s first adventure, although one wonders if Joe didn’t pull that out of the dictionary to explain away the logo designer’s spelling error).

Pirana was the headliner of the revived Thrill-ORama, demoting its previous star, “The Man in Black Called Fate,” to back-up status beginning with issue #2 (Sept. 1966).

There are many dangers lurking in the deep, and Joe Simon attempted to portray Pirana as one of them, nicknaming him “the deadliest creature in all the world.” If in your vocabulary “deadly” means “unoriginal Aquaman ripoff,” then Pirana lives up to that claim. For those less charitable, the Otto Binderwritten/Jack Sparling-drawn Pirana has little going for it. A bland costume (“shark-colored” green, with jet-powered flippers) and bland artwork gave it little reason to stand out amid its sea of competitors.

Pirana is actually Edward Yates, an oceanographer who becomes a water-breather after stepping onto a live electrical wire at the bottom of the sea.

With his pet barracudas Bara and Cuda swimming alongside him, Pirana’s bargain-basement arch-foe is Brainstorm (a.k.a. Generalissimo Brainstorm), a Humpty Dumpty-shaped mastermind whose jumbo cranium sizzles “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” (Did Kellogg’s ever notice this encroachment upon its Rice Krispies property?) Brainstorm’s lackeys are the Human Anchor, Murderina Mermaid, and Killer Porpoise.

Pirana appeared in two issues of Thrill-O-Rama, being deep-sixed with issue #3, although a fourth

issue was in the works in which Pirana would fight an undersea cowboy. In addition to the “Man in Black Called Fate” back-ups, issue #2 featured a twopage preview for the gorgeously rendered Clawfang the Barbarian (keep reading), and issue #3 featured a cute two-page throwaway titled “My Pal, Alien,” about a teen and his extraterrestrial buddy.

B-MAN Premiering on September 15, 1966, alongside the second issues of Jigsaw and Spyman, was DoubleDare Adventures #1 (cover-dated Dec. 1966), a double-sized (64 pages) anthology comic headlined

by B-Man, a.k.a. the Bee, a.k.a. Bee-Man. Devious astronaut Barry E. Eames is swarmed by alien bees while on a mission. Their bites imbue him with an accelerated metabolism—with the unexpected side effect of needing to consume honey to replenish his energy—and links him with a race of insect-men on the Martian moon of Deimos. Outfitted with otherworldly gear including a helmet with sonic-buzzing antennae and a stinger “that ejects a deadly drug against enemies,” plus “vapor-honey grenades” that knock out his foes, Eames returns to Earth to become a super-criminal (“Is he a force for good or evil?” is his shtick), wearing a ludicrous purple-andgold winged costume reminiscent of one of Batman’s most gaudily garbed villains, Killer Moth. Setting up shop in a giant beehive complete with protective cannons and a Bee-Plane, the Bee has a change of heart in his second adventure, admitting to F.B.I. agent Roy Dunn in issue #2 that “sometimes I wish I hadn’t turned to crime when I became this freak being… I would have liked to have been on the side of the law!” So Dunn recruits him to be a super-agent of… wait for it… yeah, you guessed it… the F-Bee-I. B-Man was only seen in two short stories, the first one nicely drawn by Bill Draut, but Harvey’s attempt to create an insect version of Batman was overburdened by too many competing elements and too few pages to adequately develop them, as well as a costume that looked as if it were designed by a third-grader.

Double-Dare Adventures was also the home of the aforementioned Steranko creations, the Glowing Gladiator and Magicmaster. The Glowing Gladiator is actually Harry Barker, “president and chief troubleshooter” of Adventure Unlimited, “the organization which guarantees to fill unusual requests.” Sort of an Indiana Jones for hire, Barker’s discovery of the amulet of the Hannibal allows him to channel that warrior’s spirit and become a sword-wielding barbarian/super-hero. Magicmaster combines Steranko’s knowledge of magic with a Captain Marvel-like boy/ man hero relationship as teen magician Jimmy Apollo discovers a magic incantation with which he can summon “magician of the gods” Shamarah the

Sorcerer (called “Kazzam” in the second installment) to battle numinous menaces such as Prince Infernus and the Blue Wizard. The Magicmaster feature also reveals behind-the-scenes secrets of Jimmy’s magic tricks. Bob Powell illustrated the first Glowing Gladiator story, followed by Jack Sparling on the second; Sparling drew both Magicmaster tales. What’s most interesting about these two features is their unfulfilled potential: While Joe Simon was only doing his job in tailoring the Glowing Gladiator and Magicmaster for Harvey’s youthful audience, one wonders what might have occurred had the eager 27-year-old Steranko been given the chance to fully develop and illustrate his original Gladiator and Sorcerer ideas.

Reprints fleshed out the rest of Double-Dare Adventures’ pages. The book was cancelled with issue #2 (Mar. 1967).

JACK QUICK FROST Also premiering on September 15, 1966 was “the coolest hero in comics,” Jack Quick Frost, a.k.a. Jack Q. Frost, a.k.a. Jack Frost, in Unearthly Spectaculars #2, a title revived from its 1965 tryout. Another of Joe Simon’s grabs at replicating proven concepts, Jack Quick Frost was the latest in a long line of super-spies, commanding subzero super-powers borrowed from the likes of Iceman, Captain Cold, and Mr. Freeze. He is first seen on ice, literally, discovered frozen within an iceberg being blasted apart during the military’s Jack Quick Frost versus Lord Lazee in Unearthly Spectaculars #3. © the respective copyright holder.

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undersea atomic test. One of the personnel on site remarks, “Look at the letters on his chest—J.F.—I always thought Jack Frost was a myth!” Those letters are actually the chest insignia I.D. of James Flynn, an operative of the International Counter-intelligence Agency (Simon missed an acronym pun by not using “Enterprise” or “Espionage” instead of “Agency”), whose spies share the same drab fashion sense, each wearing a cowled blue jumpsuit with a chestplate insignia bearing his initials. Readers discover that secret agent Flynn was left to die in frigid Arctic waters while on a mission, but survived in suspended animation—Holy Rip-off of Captain America’s Avengers rebirth, Batman! It turns out that the atomic radiation and Flynn’s ice-cube coma combined to cause “a complete chemical change” in his body that gives him the power to shoot icicles and generate snow and ice from his fingertips. As Jack Frost, he uses those abilities in a two-issue battle with “the world’s laziest villain,” Lord Lazee, a tubby couch potato with a button-controlled arsenal at his fingertips. Jack Sparling produced the first installment, Double-Dare Adventures #1’s triplethreat features: B-Man, plus the Sterankocreated Magicmaster and Glowing Gladiator. © the respective copyright holder.

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with Bill Draut drawing Jack Frost’s second and final outing in the last issue of Unearthly Spectaculars, #3 (Mar. 1967).

Unearthly Spectaculars #2’s cover blurb announced its superlative back-ups: “Surprise preview showing of top new super-heroes by comicdom’s greatest!! Soon to be seen in magazines of their own.” Wallace Wood was one of those “greatest,” seen in three different features: the Wood-scripted “Clawfang the Barbarian,” a dormant concept he dusted off, paired with the phenomenal Al Williamson as its illustrator; and two features written and drawn by Wood, “Miracles, Inc.,” a super-hero spoof (see Chapter 3), and “Earthman,” a sci-fi strip. “Wally Wood produced a feature called ‘Earthman’ for Unearthly Spectaculars, and it was just beautiful,” said Joe Simon in his autobiography. “I gave him free rein. He’d work from my script if I asked, but he preferred to produce his own stuff.” Also in issue #2: a two-page Pirana preview; a five-page “Tiger Boy and Company” story drawn by Gil Kane; the Otto Binder-scripted origin of the 3 Rocketeers, drawn by Mike Sekowsky and Joe Giella; and a two-pager filler about superfluous super-heroes, “Super Surplus.”

By comparison, Unearthly Spectaculars #3 was a letdown.

While the sleek, always-efficient Bill Draut improved the look of the Jack Q. Frost feature and ably stepped in for Sekowsky for a new 3 Rocketeers adventure, and Tony Tallarico delivered a fun super-villain spy spoof starring Dr. Yes, Wally Wood was AWOL, driven away by Leon Harvey’s editorial interference.

Miracles, Inc. limped on under a different creative team, and the rest of the issue contained filler and reprint material. This issue, along with Double-Dare Adventures #2 and The Spirit #2, were published on December 15, 1966 and were the final three titles in the Harvey Thrillers line.

What went wrong with Joe Simon’s Harvey Thrillers? Marketplace glut and unpredictable distribution—the two great enemies of many Camp Age comic books— were certainly a factor. Their clichéd headliners didn’t help—who knows what might have happened had Simon allowed the A-list talent to dominate the books instead of the generic super-heroes? The Thrillers were an uneven lot, from the inconsistency of their story and art quality to their confusing titles (Jigsaw or Big Hero Adventures?

Why did Double-Dare Adventures

feature three stars?). And I hate to single out Jack Sparling, called “a prolific artist” by Simon, but his work on these books was rushed and unexciting.

Simon’s reliance upon Sparling may have kept the trains running on time, but Jack’s mediocre artwork helped derail the books.

Joe Simon certainly had the talent and ingenuity to produce a line of standout books, but despite the glimmers of greatness, as a whole the Harvey Thrillers offered more disappointments than delights.

TIGER GIRL Harvey Comics wasn’t the only Sixties publisher with a tiger in its tank. As the Camp Age was winding down, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, who had been camping it up with Archie’s super-heroes and Gold Key’s revival of The Owl, created a new super-heroine that loosely borrowed from the pages of Batman. Gold Key’s Tiger Girl #1 (Sept. 1968) introduced circus aerialist Lily Taylor (Robin, the Boy Wonder, anyone?), who moonlighted as an agent of W.A.A.V. (War Against Arch Villainy) as the stripe-pelted Catwoman clone Tiger Girl.

She shared a symbiotic connection with her sidekick tiger, Kitten, and fought the insidious forces of I.N.F.A.M.Y., abetted by a ragtag group of circus performers. The omnipresent Jack Sparling was the artist. A second issue of Tiger Girl was planned but never materialized.

CAPTAIN ACTION

The Original SuperHero Action Figure “Stand back, Superman! This is a job for Captain Action and company!” Those were the words uttered by the plucky Man of Action to the ruffled Man of Steel as he shoved the big guy aside on the Irv Novick-drawn cover to the first issue of his DC Comics series, Captain Action #1 (Oct.–Nov. 1968).

Hold on there, fella! Not since Metamorpho said “No!” to the Justice League had an upstart super-hero told off one of DC’s heavy hitters. An obstinate fellow, that Captain Action—so determined, he just doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quit.”

Captain Action started as a twelve-inch poseable action figure (don’t you dare call him a doll!) for boys, introduced by the Ideal Toy Company at the 1966 Toy Fair. Two years earlier, Hasbro rolled out G.I. Joe, an articulated action figure billed as “America’s movable fighting man.” G.I. Joe’s creators, licensing impresario Stan Weston and toy exec Don Levine, appropriated from Mattel’s popular Barbie line the “razor/razor blade” marketing approach: sell a kid the “razor” (the primary figure) and she/he will be compelled to buy the “razor blades” (clothing and accessories). Through an expanding array of uniforms, G.I. Joe could become a sailor, a Marine, a frogman—even an astronaut!—and Hasbro dropped a decisive salvo onto war-toy competitors.

Weston, a fan of comics and pulps, was convinced that lightning could strike twice with this “razor/razor blade” concept for boys. He conceived a generic super-hero that could “become” different commercially popular champions with the mere change of a uniform. “It was a logical move for me, since comic books were my left

DC Comics’ Captain Action #1.

Cover by Irv Novick (from a Carmine Infantino design).

Captain Action and Action Boy TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: Captain Action’s classic pose was recreated by an unknown painter for an Aurora model kit starring the hero.

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC.

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Captain Action’s 1st issue box, featuring his original nine superhero identities (each sold separately).

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Other characters © their respective copyright holders.

RIGHT: From the 1966 Sears Christmas WishBook, ordering info for Captain Action and Ideal Toys’ Batman figure sets.

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Batman, Robin, and Superman TM & © DC Comics. Catalog © Sears.

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arm,” Weston told me in 1998 in an interview for my TwoMorrows Publishing book, Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure (First Printing, 2002). From Weston’s thinking, magic would trigger the hero’s transformations— hence the original name of his action figure: Captain Magic. “I had a sample of a basic figure and a foldout of comic-book characters that would allow me to show which heroes Captain Magic could become,” Weston said.

Weston proposed the idea to Ideal Toys’ Larry Reiner in 1965.

Reiner was reluctant, fearing that Captain Magic’s own identity would be lost behind the rubber masks of the better-known characters’ faces—“I hated the product when I first saw it,” Reiner told me in 1998—but he conceded to Weston’s enthusiasm. Ideal designed the hero with subtle military implications including the rank of “Captain” so as not to stray too far from G.I. Joe, but rebranded him with a name more reflective of a super-hero: Captain Action. Ideal’s development team, led by artist Dan Windsor, one of the original designers of Smokey the Bear, began refining Weston’s toy concept. Working with Windsor were staff artist Norman Cohen, sculptor John O’Shaughnessy, and designer Walter Moe, under the executive watch of Abe Kent, the head of Ideal’s art department. After an evolving series of prototypes they honed a barrel-chested, grim-faced champion (“He looks like my dentist,” joked one Ideal employee) whose points of articulation were an improvement upon his “ancestor,” G.I. Joe. Meanwhile, Stan Weston recruited multiple licensors’ properties to the initial line.

Ideal’s next move was to create the packaging for the Captain Action franchise. The company, located in the Jamaica, Queens, district of New York City, intended to feature painted artwork on its packages. Here’s where Murphy Anderson, the illustrator whose crisp delineations epitomized DC Comics’ house style of the Sixties, entered Captain Action’s Headquarters. In 2006, Murph recounted to me, “I had been… quite friendly with Jay Emmett.… He was Jack Liebowitz’s nephew, and he had started the Licensing Corporation of America (LCA).… But Jay, sometimes through [DC executive] Sol Harrison, would recommend me to his LCA clients. As a result, I did a lot of stuff. When a licensee would have to use a qualified artist, they would send me directly to a client or to his ad agency… that’s how Captain Action came about.” At first, Anderson was only informed that an agency was looking for painted portraits of super-heroes, and he submitted a painting of one

of his signature DC characters. “I did a painting of Hawkman and wasn’t satisfied with it,” Anderson told me in 1998.

After four months of sweating it out, Murphy Anderson finally got a call back, commissioning him to produce artwork for Ideal’s Captain Action. To Murph’s satisfaction, Ideal had axed the painted art premise for line art, to mirror the traditional style of comic books and comic strips. A painted portrait of Captain Action brandishing his lightning sword and ray gun did appear, however, on the box for the Captain Action figure itself; this image, by an unknown artist (believe me, I’ve asked, and no one knows for sure, although at one time there was speculation that Norman Saunders did the painting), was reused on other Captain Action merchandise. Similarly styled paintings by the same artist appeared on the boxes for Captain Action’s sidekick, Action Boy; Cap’s vehicle, the Silver Streak; and the line’s almost-impossible-to-find Dr. Evil’s Sanctuary vinyl headquarters.

For the initial product line, Anderson illustrated the art for the box fronts of the majority of the superhero costumes sold alongside the Captain Action figure.

And thus, in early 1966, the American public met Captain Action, “the Amazing 9-in-1 Super Hero” who could become Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Captain America, Sgt. Fury, the Phantom, Flash Gordon, Lone Ranger, and Steve Canyon. (Murphy Anderson drew the box art for each super-hero’s costume with the exceptions of Marvel’s Captain America and Sgt. Fury, which used Jack Kirby pickup art, and the Chicago News Syndicate’s Steve

Canyon, which used an image by the strip’s creator, Milton Caniff.) The first Captain Action artist in the minds of most DC Comics readers, however, was Lois Lane’s Kurt Schaffenberger, who drew a onepage Captain Action house ad appearing in DC titles.

The debut of Captain Action could not have been more fortuitously timed, on the heels of the overnight success of TV’s Batman. Ideal’s Captain Action enjoyed a modestly successful first year, and product expansion briskly followed: several major department stores offered exclusive playsets, and in 1967 Ideal unleashed more costumes (Spider-Man, Green Hornet, and Tonto), a kid sidekick (Action Boy, with his boomerang and pet panther, Khem), Action Boy uniforms (Robin, Superboy, and Aqualad), and a Barbie-like line of “Super Queens” (Supergirl, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and Mera) marketed to girls. Murphy Anderson returned to Ideal to illustrate package art for all of these additions to the line, with the exception of the Spider-Man costume box, which used Steve Ditko pick-up art. The first Captain Action comic book, a 32-page illustrated catalog/minicomic drawn by Chic Stone, was also released in 1967, inserted into Captain Action figures and accessories. Other Captain Action products were considered by Ideal but not

produced: a talking Captain Action, a Davy Crockett costume, and an Ultraman costume for the Japanese market (the latter of which was finally produced in 2016 as a celebration of Captain Action’s fiftieth birthday).

While Ideal aggressively pushed Captain Action’s and Action Boy’s comic-book alter egos, they also exploited Captain Action as a hero in his own right, releasing a vehicle (the Silver Streak) and accessory packs (including the Directional Communicator and the 4-foot Working Parachute). Ideal licensed Captain Action to other vendors for products including an Aurora model kit, a Ben Cooper Halloween costume, and a card game promotion with General Mills’ KoolPops.

During the product’s third year, 1968, no new licensed super-hero costumes were produced.

Instead Ideal continued to push Captain Action as their super-hero by introducing his nemesis, Dr. Evil, a blue-skinned “sinister invader of Earth” with an exposed brain—and groovy threads (a Nehru jacket, sandals, and a medallion). Also released that year was a second-issue Action Boy, clad in a spacesuit.

By this time, the Batman-inspired super-hero fad was stalling, and so were Captain Action’s sales.

Revitalization attempts had fizzled, including a giveaway parachute with Captain Action figures and the addition of “Video-Matic” flasher rings to costumes.

Ideal discontinued the line at the end of 1968. It’s unlikely that a single factor can be blamed for the toy’s demise, but former Ideal salesman Larry O’Daly believed that the figure’s dual function as a superhero and a super-hero masquerader tended to “fragment the imagery of the basic character.”

While American boys were playing with Captain Action, Jim Shooter, a teenager just a few years older than Ideal’s target audience, was writing Superman and Legion of Super-Heroes stories for DC editor Mort Weisinger. In 1968, Shooter was thrilled when he landed the assignment to produce a “new” superhero book for Weisinger… until Mort rattled off the feature’s prerequisites: “His name is Captain Action. He has a sidekick named Action Boy, a three-wheeled car, a secret cave,” Shooter recalled to me in 1998. Nonetheless, Shooter jumped at the assignment, a DC comic book starring Captain Action.

The colorful but vague concept of Ideal’s Captain Action presented a superhero that could take on the guises—and powers—of other super-heroes. That’s great for playtime, but improbable for comic-book storytelling.

Shooter concocted a backstory: DC’s Captain Action was actually archaeologist Clive

LEFT: The DC Comics house ad for Ideal Toys’ free parachute promotion, with Captain Action as drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger.

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Other characters © their respective copyright holders.

Murphy Anderson.

Murphy Anderson’s artwork graces the uniform packaging for Captain Action’s Batman costume.

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

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Action Boy in his 1st issue box.

Action Boy TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC.

RIGHT: House ad in Captain Action #2 announcing Dr. Evil’s appearance in the next issue. Art by Gil Kane.

Captain Action and Dr. Evil TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC.

Krellik’s up to no good on this original art page to page 2 of DC’s Captain Action #2.

Art by Wood, story by Shooter.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC.

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Arno, who, along with his duplicitous colleague Krellik, unearthed ancient coins imbued with the abilities of the gods of myth. The altruistic Arno wields the tokens as the superhero Captain Action, while Krellik, empowered by the coin of the god of evil, Chernobog (Loki), unleashes a crime spree, usurping Arno’s Captain Action identity as well as many of the coins. Wally Wood was tapped by Weisinger to launch the series. Since Shooter at the time drew breakdowns instead of typing scripts, on Captain Action #1’s splash page Wood credited himself as artist plus “Story by Jim Shooter” (at this time, the majority of DC’s comics were published uncredited). The writer told me in 1998, “It was the first time I got a credit. Wally considered me an artist, because I did layouts.”

DC had contracted with Ideal for a five-issue run, the company’s first toy tie-in. Longtime Green Lantern artist Gil Kane stepped in as penciler with issue #2, with Shooter scripting and Wood remaining on as inker. This issue concluded the Krellik storyline.

By the time the third issue of the bimonthly series went into production in late 1968, Weisinger passed off Captain Action to editor Julius Schwartz.

Schwartz offered Gil Kane the opportunity to write as well as draw Captain Action, which Gil relished.

Kane brought Ideal Toys’ Dr. Evil into comics with issues #3 and 4. Issue #5 pitted Captain Action and

Action Boy against a persuasive demagogue. Despite dynamic storytelling and gorgeous artwork, DC’s Captain Action premiered too late to capitalize upon the toy line’s momentum and was not renewed. Kane confessed to me in 1998, “It broke my heart when it ended cold.”

From time to time, the good Captain seemed primed for a comeback, including Lightning Comics’ A.C.T.I.O.N. Force #1 in 1987 and a Captain Action #0

ashcan edition in 1995. Finally, in 1998, Joe Ahearn, who thirty years earlier had been one of those kids playing with Ideal’s Captain Action, convinced toy manufacturer Playing Mantis to release a new line of Captain Action super-hero figures, including additions to original line such as the Green Hornet’s ally Kato and villain costumes for Dr. Evil. In the years since, Captain Action’s fate has been charted by Ahearn and his business partner Ed Catto. Their Captain Action Enterprises venture has kept the hero in the public eye through additional figure and costume releases (including an impressive array of Marvel uniforms), action figures of various sizes, comic books, novels, T-shirts, and other merchandise.

Of the many super-heroes introduced during the Camp Age, Captain Action is one of the few who has proved durable. Looks like his boast on the cover of his first DC issue was right: This really is a job for Captain Action!

Portions of this essay appeared in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #45 and appear here in edited form.

TOY TITANS

Ideal wasn’t the only toy manufacturer that played with the super-hero market during the Camp Age: Wham-O Mfg. Co., the San Gabriel, California, company best known for the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee, gave super-hero comic books a spin. The company hosted a hullaballoo and invited many comics luminaries, including Lou Fine, Alex Kotzky, and Wally Wood, courting them for a new project. Shepherded by editor Bill McIntyre and art director Del Potter, WhamO Giant Comics #1 (Apr. 1967) was a 48-page one-shot that boasted it was the “world’s largest comic book!” And that it was, measuring 21-by-14 inches! That large size invited many more panels per page than you’d find in a traditional comic book. It sold for 98 cents.

Included in the contents of Wham-O Giant Comics #1 was Wood’s “atomic Hercules” Radian, Fine’s Hulk-like Tor (no relation to Joe Kubert’s char-

acter of the same name), Marvin Stein’s pulpish space-hero Galaxo the Cosmic Agent, W. T. Vinson’s super-hero comedy Super Sibling, and Mike Arens’ astronaut-hero Star-Key. It was an imbalanced mix of genres, including gags, that tried so hard to please everyone that it had no single target audience and flopped.

Hassenfeld Bros., Inc. (Hasbro Toys) of Providence, Rhode Island, released Zok in 1967, a “jumbo-sized board game.” It featured a Twister-like vinyl “board” onto which players would score points by strategically placing “super game cards” bearing the images of

LEFT: Front cover to Wham-O Giant Comics #1.

Cover by W. T. Vinson.

super-heroes specially created for the game.

Zok’s super-heroes were Flash Futura, Mystic Man, Dorothy Daring, and Fantastic Falcon.

Samuel Lowe Company, a children’s book publisher in Kenosha, Wisconsin, created its own super-hero, Electro-Man, for a 1967 coloring book illustrated by an unidentified artist.

As The Adventures of ElectroMan’s title page explains, “A band of strange Robots descends to the Earth and starts wrecking cities. Electro-Man and Flicker, who live far away on the planet Venus, are called upon for help. With their superpowered laser beams, ElectroMan and Flicker are able to subdue the Robots and drive them from their evil deeds.”

Electro-Man, like so many other super-heroes of the Sixties, popped a power pill to stimulate his super-abilities.

Hasbro’s super-hero card game, Zok.

© Wham-O.

© Hasbro.

LEFT: ElectroMan and Flicker, superheroes of a rare coloring book. © 1967 James & Jonathan, Inc.

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MONSTER MASH-UP Dell’s Monster Super-Heroes

Famous Monsters of Fightland! Dell’s super-hero Frankenstein and Dracula comics. © the respective copyright holder.

36

All you need is love. That holds true for monsters, too.

Poor guys, they’ve been hunted by angry villagers, chased by bloodhounds, impaled with wooden stakes, shot with silver bullets, and left to die in burning buildings.

But no indignity heaped upon them is greater than the disdain of the fans that rejected their reinvention as super-heroes in Dell Comics’ Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf, each of which had a three-issue run from 1966 to 1967. Historians and bloggers alike have taken torches and pitchforks to these monster-heroes. Many have slammed the comic books without ever even reading them.

This hysteria is so contagious that the creative team behind the books has joined the rioting mob.

“Somebody wrote an article about them, calling them the three worst comic books ever done,” artist Tony Tallarico laughed to me during a September 2015 phone conversation. Writer/editor D. J. (Don) Arneson told interviewer Jamie Coville in 2010 that Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf “will be judged by comicbook readers and comic-book historians. I understand they have been pretty well panned. (Some have said they were the worst comic books ever… I won’t argue with that.) I’ll take credit or the blame for the writing.”

Okay, so they’re not Watchmen, but Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf were a product of their

time, a noble experiment, a clever merger of two popular genres. Let’s douse the torches, toss the pitchforks back into the barn, and give the undead and cursed a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. They’re due.

Before these most famous of monsters were reimagined as super-heroes, their publisher, Dell Comics, had recently dabbled in creature features via its publication of one-shots loosely based upon Universal Pictures’ versions of the characters. These comics came about at a time when Dell was scrambling for new properties. In 1962, Dell Publishing and Western Publishing ceased their longtime partnership—since 1938, Western had been producing comic-book content that Dell financed and distributed—with Western breaking ties to form its own imprint, Gold Key Comics, taking most of the comics line with them. So, in 1962 and 1963, Dell released single issues of The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature [from the Black Lagoon], and The Wolf Man, each with painted covers, as well as Movie Classic adaptations (some with photo covers, others with illustrated covers) of horror films such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror; during this time Dell also premiered a spooky anthology, Ghost Stories. Such gruesome fare had largely been absent from comics for about a decade due to the machinations of comicdom’s most diabolical witch hunter, Dr. Frederic Wertham, and the implementation of the Comics Code Authority. Dell, however, refused to publish its titles under the auspices of the Code. So, as America was Twisting to Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” and kids were watching Frankenstein and other Universal movies on Saturday afternoon TV, Dell grabbed the Universal monster licenses. By their own policing (including their pledge to parents, “Dell Comics are good comics”), Dell’s fare was certainly much tamer than EC’s Fifties shockers that drove Wertham into a frothy frenzy in the first place. In 1963 and 1964, Dell reprinted a handful of the Universal Monsters issues, even combining two of them into a one-shot titled Universal Pictures presents Dracula and the Mummy.

Fast forward to 1966—the Camp Age. D. J. Arneson had been entrenched at Dell as its comicbook editor since the Spring of 1962, joining the publisher around the time of the Dell–Western split and succeeding Dell’s previous comics editor, the recently fired L. B. (Len) Cole (the renowned Golden Age cover artist), after a month on staff as Cole’s assistant. Dell president Helen Meyer had shown interest in adding super-heroes to the comic-book line, starting with adventure-hero titles Naza, Stone Age Warrior and Toka, Jungle King. Following were the atomic hero Nukla (by writer Joe Gill and artists/ brothers-in-law Dick Giordano and Sal Trapani), the morally confused Neutro (drawn by Jack Sparling), and a super-team called the Fab 4 (El, Crispy, Hy, and Polymer Polly, drawn by Trapani) in a book titled Superheroes. “Dell attempted to do some superheroes,” Arneson, editor of the books, told Coville.

Dell’s Universal Monsters one-shots from 1962 and 1963. © Universal Pictures.

“You know, it was an attempt.” Nukla and Superheroes lasted four issues each, and Neutro, only one.

During this blitz, Dell decided to unleash the monster-heroes. It was a stroke of brilliance, actually.

Kids love monsters. Kids love superheroes. Victor Frankenstein had cannibalized parts from cadavers to make his famous, and misunderstood, Monster, so why not “rob the graves” of two popular genres… …three, counting Werewolf, a super-secret agent?

At the time, Dell no longer had the rights to publish the Universal Monsters. Luckily, Frankenstein and Dracula were in the public domain, and instead of the Wolf Man, Dell introduced Werewolf. Arneson was the mad scientist behind the trio of titles, creating their backstories and writing their scripts.

Frankenstein was first out of the lab, starting with issue #2 (continuing the numbering of the Frankenstein one-shot), published on May 3, 1966 with a September 1966 cover date. The story starts with the Frankenstein Monster we all know—at least, Dell’s approximation thereof—lying on a laboratory slab and being awakened from a century-long slumber by an errant lightning bolt. His memory is fuzzy, but we soon learn that in 1866 he was cobbled together by Dr. Victor Frankenstein there in the doctor’s castle, which happens to be not in some remote European settlement but just miles away from the American megalopolis of Metropole City. The Monster, however, after seeing a broken chunk of stone with the (incomplete) name “Frank” chiseled into it, takes the name “Frank Stone,” dons a Caucasian flesh-colored facemask to hide his grisly green visage, and heads out to find his way in the world. Witnessing the car crash of wealthy Henry Knickerbocker, Frank Stone uses his monstrous strength to rescue the injured

driver. When Knickerbocker dies shortly thereafter, he bequeaths his fortune to his rescuer, and Frank Stone becomes a millionaire, attended to by a gentleman’s gentleman, William, who was formerly in Knickerbocker’s employ. And thus, the stage (albeit a familiar one) is set: an altruistic tycoon, abetted by his loyal butler, begins to use his secret super-powers on a mission to eradicate evildoers: “…so until such time that the world is safe from evil… I, Frankenstein, will utilize my full powers to keep it safe!” (those powers being incredible strength, stamina, and speed, the

Superheroes, one of Dell’s short-lived super-hero comics. © the respective copyright holder.

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D. J. Arneson in his Dell Comics office, late summer 1964.

Courtesy of D. J. Arneson, via Facebook.

Freaky Frankie!

Superheroisms galore from Frankenstein, including a Batusiinspired dance! © the respective copyright holder.

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latter an upgrade from the Universal incarnation of the Monster, whose lumbering gait could be compared to the swiftness of a nursing home patron’s rehab session). Another familiar element in the strip is a snoopy female, Stone’s neighbor, whose curiosity about the monster-hero is piqued after the mighty Frankenstein reveals himself to the world when racing to her rescue. While this “Lois Lane” suspects that Frank Stone is secretly the manmade Man of Steel, kudos must be given to D. J. Arneson for the character’s name, one of the best puns of the Camp Age: Miss Ann Thrope. (Another High Camp moment in the

series occurs in issue #4, when arch-foe Mr. Freek forces Frankenstein and company to dance, no doubt inspired by Adam West’s Batusi.)

If Frankenstein was Dell’s monster-Superman, then its Batman was none other than Dracula, who premiered in Dracula #2 (which, like Frankenstein, continued the one-shot’s numbering), released on June 2, 1966, with a November 1966 cover date. It begins in Transylvania, unnamed in the introductory paragraph but described as “a little known middle European country far removed from the fears and worries of a twentieth century world constantly on the brink of nuclear war.” On a hilltop we find the foreboding castle of Count Dracula. Inside, the dreaded vampire’s descendent, a scientist who studied in America, has created a “bat-derived healing serum” designed to cure brain injuries and repair the damage his neck-chomping ancestor inflicted upon the family name. After one of his laboratory bats accidentally spills the serum into the scientist’s glass of mineral water, young Dracula inadvertently drinks his concoction and develops the ability to transform into a bat at will. After using his unusual gift to topple a dictator’s plans for atomic war and global dominance, Dracula undergoes an intense physical-conditioning regimen, commissions a bat-eared fighting suit (buying the tailor’s silence), an utters a vow worthy of a recitation from Bruce Wayne’s study: “I pledge by the strange powers which have become mine to fight against the injustice, corruption, evil, and greed which fills this earth in hopes that somehow my example will be an example to all men.” After his castle is destroyed by fire (apparently started by those pesky villagers who’ve lived in fear of Dracula for generations), in the second issue (#3), the new Dracula takes the name of Al Ulysses Card (or Al U. Card, “Dracula” spelled backwards), relocates to the United States, and in issue #4 establishes a secret cave as his crimefighting headquarters. In that issue, the lovely B. B. Beebe, a socialite whom Al met during his trans-Atlantic sea

journey to America, joins Dracula as his sidekick, Fleeta (as in fledermaus).

Four weeks after the debut of Dracula, on June 30, 1966, Werewolf #1 premiered, with a December 1966 cover date. Its cover claimed that Werewolf was “The Only Super Hero… Super Spy in the World.”

That wasn’t quite true—competitor Harvey Comics’ Spyman #1 hit the stands a week earlier, Marvel’s non-powered Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. had already been mixing super-heroics with espionage for over a year in the pages of Strange Tales, and Charlton’s ironfisted Sarge Steel had been around since 1964—but Dell did offer a fresh spin on a trend that was beginning to wear thin. Issue #1 begins with U.S. Air Force pilot Wiley Wolf, on a mission, crash landing in “the forbidding wastes of the Arctic Circle.”

He survives the crash but awakens with amnesia, and tends to a wolf that was injured by his plane’s wreckage. A bond forms between man and beast, and for months, Wiley, still without his memory, lives among the wolves: “For a while I thought I was a wolf.

Although I knew I was different, I started to think like them merely to survive.” Here, writer Arneson borrows more from Tarzan than The Wolf Man, the result being a cold, detached person with a wolf (named Thor) as his friend and ally. Wiley Wolf’s memory returns and he’s rescued from the frigid tundra. With the world believing that Wiley had perished in his crash, the Feds recruit him to Top Priority Unit One of Central Intelligence, outfitting him to be the super-spy codenamed Werewolf. He’s “implant[ed] with physiognomical disguise suggestions,” a preposterous ability to train his face muscles to replicate the personal characteristics of others, making him a master of disguise. Werewolf is also outfitted in a pitch-black jumpsuit with a full facial hood which makes him bulletproof and able to survive underwater. Other than having Thor the wolf as his partner, there’s little in Werewolf to tie it in to Dell’s other monster-hero books (while a Frankenstein cameo in Dracula #4 tied their two books together), and thus these lone wolves were left to their own devices to bust up Commies and no-goodniks for the rest of Werewolf’s threeissue run.

My defense of Dell’s monster-heroes may seem half-hearted from these series’ descriptions, as they illustrate the obvious parallels between their charac-

ters and other material. Of the three, Werewolf is the weakest, one of many dime-a-dozen super-spies of the Sixties.

But the concepts behind Frankenstein and Dracula were just darn clever. Crimefighting monsters?

Although this theme has been revisited in the years since, Dell’s Frankenstein and Dracula were revolutionary for the Camp Age. True, Dracula borrowed liberally from Batman, but then again, Dracula was one of the original inspirations for Batman, so both have taken their bites from the same neck. I will point out that in Dracula, the title character’s lab work with bats predates DC’s Man-Bat by roughly four years; Dracula’s lab scenes are uncannily prescient of Kirk

Fighting Frankies!

Original Tony Tallarico cover art to Frankenstein #3.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

Boxing Bloodsucker!

The POW!er of Dracula. © the respective copyright holder.

39

Werewolf #2.

If Arneson, Tallarico, and Fraccio weren’t being hounded by torch-wielding deadlines, the books might have been smoother reads. With all due respect to the creators, perhaps different art teams on the properties might have helped each develop its own identity. And the Creature and the Mummy missed out on the fun: an Aquaman/Sub-Marinerlike Creature and a mythology-rooted Mummy would have been great additions to the line.

The ultimate comeback creeper, Dell’s Dracula rose from the grave in 1972. Changes in the Comics Code Authority revived the undead in mainstream, Code-approved comic books, and Marvel Comics added the Prince of Darkness to its universe with the publication of Tomb of Dracula #1 (cover-dated April 1972 but going on sale in November 1971).

Dell reprinted its three issues of Dracula, continuing the numbering of the original series but strangely skipping issue #5. By the time the final issue (Dracula #8) was released in 1973, Dell Publishing was nailing shut the lid on its entire comic-book enterprise, tolling the final bell for its ill-fated monster super-heroes.

© the respective copyright holder.

RIGHT: Drac and Fleeta, from Dracula #4. BOTTOM RIGHT: Wiley Wolf raps with fans in Werewolf #3. © the respective copyright holder.

40

Langstrom’s origin sequence in Detective Comics #400.

Frankenstein and Dracula also shared a subtext of redemption. In the modern day of 1966, the patchwork man and the vampire’s kin were dedicated to undoing the damage their ancestors had inflicted upon humankind.

What has banished this trio of titles to the funeral pyre is their execution. Despite their flourishes of originality, each book feels rushed. That’s because each book was rushed. According to artist Tony Tallarico, “It was like one a month… one title a month.”

Tony’s right: The three quarterlies rotated, one following another every four weeks, on the average.

Tallarico and his uncredited art partner, Bill Fraccio, shared and swapped duties, usually with Bill penciling and Tony inking and acting as an agent to acquire work. And during this bounty of comic-book product, there was no shortage of work for them, from Dell, Charlton, Harvey, and elsewhere. On the story side, D. J. Arneson was editing Dell’s entire comic-book line, plus writing scripts, so his Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf scripts were rapidly produced to meet the demand. Artistically, Dracula and Werewolf were penciled by Fraccio and inked by Tallarico, while Frankenstein was penciled and inked by Tallarico.

According to Tony, “I think Bill was doing some comics about the history of stamps and he had no time for [Frankenstein]. He did the other two but he couldn’t do all three… which was fun, because I never really got a chance to do the whole thing myself except for the stuff I did for Classics Illustrated.”

PALISADES PARK

Superman’s Favorite Amusement Park The ink was barely dry on copies of Action Comics #1 back in 1938 before Superman’s corporate bosses discovered that the hero’s “S” also stood for “$.” While you never find super-salesmanship listed among Superman’s super-powers, the Metropolis Marvel has long doubled as the Madison Avenue Marvel, over the years hawking everything from bubblebath to peanut butter.

Outside of lending his name to his publishing home of National Periodical Publications (“Superman” top-lined DC Comics’ cover bullet for many years), no promotional campaign involving the Man of Steel was more visible during the Sixties than Supie’s Palisades Amusement Park ads appearing in DC titles. “Be my guest,” invited Superman in a compelling late-Sixties ad that caught my young eye. This wonderland was located in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, “½ mile south of the George Washington Bridge,” the ad explained. For those of us living in far-flung Anytown, U.S.A., we could only dream of accepting Superman’s kind offer.

Alan Brennert didn’t have to dream. The Emmywinning TV writer/producer (L.A. Law), comic-book

scribe (a handful of the best Batman stories—ever), and bestselling novelist (his books including Moloka'i), grew up near the park. “When I was a kid, circa 1960, I used to get my comic books at Pitkoff’s candy store on Palisades Avenue in Cliffside Park, New Jersey,” Brennert shared with me in January 2016. “About a mile down the street was Palisades Amusement Park, in whose giant saltwater pool I waded as a toddler and in which my Aunt Eleanor once laid down God knows how many quarters at a concession stand in order that I might win a giant stuffed dog I immediately named Ruff, after Dennis the Menace’s dog.

“When I started reading DC Comics, of course I saw the half-page ads in which Superman shilled for the park (even holding a not-to-scale replica of it aloft with one hand, my favorite of the ads). Having Superman ‘ballying’ for my neighborhood amusement park was both thrilling, and yet unsurprising, to me. After all, Palisades was a great park—why shouldn’t Superman be endorsing it? It wasn’t until years later, when I started to understand how advertising worked, that I began to wonder why a regional amusement park should be advertising in national publications (no pun intended). And still later I would hear from comics readers/writers like Mark Waid, who once told me

Alan Brennert’s tale of diver Toni Stopka, 2013’s Palisades Park. © Alan Brennert.

Superman invites DC Comics readers to visit Palisades Park.

TM & © DC Comics.

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This 1937 poster for the park featured a gorgeous Cardwell Higgins bathing beauty portrait.

Courtesy of Heritage.

RIGHT: By the end of the Sixties, Superman wasn’t the only comics star pitching for Palisades Park.

Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman © DC Comics. Archie and Jughead © Archie Publications, Inc. Casper and Wendy © DreamWorks Classics.

Outside of ads, Palisades Park has also been featured in comicbook stories, including this cover-featured one in 1968’s Falling in Love #99. Mod cover art by Ric Estrada.

TM & © DC Comics.

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how, growing up in Alabama, he was bitterly envious of New York-area kids like me who could actually go to Palisades Park, which had to be way cool because, you know, Superman said so!

“And so it was. To this day, if I’m paging through an old DC comic and come across one of those ads, it takes me back to the years I spent splashing in the pool, riding the kiddie coaster, and eating the fabled French fries—in Superman’s favorite amusement park.”

It turns out that Palisades Park was also Casper the Friendly Ghost’s favorite amusement park—and Archie Andrews’, too! And while it was a “regional” park for young Alan Brennert, that region was the populous New York City Metro area.

Founded in 1898 and stretching thirty acres along the Hudson River, Palisades Amusement Park became renowned for its French fries, Tunnel of Love, Cyclone rollercoaster, segregation battle, music concerts, and 400-foot-by-600-foot swimming pool (filled with saltwater from the Hudson). Its rich history was lyrically and lovingly shared in Brennert’s 2013 novel, Palisades Park, a page-turner about a family of dreamers and their lofty goals, some realized, some shunned, some shattered. Long before Alan’s book was published, “Palisades Park” was also a 1962 hit song written by future Gong Show gonzo Chuck Barris and recorded by Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon. That tune, with its infectious calliope organ riffs, was actually a B-side selection that became a Twistinducing radio hit and bounced its way up to Billboard’s #3 spot.

Palisades Park etched its niche in comic-book history once

the park’s long-time owners, brothers Jack and Irvin Rosenthal, used the affordable advertising medium of DC Comics to lure big city kids to their attractions.

When Batmania hit in 1966, coupons promoting a Batman Slide began to appear in DC ads, and soon Batman and Wonder Woman joined Superman as hawkers. Before long, the Rosenthals struck deals with Harvey Comics and Archie Comics, and the park introduced the comics-spawned attractions Casper’s Ghostland and Archie’s Hot Rods while promoting Palisades Park in Harvey and Archie funnybooks.

After regaling generations of families, Palisades Amusement Park closed in the Fall of 1971 to make way for high-density housing. But for comics fans who routinely revisit the moldy, musty pulp pages of the Sixties, Palisades Park remains a wonderland of dreams.

A HERO-A-GO-GO TOUR OF PALISADES AMUSEMENT PARK An Interview with Vince Gargiulo

Vince Gargiulo grew up in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, just fifteen blocks away from Palisades Amusement Park. Today he is the Executive Director of the Palisades Amusement Park Historical

actor dressed as Superman ever appear at the park?

I don’t believe anyone ever appeared at Palisades as a Superman costumed character.

George Reeves did, however, make a personal appearance. I do not have an exact date as to when this occurred.

Were there marketing studies conducted to show how many attendees were drawn to the park from outside of the New York metro area by the ads published in comic books?

None that I am aware of. But based on published newspaper articles throughout the lifetime of the park, I was able to calculate that 33% of the visitors to Palisades were from New York.

Society and webmaster for its website, PalisadesPark.com. The park’s most renowned historian, Gargiulo has written two books and produced one documentary on the subject: Palisades Amusement Park: A Century of Fond Memories (Rutgers University Press, 1995), which was followed in 1998 by his PBS documentary based on the book, narrated

by Ken Burns; and Postcard History Series: Palisades Amusement Park (Arcadia Publishing, 2005). Vince has kindly shared with Hero-A-Go-Go photographs of Palisades Park’s comic-related attractions.

The Batman Slide was built in the mid-Sixties. Do you know exactly when? I’m assuming it was in response to the over-

night success of TV’s Batman, which first aired in January 1966.

The first mention I found of the Batman Slide in news articles was from March 1966.

What Batman-isms were featured on the Batman Slide?

At the very top of the tower was a large cutout of the comicbook Batman. Below that was a sign that read “Batman Slide,” with a version of the Batman logo in the background. I do not believe they ever included Robin’s image anywhere on the attraction.

Was the Batman Slide still in operation when the park closed in 1971?

Yes, the Batman Slide was in operation right up until September 12, 1971. It was sold to Adventurers Inn in Queens, New York.

There was also a Batcave amusement there around the same time. What was it?

Vince Gargiulo.

LEFT: A revised edition of Gargiulo’s Palisades Amusement Park: A Century of Fond Memories, plus a DVD of its PBS special and other park-related collectibles, can be purchased at www.

PalisadesPark. com.

The Batman Slide and Batcave barrel attractions.

The Corbett Collection/www.

PalisadesPark.com.

Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

Interview conducted in January 2016.

Since Superman was Palisades Park’s pitchman in DC Comics throughout the Sixties, did an 43

Various views of the Casper’s Ghostland attraction.

Vince Gargiulo/ www.PalisadesPark. com. Casper and related characters TM & © DreamWorks Classics.

A front view of Archie’s Hot Rods.

Vince Gargiulo/www.

PalisadesPark.com.

Archie and related characters TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

It was nothing more than a simple barrel that rotated while patrons tried to make it from one end to the other. The park already had one of these in their fun house.

But I guess they decided to install this one with the Batman theme and ride the wave of popularity. The attraction is frequently found inside fun houses and is called the “Barrel of Fun” or the “Barrel of Love.”

What can you tell me about the Casper’s Ghostland attraction?

Palisades Amusement Park first coined the term “Tunnel of Love.”

This was a dark ride in which patrons rode pretzel cars through a darkened building with scary

surprises popping up out of the darkness. By the early Sixties, the ridership was in a decline, so Palisades redesigned the exterior of the building with Taj Mahalstyle domes and they renamed the ride “Arabian Nights: Tunnel of Love.” Of course, the interior of the ride was also changed to fit the new theme. It didn’t do as well as they had hoped, so they made a deal with Harvey Comics to get the rights to several of their characters, including Casper the Friendly Ghost. Its dark caverns became populated by such Harvey Comics characters as Casper, the villainous Ghostly Trio, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, and Nightmare the Ghost Horse. They renamed the ride “Casper’s Ghostland.” It became an overnight success.

It remained in operation until the park closed.

Once the Archies became popular in the late Sixties, Palisades added an Archie’s Hot Rods amusement. What kind of ride was it?

The park had a ride originally called “The Motor Parkway” (later renamed “Auto Speedway”) that had been in operation since at least the Forties. It was a wind-

44

ing track in which patrons could steer motorized cars, single file, along a scenic track. When they made a deal with Archie Comics in the Sixties, they renamed the ride “Archie’s Hot Rods.”

While Superman, Batman, Casper, and Archie had some type of Palisades Park presence, Spider-Man and Captain America were noticeably absent. Were there ever any gestures made to Marvel Comics about an attraction featuring one of its heroes?

None that I am aware of.

Although it’s been nearly a halfcentury since Palisades Amusement Park closed, it maintains a warm spot in the hearts of many. What was it about the park that has made its legacy endure?

For many Baby Boomers, Palisades Amusement Park was so much a part of their childhood.

Whether you lived in the area and visited the park every week, or you lived elsewhere and only visited the park once, it left fond memories to everyone who was lucky enough to experience the magic that was Palisades Amusement Park.

HOLY HOMOGENIZATION, BATMAN! Batman All Star Dairy Products

“Robin doesn’t have green legs!” chided the eightyear-old me in 1966 when I first saw the poster for Batman Slam Bang Vanilla (with Banana Marshmallow) Ice Cream. It was taped to the paneled wall above a jangling freezer in a neighborhood supermarket in my hometown of Concord, North Carolina.

I was with Mom and Dad and my baby brother John for a routine grocery stop, but this otherwise forgettable shopping outing became eternally etched into my memory because of that egregious coloring snafu. Any kid worth his weight in banana marshmallows could tell you that Robin’s legs were bare, and his costume was red, green, and yellow. Of course, at the time I didn’t understand that this marketing tool’s sherbet hues of lavender, green, orange, and white were designed to grab the eyes of kids like me and make us salivate for this dairy product promoted by the super-heroes we watched twice a week on TV. It did. It was around this time that I began a steady weight gain which, two years later, had me muffintopping the waistband of my “Husky” dungarees and had Mom patching their inner legs chafed threadbare by my waddling, dumpy thighs. It wasn’t until writing this essay that I realized that my childhood obesity was sparked by the fighting-trim Batman and Robin, but I was such a Dynamic Duo devotee that I’d follow the Caped Crusader anywhere—including the ice cream cooler.

My childhood body-image issues aside, what was cool about Batman’s stint as a dairy-product spokesman was that it brought the hero, his youthful ally, and even his atomic-battery-powered hot rod to

The garish eye-grabber that drove third-graders wild!

Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

All Star © All Star Association.

my little town of 18,000! And I wasn’t alone— during the Camp Age, Batman and Robin All Star Dairy posters and products spread across communities in the Eastern and Central U.S. faster than the Joker’s laughing gas. “Batman” even drove his “Batmobile” in promotions and Christmas parades.

And the once-popular screen cowboy Hopalong Cassidy was all the poorer for it.

How did the Caped Crusader become the Masked Milkman?

The All Star Dairy Association—which is over a half-century old and still in business at this writing from its Lexington, Kentucky, headquarters—provides uniform packaging and promotional materials to small, regional dairies that join its network. From the mid-Fifties through the mid-Sixties, Hollywood’s Hopalong Cassidy was under contract with All Star as its celebrity face, his smiling visage printed onto milk bottles and ice cream cup lids. William Boyd, the actor made famous by his role as “Hoppy,” hopped from town to town making All Star-sponsored personal appearances at Boys Clubs and movie houses, encouraging kids to drink milk (who, in turn, encouraged their parents to buy milk).

Hoppy was asked to ride off into the sunset in late 1965 when All Star, anticipating the swelling tsunami of Batmania, licensed Batman and Robin

You won’t be smiling much longer, Hoppy!

William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd was All Star’s dairy pitchman— until Batmania hit!

Photo courtesy of Robert E. Burrage, Sr.

LEFT: From the author’s collection, a Batman ice cream carton.

Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

All Star © All Star Association.

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Some of the Batman store promos distributed by All Star.

Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

All Star © All Star Association.

“Batman” drives the “Batmobile” in the 1966 Christmas Parade in Concord, North Carolina. Maybe “Batman” came to your town, too.

Photo courtesy of Robert E. Burrage, Sr.

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from National Periodical Publications (DC Comics) for nearly $3 million to use the Dynamic Duo on their products.

That product line included Batman Homogenized Milk (in Chocolate, too), Batman Orange Drink, Batman Fruit Drink, Batman Lemon Drink, the aforementioned Batman Slam Bang Vanilla Ice Cream, and even the Christmastime 1966 release of a frothy Bat-nog, all bearing the All Star Dairies icon. Grocers and dairies selling All Star products plastered brightly hued Batman and Robin posters in their windows, some of them designating the site as the “Official Headquarters” of “Batman Dairy Products” (unused or gently used posters are highly coveted in today’s collectors’ market). The business journal The Kiplinger Magazine reported in its January 1967 edition that All Star products bearing

Batman and Robin’s likenesses enjoyed sales spikes of up to 300%, starting its account with this intro: “To the ‘crash’ and ‘wham’ and ‘pow’ of Batman a sound effect has been added, straight from the cow barn: ‘moo’.”

In the vein of the hometown appearances of Hopalong Cassidy, many American hamlets with All Star Dairy Association-affiliated businesses began featuring Batmobile “replicas” during store promos and main street parades. I’ve offset “replicas” in quotes because these were not officially licensed Batmobile duplicates, but instead random vehicles modified by area car buffs; they certainly wouldn’t fool eagle-eyed young fans like me as being the “real” TV Batmobile as created by the one and only Czar of Customizers, George Barris. Still, Batmaniacs accepted with great fanfare these Batmobile knockoffs and the “Batmen” driving them. We knew that Batman, like Santa Claus, was a busy fellow (it seemed as if at least one super-villain made the rounds in Gotham City each week!) and needed some helpers to keep the streets crime-free.

Batmania swept through my hometown of Concord and our neighboring town (and football rival) of Kannapolis thanks to the Cabarrus Creamery Company, Inc., which had been a member of the All Star Dairy Association since 1954. The Cabarrus Creamery’s headquarters in Concord was a major manufacturing and distribution hub for All Star Dairies, which explains why many of the Batman All Star Dairy packages now preserved in collections of folks like me bear the inscription “Mfd. by Cabarrus Creamery Co., Inc.,

POP ART MEETS POP-TARTS®

Batman Mini-Comics

Concord, N.C.” under its All Star Dairies logo. “The Creamery,” as we locals called it, dated back to a mid-Twenties merger between dairy farmer Robert L. Burrage, Sr. and other area businessmen.

By the time the Batman All Star promotion occurred, Burrage’s son, Robert L. Burrage, Jr., was calling the shots. Burrage posed for a 1966 promotional photo for Kannapolis’ Daily Independent newspaper and was described by reporter Marvin Eury (my uncle!) as being “a local look-alike to the man portraying the commissioner on the popular TV show.” While I’ll leave it to you readers to agree or disagree with Uncle Marvin’s comparison of Mr. Burrage to actor Neil Hamilton, I’m sure we can all agree from the photograph shown here that the poor soul driving the Creamery’s own Batmobile—the company car, a station wagon, decorated with Bat-insignias and a Batman Dairy Foods logo—was no “look-alike” for Adam West. He appears to be wearing a ski mask rolled up to expose his chin, work gloves at least one size too large, and a white terrycloth bath towel haphazardly safety-pinned around his neck. Holy Haberdashery! But, hey, we were forgiving of these details. How often does Batman come to town?

Riddle me this: Which Camp Age Batman comicbook series is impossible to find in Mint condition?

Answer: The Kellogg’s® Pop-Tarts® Batman mini-comics.

It was 1966, and among the myriad merchandising deals brokered by DC Comics to promote its smoking-hot Batman character was a series of six Batman mini-comics, measuring 5½ inches by 3 inches each, produced as giveaways with Kellogg’s fruit-filled breakfast treats. These 16-page comic books were published on newsprint with paper covers, each opening with a splash panel and featuring one or two panels per page. They were folded at the

LEFT: Batman dairy products were hyped at the Swanee Theater’s showing of the 1966 Batman movie in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

Photo courtesy of Robert E. Burrage, Sr.

Pop-Tarts’ Batman minicomics were a popular promotion during 1966.

Batman and related characters TM & © DC Comics. PopTarts® is a registered TM of Kellogg’s®.

LEFT: Is that Commissioner Gordon?

Cabarrus Creamery’s Robert L. Burrage, Jr. and Batman in 1966.

Photos courtesy of Robert E. Burrage, Sr.

47

artist who at the time was also drawing the Superman/Batman team-ups in World’s Finest Comics, penciled one of the Pop-Tarts comics, inked

by George Klein. Swan wasn’t the only Superman artist tapped for the Pop-Tarts comics: Al Plastino illustrated the Iron Mask story (before long, Plastino would again be attached to the Caped Crusader as the artist of the Batman syndicated newspaper strip), while the artist who epitomized Superman’s Atomic Age, Wayne Boring, drew the Mad Hatter and Batman II tales, giving readers a rare chance to see his rendition of the Dynamic Duo! Being giveaways, many of the Pop-Tarts Batman comics were discarded after their initial readings, making them scarce in today’s collector’s market, often commanding a price of $50 each or more; The Overstreet Comic Book Price 2015–16 edition values them at $65 each in NM- condition. Even harder to find are the Kellogg’s Pop-Tart boxes themselves, which bear the brand of Batman’s insignia.

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THE POP-TART® BATMAN MINI-COMICS “The Case of Batman II!”

Art: Wayne Boring Synopsis: Bruce Wayne dies in an accident, and Robin and Alfred recruit a new Batman.

Adapts: “The Case of Batman II” from Batman #40 (Apr.–May 1947) Original story by: Don Cameron (suspected writer), Dick Sprang, and Gene McDonald

TM & © DC Comics.

Batman and Mad Hatter TM & © DC Comics.

printer for insertion into Pop-Tarts boxes, permanently creasing them and adversely affecting their condition for the discerning collector. However, such matters were inconsequential to the kid of 1966 who delighted in the adventures of the Dynamic Duo as he scarfed on a warm cherry or blueberry Pop-Tart before darting to catch his school bus.

E. Nelson Bridwell, DC’s master of continuity, wrote all six Batman mini-comics, adapting Golden Age stories for a new generation. Four of Bridwell’s stories spotlighted villains that were on view on the Batman TV series: the Joker, Catwoman, the Penguin, and the Mad Hatter. The remaining two reflected Nelson’s eclectic tastes: “The Man in the Iron Mask!” involved a one-off Bat-villain inspired by French history and literature, and “The Case of Batman II!” featured a popular recurring theme in the Bat-mythos—legacy—as Bruce Wayne’s unexpected death (!) forced Robin, the Boy Wonder to seek out a new Caped Crusader. Bridwell judiciously trimmed the original stories for this abbreviated format, yet most closely resembled their source material. He took the most liberties with the Batman #49’s “The Scoop of the Century!” from 1948, adapted as “The Mad Hatter’s Hat Crimes!” That original story debuted Bruce Wayne’s love interest, reporter Vicki Vale, but her character and the subplot of her discovery of Bruce’s Batman identity were omitted from the Pop-Tarts tale. Batman #49 was also the first appearance of the Mad Hatter, but in the PopTarts version, Jervis Tetch (the villain’s real name) was returning to plague Gotham City, following the revolving-door-villain formula of the Batman TV show.

The Batman dream team of penciler Carmine Infantino and inker Murphy Anderson illustrated two of the mini-comics. Curt Swan, the beloved Superman

“The Catwoman’s Catnapping Caper!”

Art: Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson Synopsis: Catwoman steals random pet felines to assist with cat-related crimes.

TM & © DC Comics.

Batman, before and after: a Mad Hatter scene from Batman #39 and its recreation in “The Mad Hatter’s Hat Crimes!”

Original story by: Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Ray Burnley

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Adapts: “A Christmas Tale!” from Batman #39 (Feb.–Mar. 1947) Original story by: Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Ray Burnley

“The Penguin’s Fowl Play!”

Art: Curt Swan and George Klein Synopsis: Penguin poses as “Ben Guin,” assistant to famed ornithologist Prof. Boyd, to gain access to birds for a crime wave.

Adapts: “Fowl Play!” from Detective Comics #120 (Feb. 1947)

“The Joker’s Happy Victims!”

Art: Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson Synopsis: Those burgled by the Clown Prince of Crime are oddly elated by his robberies.

Adapts: “The Happy Victims!” from Batman #52 (Apr.–May 1949) Original story by: Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Lew Sayre Schwartz, and Charles Paris

THE PRELL® BATMAN MINI-COMIC

TM & © DC Comics.

Much harder to find than the Pop-Tart comics is the Batman mini-comic The Joker’s Practical Jokes, released in 1966 as a promotional giveaway courtesy of Prell Concentrate Shampoo. Measuring 6⅞ inches by 3⅜ inches, this is a 16-page reprint of “The Joker’s Practical Jokes” by Bill Finger, Dick Sprang, and Charles Paris, originally published in Batman #123 (Apr. 1959). While Overstreet values it at $165 in NM- condition, a Fine condition copy of this rarity netted over $4,000 in a 2008 Hake’s Americana & Collectibles auction.

“The Mad Hatter’s Hat Crimes!”

TM & © DC Comics.

Art: Wayne Boring Synopsis: Hat clues point Batman and Robin toward the crime plans of the Mad Hatter.

Adapts: “The Scoop of the Century!” from Batman #49 (Oct.–Nov. 1948) Original story by: Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Lew Sayre Schwartz, and Charles Paris

Art: Al Plastino Synopsis: Batman tangles with Iron-Hat Ferris, a killer whose face is hidden behind a metal mask.

Adapts: “The Man in the Iron Mask!” from Batman #39 (Feb.–Mar. 1947)

TM & © DC Comics.

“The Man in the Iron Mask!”

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SUPER-HERO PAPERBACKS

Camp Heroes Find a New Market

Miss Mary Propst.

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Miss Mary Propst did not like Batman. Miss Propst was a no-nonsense career teacher whose hair dye turned her tightly coiled silver perm an unusual shade of lavender. She was a meticulous, thorough, and demanding educator and I learned a great deal from her. But the poor soul had the misfortune of teaching third grade in 1966 when Batman became an overnight sensation. After refereeing make-believe Batfights (POW! ZOWIE!) and confiscating the latest issues of Batman and Detective from her distracted students, Miss Propst ultimately declared her classroom a Batman-free zone.

Luckily, Signet Books enabled the eight-yearold me to outsmart the eagle-eyed “Purple-Headed Propst,” as we privately called her (now that I think of it, that would’ve made a good name for a TV Batman villain). With Signet’s March 1966 publication of a Batman paperback book collecting “The BEST of the ORIGINAL BATMAN—the Caped Crusader’s greatest adventures,” this pocket-sized primer (it started with his origin!) introduced me (and many other kids) to the Batman of the previous generation… and the book’s unassuming, hand-held size was perfect for smuggling it into class inside a textbook.

This comics-to-paperback Batman collection was certainly nothing new in bookstores. The popular, and frequently expanding, libraries of Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and MAD Magazine reprints in paperback form stretched back to the Fifties; joining Charles Schulz, Hank Ketcham, and Alfred E. Neuman on book spinner racks were paperbacks collecting other syndicated comic strips including The Addams Family, Nancy, Hazel, Andy Capp, and The Born Loser.

But during the Camp Age and the height of Batmania, a legion of super-hero paperbacks brought past adventures from comic books to a new audience, and in a few cases, dared to tell new, original adventures of super-

heroes in prose novel form! As with the MAD and comic-strip reprints, each of the super-hero reprint paperbacks re-presented their earlier stories in black and white, and the multi-panel comic books were adapted to the paperback medium, with each paperback hosting one to three panels per page. The paperbacks surveyed here sold for 50 cents.

BATMAN SIGNET BOOKS In the Sixties, Signet Books, a division of the New American Library, was being distributed by Independent News Co. (IND), the book-and-magazine circulation outfit owned by National Periodical Publications (DC Comics). When the Batman craze hit, Signet released six Batman paperbacks during a six-month window: Batman, containing comics reprints, in March 1966; Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom, an original novel by Winston Lyon, in April 1966; a pair of comics reprint volumes starring villains, Batman vs. the Joker and Batman vs. the Penguin (the Penguin volume included one Catwoman reprint), both released in May 1966; Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome, Winston Lyon’s novelization of the Batman movie screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., in August 1966; and Bill Adler’s Funniest Fan Letters to Batman, also in August 1966. Of the six, the Joker volume is numbered “No. 3” and the Penguin volume is numbered “No. 4.”

The cover of the first book, Batman, repurposes the now-iconic Carmine Infantino/ Murphy Anderson pose of the Dynamic Duo originally produced as a comic-book insert poster but later used, and reused, on a variety of products from the cover of the Crown Publishing 1973 hardcover Batman from the Thirties to the Seventies to a 1974 jigsaw puzzle produced by APC (American Publishing Corp.).

However, other than its supermoon background, the artwork is truncated to Batman’s and Robin’s figures, from the knees up, and appears to be traced from the original, with a production artist poorly redrawing Batman’s legs to emerge from off-panel, creating the unfortunate appearance of a stifflegged Caped Crusader falling into the frame (Holy Bad Trip, Batman!). The two original

novels’ covers employ photos from the Adam Weststarring Batman TV show and film, while pre-existing comic-book images are used on the Joker and Penguin book covers. Murphy Anderson, whose slick art epitomized DC Comics’ house style of the Sixties, illustrated the Fan Letters book cover. The first four volumes are thematically linked by a compatible back cover design relying heavily upon the splashy sound effects popularized during the Camp Age and on TV’s Batman.

Under a “Caped Crusader Classics!” brand, Titan Books reprinted the Batman, Joker, and a revised Penguin (minus the Catwoman tale) editions in 1988, and added other books to the line, which concluded the following year. Comprising the “Caped Crusader Classics!” line were No. 1: Batman and Robin, No. 2: Batman vs. the Joker, No. 3: Batman vs. the Penguin, No. 4: Batman vs. the Catwoman, No. 5: Batman: Return of the Joker, and No. 6: Batman and Superman.

Batman (D2939)

Signet Books (Mar. 1966) Reprints: “The Legend of the Batman” (Batman’s origin) from Batman #1 (Spring 1940) and Detective Comics #33 (Nov. 1939) “The Web of Doom!” from Batman #90 (Mar. 1955) “Fan-Mail of Danger!” from Batman #92 (June 1955) “The Crazy Crime Clown!” from Batman #74 (Dec. 1952–Jan. 1953) “The Crime Predictor” from Batman #77 (June– July 1953) “The Man Who Could Change Fingerprints!” from Batman #82 (Mar. 1954) “The Testing of Batman!” from Batman #83 (Apr. 1954)

Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom

by Winston Lyon (D2940)

Signet Books (Apr. 1966) Synopsis: The first full-length novel (128 pages) starring Batman (and Robin), this original story by Lyon (a pen name for William Woolfolk) concerns a competition between a Terrible Trio of Gotham’s most lethal lawbreakers— the Penguin, the Joker, and the Catwoman—as they vie for the underworld’s equivalent of an Oscar®, the Tommy Award, a gold-plated machine gun. One by one, the “Three Villains of Doom” match wits with Batman and Robin, with the ultimate goal of defeating or destroying the Dynamic Duo, the winning criminal taking the prize!

Between the covers: Quickly produced to capitalize on the overnight success of ABC-TV’s Batman, Lyon’s novel bears little resemblance to the campy tone of its source material, which isn’t a bad thing. Instead, it reads like a novel starring the Fifties noirish Batman and Robin—

not surprising given Woolfolk’s past as a writer of comic books featuring reality-based Golden Age characters such as Blackhawk and the Spirit (he also wrote the original Captain Marvel, so he had a flair for whimsy which he didn’t apply to Batman vs.

Three Villains of Doom). While maintaining an all-ages tone for commerciality, the author colors the work with enough darkness to compel the adult reader to keep turning pages, capturing his audience from page one with gripping character descriptions such as: “Coal-black eyes stared out of dead-white eyeballs beneath curving black brows that seemed painted on the forehead in an expression of perpetual mockery.” (If you think that’s Catwoman’s introduction, back to Bat-school for you!) It’s obvious to the TV Bat-fan that Lyon/Woolfolk was working with limited reference to the then-new television series, as Chief O’Hara is identified throughout as “Inspector O’Hara” and bears little of actor Stafford Repp’s personality (actually, none of the characters’ voices sound like their TV counterparts). Also, the novel’s Joker is a cluemaster not unlike the Riddler, and in one harrowing sequence where a nearly defeated Batman believes Robin to be dead, the broken-spirited Caped Crusader mopes uncharacteristically. These incongruities might have puzzled the Camp-minded reader of 1966 but work to the advantage of Three Villains of Doom, as it’s a captivating thriller that holds up fifty years after its publication.

Batman vs. the Joker (D2969) [No. 3]

Signet Books (May 1966) Reprints: “The Challenge of the Joker” from Batman #136 (Dec. 1960) “The Joker’s Winning Team!” from Batman #86 (Sept. 1954) “The Joker’s Millions!” from Detective Comics #180 (Feb. 1952) “The Joker’s Journal!” from Detective Comics #193 (Mar. 1953) “Batman—Clown of Crime!” from Batman #85 (Aug. 1954)

Batman vs. the Penguin (D2970) [No. 4]

Signet Books (May 1966) Reprints: “The Parasols of Plunder” (Penguin) from Batman #70 (Apr.–May 1952) “The Golden Eggs!” (Penguin) from Batman #99 (Apr. 1956) “The Penguin’s Fabulous 51

Fowls!” (Penguin) from Batman #76 (Apr.–May 1953) “The Return of the Penguin” (Penguin) from Batman #155 (May 1963) “The Sleeping Beauties of Gotham City!”

(Catwoman) from Batman #84 (June 1954)

Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome by Winston Lyon (D2995)

Signet Books (Aug. 1966) Synopsis: Author Lyon (William Woolfolk) returns with the Caped Crusader’s second full-length novel (128 pages), an adaptation of Lorenzo Semple, Jr.’s screenplay for the 20th Century Fox “Batacular movie,” Batman. A quartet of quarrelsome criminals—the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, and the Joker—unite for an insidious plot which includes a disappearing yacht, an exploding shark, kidnappings, a nonextinguishable bomb, human dehydration, and a broken heart for Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne.

Between the covers: Welcome to the adaptation of the Batman movie of Earth-Two. Unlike Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom, Lyon’s Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome is unmistakably the world of the “As Seen on TV” Dynamic Duo, although the author’s tongue isn’t planted as firmly in his cheek as screenwriter Semple’s. But Lyon’s Fearsome Foursome adapts the first draft of the Batman script, not the revised shooting script, and as such there are a number of departures from the movie that geeks like me have watched time and time again since our child-

hoods. Among them: instead of the movie’s Commodore Schmidlapp, the novel features Commander Redhead of Schlepp’s Whiskey Company, whose whiskey dehydration device the villains plan to use on international leaders; when the Penguin, the Joker, the Riddler, and their henchmen bust up millionaire Bruce Wayne’s détente-date with “Russian reporter” Miss Kitka (Catwoman in disguise), they escape with jetpacks instead of giant flying umbrellas; and in a scene that does not appear in the movie, Robin phones in a National Guard air squadron for an aerial pursuit of the jetpacking villains. These discrepancies are actually a lot of fun, and Lyon’s proficiency as an author adds drama to situations played for laughs in the film (such as Batman’s encounter with a shark).

Note: The paperback contains a four-page insert of black-and-white photographs from the movie.

Bill Adler’s Funniest Fan Letters to Batman (D2980)

Signet Books (Aug. 1966) Synopsis: “Batman has swept the county and today it is hard to find a living soul who isn’t a loyal, dedicated, devoted Batman fan,” writes editor Adler in his introduction (he obviously never met Purple-Headed Propst).

Adler, who flooded the market with similar quickly produced paperbacks compiling letters to and comments from other Sixties icons including President Kennedy, the Beatles, James Bond, and Pope John, shares “the Wildest, Funniest, Kerpowiest Fan Letters that ever went through the U.S. mails,” letters from fans of all ages.

Between the covers: Gen-Exers, Millennials, and others who arrived late to the Batmania party should seek out this paperback if they’d like to get up close and personal with the fans that put the “mania” into the Batman craze. As the collection’s front- and back-cover hype promises, the letters run the gamut, from children…

Dear Batman, I read about the Getaway Genius in one of your comic books.

I would like to meet him.

Maybe he can help me escape from this school.

Your fan,

Jeffrey P.

Raleigh, N.C. …to parents…

Dear Batman, Ever since your program went on television, my son Barry, who is 5, insists on watching every Batman program.

He gets so excited watching Batman on TV that I have a difficult time getting him to bed when the program is finished.

If it isn’t too much trouble[,] could you just once, at the end of the show[,] say, “And now it is

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time for Barry Strauss to brush his teeth and go to sleep.”

It would be a big help.

A grateful parent,

Mrs. James S.

Chicago …to teenagers…

Dear Batman, You are so tall and handsome and brave and I would give anything to have a date with you just once.

Frankly, the last time I ever went out with someone who wore a mask was on Halloween six years ago.

Sincerely,

Marsha W.

Newark, N.J. …to comic-book readers: Dear Batman: Wow! What a story! What a cover! Batman no.

180 was the greatest, by far.

There are two things I liked best about this particular issue.

On the splash page, the Batman “insignia” was super-imposed over the colorful art, rather than being placed over a black background. This might seem like a nutty thing to point out, but it signified a change.

Batman got shot! It might seem morbid of me to thank you for this incident, but it seems unlikely that the Cowled Crusader would go through every single adventure without getting hurt. He had to get shot sometime, and this was as good a time as any.

Sincerely,

Mark P.

St. Louis, Missouri A brisk but deliriously engrossing read, Bill Adler’s Funniest Fan Letters to Batman is the ultimate feel-good book that harkens back to a simpler era in the not-yet-Dark Knight’s history.

SUPERMAN SIGNET BOOKS The Man of Steel had to shrug off being demoted to DC Comics’ No. 2 hero during Batmania, but on the cover to Signet Books’ little-known Superman paperback—in the same black-and-white reprint format as its Batman, Joker, and Penguin books—Supie is also shrugging off a lightning bolt. Each of the five stories reprinted in this hard-to-find edition are illustrated by Wayne Boring, but the art of THE Superman artist of Sixties, Curt Swan, graces its cover. Problem is,

Swan’s cover image—the flying Superman penciled

by Swan and inked by Stan Kaye for the cover of Superman Annual #2—has been retouched, probably traced, quite possibly by the same artist that hacked off the Caped Crusader’s legs on the Batman volume.

Still, this hard-to-find paperback—hyped on its back cover as “the first full-length book featuring the greatest adventures of America’s superhero”—is a fun sampler of Atomic Age Superman stories.

Superman (D2966)

Signet Books (May 1966) Reprints: “The Invulnerable Enemy” from Action Comics #226 (Mar. 1957) “Superman’s 3 Mistakes!” from Superman #105 (May 1956) “Titano the Super-Ape!” from Superman #127 (Feb. 1959) “The Menace of Cosmic Man!” from Action Comics #258 (Nov. 1959) “The Menace of Red-Green Kryptonite” from Action Comics #275 (Apr. 1961) 53

MARVEL SUPER-HEROES LANCER BOOKS Batmania, the sensation, might not have been possible without the birth of the Marvel Age which preceded it. The House of Ideas’ Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, et al. reinvigorated the masked men genre with a “new, groovy breed of”—as the New York Herald Tribune called Marvel’s mightiest—“Super Heroes with Super Problems,” characters that clicked with teens and college-age readers. Once the Batman fad hit, Marvel jumped on the paperback bandwagon by licensing some of its characters to Lancer Books for a series of six collected editions, with a strong marketing push toward universities. The back cover of the Fantastic Four edition used this quote culled from Michigan State News: “The campus craze that’s sweeping the nation: ‘Cool heroes… cool villains… cool plots… cool adventures… comic book reading is in!” Were the hallowed halls of higher learning not an impressive enough pedigree for culture lovers, the California Pelican called Marvel Comics “the Playboy of comicdom.”

Holy Hugh Hefner! While essentially in the same format as Signet’s Batman and Superman books, the six Marvel reprint paperbacks mostly featured a horizontal layout.

The Fantastic Four Collector’s Album (#72-111)

Lancer Books (1966) Reprints: “Captives of the Deadly Duo” from Fantastic Four #6 (Sept.

1962)

“[Who are the Fantastic Four?]” story/panel montage from Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961) and Fantastic Four #11 (Feb. 1963) “The Impossible Man” from Fantastic Four #11 (Feb. 1963) “The Mad Menace of the Macabre Mole Man” from Fantastic Four #31 (Oct. 1964) 1-page pin-ups: Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, the Thing, the Human Torch, Super-Skrull, the Molecule Man, and Hate Monger from Fantastic Four Annual #2 (1962)

Spider-Man Collector’s Album (#72-112)

Lancer Books (Apr. 1966) Reprints: “Duel with Daredevil” from Amazing Spider-Man #16 (Sept. 1964) “Who is This Amazing Teen-Ager? Here’s… the Origin of Spider-Man” story/panel montage from Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962) and early issues of Amazing Spider-Man “The Menace of Mysterio!” from Amazing SpiderMan #13 (June 1964) 1-page pin-ups: “Guest Star Page” (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and the Hulk) and “Peter Parker as Spider-Man” from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (1964)

The Incredible Hulk Collector’s Album (#72-124)

Lancer Books (1966) Reprints: Opening page from Tales to Astonish #60 (Oct. 1964) “Banished to Outer Space” from Incredible Hulk #3 (Sept. 1962) “The Ringmaster” from Incredible Hulk #3 (Sept.

1962) “[The Origin of the Hulk]” from Incredible Hulk #3 (Sept. 1962) “The Incredible Hulk” from Tales to Astonish #60 (Oct. 1964) “Captured at Last” from Tales to Astonish #61 (Nov. 1964) “Enter… the Chameleon” from Tales to Astonish #62 (Dec. 1964) “A Titan Rides the Train” from Tales to Astonish #63 (Jan. 1965) 1-page Hulk pin-up from Tales to Astonish #62 (Dec. 1964)

The Mighty Thor Collector’s Album (#72-125)

Lancer Books (1966) Reprints: “[The Mighty Thor Battles… the Lava Man]” from Journey into Mystery #97 (Oct. 1963) “Giants Walk the Earth!” from Journey into Mystery #104 (May 1964) Tales of Asgard in “[Home of the Mighty Norse 54

Gods!]” from Journey into Mystery #97 (Oct. 1963) “The Stronger I Am, the Sooner I Die!” from Journey into Mystery #114 (Mar. 1965) “The Vengeance of the Thunder God!” from Journey into Mystery #115 (Apr. 1965) 2-page Map of Asgard from Journey into Mystery Annual #1 (1965) 1-page Thor pin-up from Journey into Mystery #110 (Nov. 1964)

The Fantastic Four Return Collector’s Album (#72-169)

Lancer Books (1967) Reprints: “The Final Victory of Doctor Doom” from Fantastic Four Annual #2 (1964) “Side-by-Side with Sub-Mariner” from Fantastic Four #33 (Dec. 1964) “Calamity on the Campus!” from Fantastic Four #35 (Feb. 1965)

Daredevil Collector’s Album (#72-170)

Lancer Books (1967) Reprints: “None Are So Blind..!” (guest-starring SpiderMan) from Daredevil #17 (June 1966) “The Origin of Daredevil!” from Daredevil #1 (Apr. 1964) “The Verdict is: Death!” from Daredevil #20 (Sept. 1966)

AVENGERS AND CAPTAIN AMERICA NOVELS BANTAM BOOKS On the heels of Lancer’s half-dozen reprint editions came two original novels from Bantam Books starring Marvel heroes: 1967’s The Avengers Battle the EarthWrecker by Otto Binder and 1968’s Captain America: The Great Gold Steal by Ted White. Both paperbacks featured painted covers, a rarity during this era, and were the first full-length novels to chronicle adventures of Marvel super-heroes. With the marquee value of a sci-fi and comic-book legend (Binder) and a cutting-edge sci-fi talent (White), plus Marvel’s surging popularity, these books seemed headed for the bestseller lists.

Yet neither performed up to expectations. They were largely invisible to the average Marvel Comics reader, and those kids who did discover them were turned off by their absence of the flashy graphics and dynamic sequential storytelling that had become a Marvel hallmark. Making matters worse: By ’67 and ’68, most of the grown-ups who had been swept

away by the comics-a-go-go movement had gone-gone elsewhere, diminishing the novels’ intended target audience. But these novels were ahead of their time, and the discerning super-hero reader should seek them out in the collectors’ market.

The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker

by Otto Binder

Bantam Books (1967) Synopsis: This original novel by sci-fi-master Otto Binder, whose career spanned decades and included his celebrated Adam Link series, features the menace of Karzz, the time-hopping “invincible Nemesis of all mankind” from the 70th Century, who arrives in the modern day (1967) to obliterate the Earth through a quartet of doom-machines. Captain America assembles his allies, the “daring, dauntless, deadly” Avengers, to challenge the menace of Karzz, but the team is nearly ripped asunder in the process.

Between the covers: This original novel’s cover is eye-catching, from its Doc Savage-parroting title font to its stunning painted portrait of five members of the Mighty Avengers: Captain America, Goliath, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch. The reader is thrown for a loop as the novel unfolds, however, since the Avengers starring in the story are Captain America, Goliath, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and the Wasp!

Another jarring discovery for the reader is that the “original” villain, Karzz, is an analog for Marvel’s own Kang the Conqueror, making one wonder why Kang himself wasn’t used. Still, this sci-fi fable masquerading as a super-hero story is a fun read for Binder fans, as it’s bristling with world-chewing weaponry and a scenery-chewing adversary. However, Stan 55

Captain America: The Great Gold Steal

by Ted White

Bantam Books (1968) Synopsis: This original novel pits Captain America against a crime network of bird-codenamed operatives (the Starling, the Raven, and the enigmatic Eagle, plus a female accomplice named Robin) that is orchestrating a $12 billion gold heist that threatens to topple the solvency of the entire United States.

Although Cap’s Avengers teammates play a minor role in the story (however, their mansion-headquarters is described in remarkable detail), Marvel Comics’ “glory-studded powerhouse” is forced to rely upon his “extraordinary physical and mental powers” to go it alone on this mission.

Between the covers: If Winston Lyon’s Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome is the adaptation of the Batman movie of Earth-Two, then Ted White’s Captain America: The Great Gold Steal stars the Fifties Red Scare-era version of the Star-Spangled Sentinel. This Cold War, 007-esque Captain America is a realistic interpretation of the character penned and published during a time when it seemed that no one other than White was taking super-heroes seriously.

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TM & © Marvel.

TM & © Marvel.

Lee fans might find it tougher to swallow, as Otto’s character banter lacks Stan’s dynamism.

Notes: Novel is 122 pages. Introduction and comicslike footnotes by Stan Lee. Cover painting by Robert McGinnis.

What stands out most in White’s story is his reimagining of Cap’s origin. The hero’s oft-retold first adventure selects spindly but sparky patriot Steve Rogers to “become one of America’s saviors” (as written in 1941’s Captain America Comics #1) after being injected with a serum which quickly transforms him from zero to hero. In The Great Gold Steal, White instead subjects Rogers to an arduous physical and mental re-creation, weeks of surgeries and drug injections that eventually make him superhuman and afford him uncanny control over his new abilities. As the author writes in Chapter Three (“Rebirth!”), “Steve Rogers knew that if the occasion ever arose, he had a great reserve of power he could call upon and will into use. He knew too that he could speed or slow his reflexes at will. There would be a price paid, of course, for each feat of strength and will. The energy needed would have to come from somewhere. He could deplete his body badly if he didn’t restore it with additional sleep and food—the sleep to rid his body of toxins, the food to refuel it.”

Also of note is a chapter featuring Captain America’s capture, where he is unmasked by his captors. I won’t spoil their reaction or the outcome but will note that this is one of the author’s favorite moments in his story.

Notes: Novel is 118 pages. Introduction and comicslike footnotes by Stan Lee. Cover painting by Mitchell Hooks.

AUTHOR TED WHITE DISCUSSES BANTAM’S MARVEL NOVELS From a 2012 Timely-Atlas Yahoo Group (Timely-Atlas-Comics@yahoogroups.com) post, reprinted with permission (with edits made by Mr. White in November 2015): “It starts with Otto Binder. Binder wanted to write for Marvel (in the mid-Sixties) and Stan [Lee] refused to let him, feeling (rightfully) that Otto did not ‘get’ and could not write in the current Marvel style. So Otto made an end-run, going over Stan’s head to [Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman and to Bantam Books.

He talked Bantam into doing Marvel-character novels. This was when Batman was coming on TV and there was a big (but shallow) public interest in comics.

“At this same time I had wanted to do a Batman novel, and my agent had talked Bantam into it—until they discovered Signet Books had first refusal on all books originating from DC Comics characters (Signet was then distributed by IND). I’d primed the pump, but Otto brought them Marvel, and contracted to write an Avengers book. (Goodman would not license the biggest characters, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.)

“When Stan found out, he was infuriated. He knew Binder was wrong for the project, and he told Bantam they should get me to do the second book, on Captain America. I’d met Stan a year or two earlier, when we were both guests on a late-night radio show, and we’d gotten along quite well. He asked me to write for Marvel, but I had no confidence in myself as a comics writer; I was a writer of prose fiction (and a jazz critic and a journalist).

“Stan knew I ‘got’ Marvel, so when he recommended me to Bantam, and Bantam already knew who I was (from the Batman proposal), all it took was a half-hour conversation with the Bantam editor (mostly, as it turned out, about Ross Macdonald, whom we both liked a lot and Bantam published) and a handshake and I had the contract. My agent even negotiated a clause giving me ‘royalties’ if/when the book passed certain sales milestones, even though I could not own the property; it was essentially Work For Hire.

“I originally wanted to redo the plot of my Batman book as the Captain America book, but when I discussed it with Stan, he talked me out of it. So I hatched a brand-new plot, involving the robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan, which at that time had more gold stocks than Fort Knox.

“My influences were Ian Fleming (James Bond) and Lester Dent (Doc Savage)—which is why I put

Monk from Doc Savage in the opening chapters of the book (and ended up offending some Doc Savage fans, *sigh*). I felt it should be a fast-moving pulpadventure story. I had a lot of fun writing it.

“One Sunday I drove to lower Manhattan and walked the area around the Federal Reserve Bank to get the feel of it. When I got home I wrote the first two chapters immediately (finished copy). I finished the book in less than two weeks, and it virtually wrote itself. (I loved the unmasking scene; I’d wanted to see a scene like that for years.)

“I turned in copies of the manuscript to both Bantam and Stan. Stan couldn’t bring himself to read it and gave it to Roy Thomas to vet. (I don’t think Stan ever read it.) Roy was a friend of mine and he liked it and even incorporated elements of it (the description of the Avengers HQ) into that year’s Avengers Annual.

“I wrote it in the Fall of 1966 for publication in early 1967. January 1967, Bantam brought out Binder’s Avengers book. It was awful. It opened with a chapter which described the Avengers’ costumes in tedious detail, without the glimmerings of a story.

There was no ‘hook’ to pull the readers in. There was instead an opening guaranteed to repel anyone who read it. The book stiffed, sales-wise.

“So Bantam sat on my book for a year, publishing it in the late spring of 1968. By then the boomlet of interest in such books had peaked and declined. It never sold more than its first printing (maybe 95,000 copies), although I think it did sell out that printing eventually. I never received any additional royalties.

“I think Marvel owns the book and it could be republished any time they wished to.”

Ted White.

Photo by Bill Burns.

ARCHIE COMICS (RADIO COMICS, INC.) Archie Comics was quick to capitalize on virtually any Sixties super-hero trend, including paperbacks, producing in April 1966 High Camp Super Heroes (alternately High Camp Super-Heroes and High Camp Superheroes), gathering in black-and-white a handful of its most recent Steel Sterling, Shield, and Fly Man stories. Its cover, using Paul Reinman art, featured cover copy which winked at their two biggest competitors: “Dig their Crazy costumes—Marvel at their stupor deeds!” The wacky wordsmith behind the cover puns—as well as the book’s introduction and the interior tales’ scripts—was Superman cocreator Jerry Siegel, a DC Comics expatriate: “Could a High Camper, or even a Low Camper, ask for 57

more?” he quipped inside. Archie’s single entry in the Sixties super-hero paperback sweepstakes was intended to be the first in a series, as hinted by its back-cover copy: “Sensational non-news! More HIGH CAMP SUPERHERO masterpieces will be swarming at you soon, soon, soon…” The fad fizzled before any further editions were published.

High Camp Super Heroes (#B50-695)

Belmont Books (Apr. 1966) Reprints: Steel Sterling in “The Monster-Maker”: First publication, although the story was originally intended for comic-book publication. It was later serialized into comic books in Fly Man #39 (Sept.

1966) and The Mighty Crusaders #7 (Oct. 1966).

The Shield in “The Gladiator from Tomorrow” from Fly Man #37 (May 1966) Fly Man in “Fly Man’s Strangest Dilemma” from Fly Man #36 (Mar. 1966) The Shield in “Suffer, Shield, Suffer” from Fly Man #36 (Mar. 1966)

TOWER PUBLICATIONS Members of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, the superspies brainstormed by Wally Wood for Tower Comics, became the final contenders in the Camp Era’s phase of super-hero paperbacks in a quartet of titles released in 1967. Artists featured in these volumes include Dan Adkins, Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky, George Tuska, and, of course, Wood himself, who also provided the covers. Larry Ivie edited the books.

Dynamo, Man of High Camp (#42-660)

Tower Publications, Inc. (1967) Reprints: T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents in “First Encounter” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965) Dynamo in “Menace of the Iron Fog” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965 NoMan in “NoMa n Battles the Spawn of the Devil” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965) Menthor in “The Enemy Within” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965) Dynamo in “At the Mercy of the Iron Maiden” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965)

NoMan, the Invisible T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent (#42-672) Tower Publications, Inc. (1967) Reprints: “In the Warlord’s Power” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2 (Jan. 1966) “NoMan Faces the Threat of the Amazing Vibraman” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #3 (Mar. 1966) “The Synthetic Stand-Ins” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #4 (Apr. 1966) “NoMan in Action” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #4 (Apr. 1966) “In the Caverns of Demo” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #5 (June 1966) 1-page NoMan character profile from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #3 (Mar. 1966)

Menthor (#42-674)

Tower Publications, Inc. (1967) Reprints: “[Turnabout]” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. 58

Agents #2 (Jan. 1966) “Dynamo vs. Menthor” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #3 (Mar. 1966) “The Great Hypno” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #4 (Apr. 1966) “Menthor vs. the Entrancer” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #5 (June 1966)

The Terrific Trio (NoMan, Dynamo, and Menthor) (#42-660) Tower Publications, Inc. (1967)

Reprints: Dynamo in “Dynamo Battles the Subterraneans” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #3 (Mar. 1966) Dynamo in “Dynamo Battles Dynavac” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2 (Jan. 1966) Menthor in “Carnival of Death” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #6 (July 1966) NoMan in “To Fight Alone” from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #6 (July 1966) T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Profile Page (back cover)

CAMP AGE BIG LITTLE BOOKS® Targeted toward readers younger than the paperback market’s demographic, Big Little Books® (BLBs), Whitman Publishing Company’s plump, 256-page, 3⅞ inch by 5⅞ inch illustrated novellas, topped off the Sixties with several releases based upon properties of interest to Camp-crazed kids. The BLBs’ format consisted a page of text alternating with a full-page illustration, usually in color. Each of the books below were originally published in hardcover, but some were later available in softcover in subsequent printings. While the authors always received a byline, the artists went uncredited. However, the interior artists of a few of the editions have since been identified and are noted below.

Tarzan in “The Mark of the Red Hyena” by George S. Elrick (1968) Interior art by Jerry Pellini.

Aquaman in “Scourge of the Sea” by Paul S. Newman (1968) Batman in “The Cheetah Caper” by George S. Elrick (1969) Dick Tracy Encounters Facey by Paul S. Newman (1967) The Fantastic Four in “House of Horrors”

by William Johnston (1968) Interior art by Herb Trimpe and John Verpoorten.

Frankenstein, Jr. in “The Menace of the Heartless Monster” by Carl Fallberg (1968) Journey to the Center of the Earth in “The Fiery Foe” by Paul S. Newman (1968) The Lone Ranger Outwits Crazy Cougar by George S. Elrick (1967) Major Matt Mason by George S. Elrick (1968) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in “The Calcutta Affair” by George S. Elrick (1967) Shazzan in “The Glass Princess” by Don Christensen (1968) Space Ghost in “The Sorceress of Cyba-3”

by Don Christensen (1968) Interior art by Dan Spiegle.

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BLACKHAWK

The “Junk-Heap Heroes” Era

The JLA and LBJ are ready to put the Blackhawks out to pasture. From Blackhawk #228.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Oh, the humanity! Blackhawk, the long-running series that was one of the Golden Age’s bestsellers, sprung a slow leak in the Silver Age that finally sputtered into an ignominious Camp Age detour.

The Blackhawks, the leather-clad, international flying squadron of World War II freedom fighters under the leadership of the chisel-featured he-man known as Blackhawk, first took to the air in Quality Comics’ Military Comics #1 (Aug. 1941). Soon thereafter, America’s involvement in the war helped soar the feature and its solo spin-off title Blackhawk (which launched with issue #9, continuing the numbering of Uncle Sam Quarterly) to the top of the sales charts. During its heyday, Blackhawk commanded some of the best talent of the era, from the team who created the series—Chuck Cuidera, Bob Powell, and Will Eisner—to a host of others including the remarkable Reed Crandall, William Woolfolk, Manly Wade Wellman, Bill Ward, Paul Gustavson, and the artist who would draw for series for many years, Dick Dillin. Known for their rallying cry of “Hawk-a-a-a!” and for their aerial-battle crooning, the Blackhawks were popular enough to become multimedia stars, first in a short-lived 1950 radio series with Michael Fitzmaurice as Blackhawk, followed by a 1952 fifteenchapter movie serial starring the dashing Kirk Alyn, previously known to comics fans as the Man of Steel in two Superman serials.

Despite those successes, Blackhawk seemed out of its element in the postwar world. The team tangled with Communists, mummies, and enemies with wild weapons (such as sky sleds, a flying cannon, and flying tanks). Still, the series plodded on, published monthly, shifting from Quality Comics to DC Comics when the latter licensed (and later purchased) the title beginning with issue #108 (Jan. 1957). Then Blackhawk really started to get weird.

Under editor Jack Schiff, the Blackhawks were sort of like the Challengers of the Unknown, fighting monsters, genies, giants, and mutant insects—stuff right out of sci-fi movies of the day. The Blackhawks also encountered no end of costumed super-villains during a time when such menaces weren’t in vogue, from returning enemy Killer Shark to oddballs like Mr. Beam, the Eel, King Condor, the Chameleon, Molecule Man, Split-Man, and Mr. Quick-Change.

(Schiff even trotted out prototypes for future Batman villains: Blackhawk #117 [Oct. 1957] featured a Mr. Freeze, over a year before the Bat-rogue who would eventually take that name—Mr. Zero—first appeared in Batman #121. Two years later, Blackhawk #141 [Oct. 1959] introduced a Cat-Man, a villain not unlike the one who would first plague Batman and Robin in late 1962’s Detective Comics #311.) Editors changed, writers changed, and costumes changed, with the team getting red-and-green togs beginning in Blackhawk #197 (June 1964). By the time the flying aces were ready for the junk heap, George Kashdan was Blackhawk’s editor, with France Herron scripting for the durable Dillin/Cuidera team. They were desperately trying to help this book find its voice, with Kashdan himself scripting a back-up about Blackhawk’s WWII glory days, but nothing seemed to click.

Enter Bob Haney, the writer who feared no challenge. And under editor Kashdan, Haney ushered in “The New Blackhawk Era!” commencing with Blackhawk #228 (Jan. 1967), abetted by the art team that had been plugging away for what seemed like forever, Dillin and Cuidera.

Its cover is legend among Justice League collectors, as it features the JLA’s Superman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern, drawn for the first time

by Dick Dillin, the illustrator who would soon replace Justice League of America’s Mike Sekowsky and become that book’s artist in residence for over a decade.

On Blackhawk #228’s splash page, Haney jumpstarts this new era by whisking readers to the White House, where the JLA’s Big Four confer with the President of the United States (only seen over the shoulder but clearly Lyndon B. Johnson). Haney’s caption warns us of a “grim, momentous meeting,” where the Caped Crusader spells it out to the Chief Executive: “…It’s a fact, sir—the Blackhawks are washed-up has-beens, out of date antiques, a danger to national security! To put it bluntly… they just don’t swing!”

Don’t mince words, Batman—tell us what you really think.

Even for readers conditioned to love Haney’s Batman (I’m one of them)—the cocksure Caped Crusader who was eager to team up with any superhero with a pulse in The Brave and Bold, the copwith-a-cowl whose mercurial temper and unpredictable mood swings prompted such unconventional behavior that fans eventually assigned his antics to the made-up world of Earth-B—this assessment of the Blackhawks was appallingly harsh. Batman might have soft-pedaled the matter by informing the president, “I fear that the Blackhawks’ war-hewed methods may no longer be adequate when facing today’s threats,” or, “Perhaps the Blackhawks’ advancing age might suggest reassignment to… less dangerous fields.” No, the Bat-buddy of B&B was ready to trashpile these “Junk-Heap Heroes.” (And re the “they just don’t swing” remark: It’s unlikely Haney was intimating that the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes had more than monitor duty going on in their Secret Sanctuary.

It’s just another case of Haney trying to be hip, with laughable results.)

Still, Haney was there to shake things up, not mollycoddle these Golden Age old-timers, and he wasted no time doing so. By the bottom of the splash page the action had revved into high gear, with LBJ ordering a test of the Blackhawk team, giving them “exactly ten minutes to show Uncle Sam you’re not washed-up has-beens!” Calling the shots is Mr. Delta, the Man from G.E.O.R.G.E. (the Group for Extermination of Organizations of Revenge, Greed, and Evil), a government agent wearing a snow-white facemask that obstructs his features (like the Question), who puts the Blackhawks through a series of tests to gauge their battle-worthiness. A trenchcoatwearing robot called the Master humiliates marksman Hendrickson (Hendy) by exposing his partial blindness, then renders muscleman Stanislaus senseless—and by that point we’re only on page 3. Not only do we watch the Blackhawks fail at their trials, but they are routinely ridiculed and dishonored. Any

kid lured to Blackhawk #228 by the JLA’s gueststatus had to finish this comic with the impression, “What a bunch of losers.”

“The New Blackhawk Era!” continues the next month with Blackhawk himself pleading to the reader on the cover, “DON’T QUIT ON US! Everyone says the Blackhawks are washed up… but you be the judge!” The Fastest Man Alive had similarly appealed to his readers a few months earlier on the cover of The Flash #163 (Aug. 1966), imploring, “STOP! Don’t pass up this issue! My life depends on it!” But Blackhawk #229’s cover doesn’t entice empathy or pique curiosity like the Flash cover did—instead, it seems like begging. Inside, Blackhawk, chagrined by his team’s failures but determined to whip them into shape, becomes an abusive taskmaster, routinely insulting his comrades (an example: He calls Hendy a “chucklehead” and demeans him for his ethnicity: “Not ‘der’ guns—‘the’ guns! Modern agents don’t give themselves away with accents!”). And in a sadistic twist that is every Catholic school kid’s nightmare, Blackhawk orders a giant, robotic ant named “Oscar” to crack the Blackhawks’ knuckles with a baton each time they goof. While Haney is often lauded for his unbridled imagination and tightly paced (albeit sometimes outlandish) plots, here, the characters’ unbecoming behavior and his story’s emotional excesses make this difficult to read, even for the Camp Age junkie like me who grew up on contrivances and corny dialogue.

But halfway through issue #229, instead of turning against their obnoxious leader and vengefully pistol-whipping him, the team gets “the old Blackhawk spirit” back—it seems that Blackhawk’s overthe-top tactics were designed to reignite that spark.

A-ha! Now we get it! If you can shrug off Haney’s lack of subtlety in pushing the team to this cue-theRocky-theme moment, then you may enjoy what comes next: They become a spy/super-hero hybrid, each Blackhawk adopting a costume and codename, as the cover of Blackhawk #230 reveals. Stanislaus becomes the Golden Centurion, sort of an Iron Man/

LEFT: Dick Dillin’s first time drawing the Justice League: Blackhawk #228.

CENTER: The Scarlet Speedster appeals to his readers on Flash #163’s cover.

RIGHT: Blackhawk begs for readers on Blackhawk #229.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Dig those crazy costumes!

TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: The “Long L” and the JLA give the Blackhawks the A-OK in the conclusion of Blackhawk #230. By Haney/Dillin/ Cuidera.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Captain America blend; Andre becomes M’sieu Machine, the team’s gadget guru; the acrobatic Olaf dons a Michelin Man suit and bounces around as the Leaper; Chuck presages DC’s Oracle (Barbara Gordon) as a surveillance/communications whiz, but as the Listener wears a ridiculous jumpsuit decorated with human ear decals; Hendy gets a high-tech arsenal as the Weapons Master; and Chop-Chop, the one-time comic-relief character whose Chinese heritage was caricatured in a fashion today’s audience would find grossly offensive, becomes the martial artist with two iron fists codenamed Dr. Hands.

Calling the shots is the Big Eye—Blackhawk himself— in a flying craft shaped like a double-headed black hawk. Wow! This is zany, even for Haney!

In Blackhawk #229 and 230, the new team topples a covert espionage group led by “the Emperor” and regains the confidence of President Johnson (now codenamed “The Long L”) and the Justice League. The new Blackhawk era is here!

But not for long.

The book continued to teeter. While he’s to be commended for trying something different with the Blackhawks, Haney’s take borrowed too liberally from both the worlds of secret agents and super-heroes, never deciding exactly which genre it wanted to be.

This radical departure from the norm might have had a better chance with a new art team, but Dillin and Cuidera’s continued presence made Blackhawk look familiar, yet seem distorted because of these peculiar happenings. And on cover after cover, the Blackhawks were always “getting clobbered,” be it by robots, villains like the Terrible Twins, or deflating story titles like “Too Late, the Leaper!” and “A Coffin for a Blackhawk” that reinforced Batman’s original belief that they were “washed-up has-beens”—even with the new super-suits.

Blackhawk was demoted to bimonthly with issue #237, an obvious sign of its poor health. The boys were back in their original costumes for an issue (#239) that even featured a giant Swastika on the cover, harkening back to their glory days of Axis-busting, but in #240 it was business as usual, with the new Blackhawks. Editor Kashdan was replaced on staff by former Charlton editor Dick Giordano (who was unaware at the time that his hiring at DC was displacing the longtime Kashdan, who was put out to pasture). Dick tried new logos and eye-catching cover layouts, and assigned fellow Charlton transplant Pat Boyette to illustrate the series with #242, where the book dumped the G.E.O.R.G.E. spy subplot and put the team back in their original leather costumes. Alas, it was too late, and Blackhawk was cancelled with issue #243.

The “Junk-Heap Heroes”/New Blackhawk Era has earned a spot in comic-book infamy for its audacity and campiness. It has also stood as a lesson for creators who revived Blackhawk in the future to never again stray so far from the series’ roots.

AQUAMANIA

“The Death of Aquaman” (he got better) in Aquaman #30 was one of the Camp Age’s shockers!

The King of the Sea and TV’s Big Splash

TM & © DC Comics.

Really, is there a super-hero more lampooned—more harpooned—than the Rodney Dangerfield of the Justice League, Aquaman? No respect, no respect at all.

Go ahead. Laugh at him. Get it out of your system.

(You’d better, or you’ll have to answer to Jason Momoa.)

We weren’t laughing at Aquaman during the Sixties. Back then, DC Comics’ Atlantean superhero was the “KING of the SEA and TV” (his series’ tagline), transcending his bimonthly comic book to star in an animated cartoon show and a wave of merchandise from a Big Little Book to a jigsaw puzzle.

The unfortunate byproduct of this Aquamania was that the Sea King’s increased profile during the Sixties helped him dive into a role on Super Friends in the Seventies. Sure, that sounds like a good gig, but on Super Friends, Aquaman’s water-based powers seemed limiting when juxtaposed against the high-flying Superman and Wonder Woman, or the Batmobile-ing Dynamic Duo… which thereby opened the floodgate of Aquaman jokes that haven’t seemed to ebb, lo, these decades later.

But let’s forget all of that and dip back into the Camp Age to relive Aquaman’s crowning moment.

A decade before Jaws soiled our swimtrunks and scared us out of the ocean, kids thought that the Seven Seas were cool! We were weaned on reruns of Sea Hunt, a syndicated “action” show whose pacing rivaled a slow faucet drip (but we still had attention spans back then, so we didn’t know any better). We flipped over Flipper, Frankie and Annette movies, Surfside Six, Sea Devils, Sub-Mariner, G.I. Joe’s frogman uniform, the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Ventures, View-Master’s Wonders of the Deep, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. We were

so wet behind the ears that we didn’t even realize that Jacques Cousteau was tricking us into watching documentaries.

Swimming alongside these undersea properties was DC Comics’ own Aquaman, one of the publisher’s more steadfast super-heroes despite his secondstring reputation. He premiered in 1941 and managed to stay in print—as a back-up feature in anthology books like Adventure Comics—long after most other long-underwear types fell out of fashion. By the early Sixties, Aquaman had found his way into the original line-up of the Justice League of America as well as his own bimonthly series, a reliable B-list book from the editorial desk of Jack Schiff and soon, George Kashdan. Originally, the Aquaman title suffered from DC’s Sea Devils and TV tie-ins Sea Hunt and Flipper were among the waterlogged comics of the Sixties.

Sea Devils TM & © DC Comics. Sea Hunt © United Artists Television. Flipper © Ivan Tors Films, Inc. and MGM.

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The evil organization O.G.R.E. and super-villains Ocean Master and Black Manta were among Aquaman’s Camp Age threats.

TM & © DC Comics.

Aquaman artist Nick Cardy.

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a blandness that permeated much of DC’s earlySixties fare. Sometimes Aquaman felt like an undersea version of Superman (Aqualad = Jimmy Olsen, Mera = Lois Lane, Aquababy = Superbaby, Quisp the water-sprite = Mr. Mxyzptlk), and sometimes Aquaman stuck a toe in the monster-of-the-month waters that fed DC’s lower-tier books like Sea Devils and Challengers of the Unknown (flame-spewing Fire-trolls, a giant Aqualad, sorcerers and sea gods as villains, a giant Aquaman). Luckily, one of DC’s most gifted artists, Nick Cardy, made Aquaman an attractive book, especially through his rendition of the voluptuous, hot-headed Mera (and let’s not forget that Aquaman and Mera were among the first married couples of the Silver Age). Aquaman looked great, but really wasn’t very exciting.

Once writer Bob Haney replaced scribe Jack Miller on the title in the mid-Sixties, he brought a new energy with him. Granted, Haney was borrowing ideas from other sources, but he made them fresh in Aquaman, as did a revitalized Nick Cardy, their efforts often trumpeted by dynamic cover blurbs from DC’s calligraphy king, letterer Ira Schnapp. Aquababy turns into a teen (issue #25)! The ongoing threat of the super-secret organization O.G.R.E. is introduced (#26)! Aquaman encounters a villain he refuses to fight, the Ocean Master (#29)! Readers are shocked by the death of Aquaman (#30)! We meet “Aqualad’s Deep-Six Chick,” Aquagirl (#33)! Black Manta is introduced—and Aquaman is caught between this new villain and Ocean Master (#35)! Cardy’s Aquaman covers during this time were spellbinding and difficult

for a buyer to resist. The artist’s favorite? As Cardy himself told me in 2006, that would be Aquaman #37 (Jan.–Feb. 1968), “When the Sea Dies!”

The Haney/Cardy Aquaman of the mid-Sixties was one of DC’s most exciting titles, pulsating with the type of drama, unpredictability, and soap opera you’d find in a Marvel comic. And so, when superheroes old and new were making a big splash, it made perfect sense to turn Aquaman into a TV cartoon.

As a high concept, the animated Aquaman was Batman-meets-Flipper-meets-Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea-meets-Father Knows Best. Aquaman had it all: a colorful waterworld environment, playful pets (Tusky the Walrus and seahorses Imp and Storm), freaky undersea menaces (villains, monsters, and aliens, both from the comics and created for TV), a kid sidekick, a cute wife, and imaginative superpowers and sound effects that translated well to cartoons. At least that’s what the folks at DC Comics believed.

Filmation Associates’ co-founder Lou Scheimer needed persuading, though. Animation house Filmation had scored a hit in 1966–67 with its half-hour New Adventures of Superman program for CBS, so for the 1967–68 season it was working with DC in the development of the publisher’s heroic pantheon for Saturday morning cartoons. “DC actually asked us to do Aquaman, but I wasn’t convinced the network would buy it without seeing a pilot,” the producer revealed in his 2012 TwoMorrows Publishing autobiography, Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation

by Lou Scheimer with Andy Mangels. “He wasn’t as

famous as Superman or Batman.” So Filmation produced an Aquaman cartoon pilot that convinced CBS to pick up the project. “Nothing like it had been on the air,” Scheimer wrote. “The undersea stuff looked interesting, and it was visually fascinating.”

And thus, in the Fall of 1967, Filmation rolled out the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, sixty minutes of DC super-heroes (see Chapter 4). The following season, once ABC’s live-action Batman had ended, Filmation rebranded its hour-long block as The Batman/Superman Hour and moved Aquaman to his own half-hour show on Sundays. A total of 36 Aquaman episodes were produced.

Filmation’s Aquaman veered slightly from DC Comics’ Aquaman—the hero’s costume was modified for animation and he received the visually fun super-power of throwing hard-water balls—but more or less, the TV Aquaman was very much like the comic-book Aquaman. You can thank DC Comics for that: The publisher policed Filmation’s Aquaman, with Superman editor Mort Weisinger (who wrote the very first Aquaman story way back in the day, by the way) story-editing the show. Scripts were produced by comic-book people intimate with the character, most notably George Kashdan and Bob Haney.

As Aquaman artist Nick Cardy told me in 2006, he was also involved with the development of the cartoon’s visuals— which explains the animation’s similarity

to Cardy’s style. “Well, when Aquaman first started, DC’s publisher was Jack Liebowitz,” Cardy remembered. “And he said, ‘We’re going to have animation that’s done in Australia.’ They talked about sending me there [to work with the animators], but someone decided, ‘No, we can do it here.’ So there went my trip to Australia! [laughs]” Aquaman also looked as if took place underwater, an effect the comic books could never quite produce. Scheimer revealed in his autobiography that this appearance was achieved by shooting through a baby oil-coated piece of acetate, a gimmick used judiciously but commendably.

Did you know that the animated Aquaman was a millionaire? No, not in the Bruce Wayne fashion, but behind the microphone. Former radio voice talent Marvin Miller played the Sea King, but was earlier known from his star turn in the TV show The Millionaire (1955–60). Miller spent a lot of time cavorting with Camp Age super-heroes: He played on-screen broadcasters on episodes of Batman and The Green Hornet and voiced the Super-Skrull on Fantastic Four.

Filmation selected him to play Aquaman after an exhaustive series of auditions that included would-be Sea Kings Rich Little (one of TV’s most popular impressionists) and radio Captain Midnight Ed Prentiss among the many voice talents vying for the part.

Sidekick Aqualad was portrayed by Jerry Dexter, who, like Marvin Miller, enjoyed a career behind the mike and in front of the camera; he was also the voice of young Chuck on the Hanna-Barbera toon Shazzan and the on-air talent of Good Day L.A. British actress Dianna Maddox played Mera. But Aquaman’s most recognizable voice was that of its narrator, Ted Knight, whom you’ll read much more about in Chapter 4.

Released in tandem with the show was a blitz of Aquaman merchandise. Some of this followed DC’s (or Filmation’s) models for the character, while a few

LEFT: Nick Cardy original artwork to the artist’s favorite Aquaman cover, #37, “When the Sea Dies!”

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Marvin Miller, the voice of Aquaman.

Wikimedia Commons.

The Sea King, as seen on Saturday mornings.

Cel from Filmation’s Aquaman cartoon.

Aquaman TM & © DC Comics.

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Some of the Aquaman merchandise released during the Sea King’s wave of popularity.

Aquaman, Aqualad, Mera, and related characters TM & © DC Comics.

One of Aquaman’s covers plugging his TV show.

TM & © DC Comics.

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items prove that DC’s licensing staff had little quality control standards (case in point: 1967 Ben Cooper Aquaman Halloween costume, which featured a picture of Aquaman and his logo on the body and a facemask of Aquaman wearing an orange, finned domino mask!). Ideal Toys produced the first Aquaman action figures during this time: An Aquaman suit for Captain Action (with accessories including a trident and knife), an Aqualad costume for Action Boy, and a Mera doll for its Super Queens companion line. Most of these collectibles command astronomically high prices in today’s collector’s market (especially Mera), as do high-grade copies of DC’s Silver Age Aquaman.

So, the next time you hear someone making fun of the Sea King, swat him with a Haney/Cardy Aquaman comic (a slabbed one, for an extra sting) or wave a toy price guide in front of him and ask, “Who’s laughing now?”

B’WANA BEAST

The Jungle Master DC Comics’ resident mad-scientist writer, Bob Haney, combined Tarzan and Batman (and the Phantom, too) into “The Jungle Master” known as B’Wana Beast, an offbeat super-hero that began his twoissue Camp Age run in Showcase #66 (Jan.–Feb. 1967), hitting the stands on November 22, 1966, just under three months after the premiere of NBC-TV’s new Tarzan series starring Ron Ely. Joining Haney were artist Mike Sekowsky, inker George Roussos, and editor George Kashdan.

Under B’Wana Beast’s pelt-masked helmet was Mike Maxwell, a millionaire’s aimless heir who follows his college buddy, Rupert Kenboya, the son of an African tribal leader, back to “Ken’s” homeland of Zambesi to become a ranger on its game preserve.

Mike and Rupert’s plane crashes atop Mount Kilimanjaro, where an injured Maxwell is nursed with mineral water from its inner caves. Luckily for originseeking readers, that water possesses mystical properties, and Mike is transformed into a human powerhouse! This occurrence seems to be preordained, with a gorilla named Djuba being the “wizard Shazam” that guides Maxwell on his heroic journey, crowning him with a colorful headdress which enables Mike—now B’Wana Beast—to telepathically communicate with animals (imagine the fun Haney would have had scripting an Aquaman/B’Wana Beast Brave and Bold team-up). B’Wana Beast’s weirdest super-power is his helmet’s ability to merge two jungle beasts into one, as he does in the premiere installment by blending a charging rhino and buffalo into—oh, I don’t know, let’s call it a rhinalo—a leviathan massive enough to trample a dinosaur-shaped tank operated by the jungle super-villain “He Who Never Dies.” And thus B’Wana Beast, whose “very name invokes terror,” protects the jungle under the

veil of a Phantomesque mystique which Ken, the police commissioner of his people’s burgeoning government, loyally guards.

The Batman influence is obvious on Showcase #66’s cover (where Sekowsky is inked by Batman artist Joe Giella), as the hero punches notyet-ally Djuba with an uppercut—all that’s missing is a giant POW! sound effect. Its jungle setting aside, B’Wana Beast borrows from Tarzan’s playbook with his yell “Kiiiiiuuuuuuueeeeee!” which, when you read it aloud, sounds like a hog call.

Haney was famous for his well-intentioned attempts at relevance that were later regarded as comical due to their slightly dated vocabularies. With B’Wana Beast, Haney’s timing was way off: His portrayal of African tribal customs marched out of step with the then-emerging Civil Rights Movement, most infamously in one panel where Rupert Kenboya disparages his father by joking to Maxwell, “Sure, pal—he’s loaded! He’s got more leopard claws than anybody in Africa…!” The hero’s name (“bwana” means “boss” or “master”) also harkened back to an era of black-and-white jungle movies where the white man lorded over people of color. Haney didn’t intend his feature to be offensive (after all, this was the era of Wonder Woman’s Asian arch-foe, Egg Fu), but later regarded B’Wana Beast as one of his failures. There’s a legend in comicdom that a planned third Showcase tryout issue for B’Wana Beast was scrapped after artist Mike Sekowsky walked away, incensed by the script’s racism.

In our contemporary society, political correctness would never have allowed the creation of a character such as B’Wana Beast, so you might assume that the Jungle Master has been permanently banished to limbo. Think again. While B’Wana Beast did take a long vacation after his second Showcase issue, the Jungle Master would eventually return in a handful of appearances, most notably in writer Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and as a Batman ally on the Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. There have been B’Wana Beast action figures, and every once in a while you might spot a body-sculpted cosplayer parading through comic-cons dressed as the hero. Bob Haney would be surprised.

Batman of the Jungle— B’Wana Beast’s POW!erful premiere in Showcase #66.

TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: When Rhino met Buffalo— the Jungle Master’s composite creature. From Showcase #66.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Chapter 2

CAMPTOWN REVIVALS SPLIT!

eek!

Detail from M.F. Enterprises’ Captain Marvel #1. (C) the respective copyright holder.

UNSUCCESSFUL COMEBACKS SUPER COMICS

Israel Waldman’s Unauthorized Comic Book “Revivals” The Fifties were a bad time for the comic-book business. The boom of World War II and the Forties had faded, the new innovation of television was siphoning readers, and the entire industry found itself under siege “thanks” to a fussy psychologist who blamed the comic books for juvenile delinquency. Golden Age startups like Avon, Fiction House, and Fox closed shop, leaving behind a ton of inventory.

Then came the Silver Age, where reboots (the Flash, Green Lantern) and upstarts (Martian Manhunter) trickled into print in the late Fifties. Soon, the business was booming again, opening a door for one of comics’ most inglorious opportunists.

Publisher Israel Waldman gobbled up artwork from those shuttered comics houses and started publishing random issues of series reprinting material from the Golden Age of Comics. Beginning in 1958, his immodestly named I.W. Enterprises cranked out a barrage of irregularly released comic books in every imaginable genre, dusting off former stars like Sheena (Queen of the Jungle), Ka’a’nga (Jungle King),

Torchy, and Phantom Lady, and also-rans like SuperBrat, Apache, Kat Karson, and Man O’Mars. I.W. avoided cover dates, a gimmick to keep its books on display longer. Most kids who stumbled across these titles had no clue that they were reading reprints.

I.W.’s production costs were minimal, with an occasional new cover being the only fresh material commissioned. And thus, Israel Waldman became the Big Lots of comic books, offering remaindered product to consumers.

As the Camp Age emerged in the mid-Sixties, Waldman renamed his funnybook line Super Comics, ramping up his super-hero output by reissuing more golden oldies. Here’s where a trio of once-famous super-heroes got another moment in the spotlight once Waldman repackaged issues of their magazines from Quality Comics: Plastic Man, the Spirit, and Doll Man. Super Comics’ Plastic Man—tagged “The Flexible Man with the Power of Steel!”—ran for three issues, starting with #11 (1963), under an uncredited cover possibly drawn by Jack Abel and Sol Brodsky.

It reprinted the contents of Quality’s Plastic Man #13 (Mar. 1949): two Plas stories by the character’s creator, Jack Cole (“Gazelle Van Gander” and “Say It Ain’t So, Plas!”), plus a Woozy Winks tale. Super’s next Plas issue was numbered #16 (1964), with a cover by Gray Morrow. It reprinted Quality’s Plastic Man #21 (Jan. 1950), another issue with two Plas tales (“Kra Vashnu” and “Where is Amorpho?”) and a Woozy short. Lastly, Super published Plastic Man #18 Three of Super Comics’ unauthorized reprints: Plastic Man #11, Spirit #11, and Doll Man #17.

Plastic Man and Doll Man TM & © DC Comics. The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios Inc.

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issue run from Super Comics, each with Andru/ Esposito covers: Doll Man #11 (1963), reprinting Quality’s Doll Man #20 (Jan. 1949); Doll Man #15 (1964), reprinting Doll Man #23 (July 1949); and Doll Man #17 (1964), reprinting Doll Man #29 (May 1950).

Two Doll Man tales and a Torchy back-up comprised each issue. Super’s first issue (#11) presented the one-time Quality Comics Mighty Mite as “The World’s Most Dynamic Crime Fighter.” With its second issue, #15, Super’s presentation took a campy turn with its Doll Man vs. the Minstrel cover image and its tagline, “The Biggest Little Pack of Dynamite.”

Three headliners from the Golden Age, liberated from limbo and debuted to a ballooning readership that was rabid for caped crusaders. With Waldman’s virtually non-existent overhead, this sounded like a recipe for huge profits and new stardom.

Yet by 1964—just as the Camp Age was gearing up for its multimedia explosion—Waldman’s Super Comics followed the footsteps of its subject matter’s originators and went out of business. Good thing, too, as Waldman never obtained the rights to legally publish these characters. Plastic Man and the Spirit would soon get authorized revivals, and Doll Man would, some ten years later, pop up again at DC Comics.

It’s easy to criticize Waldman for making a fast buck off of something that wasn’t legally his. Little did he know at the time, however, that he was creating a blueprint for the collected edition.

Doll Man redone: Compare the Andru/ Esposito Super Comics Doll Man covers to the original Quality covers.

Doll Man TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: Gray Morrow’s cover to Plastic Man #16.

Plastic Man TM & © DC Comics.

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(1964), with a cover by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, the Wonder Woman team that Waldman tapped for many of his Super Comics covers during this time.

The cover also blurbed the comic’s inclusion of “The One and Only Spirit,” Will Eisner’s famous masked man who starred in a popular newspaper comicbook supplement (whose stories were recycled in Quality Comics titles). Plastic Man #18 reprinted an issue of Quality’s anthology Police Comics, #95 (Oct. 1949), featuring the stretchable star in “Wanted Dead, Not Alive” as well as that issue’s stories featuring the Spirit, Candy, and Manhunter.

Will Eisner’s legendary Spirit also headlined two issues of his own Super Comics title: Spirit #11 (1963), reprinting the contents of Quality’s The Spirit #19 (Jan. 1950), a mix of Spirit newspaper comics from the mid-Forties and Jonesy, Honey Bun, and Flatfoot Burns back-ups, and Spirit #12 (1964), reprinting the Spirit and Flatfoot Burns stories from Quality’s The Spirit #17 (Sept. 1949). Joe Simon produced both Super Spirit covers, which promoted the masked detective as the “Master of Mystery!”

And Doll Man, Quality’s pint-sized powerhouse, rode the coattails of DC’s revamp of the Atom and Marvel’s introduction of Ant-Man in his own three-

THE SHADOW

This moody Paul Reinman cover clouded readers’ minds into expecting this scene inside the comic.

The most ludicrous of the Silver Age Superman’s super-powers was super-ventriloquism. But during the Camp Age, the Metropolis Marvel wasn’t comics’ only Edgar Bergen impersonator. Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. the Shadow, was another super-ventriloquist!

If you’re scratching your head trying to recall the episode of The Ed Sullivan Show featuring the comedy stylings of Lamont Cranston and his dummy, Shrevy, don’t. No such thing. But during the summer of 1964, Archie Comics (Radio Comics, Inc.), home to America’s favorite teenager and its own mighty crusaders, boarded the super-hero revival bandwagon by licensing that famous mystery man from the pulps and old-time radio and turning him into a superhero… and a super-spy. Two—count ’em, two— secret identities in one!

Older readers still haunted by the Shadow’s terrifying laugh on radio must have had high hopes when spotting the Paul Reinman-drawn cover of Archie’s The Shadow #1 (cover-dated Aug. 1964). In the left foreground prowls the Shadow, his brow furrowed, his stony face and prodigious honker concealed by his enveloping cloak and his sweeping fedora. He lies in wait for the “cruel, ruthless” descendant of Genghis Khan, Shiwan Khan, his mortal foe (since 1939) who’s approaching with minions in tow. While yellow is the dominant color on the cover, its figures are moodily monochromatic, and a blurb beneath the logo stirs the memory and stills the heart: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men… only the Shadow knows!” At last—the Shadow had returned!

If DC Comics’ covers of the Sixties stretched the truth by sensationalizing scenes that barely existed inside the comics themselves, then Archie’s Shadow #1’s cover told such a flat-out lie that it would’ve spiked a polygraph off the charts. There was no transition from the classic, creepy Shadow shown on the cover to the modern, campy Shadow whose adven-

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

Archie Comics and the Dark Avenger

tures abruptly begin on page 1. It’s as if the cover was produced for a wholly different comic book.

That said, it’s really not a bad Sixties comic.

“The Shadow vs. the RXG Spymaster!” begins with a flashback to an earlier encounter between the Shadow (the new Archie version, not his classic version as seen on the cover) and his enemy, Shiwan Khan, in “a grim showdown on the gargoyle-lined battlements of the cathedral of Notre Dame!” The Shadow disorients his foes by throwing his voice to make it seem he’s hidden in the darkness, then gets the drop on the bad guys through physical combat and sharpshooting. This sounds similar to the Shadow we know, but his appearance, as seen from the splash page forward, is disconcerting to those who know the Dark Avenger’s conventional look. Archie Comics’ Shadow is, essentially, a blond-haired, handsome white guy in a black suit and black opera cape. That’s it. No fedora, no scarlet muffler, and no aquiline nose. Once Khan manages to escape, the Shadow “switches to Lamont Cranston, his secret identity” simply by removing his cape and putting on horn-rimmed eyeglasses. At least the other guy who uses super-ventriloquism changes clothes when donning spectacles as a disguise!

Archie Comics’ Cranston, a Manhattanite, is a “wealthy

LEFT: The Shadow’s elaborate disguise change to Lamont Cranston!

From The Shadow #1.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

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Not your father’s Shadow—the Dark Avenger as a caped crusader, on The Shadow #2.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

socialite” in the public eye but moonlights as an agent of the U.S. Secret Service (the C.I.A.). But even his trusted Gal Friday, Margo Lane, isn’t aware of Cranston’s other after-hours gig: as the Shadow!

(Cranston is also abetted by his Guy Friday, chauffeur Shrevy, in the Archie series.) Along the way in his struggle against Khan, in addition to ventriloquism the Shadow uses hypnosis against his adversaries in a process he calls “be-clouding.” (Appropriately, the page showing the Shadow mind-wiping Khan and his men is juxtaposed against a full-page ad for a book titled How to Hypnotize—for only $1.98!) The Shadow #1 also includes a one-page text origin and a five-page secondary adventure of the title star.

It’s standard Camp Age comics fare, scripted by Robert Bernstein, a longtime comics writer who, like his Cranston, moonlighted with two other “identities” (he was a classical music promoter and a playwright).

In the late Fifties and early Sixties at DC, Bernstein It’s a danger room! Our hero runs a survival course in The Shadow #5.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

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had proven he could infuse new energy into longrunning features: He stirred up Aquaman’s adventures by fleshing out the character’s origin and by introducing Aqualad, and he revamped DC’s jungle explorer Congo Bill into Congorilla. Just prior to The Shadow, Bernstein had written Adventures of the Jaguar and Adventures of the Fly, part of Archie Comics’ “Archie Adventure Series” imprint. On both series he was paired with the artist who also joined him on The Shadow: John Rosenberger, whose work at the time could also be found in romance comics. Rosenberger’s Shadow #1 art is utilitarian, with attractive, fashionable figures (his Lamont and Margo could have stepped out of an issue of Young Love), albeit slightly mismatched for a series with mystical underpinnings.

Now, that’s the good news. Archie’s The Shadow begins shifting gears, be-clouding readers’ minds with its indecisiveness. Paul Reinman’s cover for The Shadow #2 (Sept. 1964) introduces another new look for the Dark Avenger, outfitting him in a navy and green spandex suit, complete with a highcollared cape and a facemask that exposes his shock of blond hair, a makeover that evokes those Golden Age days when DC’s mystery man the Sandman became DC’s flashily festooned super-hero Sandman.

However, with issue #2’s cover, Archie’s Shadow once again pulls a bait-and-switch, as the interior contents are more of the same spy fare seen in issue #1. In #2, Bernstein and Rosenberger take the Shadow’s battle against Shiwan Khan to Red China and continue to use the hero’s same parlor tricks introduced the previous month.

The Shadow teased on issue #2’s cover is seen in issue #3 (Nov. 1964) in his full glory—with a haircolor change to black. Here, the character’s metamorphosis is complete—he is now a full-fledged costumed crimefighter! Another change is the artistic look of the book, as cover artist Paul Reinman also picks up the interiors. Marvelites knew Reinman as an inker for Jack Kirby on some landmark early issues of The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and The X-Men, but on The Shadow, while employing energetic Kirbylike layouts, his work seems rushed—not surprising since he was cranking out a lot of Archie’s midSixties super-hero material. The writing also changes with this issue, with Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel taking over from Robert Bernstein.

The poignancy that Siegel had added to early Silver Age Superman stories (I dare you not to well up after reading 1961’s “The Death of Superman” in Superman #149) is nowhere to be found with his Archie super-hero work of the mid-Sixties, all interchangeable pun-filled punch-’em-ups.

It’s with The Shadow #3 that what might have been called a grand endeavor—the reimagining of the Shadow as a super-spy—

CAPTAIN MARVEL

When Trouble Calls, This Super-Hero SPLIT!s

clumsily plods into dreadfully familiar terrain where the Dark Avenger settles into a bland series of Campheavy yarns. Shiwan Khan sticks around to make mischief throughout most of the run, along the way employing a bevy of bargain-basement bad guys such as the Nazi called Dr. Demon, a human bomb named Mr. T.N.T., the death-gripping Radiation Rogue, the axe-grinding Atilla the Hunter, and a juggernaut called Brute. The Shadow continues to grab from outside sources to latch onto popular trends: the C.I.A. is replaced by an organization named C.H.I.E.F. and the Shadow begins wielding an arsenal of super-weapons. With The Shadow #8 (Sept. 1965), Archie Comics allowed this ill-fated incarnation of the classic anti-hero to fade from view.

This revival of The Shadow certainly suffered from an identity crisis, thematically morphing from issue to issue in a slapdash shuffle to find a working formula. If the Bernstein/Rosenberger team had been allowed to continue their vision for the series, perhaps it might have fared better. Also working against this reimagining of the Shadow was the near-concurrent release of a new line of paperback novels from Belmont Books starring the more traditional interpretation of the character, launching with 1963’s The Return of The Shadow by Maxwell Grant. Belmont, a paperback publisher known for horror and sci-fi titles from 1961–71, was part of the same publishing conglomeration that also owned Archie’s properties, explaining how the Dark Avenger ended up in the House of Jughead in the first place. So the chilling Shadow of yesteryear had returned, making this campy imposter seem even more out of place.

Let’s say that you’re about to launch a singing career and you need a stage name.

And you choose “Elvis Presley.”

Of course, you wouldn’t dare do that. Some icons are sacred—and for those who don’t agree, there are lawyers prepared to convince you. Besides, no one would ever believe that you were that Elvis, even if you could belt out a hair-raising cover of “All Shook Up.” Many would argue that this thinking also applies to the Big Red Cheese, Fawcett Publications, Inc.’s original Captain Marvel, who, as the legend goes, is actually a boy named Billy Batson whose utterance of the magic word “Shazam!” transforms him into the World’s Mightiest Mortal. Captain Marvel was the King of Golden Age Comics (in sales figures, at least) who went dormant in the Fifties after years of weathering costly legal battles over his supposed similarities to Superman.

But for those of us who were children during the Camp Age, the name “Captain Marvel” carried little weight. We knew that he was the favorite super-hero

LEFT: How often do you see “Whamo!” and “The Shadow” in the same caption?

Original art by Paul Reinman for an Archie house ad for the series.

Courtesy of Heritage.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

Captain Marvel is broken up over his mission to save Billy Baxton. Cover to Captain Marvel #1 by Carl Burgos and Leon Francho. © the respective copyright holder.

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of that man-child Marine from Mayberry, Gomer Pyle, who was prone to pronouncing “Shazam!” when amazed. A few of us encountered the character in Jules Feiffer’s seminal history book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, first published in 1965, and a few more discovered the hero’s movie serial incarnation The original Captain Marvel’s movie serials returned in 1966’s On the Scene presents Super Heroes Warren magazine and in an art-house re-release (albeit with a mis-colored Cap on its movie poster).

Movie poster courtesy of Heritage.

Shazam!, Superman, Batman, and related characters TM & © DC Comics. Captain America © Marvel.

The Phantom and Flash Gordon © King Features.

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through its inclusion in Warren Publications’ On the Scene presents Super Heroes one-shot magazine in 1966 or through the serial’s 1966 re-release in bigcity art-house movie theaters.

Myron Fass hailed from a generation before mine, however, and for him, Captain Marvel still had great marquee value. Fass had built an empire of sleazy, cheesy pulp magazines, parroting hot commodities—MAD, Playboy, Famous Monsters of Filmland—with low-budget knock-offs—Lunatickle, Foto-Rama, Shock Tales. Prior to becoming a publisher in the mid-Fifties, he put pencil and pen to paper as an illustrator for lots of funnybook houses.

So when super-heroes were enjoying a new wave of success in the mid-Sixties, Fass launched his own comic-book company, M.F. Enterprises, Inc., built around its signature star: Captain Marvel.

M.F.’s Captain Marvel #1 (cover-dated April 1966) contains much of what an older reader might expect from a character with that eminent appellation: a young boy named Billy, a magic word, and a flying super-hero in brightly hued tights. Yet even a kid who only knew of Captain Marvel from Gomer Pyle’s fixation would have suspected that something was a bit… off with this comic book, beginning with its cover.

The cover shows Captain Marvel displaying what might very well be the most ludicrous and, quite frankly, disturbing super-power ever: the ability to segment his body into pieces. M.F.’s Captain Marvel could propel his head, torso, arms, legs, and hands— even his fingers—into different directions, orchestrating their actions. I suspect that sounded revolutionary when this super-hero was brainstormed—and yes, there are some fun panels where Captain Marvel’s fists and feet simultaneously pummel his foes—but the end result is quite morbid, almost like something out of a grisly EC horror comic. Witness the splash page of issue #1, where a welcoming Captain Marvel is cradling his own head. No, it’s not a bloody, severed noggin like the ones that drove Dr. Wertham on an anti-comics crusade a decade earlier, but it’s still unsettling enough to give an eight-year-old Bat-fan the willies.

The cover also features this blurb: “PLUS a bonus feature PLASTIC MAN,” superimposed over a yellow-colored panel showing a hard-to-identify stretchable figure using an elongated arm to apprehend a stunned victim. Plastic Man also wasn’t on the radar of most Camp Age kids (yet), but like Captain Marvel, he was a super-star from a previous generation. But this Plastic Man and this Captain Marvel were not the heroes that found success in the Forties and early Fifties. Fass was banking that the once-popular names of his characters would equal a modern-day hit.

Perhaps his senses had been dulled by exposure to pulp paper mold spores and hammering printing presses, but Fass thought no one would object to his super-powered pretenders to the throne. Sure, you

but was instead Carl Burgos, the writer-artist who in 1939 created one of Marvel Comics’ first superheroes, the original Human Torch (not to be confused with Johnny Storm, the second Human Torch, of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, which launched in 1961).

Burgos’ two super-heroes shared similarities: both were super-androids, and both had disturbing superpowers (the Torch’s spontaneous combustion is the type of “Kids, don’t try this at home!” super-power that has been known to inspire Saturday Night Live sketches, urban myths about animation censorship, and tear-jerking John Byrne FF stories). Litigation also provided an ironic link between the two characters: “Captain Marvel” was a name embattled by lawsuits, and during the mid-Sixties Burgos unsuccessfully sued Marvel over ownership of the Human Torch.

The problem with Burgos’ Captain Marvel, however, was not its illegitimacy as an unauthorized “revival” of a beloved character—it was simply a bad comic book. Despite its star’s extraordinary superpower, the series spiraled out of control from one forgettable story to another, each issue fraught with changes that exemplified a lack of creative development. Burgos, presumed to be the book’s uncredited editor, and his sometimes-credited creative team (including writers Roger Elwood and Leo August and could crank out your own version of a humor mag, or a nudie mag, or a horror mag, and while you wouldn’t win any awards for originality, so long as your product differentiates enough from what you’re copying, you’re simply following capitalism’s dictum of supply and demand. But when you take an established brand name like “Captain Marvel” and offer something different, people notice.

M.F.’s Captain Marvel wasn’t a human being, but a super-robot created on another planet for “the good of man.” Clad in purple tights with aerodynamic “astro boots,” Captain Marvel’s power needed daily replenishing, which he’d accomplish by rubbing the “M” medallion on his chest. When war destroyed his world, Captain Marvel migrated to Earth, where he became a super-hero. He was befriended by a boy named Billy Baxton, who in the earliest stories acted as Marvel’s confidant. To activate his unique superpower, Captain Marvel would shout the word “Split!”

To reassemble his body, he’d yell, “Xam!” Phonetically, those words, when combined, came pretty darn close to “Shazam!” And besides, “split” was a popculture buzzword that meant “to leave” or “go away.”

Its use here is one of the Camp Age’s many examples of an aging comics pro trying to sound cool. (That word might’ve confused some kids in its usage on issue #1’s cover, where Captain Marvel yells to the captive Billy Baxton, “Hold still, Billy, I’ll save you!

SPLIT!” Make up your mind, Cap—should Billy hold still or split?)

The “aging comics pro” responsible for creating this Captain Marvel was not publisher Myron Fass,

LEFT: Captain Marvel #1’s unsettling head-holding splash page. © the respective copyright holder.

Funny, this Plastic Man doesn’t look a thing like Eel O’Brian! © the respective copyright holder.

artists Leon Francho and Carl Hubbell, as well as Burgos himself), were making this stuff up as they went along in a string of short stories published bimonthly in a 52-page giant-sized title.

The Earthbound Captain Marvel’s alter ego changed from Mr. Marvel the news journalist to college professor Roger Winkle with no explanation. His purple costume from issue #1 became red in issue #2 (although still a lighter shade of purple on that issue’s cover), and with issue #3 he was sporting a domino mask. His “M” insignia changed from a chestplate to a medallion on a necklace. Captain Marvel was blond on his covers but a redhead in the stories inside. Billy Baxton went from cover-featured sidekick to invisible cast member, supplanted by Linda Knowles, daughter of Professor Winkle’s boss, as a potential love interest (for a robot!).

Carl Burgos.

Courtesy of Alter Ego.

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RIGHT: With two magic words: Captain Marvel mouths off. © the respective copyright holder.

Captain Marvel battles the Bat in issue #3. © the respective copyright holder.

After a few early stories featuring bargainbasement aliens (including one group of living, extraterrestrial monoliths that looked like Hostess Twinkies), Captain Marvel’s rogues’ gallery emerged, but it borrowed unapologetically from other sources, like the hero himself. Issue #1’s Plastic Man—a villain in the M.F. Universe—was renamed Elasticman in Captain Marvel #2, with no explanation (although today we know that DC Comics, which had acquired Plastic Man from Quality Comics, was in the midst of reviving the original Stretchable Sleuth). In that story, Elasticman asked Marvel to say hello to his little friend, Tinyman, a diminutive character in the tradition of Doll Man, the Atom, and Ant-Man. That issue also featured an evil scientist who ripped off the name of a DC super-hero, Dr. Fate, as well as the steel-jawed Atom-Jaw, a dead-ringer for the Golden Age villain Iron Jaw, the enemy of Crimebuster, the star of Boy Comics. Throughout his appearances, Captain Marvel would battle criminals you might’ve thought you knew from other sources: Dr. Doom (identified as such on a cover but called Prof. Doom inside), a knock-off of the Mist (enemy of the Golden Age Starman) called Vapor Man, the Destroyer (using the name of an early Marvel character), the Ghost Patrol (which was a Golden Age DC feature), and a Sub-Mariner/Aquaman hybrid anti-hero named Tarzac, whom Fass and Burgos had planned to spin off in his own title.

Then there was the cover of Captain Marvel #3 (Sept. 1966), which depicted the hero split-punching a gray-and-blue-costumed figure with a scalloped cape and pointy-eared cowl. This was the Bat, a blatant Batman rip-off—but even the brazen Myron Fass became gun-shy over potential copyright infringement with that one, since when the villain returned in the next issue, he had a recolored costume and a new name: the Ray (which, of course, was a Golden Age character published by Quality Comics and later acquired by DC Comics). The rechristened Ray, however, still used bats as accomplices, and in an editorial goof in issue #4, he’s called “Bat” by Tinyman.

The few displays of originality offered by Captain Marvel’s rogues even had strikes against them, such as with issue #3’s spreader of viruses, a sicko scientist whose clever moniker of Colonel Cold unfortunately made readers think of the Flash’s not-so-nice ice-man Captain Cold (another bad guy who caused sniffles). I will give M.F.’s Captain Marvel credit for its reformation of Tinyman: Over the course of the series, this ne’erdo-well “Man of a Thousand Sizes” became a superhero and the crimefighting partner of Captain Marvel, and in his civilian I.D. of Jack Baker, Tinyman studied law and became assistant D.A. (all in a matter of several pages!).

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DOC SAVAGE

The Man of Bronze in the Silver Age Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, that golden-skinned, super-scientist Adonis whose Depression-era pulp adventures imprinted Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, staged a Sixties comeback beginning with Bantam Books’ 1964 re-release of the paperback novel The Man of Bronze by Lester Dent (the Doc Savage nom de plume of Kenneth Robeson).

Doc’s series of exotic, often chilling exploits became bookstore perennials—and even those who didn’t read Doc Savage novels couldn’t help but be mesmerized by their high-testosterone cover portraits, 62 of which were painted by the master of realism, James Bama. So when the super-hero and spy explosions of the Sixties left creative types scrambling to find uber-men and secret agents to exploit, Western Publishing Company’s Gold Key Comics scored the Doc Savage rights from Condé Nast Publications. The result was Doc Savage #1 (Nov. 1966).

Captain Marvel ran four bimonthly issues, ending with #4 (Nov. 1966). Between issues #2 and 3, a one-shot, Captain Marvel presents the Terrible 5, was published. The next year, that title was reused for the final M.F. Captain Marvel publication, Captain Marvel presents the Terrible 5 #5 (the villains cover-blurbed as “The Worst Bad Guys in Comicdom!”), continuing the host series’ numbering. “Can this be the end of Capt. Marvel, comicdom’s greatest hero?” asked its cover. Absolutely. This last-ditch effort to publish Captain Marvel was about to be silenced by Marvel Comics, which was legally obtaining the Captain Marvel trademark. “Marvel’s Space-Born SuperHero,” the Kree warrior Mar-Vell, became the first of many Marvel characters named Captain Marvel, starting in Marvel Super-Heroes #12 (Dec. 1967).

Copyright attorneys will argue that Marvel Comics was well within its rights to obtain that mark and produce its own Captain Marvel, but it’s a sore spot with many fans who have since been forced to accept a revived “original Captain Marvel” rechristened as DC Comics’ “Shazam.”

The Big Red Cheese did get a chance to thumb his nose at his imitators. In DC’s The Power of Shazam! #27 (June 1997), writer Jerry Ordway and artists Pete Krause and Mike Manley took a jab at M.F.’s and Marvel’s Captain Marvels in a story involving time anomalies and Captain Marvel variants.

Fads and characters come and go and change is inevitable, but from where I sit, the original Captain Marvel is the real Captain Marvel!

The comic’s cover features the sinewy Man of Bronze wrestling with a colossal serpent, splendidly rendered by premier portraitist Bama. Yet once cracking the cover of Gold Key’s Doc Savage #1, the reader can’t help but feel let down by the lackluster interior artwork by journeyman Jack Sparling. It’s like being lured into a gourmet restaurant by its ritzy storefront only to find a greasy spoon inside.

The comic’s writing isn’t bad, actually. It’s an adaptation of the Robeson Doc Savage novel The Thousand-Headed Man (the cover art was repurposed from Bama’s paperback cover from that novel, although the Gold Key version zooms in on our goldenhued hero and ignores his horrific adversary). At the typewriter is storyman Leo Dorfman, best known as

LEFT: Waverider gives DC’s Captain Marvel a glimpse of his alternatereality doppelgangers—including M.F.’s Captain Marvel—in The Power of Shazam! #27.

TM & © DC Comics.

CENTER: Gold Key’s Doc Savage #1, which went on sale August 25, 1966.

TM & © Condé Nast.

James Bama’s cover art in its entirety, on the Doc Savage paperback, The ThousandHeaded Man. TM & © Condé Nast.

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Bama’s rendition of the Steve Hollandinspired Man of Bronze, and a Sparling swipe of that iconic pose.

TM & © Condé Nast.

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a scribe for DC Comics’ Superman. Dorfman ably adapts the original novel into the framework of a 32page, no-ads comic book, although the tale’s beginning and ending suffer from claustrophobia. Through exposition Dorfman quickly introduces Doc and his quintet of operatives (beefy chemist Monk, engineer Renny, smooth-talking attorney Ham, archaeologist Johnny, and electrical whiz Long Tom), and thrusts them into a fast-paced adventure involving a quest for three keys that lead to “the secret of the man with the thousand heads!” Along the way we meet a dubious Cambodian named Sen-gat (grotesquely illustrated by Sparling and colored, per the standard of the day, in a pale yellow) and a spear-hurling beauty who draw Doc deeper into a mystery that ultimately pits him against the titular menace.

“Fantastic!” and “Perilous Adventure!” are the promises printed onto the comic’s cover, and Doc Savage #1 delivers both. But you can thank Lester Dent’s The Thousand-Headed Man novel and its adaptor Leo Dorfman for that. Jack Sparling’s sketchy art style struggles to keep pace with Dorfman’s script. Sparling’s storytelling is adequate, but his illustrations lack polish, especially when compared to the extraordinary front and back covers by Bama (Doc Savage #1’s back cover re-presents its front cover, sans logo, as a pin-up, as did so many Gold Key titles of the day). Sparling, who excelled on DC’s Eclipso and Secret Six features, was sometimes mismatched to his assignments (his 1968 stint on Green Lantern was painfully awkward), and Doc Savage was one of them. Doc Savage #1’s story calls for depictions of such monstrosities as a pagoda of feet, a temple of heads, and killer cobras trained to pursue and attack, but unfortunately, Jack’s crude etchings just weren’t up to the job. Equally bothersome were Sparling’s occasional swipes of Doc Savage’s face from Bama’s cover painting for the novel The Man of

Bronze; Bama famously used actor Steve Holland as his model for his Doc covers, but Sparling’s replications fall short. One can only imagine how this comic book might’ve looked under the pencil and brush of the legendary Alex Toth, Jonny Quest’s Doug Wildey, or then-newcomer Jim Steranko.

Doc Savage #1 was Gold Key’s one-and-only issue starring the Man of Bronze, and it would take another six years before the hero returned to comic books, courtesy of Marvel. It’s unlikely that the blame for the Gold Key comic’s lack of continuance can be placed on the shoulders of its artist, however.

As reported in the May 23, 1966 edition of Newsweek, Hollywood producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman (best known for some of TV’s most popular game shows, such as The Price is Right, Match Game, and Family Feud) were about to launch a Doc Savage movie franchise, starting with The ThousandHeaded Man. Goodson-Todman’s Doc Savage would be played straight, shunning the Camp flavor of the month. Purportedly their Man of Bronze was to be Chuck Connors, TV’s Rifleman, who also starred in the Western they executive-produced, Branded; Goodson-Todman were also said to be developing a Doc Savage TV show for the 1967–68 season. It all fell apart when it was discovered that Condé Nast owned only publication rights to Doc Savage, with ancillary rights being the domain of the widow of Doc’s co-creator, Lester Dent (Dent died in 1959).

Perhaps that was all for the best, due to the audience’s lukewarm reaction to The Green Hornet, the Camp Age’s most famous example of playing a costumed character straight. While Doc Savage didn’t achieve multimedia stardom during the Sixties, he certainly held the paperback market in his steely grip—the aforementioned issue of Newsweek reported that 2.2 million copies of eleven reissued Doc Savage novels were in print at the time!

THE SPIRIT

Will Eisner’s Outnumbered Crimefighter Will Eisner was a class act. As a visual storyteller, he raised the bar for the comic-book medium, soaring miles above the pap cranked out by the sweatshops of the Golden Age. His exquisitely rendered marriage of words and pictures led him to develop what we now recognize as the graphic novel. For a career pushing eighty years he molded lives as a teacher and inspired those who only knew him from the printed page. His very name signifies excellence, as evidenced

unbeknownst to Will it presaged the outcome of the Spirit’s ill-fated revival.

The cover also asked, “Who is the Spirit?”

Comics History 101 teaches us that the Spirit is actually Central City crimebuster Denny Colt, who was thought by the public to have passed from this mortal coil but who instead clobbered crooked mortals with coiled fists as a mysterious masked man. Eisner introduced the Spirit in 1940, for a dozen years producing, with his studio, the character’s adventures as a newspaper comic supplement; some Spirit adventures found their way into Quality Comics titles as well.

“Will [Eisner] and I always seemed on the brink of working together,” wrote Captain America cocreator Joe Simon in his autobiography, “and this was one time when it actually happened.” That door was opened by Harvey Comics’ Leon Harvey, after reading Eisner’s and inker Chuck Kramer’s new Spirit five-pager expressly produced for a January 1966 Sunday magazine supplement for the New York Herald Tribune. The story was part of a special edition covering the revival of comic books’ popularity, which featured an essay by Jules Feiffer, on the heels of the publication of Feiffer’s seminal 1965 hardcover collection, The Great Comic Book Heroes, which included the Spirit. Leon Harvey reached out to Will Eisner about reviving the Spirit, and a licensing agreement was struck to reprint select Spirit stories as part of editor Simon’s Harvey Thriller line.

And so, The Spirit joined Harvey’s smorgasbord of super-hero and secret-agent comics designed to capitalize on those trends. Published in Harvey’s

LEFT: The Spirit rises— Eisner’s signature character returns as one of the “Harvey Thrillers.”

The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios Inc.

The Spirit #1 opens with the character’s origin.

The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios Inc.

by the comics industry’s most coveted honor, the Eisner Award.

So it may be difficult to comprehend that Eisner’s Camp Age revival of his signature work, The Spirit, was cancelled after a mere two issues. “Can the world’s most out-numbered crime fighter come back?” asked the tagline above the logo of The Spirit #1 (Oct. 1966), published by Harvey Comics as part of editor Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” imprint.

Eisner’s cover question was intended to complement his artwork depicting his harassed hero under attack by a small army of dodgy, gnawing crooks, yet 79

Eisner’s original artwork to the cover of The Spirit #2, and its published version, with its loads of cover copy.

Courtesy of Heritage.

The Spirit TM & © Will Eisner Studios Inc.

Will Eisner.

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Giant Size at 64 pages for 25 cents, The Spirit #1’s cover worked a little too hard at courting both the super-hero and spy markets: Its humorous crooks and bright colors flirted with the kids addicted to the slam-bang antics of TV’s Batman, while its inventive layout—especially its elaborate title, an Eisner hallmark—winked at the more sophisticated reader who might curl up with this comic book before diving into the latest Ian Fleming 007 paperback. The cover also promised “Action,” “Intrigue,” “Suspense,” and “Laughter,” yet these graphic elements weighted down Eisner’s breathtaking artwork. Those bookselling virtues were clearly evident in Will’s rendering and didn’t need to be plastered alongside the illustration.

Inside, Eisner, with an inking assist from Chuck Kramer, retells the Spirit’s origin in an updated sevenpage adventure. That was followed by a breezy twopage “interview” with the Spirit penned by Marilyn Mercer (Eisner’s former secretary) that contemporizes the hero with then-current pop-culture references to the Beatles, James Bond, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (an example: “And then there was the plot to cut the Beatles’ hair,” says the Spirit, confidently claiming that he spared the Fab Four’s coifs). The rest of the book reprints seven Spirit seven-page tales from 1948 and 1949, and includes a “Spirit Lab” twopage “Invincible Devices” filler newly produced by Eisner.

Nearly half a year passed before Harvey released The Spirit #2 (Mar. 1967). With this edition, Eisner’s delightful cover art and design were allowed more breathing room, with limited copy appearing—however, the text’s hyperbolic proclamation (“8 smashing,

fabulous, absolutely boss stories”) seemed better suited for an issue of Archie Giant Series than The Spirit. The first of the issue’s eight stories was another new adventure by Eisner, presenting the origin of the hero’s nemesis the Octopus; Eisner also produced another “Spirit Lab” two-pager titled “The Man from MSD,” while Mercer assembled a two-page lettercol.

Rounding out the package were seven more Spirit seven-pagers from 1948 through 1950.

There was no Spirit #3, although it was planned and previewed in a one-page house ad at the end of issue #2. Harvey’s Thriller line had imploded, gone after a scant two years on the stands.

Why did The Spirit fail to catch on? Harvey Comics’ attempt to shoehorn The Spirit into a ZOWIE!-compatible package was a poor decision, and grouping one of the medium’s most unique concepts and acclaimed artistic visions with leaden underperformers like B-Man was a millstone around The Spirit’s neck. Yet despite the patently campy flourishes of these two Harvey issues, Eisner’s Spirit remained Eisner’s Spirit, not a misstep like so many other Sixties revivals.

Looking back from the comfortable vantage point of hindsight, Harvey’s The Spirit was also an instance of bad timing. The market screamed for over-the-top super-heroics, and Eisner’s crafty sequential art zipped over the heads of eight-yearolds. As it had been a generation earlier, The Spirit was miles above most of its competitors, yet in a market with glutted with entries clambering for shelf space, Eisner’s crimefighter was indeed “outnumbered.”

FIGHTING AMERICAN

Simon & Kirby’s Father of the Camp Age You might call Simon & Kirby’s Fighting American the father of the Camp Age. Co-created by Joe Simon (co-plotter/inker) and Jack Kirby (co-plotter/penciler) for Prize Comics in 1954, their Cold War answer to Captain America was originally a no-nonsense Commie-crusher, a product of an era of McCarthyism—the Communists were everywhere, waiting to paint the town Red by infiltrating our neighborhoods and our movies, so we needed a new star-spangled paragon to give ’em a patriotic uppercut. “The atmosphere at that time was very bleak for everybody, really, because it was right after the war and it was the early [Fifties] and we were just turning our attention to look for another enemy,” Kirby told Will Murray in a 1989 interview that was published in 2016 in The Jack Kirby Collector #67.

With the second issue, Simon & Kirby loosened up a bit when introducing the villains Double-Header (a two-headed crime czar) and the Handsome Devils, thieves whose Hollywood-worthy good looks wooed their starstruck victims (in reality, the Devils were actually hideous goons that looked like they walked out of a Basil Wolverton drawing who hid their horrid mugs under facemasks, prompting the Fighting American’s young sidekick, Speedboy, to exclaim, “Why, the Handsome Devils are nothing more than a bunch of ugly ducklings!”). According to Kirby, changing the tone of the feature “was my idea, but Joe agreed, finally.”

After dipping that toe in the waters of humor, Joe and Jack jumped in the deep end of the High Camp pool with Fighting American #3. No longer was the Cold War a chilling subject: readers met the ridiculous Russkies Poison Ivan and Hotsky Trotsky. Soon, Simon & Kirby pitted the Fighting American and Speedboy against enemies of decency like Rimsky and Korsakoff, Rhode Island Red, Professor Dyle Twister, Invisible Irving, and Super-Khakalovitch, among others. “…I think both of us had a bellyful of serious heroes at the time, and the war itself had spent itself inside us and inside everybody else,” Kirby said. “So we decided to do something different and the field itself demanded it.”

Despite Kirby’s contention of market demand, audiences failed to connect with his and Joe’s Fighting American—Duck and Cover drills at schools conditioned comics-reading kids to fear, not poke fun at, the Communist threat, and adults had not yet found Camp fashionable. So Prize’s Fighting American went bye-bye in 1955 with #7 (an issue that also

featured contributions from writer Carl Wessler and artist John Prentice), although Joe and Jack had begun work on an eighth issue.

Once the American popular culture caught up with Simon & Kirby and the Camp Age was in full swing, Joe Simon brought back his and Jack’s “Battling Prince of Comicdom” (and Speedboy, too) in Fighting American #1 (Oct. 1966, on sale July 15, 1966), published in Harvey’s Giant Size format as one of Simon’s “Harvey Thrillers.” “Look out! It’s Round Robin!” exclaims our flag-draped fighter on the allnew Kirby/Simon cover as a portly pilferer bounces like a rubber ball at our hero. Kids who read the Legion of Super-Heroes in DC’s Adventure Comics had seen such a wacky super-power in the shape of Bouncing Boy, who had been around since 1961— although Fighting American #1’s Round Robin story had been intended for Prize’s Fighting American #8 and had been collecting dust in a flat file since 1956.

Harvey’s Fighting American #1 was a mix of previously unpublished material and reprints. It opens with the cover-featured Round Robin short story, interrupted midway by a reprint of the Fighting American’s origin (from Prize’s first issue), which tells the grim tale of how the mind of nerdy Nelson Flagg was transferred into the body of his Commie-crushed, super-soldiered brother, Red-hating speaker-of-truth Johnny Flagg. Two other previously produced tales saw print for the first time: “Roman Scoundrels,” featuring the villainy of Commissar Yatz, and “The Secret of Yafata’s Moustache,” pitting the patriotic pair against Viva Yafata. In addition to the origin, the

Jack Kirby.

Courtesy of HeroEnvy.com.

Fighting American and Speedboy bounce back into comics in 1966.

TM & © Joe Simon estate.

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Teaser page from FA #1.

TM & © Joe Simon estate.

RIGHT: Original art to stories planned for the unpublished second Harvey issue.

Note Simon’s corrections on the second page, made on vellum paper.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Joe Simon estate.

premiere issue’s reprints from the Prize Comics run were #1’s “Duel to the Finish Line,” #2’s “Find the King of the Crime Syndicate,” and #2’s “The League of the Handsome Devils.” These stories were reinked on vellum by Simon for better reproduction, with minor alterations taking place to address Comics Code changes that had been instated in the years since they were originally created. Fleshing out the contents of Fighting American #1 was “The Hero Who Laughed at Himself,” a two-page text piece, authored

by Steve Perrin and reprinted from an unspecified fanzine, which brought readers up to speed with the Fighting American’s past. All in all, it’s a nice collection, but its mix of early and later Fighting American stories and their shifts in tone presented a character that appears uneven to the first-time reader.

Harvey’s Fighting American #1 was packaged under a brightly colored new cover penciled by Jack and inked by Joe, replicating the Simon & Kirby style of yesteryear. Such nostalgia may have been a contributing factor as to why there was no Fighting American #2, although Simon and Harvey Comics had intended to produce a second issue (contents would have included reprints of Prize Comics’ issue #2’s “City of Ghouls,” #4’s “Tokyo Run-Around” and “Operation Wolf,” and #5’s “Jiseppi the Jungle Boy”).

By the time this Fighting American revival came about, Jack was dazzling fans with his Kirby-krackling, dynamic art on Marvel’s still-new and emerging universe. Juxtaposed against the other Kirby-drawn covers on the comic racks in July 1966—Fantastic Four #55 (inked by Joe Sinnott), an in-your-face 82

shot of the Thing being blasted by Marvel’s hot new character, the Silver Surfer, and Tales of Suspense #82 (inked by Frank Giacoia), a poster-worthy gripper dominated by a shield-wielding Captain America popping off the cover’s eye-catching chartreuse-and-

yellow background montage of foes—the cover of Harvey’s Fighting American #1 looked like one of your dad’s dusty old comic books. With the market glut and shaky distribution of the summer of 1966, a lot of those dads who had been lured back to comics by Batman overlooked Fighting American. Also, while Simon & Kirby were the first to take a swing at the Cold War back in 1954, by 1966 the rest of America had gotten the joke and Commie spoofs (and nutty Nazis, for that matter) were in endless supply. Joe and Jack, responsible for creating numerous trends in comic books, were victims of their own ingenuity, striking too early with the original Fighting American, then too late with its Camp Age revival.

PLASTIC MAN

Arnold Drake’s Revival of the Pliable Pretzel Many fans contend that no one has ever done justice to Plastic Man other than his talented and tragic creator, Jack Cole.

True, Cole’s Plastic Man is unmatchable, but there are a handful of interpretations of the Pliable Pretzel that have left behind an admirable and entertaining legacy: the Skeates/Fradon/Smith version of the mid-Seventies, the Wein/Pasko/Staton/Smith version of the late Seventies/early Eighties, the Foglio/Barta/Nyberg version of 1988, and the Baker version of 2004.

You’ll notice that Plastic Man’s Camp Age revival is not listed above.

For a super-hero comic book that didn’t take itself seriously, DC Comics’ 1966 revival of Plastic Man wasn’t bad. It was silly, witty, and off-kilter. Then again, so was just about everything else being published then.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the Plastic Man revival was nothing special—because by the time it occurred, Plastic Man, unfortunately, was nothing special. Fantastic Four, featuring the rubbery Mr. Fantastic, had bounced onto Marvel’s bestseller list and DC’s own Ductile Detective, the Elongated Man,

LEFT: These bombastic Marvel covers

by Kirby were on the stands the same month as Harvey’s Fighting American #1.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

The former Quality Comics super-star premieres in his own DC series! Art by Gil Kane.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Plastic Man bounces back, as a Dial H for Hero transformation, in House of Mystery #160.

TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: Meet the book’s cast, from page 1 of issue #1.

TM & © DC Comics.

Lots of DC heroes’ names are dropped in the house ad for Plastic Man #1.

TM & © DC Comics.

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was solving mysteries after every month’s Batman adventure in Detective Comics. Even Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olsen, would occasionally guzzle Elastic Serum to stretch his legs as Elastic Lad. Although those flexible fighters were imitators of Plastic Man, few kids plunking down a dime and two pennies for a new funnybook knew that. So at no fault of his own, Plastic Man had lost his snap by the time his first issue hit the stands on September 22, 1966.

Complicating things was Plastic Man’s first issue cover (also shown in a DC house ad), where many readers first met the Stretchable Sleuth. Here, Plas is on a police call box, phoning in a report to… the Commissioner. Yes, just like Batman does on his Hot-Line (in the comics) or Batphone (on TV). Granted, Plas is simultaneously lassoing a trio of troublemakers while yammering on the phone, something that would require a few POW!s and ZOWIE!s from the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder, but still… the Commissioner?

Another reason that Plastic Man seemed imitative.

Those kids holding a tight grip on their twelve cents were no doubt puzzled by the cover copy of Plastic Man #1 (Nov.–Dec. 1966), which ballyhooed “the epic event” of “the triumphant return of the one and only original” Plastic Man. DC had to stake that claim not only to differentiate Plas from Reed Richards, Ralph Dibny, and Jimmy Olsen, but to avoid confusion with M.F. Enterprises’ rip-off Plastic Man from its notorious Captain Marvel series. Unless they had read Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, those kids weren’t aware that Plastic Man’s history extended back to Quality Comics’ Police Comics #1 (Aug. 1941). In that landmark story, cartoonist Jack Cole introduced gangster Eel O’Brian, whose run-in with the law and a vat of acid made him an “India rubber man” and triggered an ethical conversion to a life of fighting crime. They had no clue that Plastic Man could stretch like his bendable brethren but also hide in plain sight by assuming the

shapes of ordinary objects like chairs, rugs, and fire hydrants. They didn’t know that Plastic Man and his portly pal Woozy Winks had starred in distinctively kooky adventures during a time when most superhero strips were Nazi-crushing and gangbusting. Plas and Woozy’s antics carried Quality’s Police Comics and Plas’ self-titled spin-off book until the midFifties, when Quality closed shop. DC acquired many of Quality’s characters and continued publication of a select few titles like Blackhawk and G.I. Combat, but Plastic Man curled up into limbo… just long enough for those pliable pretenders to plunder his thunder.

The Camp Age seemed the perfect time to bring back Plastic Man. Most of his DC contemporaries had to go through two or three issues of Showcase before getting their own title, but the publisher floated a different trial balloon for Plas. Robby Reed, the bespectacled nebbish with the coolest rotary in comics history, became the “new old hero” Plastic Man in the “Dial H for Hero” episode in House of Mystery

#160 (July 1966). In that issue’s battle with the woeful Wizard of Light, Robby’s third super-transformation of the issue (after Giant-Boy and King Kandy) was Plastic Man—and his thought balloon brought newer readers up to speed, describing this proto-Plas as “that famous crime-fighting hero of years ago!” That Dial H tale by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney put Plastic Man back in the public eye, and a few months later the character’s first issue introduced “the slyest, slippery-est, slinky-est super-hero of them all!” as an actual DC star, name-dropping everyone from Superman to Aquaman in the Plastic Man #1 house ad.

At the typewriter for the Plastic Man revival was Arnold Drake. Historically, “Arnie” is probably best

known as the writer of DC’s Doom Patrol, the Marvellike quarrelsome team of nonconformist heroes, and Deadman, the murdered circus aerialist on an afterlife mission to find his killer. During the Camp Age, Drake was editor Murray Boltinoff’s go-to guy for funny stuff, being the writer behind The Adventures of Bob Hope, The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, and the Calvin and Hobbes forerunner Stanley and His Monster, a back-up which eventually squeezed The Fox and the Crow out of their own book.

For the first issue of Plastic Man, Drake was paired with artist Gil Kane—yes, that Gil Kane, who had wowed DC readers with the Silver Age revivals of Green Lantern and the Atom from editor Julie Schwartz’s desk. DC’s funniest writer, teamed with one of DC’s most dynamic draftsmen, on a revival of a once-beloved character. How could it fail?

Issue #1 is a lot of fun. Drake applies the same reasoning to Plastic Man that he did to Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, jettisoning Plas’ former partner, the roly-poly Woozy Winks, whom he considered dated, for an all-new, all-now supporting cast. Plas’ new pal is pet-shop owner Gordon K. “Gordy” Trueblood, an all-American straight man to the playful Plastic Man. The “Sapphire Stagg” to Plastic Man’s “Metamorpho” is rich girl Micheline “Mike” DeLute III, a strawberryblonde beauty whose tightly wound mother, Micheline “Moms” DeLute II, and scheming butler, Fawnish, have it out for the “plastic peasant.” Also at odds with Plas are police Captain Matthew McSniffe, who for some unexplained reason believes Plastic Man is actually a crook (maybe he read Police Comics #1), and the villain of the series, Dr. Dome, whose clanging bell-like helmet predates Howard the Duck’s Dr. Bong by over a decade. The sworn enemy of Plastic Man, Dr. Dome unleashes two of his minions against our hero: Professor X (no, not that Professor X, although Drake would write a few issues of Marvel’s X-Men two years later) and the bad doctor’s sexy daughter, Lynx.

In one 23½-page story, Plastic Man catches a falling piano, fends off an adoring public, disguises himself as a birdcage, swings with a monkey, outwits a superglue weapon, gooses a countess, pesters his wouldbe mother-in-law, drenches two pesky cops, dodges a thermal ray, is slipped a mickey by a femme fatale, survives a drowning attempt, and shrugs off constrict-

ing hoops. This madness is delightfully drawn by Kane, who stretches his own artistic chops by showing us he’s more than just a sci-fi/superhero artist. Gil’s Plas shifts, shakes, and shimmies with the best of ’em.

Plastic Man #1 includes with a text page titled “The Boys Behind the By-Lines,” a jokey interview with (actually, by) Drake. Therein, in addition to his comics creds Arnie mentions his screenplays for the grisly horror flick The Flesh Eaters (1964) and the voyeuristic thriller Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965). He also announces, “I just completed the pilot script for a PLASTIC MAN [animated] television series.” The text page concludes with a blurb that the next issue would feature an interview with the other boy behind the by-line, Gil Kane… …but Kane’s continued presence, like the promise of a Plastic Man TV program (which didn’t happen, at least during the Sixties), was another dashed hope. Two months later, readers who bought Plastic Man #2 were surprised to find that Kane had moved on. The new Plastic Man artist was Win Mortimer, a longtime illustrator for DC (Superman, Batman, and Robin’s solo series in Star Spangled Comics) and comic strips (Superman, David Crane). Win had recently co-created Stanley and His Monster with Drake, in the pages of The Fox and the Crow, and with Mortimer on Plastic Man, editor Boltinoff was banking on a (excuse the pun) win-win. No such luck.

Win Mortimer’s Plastic Man was flat, and Drake’s first-issue energy started to wane. Dr. Dome’s presence as a villain in issues #1–4 and 6 quickly wore thin, as did the recurring shtick with the rest of the supporting cast.

Plastic Man #7 (Nov.– Dec. 1967) is the most noteworthy issue outside of the premiere ish. It features a gorilla cover penciled by Carmine Infantino—the visual creator of Super-Gorilla Grodd and the artist of many of DC’s famed gorilla covers—and inker Mike Esposito. Its story, “Plastic Man’s Fantastic Old Man,” reveals that the Plastic Man we’ve been reading is actually the son of the original Plas, who had earlier retired from super-heroics to

LEFT: Kane springs through Plastic Man #1 with an unexpected flair for humor.

TM & © DC Comics.

Arnold Drake.

Courtesy of David Siegel.

Plastic Man #7 offered an Infantino gorilla cover.

TM & © DC Comics.

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RIGHT: Win Mortimer’s rendition of the Stretchable Sleuth, in original art form, from Plastic Man #4.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

In a precursor to the Hostess comicbook ads of the Seventies and Eighties, Plastic Man as a pitchman, from 1967.

Plastic Man TM & © DC Comics.

Pure-Pak® © Ex-Cell-O Corp.

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settle down and raise a family. In a flashback sequence, Plas Jr. drinks the same acid which gave his dad his stretching powers (“Not so horrible!” the toddler tells his mortified father, “Me put chocolate syrup in it first!”). Plastic Man’s old man is a resident of the Plastic Acres Rest Home, and the issue also reunites us with Woozy Winks.

Issue #7 was Mortimer’s last. With Plastic Man #8 Boltinoff brought in artist Jack Sparling, with whom he had recently worked on the Eclipso feature in House of Secrets. Murray should have looked harder for a replacement.

Sparling’s hazy style was ill suited for Plastic Man, and the artist lacked the imagination and draftsmanship to make Plas’ transformations look convincing.

That wasn’t the only thing working against DC’s Plastic Man revival. Other buffoonish bad guys followed Dr. Dome and paraded through the book—the Society to Assassinate Plastic Man, the Assassin, the Sphinx, the Bond pastiche Goldzinger, Waisel the Weasel, Killer Joe, and Marcel Mannequin—and all were played strictly for laughs, without any true sense of menace. That, coupled with the tiresome supporting cast, made Plas’ comeback fall flat.

Drake’s hip quips and pop-culture satires worked well in Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, as they were humor comic books where very little was sacred. But Plastic Man was supposed to be a super-hero comic book that also made you laugh, and with Arnie’s reliance upon slapstick and parodies he never really told a super-hero story. The book was cancelled with issue #10 (May– June 1968).

What might have made DC’s Plastic Man revival a hit? Let’s don Plas’ goggles and tune in our hindsight to consider some pliable possibilities.

Boltinoff was not known for exercising creative control over his writers and artists—he was more the type of editor who’d add a missing comma in a script than to suggest a change in direction. But imagine if Murray had pulled Arnold Drake aside after read-

ing the Plastic Man #1 script to say, “Arnie, instead of all these new characters, let’s go back to basics and make Plastic Man and Woozy Winks federal agents.”

That would have forced Drake to tell stories instead of jokes, and the book might have benefitted.

The rotating artists severely wounded Plastic Man’s potential. Imagine if Gil Kane had stayed on the book. Not only would that have offered visual consistency, but it could have also reshaped the direction of the series. During the late Sixties, Kane was beginning to take more control of the storytelling process (he soon would write as well as illustrate two issues of Captain Action and plot and illustrate the hardboiled graphic novel His Name is…

Savage). If Kane had stayed on Plastic Man, he might have flexed more muscle to curb some of Drake’s excesses on the book.

THE OWL

Jerry Siegel’s Other Flying Hero

Or imagine if Boltinoff had moved Bob Oksner off of Hope or Lewis to draw Plastic Man instead. That would not have changed the creative direction of the series, but the issues would be a lot nicer to look at!

And my wildest fantasy: Neal Adams as the Plastic Man artist. Boltinoff was wasting Adams on Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis covers at the time, but soon very famously assigned the groundbreaking newcomer to draw the Batman team-ups in The Brave and the Bold—an historic move, as we now know. Adams’ versatility would have allowed him to easily straddle the line between Plastic Man’s worlds of super-hero and comedy, and the experimental layouts he soon employed on The Spectre would have given Plastic Man a unique look, something it sorely needed during that era of ubiquitous superpunsters and crazy criminals.

Adams got one shot at Plastic Man during the Sixties: the cover for the Batman/Plastic Man teamup in B&B #76 (Feb.–Mar. 1968). And Plas got a few additional opportunities to moonlight outside of his title: Like Metamorpho, he was denied his TV toon but got his own surf-music song in 1966. Also that year, Plas starred on one of the 44 Comic Book Foldees non-sports cards produced by Topps; Wally Wood was the Foldees artist. And in 1967, an uncredited creative team produced a comic-style ad for the newspaper Sunday funnies starring Plastic Man as a spokesperson for Ex-Cell-O Plastic PurePak Milk Cartoons. These outings hint at the Pliable Pretzel’s potential; too bad his own comic book didn’t live up to it.

Here’s a super-hero revival that most readers of 1967 didn’t realize was a super-hero revival.

The Owl made a rather inauspicious debut in Dell Comics’ Crackajack Funnies #25 (July 1940), a title mostly populated by reprints from comic strips and Big Little Books. Popular literary sleuth Ellery Queen starred on the cover, with the Owl getting third billing in a bulleted contents list of four co-stars. That issue’s five-page Owl adventure traipsed through recognizable terrain that was still new enough to be considered fresh but would soon, through relentless replication, become clichéd: Police investigator Nick Terry has adopted a costumed guise to become a nocturnal crimefighter, covertly working without the constraints pinned to him by his badge.

In his first story, the Owl was draped in black with a wide-eyed Owl cowl that resembled a pillowcase; he eerily lurked in the dark, not unlike the Shadow. In his second outing, the Owl’s appearance was refined to mirror Batman’s, setting the pace for future episodes, where he employed super-weapons in his mission as the “sworn foe of the underworld” and traded on an owl symbol as a calling card. The cartoonist behind the Owl, Frank Thomas (a different Frank Thomas from the Disney animator), apparently had a stack of

Jerry Siegel.

Photo courtesy of Alan Light.

LEFT: What if then-newcomer Neal Adams had become the Camp Age Plastic Man artist? Here’s Neal’s take on Plas: the cover to The Brave and the Bold #76, drawn in late 1967.

TM & © DC Comics.

The Owl drops in on the Camp Age. Owl #1 cover

by Tom Gill.

TM & © Dynamite Characters, LLC.

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TOP: The Owl’s original costume, from his first appearance in Crackajack Funnies #25.

BOTTOM: His maskedmanhunter makeover, on the cover of Crackajack #31.

The Owl TM & © Dynamite Characters, LLC.

Detective Comics handy, as his appropriation of Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman tropes (yes, there was an Owlmobile and an Owlplane) for his hero wasn’t enough—Nick Terry’s girlfriend’s name was Belle Wayne (a distant cousin of Bruce’s, perhaps?), and Terry had a manservant (albeit an Asian one, evoking every now-offensive stereotype imaginable).

Those criticisms aside, the Owl, released at a time when super-heroes were becoming a valuable commodity, was one of the few original characters published by Dell and stood out amid the recycled newspaper funnies in Crackajack. Thomas, whose résumé included comic strips as well as comic-book characters such as Centaur Publications’ the Eye, occasionally brought a wisp of whimsy to the otherwise street-level feature. The Owl soon perched himself onto the covers and gained a sidekick when Belle adopted the guise of Owl Girl in Crackajack #32 (Feb. 1941). Once Crackajack Funnies was cancelled at the end of 1941, the Owl nested into the mix of Popular Comics, another Dell anthology of reprinted news88

paper strips. By 1943, his adventures were over. Not that a lot of people noticed. The Owl, like his namesake, had maintained a low profile.

It’s unlikely that anyone other than the most dedicated of adult comic collectors grinned, “Boy, did I miss him!” when spying Gold Key Comics’ The Owl #1 on the racks in late January 1967. There was no “Back by popular demand!” cover blurb indicating that the Owl was not one of the many newly created super-heroes cluttering the newsstands. It wasn’t until the reader turned to page 1 that the Owl’s history was revealed: “You admirers of the Golden Age of Comics who have been demanding that a certain costumed hero of that glorious era zoom into action once more, have triumphed! He’s back again, and you’ve got him…”

Penning that bombastic intro—and the entire comic—was Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, during a time when his on-again/off-again copyright battles over his red-caped baby were nudging him out of Superman editor Mort Weisinger’s stable and forcing him to find work elsewhere. During the midSixties, after an unsuccessful attempt to become a Marvel scribe, Siegel was scoring freelance checks at Archie Comics, doing his best to ply Stan Lee-like pulse-pounding prose on The Shadow, Adventures of the Fly/Fly Man, and The Mighty Crusaders. Quirks, quips, and craziness, Siegel had no shortage of, and he applied them abundantly in The Owl #1.

The Owl #1’s “The Attack of the Diabolical Birdmen” puts the hero in conflict with the Birds of Prey Gang, seven “ex-jailbirds” who “flocked” together as a crime network. These Birdmen—mobsters wearing giant bird-head masks—are the Vulture, the Raven, the Condor, the Falcon, the Buzzard, the Pelican, and their crimeboss, the Eagle. Across the metropolis of Yorkstown they pull a series of heists using birdinspired weapons: the Vulture snatches an armored car from his hovering Vulture-Plane, the Pelican’s Pelican-Plane’s bill bores through a bank roof and scoops up a safe, etc. Naturally, these shenanigans lure the Owl from his roost (the Owl Roost is the hero’s mountaintop sanctuary), with his curvaceous ally Owl Girl by his side, her secret identity in this Sixties’ incarnation being Laura Holt, “ace girl reporter on the Morning Eagle” (her words), instead of the Golden Age version’s Belle Wayne.

Joining Siegel is Tom Gill, best known for his decade-plus run as the artist of Dell Comics’ Lone Ranger. He does an efficient job on The Owl—nothing too flashy, with airy, coloring book-like artwork and easy-to-follow storytelling.

In The Owl #1, Jerry Siegel channels not Stan Lee, but Batman’s Lorenzo Semple, Jr., saturating the comic with as-seen-on-TV nuttiness such as inept policemen (including a Car 54, Where Are You? nod), labeled technology (“Black Light Push Button”), a punning hero (“Why don’t you complain to a cop?” jokes the Owl when punching a whiny bad guy), and out-of-this-world weaponry (the hero’s Owl-Gun’s

“varicolored rays… have the unique ability to render my foes… ga-ga!”). Siegel and Gill excel at creating one of the best Batman spoofs of the Camp Age, including a hilarious panel where the “Terrific Twosome” zip down—no, not the Owl-poles, but hisand-her sliding boards… and if that wasn’t enough to make you guffaw, Siegel punctuates the lunacy with the Owl’s remark, “Ouch! Darned splinter! Must remember to sandpaper this…” The Owl #1 is a very funny, and fun, Camp Age comic book.

In his Forties adventures, the Owl was unmistakably a Batman clone. Jerry Siegel saw that, and ran with it. Not only did he borrow from the Batman TV show, he pillaged the comic books as well: His Birds of Prey Gang are evocative of the Batman villains Fox, Shark, and Vulture, a.k.a. the Terrible Trio (first seen in late 1957 in Detective Comics #253), and the Vulture-Plane and Pelican-Plane bring to mind several classic Penguin stories. Gill’s cover for The Owl #1 also rips a page from the Batman playbook: From the full moon-backlit Owlplane, the Owl glides toward two bird-masked costumed criminals. Look at that cover for a moment—it’s easy to reimagine it as a Batman cover, with the Caped Crusader Batropeswinging into the Joker and the Penguin with the requisite POW! and CRUNCH! Gold Key published a second issue of The Owl— almost a year to the day later—in January 1968, with Siegel and Gill returning. This time, the Owl and Owl Girl tangle with the “skull-faced duo” called the Terror Twins, a pair of slightly out-of-date hipsters that might have stepped out of a Bob Haney-scripted issue of Teen Titans. Once again, Siegel’s script is a blast, with ginchy dialogue (“Guess they don’t dig our fab collection of way-out weapons!” snipes one of the villains as he fires a laser beam from his guitar at our heroes). Both issues of The Owl are a blast for connoisseurs of Camp.

So why, then, did Gold Key Comics’ The Owl lay an egg?

Some might blame the end of the Sixties’ superhero blitz for its demise. Or the fizzling of the Camp craze. Or its publisher’s inexperience in producing and marketing a super-hero comic book. Those factors definitely played a role.

Yet I suspect that what worked well in Gold Key’s The Owl also worked against it.

While concocting a pitch-perfect parody, Siegel and Gill failed to offer the reader anything unique about the character, the end result being a comic book where—yes, I’ll say it—no one gives a hoot about the Owl! Well, that’s not entirely true. Jerry DeFuccio gave a hoot about the Owl. A fan of Golden Age comics, DeFuccio was an editor at EC Comics in the Fifties and for years was an editorial mainstay at MAD Magazine. In 1966—before Gold Key’s Owl revival— DeFuccio, as writer, and artist Mart Bailey partnered to create a proposed newspaper strip titled Alias… the Owl, an original character rooted in DeFuccio’s

love of the Frank Thomas-produced Owl. The strip didn’t sell but has been covered in a handful of fan publications in the decades since.

Writer Donald F. Glut also was an Owl-booster.

“By 1976, I’d written quite a few comic-book scripts for various companies, stories that featured vampires, dinosaurs, cavemen, monsters, extraterrestrials, funny animals, sword and sorcery, and jungle heroes, and you-name-it,” Glut told me in December 2015.

“But none of these stories were about super-heroes; and, in addition to being a professional writer, I also happened to be a fan of the costumed-crimefighters genre. Getting into that area of comics writing, however, was still about a year down the road.

“At the time I was writing The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor, a book I created for Gold Key Comics.

Browsing through my set of Man, Myth and Magic books, looking for subject matter that I hadn’t already used, I came across a supernatural owl-like being named Andras. Aspects of the character immediately reminded me of Gold Key’s Owl, a Golden Age super-hero of the Batman mold that the company had briefly revived during the Sixties to capitalize on the ‘Camp craze’ stemming from the Caped Crusader’s TV series. I wanted to bring the Owl into the Andras story, not as a Camp character, but in the more serious vein that Batman had been portrayed in his earliest stories. It seemed logical to me that, in Dr. Spektor’s universe, the hero Owl might be blamed for crimes committed by the supernatural character; and from that basic premise, the story evolved.

“The editors at the Hollywood offices of Western Publishing Company, Gold Key’s parent company, hated super-heroes, so I knew to get the story approved it had to be strong. Moreover, I couldn’t pitch the plot as an ‘Owl super-hero story,’ but as a typical Spektor story involving a supernatural creature. It wouldn’t be until I got well into telling the plot to editor Del Connell that the super-hero Owl was even mentioned—and by that time he was hooked on the story and gave me the okay to forge ahead with the script.”

Glut’s tale, “Night of the Owl,” illustrated by Jesse Santos, appeared in The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor #22 (Oct. 1976).

In recent years, the Owl has flown again in his own miniseries, as part of Dynamite Entertainment’s Project: Super-powers initiative. Also, the UK’s Black Tower Comics has published (in black and white) reprints of a handful of Owl stories—including Gold Key’s—in the graphic album The Owl–Master of the Night. So it appears that someone gives a hoot about the Owl after all!

Writer Donald F. Glut, with artist Jesse Santos, brought back the Owl in 1976 in Gold Key’s The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor #22.

Dr. Spektor © the respective copyright holder. The Owl TM & © Dynamite Characters, LLC.

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Chapter 3

CAMPUS CLOWNS

LOOK! Up in the ever-lovin’ sky!

It’s a Goony-Bird!

Naw! It’s nothin’ but STUPORMAN!

Detail and dialogue from Not Brand Echh #7. TM & (C) Marvel Characters, Inc.

It’s a Jefferson Airplane!

SUPER-HERO SPOOFS JERRY LEWIS

One-Man Justice League Move over, Snapper Carr! Step aside, Captain Action!

Although Snapper had a key to the JLA’s Secret Sanctuary and the good captain was an ideal substitute for the world’s greatest super-heroes, there was one non-powered DC Comics character that was both stooge to and stand-in for the Justice League of America: Jerry Lewis!

Google “Jerry Lewis DC Comics” and you’ll find links to blogs written by incredulous fanboys befuddled over how a TV and movie comedian could have his own comic book in the first place. Those bloggers were born too late to get it, and from their youthful vantage point, the idea of a Jerry Lewis comic book seems as peculiar as a contemporary comic book starring Amy Schumer. But as with all matters historic, to fully understand why something happened, you have to couch your thinking in the culture of the day.

So before we explore Jerry’s encounters with Justice Leaguers, let’s look back at how he joined the line of DC super-stars in the first place—and his brushes with comics characters outside of DC’s pages.

JERRY LEWIS’ EARLY COMIC-BOOK ENCOUNTERS In 1946, debonair Dean Martin, a nightclub crooner, and jumpy Jerry Lewis, a stage funnyman, joined forces as a musical-comedy act. Over the next ten years, they graduated from stage to radio, to television, and to movies, and became one of entertainment’s dynamic duos, with Martin playing the womanizing straight man to Lewis’ bungling man-child.

Meanwhile, in the mid-Fifties, shrinking comic-book sales were partially being blamed on the advent of the Television Age. So the big daddy of funnybook publishers, DC Comics, snatched up a handful of

licenses to create comic books based on popular TV shows and celebrities in an effort to lure back readers. Among them was an Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis humor comic launched in 1952.

As the world of comic books borrowed from Hollywood, Tinseltown returned the favor with the 1955 Martin–Lewis musical comedy Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin. Here, Jerry is Eugene Fullstack, the comic book-obsessed roommate of struggling artist Rick Todd, played by Dean.

Eugene dreams of comic stories and blabs in his sleep, spouting freakish fantasies which eavesdropping Rick puts to paper. Romantic interests are in the form of Dorothy Malone as artist Abby Parker, and Shirley MacLaine as Bessie Sparrowbrush, the model for Abby’s signature character, Bat Lady—which happens to be Eugene’s favorite comics hero. Topping it off is a Bill Gaines-like comic-book editor played by Eddie Mayehoff, whose other super-hero connection is his co-starring role with Mickey Rooney in the illfated spoof The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado.

Bat Lady comic books were dummied up for the movie and are spotted in several scenes, including a few original art pages believed to have been drawn for the film by Arthur Camp and Neil Wheeler.

It’s noteworthy that Eugene’s favorite character, Bat Lady, predates DC Comics’ own Batwoman! Artists and Models premiered on November 7, 1955, and Batwoman first appeared in Detective Comics #233, cover-dated July 1956.

The Martin–Lewis partnership dissolved in 1956, and soon, Dino was removed from the DC Comics title. It became The Adventures of Jerry Lewis with issue #41 in 1957.

At the box office, Jerry—without Dean—starred in a flurry of screwball comedies built around witless but affable protagonists including The Delicate

One of the campiest comics of the Camp Age: The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #97, teaming Jerry with the Dynamic Duo! Batman, Robin, and Joker TM & © DC Comics. The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

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Jerry goes batty over Bat Lady Shirley MacLaine in 1955’s Artists and Models.

Poster courtesy of Heritage. © 1955 Paramount Pictures Corporation.

The Jerry Lewis comedy The Sad Sack was loosely based upon (INSET) George Baker’s Sad Sack comic book.

Poster courtesy of Heritage.

The Sad Sack © 1958 Paramount Pictures Corporation. Sad Sack TM & © Sad Sack, Inc.

Delinquent (1957), The Bellboy (1960), The Nutty Professor (1963), and The Disorderly Orderly (1964), and enjoyed a brief reign as the king of comedy. One of his earliest solo movies was loosely based upon George Baker’s Sad Sack comic book. Directed

by George Marshall, 1957’s The Sad Sack features Lewis as an ungainly Army private named Meredith C. Bixby, with David Wayne (the Mad Hatter of TV’s Batman) as the officer charged with whipping this foul-up into shape.

Lewis’ physical comedy translated well to comic books, and in his DC exploits Jerry might find himself on an African safari (because it’s believed he can communicate with animals), as a private eye, or in Arabia on a quest for oil (to quiet his squeaky shoes).

While these madcap scenarios attracted some kids who chuckled at Jerry’s movies, DC hedged its bets by decorating Jerry Lewis’ stories with Good Girl Art to attract an older readership. These beauties, lusciously rendered by Owen Fitzgerald and his Jerry Lewis successor, Bob Oksner (who once remarked, “My women had Saturday night bodies and Sunday School faces”), were prominently featured on the covers, under the watch of DC humor editor Larry Nadle.

But after a few years, despite the continuing brilliance of artist Oksner, The Adven-

tures of Jerry Lewis grew dreadfully stale, and sales were slipping. As reported in 2005’s Hogan’s Alley #13, a startling discovery was made after Nadle’s 1964 passing: Stories for Jerry Lewis—plus DC’s other celebrity tie-in book, The Adventures of Bob Hope—were either written by Nadle, or by the artists, or recycled from previous issues, with the editor paying himself for the scripts in each case. “In those days, I wrote Jerry Lewis before Arnold Drake did,” Bob Oksner told me in 2006. Oksner elaborated to interviewer Jim Amash in Alter Ego #67 (Apr. 2007), in an interview recorded shortly before the artist’s February 18, 2007 passing: “And then, searching through [Larry Nadle’s] financial records, they found out that I had done this work that had been paid for, but Larry got the money, not me. They called me in, thinking I was part of the plot. Fortunately, I had all the [thumbnail sketches] that I had done at home on newsprint pads. Jack Liebowitz, who was the boss at that time, called me in, and I told him I did the work and I really wasn’t paid for it. He said, ‘Prove it.’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll bring it in tomorrow.’ I brought in several pads of Jerry Lewis books. And he said, ‘In the future, never work for DC without getting paid.’ [chuckling] Of course, he didn’t have to tell me that.”

Editor Murray Boltinoff picked up DC’s humor titles in the wake of Nadle’s death. This opened the door for writer Arnold Drake, who had earlier gotten the brush-off from Nadle when he lobbied for scripting work on the books. Drake had previously written radio and TV comedy sketches for performers from Milton Berle to Frankie Laine. He was also involved with a low-budget titillation movie comedy called 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing). Murray first assigned Arnie some scripts for another book previously edited

by Nadel, the TV tie-in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and soon gave him the Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis titles, starting with issues #88 and #83, respectively. Initially, Drake was finding his voice with both books, fishing around for inspiration. In his first Jerry Lewis issue, #83, he capitalized on the then-current monster craze by having Jerry meet comical versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, a theme he’d return to shortly in Bob Hope. With his second issue of Jerry Lewis, Arnie took notice of a new character from rival Marvel Comics.

“JERRY LEWIS AS THE FEARLESS TARANTULA” The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #84 (Sept.–Oct. 1964) features what Drake called his “super-hero takeoff on Spider-Man,” the Fearless Tarantula (a re-use—minus the bombastic adjective—of the name of one of the publisher’s lower-tier super-heroes, the Tarantula, first seen in 1941’s Star Spangled Comics #1). At the time this issue hit the stands, Spidey was barely two

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years old, with The Amazing Spider-Man #16 being the current issue, making Jerry Lewis #84 the first time DC poked fun at a Marvel character.

However, Arnie tests the boundaries of parody by cautiously sticking one finger into the hornet’s nest with the Fearless Tarantula. This is not a spoof of an actual Marvel comic book. As rendered by Bob Oksner, Jerry’s costumed identity simply borrows the concept of a bug-hero (a six-armed one, at that, years before the infamous plight of the six-armed Wall-Crawler in Amazing Spider-Man #100) but does not play off of Spider-Man’s mythos.

The story begins with sap-headed Jerry’s obsession with the comic strip Flame Farrell. As drawn

by Oksner, Flame Farrell is another Marvel pastiche, a hybrid of the Golden Age Human Torch and SubMariner (with Aquaman nuances); for Drake himself, it’s a nod to Fireman Farrell, the star of Showcase #1 (Mar.–Apr. 1956), Arnie’s very first script for DC. As Jerry drifts off to sleep, hoping to dream of his favorite super-hero, his next-door neighbor in

since it parrots the similar premise behind Artists and Models. Also, the Tarantula’s heritage is Arnold Drake’s sly wink at France’s burgeoning fascination with the slapstick artistry of Jerry Lewis, an appreciation that stymied straight-laced Americans with an aversion toward Jerry’s brand of humor.

Jerry’s Fearless Tarantula obsession does not match “ze” comic-book hero’s “courtly manners of royalty” or “speed and cunning of the insect world,” and Jerry’s patented buffoonery is in fine form here thanks to Oksner’s cartoon wizardry. As the Tarantula, roof-hopping Jerry gets entangled in a clothesline and plunges through the covered roof of a transport truck—all in a four-panel sequence. Such shenanigans propel the story toward an eventual confrontation with Dr. Cy Klopps, and Jerry’s emergence from his dream trance—while he’s nervously perched high atop a water tower.

Oksner drew from his own family for two of the issue’s characters. The story’s requisite knockout, cartoonist Wendell’s niece, Pat, was based upon

his apartment building, Wendell, the cartoonist of the Flame Farrell feature, frantically races to create a new super-hero sensation, as Farrell’s popularity is flickering. Meanwhile, one floor down, a put-upon dentist named Dr. Cy Klopps plots revenge against those who taunted him (with their “feeble jokes” such as “the yanks are coming”) by testing his HypnoRay, with which he’ll begin a life of crime. “It may even drive the brain waves of one man into the body of another!” he thinks as he aims his device toward the ceiling, its rays directing Wendell’s thoughts into the mind of the sleeping Jerry next door. As Wendell creates the character of the Fearless Tarantula— a French nobleman, not an American teen science geek like Peter Parker—this new super-hero invades Jerry’s dreams, causing him to believe that he is actually this “doer of good! Fighter against no-good!

Crusher of evil! Masher of menaces! A nice chap!”

Sleepwalking, Jerry rouses a tailor out of bed and hires him to create a Fearless Tarantula costume.

Soon Jerry, affecting the hero’s French accent, races off to tackle “ze criminal hordes” as this new superhero. By using Jerry’s dreams of a comic-book hero as its catalyst, Drake’s 24-page story “Jerry Lewis as the Fearless Tarantula!” becomes a movie homage

Bob’s wife, Patricia. And Wendell was Oksner’s selfcaricature.

As Drake settled in to the Jerry Lewis assignment, he grew to believe that the real-life comedians Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope were barely known by Sixties’ children—DC’s target audience. As he revealed in Hogan’s Alley, he soon told editor Boltinoff, “We’ve got to start inventing characters that the kids can relate to, characters that will pull the kids into the book.” Bob Hope became the home of monster parodies (à la Jerry Lewis #83), hot rods, and the swinging super-hero Super-Hip, and Jerry Lewis got a bratty nephew named Renfrew and a mirthfully magical maid named Witch Kraft as sidekicks.

Bob Oksner. © DC Comics.

From issue #84, Jerry in multi-armed action, and Bob Oksner drawing from real life. © the respective copyright holder.

“BATMAN MEETS JERRY” Over a decade had passed since Eugene Fullstack’s Bat Lady obsession had been on view in Artists and Models when actor Jerry Lewis met the original Cowled Crusader in the very first “Bat-climb” celebrity cameo on ABC’s Batman. In the episode “The Bookworm Turns” (original airdate: 4/20/66), as 93

Jerry Lewis #97 wastes no time in revving its Batman parody into high gear.

Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

Batman and Robin are scaling a wall, who should pop his head out the window but Jerry (called “citizen” by the Gotham Guardian). Jerry’s response as he eyes the Dynamic Duo’s feat of derring-do: “Holy human flies!”

Later that year, DC house ads teased the “Holy partnership!” between “the King of Kooks” and the Caped Crusader: “Batman Meets Jerry!” in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #97 (Nov.–Dec. 1966, on sale September 20th). By this point, Jerry Lewis had taken to calling itself “America’s Funniest Comic Mag!” on its covers, a well-deserved sobriquet, since the writer/artist team had gelled to perfection. Herein, Bob “Penman” Oksner and Arnold “Punman” Drake (as described in the Stan Lee-ish credits box) deliver one of the best send-ups of Batmania.

Jerry’s nephew Renfrew is, like so many millions of American kids, batty over Batman, and persuades his “unc” to become crimefighters like the Dynamic Duo. Thanks to Renfrew’s costume making, Jerry and Renfrew adopt the guises of Ratman and Rotten, the Boy Blunder. Later, Renfrew is kidnapped from his bed by the city’s newest super-villain, the Kangaroo (aided by his son, a costumed joey), and Jerry tries to save him as Ratman, only to be cold-cocked by his own Ratarang. He awakens bound and gagged, but is rescued by none other than Batman and Robin, exhausted over their efforts to save other Dynamic Duo wannabes (such as Catman and Kitten, and Fatman and Tubbin). Ratman joins forces with Batman and Robin to track down Jerry’s abducted nephew, and from this moment on, no Bat-ism is sacred. Batman and Robin act similarly to the campy Adam West and Burt Ward interpretations, then routinely break character to react to the lunacy of it all. An example: 94

After Ratman mistakenly presses the wrong button in the Batmobile and ejects its three passengers into the air, a flabbergasted Batman calls Jerry a “stupid idiot” before correcting himself: “Uhh—I mean, you impetuous lad!” To this, Robin remarks, “That’s another thing about this job—Batman’s never allowed to get angry! They’re afraid it would corrupt the youth of the nation!”

While Drake’s script is pun-loaded, as promised in the credits, Oksner’s art is a delightful mash-up of styles, from his own flair for dead-on Jerry Lewis caricatures, to his penchant for beautiful females (a redhead, described by an infatuated Renfrew as “a swingin’ lookin’ chick!”), to his lively storytelling. His Batman and Robin mostly follow the house style, with several Carmine Infantino swipes throughout, but he cribs from the Fifties Batman in several cases, including the bubble-topped, Bat-head Batmobile and his rendition of a Dick Sprang Joker and Jerry Robinson Penguin (the Riddler also makes an appearance).

While Oksner had previously drawn Superman and Aquaman cameos in Bob Hope (see sidebar on page 98), and had drawn or inked a handful of Golden Age DC super-hero serial chapters or short stories early in his career, Jerry Lewis #97 marked Bob’s first opportunity to illustrate a full-length story featuring DC super-characters, something he would regularly do during the Seventies after the popularity of humor comics dried up.

“SUPERMAN MEETS JERRY” Not to be outdone by his World’s Finest friend, the Man of Steel was next up to chance upon “the lovable lunkhead” in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #105 (Mar.–Apr. 1968), by the Drake/Oksner team.

Jerry Lewis #105’s cover is a curiosity, one that has plagued me for years. Prior to the issue’s publication, DC house ads (including a “Direct Currents” hype column) revealed Superman’s arch-foe, Lex Luthor, brandishing a super-weapon at our favorite knucklehead as Jerry, dressed as Superman, steps out of a phone booth, in a smartly composed scene

by Bob Oksner. Luthor’s word balloon identifies the bad guy by name, as does the “Direct Currents” copy, which calls him “that formidable fink, LUTHOR.” In the sky overhead, the real Action Ace (a Photostat of Superman as drawn by Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye, lifted from the splash page of 1955’s classic “Superman in Superman Land,” from Action Comics #210) flies in from behind, uncharacteristically grinning over what appears to be a life-or-death moment for ol’ Jer. In the published version of the cover, Luthor has been altered to an unidentified balding criminal with a moustache, and his word balloon has been rewritten

to remove the villain’s name (but strangely, another “Direct Currents” column released shortly before Jerry Lewis #105 hit the stands included the earlier promo copy identifying Luthor but with the revised cover art hiding Luthor’s appearance).

Did Superman editor Mort Weisinger object to this clownish use of the Man of Steel’s chief enemy and demand that the cover be changed? Perhaps.

Another possibility is a Luthor overload, as the villain also appeared on the Neal Adams-drawn cover to Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #109, on sale the same month as Jerry Lewis #105. “It’s worth noting that both the Jerry and Jimmy covers involve Lex trying to learn Superman’s true identity, so the parallels go beyond just having the same villain,” adds DC Comics historian John Wells. Another entry in the same month’s Lex-apalooza is Justice League of America #61, from editor Julius Schwartz’s office, which features Luthor among many other DC rogues. It could be that Carmine Infantino, who oversaw DC’s covers at the time, opted to alter Luthor on the Jerry Lewis cover to avoid the bad guy’s overexposure. Since the principals behind this decision have all passed, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know exactly why the cover was changed.

The issue’s 23-page cover story, “Superman Meets Jerry,” opens with Jerry, Witch Kraft, and Renfrew watching a live television report showing Superman’s aerial struggle with

a “cosmic creature,” a flying dragon. As Superman defeats the beast after a long tussle, the creature detonates, and our hero realizes he’s been fighting a robot. In the explosion, Superman is unknowingly sprayed with kryptonite dust—which was the ultimate goal of the robot’s maker, Luthor, described by Drake in the villain’s introductory caption as “A genius who, if not for his evil, could have been president, or a Nobel winner, or Richard Burton!” The kryptonite dust slowly weakens the unsuspecting Superman. As Clark Kent, he’s assigned by Daily Planet editor Perry White to interview a computer-selected bratty kid who represents “the pre-teen menace” threatening America. That interview subject is, of course, Jerry’s nephew, problem child Renfrew, uniting our stars.

Renfrew’s pranks soil Clark’s suit, forcing him to wear some of Jerry’s clothing. This leaves Kent’s Superman suit unattended long enough to fall into curious Jerry’s hands and launch the mistaken-identity scenario with Luthor as touted on the cover (both versions). Jerry, as Superman, stumbles through a comical clash with Lex and his henchman until the real Superman is finally able to set things straight. This is another funny crossover by Drake and Oksner, with the added bonus of seeing Bob’s second shot at drawing Superman. However, Oksner’s Superman family characters (Supie, Kent, Perry, and Jimmy Olsen) all follow DC’s house style of the day, with numerous swipes from such artists as Kurt Schaffenberger, Curt Swan, and Al Plastino.

“THE FLASH MEETS JERRY LEWIS” Just over a year later, another Justice Leaguer—the Fastest Man Alive—fumbled into Jerry’s world, as The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #112 (May–June 1969) teamed the comic-book kook with the Flash.

Changes were afoot with this newest Jerry/DC team-up. First, Arnold Drake had departed DC for Marvel, so E. Nelson Bridwell, DC’s other prince of parodies, scripted Jerry Lewis #112. Second, Bob Oksner only penciled the story, with inks looking to be the work of cartoonist Henry Scarpelli. And last, unlike the previous full-length team-ups, “The Flash Meets Jerry Lewis” is only sixteen pages long (less, actually, since two of those were partial pages, containing ads)—good thing it featured a fleet-footed co-star to zip through its abbreviated page count!

Bridwell, DC’s walking encyclopedia, plays upon a staple of the Flash’s continuity: the tailor for super-villain costumes. Paul Gambi, a character named after Paul Gambaccini, a frequent letterhack

LEFT: Jerry met Superman in issue #105!

ABOVE: Jerry Lewis’ Superman cover image was appropriated from this splash page to Action Comics #210.

Superman and Luthor TM & © DC Comics. The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

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Jerry and the Scarlet Speedster become fast friends in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #112.

Flash TM & © DC Comics. The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

in editor Julius Schwartz’s books, sewed the rogues’ threads in the pages of The Flash. In Jerry Lewis #112, however, standing in for Gambi is a scrawny old-timer named Pops. On the opening page, Pops is being taken for a “ride” by mobsters just as Jerry (with Renfrew) arrives with a sweater in need of dry cleaning. Jerry offers to mind the store during Pops’ absence, and inside, he and Renfrew discover a slew of super-villain costumes. “That little, old tailor must do a big Halloween business!” guesses our goofball, but his nephew gets wise to what’s going on. So This may be Barry Allen’s only underwear shot in the history of comics. From Jerry Lewis #112.

Flash TM & © DC Comics. The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

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does the Flash, who has trailed a clue to the tailor’s shop where that “jibbering idiot” Jerry hires him as a delivery boy to return dozens of villains’ costumes to their owners’ addresses. Meanwhile, we learn that Pops has been kidnapped by goons in the employ of super-magician Abra Kadabra, who is angered over his magic wand not being returned with his freshly pressed white suit. Renfrew finds the wand and starts some mystical mischief, and when the Flash returns to the shop to snoop around as Barry Allen, hapless Jerry ends up ruining Barry’s suit as he attempts to clean it. In the confusion, Allen has lost his ring containing his compressed Flash suit. So, like the Superman story, a case of mistaken identity occurs once Jerry dons the Flash’s costume and Renfrew uses Abra Kadabra’s magic wand to imbue it with super-speed.

Bridwell’s story is silly, but a lot of fun. His interpretations of the Scarlet Speedster and Barry Allen are consistent with their portrayals in the pages of The Flash, although the Flash is clearly frustrated at times with the ridiculous antics foisted upon him by Jerry. Captain Cold also makes an appearance, as does Barry’s wife Iris in a spoof of her role as the wife to a super-hero: She’s seen in the Allen home nursing a cold caused by her hasty hubby (“Barry, must you run in so fast? You stir up a draft!”). While Batman and Superman have been spoofed ad infinitum, this is one of the few Flash farces and should be appreciated for that distinction as well.

“JERRY MEETS THE NEW WONDER WOMAN” Just under a year after the Flash appeared with Jerry, Wonder Woman dropped by in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #117 (Mar.–Apr. 1970).

Of the four Lewis team-ups with Justice Leaguers, this is the one flop. The wacky notion of pairing Jerry with a super-hero played well to an appreciative audience during the Swinging Sixties, but by the time issue #117 hit the stands, DC was transitioning into a thematic renaissance, its so-called “relevance” period. Camp and craziness were out, heroes dealing with social issues were in. During the same month Jerry Lewis #117 was published, the Teen Titans chucked their costumes and became pacifists while the Justice League of America tackled pollution.

The Wonder Woman seen in Jerry Lewis was not the traditional Amazing Amazon with the star-spangled swimsuit and bullet-bouncing bracelets, but instead DC’s answer to The Avengers’ Emma Peel.

This issue was produced during the heroine’s infamous phase where her alter ego Diana Prince—now a martial-artist fashion plate instead of the frumpy military maiden from earlier tales—was the star as the “New” Wonder Woman, having relinquished her

Amazonian super-powers and costume to engage in globetrotting adventures of espionage. Co-starring in the regular Wonder Woman title was Diana’s sightless mentor I-Ching, who apparently had enough vision to excuse himself from this Jerry Lewis crossover.

You know you’re in for trouble when you open this comic book to its splash page. Shown is lovesick Jerry, fawning over a theater’s “In Person—Wonder Woman” billboard depicting the mod Diana Prince.

Diana’s former super-identity wasn’t publicly known during her “New” Wonder Woman phase, so you’ve clearly entered a continuity-free zone. It gets worse on page 2, where Jerry—with Renfrew in tow— scurries to the stage door to get Wonder Woman’s autograph as she exits. Diana, then DC’s unofficial spokesperson for Women’s Lib, recoils at a puddle of water. Jerry gallantly plops onto the puddle, allowing Diana to cross on his back, but she stumbles and injures her leg, then whines that she needs to see her physician on Paradise Island before the city’s criminals “learn about my injury, and take advantage of my helplessness.” Hmmm… let’s count the problems we’ve seen thus far: Wonder Woman’s identity being advertised, her Disney princess personality, her awkwardness, and her uncharacteristic vulnerability.

Oh, yeah—through a dimensional portal, she takes along Jerry and Renfrew to Paradise Island, which every comics fan knows is No Man’s Land. And that only brings us to the end of page 3. Diana’s doc, by the way, is also a man, Dr. Carver D. Bratwurst. There’s a half-hearted joke that explains why he’s in business among the Amazons, the story’s only attempt to address this faux pas. You’d think that E. Nelson Bridwell would know better!

Actually, Bridwell did know better, and I suspect that DC’s resident brainiac busted his fan belt when he read Jerry Lewis #117. The uncredited author of this story was Alan R. Riefe, a multifaceted writer whose credits included magazine articles, gag books, and novels, including the Cage crime series. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, he penned a smattering of stories for DC, mostly in mystery titles like The Witching Hour. Regarding his Jerry Lewis/Wonder Woman story, you can’t assign all of the blame for its gaffes to the writer, as it was edited by the timid Murray Boltinoff, best known for his editorship of the continuity-defying Batman team-ups written by Bob Haney for The Brave and the Bold.

Once you look past these lapses, the story fares a little better and at times evokes a few chuckles.

Paradise Island is being plagued by the brutish Zodor, who holds Queen Hippolyta hostage. The Amazons need a champion, and with Diana incapacitated, it’s

A few peeks at the train wreck that was Jerry Lewis #117.

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

The Adventures of Jerry Lewis © the respective copyright holder.

up to Jerry to save the day. Clothed in the pelt of Hercules (“Jercules is more like it!” quips Renfrew), Jerry plays gladiator, then cross-dresses as Diana, the warrior, to lead the other Amazons into battle.

The Oksner/Scarpelli art team once again delivers the goods (although here Bob relies upon facial swipes from Wonder Woman’s artist, Mike Sekowsky), but despite their competence, this story still stands out as being wrong, and wrong for its time.

Actually, by this point it had become evident that DC Comics’ The Adventures of Jerry Lewis had passed its expiration date. In the real world, Mr. Lewis had been inching away from wacky film comedies into loftier enterprises, including The Jerry Lewis 97

MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association) Labor Day Telethon, which launched in 1966. DC axed the Jerry Lewis comic book in 1971 after an impressive span of 124 issues (plus one collected edition, Super DC Giant #S-19). When it was in its prime, however, The Adventures of Jerry Lewis may very well have been “America’s Funniest Comic Mag,” and its Batman, Superman, and Flash team-ups are among comicdom’s funniest stories featuring those heroes.

Special thanks to John Wells for his assistance, including his identification of the source of the Superman image on the Jerry Lewis #105 cover.

And to the French people for their love of Lewis.

BOB HOPE, SUPER-FRIEND Believe it or not, Bob Hope beat Jerry Lewis to the super-hero team-up party!

DC’s The Adventures of Bob Hope #92 (Apr.–May 1965), a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde spoof where Bob the “funster turns monster,” featured a cameo by Superman.

“Missile Beach Party” was the title of Bob Hope #94 (Aug.–Sept. 1965), a Muscle Beach Party-meets-Flash Gordon take-off. It included a cameo by Aquaman.

Not long after Batman and Robin dropped in on Jerry Lewis, they made a cameo in Bob Hope #103 (Feb.–Mar. 1967). In “The Love Machine,” Super-Hip’s new dating computer spews out all types of “perfect” couples, including the Dynamic Duo. All three Hope stories were written by Arnold Drake. Bob Oksner illustrated issue #92 (his first time drawing Superman) and 94, while the art team for #103 was Carmine Infantino and Mike Esposito.

RIGHT: The Fat Fury’s first appearance in Herbie #8.

Art by Ogden Whitney.

TM & © Roger Broughton.

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HERBIE THE FAT FURY

Have Lollipop, Will Fight Crime Whenever I read the adventures of Herbie, the improbable, unexpressive hero from American Comics Group whose capricious chronicles were written by Shane O’Shea (a pseudonym for ACG editor Richard E. Hughes) and deliciously illustrated by Ogden Whitney, I feel like a fly on the wall in the Sixties-era DC Comics office of Superman editor Mort Weisinger.

Herbie Popnecker was a square peg in a round body, an innocent and undervalued oddball whose inelegant appearance belied his inherent greatness… making him the cartoon equivalent of E. Nelson Bridwell, Weisinger’s sheepish but brilliant assistant editor.

There’s a physical resemblance between Herbie and Nelson, although Bridwell’s vocabulary was far greater than his ACG counterpart’s, who tended to speak in sentence fragments. Mort would pummel Nelson with sometimes-public verbal abuse, while Herbie’s pigheaded father, Pincus Popnecker, was merciless to his son, belittling him as a lazy, “fat little nothing.”

Herbie had super-powers, including the abilities to walk through the air, travel through time, summon spirits, and communicate with wildlife, skills mostly

connected to his trademark magic lollipops (which could also be used to “bop” an adversary on the noggin), while Nelson wielded the same talents in the stories he scripted. Once Weisinger retired in 1970, Bridwell was emancipated, while Pincus still continues to insult “the plump lump” in comics limbo.

In the case of ACG’s Herbie #8 (Mar. 1965), Pincus’ putdown becomes Herbie’s call to action. A Kong-sized super-villain named Mr. Horrible, a crook so super-strong he can peel open safe doors and use telephone poles to swat cars, is on a crime spree.

President Johnson (LBJ made frequent cameo appearances in Herbie) announces on television to the American people, “This is a time of crisis, with law and order menaced. What are you doing about it?”

Instead of protecting his childlike son, Mr. Popnecker badgers Herbie: “He’s right! Like he says… what are you doing about it?” “Can’t deny it,” Herbie thinks.

“What am I doing about it?”

So Herbie retreats to his room, and for inspiration flips through his comic-book collection (which includes Skyman, a Golden Age super-hero series drawn by Ogden Whitney; Skyman “beats up thousand fellas,” our star mumbles). Herbie reflects upon a different hero: “Another one so strong, makes Niagara Falls run backwards.” He sets his sights on becoming a “costume hero” and enrolls in the American Hero School, a trade school for super-hero wannabes that provides, according to its billboard, a diploma and hero license. Herbie’s unique talents like air-walking don’t jibe with the academy’s curriculum, and he’s expelled: “Sorry, but you’ll never make a costume hero!” he’s told.

Meanwhile, Mr. Horrible continues his crime campaign, making mincemeat of the other costume heroes—including the American Hero School’s recent graduates. Blowhard Pincus rants that he “may have to learn to be a costume hero myself!” to handle this crisis. “Anything but that!” thinks Herbie, who digs through the family’s used Halloween costumes to find the right ensemble for crimefighting.

After modeling (and rejecting) the garb of an Indian chief, a fairy princess, and a gorilla, he settles on red longjohns (with a loosely buttoned poop flap), a flowing blue cape, a blue cowl, a toilet plunger on his head, no shoes, and a “Fat Fury” chest—make that belly—insignia… and the world’s newest costume hero is born! With this nonsensical figure, “O’Shea” and Whitney gleefully mock comicdom’s heroic ideal of meaty musclemen. Of course, the Fat Fury ultimately takes down Mr. Horrible, earning the respect of an adoring public but the continuing disdain of his clueless dad (“Can you imagine how proud I’d be if

my son could be a great hero like that?”).

The Fat Fury’s adventures continued in every other issue of ACG’s Herbie. Unlike other parodies of the day, which spoofed the standard super-hero tropes, the Fat Fury series was… well, just plain nuts, putting the heavy hero in all sorts of outrageous scenarios: Herbie the Fat Fury fought a super-villain who used hypnotic bowling balls, took a Dr. Strangelove missile ride, fought a runaway gorilla, a two-headed Chinese spy, his evil twin (Phony Phat Phury), and Dracula, and even teamed up with ACG’s Nemesis and Magicman. While other super-spoofs—even the best of the lot—quickly became formulaic, in the hands of Herbie’s whiz team, the Fat Fury’s stories were unpredictable and a blast to read. Too bad they ended in late 1967, when American Comics Group stopped producing funnybooks. Of all of ACG’s properties, Herbie remains its crown jewel, and the short-lived but beguiling Fat Fury, an added sparkle.

Original Ogden Whitney cover art to the Fat Fury’s last appearance, Herbie #22.

Herbie was cancelled with the next issue.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Roger Broughton.

LEFT: Herbie Popnecker and E. Nelson Bridwell.

Herbie TM & © Roger Broughton.

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PER GOOF A SuSU per-Spoof f or s r e d a e Young R

RIGHT: Super Goof, v.1: Goofy goes into action in The Phantom Blot #2 .

TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc .

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Some super-spoofs emerge full-blown, like Ralph Bakshi’s The Mighty Heroes, created in a flash of inspiration (and desperation) during a CBS pitching session.

Other super-spoofs detour from their original concepts, like the Inferior Five, envisioned as the Inferior Four, a Fantastic Four parody.

Then you have the work-in-progress, like Walt Disney’s goober-gobbling Super Goof. Unlike the Inferior Five, whose re-development took place before the publication of their first adventure, readers of Gold Key Comics’ Disney stories witnessed Super Goof’s evolution in three separate stages.

As Cathy Sherman Freeman revealed in her 2012 book A Disney Childhood: Comic Books to Sailing Ships, it was George Sherman, the chief of the Disney Publications Department, and Peter Woods, a Disney U.K. merchandising agent, who concocted in 1964 the idea of turning Disney’s resident dumbbell, the loveable Goofy, into a super-hero, in response to the resurgence of caped crusaders. The assignment fell to Del Connell, one of the linchpins of the Disney creative enterprises, a master storyteller who had been involved with the company’s pantheon in animation, comic books, and comic strips. Connell and Mickey Mouse artist Paul Murry co-produced the 32-page adventure “The Phantom Blot Meets Super Goof” in The Phantom Blot #2 (cover-dated Apr. 1965, going on sale January 28th of that year), a short-lived Gold Key series starring a Disney bad guy. The prototypical Super Goof shown flying on that cover isn’t the version in red longjohns we now imagine when thinking of the hero—his thermalunderwear “tights” are indigo, with a patched red cape tied around his neck—and the story itself is a bit of a cheat, relegating Super Goof’s super-powers to Goofy’s dreams.

Super Goof, phase two, appears three months later, in the four-page “All’s Well That Ends Well,”

another Connell/Murry collaboration, running in Donald Duck #102 (July 1965). Here, the concept has been fine-tuned: Super Goof’s longjohns are now red, with a blue cape, although his chest insignia is a “G” instead of the overlapping “SG” we’d soon come to expect. His super-powers are now the result of a Gyro Gearloose-created high-tech super-cape. The story mainly features Super Goof zooming about, awkwardly demonstrating his powers.

The third time’s a charm, as they say, and when Super Goof returns two months later—in his own magazine, Super Goof #1—he is now in the costume in which we recognize him, including the green hat he normally wears as Goofy. That premiere issue introduces the mechanism through which Goofy acquires temporary super-powers: an irradiated goober (peanut) patch in his backyard.

And thus, the formula is established: Once Goofy gulps a super-goober, he gets Supermaninspired super-powers and super-senses, including some the Man of Steel would never dream of, even in a red kryptonite hallucination, like Super Goof’s “television,” his field of sight tuning into TV broadcasts. As good-natured Goofy, he keeps a supply of super-goobers in his hat, ready to spring into action as Super Goof whenever trouble arises.

His weakness—other than his less-than-super intellect—is the temporary nature of his powers, which tend to fizzle out at inopportune times.

Clichés are lifted from other sources to round out Super Goof’s mythos: He heeds the call of the law (Chief O’Hara), has his own Lois Lane (Clarabelle Cow) and Lex Luthor (Emil Eagle), and a sidekick in

EVERYTHING’S ARCHIE

Pureheart the Powerful and the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. Archie Andrews and his pals and gals were comicdom’s equal-opportunity fad exploiters. Whatever the Sixties’ craze, you’d find it in an Archie comic: monsters and flying saucers (Archie’s Mad House), Beatlemania, go-go dancing, surfing, the Monkees (the Archies), Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (Archie’s TV Laugh-Out), and the big two (of this book, at least), super-heroes and spies. During the Camp Age, Archie faced front as a caped crusader—Pureheart the Powerful, a.k.a. Captain Pureheart—and as a secret agent—A.R.C.H.I.E., a.k.a. the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. Archie first became the super-powerful Pureheart in Life with Archie #42 (Oct. 1965). In “Cold Cash,” Riverdale’s richest tycoon, Hiram Lodge (Veronica’s daddy), is the target of the thieving human icicle, Ice Cube. Archie saves the day as Pureheart the Powerful, exhibiting super-strength and an occasional bout of clumsiness for comedic effect. Meanwhile, one of his two girlfriends, Betty Cooper, made her first appearance as Superteen (sometimes Super-Teen)

the form of Goofy’s whiz-kid nephew Gilbert, who occasionally pops super-goobers to become Super Gilly.

In addition to recurring scuffles with the baddest of Disney’s bad guys, those rotten Beagle Boys, Super Goof often tangles with super-villains created specifically for his title, like Mr. Mystery-Man, who controls minds with a hypnotic eye (Captain Action’s foe Dr. Evil’s hypnotic eye came first, by the way).

Super Goof’s rogues’ gallery includes no shortage of criminal scientists with diabolical doctorates: Dr. Syclocks, super-thief Dr. Stigma, Dr. Tempo and his cold ray, and Dr. Hydenzik.

Very little of Super Goof was original. But while kids were chuckling at Not Brand Echh and The Inferior Five, at least their little brothers and sisters had a goofy super-hero all their own.

Although Super Goof’s super-powers were prone to disappear, the character outlasted all of the other super-spoofs of the Camp Age: His title ran for 74 issues, until 1984! Omigarsh!

TOP LEFT: Super Goof, v.2: panel from Donald Duck #102.

TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

BOTTOM LEFT: Super Goof, v.3: Super Goof #1 hits the stands!

TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Archie’s double duty as a Swinging Sixties superhero and secret agent!

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

that same month in Betty and Veronica #118, using her mighty strength to rescue a helpless, nonPureheart Archie and to give her rival, that stuck-up Veronica, the super-what-for!

Both heroes’ costumes were patterned after Superman’s, but with their reds and blues reversed from the Man of Steel’s togs. And both stories shared the same hook: In Superteen’s premiere, titled “Just 101

Imagine,” Betty’s super-identity was her fantasy, and as we discover at the end of the Pureheart tale, a napping Archie has dreamt the whole Pureheart adventure. Holy Hero Hallucinations!

It was no dream as Superteen and Pureheart promptly returned, however. In Betty and Veronica #119 (Nov. 1965), Superteen is back to protect Archie from the Consumer, a matter-eating monster with suction breath. Two months after his premiere, Pureheart the Powerful appears in Life with Archie (LWA) #44. This time his costume is less like Superman’s, its former red now orange (although it would vacillate Bob White’s original cover art for LWA #42, Pureheart’s premiere.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

RIGHT: I’ve got a C.R.U.S.H. on you… The first Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. issue, LWA #45.

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

Frank Doyle.

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from orange to red in future tales), and he rescues Betty from that slick-haired trickster Reggie Mantle— a.k.a. the Bloodshot Eye—who, like Eclipso, fires sizzling bolts from his swollen left eyeball. Kooky!

As if being a teenager and a super-hero weren’t enough, Archie’s next extracurricular activity is as the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. (a meaningless acronym) in LWA #45 (Jan. 1966). In this feature, Archie—or A.R.C.H.I.E.—and his allies B.E.T.T.Y. and J.U.G.H.E.A.D. are agents of P.O.P. (Protect Our Planet), sworn enemies of the crime cartel C.R.U.S.H. (riffing on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s T.H.R.U.S.H.).

A.R.C.H.I.E. seems a smooth operator when clashing with the Toymaker, a C.R.U.S.H.-sanctioned super-villain out to steal designs from Mr. Lodge, but his head is easily turned by the spy who loves him, C.R.U.S.H. agent V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A. (Wiseguy R.E.G.G.I.E. is a C.R.U.S.H. agent, too.) The P.O.P. agents use non-lethal firearms (an ice gun, a sleep

gun, and for B.E.T.T.Y., a lipstick gun) to subdue cloak-and-dagger types, and wear “POP” pinback buttons on their lapels or shirts (taking the “secret” out of “secret agent”). Wacky!

Who came up with this stuff? Fantastic Frank Doyle, that’s who, one of Archie’s most prolific writers and the company’s chief scribe for decades. Doyle was a visual thinker, having been trained as an artist at the Pratt Institute and even illustrating comics for a while during the Golden Age before retiring his pencil for a typewriter. As he rerouted the kids from high school into these fantastical realms, Doyle never altered their personalities—Archie still acted like Archie, whether he was flapping his cape or making a spy cry uncle. Archie artists Bob White and Bill Vigoda were the main pencilers of the Pureheart the Powerful and Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. features, while Dan DeCarlo penciled the two Superteen stories in Betty and Veronica.

Riverdale’s super-hero universe expanded exponentially. Pureheart’s origin was told in LWA #46, which revealed that Archie can summon his “inner goodness” and will himself into a super-hero because his “PH (pure heart) Factor” triggers his powers whenever Veronica or Betty are in trouble (which conveniently occurred in every Pureheart story). The PH Factor also fogged people’s memories of Pureheart’s super-heroics once his job was done. In LWA #48, Reggie summoned his avarice and became the anti-hero Evilheart, a foil to Pureheart who would pitch in to help when things got tough. In issue #50, Riverdale got its own Justice League, the United

Three—Pureheart, Superteen, and Captain Hero (actually Jughead Jones)—who joined forces to rescue a brainwashed Veronica from the clutches of the dastardly duo of Evilheart and Mad Doctor Doom (a villain transplanted from the pages of Little Archie).

The super-heroes then branched out, with Evilheart appearing in Reggie and Me, Superteen in Betty and Me, and Pureheart the Powerful and Captain Hero getting their own books. (Not to be outdone, Little Archie—the adventures of Archie as a child—featured Little Pureheart stories, and even Little Evilheart made an appearance!) Their super-powers were of the garden variety, mostly super-strength (except for Evilheart, who was powerless), but occasionally a cockamamie super-power would emerge if it would guarantee a laugh, like Pureheart’s Intercranial TV. Superteen’s transformations were attributed to Betty’s twirling of her blonde ponytail, while Jughead would become Captain Hero after reciting this oath to his trademark headwear:

TOP & BOTTOM: Jughead’s Captain Hero costume went from yellow (LEFT) to blue during his brief super-stint.

Teeny weeny magic beanie Pointing towards the sky, Give me muscle, power, vigor, Form a SUPER GUY!

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

Meanwhile, the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. took over Life with Archie with issue #51. V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A. and R.E.G.G.I.E. were reformed into P.O.P. agents, and once TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s spin-off The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. debuted, Betty was billed as the Girl from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. Frank Doyle’s spy

spoofs got zanier with each issue: The Batusi craze inspired the villain the Whistler, whose music forced the P.O.P. agents to dance in LWA #52, and LWA #59 spotlighted Archie’s red jalopy, souped up into the P.O.P.mobile.

Between these two hero-vs.-villain genres, there seemed to be no end of threats to the previously Norman Rockwellian suburban landscape of Riverdale. Super-villains were in high supply, some of them leaping the fence between the Pureheart and R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. stories. Atom Man, Birdman, the Bowman, the Collector (who trapped go-go girls under glass), the robot Computo (no relation to the Legion of Super-Heroes villain), the Demon Dropout (a.k.a. the Mad Chemist), the Devilish Disguiser, Dr. Demon, Dr. Detest, Dr. Nose, the Drummer, the Enforcer, Fang Finkster, Flamethrower, the devil Hotfoot, the mind-controlling sexpot Looker, the Mad Clown, the Mad Music Master, the Mailman, Mr.

LEFT: Even Reggie Mantle got into the super-“hero” act!

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

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RIGHT: Showcase #62, introducing the Inferior Five. Cover by Joe Orlando.

TM & © DC Comics.

Machine, Mr. X, Mod Man, the Octopus, the Postman, the Reptile, Sandman, Super Spy, Tar-Man (who spewed asphalt!), Toyman, the Whammy, and Witch Doctor were among the super-crooks causing trouble for the gang.

Two years after Archie first donned a cape, the super-hero and spy fads were waning and Pureheart, the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., and company vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Pureheart the Powerful (which had been retitled Captain Pureheart) and Captain Hero were cancelled, Betty and Reggie returned to normal teen life, and the new hot thing—the Archies—squeezed the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. out of Life with Archie. The end of the Camp Age certainly contributed to their demises, but in Archie Comics’ case, the publisher’s own excesses, particularly with superfluous super-villains, caused the properties to implode, an example of too much of a good thing.

The World’s Greatest Goof-Ups DC Comics’ Inferior Five were the Camp Era’s Guardians of the Galaxy (movie version): a team of ill-motivated, laughing-stock misfits, united by fate and forced to work together. They were also the product of a time when it was fashionable to laugh at, and with, blundering authority figures, from nervous deputies (Barney Fife) to fumbling frontiersmen (F Troop) to meatheaded marines (Gomer Pyle). As a super-hero parody, the Inferior Five were certainly not

CAPTAIN SPROCKET Archie Comics’ Archie’s Mad House was the home of unorthodox takes on the Archie gang, plus otherworldly and crackpot humor involving UFOs, aliens, witches (like Sabrina), and monsters. It was in this bizarro book that Captain Sprocket, one of the Camp Age’s earliest super-hero parodies, debuted in issue #25 (Apr. 1963), in a story drawn by Joe Edwards (and possibly written by George Gladir).

This way-out wonder, a “space scientist, space adventurer, [and] space loverboy”—or “the World’s Only Three-inOne Hero,” as he was billed—was Space Ghost with Roger Ramjet’s personality, years before either of those Gary Owens-voiced characters were created. For some inexplicable reason, the Feds in Washington, D.C., would summon Captain Sprocket in times of national or global crisis, only to be flummoxed by his ineptitude—although somehow, someway, he’d always defeat his enemy.

Captain Sprocket was an irregularly published feature, appearing off and on in Archie’s Mad House throughout the Sixties, even scoring some cover appearances along the way.

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THE INFERIOR FIVE

alone, tripping over contemporary costumed clowns such as Captain Nice, Forbush-Man, the Mighty Heroes, and Captain Klutz. As characters, they were “the greatest group of rejects in comics history.” But as a comic-book series, The Inferior Five was far from inept, thanks to the talented writer who first gave these oddballs voice, E. Nelson Bridwell.

In a 1981 interview in Comics Feature magazine, Bridwell acknowledged the original Inferior Five editor, Jack Miller, with brainstorming a book about incompetent super-heroes in what Miller called “The Inferior Four,” an obvious spoof of Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four. “At first I was going to write the script myself,” Miller revealed in the lettercol of the I-5’s first

adventure in Showcase #62 (May–June 1966). “In fact, I’d gone so far as to slip a sheet of paper into the typewriter before the full enormity and shame of the project struck me.” Faux embarrassment aside, Miller was no stranger to storytelling. His scripting credits for DC stretched back two decades, including Aquaman and Manhunter from Mars, and over time he employed a plethora of pen names, most of which shared his own initials (Jay Marr, Jesse Marian, Jason Mallory, etc.). Born Jacob Edward Miller, Jack had writing credits in other media including animation (The Mighty Hercules, The New Three Stooges), and took an editor’s chair at DC in 1964, chaperoning its romance line. Miller was sometimes blustery, with lavish tastes, sporting pricey suits personally tailored for him. After a couple of years of blue-penciling heart-jerkers with syrupy titles like “Too Young

to Go Steady” and “Someone of My Own to Love,” Miller added to his workload two new humor comics he developed, the Beatlemania-inspired Swing with Scooter (see Chapter 5), which he co-edited and cowrote with his assistant editor, Barbara Friedlander, and The Inferior Five. (A year later, Miller took over Strange Adventures from editor Jack Schiff, overseeing that title’s gripping “Deadman” feature, and even later, he picked up from Robert Kanigher DC’s Metal Men and Wonder Woman books.)

In his Showcase #62 text page, Miller quipped, “I realized then what I needed—a script writer I could blame later!” Enter E. Nelson Bridwell, an Oklahoma native who started working at DC in 1965 as an

assistant to Superman editor Mort Weisinger. Weisinger’s ironfisted management style is legend, as are the stories of how he would badger his brilliant but timid assistant. None of that abuse was visible to the young fans of DC’s comics, however.

At DC, Nelson was the smartest guy in the room.

A voracious reader, he was a trivia expert, well versed in the Bible, mythology, folklore, literature, musicals, and comic books. At a time when continuity was rarely policed at DC Comics, Bridwell was a stickler for it, although his appeals for cohesiveness in DC’s titles sometimes fell upon the deaf ears of his editorial superiors or of DC’s writers. It was the little stuff that bugged him—why Aquaman’s Atlantis was different from Lori Lemaris’, for example—the type of details that get under the skin of a fan, as opposed to a casual reader.

Bridwell was also a skilled parodist, counting MAD Magazine among his earliest credits. It’s fortunate for us that Miller turned to Bridwell for his “Inferior Four” concept—had Miller himself scripted his imagined FF send-up, it’s unlikely that this limited concept would have survived past a Showcase tryout. But Nelson gave “The Inferior Four” substance by sidestepping the intended source of the take-off (although he’d later get around to lampooning the FF) and by instead developing original characters. “I completely created the heroes as a clown set, and Joe Orlando created the costumes,” Bridwell told interviewer Margaret O’Connell in 1981 in Comics Feature #10.

He also gave his rechristened Inferior Five big shoes to fill. Comics fan and historian Rich Morrisey, in an Inferior Five article in Fantagraphics Books’ fanzine Amazing Heroes #35 (Nov. 15, 1983), wrote, “Logical-minded even in a parody, Bridwell at once wondered why a group of self-styled ‘inferior’ heroes would enter the trade at all. Perhaps because their parents insisted on it?” As Bridwell himself put it, in his 1981 Comics Feature interview, “They had to please their parents.”

Yes, Bridwell’s next-generation heroes, the Inferior Five, were the super-powered offspring of the Freedom Brigade, the one-time protectors of Megalopolis. In the I-5’s inaugural adventure, “The Coming

A 1966 house ad promoting the I-5’s debut.

TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: A rejected, unpublished version of Showcase #62’s cover, by Orlando.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

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daughter of Freedom Brigade member Princess Power; the Blimp, secretly blubbery restaurateur Herman Cramer, son of the Flash analog Captain Swift, who slowly drifts through the air like a dirigible; the cowardly White Feather, fashion photog William King, who, as the son of the Green Arrow pastiche the Bowman, inherited his father’s archery motif, with this catch, in Bridwell’s words: “instead of goose feathers, his arrows are fletched with chicken feathers”; and Awkwardman, beach bum Leander Brent, a musclebound “one-man demolition crew” who has the combined powers of his parents, Mr. Might and Mermaid (analogs of Superman and Lori Lemaris), with none of their grace! (According to Rich Morrisey, the name Awkwardman came from Bridwell’s earlier letter to Adventure Comics suggesting that name for a BizarroAquaman in that series’ “Tales of the Bizarro World” feature.)

TOP: Myron’s folks remember the good, old days of the Freedom Brigade.

BOTTOM: The next wave!

TM & © DC Comics.

of the Costumed Incompetents,” police informer Louis the Lip’s tip that a mad scientist is on the loose gives the authorities alarm. “We’re not equipped to combat crazy doctors!” whines the police chief.

“After all, we disbanded our mad scientist division twenty years ago—after the Freedom Brigade ended the career of Dr. Evil!” (Merely a throwaway name, Bridwell’s Dr. Evil bears no relation to the blue-hued alien invader of the same name who would plague Ideal Toys’ Captain Action two years later… who bears no relation to the bald-pated world dominator of the same name played by Mike Myers in the Austin Powers film trilogy beginning in 1997.) At first, the now-elderly Patriot and Lady Liberty, described by Bridwell as “two red-white-and-blue heroes” of the Forties, fish their costumes out of mothballs and are eager to pursue the mad scientist. But they persuade their nebbish son, Myron Victor (who “used to be a 97-pound weakling before he lost weight!”), to carry on in their footsteps. Reluctantly, Myron agrees, visiting the Heroic Costume Shop (their motto: “Tailors for Costumed Crimefighters”) for his battle togs to shield his true identity. (Myron thinks, “No one must know that it’s Myron Victor who’s making a great big idiot out of himself!”)

Soon, our heroes meet for the first time: Myron as Merryman, the puny but brainy team leader in a purple jester’s suit (spinning off of Bridwell’s original name for the hero, Wonderfool, a character he had created during his childhood), a martial artist and boxer of the lowest caliber; Dumb Bunny, alias shapely fashion model Athena Tremor, the scatterbrained, super-strong

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After banding together, the junior heroes consider various team names (the Jester’s League of America, the Fantastic Farce, and the Doomed Patrol), settling on Merryman’s suggestion, the Inferior Five. Meanwhile, the aforementioned mad scientist, Dr. Gregory Gruesome—destined to become the I-5’s recurring foe—is working on a death ray from his junkyard secret lab, but laments his lack of resources: “Other mad scientists are rich! They turn out multi-million-dollar missiles like they were paper planes! Why can’t I be like Luthor? He never has a shortage of materials!” Doc Gruesome creates a robot out of trash—bathtubs, vacuum hoses, a radio—to locate a ruby to power his death ray’s laser. The robot attracts the attention of the I-5, who destroy the automaton through a series of flubs. Next up, they battle Dr. Gruesome himself, who’s driving his dilapidated Crime Car, which is similarly disabled thanks to the Inferior Five’s buffoonery. The hapless heroes converge on the doctor’s junkyard hideaway, where the evil scientist, having finalized his death ray, uses it against Dumb Bunny—only to have it backfire once its laser beam is accidentally deflected by the glamour-obsessed heroine’s compact mirror. In 23½ pages, Bridwell toyed with the conventions of the costumed crimefigher world, satirizing the Justice Society/League, super-hero origins, alter egos, mad scientists, secret headquarters and super-weapons, super-powers and weaknesses, and hero vs. villain clashes, with those witless wonders, the I-5, stumbling to victory. The writer’s concluding caption conveys the self-deprecatory tone of the series: “Will the Inferior Five always have the dumb luck to win?

We’ll find out when they return—which will be soon if we aren’t careful!”

Assigned to draw this DC mess-terpiece was former EC Comics and MAD artist Joe Orlando, who

was also working with Jack Miller on his new Swing with Scooter book. As Miller wrote in Showcase #62’s text page, Orlando was originally slated to pencil and ink the Inferior Five, but “the poor guy ran out of brushes, pens, ink, energy, and time.” Orlando’s well was apparently so depleted that he quietly tapped Jerry Grandenetti to ghost-pencil the Inferior Five for him, retouching some of the art to bring it more into line with his own style. Mike Esposito, best known to DC fans as the inker of penciler Ross Andru on Metal Men and Wonder Woman, was tapped as the I-5 inker. Orlando/Grandenetti and Esposito meshed nicely as a team, but the ghost penciler/penciler lacked an affinity for super-heroes, so “Orlando’s” rendition of these costumed clods was at times stilted. Still, largely due to Bridwell’s wit and the appeal of the characters themselves, the Inferior Five’s first story clicked.

Two months later, the I-5 returned in their second tryout issue, Showcase #63, wherein Nelson Bridwell took on Marvel Comics: “Put up your dukes!” challenges Merryman, the last man standing among his unconscious I-5ers, all kayoed by the Incredible Hulk. Yes, the Hulk. Kinda. As the interior story reveals, this Hulk lookalike (in purple gym shorts instead of tattered purple trousers) is Man-Mountain, alias “Brute” Brainard, who transforms into DC’s own Ol’ Greenskin after exposure to Phi Beta Kappa radiation. This was one of five Hulk homages occurring at DC Comics in the course of a year.

Bridwell targets the X-Men in the I-5’s third story.

TM & © DC Comics.

That Hulk-abaloo was, no doubt, a coincidence, as the stuffed shirts at DC at that time still mostly disregarded Stan Lee’s upstart Marvel as serious competition. Not Nelson. With his I-5 proxy, Merryman (who, like Bridwell, was always the brainiac among his peers), Nelson zeroed in on the House of Ideas’ characters through the super-weapon of parody. In his tale “Conquer Man-Mountain— Because He’s There,” Bridwell pokes fun at Marvel by making super-villains out of the Avengers—or, in this case, variants thereof—portraying them as the middle-aged former foes of the Freedom Brigade.

We meet the fleet-footed, short-winded Speed Demon (Quicksilver); the winged archer, the Sparrow (Hawkeye); the Nazi metal man with a thick German accent, the Masked Swastika (Iron Man); and the curvy magician, the Silver Sorceress (Scarlet Witch).

(Dialogue from the villains’ reunion: Sparrow: “The Masked Swastika! We thought you were hanged for war crimes!” Masked Swastika: “Heh, heh! Dey cut me down for goot behavior!”) The Masked Swastika has assembled these revengers to settle their score with the Freedom Brigade, and after the villains’ have their vigor restored thanks to Silver Sorceress’ youth potion, they target their old foes’ children, the Inferior Five.

And thus begins the I-5’s second misadventure, with Man-Mountain tossed into the madhouse.

Abetted by artists Grandenetti/Orlando and Esposito, Bridwell once again riffs on super-hero conventions, including the character bickering popularized by Stan the Man at Marvel. Nelson’s script was loaded with

LEFT: Showcase #63, with the I-5 vs. “ManMountain.”

TM & © DC Comics.

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of DC’s Justice League of America, replaced Joe Orlando (and ghost Jerry Grandenetti), who moved over to the new book from the Miller/Friedlander office, Swing with Scooter. Sekowsky was more fluent in staging super-hero scenes than Grandenetti/ Orlando, and to the surprise of many JLA readers, was a skilled humor cartoonist. His characters had more weight than the previous wispy versions—when Awkwardman tripped, for example, the reader could almost feel the comic book quake in his hands.

A few months later, the I-5 received their own bimonthly title. Bridwell, Sekowsky, Esposito, and Miller returned with The Inferior Five #1 (Mar.–Apr. 1967), in that one issue lampooning The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (as C.O.U.S.I.N. F.R.E.D.), the Green Hornet, and the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Jack Miller’s “Inferior Four” finally got its due in issue #2, which introduced the Kookie Quartet (Mr. Manplastic, Vanishing Queen, Matchstick Kid, and Whatchamaycallit), a George M. Cohan-like songwriter who composed super-team themes, and the menace of King-Size and Tse-Tse Fly (Giant-Man and the Wasp); it also featured a Plastic Man cameo. Bridwell spoofed Tarzan in #3, Thor and Norse mythology in #4, and the French Revolution in #5. In addition to the “Dead Letter Office,” editor Miller included a second lettercol, “The Fantatical Fans Squawk,” giving away Inferior Five

Bridwell’s parody of DC Comics’ offices and politics took place in Inferior Five #6, which included (RIGHT) jabs at E.N.B. himself and his editor, Jack Miller.

TM & © DC Comics.

chortles, such as this exchange between a cop with a Chief O’Hara-inspired Irish brogue and the I-5’s leader: Cop: “Begorra! Yer the most powerful man oi’ve ever seen, Merryman—that ye are!”

Merryman: “You shouldn’t talk that way! After all, you aren’t Irish, Officer Gianelli!”

The Inferior Five received a third tryout later that year in Showcase #65 (Nov.–Dec. 1966), and by this point the concept had gelled—Bridwell was firing on all cylinders, this issue spoofing Marvel’s X-Men as the Egg’s Men, students at a super-hero academy, and Miller’s text page, “The Inferior Five Dead Letter Office,” bristled with funny letters written by fans (and some phony ones penned by the editor). What made the I-5’s latest story truly shine, however, was its new artist: Mike Sekowsky. Yes, “Big Mike,” the same fella who crammed multiple super-heroes into the panels 108

original art to readers who wrote the nastiest letters!

Bridwell’s gutsiest issue was The Inferior Five #6 (Jan.–Feb. 1968), where he peeled back the veneer of the vaunted halls of DC to peek at, through satire, some of the idiosyncrasies of the publishing house and its personnel. Its cover gave the appearance of being yet another super-hero farce, with the I-5 surrounded DC super-stars Superman and Superboy (!), Batman and Robin, the Justice League, the Metal Men, the Blackhawks (in their dreadful superhero guises), and the Elongated Man (Wonder Woman was curiously absent), all revolting against the title’s bungling characters. The story inside, however, eschewed the expected superhero parody. In Bridwell’s “How to Make a Bomb,” team leader Merryman opens the tale by saying, “We have received numerous requests asking for a complete explanation of how an issue of this magazine is produced. What

bothers us is that these requests have come from the editor, the writer, and the artists.” From there, the company’s “big boss” (executive vice president Irwin Donenfeld), characterized as a petulant child named I.D. who brandished a “D.C.” lollipop (à la Herbie Popnecker) to head-bonk insubordinates, emerges from his office to check on the progress of the latest Inferior Five issue. Bridwell, with artists Sekowsky and Esposito, provides a sidesplitting backstage pass through DC’s offices, burlesquing its editors and production staff. Nelson portrays himself as a frequently abused nebbish, in this case at the mercy of not only of Mort Weisinger but also Donenfeld and the story’s real “villain,” Inferior Five editor Jack Miller, caricatured as a self-aggrandizing overlord perpetually being fitted for a tailored suit.

Inferior Five #6 seems like a nutty behind-the-scenes spoof worthy of the typewriter of Not Brand Echh’s Stan “The Man” Lee or “Rascally” Roy Thomas, but one suspects it may have been Nelson’s sly joke, a veiled vengeance ploy against those who didn’t take him seriously. (Bridwell even snuck in a cameo by a lisping Dr. Sivana, arch-foe of the original Captain Marvel.)

That was the beginning of the end for The Inferior Five. With issue #7, Joe Orlando replaced Jack Miller as editor, ordering drastic changes to the book. A new logo was introduced, prefixed as “The New” Inferior Five (let’s face it, aside from 1980’s The New Teen Titans, any comic that added “The New” to its logo was surely on its last legs). Sekowsky and Esposito were out as artists, replaced by Win Mortimer and Tex Blaisdell, who offered a crisply rendered comic book that looked a little too polished for such unpolished buffoons. Miller’s lettercols were axed for “Uncle Merry’s Mailbag,” with Merryman “answering” fan mail. And Bridwell was instructed to emphasize story over parody.

Issue #7 led the I-5 into the sewers in pursuit of a villain called the Blast. Down below, they ran into a slew of guest-stars, from Ed Norton (Art Carney’s

FANTASY FILM CAST: THE INFERIOR FIVE, THE TV SERIES (1966) Merryman: Wally Cox Dumb Bunny: Carol Wayne Awkwardman: Mike Henry The Blimp: Buddy Hackett White Feather: Lyle Waggoner

sewer cleaner from TV’s The Honeymooners), the Fox and the Crow, Donald Duck, Marvel spoofs (Prince Nabob the Sub-Moron, Iron Pants, and the Cobweb Kid), and other walk-ons. Issue #8 featured the return of Dr. Gruesome, attacking Megalopolis with a giant trash pile.

Bridwell had had enough of this “new” I-5—he plotted but did not dialogue that issue, which was scripted by Don Segall. Nelson slipped away during the next issue. As reported by Rich Morrisey in Amazing Heroes, “Bridwell privately admits to plotting #9, but not #10, which he recalls as having been plotted by Sergio Aragonés. Mark Evanier adds that the dialogue in #10, and probably #9 as well, was probably by Howie Post” (The Dropouts, Anthro).

The Inferior Five #10 (Sept.–Oct. 1968) coverfeatured guest-star Superman, as well as several returning Marvel take-offs, rallying to stop an alien invasion. The manic magic of its earliest stories now a distant memory, issue #10 was the series’ last.

The Inferior Five have managed to sneak out of limbo from time to time. A two-issue revival as a reprint series came and went in 1972, with little fanfare.

The I-5 were among the throng of Showcase characters co-starring in that series’ 100th issue in 1978.

In 1980, Mark Evanier was hired by Ruby-Spears Animation to develop The Inferior Five as a Saturday morning cartoon, but the show wasn’t picked up. And in the decades since, the I-5 have managed pop-ups in random DC books, most notably in Grant Morrison’s Animal Man #25 in 1990, in Phil Foglio’s 1991 Angel and the Ape miniseries (appropriately so, since Bridwell also co-created that concept), in a team-up with the Legion of Substitute Heroes in 2010’s The Brave and the Bold #35, and in 2015’s Bat-Mite #5.

Not too shabby for a group of rejects!

Marvel takeoffs and the Man of Steel send off the Inept Avengers in their last issue, #10.

Cover by Win Mortimer and Tex Blaisdell.

TM & © DC Comics.

The Bridwell/I-5 #6 material in this essay appeared in Back Issue #81 and appears here in edited form.

Special thanks to John Wells and Mike Tiefenbacher.

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GO-GO

Charlton’s Nutty New Talent Showcase Go-Go is a teen comic!

Go-Go is a spoof comic!

No, it’s a teen comic!

It’s a spoof comic!

Hold on, there! Go-Go is two, two, two comics in one! (With apologies to Certs.)

No comic book of the Swinging Sixties glommed onto trends with more groovy gusto than Go-Go. The same could be said of its publisher, Charlton Comics, the periodicals packaging, printing, and distribution house in Derby, Connecticut.

MAKING MAGAZINES FOR A SONG RIGHT: An issue of Hit Parader. © the respective copyright holder.

Charlton’s lampoon/top tune hybrid, Go-Go #1 (June 1966). © the respective copyright holder.

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If there was a reader market for a genre, Charlton had at least one magazine or comic that milked it, be it rock and roll, crossword puzzles, Westerns, hot rods, girls’ love stories, super-heroes, funny animals, mystery, science fiction… you name it.

Charlton’s publications, especially its comic books, often suffered from spotty and unpredictable

distribution. “Spotty and unpredictable” might also describe the company’s product. Quality took a back seat to volume, as Charlton’s presses were primed to crank, crank, crank, rarely slowing down. These printed comic-book pages might be poorly trimmed, with ragged edges, or their staples misaligned, or their artwork marred with ink blotches. Word balloons and captions were often typeset to save the cost of paying a letterer, earning the credit “Lettered by A. Machine.” And in the battle for newsstand rack space, since Charlton lacked the name recognition boasted by the majors, its comics sometimes remained bundled and stacked in warehouses or storerooms, only seeing the light of day after their logos were torn off to earn retailer credit.

Comic books weren’t Charlton’s primary product, at least not in the beginning. In the early Thirties, Italian-immigrant brick mason John Santangelo, in an effort to impress his music-loving girlfriend, started publishing inexpensively produced magazines that printed the lyrics of popular songs. Yes, he was making magazines for a song, and he was breaking the law, soon being convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison. There he met a disbarred lawyer named Edward Levy, and after their release Santangelo and Levy started Charlton Publishing, legally obtaining the rights to song lyrics. They produced several successful music magazines including Hit Parader, as well as puzzle magazines. For their venture they operated on the cheap, headquartering their enterprise not in the nation’s publishing capital of New York City but instead in Derby, a mill town that was the home of a corset-manufacturing plant. Expenses were further cut by Charlton’s purchase of a used printing press. Charlton’s plant was a seven-and-ahalf-acre facility, where every aspect of the company’s business was located under one roof.

Charlton trickled into the comics game in the mid-Forties, then expanded its comic division in the Fifties, with editor Al Fago (and later, editor Pat Masulli) grinding out generic fare that capitalized on whatever trend would sell. Company owner Santangelo’s financial tightfistedness is legendary, especially with his comic-book line—not only did Charlton publish thinly disguised appropriations of popular characters, such as Timmy the Timid Ghost and Atomic Mouse, the not-too-distant cousins of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Mighty Mouse, its rates were the lowest in the industry (Santangelo was even buy-

Peeks at three of Go-Go’s features, all from issue #4: (LEFT) the Rotting Stumps, (RIGHT) Return to Peculiar Place, and (BELOW) Dear Park. © the respective copyright holder.

ing content for his puzzle magazines from prisoners, paying them five bucks a pop).

GOING TO A GO-GO By the time the Camp Era arrived, Dick Giordano, an illustrator who had worked for Charlton off and on over the previous decade, stepped into the managing editor’s chair once Pat Masulli took over the magazine division in 1965. Giordano oversaw a jawdropping total of 34 bimonthly titles, editing 17 books a month with no assistant to help him. Among this robust roster was the love child of 16 Magazine and MAD Magazine, one of comicdom’s wildest mashups off all time—Go-Go. Since Masulli was amassing a wealth of music celebrity photos and features for Charlton’s teen magazines, he suggested to Giordano that Go-Go be created to provide a home for some of that material.

Go-Go claimed it was the Charlton reader’s ticket to “Join the IN crowd,” and that it was “Teen’s [sic] Top Comic” (presumably that was a never-corrected letterer’s error, since if only one teen were reading this book, it wouldn’t have lasted nine issues). It also boasted, “We’re so in… we’re out!” Go-Go’s covers, like those of teenybopper fanzines 16 and Tiger Beat, were an image overload, a mixture of drawings teasing its comics contents and pop star headshots or photos promoting its celebrity pin-ups and text features.

That may sound as if Go-Go was a grab bag of random material. While you never knew which real-life hitmaker or heartthrob might be spotlighted—from shaggy-haired headliners like the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, David McCallum, and the Mamas and the Papas to clean-cut crooners like

Petula Clark and the little-known, short-lived quartet, the Cyrkle—recurring features comprised the comicbook contents of Go-Go: The Rotting Stumps, the ongoing misadventures of “that rockin’, rollin’, rantin’, ravin’ foursome from the far reaches of Brooklyn.” While their name was unabashedly appropriated from the Stones, they were more a spoof of the Beatles; Dear Park, starring Miss Park Overtime. This kids’ advice column poked fun at Go-Go’s readers with gags and cartoons written around their questions. It was a mix of comics and fumetti (photo comics), with readers’ submitted photos worked into the narrative; The Man from R.E.L.A.T.I.V.E. (Real Energetic Legal Aid Teen International Voice Exploiters), a send-up of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s breakout star, David (Illya Kuryakin) McCallum, as Agent E=MC2, a Russian rock-and-rolling spy; The Wild Life and Adventures of Miss Bikini Luv, Go-Go’s requisite entry in the Archie clone sweepstakes, starring its Betty-and-Veronica-ish blonde heroine/media starlet who asks readers to “Just call me Luv!”;

Dick Giordano. © DC Comics.

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RIGHT: Friedrich and D’Agostino introduced Blooperman Go-Go #3. © the respective copyright holder.

Return to Peculiar Place, a silly soap-opera parody mixing Peyton Place with the monster craze. It starred the ghoulish but suave Walter Warlock, who considered himself “just a good, clean, fun-loving ghoul,” tossed into an ensemble of wacky socialites and doctors riffing on thenpopular TV soaps and nighttime dramas; Blooperman, the super-hero spoof that took the Man from R.E.L.A.T.I.V.E.’s spot in Go-Go beginning with issue #3; Farthest Out Fairy Tales, mod versions of children’s lit, which premiered in issue #6; and The Modkees, a Monkees send-up which unseated the Rotting Stumps’ position in the mag once Monkeemania hit in ’66 (see Chapter 5).

The earlier issues of Go-Go were mostly devoid of credits, and a half-century after their publication it’s not entirely clear who did what on some of the stories. The early covers and the Miss Bikini Luv feature were drawn by Jon D’Agostino, a multifaceted cartoonist whose lettering had also been appearing at Marvel under the pen name Johnny Dee. From the mid-Fifties through the mid-Sixties, Jon produced a wealth of work for Charlton, but during Go-Go’s run began transitioning to Archie Comics, where he would ultimately become best known. Many of the Return to Peculiar Place tales were penciled by Morris “Mo” Marcus and inked by Charlton stalwart Rocco “Rocke” Mastroserio.

Beyond its role as a snapshot of the mod popular culture of the Camp Age, Go-Go’s most significant contribution to comics was as a training ground for new talent.

Editor Giordano, throughout his storied career, nurtured young creators, and Go-Go’s mixed bag of features, coupled with Charlton’s low rates, made “Teen’s Top Comic” the perfect place for newbies to ply their craft. One of them was writer Gary Friedrich, a Missourian whose high school friend, Roy Thomas, had recently landed at Marvel Comics’ editorial department after a notoriously brief stint at DC under Mort Weisinger. Thomas steered his pal Friedrich to Giordano, who assigned him scripts on romance stories as well as assignments in Go-Go.

BLOOPERMAN Gary Friedrich’s Superman send-up Blooperman was introduced in Go-Go #3 (Oct. 1966) in a four-pager drawn by Jon D’Agostino. This stocky super-hero is in reality football hero Crash Carlton, at whose declaration of the word “Shazoom!” transforms (under a rain cloud) into Blooperman, “that brazen, bold battler of blunder!” Actually, the accident-prone muscle-head creates blunder—not unlike Awkwardman, who had stumbled into DC Comics alongside his fellow members of the Inferior Five some five months earlier— 112

slipping and tripping throughout each panel, leading a dumbstruck cop to call the gawky crusader a “bloomin’ bull in a china closet!” It’s on the final page of this first story that Blooperman shows promise as being more than just a series of slapstick gags as Badman and Robber, the Boy Plunder—criminal versions of comics’ and TV’s hotter-than-hot Dynamic Duo—show up and take Blooperman, who knocked himself out during a fit of inelegance, hostage.

Blooperman comes to and finds himself “Bound in the Badcave” in Go-Go #4, where Friedrich (“Who has to be sick to write trash like this,” according to the credits box) is paired with artist Bill DuBay on this installment. This was the first credited work for DuBay, who was emerging from fanzines into a professional career that would eventually direct him toward writing and editing for several companies including Warren Publishing, where he would create his best-known character, the Rook. Badman and Robber have enfeebled Blooperman by exposing him to his one weakness: cigar smoke, which they have handy since Robber constantly puffs on a stogie. This Dastardly Duo is attempting to persuade Blooperman to join them on their crime campaign, and although they’re bad guys, Badman still has enough of his analog Batman’s integrity to warn Robber against over-exposing Blooperman to smoke: “It might kill him,” to which Robber responds, “Holy mortal weakness, Badman! I completely forgot!” Instants before Badman exposes Blooperman to a spray that puts him under the villain’s control, Blooperman emits a “supersonic high-pitched whistle which only my allies

can hear,” and on the tale’s last panel, in a cliffhanger ending, his super friends have come to the rescue: the Bestest League of America!

The Bestest League of America?? For those familiar with comic fandom of the Sixties, the BLA may strike a familiar chord. Roy Thomas created this take-off of the JLA just for fun in 1960, writing and cartooning the whole shebang. The next year, at the invitation of Jerry Bails, editor of the fanzine AlterEgo (now Alter Ego), Roy redrew the adventure for ditto-master duplication for AE #1. Roy produced a few more BLA tales and gags for AE, along the way parodying DC heroes as the Cash, Aquariuman, S’amm S’mithh the Martian Manhandler, Wondrous Woman, Green Trashcan, Lean Arrow, the Ipom, Aukman, Snappy Carp, Adamn Stranger, the Bestest Society, and his versions of the World’s Finest heroes, Superham and Wombatman. “I gave Gary my blessing to use the Bestest League, but had nothing else to do with the [Go-Go] story,” Roy Thomas told me in February 2016.

Thomas also gave Friedrich the Badman and Robber characters—although Badman and Robber were created by Gary. Sound confusing? The names “Badman and Robber” harken back to Thomas’ early childhood, when his mother would read Batman and Robin comics to him. Since the characters wore masks, li’l Roy thought the duo had to be crooks, Badman and Robber. (He also had youthful misconceptions of “Souperman” and “Captain Marble.”)

According to Thomas, “Badman and Robber first appeared in that Go-Go Blooperman story. That was

the first time those characters had ever appeared in print… I’d simply told Gary the story of how I’d briefly thought those were their names when I was four or so.”

Friedrich’s Blooperman/BLA story continued in Go-Go #5, illustrated this time by Richard “Grass” Green. Green was a very popular artist in fandom, as well as one of the few African Americans in the comics world at the time. His unrefined style and exaggerated characters and facial expressions perfectly lent themselves to the wild abandon of a Justice League spoof. Here, writer Friedrich started to develop his stride as a parodist, with super-heroes going on strike. By the story arc’s conclusion, in GoGo #6 (Apr. 1966), the super-hero strike had spread to involve the “Marvelous” super-heroes, leading to a tussle between the BLA and Marvelous heroes.

Friedrich and Green (the latter now inked by Giordano’s frequent studiomate, Frank McLaughlin) unleashed spoofs of the Avengers (Captain Americuss, Scrap-Iron Man, Great-Big-Huge Man, the Wisp, the Hunk, and the lisping, effeminate Thore), three of the Fantastic Four (Mr. Fantabulous, the Thang, and the Fumin’ Scorch), and a certain amazing Wall-Crawler, Spider-Dan. This story, “Showdown,” is noteworthy for three reasons: outside of fanzines, it’s the first DC vs. Marvel “crossover”; it predates Marvel’s own self-deprecating lampoon, Not Brand Echh, by four months; and its conclusion features Charlton versions of DC’s Julius Schwartz and Marvel’s Stan Lee racing in to put an end to the super-hero vs. super-hero battle. There’s even a Jack Kirby joke, as “Stan” warns his quarrelsome characters, “But I sure as Hercules can have Jack Curly erase you anytime I feel like it!” In reflecting upon his involvement with Gary Friedrich on these Charlton stories, Roy Thomas said, “I don’t recall our discussing the appearances of Stan and Julie in the story, but we could have.”

JIM APARO

LEFT: Friedrich and Green’s DC vs. Marvel clash, in issue #6. © the respective copyright holder.

Jim Aparo.

Courtesy of the Aparo family.

Another of Dick Giordano’s Go-Go finds: Jim Aparo, known as one of the all-time great Batman artists.

Midway through Go-Go’s nine-issue run, Jon D’Agostino was finding more work at Archie Comics, leaving editor Giordano with a slot to fill. “Dick got me started in the comic-book business in 1966 when he made an appointment for me to see him in his office at Charlton Comics in Derby, Connecticut,” Aparo told me in 2003. “He observed the samples of comic pages that I created and was very interested. Out of his desk drawer came a script that he offered me to illustrate.

“I was quite pleased. I accepted the script with thanks and headed home. After I drew the first page I decided to make the trip back to Charlton to seek his approval. I was thrilled. I had broken into the comicbook field.

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“The script I drew was ‘The Wild Life and Adventures of Miss Bikini Luv,’ which appeared in Go-Go #5.”

Jim Aparo, on a humor strip? For most of his fans, that may seem as odd a notion as, well, a teen comic and spoof comic in one. Some comic fans know that Aparo’s Miss Bikini Luv was followed by braver and bolder assignments at Charlton (the sci-fiWestern feature “Wander,” the spy back-up “Tiffany Sinn,” the super-hero back-up “Nightshade,” and gorgeous work on The Phantom). Even more fans know that once Giordano jumped to DC, he brought Aparo with him, to replace Nick Cardy on Aquaman, which was followed by Aparo’s assignments from DC editors Joe Orlando (The Phantom Stranger, and the

Aparo-AGo-Go! Jim Aparo Miss Bikini Luv art: (LEFT) with Elvin and the Colonel, from Go-Go #6, and (RIGHT) a stylish splash from issue #9. © the respective copyright holder

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Spectre in Adventure Comics) and Murray Boltinoff, who, at editorial director Carmine Infantino’s urging, put Jim on the Batman team-up book The Brave and the Bold (B&B), where he rarely missed an issue in a remarkable ten-year run. B&B was followed by Aparo’s co-creation of Batman and the Outsiders with writer Mike W. Barr and his penciling of the monthly Batman title, where he drew the wildly successful “Knightfall” chapter where Batman’s back was broken by Bane.

Yes, that Jim Aparo—whose work has since been reprinted in a three-volume Legends of the Dark Knight deluxe hardcover series—drawing a cute-girl teen comic!

If you’ve studied Aparo’s work closely, however, that might not be such a surprise. While in his prime in the early to mid-Seventies, Aparo was great at Good Girl Art, as seen from the occasional gun moll, beach beauty, or heiress spicing up a B&B tale to the handful of times he’d draw his sexy renditions of

Wonder Woman, Black Canary, or Supergirl in Batman team-ups. He also had a knack for humor, although the only time DC readers caught a glimpse of that was through Batman team-ups with Metamorpho and Plastic Man. Aparo effortlessly stepped into Miss Bikini Luv, instantly creating a seismic shift in the strip. Previously, Jon D’Agostino’s simplistic style was easy on the eyes but lacking substance. Aparo’s version featured Archie-like characters navigating a realworld setting. Jim had an advertising and fashion art background, so Luv’s lavish wardrobe was a piece of cake. Similarly, the strip’s background visuals— from furniture to cars to offices—were realistically drawn, as if torn from Aparo’s ad portfolio. Luv was still the Luv who had graced the D’Agostino tales, but under Aparo now had a hint of realistic sexiness that made her attractive. From his beefy Elvis parody Elvin Prisly to Luv’s hunky actor beau Ajax Strong, Aparo’s hemen were powerful but comically off-kilter. And his supporting and incidental characters were often as absurd as something that might have originated a generation earlier on the drawing board of Plastic Man’s Jack Cole.

“Go-Go was, in fact, the first comic that both Jim Aparo and myself worked on, though in that book, we were never teamed!” writer Steve Skeates told me in January 2016. In 1966, Skeates had recently come off a brief staff job at Marvel as an editorial assistant and had been writing scripts for Tower Comics’ T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. “Back when I was still working for Tower, I was representing Tower on a panel at some New York City comic convention and was seated next to Dick Giordano, who was representing Charlton,” according to Skeates. “Once I heard it was all over for Tower, I called up Dick, reminded him of the panel we had been on, and said I was looking for work!” And so Giordano opened the door for Skeates to write stories for Charlton. Before long, Skeates would produce an impressive body of well-remembered work—Charlton super-hero and mystery tales, Charlton’s Abbott & Costello, Aquaman, Steve Ditko’s The Hawk and the Dove, Plop!, and Plastic Man. Among his earliest work for Charlton were scripts for Go-Go’s “Farthest Out Fairy Tales” feature.

Farthest Out Fairy Tales had been rolled out in Go-Go #6 with “The Swingin’ Saga of Superella” by Gary Friedrich and Grass Green, a contemporary take on the Cinderella legend. Here, our ragamuffin

A CALL GOES OUT FOR…

The Mighty Heroes

heroine is transformed by her Fairy Godmommie into a super-heroine, complete with Nancy Sinatrainspired glass go-go boots (made for walkin,’ as well as flyin’). Superella’s saga concluded in Go-Go #7, with Green returning as artist but with Sergius O’Shaugnessy (the pen name for Denny O’Neil, another comics great who was a relative newcomer at the time) scripting the story, although decades later, Denny doesn’t recall these early assignments.

“I wrote two Far[thest] Out Fairy Tales—Snow What and Rapunzelstiltskin!” said Skeates, his stories appearing in the final two issues of Go-Go, #8 and 9, respectively. “Grass Green drew those two fairy tales of mine.” According to Skeates, he had penned another funky fable for Go-Go. “My best Far[thest] Out Fairy Tale, Little Orphan Riding Hood, was written for Go-Go but never made it into that publication due to that book biting the dust! It ultimately made the scene in Abbott & Costello #5 and 6; art once again

by Grass Green!”

Denny O’Neil penned another Go-Go short story, the four-page “Maury DeCay—Disc Jockey!” in issue #9, a riff on the famous radio platter-spinner Murray the K. O’Neil once again employed the O’Shaugnessy nom de plume… …which leads us to Go-Go’s big creator mystery, the identity of Charlton writer Norm DiPlumm, or Norm DePlume, who wrote the last issue’s Miss Bikini Luv story and whose credit was also found in a handful of late-Sixties’ Charlton comics including The Phantom.

There has been much speculation among fandom that Steve Skeates was the scribe behind that pen name, a contention Skeates has repeatedly denied, even to me: “I still have no idea who it was who was writing under the name Norm DePlume, but I quite liked his stuff!”

Ralph Bakshi created the Mighty Heroes by the seat of his pants—ironic, since two of the heroes don’t wear pants.

Terrytoons, the New Rochelle, New York, animation studio that took the name of its founder, Paul Terry, and gave the world the super-rodent Mighty Mouse and the combative magpies Heckle and Jeckle, transitioned from producing theatrical shorts to television cartoons in the mid-Fifties, being purchased by CBS-TV. With producer Bill Weiss at the helm of Terrytoons, Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle relocated to the small screen, joined by new programs such as Deputy Dawg and The Hector Heathcote Show. By 1966, however, Fred Silverman, head of CBS’ Daytime Programming, had become enchanted with Hanna-Barbera Productions, working with H-B on the development of new shows like Space Ghost that capitalized on the super-hero trend.

CBS’ own Terrytoons had fallen out of favor with the network suits, and during a fateful pitch meeting, a disinterested Silverman was tromping out of the room after rejecting a slew of Weiss’ new show

LEFT: Farthest-Out Fairy Tale “Superella,” from Go-Go #6. © the respective copyright holder.

Ralph Bakshi at Terrytoons, 1960s.

Courtesy of RalphBakshi.com.

Dell Comics’ The Mighty Heroes #1 (Mar. 1967).

Cover by John Chilly.

TM & © CBS.

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proposals. Bakshi, a young Terrytoons animator there to assist Weiss, nervily spoke up and improvised a spiel about a quintet of stupid, fumbling superheroes, with villains who were even more inept. The characters came to Ralph on the spot—such as Diaper Man, inspired by his bottle-hurling infant son—as did their ridiculous rogues’ gallery of goofballs like the Frog and the Raven. This gut-busting concept not only kept Silverman from bolting from the meeting, it got a green light, and the Mighty Heroes were born—with Bakshi assigned the task of producing the show!

Who were the Mighty Heroes? The protectors of Goodhaven, and a pivotal step for an animator who would spend his career bucking the system.

It’s time for the Mighty Heroes roll call!

Strong Man, the team’s surrogate Superman, a hick auto mechanic who wears his crimefighting costume under his smock; Cuckoo Man, a jittery bird shop owner who leaps into a cuckoo clock to emerge as a superhero, flapping and flailing his arms to fly; Tornado Man, a meteorologist who spins (think: Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, only Tornado Man did it first) to transform into a human cyclone; Rope Man, a British sailor who goes from deckswabbing at the shipyard to lassoing bad guys (and often, his teammates, by mistake); and Diaper Man, the team’s leader, a baby who spends his days in his crib, sucking his bottle, until duty calls.

And duty would call, each episode, with The Mighty Heroes’ tried-and-true formula: a threat would imperil the good people of Goodhaven, prompting the announcer to proclaim, amid a Fourth of July– worthy explosion of fireworks and patriotic imagery: “A call goes out for the Mighty Heroes!”

Cue the Mighty Heroes theme song. Composed

by Elliot Lawrence and Phil Scheib, its melody bore a passing resemblance to the theme for the Fleisher Covers for issues #2–4 of Dell Comics’ The Mighty Heroes. Note that it wasn’t until issue #4 (FAR RIGHT) that Rope Man was colored correctly on a cover.

Mighty Heroes TM & © CBS.

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Studios’ Superman cartoons from the Forties—wholly intentional, as Bakshi, a fan of those trailblazing toons, told me in January 2016. Each of the Mighty Heroes were introduced, then assembled to tackle the menace. Problem was, they were their own worst enemies, tripping over each other or themselves.

By the end of the episode, they would stumble past their awkwardness and defeat whichever swaggering super-villain wielded his super-weapon. The episode would conclude with the narrator thanking the Mighty Heroes for saving the day—a shtick lifted decades later by the Cartoon Network’s Powerpuff Girls.

On Saturday, October 29, 1966, The Mighty Heroes premiered on television as the former Mighty Mouse Playhouse was redubbed Mighty Mouse and the Mighty Heroes. Although it wasn’t promoted in the famous double-page spread comic-book ad touting CBS’ new super-hero shows (Space Ghost, Frankenstein, Jr., Superman, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Impossibles, and Dino Boy were shown), The Mighty Heroes had no trouble finding an audience— “We were a hit!” according to Bakshi.

Sure, there were plenty of super-heroes on TV that season, in cartoons and in live action. But the tongue placed in cheek by Batman and The Underdog Show was instead blowing the raspberries with The Mighty Heroes. Some of what you saw on The Mighty Heroes seemed familiar: brawny Strong Man called Diaper Man “little buddy,” suggesting a Skipper/Gilligan dynamic (although Diaper Man was clearly the smarter of the pair), and Cuckoo Man’s rallying cry sounded a bit like the spasms pitched by the Cuckoo Bird in the popular Cocoa Puffs commercials. But there were flourishes of sheer insanity in Bakshi’s concept that were unlike anything else on the air: their absurd character designs (Strong Man’s barrel chest and arms dwarfed his scrawny, hairy legs; Rope Man looked so spindly that a stiff wind could blow him over; and Tornado Man was squat and balding), the riotous image of Cuckoo Man feverishly flapping his arms to fly, the oafishness of its hapless heroes (The Mighty Heroes predated Captain

Nice and Mr. Terrific by several months), and Diaper Man’s gravelly voice that seemed more appropriate for a three-pack-a-day smoker than an infant.

That voice came from Hershel Bernardi, whose booming vocal chords also brought Strong Man and Tornado Man to life. Bernardi’s impressive stage and screen pedigree included Fiddler on the Roof, the role of Lieutenant Jacoby on the hip private-eye show Peter Gunn, and his own sitcom in the early Seventies, Arnie, but he is probably best known as the voices behind two TV commercial icons, the Jolly Green Giant and Charlie the Tuna. Cuckoo Man and Rope Man were portrayed by Lionel G. Wilson, a voice actor whose Tom Terrific roles put him on the map.

Wilson continued to work behind the microphone up until his 2003 death, voicing Eustace Bagge on the Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog. Diaper Man is the Mighty Hero most remembered by now-adult original viewers of the cartoon. And who can blame them? Not only did the bombastic baby defy convention with his unapologetic appearance, but through Diaper Man’s bottle slurping and bottle-nipple manipulation the subtly subversive Bakshi also snuck in suggestive imagery that flew over the heads of its young audience (many of whom would grow up to become the same parents who, twenty years later, gave Ralph no end of grief over the infamous crushed-flower-sniffing scene in Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures). Toddler super-heroes weren’t entirely unheard of, but Diaper Man ruled this particular crib.

The Mighty Heroes was unlike anything else playing on the boob tube, but DC Comics ventured into similar terrain around this time. While Bakshi was developing his kookie quintet, E. Nelson Bridwell and Joe Orlando were doing the same with the Inferior Five, which hit the newsstands on March 24, 1966.

Just a few weeks later, a titanic tot called Mighty Moppet was one of the super-hero transformations of teenage Robby Reed in the fourth Dial H for Hero installment, in House of Mystery #159 (cover-dated June 1966). Like Diaper Man, Mighty Moppet wielded a baby bottle (two of ’em, in fact, strapped to his sides on his belt) as a weapon, squirting from the bottle a reducing solution that shrank his adult foes to kid size.

For my money, though, if it came down to a knockdown/drag-out between Diaper Man and Mighty Moppet, Bakshi’s bottle-battler would drive Robby Reed’s back into his H-Dial, wailing for his mama.

The Inferior Five and the Mighty Moppet soon had company on the comic-book racks, as The Mighty Heroes #1 hit the stands on October 11, 1966—a little over two weeks before the premiere of the Mighty Heroes cartoon, a peculiar scheduling fluke for a spin-off comic. It was from Dell Comics, not surprisingly, since Dell was at the time publishing comic-book versions of Terrytoons properties Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle. Dell released four issues of The Mighty Heroes during a six-month window, each an anthology headlined by the Heroes

but also featuring short stories starring other Terrytoons stars (Dinky Duck, Heckle and Jeckle, Hector Heathcote, and Mighty Mouse). The Mighty Heroes stories, written and drawn by uncredited personnel—aside from a “J. Chilly” (Dell Comics’ art director John Chilly, according to comics historian Mark Evanier) signature on the cover of issue #1—were drawn onmodel, although mistakes were common, including the incorrect coloring of Rope Man’s face and helmet, the frequently disappearing leg hair on Strong Man, and Cuckoo Man flying without flapping his wings.

The comic used bad guys from the show, with the Frog, the Raven, the Junker, and the Shrinker appearing in print. The Mighty Heroes were also captured in merchandising, including a board game, a frame tray puzzle, and temporary tattoos sold with bubble gum.

By the time Dell published its fourth issue on March 30, 1967, the bottom was dropping out of the Terrytoons-driven Mighty Heroes cartoon show.

“Terrytoons was trained for production, not creativity,” according to Bakshi, and The Mighty Heroes never quite lived up to the offbeat potential envisioned by its originator. A frustrated Bakshi bolted for Paramount Studios, and without its creative engine at the wheel, The Mighty Heroes ceased production after twenty episodes, ending its run after one season (although syndication would later recycle those cartoons). Bakshi revisited his half-baked heroes in a 1987 Mighty Mouse episode, where the characters had since matured into middle-aged accountants (for the firm Man, Man, Man, Man, and Man) who relished the chance to be called out of super-hero retirement

by Mighty Mouse for a special case. Some episodes of the series were released on VHS, and the shortlived publisher Spotlight Comics produced a Mighty Heroes one-shot in 1987. Outside of a Marvel Comics one-shot in late 1997, no call has since gone out for the Mighty Heroes.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Everyone’s favorite Mighty Hero, Diaper Man! Three of DC Comics’ Sixties Super-babies: Superbaby, a recurring feature; Bat-Baby, a one-time transformation; and Dial H for Hero’s Mighty Moppet.

Mighty Heroes TM & © CBS. Superbaby, Batman and Robin, and Dial H for Hero TM & © DC Comics.

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Detail from Spotlight Comics’ The Mighty Heroes #1 (1987). Art

by Jim Engel.

fully subversive 1987 Saturday morning cartoon The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse.

In this interview, Bakshi takes us behind the scenes of the creation of The Mighty Heroes, his projects at Paramount, and his early days of working with Steve Krantz.

Mighty Heroes TM & © CBS.

Interview conducted in January 2016 and transcribed by Steven Thompson.

A CALL GOES OUT FOR… THE MIGHTY BAKSHI!

An Interview with Ralph Bakshi

RIGHT: Bashi’s high school portrait.

Courtesy of RalphBakshi.com.

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In the Seventies, Ralph Bakshi directed the revolutionary animated films Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Wizards, and The Lord of the Rings (the 1978 version). But then again, he was always one to test boundaries.

Born in Palestine, as an infant Bakshi was moved by his family to the U.S. to flee the threat of war. He grew up in the rough-and-tumble Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, where he learned to think on his feet. After graduating from an arts-vocational high school in 1956, Bakshi, a comic-book fan, began his animation career as a cel polisher at Terrytoons.

He rapidly learned his craft and rose up the ranks until the fateful day in 1966 that he made an impromptu pitch to CBS’ Fred Silverman for The Mighty Heroes.

That led to his becoming that series’ director and the Creative Director for Terrytoons, and a whirlwind few years of Camp Age animation projects. In 1967, Bakshi replaced fabled animator Shamus Culhane as the head of Paramount Cartoon Studios’ (Famous Studios) New York-based animation house, with an aggressive mandate to develop cartoons for television. That short-lived venture was followed by Ralph’s often-tumultuous professional relationship with Steve Krantz, during which time Bakshi took over the TV toons Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man. This led to Fritz the Cat, which Krantz produced.

In the decades following, Bakshi directed several other animated films including American Pop, Fire and Ice, and Cool World, and was responsible for the delight-

Let’s start with how you got started at Terrytoons. How old were you then?

That’s a good question. I was eighteen and I’d just graduated high school at the School of Visual Arts. I think it’s now called the School of Visual Arts but in those days it was the Vocational Professional Arts School, where professionals from the industry taught the various classes. So I graduated and, because I won an award in cartooning, Terrytoons offered me a job at graduation.

There was no thought of going to college. In those days, if you had options, you’d rather work.

So I accepted the job. Little did I know I’d be at a desk polishing cels, [laughs] for the camera.

I might have thought twice about it, but there I was, suddenly selfdetermined. My mother could not get me to clean a glass, and then I end up polishing stuff all day. [laughs] Some of the early shows you were working on was stuff I cut my teeth on as a kid watching

Mighty Mouse TM & © CBS.

The point is, with all the companies making television pilots and using them as theatricals, there was bad stuff on the big screen, until the late Fifties, when UPA and some people came out with some extraordinarily good-designed films that almost brought it back. But it was too late, you know.

I want you to confirm what has become a legendary story about how The Mighty Heroes came about…

It’s true!

TV: Mighty Mouse, Deputy Dawg…

What about Hashimoto-San? That was probably the first martial-arts cartoon character.

Hashimoto was created by a Japanese animator named Bob Kuwahara. Bob was also a gag cartoonist. He used to work for the New Yorker in the Twenties.

If you worked for the New Yorker magazine, which had great cartooning in those days, that was something. If it was the first karate thing, I don’t know. I enjoyed working with Bob. He was a wonderful guy.

[Hashimoto-San] was very sweet. It was also theatrically released. The whole thing with Terrytoons in those days was theatricals. They eventually were all pushed out. There wasn’t much money in theatricals anymore.

But to take television material and release it theatrically, then release it back on television to break even, we were able to afford to do Hashimoto and Deputy Dawg and stuff because, believe it or not, they got released around the country as a theatrical. I winced a little because it was limited animation. Full animation was gone.

It was good limited animation, just it was cheap animation.

Was that more evident when you saw the shorts on the big screen than on the small screen?

Yeah, you got it.

Well, you had your popcorn and soda to keep you distracted from that.

[laughs]…that it happened when Bill Weiss was pitching ideas to Fred Silverman to pump up the Mighty Mouse show. Tell me the story.

Here we are, at CBS. CBS had bought Terrytoons in the Fifties when I was hired. So, you know, they had put in a lot of money.

All these things that we were doing pilots on were because CBS had come into the business and bought Terrytoons. For a “whopping” three million dollars, which was nothing! All the old shorts had been put on—Popeye, Mighty Mouse, and everything. It should’ve been fifty or one hundred million dollars, the way they played those things around the clock.

So we had a lot of money from CBS. That’s why I was hired.

They had a huge hiring boom.

The theatricals were dying and CBS saved the studio, but Fred Silverman at CBS kept thinking that Hanna-Barbera on the West Coast gave you more quality or bang for your buck. So they weren’t buying anything from Terrytoons! In other words, here they owned Terrytoons, and Saturday morning CBS, run by Fred Silverman at that point, was buying stuff only from Hanna-Barbera!

Yeah, they were very aggressive at that time with Hanna-Barbera product.

Before Hanna-Barbera, it was the old Disney myth that the West Coast was better and the East Coast was crappy. Max Fleischer

was as good as Walt Disney Productions ever was as far as great animation. It just shows you how the West Coast had the game stacked. This is the East Coast animator point of view…

[Michael laughs] Now, we had just finished doing the Deputy Dawg series, which was the first series that CBS, when they bought the company, was obliged to buy. But, no, they didn’t buy it! CBS passed on Deputy Dawg! But Bill Weiss managed to get it into syndication, which was a big business in those days. Syndication’s when you sell it to different stations around the country. So Deputy Dawg was five years, but different stations around the country— local stations, right?

Ralph Bakshi in 2015.

Courtesy of RalphBakshi.com.

Mm-hm.

They were able to afford to do it and the Deputy Dawg series continued, and we did 52 of them, which is a lot. But then that was over with and we were getting to the end ’cause CBS wasn’t buying anything. There was a lot of back and forth political calls and from what I gather—I was listening to the scuttlebutt at the studio—[Terrytoons] was angry at Fred and Fred said that Terrytoons was s***. [We thought,] “He’s not gonna buy crap.” CBS was in the middle. They weren’t doing anything.

So it was a big mess with Bill Weiss and Fred Silverman and CBS. And Bill Weiss put a fortune into hiring Jules Feiffer, one of the best writers and artists in Manhattan at the time, to create shows, to pitch to Fred Silverman. It’s a very expensive business. You have to write scripts, do storyboards, define characters, you know. And there we would spend about a half a year or a year getting great artists together to produce shows.

When Jules Feiffer was working 119

Terrytoons’ headquarters in New Rochelle, New York.

Courtesy of RalphBakshi.com.

there he did a great series called Easy Winners, a bunch of kids who had stomachaches. [Michael laughs] Typical Feiffer stuff. This was before Sick, Sick, Sick. Before Jules Feiffer became Jules Feiffer. And his stuff! I thought his stuff was the greatest, and I thought Easy Winners was great.

That’s one of the things I remember that Fred Silverman shoulda bought. I don’t know, it might’ve been too sophisticated for Saturday morning. But it certainly should have been ahead of The Flintstones on Friday nights.

Anyway, what am I doing at the time? I’m animating, see? I’m animating these swell pictures and having a ball. Bill Weiss, the owner, liked me. I’d come out from Brooklyn every day to get there on time. Everyone else who worked on the show was late for work. I had to come from Brooklyn! You know, and he’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He really liked me, okay? He’s kind of one of the key figures of animation but he was a good guy. He used to be Terrytoons’ bookkeeper. How he got the job is beyond me. I guess he made that great deal with CBS. Weiss used to be Terrytoons’ bookkeeper?

Yeah, yeah, that’s what I got from Connie [Conrad] Rasinski, who was the great director of Terry120

toons when I started. I loved him.

He gave me most of this information. In fact, it was Connie that made me an animator when I was just right downstairs and started to animate. He was a great guy!

He was a circus clown, he was a boxer, and then he became an animator. He was a very colorful guy.

[Terrytoons] had hundreds of portfolio drawings, presentations. They were all nervous as hell and they were gonna take it down to CBS in New York. And Weiss was the Production Manager, and he asked me if I would help. Bill knew that I’d be in the room and I could keep my mouth shut. [Michael laughs] I thought it was great to get down to see the pitch and meet Fred Silverman and watch, and I’d be the fly on the wall, right?

I was more than happy to go down to the CBS building. It was downtown. It was a big, black building with all the elevators.

I’d never been in such luxurious offices. To me, I can’t believe what I’m looking at. Anyhow, so I’m up there, looking over at the great skyline in New York. I put all the presentations up around the room in order. You know, it’s a lot of work. And I’m putting thumbtacks on storyboards, and then when it’s all over, I go to this wall in the back. It’s a very big con-

ference room. And I stand there watching, ’cause my job is over.

My job is to run out and get coffee if anyone wants it. [Michael laughs] My job is to pack up the presentation, right?

So [Weiss] goes from one pitch to the other. I mean, great pitches! Great stories, as far as I was concerned. And Fred says, “No. No. No. No. No.” And the room was getting tense. You could feel the temperature rising.

I mean, it’s really tough, because the company’s existence was on the line! It wasn’t a question of buying a show—Terrytoons was about finished, economically, right? So all of those “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” and it’s over! And the room is dead silent. It’s just anger and fury. It’s like… you’re suffocating. Everybody is suffocating in the room. Except Fred!

He seems to be enjoying this s***!

He stands up and starts to leave. He’s heading for the door.

He’s finished. He’s outta there.

And I, out of embarrassment for my boss—who I loved very much because he gave me lots of breaks, you know—out of embarrassment for my boss and embarrassment for my studio, I said, “I have an idea.” From the back of the room. I also have a tremendous ego. [both laugh] I didn’t know what the f*** I was gonna say! But I knew I had an idea… or I knew I had to have an idea!

Because that’s the way I live my life. You grow up in Brownsville, instinct has to take over. I’m serious! I’m not kidding. You’re walking down a dark block and you hear a noise. You better quickly move out of the way.

“Fight or flight,” right?

Yeah, a lot of rough guys out there, a lot of unfair guys out there. When I used to shine shoes when I was a kid, eight or nine years old, I used to shine gangsters’ shoes. They were the only guys who had money. I had this little box and I sat on the corner by the candy store. It was ten cents a shine. That was a lot of money. So I was one day shin-

ing shoes and a gangster says to me, and he pulls up his pants and he was standing, you know, and he says, “Look, if you get any of that stuff on my silk stockings, I’m gonna kill you.” I looked up at him. I closed my can of shoe polish. So he laughed. I mean, the point is, I knew he’d laugh. I knew I hadda get outta there, too!

My instincts were always working that way.

That’s why I’d say, “I have an idea.” Fred turns around and looks across the room at me. And the greatest thing to my comfort was that I was a young guy, like, 24 or 25, and everyone else in the room was over fifty or sixty. Well, Fred was a young guy. He was in his mid-thirties, I would suppose.

I was a young guy and young guys are supposed to know more than the old guys…

And he goes back to his chair and sits down, which is, like, giving me full respect. He didn’t even know who I was! [both laugh] I coulda been anybody! And he says, “What is it?”

Everyone’s looking at me. Everyone has turned my way. Everyone was dumbstruck.

And I pitched The Mighty Heroes. I start with these five guys who are super-heroes but they’re all stupid and they’re all weird. I went through each one.

Cuckoo Man and Tornado Man and Rope Man and Strong Man and Diaper Man, who was my son—I had a young boy and he’d sit up in the morning in his crib when he wanted milk and he would throw his bottle at me.

[Michael laughs] So once I called him Diaper Man and after The Mighty Heroes, I let him do that.

He could throw his bottle. [laughs] How long did your pitch take?

It takes fifteen minutes. It’s pretty solid! I don’t know where it came from. But it was pretty much—to my thinking of that period—pretty much what everyone else was doing in the comic-book world.

There was the MAD comic book out and the beatniks were run-

ning around. I mean, it was all part of that generation that was becoming very arrogant and breaking with the past. You know, the underground comix were about eight, nine years away, but things were starting [in that direction] then. I never thought it was that great an idea. Never did.

People all the time tell me how much they love it. Okay, good! I think the Easy Winners was better, you know, the one that they had from Jules Feiffer.

So the whole Mighty Heroes pitch came out of you full-blown, even the villains?

I pitched stories, I pitched the villains—Frog Man [the Frog] and [the Junker]. I mean, I pitched the whole f***ing thing!

What was Bill Weiss’ reaction to that?

Well, everyone was looking, and the room is dead silent. No one knows but Fred Silverman. Everyone in the room probably hated it because it just wasn’t where they were going, you know? I have to admit that everything they were doing was leaning toward intellectual sentimentality. This one was really very rugged and street level. In other words, this one was very basic. I had ’em knock the f***ing villains’ heads off, like the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers that I grew up with.

But Fred said, “I love it! I wanna buy it.” And he leaves the room! And I was standing there!

And I say, “I’ll take the stuff back now.” I packed up, [and when] I get back to the studio, everyone asks me how it went. Of course, they had to check with Fred to see if what he said was true.

And they come back and they’re screaming and they’re yelling and the guys are patting me on the back. They can’t f***ing believe it.

And then Fred calls in to Weiss and says, “I’m not gonna buy the series unless Ralph directs it and runs it. All right?” So I said okay to that.

I went from… about five hundred bucks a week to 1500 bucks a week. Now, understand that gas cost twenty-five cents a gallon and my three-room apartment in Brooklyn was fifty bucks a month. You have to understand, I’m rich! [laughs] But that wasn’t what excited me anyhow. I’m gonna direct this show! And the place went crazy. Everyone went crazy. And we started and I was deliriously happy and very proud of what I had done.

So that was the beginning.

But let me tell you the downside, okay?

Uh-oh. What was the downside?

Money wasn’t the issue with me.

I really wanted to make a great show! I really saw [The Mighty Heroes] as MAD comics on television. And I thought I wanted to hire all of the comic artists like Wally Wood and all the guys that were doing MAD comics… Kurtzman.

But the old guard at Terrytoons—they were going to the same old guys. They would do the storyboards upstairs, then they would record a track, right?

That couldn’t change. They never wanted to rewrite lines that somebody had already recorded.

And I was supposed to follow their direction. And direction, to them, really meant production

Jules Feiffer briefly worked with Bakshi at Terrytoons, creating a proposal for an animated series called Easy Winners.

Courtesy of quoteof.com.

I’ll bet you did! [laughs] 121

managing to get the s*** through.

And it started to feel real bad because it was really killing the show for me.

Whatever it was, it coulda been that much greater! The rendering. I wanted to do the Wally

Merchandising for the Mighty Heroes included this frame tray puzzle.

Mighty Heroes TM & © CBS.

Wood style with drop shadows, or do Will Eisner, the Spirit, you know? I wanted to make it really dramatic! You know, with a lot of great background. Good stuff that I had in my head, which I did later in Heavy Traffic and stuff.

But they were putting out the same old stuff and I was fighting and arguing with them but I couldn’t get anywhere. I said, “What are you doing? You said you want me to direct this stuff.

Fred thinks I’m directing. I’m not directing! You guys are directing because I’m not being able to change anything. What kind of director am I?” So I left. I quit.

So that’s why The Mighty Heroes only ran one season. But you definitely boosted the ratings on the Mighty Mouse/Mighty Heroes show.

It was a hit! The Mighty Heroes were a big hit! But it could have been amazing! It could’ve gotten to nighttime [primetime]! You

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know, [like] The Flintstones. It could have been absolutely great!

And when I left, they fell apart, because I was really running the whole studio. And I was running around talking to each director and animator, and the crew loved me. The guys loved me. In other words, I was helping and I worked around the clock to make this stuff as well drawn as I could, you know? And we were within our budget, too. So I had no problem with the guys there. I loved every animator there and I think they loved me.

But I couldn’t get [Bill Weiss] to understand that he was killing the show. I left and took a job running Paramount Cartoon Studios in New York—the old Fleischer Studio—because they had known what I had done and they wanted me to create television shows for them.

How’d you get the Paramount job?

Well, I’d heard that they’d fired a guy at Paramount Pictures, or rather their cartoon studio…

Shamus Culhane! Shamus Culhane had taken over for Howie Post, and I heard Shamus Culhane was fired. [Note: Culhane later contended that he resigned from the position. – M.E.] They had tried one guy there, then tried another guy there. I heard this through the grapevine, so I called Paramount for an interview.

So I go up to Paramount at 1501 Broadway. I’m up there with Burt Hanft for an hour and a half telling him what I wanna do.

He had checked me out by then and he knew what I was doing at Terrytoons. He knew what happened at CBS. He says, “Okay.

You got it.” I say, “I got it?” He says, “Yeah, you got it.” So I am now producing and directing for them. I’m producing and I can do anything I want! Anything! And I’m really f***ing happy! [Michael laughs] I say, “Are you sure?” He says, “Yeah.”

So he walks me out to the elevator. He’s very proud and happy. He likes what he did. I like what I did. And I’m waiting

to push the button to go to 15 from the 30th floor and I push the button and the f***ing elevator isn’t comin’. And he’s just waiting there looking at me, doing small talk, which I’m not good at. So I say, “I’m gonna run downstairs before you change your mind” and ran down 31 flights! And I was laughing all the way down!

[Michael laughs] But I got outta there and went home and then quit Terrytoons and started to work. And then I started to put out a call to all the guys I wanted to work with on The Mighty Heroes to create other shows!

Who were some of those artists?

Wally Wood—Wally Wood’s witzend, just the greatest stuff in the world. Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Kubert, Jim Steranko, Gray Morrow, Paul Coker.

Was Jack Davis one of those?

Jack Davis. Thank you, Jack Davis.

And we created shows! Let me tell ya, we were doing shows, and they were great! Beautiful!

I think I still have the artwork! A lot of it’s still here. I never threw it away. All this great work is in my drawers in my studio.

One of the shows was called The Fiendish Five, which was like, I guess, The Mighty Heroes. It was five mercenaries, flying double-wing airplanes, right? Over the country to fight whatever was going on. It was drawn by Wally Wood. Very much like MAD comics. Very much like Blackhawk. It was a cartoon satire on Blackhawk, and Wally Wood and I designed it.

At Paramount you did another super-hero spoof, about a character called Super Basher, in a short called “The Fuz.” Super Basher and Bop. Tell me about that one, because very few people have actually seen it.

Actually, it was me doing a sequel to Marvin Digs, which was a hippie who draws flowers all over the

Before long, Paramount abruptly closed down its animation studio, and all of those concepts got canned. Then your career took a wild detour, with Rocket Robin Hood.

The guy at Paramount who gave me the job felt very bad for me and sent me over to [animation distributor] Steve Krantz. I meet Steve Krantz, and Steve Krantz’s company was producing Rocket Robin Hood in Toronto, but the studio was having a lot of trouble, because guess who was producing his work? The guy that I took over for at Paramount, Shamus Culhane, is doing it!

He’s Krantz’s producer. Krantz is unhappy with Culhane. And I get Shamus Culhane’s job, and as Shamus was leaving the office, I asked Shamus where he was going next!

Diaper Man TM & © CBS. Marvin Digs TM & © Paramount Pictures.

You actually passed him on his way out?

He was leaving Krantz’s office!

He was turning his things over to me. It was his obligation to the studio. You know, he did his job as a producer. But I was such a young motherf***er, that as he was leaving the room, I asked him where he was going next! It’s a cartoon thing…! Krantz nearly went out of his chair trying not to laugh. Shamus looked at me real funny. Then he kinda smiled. He knew it was hysterically funny.

So I’m going to Toronto to the studio [Trillium Productions Ltd.]. And my job was to make the pitches good because they weren’t getting accepted—these were syndicated shows. They weren’t getting accepted because they were pretty bad. So I bring up Gray Morrow and Jim Steranko and they start doing animated layouts for the production department. Layouts are what the animators use to draw from.

So these guys got to do layouts, and the show improved—tremendously!

Now, Krantz and [Trillium producer] Al Guest get into a huge fight because Krantz isn’t paying people. He’s not paying you, but he’s sending shows to New York. There’s a huge lawsuit starting, right?

So Krantz gives me a call one day and says, do I think I could produce the shows in New York myself? So I packed up the model truck [the model sheets for Rocket Robin Hood] with my friend Johnny Vita, who was my background artist for years and worked with me. He was up there [in Canada] painting backgrounds for me. He was a World War II combat designer.

I have never loved a man more dearly than Johnny Vita. I met him at Terrytoons. A brilliant background painter. He painted Fritz the Cat, he painted Heavy Traffic, he painted Lord of the Rings. An all-around great guy.

So we were going to the train station [with the model sheets], and someone comes running

Super Basher TM & © Paramount Pictures.

city. Well, what I had done with Marvin Digs was, start doing real life in the city. I went from fantasy, which everyone was doing— mythical—to being in Greenwich Village. Marvin Digs’ father was a loudmouth Republican, and [Marvin] was the hippie, and we had those arguments about flower power and everything. So I was now starting to pick up on where I was heading, but I didn’t know it [at the time], with Heavy Traffic.

Super Basher and Bop was basically me still trying to get the MAD comics stuff done correctly. You know, with the Shadows and the right cartoonists and everything. But the budgets had become so low for theatrical shorts, there was no way to pay for the top artists that I wanted to get. So Super Basher and Bop was another super-hero spoof.

It was me still trying to come to terms with what I didn’t get with The Mighty Heroes, you know.

But Marvin Digs, that was really a breakthrough to me. I said to myself, “Wow. There’s stuff that’s really happening out there, talking about it instead of pulling gags out of your head, straight gags.”

So I liked it a lot ’cause it eventually got me to Fritz.

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Rocket Robin Hood TM & © Centaur Distribution Corp.

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel.

breathlessly to me, saying, “You gotta hide, because Al Guest just called the cops, the Mounties, because you robbed his stuff, the model truck! They’ll lock you up!”

Wow, so there was a warrant out for your arrest, because of this lawsuit between Guest and Krantz?

Yes, there was a warrant. I didn’t know what to do. This was like John Garfield in a Forties movie.

I’m the kid from Brownsville on the lam, right? “I’ve gotta be smart,” I’m thinking. “I think I can outsmart the Canadians.” I say [to Johnny Vita], “John, we’ll just go to the bus station. We’ll buy two tickets to New York. If you go to the airport, they’ll think that I’m leaving by bus to get over the border.” Okay, so we go to the bus station, we buy two tickets, and Johnny goes to the airport, where he’s surrounded by cops, right? You know what I do?

What did you do…?

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You won’t believe it. I jumped in the back of a cab and I say, “Take me to the border.” [laughs] [The driver] looks at me like I’m crazy.

[At the border,] there’s a bridge. I think it was outside of Buffalo. It was a bridge, there was a guardhouse on one side that’s Canadian, and a guardhouse on the other side that’s American. There’s a dotted line in the middle of the bridge that says, “You’re now in Canada/ You’re now in America,” right?

And I hadda get across the bridge [with the models]. So the guy’s walking back and forth and turns around, so I take off like a shot. I just run! I’m thinking, “I’m not gonna be arrested. I gotta go see my woman.” [Michael laughs] My wife. She’ll confirm this when she picks me up!”

So I’m running across the bridge and the guy the Canadian, is yelling at me, right? As I run, an American steps out by the other side, there’s a little guard, you know… it was stupid! It was like a Toonerville Trolley kind of thing, you know? And he says, “Where the f*** do you think you’re going?” Every f***ing American was trying to get away from the Vietnam War by running into Canada, and I’m running out. [laughs] Always one to buck the trend, huh?

Yeah. I called my wife, Elizabeth. She cried, because Steve Krantz was telling [her] I was arrested, and Johnny Vita was arrested—which he was—and we were all taken to jail. She’s in Steve Krantz’s office, right, when I finally get to her, and she says, “Where are you?” I say, “I’m in Buffalo.” She goes, “Buffalo?”

Krantz jumps on the phone, and he’s flabbergasted because if the Canadians had me in jail, he’d have to sell [Rocket Robin Hood]. But I was free! I was free and they couldn’t get me! So Krantz could continue to fight.

There was no [longer an] arrest warrant for me, though. They got scared and sent Johnny home, on a plane.

So next, Rocket Robin Hood ends pretty quickly, and you open up an animation studio in New York, in the garment district. How did you come to work on Spider-Man? [Krantz,] he was one of the great salesmen of all time, let me tell ya something! But he had this company in L.A., Grantray-Lawrence, doing the first season of SpiderMan. At any rate, I was doing $14,000 per half hour—which is very cheap—on Rocket Robin Hood. I think it was $25,000 a half hour, what the Spider-Mans were at Grantray-Lawrence.

So Krantz automatically fired Grantray-Lawrence and gave me the series to do, because I guess I was coming in at $14,000. He just told me he fired GrantrayLawrence and he wanted to keep the studio going, because he enjoyed the studio because he could keep tabs on it. And we could have meetings on stuff to sell. That’s where we had the Fritz the Cat meeting, you know. I’d go up and we’d have these meetings. [Spider-Man] was a good boost to him and I think a good boost to me. I needed a job and I loved running a studio!

Well, Spider-Man was a pretty big hit at that time.

Huge. Huge. It was a big hit then.

Steve Krantz really slashed the budget on Spider-Man for those seasons that you did.

Yeah. Every penny I saved went in Krantz’s pocket. It was a very big deal. I tried to do that without putting money in my pocket, too.

I’m not [just] trying to work, I’m trying to run a good business! I was trying to show that you don’t need all that money to make a decent film. And I proved that on my early low-budget films. Wizards, [Heavy] Traffic, and Fritz were under a million dollars [to produce], and they’re still playing!

WHO YA GONNA CALL…?

Super Luck

Editor Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” super-hero comics were packed with random back-up stories.

From issue to issue, you never knew what to expect in the B-pages of B-Man and other Harvey headliners.

One such strip was “Super Luck,” an easy-tooverlook two-pager in Jigsaw #1 (Sept. 1966). Your guess is as good as mine as to who wrote and drew it (the Grand Comics Database guesses that Otto Binder was its writer). I’d allow Super Luck to remain in its cobwebbed corner of limbo if its premise weren’t so much fun.

Super Luck stars Homer Glitch, a dweeb who makes Robby Reed look hip. Homer is billed as “America’s ‘Secret’ Comic Agent,” the ultimate fanboy

(before such a word was coined), also described as “the world’s #1 comic fan.”

As we meet Homer, he’s zipping into what we assume is a newsstand—although the store has “COMICS” stenciled onto its window, making you wonder if we’re not witnessing the first comic shop— answering “another distress call” from a super-hero in trouble. The flapping pages of an Ignito comic book tell Homer that it’s that heroic “Fire Bomb” who needs help. With the utterance of his “mystic words” (which could double as TV Batman sound effects), “Whammo-Pow-YIPES-Crack-Zap-KAZOOM!”, he is transformed into the spindly super-hero Super Luck, a living good-luck charm for imperiled super-heroes.

Super Luck flies into “comicdom’s danger dimension,” arriving to find Ignito (a sadly out-of-shape fire-breather in what resembles a pro wrestler’s outfit) trapped in a giant ice cube by the villainous Monstro. By rubbing his lucky-horseshoe chest insignia, Super Luck creates jinxes that put Monstro out to pasture. “How do you do it?” asks a grateful Ignito. Super Luck responds, “Because I’m a super fan, I’ve been given super powers to help super heroes!” Homer then wakes up amid a batch of comic books strewn across the store, being yelled at by the store’s proprietor, who tells him to stop daydreaming and restock the comic-book rack.

Sure, the dream is perhaps the greatest of storytelling contrivances, but who among us hasn’t at least once fantasized about being a superhero?

Super Luck’s luck ran out with this one installment, however, as he was never seen again.

LEFT: Page 1 of the two-page Super Luck feature from Jigsaw #1. © the respective copyright holder.

Ignito (who looks like he’s due a return trip to SuperHero Boot Camp) sure is grateful for Super Luck! © the respective copyright holder.

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RIGHT: Original art by Wood for a Miracles, Inc. house ad appearing in Harvey Thriller titles.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

Wallace “Wally” Wood.

Courtesy of Marvel Wikia.

Meet Miracles, Inc., on the splash page of their first Wally Woodproduced adventure, from Unearthly Spectaculars #2.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

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MIRACLES, INC. Wally Wood’s Wacky Wonders

Stan Lee called Wallace Wood “The Master of the Printed Picture” in the credits of Marvel’s Daredevil #7. Wood was also one of comicdom’s most temperamental and tormented talents, taking his own life in 1981, leaving behind a phenomenal body of diverse work spanning three decades.

With this in mind, Miracles, Inc., barely remembered as Harvey Comics’ super-team super-spoof, becomes more a study in unfulfilled promise. Promoted as “the new ‘IN’ group” in its cover blurb on Unearthly Spectaculars #2 (Dec. 1966), Miracles, Inc. took a back seat to the super-hero-comics-by-rote lead feature, Jack Quick Frost. That wasn’t originally editor Joe Simon’s plan. Simon had intended that Wood’s Bohemian super-team would headline the second issue of Blast-Off, and a cover mock-up spotlighting the group was produced. But as did many things in Woody’s life, his Miracles, Inc. plans went haywire.

Before we look at what went wrong, let’s examine what went right. Wood wrote and illustrated the first Miracles, Inc. tale, a mere five-pager that succinctly introduces its characters and sets up the premise that was intended to follow. The story opens

with a splash where Wood ushers his cast onto the stage in a single, glorious illustration. We meet the wise Professor Who, clearly the brains of the outfit; Manlet, a doll-sized hero with a horse-sized appetite; the hulkish beatnik Misfit, who juggernauts through a brick wall instead of walking through a door; the super-speedster Reflex, who is quite lazy despite his swiftness; the hunky Thermo, whose heat-generation abilities are relegated to mundane chores like warming a coffeepot; Una, Professor Who’s daughter, the group’s gorgeous Gal Friday; and the super-robot Klank, stoically poised in a Gort stance, waiting for mission activation. On the next page, a tall, lean, dapper figure with a bumbershoot—looking a bit like a thinner John Steed, with glasses—enters Miracles, Inc.’s spooky mansion and saunters past its security system. Watching on a monitor, Professor Who dispatches his super-team to stop the intruder, which allows Wood to showcase each team member in his attempt to stop the uninvited man. Here, we discover Misfit’s ineptitude, Reflex’s difficulty in braking his speed, Thermo’s knack for setting off the building’s sprinkler system, little Manlet’s vulnerability (in his toy-sized Ramjet, he is swatted with an umbrella), and Klank’s weakness of being distracted by mathematical equations. Then we have an ultimate showdown between the black-clad gentleman—who’s there to join Miracles, Inc., we discover—and Professor Who. Who is so irritated that this interloper has bested his super-team that he beats the crap out of him… then admits him as a member. The newbie becomes the Wizard, and the story ends as he performs a “small miracle”—mopping the headquarters, his task with the team.

In other hands, this short story might have been disregarded. But as produced by Wally Wood—the artist of two of comicdom’s all-time best super-hero spoofs, MAD’s “Superduperman!” and “Bat Boy and Rubin!”—it’s highly amusing.

Miracles, Inc. got more ink in the next issue in a 17-page story in Unearthly Spectaculars #3. However,

the feature’s creator had vacated the strip. Joe Simon explained why in his 2011 autobiography: “Wally did get mad when [executive editor] Leon Harvey got involved with the books. For some reason Leon decided he had to teach Wally Wood, one of the most accomplished illustrators in the industry, how to draw, and Wood took offense at that. It was the last we saw of him. Nothing I could say would get him back.” And so, after the promising debuts of Miracles, Inc. (and another Wood strip, Earthman) in Unearthly Spectaculars #2, Wallace walked away.

Stepping in for the second installment of Miracles, Inc. were Joe Simon as writer and Jerry

Grandenetti as artist (not Joe Orlando, as some fans have believed due to the story’s artistic similarities to DC’s first two Inferior Five tales, which Grandenetti ghost-penciled for Orlando). There are significant changes from the first story: Una now has the superpower of a love stare, Misfit is missing (although he’s shown on the Bill Draut-drawn promo box on the comic’s cover), Wizard is now a full-fledged member, and new hero Super-Chef (“the crimefighting gourmet”) is part of the team. The feature meanders away from Wood’s opener, where Miracles, Inc. was portrayed a bit like the Doom Patrol-meets-the Addams Family, and veers into generic super-hero parody. The Wizard convinces Professor Who that Miracles, Inc. needs a purpose, so the professor adopts a “Rent-A-Hero” premise for the super-group (perhaps Joe Simon had been watching episodes of Saturday morning’s The Super 6). They’re summoned on the Rent-A-Hero Alert Phone to tangle with the Institute of Infamy, a super-villain group under the leadership of the bell-headed Gong. After a series of silly hero-vs.-villain clashes, Professor Who calls in Miracle, Inc.’s “Ace-in-the-Hole Hero,” the jinx-master Kaput—a dumpy hillbilly—to help bag the bad guys once and for all. An eight-year-old reading this would find it funny, but this Miracles, Inc. lacked the sparkle of Wood’s first outing and the crisp wit of the Inferior 5’s writer E. Nelson Bridwell.

In 1967, Wally Wood, with collaborator Bhob Stewart, got another crack at a super-team spoof with “The Rejects”: Blue Banana, Dimentius, Glomb, Hairy James, I.Q., Kenneth Banghead, Miniman, Venus, and Wee Wit. As Stewart blogged in 2010, the Rejects were one of several concepts planned as half-hour cartoon TV series to be produced by Paramount Studios, under Ralph Bakshi’s direction. When Paramount abruptly closed its animation studio, Wood, anxious to protect his copyright, had Stewart script and lay out a three-page Rejects story that Wally illustrated (assisted on the inking by Dom Sileo) and published in 1968 in his magazine, witzend #4.

Special thanks to John Wells and Mike Tiefenbacher.

LEFT: Original art by Bill Draut for Miracle, Inc.’s cover blurb on Unearthly Spectaculars #3.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the respective copyright holder.

Wood’s Rejects, which he coproduced with Bhob Stewart. © Wallace Wood estate.

LEFT: Joe Simon and Jerry Grandenetti’s new “Rent-AHero” Miracles, Inc., from Unearthly Spectaculars #3. © the respective copyright holder.

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JFK and LBJ in Comic Books

The original SuperLBJ versus his greatest enemies!

Detail from the cover of the comic insert A.P.E. Comics, from 1965’s Biggest Greatest Cracked #1.

Art by John Severin.

Scan courtesy of John Wells. © 1965 Cracked Magazine.

Before Nixon and Watergate, people looked up to the U.S. President. It’s true! Every kid believed that he (not she—back then, only First Ladies, secretaries, and mistresses were allowed in the White House) could grow up to be our commander-in-chief. They also believed they could grow up to be an astronaut or a cowboy.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the Swinging Sixties gave us an astronaut president and a cowboy president—the handsome Man from Camelot who promised us the moon and the feisty Man from Texas who ran Jim Crow out of town on a rail.

JFK’S NEW FRONTIER OF COMIC BOOKS The Camp Era was in its embryonic stages during the presidential election of 1960 when Republican Richard M. Nixon, a familiar face who’d been eyeing the Oval Office from down the hall as vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower, campaigned against Democrat John F. Kennedy, a fresh face who’d impressed folks with both his promise of a New Frontier and his gorgeous wife who wore the best pillbox hats this 128

side of Kurt Schaffenberger’s Lois Lane. Old versus Young. Status Quo versus Here We Go. And if you believe the political analysts, the Gray Suit versus the Dark Suit, as Nixon’s drab, five o’clock-shadowed appearance in a televised debate (in black and white) made many viewers tune him out in favor of the stark, striking, vibrant Kennedy. Still, MAD Magazine hedged its bets with its sixtieth issue by releasing a flip cover, one side duplicitously congratulating Nixon, the other, JFK! (MAD, and Americans of voting age, ignored the candidacy of Huckleberry Hound, who ran on the Hanna-Barbera ticket, at least according to the Huckleberry Hound for President issue of Dell Comics’ Four Color series, #1141. However, those same voters disregarded MAD #56’s “New Man” campaign for Alfred E. Neuman for President, highlighted by a Kelly Freas cover crammed with likenesses of political figures.)

While celebrities and comic books were frequent bedfellows, U.S. presidents were infrequently seen. Presidents in comic-book stories were traditionally generic statesmen (except for flashbacks to historically significant past presidents like Washington and Lincoln, who tended to pop up frequently), or their faces were purposely obstructed or in shadows (done so to preserve “the dignity of the office”). Then came the first rock-star president of the TV age. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had barely lowered his swearing-in hand after his January 20, 1961 inauguration before he became one of the most indemand real-world guest-stars of comic books of the early Sixties.

The new U.S. president made a quickie comicbook appearance in a one-shot aptly titled John F. Kennedy, New U.S. President. Published on newsprint with a newsprint cover, this issue flew under the radar of, well, everyone reading comic books, since it was produced by the U.S. Information Agency as a giveaway to international dignitaries to introduce them to our new commander-inchief.

Charlton Comics, the little Derby, Connecticut, comics house that rapidly and rabidly exploited any new trend, was the first to rush a JFK comic-book publication onto the

© U.S. Information Agency.

SUPER PRESIDENTS

stands—yet it starred not the handsome new president, but one of his greatest assets. “America’s First Young Lady” headlined a Spring 1961 Caroline Kennedy one-shot, with the adorable moppet and her lovely mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, perfectly caricatured on its cover by Dick Giordano. Its hastily produced contents consisted of a text biography of Caroline illustrated by photographs, press clippings, and illustrations, with puzzle and coloring pages added for fun. Interior artists on the project were Sal Gentile, Giordano, and Jon D’Agostino. Before long, the First Daughter also headlined a paperback of one-panel gag cartoons written by Gerald Gardner and illustrated by Frank Johnson titled Miss Caroline.

At the House of Ideas, Caroline’s father dropped in on a handful of Marvel Comics stories, including Patsy Walker #97 (Oct. 1961) and the Thor adventure in Journey into Mystery #96 (Sept. 1963). Marvel published a 1963 political humor fumetti magazine written by Stan Lee titled You Don’t Say!, featuring photos of politicians—with a heavy Kennedy emphasis—with wacky word balloons by Stan the Man. American Comics Group’s roly-poly, lollipoplicking quasi-hero Herbie Popnecker met lots of famous people, present and past, in his time-tripping adventures. He crossed paths with President and Mrs. Kennedy in Forbidden Worlds #114 (Sept. 1963).

Meanwhile, MAD Magazine frequently poked fun at the new prez.

Yet these and other Kennedy comic-book appearances were dwarfed by the president’s outings in DC Comics’ Superman titles—not surprising since

their editor, Mort Weisinger, was a staunch Democrat and ran in some heavy political circles with folks like Adlai Stevenson. Occasional cameos by JFK conveyed a bond between the American President and the Man of Tomorrow. Mort snuck JFK into the pages of Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #25 (May 1961), Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #56 (Oct. 1961), and Action Comics #283 (Dec. 1961). President Kennedy (with the First Lady and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson) even welcomed the newly revealed-to-theworld Supergirl in the landmark issue Action #285.

Some have speculated that Mort was in on what was at the time Washington, D.C.’s most hushhush secret, the alleged affair between JFK and Hollywood bombshell Marilyn Monroe, when he published the “Tales of the Bizarro World” story in Adventure Comics #294 (cover-dated Mar. 1962, but going on sale on January 30, 1962). Its Curt Swan/ George Klein cover showed a Bizarro Superman and a Bizarro Lois wearing Kennedy and Marilyn trick-or-treat masks (alongside another Bizarro as Jerry Lewis), and inside, the Siegel/Forte story also depicted the pseudo-Jack-and-Marilyn duo together.

Just under a year later, in Adventure #305, a Fortedrawn Legion of Super-Heroes story, set in the 30th Century, established a re-election for Kennedy (this was altered in reprints of the tale). Forte also illustrated “Jimmy Olsen’s Viking Sweetheart,” published in April 1963 in Jimmy Olsen #69. Therein, Jimmy glows with pride as First Lady Jackie Kennedy welcomes the Cub Reporter and his new girlfriend Holga to the White House.

With such wacky goings-on linking the First Family and Superman Family, fans wondered what was next: Would Lois try to snip a lock of the president’s hair to see if JFK was secretly Superman?

Would Jackie ask Supergirl to babysit Caroline and little John-John?

The next noteworthy DC Comics Kennedy appearance came in Action Comics #309 (coverdated Feb. 1964). Its Swan/Klein cover quizzed readers to guess the identity of the Clark Kent standin shaking Superman’s hand on a televised tribute to the Metropolis Marvel. Once you read the story

MAD flips for Kennedy—no, Nixon! Bob Clarke’s flip covers for MAD #60.

MAD TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc.

LEFT: Did editor Mort Weisinger know of the alleged JFK/ Marilyn Monroe affair when he commissioned this Curt Swan/John Forte cover for Adventure Comics #294 (Mar. 1962)?

TM & © DC Comics.

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The splash page to Superman #170’s landmark “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy!” in original art and published forms, plus a 2013 photo of its artist, Al Plastino, with the art.

TM & © DC Comics.

inside you discovered (SPOILER ALERT!) that it was the Man in the White House who had masqueraded as the Man of Steel’s alter ego, with Supie having entrusted JFK with his alter ego. This well-intentioned story proved embarrassing as it hit newsstands on December 26, 1963—just over a month after Kennedy’s November 22nd assassination.

“SUPERMAN’S MISSION FOR PRESIDENT KENNEDY” That bleak moment in American history cast a pall over another Weisinger-edited Superman/Kennedy tale, “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy,” a ten-page public-service announcement in comics form where the commander-in-chief enlists Superman’s aid in whipping flabby Americans into shape as part of the President’s Fitness Program.

Weisinger announced this tale in the August 30, 1963 edition of the New York Times, his article illustrated by an uncolored Superman/JFK panel by Swan and Klein. Then came Kennedy’s horrific murder.

In a letter to readers published in the “Metropolis Mailbag” lettercol of Superman #168 (cover-dated Apr. 1964), which went on sale the first week of February, Mort stated that “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy” was completed and had been intended for publication in the very next issue (#169) but was being cancelled due to Kennedy’s death, with the original artwork to be respectfully donated to the president’s grieving widow. The Swan/Klein panel was reprinted in #168’s letters page.

But soon thereafter came Superman #170 (cover-dated July 1964), cover-featuring an imaginary story about Luthor being Superman’s Kryptonian father, but opening with… “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy”—its Bill Finger/E. Nelson Bridwell script drawn by Al Plastino, not Curt Swan!

Its now-iconic splash page features the Man of Steel 130

solemnly waving at the a symbolic specter of JFK looming over the U.S. Capitol building, and notes that the tale was published at the request of Kennedy’s vice president-turned-successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. An editorial note concluding the tale promised, “The original art for this story will be donated to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, at Harvard.” And that’s what artist Al Plastino believed for most of the rest of his life.

But the particulars surrounding this Superman classic are choked in a murky grassy knoll. What happened to the Swan/Klein art? Was it donated to Mrs. Kennedy, prompting a re-do by Plastino once a decision was made to publish the story? Or was it never illustrated in the first place, beyond a trial panel shown in the New York Times and in Superman #168?

Did Johnson really ask for its publication? Comics historians such as Mark Evanier and Eddy Zeno have weighed in with theories, but one thing is for certain: Guest of honor Al Plastino was informed at the New York Comic-Con on Friday, October 11, 2013 that Heritage Auctions would be selling the original artwork for “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy” on November 22, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. The elderly artist bravely posed for a photo holding the original art of the splash page, but was heartbroken, telling Eddy Zeno, his biographer, “In the picture, my eyes were all red. I was crying.” Thus began a firestorm of public reaction to the art’s fate and the artist’s plight.

Plastino’s eldest children, Fred and MaryAnn, rallied to assist their father, and discovered that the artwork had never been donated to the Presidential Library in the first place, as their father had long believed (along with the rest of us). There are conspiracy theories as to how it ended up winding its way into a private collector’s hands and onto the auction block, but after news media coverage, lobbying from creator-rights advocates, legal intervention, and fan backlash, Heritage called off the auction. Sadly, the ailing Plastino passed away on November 25th of that year, not living to see the artwork’s eventual fate: On December 16, 2013, DC Comics announced its acquisition of the original artwork to “Superman’s

Mission for President Kennedy” and its donation to the Kennedy Library and Museum.

Shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, two publishers released biographical comic books to honor the slain president, both featuring photo covers and released in 1964: Worden & Childs’ John F. Kennedy, Champion of Freedom, produced by an unknown creative team, and Dell’s John F. Kennedy, written

by Paul S. Newman with art by John Tartaglione and Dick Giordano. The Dell edition was reprinted twice, in 1965 and 1966. Marvel’s More You Don’t Say!, a follow-up fumetti magazine to its earlier one-shot, was released in late 1963 but soon yanked from the stands after the president’s murder. And back at DC, Mort Weisinger snuck in another JFK tribute, a final-panel salute to the fallen president in the Jimmy Olsen story “The Infamous Four!” by Siegel and Schaffenger, in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #89 (Dec. 1965). Not to be outdone, from George Kashdan’s editorial office, Teen Titans #7 (Jan.–Feb. 1967),

by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy, featured a panel of the Titans saluting a portrait of the slain president.

JFK’s comic-book appearances weren’t limited to depictions of his presidency. On two occasions— almost three—Lieutenant Junior Grade John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s legendary World War II exploits, a gripping survival story involving the sinking of the young Naval officer’s torpedo boat by a Japanese destroyer, were immortalized in comics. But first came the 1961 publication of Robert J. Donovan’s book, PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II, a bestseller that inspired a hit song the following year by country star (and future sausage salesman) Jimmy Dean.

Not only was he the world’s most charismatic leader, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a real-life action hero.

Dell Comics’ Combat #4 (June 1962) adapted his war story, courtesy of artist Sam Glanzman. A few months before Kennedy’s assassination, the movie PT 109, starring Cliff Robertson as Lieutenant Kennedy, was released, on June 19, 1963. After President Kennedy’s death and a year after the release of the Robertson film, Gold Key Comics published a oneshot adaptation of the movie, with art by Dan Spiegle.

Comics pioneer Joe Simon also intended to publish a comic book about the president’s war story; he and his studio produced the cover for a comic titled Young Jack Kennedy in the Adventures of the PT-109 [hyphenated] and a related story titled “Distant Thunder.” Apparently, this project went unpublished.

COMICS GO ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ President Kennedy’s assassination propelled the Camp Age into high gear, with America recoiling from this and other real-world horrors through escapist entertainment. As a result, Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain president’s successor in 1963 and the duly elected president in 1964, became a pop-culture fixture.

For a brief while, so did his “arch-foe,” Republican Barry Goldwater, the New Deal-hating conservative’s conservative who challenged Johnson for the White House in ’64. Remco, the toy manufacturer famous for plastic big-head rubber dolls (with “real” hair) of the Beatles, the Munsters, and the Monkees, issued LBJ and Goldwater figures during election season, urging buyers to pick their candidate and stick him on their car dash. Dell Comics catered to both political parties by publishing the “Complete Life Story” oneshots, Barry M. Goldwater and Lyndon B. Johnson, both with photo covers. Dell offered readers a third voting option with its publication of an Alvin for

Shortly after the president’s assassination, these tribute comics were published by Dell Comics and Worden & Childs, respectively. © the respective copyright holders.

LEFT: Original cover art for the Joe Simon studio’s unfinished Young Jack Kennedy in the Adventures of the PT-109 comic.

Courtesy of Heritage. © Joe Simon estate.

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The 1964 presidential election spawned collectible dolls and comic books about the candidates. © the respective copyright holders.

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President special—and despite the endorsement of kooky scientist Clyde Crashcup, TV’s popular singing chipmunk lost his White House bid. So did HannaBarbera’s pet-shop gorilla, Magilla, and pic-a-nic basket-pilfering Jellystone Park denizen, Yogi Bear, who ran against each other for president in the pages of Gold Key’s Magilla Gorilla #3 (cover-dated Dec. 1964).

After his re-election, President Johnson—sometimes identified by name, sometimes not—could be seen in walk-ons or cutaways in a variety of comics from different publishers. While he lacked the good looks and charisma of Kennedy, Johnson’s yam-like nose, floppy-lobed elephant ears, and cartoonish Texas plain-talk made him easy to caricature.

At Marvel Comics, the president was sympathetic toward the plight of the Incredible Hulk in Tales to Astonish #88 (who sez nobody loves the Hulk?), was seen in an Iron Man adventure in Tales of Suspense #83, kept abreast of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s doings in issues of Strange Tales and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and sent the Howling Commandos to Vietnam in Sgt. Fury Annual #3. Across town at DC, Mort Weisinger’s Superman office continued to summon the president

for appearances, with LBJ drop-ins in the pages of Action Comics (numerous issues starting with #332), Lois Lane (#71), Superman (#205), and Jimmy Olsen (#114). Down the hall at DC in other editors’ offices, the Chief called the chief executive in Doom Patrol #98, while LBJ was also on view in Rip Hunter… Time Master #23, Challengers of the Unknown #45, Blackhawk #228, The Adventures of Bob Hope #91, and elsewhere.

Occasionally, LBJ’s comics cameos were humorous, such as when President Johnson sang Herbie Popnecker’s praises to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1964’s Herbie #1, or when he took a breather to allow Super-Hip to be president for a day in 1966’s Adventures of Bob Hope #100. Parody books like MAD, Sick, and Not Brand Echh loved LBJ, sometimes drawing the Texas-born president in a ten-gallon cowboy hat.

Hollywood also had a lot of laughs at Johnson’s expense. You might hear a voice actor aping his drawl in phone conversations in movies (like 1966’s Batman). Fred Flintstone taught a Stone Age version of Johnson how to dance “The Frantic” in 1965’s Season Six Flintstones episode “Shinrock-A-Go-Go.” Hollywood also borrowed from Johnson’s Oval Office for drama. Two Cold War movies from 1964, the Peter Sellers serio-comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and the Henry Fonda gripper Fail-Safe, depicted their film presidents holding telephoned crisis confabs with Communist leaders, inspired by President Johnson’s August 1963 installation of his “hot line” which linked him to the Kremlin (although the real hotline’s connection was not smooth or immediate like that portrayed on screen). Once editor Julius Schwartz was assigned by DC Comics’ top brass to revitalize the company’s sagging Batman franchise, his socalled “New Look” Batman and Detective Comics in 1964 featured a flashing, red “Hot-Line” between Batman’s Batcave (and a remote unit in the Batmobile) and Commissioner Gordon’s office at the Gotham City Police Department (Detective’s letters column was also known as “Batman’s Hot-Line”). The image of a red, glowing, beeping hotline was most famously portrayed on television’s live-action Batman show, which made “Batphone” a household word (and a marketable tie-in for Marx Toys), thereby becoming President Johnson’s most significant—albeit indirect—contribution to the world of comic books and pop culture.

SUPERLBJ In 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson reached a new high (or low, depending upon your perspective) as a caped super-hero: SuperLBJ! In the pages of the 1966 one-shot The Great Society Comic Book, President Johnson, his chief

advisors, his political enemies, and other world leaders were lampooned as super-heroes and supervillains.

For those who read comic books during American History class instead of paying attention to your teacher, here’s a quick recap of Johnson’s transformative presidency: LBJ carried forth the promise of JFK’s New Frontier through a “Great Society” reform agenda that included the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, the establishment of the Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) and Head Start, the creation of Medicare and the Peace Corps, the construction of low-income housing via the Omnibus Housing Act, and other socially friendly programs that led Barry Goldwater to chug PeptoBismol. Ultimately, his escalation of American troops in the unpopular Vietnam War proved Johnson’s undoing as it eroded his public support, leading an emotionally and politically wounded President Johnson to opt against seeking re-election in 1968.

But Johnson had yet to crash to such a low in 1966. The Great Society Comic Book is set during the height of the Camp Age, when SuperLBJ could indeed exclaim, as he so hopefully does on the comic book’s cover, “Why… that, that could be a great society!” while pointing at the good, ol’ U. S. of A. and orbiting the globe like Superman.

Behind this take-off was scribe D. J. Arneson, whose day job was as the comic-book editor at Dell Comics. As a writer, two years earlier he was the satirist behind Simon & Schuster’s Instant Candidates ’64 book, a “flip book” with tri-cut, spiral-bound pages drawn by Jack Sparling which allowed the reader to

mix and match politicians’ heads, bodies, and slogans into “more than 4,900 hilarious combinations.”

(Think of this as a larger version of Topps’ Comic Book Foldees cards of 1966.) Dell Publishing President “Helen Meyer was upset when she learned I had done that, as that was done at Simon & Schuster,” Arneson told interviewer Jamie Coville in 2010. “She was concerned that I had gone outside the company and said, ‘Why didn’t you bring it to me?’ My understanding at the time was that editors went outside the[ir] company just because of the presumption of it would somehow de-legitimize it if somebody inside the company had published the book.… Anyway, I had the notion of another political satire based on a super-hero. Super-heroes had been revived at the time.”

D. J. turned to artist Tony Tallarico, with whom he had worked on several Dell Comics projects, as his collaborator. “Tony and I were friends,” Arneson said.

“He was a very reliable artist. I could call Tony with a book that was under pressure and he would be able to produce that quickly, which was essential at the time.… He was also willing to do stuff on spec.”

Tallarico produced a concept cover for what Arneson called The Great Society Comic Book. D. J. pitched it to his boss, as he’d been asked, but Helen Meyer turned it down, feeling it wasn’t a good fit for Dell’s line. Arneson then shared it with former Dell lawyer Dick Gallen. Gallen and one-time Dell editor Peter Workman “were in the process of developing a publishing company called Parallax Publishing” and were in the market for a political satire project. D. J. and Tony’s SuperLBJ-starring vehicle became Parallax’s LEFT: D. J. Arneson’s Instant Candidates ’64 book was followed by his Great Society Comic Book of 1966.

TM & © Simon & Schuster.

SuperLBJ surveys his domain on the cover of The Great Society Comic Book. © D. J. Arneson and Tony Tallarico.

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Two of comicdom’s many LBJ cameos, the Hulk tale in Tales to Astonish #88 and from Herbie #1.

Herbie TM & © Roger Broughton. Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

first publication. Tallarico’s frequent associate, Bill Fraccio, co-produced the artwork, albeit uncredited.

The parody opens with a gathering of the superhero team the G.R.E.A.T. (Group Resigned to End All Threats) Society (herewith Great Society to keep me from typing all those periods) lamenting “the greatest imaginable disaster,” a crisis that is also the story’s title: “SuperLBJ is Missing!” Were things not bleak enough, with the absence of their leader, the Great Society braces for an attempted takeover by the opportunistic Dynamic Duo of Bobman and Teddy (Robert and Ted Kennedy).

The Great Society’s roll call features the realworld Johnson’s inner circle as parodies of famous super-heroes: The Shadower (The Shadow) = Vice President Hubert Humphrey Wonderbird (Wonder Woman) = First Lady Ladybird Johnson Captain Marvelous (Captain Marvel) = Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara The Phantasm (The Phantom) = Secretary of State Dean Rusk Disagreein’ Hornet (Green Hornet) = Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the Senate Minority Leader U.N. Man (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) = U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg In the tradition of the early Justice Society of America epics, the members of the Great Society splinter into solo adventures on their search for SuperLBJ, with each encountering the team’s arch134

enemies along the way: The Phantasm heads for France, suspecting its leader, Gaullefinger (Charles DeGaulle), to be behind SuperLBJ’s abduction.

Captain Marvelous’ search takes him to the “Mysterious East” (identified as such by a sign atop the Great Wall of China) and a run-in with super-villain Fu Man Lai (Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, or Mao Tse-tung). At United Nations Headquarters—“The one place on earth where supervillains can operate within the law!”—U.N. Man’s appeal for Super-LBJ’s return is upended by the rabblerousing Dr. Nyet (Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev) and the Sicko Kid (Cuba’s Fidel Castro). And Wonderbird’s feathers are ruffled by another cook in the White House kitchen, Chefman.

The next chapter cuts away to a star-spangled character that is not a member of the Great Society.

“This one looks like a hero… he talks like a hero… but is he?” asks the narrator. We meet Colonel America, with Barry Goldwater as a Captain America spoof, flying a plane with only a right wing (“With twentysix million people supporting me… who needs a left wing?”) as he, too, joins the search for SuperLBJ. Colonel America crosses paths with another nonGreat Society member, “that three-time loser who keeps coming back for more,” the Along Ranger (Richard Nixon). Together, they tangle with a Klan robe-wearing racist named Whiteman (Alabama Governor and then-segregationist George Wallace).

Then we finally encounter our hero, SuperLBJ, who has been rendered powerless after exposure to AlCuFe (“that strange mixture of aluminum, copper, and steel”) as part of a plot by the ruthless Businessman, the fattest cat of them all. With SuperLBJ out of the way, his Great Society will unravel and Businessman will face no opposition in exerting his control.

Of course, the President of Power manages to save the day, rescue his endangered Great Society teammates, topple the super-villains, and even put those upstarts Bobman and Teddy in their place.

The Great Society Comic Book was not marketed toward kids. Instead, Parallax targeted it toward an adult market, selling it primarily through bookstores, distributed by Pocket Books. While its interiors look like most 32-page color comics of its day, its cover was printed on a matted, cardboard stock and the book retailed for $1.00.

The Great Society Comic Book was a smash, garnering media coverage, selling a half-million copies, and quickly spawning a sequel, Bobman and Teddy.

While The Great Society Comic Book features the most famous example of President Johnson as a super-hero, it was not the first appearance of a SuperLBJ. That distinction goes to Cracked Magazine. Its super-sized Biggest Greatest Cracked #1 (1965) included a 16-page color comic insert titled A.P.E. Comics, parodying scads of comicstrip and comic-book characters. Its cover, drawn

by John Severin, shows a cowboy-hat-wearing,

© DePatie-Freleng.

Captain America-like SuperLBJ punching out his foes Super Commie, Super Poverty, and Super “Ignerance.” Among the vignettes inside is “All the Way with SuperLBJ” by Vic Martin. Here, SuperLBJ— now sporting Superman-ish red and blue—tackles those same foes (in different forms) but calling for the readers’ help in wiping out “those brand ‘X’ super guys in the next election” (super-hero versions of Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and Goldwater).

THE OTHER SUPER PRESIDENTS In 1967, DePatie-Freleng, the animation house that gave us The Pink Panther, introduced a crimefighting commander-in-chief that was not a parody of LBJ. Super President (see above), a one-season stinker running on NBC Saturday mornings, borrowed liberally from almost every super-hero convention of the day. U.S. President James Norcross was exposed to a cosmic storm that gave him super-powers, enabling him to alter his molecular structure. As President Norcross, he governed from the “Presidential Mansion,” and as Super President (!), he fought injustice from his cave headquarters. Amazingly, no one suspected that the U.S. President was actually Super President!

Lastly, upon reading Action Comics #371 (Jan. 1969), some comic fans in the know might have suspected that the 1968 presidential election of Republican Richard M. Nixon over Democrat Hubert Humphrey (also in the running was Independent and Great Society Comic Book villain George Wallace) was a bitter pill to swallow for Kennedy idolizer Mort Weisinger. That issue began a four-part Superman adventure where the Man of Tomorrow suffers from partial amnesia, forgetting his Clark Kent identity. In this storyline, Superman stumbles through a string of supposed alter egos, starting with “The President of Steel,” taking up part-time residence in the White House as the unnamed president (that “dignity of the office” thing again)! After Weisinger’s Camelot courtship and Great Society grandstanding, it looked as

if the editor had erected a “G.O.P. Off Limits” wall around his editorial office.

But that wasn’t the case. Action #371’s “The President of Steel,” written by Otto Binder, went on sale November 21, 1968, just over two weeks after the Tuesday, November 5th presidential election, meaning at the time of its scripting and production Binder and Weisinger could not have foretold the election’s outcome. Plus, having a “real” president appear in the story would obviously negate Superman’s assumption that he was secretly the commander-in-chief. So a generic, unnamed president was Binder’s best story option.

However, President Nixon made a few appearances in Weisinger-edited books during Mort’s final year at DC before his 1970 retirement, including the Cary Bates-scripted “The Man with Superman’s Heart!” in World’s Finest Comics #189 (Nov. 1969), where Nixon eulogizes the supposedly slain Man of Steel. Conversely, Bates’ “The Self-Destruct Superman!” in Action #390 (July 1970) featured the Metropolis Marvel presenting to the U.S. president—another non-descript diplomat, clearly not Nixon—a superweapon to use against him in case he went bonkers.

Regarding the first story, Bates told me in September 2015, “I don’t have any recollection of discussions with Mort with regard to Nixon’s appearance.” It became the writer’s prerogative whether to use President Nixon or an unnamed president in their scripts— whatever best suited the story.

While President Nixon made occasional comicbook appearances in the early Seventies, the frivolity of the Camp Age had been replaced by the vitriol of the Relevance Age and at times he was treated much harsher on the four-color page than Kennedy and Johnson had been. Nixon’s own errant behavior, particularly the Watergate scandal, fomented those venomous portrayals, the most shocking (SPOILER ALERT!) being Nixon’s super-villainy as revealed in writer Steve Englehart’s climax to his “Secret Empire” storyline in Marvel’s Captain America.

Still, it’s of note that one of the last bastions of the Camp Age, NBC-TV’s hip, bawdy, and irreverent comedy Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, substantially improved the dour Nixon’s likability and helped him win the 1968 election.

On Laugh-In’s September 16, 1968 program, just weeks before the election, the then-former Veep and current GOP candidate uttered a hilarious American catchphrase (right).

Little did we know that a few years later, Nixon would sock it to us…

SOCK IT TO ME?

Special thanks to John “Chief of Staff” Wells for presidential appearance information.

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THE GREAT SOCIETY COMIC BOOK ARTIST An Interview with Tony Tallarico

spoof The Great Society Comic Book (and its follow-up, Bobman and Teddy).

Interview conducted in September 2015 and transcribed

by Steven Thompson.

Behold, the political power of the cast of The Great Society Comic Book. Back cover art by Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico. © D. J. Arneson and Tony Tallarico.

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Brooklyn native Tony Tallarico began his career as a comic-book illustrator in 1953, after studying at the School of Industrial Art, the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and the School of Visual Arts.

Often working with his uncredited partner Bill Fraccio, Tony has drawn issues of Classics Illustrated, Blue Beetle, Son of Vulcan, F Troop, The Flintstones, and David Cassidy, as well as Camp Age classics Jigsaw and Sinbad Jr. With writer/editor D. J. Arneson he co-produced the landmark Dell series Lobo, comics’ first title starring an African-American protagonist. Tallarico and Arneson were also the creative team behind Dell’s super-hero versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf, as well as the subject of this interview, the political

How did The Great Society Comic Book come about?

D. J. Arneson was the editor at Dell—Dell Comics. We’d worked together on a number of things.

One night around nine o’clock, I get a call from him. He has a meeting with Helen Meyer, who was the president of Dell Comics. I said to him, “Whaddaya want from me? What can we do?”

He says, “Can you do a finished cover by tomorrow night?” I said, “Sure. If you think it would help.

Of course.”

So, I worked a few hours and I did a finished cover. The next morning I was there, and [D. J.] took it and he went to Helen Meyer, and he came back very down.

She turned it down. She said that Dell didn’t do political stuff.

Okay, now we had heard of another publisher, Parallax, that was just starting up and we knew both of the guys that were the heads of it, so we called and he said, “Sure, come on over this afternoon.” So we went over in the afternoon… and we got a contract. It was as simple as that.

Why did Dell pass on the project?

Dell did a lot of other things, not only the ten-cent books like comic books, but they did adult books, and we thought this was perfect for them. And it woulda been. But Parallax did a great job and we were able to sell it through…

We were on TV, radio… We were all over the place.

You were on TV? Was it local TV? National TV? Give me a little more detail about that.

It was—oh, the 11:30 show, but it goes national. We were in over a hundred newspapers… and we were on numerous radio shows up and down the coast, the East Coast.

I’m not surprised. It hit at the perfect time. With the Camp movement going on, there were a lot of adults reading comics, and this was the perfect political satire. It sold quite a few copies, didn’t it?

Yes, the printing was 150,000, and then it went back to press for maybe 200,000, and, of course, that didn’t do as well. But we did very well financially.

So, this was a project with royalties, not a work-for-hire project.

Oh, no, no, no. This was royalties paid. That was the first time a comic book ever came out with a dollar price on it.

That was a pretty steep price tag back then.

Sure, sure.

And the heavier paper stock on the cover really made it seem more like a book. I can see where this was geared more toward the adult reader.

It really turned MY attentions from comics to children’s books.

I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, I was doing a lot of children’s books.

Because of The Great Society?

Yeah! All of a sudden, real publishers like Simon & Schuster, Grosset and Dunlap… they all recognized me.

That’s wonderful.

The Great Society Comic Book was a clever parody of both super-heroes and politics.

The likenesses were crisp, and

you and D. J. worked in Republicans as well as Democrats.

That’s right.

I don’t think it disrespected anybody, with the exception of George Wallace. Wallace probably wasn’t too happy with it—but then again, I don’t think he was too happy with a lot of things!

Yeah, right! [laughter] Did you or D. J., or anyone attached to the comic, catch any flak from the White House?

Well, we had—I had—a very nice note from LBJ’s secretary saying how much [President Johnson] was amazed that somebody thought he was the likeness of Superman! [laughter] Maybe five years later, I got a very nice note from his daughter.

Was that Lynda Bird Johnson?

Yeah.

I understand correctly, didn’t that vary, depending on the schedule and the project?

It did. Exactly. He inked, I inked, he penciled, I penciled. It’s just whatever was at the time. You know, we worked together for quite a long time, in fact.

You were the person who most usually went after the assignments, though, right?

Yes. His personality just wasn’t as outgoing? Is that it?

That’s it.

Any idea how many pages you two logged together over the years? [sighing] We did SO many comics, you know? From romance to cartoon things… thousands of pages.

Is it archived? Or on display?

It has been [on display]. It’s like everything else. It’s on display and then it’s not. It was in the Smithsonian.

You and Bill were versatile, but back then your forte was with TV tie-ins and such. Were you in your comfort zone when you were doing super-hero books like Harvey’s Jigsaw? Or Charlton’s Son of Vulcan, which was a super-hero book, but in a way wasn’t, because of its mythology? Did you and Bill feel comfortable doing that kind of project?

Oh, sure. We liked it. We hated doing the same kind of project all the time, and luckily we [adapted to just about any] category.

Yeah, they rotate things in and out.

By the time I got there, I spoke to—she wasn’t a curator, just somebody that worked there.

And she goes, “We just took it out last week!”

The same year you and D. J. did The Great Society, you did its sequel, Bobman and Teddy.

That one’s scarce.

Yes, yes. Again, Parallax did that, but the moment of the humor super-hero was over.

You were working with your partner, Bill, on The Great Society Comic Book. Would you pronounce his last name for me?

“Frahk-ee-oh.”

What was the story of Bobman and Teddy? It’s scarce, and I haven’t been able to find a copy. In The Great Society Comic Book Bobman and Teddy were heroes, but also the subtle villains, because of their attempts to wrestle power from LBJ in the real world. Was that

So, she liked it?

Oh, she LOVED it!

Well, good. Is there a copy in the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin?

No, sir. There’s two copies in there.

Fraccio. Some fans have been confused as to who did what with your collaborations, but if

what was happening in the second book?

Yeah, the same thing.

But they had more contacts with more personalities of that time. Teddy was a goof. He kept tripping and getting in the way and a lot of other stuff.

Today, when you’re sitting at a table at a comic convention, are you ever approached with a Great Society to sign?

Oh, yeah.

I’m glad there’s still a continuing appreciation for your work and this book.

In Germany, I was at a conference and they were selling individual titles, and quite a few people came over and I couldn’t figure out why. And then I realized that we had sold the German rights for The Great Society to Der Spiegel, which is a big, fancy magazine there. So they were familiar with the Great Society.

Tony Tallarico.

Special thanks to Jim Amash and Alter Ego.

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THE NICE–TERRIFIC WAR Guest Essay By Will Murray

Note: This essay was originally conceived as an article for Jon B. Cooke’s magazine ACE: All Comics Evaluated, for which its opening artwork by USA Today illustrator Keith Carter was commissioned.

ACE was cancelled before “The Nice–Terrific War” could be published. Jon then planned to include this feature in his Comic Book Artist magazine. Once I discovered its existence, I inquired to Jon about publishing it here in Hero-A-Go-Go instead. My sincere thanks to Jon Cooke, Will Murray, and Keith Carter for agreeing to its publication in my book.

– Michael Eury

THIS PAGE & OPPOSITE: TV heroes Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific put up their dukes in this illustration by Keith Carter.

Captain Nice © NBC. Mr. Terrific © Universal Television.

Art © Keith Carter.

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Fifty years ago, two obscure superheroes went to war—with one another. These colorful characters did not slug it out in the real world, but on an electronic battlefield still in its youth.

History has chosen not to formally record this tragi-comic epic, but some skirmishes did make the newspapers. One reporter dubbed it “The Nice–Terrific War.” Out of these accounts it is possible to recount the sorry tale of the year when Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice battled one another to mutual extinction.

It began on network television, in January of 1967—the traditional start of the socalled “Second Season.” That was the month when the Big Three dumped their Fall losers and brought in fresh troops for ratings reinforcements.

A year before, ABC’s Batman had debuted, shaking up the mid-season ratings sweepstakes.

That network followed up with The Green Hornet in the Fall. Naturally, NBC and CBS wanted to get into the act.

Buck Henry of Get Smart fame was tasked with concocting the NBC entry, Captain Nice. Over at CBS, they were allied with Universal Studios to produce Mr. Terrific. Jack Arnold, the director behind The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, was the mind behind the alternate alter ego.

Mr. Terrific was hardly original. A minor DC super-hero by that very name operated back in the Golden Age of Comics. As for the concept, it appeared to have been borrowed from the popular Saturday morning cartoon show, Underdog, starring Wally Cox. The differences between the two superschnooks were superficial. Mr. Terrific starred

Stephen Strimpell as humble gas-station attendant Stanley Beamish who is the only mortal who can swallow a “power pill” and become energized.

Recruited for a secret government agency, he dons a silver lamé suit and matching aviator goggles to battle America’s enemies as Mr. Terrific.

Police chemist Carter Nash, played by William Daniels, invented the potion that transformed him into Captain Nice. His hyper-colorful homemade costume was the gaudiest thing this side of the Golden Age Green Lantern. He, too, wore goggles when flying.

At first, the development of both shows seemed to be innocent examples of synchronicity.

Stephen Strimpell had been a New York actor when he decided to take a two-month break in Los Angeles to get away from the oppressive humidity. “I told my agent, ‘No calls. Just let me rest.’ But I was barely off the plane, still in my traveling suit, when a CBS casting director tracked me to my hotel room and asked if I was interested in doing a TV series. He had seen me off-Broadway in The Exhaustion of Our Son’s Love, where I had gotten some impressive notices, and he was delighted I was right on the scene.

Before the week was out I was signed to star in Mr. Terrific.” Strimpell had played a rough-edged garage mechanic in the play. He was also cast in a new Dick van Dyke movie, A Garden of Cucumbers. When the pilot sold, it created a problem. “I found I’d have to report for work on both projects the same day.

Obviously, I couldn’t be at both the Goldwyn and Universal Studios simultaneously. For awhile it looked like there would have to be a court fight for priority.

But finally they settled it amicably by telescoping my 5 and a half weeks of work in the van Dyke picture into 1 and a half days.”

While Buck Henry was developing Captain Nice, he remembered an actor who would be perfect for that part. Trouble was, he couldn’t remember the man’s name or where he had seen him! Walking past a theater showing A Thousand Clowns, Henry spotted the actor’s face on a display still. Fate—or something approximately like it—rudely yanked William Daniels off Broadway.

At the time, Daniels observed that Henry patterned Carter Nash after Daniel’s stuffy social worker character in A Thousand Clowns.

Both shows premiered Monday night, January 9, 1967. CBS’s Mr. Terrific debuted at 8:00 with the episode entitled “Matchless.” NBC decided to air Captain Nice a half hour later, at 8:30, in “The Man Who Flies Like a Pigeon.” Bad blood immediately resulted.

“That back-to-back scheduling is something,” remarked Daniels. “In the hierarchy of the networks it may make sense, but it’s beyond me. But I can’t concern myself with that. I just work all the time.”

Whether archly or smugly, he added, “I’ll be honest and say I feel better about it after I saw the premieres of the two shows.” Boom.

Critics were not kind. One lumped both shows together and called them “disheartening.” Strimpell

was compared to Red Buttons, while Daniels was accused of doing a blatant Paul Lynde impersonation.

Percy Shain of the Boston Globe said: “Nice was nicer than Terrific—but not by much,” while Bettelou Peterson of the Detroit Free Press opined that “Terrific is Terrible. Nice is nicer.” The New York Times admitted that Captain Nice “…at least gave some evidence of a sense of style,” but damned Mr. Terrific as “nothing less than a disaster.”

An abashed Strimpell lamented to one reporter, “For this I studied with Uta Hagen.”

While filming the pilot, an anxious Daniels told his parents, “I don’t know why I am here—I don’t want to do this.” The truth was that it was an economic decision. An actor has to eat.

Years later, Daniels confessed to TV Guide that he hated the role. But during the initial publicity push, Daniels gave it the old college try.

“It was a momentous decision for me, because I’m acutely aware of how difficult it is to do something good on television,” he told the Abilene ReporterNews. “I know Buck Henry’s work and we see eye to eye on everything. Everyone associated with the show is bright and hip. It’s like pop art and a wonderful anti-hero. I’ll be playing the part quite straight and realistically.”

Soon, both actors were hoisted up on flying wires and wishing Mary Martin was around to coach them. Neither fledgling super-hero enjoyed the experience.

“They put me in a device which must have been invented by Torquemada,” Daniels complained. The actor joked that before donning his costume, he used to get nosebleeds whenever he was more than three feet off the ground, but “Now I’ve been off a high curb and over a 25-foot obstacle. Tomorrow, the Empire State Building!”

Strimpell had to flap his arms whenever he flew, and complained that his flying harness cut his skin.

But Strimpell’s biggest problem was bursting through the supposedly breakaway walls. “I’m sure that the special-effects man is convinced I possess supernatural powers,” he lamented. “He built that wall strong enough to resist an earthquake. When I hit it on cue, it didn’t budge, but I did. Multiple lacerations later, we resumed shooting.”

In later years, Daniels recalled suffering similarly.

“There was a scene where I supposedly knock down a door and come charging in,” the actor told A.V.Club.com. “And suddenly they blew out the door, and it makes a tremendous noise. I had a ringing in my ears that went on for a couple days, so finally I went to a doctor, who said, ‘Well, sure, you’ve got a ringing: They broke your eardrum!’”

I don’t know when the first shot was fired in the Nice–Terrific War, but it may have taken place in Boston during the early publicity push surrounding the dual launch. In the pages of the Boston Globe, to be exact.

Interviewing Daniels, TV critic Percy Shain learned that Strimpell had auditioned for the role of Carter Nash, but failed to make the grade.

“I was too young for the part,” countered Strimpell when asked to confirm. “After all, their character is over the hill. He’s a mom’s boy. He must be 40. I’m too virile for that sort of thing.”

At the time, Strimpell was 26 to Daniels’ 39. But the cat was out of the bag, in terms of the publicity story of the actor’s fortuitous L.A. “vacation.” So Strimpell decided to toss a different feline into the brewing fray.

“They may have started filming first,” he added defensively, “but our show has been long in preparation. It was tried a year ago, in fact, with Alan Young in the lead role, but didn’t sell. Now it has been completely revamped.”

Fresh from a hit stint with his talking equine costar in Mr. Ed, Young starred in the original Mr. Terrific pilot, which the network wanted to premiere in the Fall of 1966. It was not picked up and the decision was made to rework it. Since Young was 47, he may not have fit the role of shoe salesman Stanley Beamish who, as Strimpell subsequently played him, was twenty years younger. Young refused to comment on why he was canned, but it marked the end of his career as a lead actor.

There was another tabby cat growling in the bag. It was also rumored that CBS was going to pass on Mr. Terrific, but when they learned of the Captain Nice project, they reactivated it. Seeing Strimpell’s Captain Nice test footage, producer Jack Arnold reportedly said, “I knew immediately I had my Mr. Terrific.” Strimpell later claimed that he only auditioned for Captain Nice as a ploy designed to keep Daniels’ salary demands low.

“The two shows are not that much alike anyhow,” Strimpell observed with what I assume was a straight face. “Maybe there’s a similarity in the central idea, but everything else about them is different.”

Confronted by this same charge, Strimpell snapped at TV Guide, “Nonsense. Nice is motherdominated. Hates girls. A passionless man, brilliantly written. But that’s the stuff of satire, not situation comedy.”

Other than their costumes and settings—Washington, D.C., for Mr. Terrific and Big Town, U.S.A., for Captain Nice—the chief difference between the two troublebusters was that Mr. Terrific’s powers faded after an hour, while Captain Nice kept his until justice triumphed and the credits rolled.

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Although both shows were broadcast as comedies, they were not situation comedies. Not according to Buck Henry, whose spy spoof Get Smart was simultaneously running on NBC: “The term ‘situation’ indicates a show is based on mundane reality with people to whom the audience can relate. Nobody has ever known a Maxwell Smart or Carter Nice (Captain Nice). They simply don’t exist in reality.”

THIS PAGE & OPPOSITE: TV Guide ads for the premieres of both shows.

Courtesy of Will Murray. TV Guide TM & © CBS Interactive. Captain Nice © NBC. Mr. Terrific © Universal Television.

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Henry went on to talk about his approach to Captain Nice in a way that makes one wonder if he wasn’t putting the reporter on. “I’ve always hoped to make social comment within the framework of comedy. This new show is about power and stupidity. And somehow I think it filters through to the mass audience. It’s based on something they know.

“A lot of the message is introduced by great characters from another framework. The message is, isn’t this ridiculous; aren’t we all dumb because we continually fall for big and little frauds that surround us—the social behavior, ego, and standards by which we live.”

At times, Strimpell sounded equally out of touch with reality. “This is not a spoof. You can’t do 13

weeks of spoof. It may have begun with that in mind, but it ended up as a real adventure story.

There are three kinds of comedy in the show: the comedy of the genuineness of each of us as a character; and the comedy of effect, or the gimmicks we use. But Stanley Beamish is not essentially a comic character.”

To be fair, Stephen Strimpell was not the only bald-faced liar. Early on, William Daniels actually asserted, “No, I don’t think this show is silly.”

One of Mr. Terrific’s co-stars, Dick Gautier, remembered, “The guy who starred in it, Stephen Strimpell, had delusions of grandeur. He thought he was doing the Cherry Lane Theater. I mean, really.

He went into a producer’s office and said, ‘I won’t say this crap!’ And he threw the script in his face. I said to him, ‘Jesus, man, this is a kiddie show! What are you doing? Get your money, button your lip, and go home.’ God, that’s all that was, a kiddie show. I don’t know what he wanted, but he was very hard to get along with.”

There were other differences between the stars. Bill Daniels was a top-flight Broadway actor.

Strimpell was the off-Broadway type. Both had acted in A Thousand Clowns. Neither were betting on their capes for long-term financial security. “We’re just renting a house here in Los Angeles,” Daniels commented. “We’re even renting the napkins. I look on this as a 13-week tour in Los Angeles—if it works, fine; if it doesn’t, O.K. I had a career before Captain Nice and I’ll have a career after Captain Nice.”

Strimpell wryly quipped that he could always fall back on his law degree if Mr. Terrific flopped. He also confidently asserted that no matter how the ratings broke, “I’ve got another 30 years of acting ahead of me­—I hope.”

As subsequent episodes aired, the publicity war grew furious, with the rival actors manfully differentiating their nebbish heroes to a parade of reporters.

Daniels asserted, “The boy-mom relationship with Carter Nash to his mother is satirical, a spoof of heroes—knocking down the hero image. Kids are more sophisticated today and they get a gas from seeing such a mother-son relationship. Also, there’s the acquiescence of the father, a faceless character who remains hidden behind his newspaper, his manly duties abdicated to the mother image.”

Struggling to define and contrast his character against his rival, Strimpell wandered all over the center line.

“Well, the Captain Nice character is more of a loser,” he told one reporter. “My character is a funny loser,” Strimpell insisted to the Schenectady Gazette.

“He’s gentle, warm, sensitive, and funny. He is a victim of a combination of fate and science. It’s definitely not a satire on Superman or any other far-out hero.

The show is based on comedy, action, and fantasy.”

The fantasy label was one the young actor clung desperately to, telling the U.P.I., “I think the premise of the show is a wonderfully comic idea, but we have

to rely on the fantasy element if we really hope to take off from its basis of reality in the filling station.”

Superman came up a lot in the dueling interviews. Coincidentally, Captain Nice was filmed on the same stage where George Reeves did Adventures of Superman a decade before.

“I don’t think of myself as Superman,” Daniels insisted. “My role is Carter Nash. It’s an acting job. I couldn’t anymore think of doing this thing for years than flying to the moon.”

“I just don’t see this comparison to Superman and Batman,” Strimpell likewise asserted. “I see in the character something of a [Scarlet] Pimpernel, or a Mark of Zorro, or even of Achilles. All that we have done is to add the power of science. It is science in collision with fate. Take it like this: the power pill doesn’t work on everybody, just on one extremely unlikely human being, Stanley Beamish. He is a total innocent, without any sense of evil, born not to recognize villains. It is the struggle of the very little man against the world.”

Yet Strimpell also told TV Guide, “Stanley is the true romanticist. He play-acts. As Terrific, he’s Flynn, Cagney, Wayne, Belmondo, Batman. But when the chips are down, he would rather bird-watch than fight evil any day.”

Doing publicity while constantly filming episodes apparently took a toll on both actors’ abilities to come up with fresh quotes to sell their series.

“We’re all thrown by events today,” mused Daniels. “Any sensible man has to be a coward. So Carter Nash is sensible and bright. He’s the only sane person in the show.”

One suspects these struggling actors of reading one another’s press. Here’s Strimpnell giving the counterpoint: “Stanley is not Caspar Milquetoast, he is Walter Mitty. He is not afraid; he is just naive, unknowing. He has a fantasy mind. He does not resent being Mr. Terrific, nor is he afraid of flying. In his fantasy mind it is only natural that these wonderful opportunities should come to him. He simply doesn’t do it very well.

“Stanley has the kind of mind which makes it impossible for him to recognize evil and deal with it. He’s always being kindly to the arch-villains. The comedy comes in because the premise of the show is as if fate entered into the picture to defeat science.

Stanley is sent out to solve problems that cannot be solved in any other way but by superhuman methods, but Stanley is unable to see the obvious dangers.

He is not idiotic, he is just unknowing. I believe what Stanley believes.”

No doubt critics’ complaints that Mr. Terrific was idiotic fare were beginning to sting. “I play the little man against the institutions of the world,” Strimpell insisted to the Birmingham (New York) Press. “But Stanley Beamish is not at all an idiot. His weaknesses are that he never recognizes evil, and his solutions to problems are never too practical.”

By the time the dueling heroes debuted, Batman had started slipping in the ratings, The Green Hornet was likewise struggling, and two other spoof shows, The Hero and Run, Buddy, Run (in which Strimpell guest-starred), had been canned. Timing was not auspicious.

Mr. Terrific ran 17 episodes, while Captain Nice manage to eke out only 15. By the end of February, the word was out that Captain Nice was doomed.

Daniels was relieved.

Despite acceptable mid-level ratings, Mr. Terrific was cancelled in March. With the announcement still fresh, Stephen Strimpell sat down for an interview with Anthony La Camera of the Boston RecordAmerican, saying dismissively, “I can take care of myself. I don’t think it’s the end. I enjoy what I’m doing, but I’m not a one-shot human being. I can find other things.”

On August 28, both shows simultaneously went off the air. One might call that a draw.

Twenty years later, Daniels explained, “The reason is obvious. Who wants to root for an insecure Superman?”

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Jack Kirby’s promotional poster art for Captain Nice.

Courtesy of The Jack Kirby Collector.

Captain Nice (C) NBC.

For his part, Strimpell spoke darkly of “hankypanky” between the network and its production partner leading to the decision, but took a theatrical attitude to the show’s cancellation, adding, “Fine!

I’ve never closed in any show with 42 million persons watching.”

The truth was that the bubble had finally popped on super-hero shows and related spoofs.

“Never trust anybody under 12” became the new ABC network slogan as Batman ratings tanked. NBC filmed one episode of The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado, starring Eddie Mayehoff and Mickey Rooney as a middle-aged Batman and Robin in 1967, but shelved the project. It was written by the trio who scripted the original Mr. Terrific pilot.

No doubt the networks were sick of scathing reviews, such as the New York Times, which opined, “…both networks should be ashamed for further trivializing their medium with excursions into comic-book fantasy.… Whether viewers can identify with these shows is a question. However, many viewers do take pills and some also drink.”

The drug issue may have played a significant role. “It’s interesting to recall the old days when 142

Superman did it without drugs,” one contemporary critic sniffed.

William Daniels went on to have a distinguished career, with Knight Rider and St. Elsewhere being two of his TV successes. Strimpell’s acting career languished over the next two decades, but is today remembered as an excellent acting teacher. Coincidently, both former rivals appeared in the 1976 TV miniseries, The Adams Chronicles.

Over the decades, Daniels seemed to have mellowed, and his distaste for the dual role of Carter Nash/Captain Nice faded from memory.

“Well, it had Buck Henry,” he reminisced, “and he would take a script, go into a room, and make it funny. He was a terribly gifted comic writer.…

But I had lovely, talented people with me. Alice Ghostley played my mother, and she was a marvelous comedienne and actress. It was a very pleasant experience.”

Stephen Strimpell died in 2006. Contrary to his 1967 prediction of a long career ahead, he dropped out of acting in the 1980s, becoming instead a highly respected drama teacher

and acting coach.

The world has changed in the half-century since Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific slugged it out with critics, ratings, network execs, casual audiences, and one another. Super-heroes now occupy the apex of the popular culture universe, much the way the cowboy once dominated TV and film to the exclusion of other genre heroes. Ironically, if someone were to launch a spoof of the genre today, it would be more acceptable to do so. But a question remains: Would 21st-Century audiences want to see their heroes mocked? Probably not.

To Buck Henry goes the last word. Interviewed at the height of the conflict, he spoke of his high hopes for Captain Nice, then admitted ruefully: “But if I’d known about Mr. Terrific, I wouldn’t have done Captain Nice.”

Novelist/journalist/comics historian Will Murray’s latest novel (at this writing) is 2016’s King Kong vs. Tarzan, from Altus Press.

And the Winner is…

Captain Nice!

On August 28, 1967, the so-called “Nice–Terrific War” of primetime ended in a draw as the super-zero/ super-hero shows Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific aired for the last time.

Meanwhile, in the comic-book world, a variation of their Nielsen knuckle-buster was taking place.

Arriving a little too late to save the day, Gold Key Comics released a TV tie-in one-shot, Captain Nice #1, hitting the stands on August 24th. While TV’s Captain Nice lacked a definable rogues’ gallery, Gold Key’s Captain Nice played to comicdom by pitting the hero against two super-villains—the Penguin and Catwoman, no less! Actually, they were the Rooster, a plump, crowing super-thief, and Slymme Fatale, a slinky cat burglar who by day ran a reducing salon from which she learned of pilfer-worthy valuables from her blabbing, blubbery clients. The comic was drawn by longtime Martian Manhunter artist Joe Certa, whose competent renditions of the TV Captain Nice characters (the Captain, Carter Nash, overbearing mom Mrs. Nash, and would-be love interest Sgt. Candy Kane) were far from photorealistic but were recognizable, something many media spin-off comics of the day could not claim.

On some newsstands and drugstore spin racks, Gold Key’s Captain Nice #1 could have very well been displayed next to the then-current edition of DC Comics’ Justice League of America, #56, which went on sale July 25th. That issue featured the conclusion of the annual two-part team-up between DC’s modern heroes, the JLA, and their forerunners, the Justice Society of America. Alongside several JSAers returning from the Golden Age dustbin was the original—the one-and-not-quite only—Mr. Terrific. This Mr. Terrific, “The Man of a Thousand Talents,” was actually Terry Sloane, one of the many jaded jetsetters who took to super-heroics in the early Forties when publishers were scrambling to crank out costumed crimefighters. Dressed in red and green and looking

Mr. Terrific (C) DC Comics

THE OTHER NICE– TERRIFIC WAR

like a bodybuilding Santa’s helper, the hero’s “Fair Play”-stamped tunic probably seemed ridiculous way back during his first appearance in Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942). It’s unlikely that Justice League editor Julius Schwartz or writer Gardner Fox—who both drew more from the sci-fi pulps of yesteryear than the TV Guide listings of the times—intended Mr. Terrific’s inclusion in that year’s JLA/JSA mix to be a sly wink to Stephen Strimpell’s CBS show. Still, it’s a fun coincidence to see Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific muscling for comic-book readers in the same month.

Superman editor Mort Weisinger certainly had his eye on the popular culture, however, often featuring celebrities in his family of titles. Going on sale the same week as JLA #56 was Action Comics #354, which featured the Man of Steel battling a certain “puny powerhouse” he found impossible to beat. The story “Captain Incredible!,” written by Cary Bates and illustrated by Al Plastino (under a Curt Swan/ George Klein cover), forced Superman into conflict with a Wally Cox-ish rival super-hero sporting a Captain Nice-like costume. As Bates told me in 2005, “‘Captain Incredible!’ was one of my first actual assignments from Mort; he asked me to write a story around a ‘nerdish super-hero’ which was intended as a take-off on Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific, two short-lived TV series about nerdish super-heroes that were on the air that year.” Both TV super-zeroes may have inspired Cary, but the Action character’s name and appearance prove that Captain Nice carried more weight (despite his slight frame).

The real Captain Nice— not his DC doppelganger—had another comic-book connection. To herald the January 9, 1967 premiere of Captain Nice, NBC and Paramount Studios hired the King of Comics himself, Jack Kirby, to illustrate a promo poster that unveiled a much beefier version of the Captain shrugging off attacks from high-tech hooligans that looked like prototypes for Kirby’s fabled Fourth World mythology, which he would create for DC a few years later.

Add to that Tempo Books’ Captain Nice paperback novel by William Johnston and Topps’ plans to release Captain Nice trading cards (which went no further than test cards that command big prices in today’s collectibles market). CBS’ Mr. Terrific had no merchandising tie-ins, nor its own comic book, making Captain Nice the clear winner in his “war” with Mr. Terrific outside of television. (Adding insult to injury, DC’s Mr. Terrific was the victim in the murdermystery JLA/JSA crossover of 1979.)

Ca pta

in Nice

(C) NBC

.

Superman battled the Captain Nice-inspired Captain Invincible in Action Comics #354.

TM & © DC Comics.

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BATMAN & RUBIN, JEWISH BOY WONDER Although comedian Marty Allen missed his chance to be Eddie Mayehoff’s Yellow Tornado sidekick, during Batmania he was a boy wonder. Oy, was he ever! The popular Sixties comedy act, Allen & Rossi—bug-eyed Marty, with his nutty catchphrase “Hello Dere,” and his handsome partner, Steve Rossi—recorded the 1966 concept album, The Adventures of Batman & Rubin (Jewish Boy Wonder), an idea pitched to them by Batman co-creator Bob Kane after one of the comedy duo’s live shows. Allen was Rubin, a Jewish fanboy who disappointed his parents by always reading comic books and dreaming of being the Cowled Crusader’s crimefighting cohort. “Steve is very good at playing Batman—straight to Marty’s wild campy Rubin, The Jewish Boy Wonder,” Kane wrote in the liner notes. Directed by Hal Mooney, in addition to Allen & Rossi, the LP included voice actors John Ridge, Jean Martin, Marilyn Striker, and Kane himself. While Kane took credit for writing the sketches, the album’s “Fingerlake Music Inc.” copyright suggests that Kane’s uncredited Batman co-creator, Bill Finger, was involved.

Steve Rossi stated in a 2011 interview that he felt that Batman & Rubin was the worst album he recorded with Allen.

Batman TM & © DC Comics. © Fingerlake Music Inc. and Viva Music (BMI).

When a villain from the past reappears to create chaos for a new generation, the hero who once stood against him emerges from retirement to challenge his old foe.

Sounds a little like the plot of 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, doesn’t it? Three decades before Austin Powers, however, this was the premise of Hollywood’s stillborn super-spoof, 1967’s The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado.

The central characters in this unsuccessful TV pilot from Universal Studios were a middle-aged, no-longer-Dynamic Duo that had long since hung up their capes. It starred about the last two actors you would associate with playing superheroes: Eddie Mayehoff and Mickey Rooney.

Balding with a bulbous nose, Mayehoff certainly didn’t cast the chisel-chinned profile you’d expect from a caped crusader. A familiar face on stage and screen, he was recently in the public eye in the sexy comedy How to Murder Your Wife (1965), and a decade earlier played a bossy comic-book editor in the Martin–Lewis musical-comedy Artists and Models.

Rooney, the one-time boy wonder of Hollywood, was on unsteady footing during the Sixties. His successes as a child actor were long behind him, and after being branded as too short (at five-foot-two) to play a leading man, he whizzed through a slew of television roles with varying degrees of success, plus the occasional ensemble comedy film like 1965’s How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, on a constant quest for work to feed the bottomless beasts of alimony payments and gambling debts.

The terrific trio of George Balzer, Al Gordon, and Hal Goldman, who had honed their funnybones writing for Jack Benny and had also cowritten the original pilot to Mr. Terrific, penned the Yellow Tornado pilot in 1966, along with Joel Kane, under producer Jack Laird. According to authors Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes, in the biography The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney (Gallery Books, 2015), The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado, prompted by the success of ABCTV’s Batman (like many of the concepts covered in this book), was shot on the Universal lot before the

Camp Age’s other live-action super-hero take-offs, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific, were made. Also in the cast were Eileen Wesson as Mayehoff’s Gal Friday, Morey Amsterdam of The Dick van Dyke Show fame, Jeff Malloy, and David Astor. While it was in production, The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado was referred to in the Hollywood trades alternately as a Batman spoof, a Superman spoof, and a Superman– Batman spoof. The glut of underperforming superhero TV shows led NBC-TV to pass on the Yellow Tornado pilot.

This super-hero buddy show had a cyclonic return—almost. Eileen Wesson’s dad, producer/writer Dick Wesson, a TV veteran with credits including The

THE MAD ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN KLUTZ

Don Martin’s Doofus Do-Gooder

Bob Cummings Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres, was tapped to produce the redubbed The Tornado as a feature-length film. Wesson’s role was expanded into a junior super-heroine who frequently fished her super-mentors out of hot water.

As Ms. Wesson recounted in the Rooney bio, the mood on the set was electric, with Eddie and Mickey cracking each other—and everyone else—up. But the project was terminated once again as the super-hero craze had waned. Curiously, photos and footage from both incarnations of Yellow Tornado have yet to be circulated to the public.

Two years later, in the summer of 1969, after a bit of a dry spell, Eddie Mayehoff was getting some press in the Hollywood trades, promoting a segment of ABC-TV’s Love, American Style he had filmed with co-star Marty Allen. Mayehoff described his chemistry with Allen in terms reminiscent of his relationship with Rooney on the Tornado shoot: “I’d break him up: he’d break me up.” Then Eddie dropped the bombshell: “There’s been some talk that they might remake a pilot that Mickey Rooney and I did some time ago, with Marty doing Mickey’s role. Get this title: ‘The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado and Dickie Boy.’ Imagine, I’m a retired Superman reading the papers how things are a mess, and decide I’d better get back into uniform. Can’t you see this pair interfering everywhere? The police shouting, ‘Get ’em out of here.’ Wild!”

Wild? Sure was—for 1966. But by 1969, the concept of The Return of the Original Yellow Tornado was, like its pot-bellied characters, past its prime.

Let me tell you something about Don Martin that you probably don’t know: He was a 20th-Century Ponce de Leon.

While he didn’t discover the fabled Fountain of Youth, he did the next best thing by cartooning in a manner that could make any fella feel like a boy again. From his trademarks such as wiener heads, potato noses, pot bellies, and flat flipper feet, Martin’s grotesque, utterly hilarious cartoons harkened back to the generation before mine, where comic books—especially MAD Magazine—were considered dangerous, subversive, and lowbrow, the stuff kids secretly read past bedtime under the covers with a flashlight.

To this day I can remember eyeing for the first time The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz, the

LEFT: DC showed us a retired Superman in late 1969’s Action Comics #386.

TM & (C) DC Comics.

Don Martin.

Photograph © Don Martin.

Don Martin’s The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz.

Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin. MAD logo TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc. Illustration © Don Martin.

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Don’s alternate, unused cover rough.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin. MAD logo TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc. Illustration © Don Martin.

RIGHT: Captain Marvel meets Captain Klutz!

Original art by Captain Marvel illustrator C. C. Beck for a 1980 Captain Klutz T-shirt ad, featuring Don Martin himself.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin.

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192-page Signet Books paperback featuring Martin’s outrageous super-hero burlesque. It was sometime in 1967.

I was nine and had arrived at my hometown’s primary comic-book source, Williams Candy Kitchen, for the latest Batman funnybooks.

I had recently discovered MAD, with its fabled “Bats-Man” take-off in issue #105 (Sept. 1966), and spotted Don Martin’s signature drawing style on the Klutz cover before noticing his name in the balloon that was levitating his hero skyward. Unlike other super-heroes, Captain Klutz didn’t look like he had just slid down a Batpole or stormed out of a phone booth.

He looked like he had just crawled out of bed: red, wool longjohns, polkadotted boxers (worn on the outside of his pants, per super-hero customs of the day), and bunny slippers.

“Why has he dedicated himself to a life of crime fighting?” asked the back cover copy. “Who really cares?”

I was still too young to appreciate the Camp humor in TV’s Batman, but this, I found funny.

I still do.

Captain Klutz could’ve been used as a parable to warn kids about the dangers of reading too many comic books, so we wouldn’t turn out to be a total loser like Ringo Fonebone. When we meet him, Fonebone has spent his life doing nothing but reading comics: Fester and Karbunkle, Brap Man, The Creep, Cockroach Man, The Purple Fink, The Plastic Freak, Acid Nose, you name it, he reads it. His parents have finally had enough and boot the adult Ringo out of the house.

What follows is a downward spiral that leads him to one conclusion: He has to end it all. Clad in

his underwear and slippers, Fonebone knots together a network of towels as a noose and hurls himself off a rooftop. This may sound distasteful at worst, seriocomic at best, but through the pen of “MAD’s Maddest Artist” it’s an insane sequence of pratfalls.

Ringo’s towel rips, he plummets into an ugly lady’s hat which “masks” him, and finally crashes atop a fleeing bank robber who snaps, “Why, you klutz!”

And thus is born the caped protector of Megalopolis: Captain Klutz!

Captain Klutz may have been Don Martin’s baby, but he was created by committee, with MAD’s Dick DeBartolo, Duck Edwing, Phil Hahn, Jack Hanrahan, and Nick Meglin in on the fun, capitalizing on the Camp Age’s super-hero craze. Some of Captain Klutz’s shtick was recycled from the Golden Age of Comics—red longjohns were the fighting togs of the original Red Tornado, and the character Supersnipe was known as “The Boy with the Most Comic Books in America.” And Captain Klutz certainly wasn’t the only super-hero spoof in town at the time. But where as the Inferior Five’s and Forbush-Man’s hands were tied by the Comics Code Authority and Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific were tamed by network Standards and Practices, there were no such restraints on Captain Klutz. His failed-suicide origin aside, Captain Klutz relished its lack of political correctness. Ringo Fonebone read Super Faggot and The Fat Maniac comic books, fought the doll-collecting Sissyman, accidentally disrobed a woman while changing in a phone booth, and paraded around naked (aside from a discreetly placed fig leaf)—and that was just in the first 78 pages! Following were battles against zombies, a giant spider named Gorgonzola, and Mervin the Mad Bomber, plus other strips and gags.

Captain Klutz returned in a handful of Don Martin paperbacks and received a sequel edition in 1983.

Still, nothing can top the original edition for its freshness and funniness… and its ability to make a middleaged man feel like a nine-year-old again.

In the MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz paperback, you’re one of four writers (including Don Martin) listed. Did each of you write different stories in the paperback, or did you write them collectively?

No, we each wrote a story, working on our own.

Which of the 1967 Captain Klutz stories was yours?

I loved writing giant creature satires and I like cheese, so “Gorgonzola” is most likely mine.

OF GOOD DAYS AND MAD

An Interview with Dick DeBartolo Every super-hero has an origin, both on the comic book page, and in the real world. Norma Martin, Don’s wife, recalls Captain Klutz being developed as a character that Don used for an original creator-owned MAD paperback book. This title was not part of the MAD pocketbook series, about 95 titles, containing only reprints of pages from the magazine. Instead, artists and writers were paid advances and royalties during the life of each original paperback they created; whereas they received nothing financially from the sales of the MAD-owned pocketbooks.

One of the writers involved with Captain Klutz was Dick DeBartolo—you might know him as “MAD’s Maddest Writer.”

Maybe you read his memoir from

Thunder’s Mouth Press, Good Days and MAD. Or maybe you watched him as TV’s gadget guru, “The Giz Wiz.” Or if you were a fan of Goodson-Todman’s long-running Match Game, a lot of what you found funny was written by Dick, as he worked on that quiz show for eighteen years.

DeBartolo was also one of the Usual Gang of Idiots who co-created Don Martin’s super-goof Captain Klutz, and in this exclusive HeroA-Go-Go interview he kindly shares a few memories from the experience.

Interview conducted in December 2015.

What do you recall about the development of Captain Klutz’s “uniform” of red long johns and boxer shorts?

When we were talking about the uniform, someone suggested that Captain Klutz leaps out the window and lands in PJs hanging on a clothesline. I think Don came up with the actual “uniform.”

Dick DeBartolo.

Photo by Dennis Wunderlin.

LEFT: Detail from the back cover of The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz, with Dick DeBartolo’s Gorgonzola.

Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin.

Illustration © Don Martin.

What can you tell me about Don Martin, the man? His personality? Work habits?

Don was an extremely quiet guy.

I roomed with him a few times on MAD trips, and you wouldn’t guess this quiet guy could draw so funny. I never heard him crack jokes, and also it was hard to make him laugh. But when you saw your work illustrated by Don, my God, it was great!

An undated Captain Klutz drawing by Don Martin.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Captain Klutz TM & © Don Martin.

Illustration © Don Martin

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RIGHT: Original C. C. Beck cover art to Fatman #1.

Courtesy of Heritage. © the original copyright holder.

FATMAN, THE HUMAN FLYING SAUCER The Original Captain Marvel’s Creators Reunite

When everyone and their brother was getting into the super-hero comic-book game in the Swinging Sixties, Will Lieberson and Bernie Miller and their brothers— Martin Lieberson and Joe Miller—decided to jump in.

As Milson Publishing Company, Inc. (its name derived from merging their last names), the Liebersons and Millers were thinking big: they chose a plus-sized super-hero who one-upped the traditional caped crusader by being “the only comic hero with 3 identities” and put him in a giant-sized, 64-page title, twice the size (and price) of the average comic book.

Published under the “A Lightning Comic” imprint, Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer #1 (Apr. 1967) appeared roughly one year after the debut of M.F. Enterprises, Inc.’s new Captain Marvel comic—although

Fatman becomes the Human Flying Saucer! From Fatman #2. © the respective copyright holder.

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Fatman was much closer to being a Captain Marvel revival than M.F.’s Captain Marvel was.

Credit for that can be ascribed to the creative talent behind Fatman, starting with the Liebersons and Millers. They formed Milson Publishing “after lamenting the glory days of Captain Marvel’s supremacy on the newsstands,” as P.C. Hamerlinck, editor of FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), wrote in FCA #147, which appeared in Alter Ego #88 (Aug. 2009). Earlier, Will Lieberson and Bernie Miller had bird’s-eye views of the World’s Mightiest Mortal’s heyday as staffers at the hero’s publishing house, Fawcett Publications.

Milson scored a major talent coup for Fatman that might have benefitted Myron Fass and Carl Burgos’ ill-fated Captain Marvel: the hiring of writer Otto Binder and artist C. C. Beck, hyped on Fatman’s covers as “the creators of the original Captain Marvel.” That pedigree might not have carried weight for the gradeschool-aged kids who saw Fatman #1 racked along-

side other April 1967-cover-dated titles like Amazing Spider-Man #47, the 80-Page Giant The Flash #169, and Richie Rich #56, but for those with familiar with comic-book history, it was like, well, catching lightning in a bottle.

Fatman is one of those campy comic books that a contemporary audience will find hard to swallow. An obese super-hero?? Depending upon your personality, that’s worthy of social-media ridicule or politically correct disgust. And his third identity (Fatman was his second) was that of Saucerman, a “human flying saucer,” into which he morphed after running up a good steam. If you’re tempted to post a smarmy meme mocking a guy who shape-shifts into a UFO, let me ask you, would you poke fun at the Transformers?

Fatman’s other identity was his real one: Van Crawford. As Fatman’s corpulence defied the iconic image of the super-hero, Crawford similarly was not what one would expect from a secret identity. He was a wealthy idler, sort of Bruce Wayne as a couch potato, an unfocused rich guy who sponged off the family fortune (his parents were alive, and disappointed in him) and wasted away his days with pursuits such as stamp collecting, culinary delights, and raising orchids. Fortunately, Van’s heart was in the right place—he was prone to helping those in need.

Crawford is bird watching during his origin in issue #1 when he waddles to the aid of a quavering flying saucer. This near-crash is actually an alien’s test of Van’s super-hero-worthiness. Crawford is awarded a chocolate drink that gives him superpowers: boosted strength, speed, and agility, and

when those don’t quite cut the mustard, the ability to become Saucerman. Much of Van’s crimefighting is done in his Fatman identity, in a costume clearly inspired by the Big Red Cheese’s. And speaking of cheeses, food is Fatman’s weakness. The scent of a bologna sandwich or hamburger can take Fatman’s eye off the ball.

From there, Fatman begins his crimefighting career. Also in issue #1, he meets a teen stringbean named Lucius Pindle who uses a magic spell to become Tinman, Fatman’s super-hero sidekick. They tangle with that issue’s cover-featured sea-monster Anti-Man, who turns out to be more henpecked husband than “Scourge of Mankind.”

Fatman #2 (June 1967) puts the hero into conflict with the villain team the Awesome Foursome in a five-part serial. While this evokes memories of “The Monster Society of Evil” for longtime Captain Marvel fans, Binder and Beck are also spoofing Marvel’s Fantastic Four: Brainman, Menace from Mars is their stand-in for the super-smart Mr. Fantastic; Lunita, the Moon Witch is Fatman’s Invisible Girl; the subterranean gnome with heat-generating hands, Grollo, is

DA-NA-NA-NA-NANA-NA-NA FATMAN!

TM & © DC Comics.

Roughly a decade before Milson’s Human Flying Saucer premiered, another Fatman made the comics scene. Writer Bill Finger, penciler Sheldon Moldoff, and inker Charles Paris introduced the Dynamic Duo to Fatman, a hefty circus clown who dressed up as Batman for laughs, in the pages of Batman #113 (Feb. 1958). Luckily for our heroes, this Corpulent Crusader saved Batman and Robin’s bacon while still eliciting chuckles. The Fatman story was reprinted in late 1975 in Batman Family #4.

the Human Torch analog (who would reform and end up grilling Van Crawford’s cheese sandwiches between his palms); and lastly, Syntho, the Patchwork Man, represents the Thing.

In lesser hands, Fatman could have deteriorated into an insensitive series of fat jokes—and granted, those were there, along with Van Crawford’s foodrelated euphemisms such as “Holy Salad Dressing!” and “Great Stewed Rhubarb!” But lightning struck a second time with the re-teaming of Binder and Beck.

Their dormancy since Captain Marvel went into a court-induced coma in the early Fifties had not weakened their efficacy as a collaborative team. Under the editorship of “Kenneth Dennis” (actually, Will Lieberson), Beck’s art was as clean, crisp, and all-ages friendly as ever, and Binder not only displayed his expected flair for whimsical adventures but a gift for Camp Era prodigious puns.

Apparently, their real-life professional relationship on Fatman was not as harmonious as their output. According to P.C. Hamerlinck, “former Captain Marvel/Marvel Family editor Wendell Crowley received a pressing call from Lieberson to edit and write stories for Fatman’s third issue in order to help smooth over Binder and Beck’s first-ever battles with ‘creative differences.’” In Fatman #3 (Aug.–Sept.

1967), the Binder/Crowley/Beck combo offer six stories, the first three a serial involving “the most sinister villains in comics”—Gung Ho, whose “evil eye of deadly crystal” is reminiscent of Eclipso’s black diamond; Bug, a masked, round-headed tech whiz; and the terrible Shroud, master of darkness and cold—all operatives of S.A.T.A.N. (Sabotage Agents To Annihilate Nations). The remaining trio of tales share nothing in common outside of their hero and creative team: Fatman meets an out-of-control “impractical joker” named Franky Prankster, a Soupy Sales takeoff; a cutie named Sugar Cane enlists Van’s help with her candy store; and a tiny UFO forms a bond with Saucerman that’s too close for comfort.

A fourth issue was in the works, apparently without Binder’s involvement. Rod Reed, another former

Rock ’emsock ’em rogues in Fatman #2 and 3. © the respective copyright holder.

Writer Otto Binder.

Courtesy of P.C. Hamerlinck.

Artist C. C. Beck.

Courtesy of P.C. Hamerlinck.

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© the respective copyright holder.

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out adults, Fatman likewise regaled children and older fans of the original Captain Marvel (many of whom had remained kids at heart). Captain Marvel Easter eggs laced the series, well beyond the obvious homage of Fatman’s costume. Some examples: young Lucius Pindle and Billy Batson dressed alike, Tinman’s catchphrase was “Holy Moley!” (like Billy Batson/Captain Marvel’s), Tinman’s transformations were triggered by the recitation of his super-hero name (like Freddy Freeman saying “Captain Marvel” to change into Captain Marvel Jr.), and issue #3’s acronymic appellation of S.A.T.A.N. was spelled out on a placard reminiscent of the list of the gods comprising the magic word “Shazam!” so frequently seen in Captain Marvel stories. Still, in 1967, too few people had an invitation to pull up a seat at the table with Fatman, and that is a shame.

Special thanks to P.C. Hamerlinck.

SUPER GREEN BERET Lightning’s other title, Tod Holton, Super Green Beret, was an Original Captain Marvel/Robin Moore’s The Green Berets mash-up created by writer Otto Binder and illustrated by Carl Pfeufer. Issue #1 (Apr. 1967) introduces young Tod Holton, who receives a glowing green beret from his uncle Roger— Captain Roger Wilson—who’s home on leave from ’Nam. Turns out the beret had been blessed by a monk who had been rescued

by Captain Wilson and would bestow superpowers to a pure-hearted individual wearing it. Once Tod—who shares Billy Batson’s style sense—dons the cap and salutes, he becomes Super Green Beret, a Viet Cong-crushing man-god whose powers mirror the Spectre’s (matter transmutation, teleportation, and kick-butt super-strength).

In addition to the distribution problems that plagued Fatman, Super Green Beret had the misfortune of being released during the era of Vietnam War protests. It lasted two issues.

© the respective copyright holder.

The house ad for the planned but canned Captain Shazam book.

Fawcett writer/ editor, and Wendell Crowley had written scripts for Fatman #4, which C. C. Beck had barely begun illustrating when the plug was pulled on the series.

The Camp Age had peaked by the time Milson had launched its line, and Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer and the other Lightning title, Tod Holton, Super Green Beret (see sidebar), were cancelled after three and two issues, respectively. Lightning’s books were poorly distributed at a time when a crowded marketplace often squeezed second-tier and untested comic-book titles from making it onto the stands. And there was little publicity for Fatman, or for the reunion of Binder and Beck… not that there were many promotional sources available to startup comics publishers of the day. “Binder and Beck were paid by Milson for their work on the three Fatman issues—and were actually promised a share of the publisher’s profits when they’d start rolling in,” according to P.C. Hamerlinck. “But there were never any proceeds gained from Milson’s initial $64,000 investment—flushed away by failure to arrange for proper distribution of the book. Milson filed for bankruptcy shortly after the three issues were completed.”

Not only were Fatman and Super Green Beret short-lived, but Lightning’s third title, Beck’s enigmatic Captain Shazam, never grew beyond the idea stage. And what an idea it was…! A Milson house ad described the character as “a turned-on super swinger!” Despite that claim, it seems likely that Captain Shazam would trip not into The Valley of the Dolls territory but instead into yet another misuse of slang that middle-aged comics pros thought was “with it.”

Still, the mere thought of Captain Shazam boggles the mind­—it’s a shame it was never produced.

Although it had a brief life, Fatman was a capricious romp, delightfully concocted by two (three, counting Crowley) masters from the Golden Age. As a super-hero parody it stood firmly on its own merits, with a likable protagonist and Boo!-Hiss! villains.

As TV’s Batman courted both children and camped-

NOT BRAND ECHH Mighty Marvel’s Self-Satirizing Super-Hero Book

In the Sixties, a friendly rivalry developed between DC Comics, which was officially named National Periodical Publications, whose offices were populated by stodgy, pipe-puffing, literary editors who wore neckties and tweed jackets with elbow patches, and Marvel Comics, the funnybook and “men’s sweat” magazine publisher that recently had reinvented itself into a college campus-wooing House of Ideas, whose hype-spewing, cigar-puffing, pseudo-beatnik editor/ writer and his bouncy Bullpen seemed to be having as much fun making comic books as their fans had reading them. DC’s and Marvel’s letters columns sometimes included editorial jabs at each other, with DC’s being more veiled while Marvel’s Stan “The Man” Lee referred to DC as “Brand Echh” (a play on the advertising world’s “Brand X” name for a competitor’s inferior product) or, when he was feeling more charitable, the “Distinguished Competition.” With the second and third installments of writer E. Nelson Bridwell’s Inferior Five, DC bypassed the polite, playful potshot and delivered a satirical salvo, lampooning the Hulk and the Avengers in Showcase #63 and

the X-Men in issue #65. The I-5 wasn’t the first time a Sixties DC comic riffed on Marvel super-heroes—in 1964, when no one else at DC seemed to pay Marvel much attention, Arnold Drake and Bob Oksner poked fun of the Amazing Spider-Man in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #84—but pitting the “Hulk” (or “ManMountain”) and other Marvel spoofs against the Inferior Five seemed a particularly nervy and nutty move for the usually staid folks at DC. Not that Marvel took it lying down. They fought back—by making fun of themselves, too!

And thus was born Not Brand Echh, the wacky Marvel comic that gave us the Fantastical Four, Spidey-Man, Ironed Man, the Mighty Sore, Charlie America, the Inedible Bulk, Scaredevil, Sunk-Mariner, and the Echhs-Men. (Along the way, NBE also ribbed some of DC’s heroes, with parodies like Gnatman and Rotten, Aqualung-Man, Stuporman, and even a Deadman spoof, Deadpan!)

How did Marvel’s campiest, craziest series come about? I had intended to pick the brain of writer/ editor Roy Thomas, one of Not Brand Echh’s coconspirators, but as Roy remarked to me, “Hard to imagine I can say much of anything about Not Brand Echh that I didn’t say in that issue [of Alter Ego, #95] some time back… and I did a shortened form of it for the Marvel Masterworks edition that just came out…”

Roy remained willing to answer my questions, but since he previously covered the origins of NBE, instead of having him rehash what he’s already said so well, let’s turn to his Introduction from Marvel Masterworks: Not Brand Echh vol. 1 (2015) for some background…

Therein, Thomas recalled a lunch that took place during the Glory Days of the Camp Age (sometime in late 1966 or early 1967), where Roy, in his second year on staff at Marvel, along with his old friend, writer Gary Friedrich, who had recently started some editorial work at Marvel, were brainstorming potential new books with Stan Lee. Thomas and Friedrich lobbied for a Marvel counterpart to the original MAD, harkening back to MAD’s color comic-book incarna-

LEFT: Marie Severin’s cover for issue #2 spoofs characters from Marvel, DC, and Tower.

RIGHT: Its contents page. Note that the series is still titled Brand Echh in the indicia.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEFT: Marvel takes on Marvel in the premiere issue of (Not) Brand Echh. Cover by Jack Kirby and Mike Esposito.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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RIGHT: Great Kreepton! Not Brand Echh #7’s Stuporman featured Roy Thomas and Marie Severin’s hilarious spoof of the Man of Steel.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

Roy Thomas.

Mirthful Marie’s original cover art for Not Brand Echh #3.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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tion that ran from 1952 to 1955 until puritanical psychologist Dr. Frederic Wertham’s comic-book witch hunt threatened to torch the business and triggered, among many other things, MAD’s transformation into a black-and-white magazine. Roy and Gary had in mind MAD’s classic super-hero spoofs like “Superduperman” and “Batboy and Rubin” when proposing Marvel’s funny funnybook. In the NBE Masterworks, Thomas noted, “Gary says I felt it should be called Brand Echh, the name Stan had coined to refer to the competition.” Roy gave Stan credit for “stand[ing their idea] on its head”: “Rather than parody rival companies’ heroes, we would burlesque Marvel’s characters!” And thus was born the home of the Silver Burper, Doctor Bloom, Sgt. Furious and His Hostile Commandos, and many other zany EarthNBE versions of Marvel—make that “Marble”—stars.

But, wait a minute—how did Brand Echh become Not Brand Echh? Originally, the new Marvel comic book was indeed titled Brand Echh, although its cover led readers to believe otherwise. Look closely at the cover of issue #1 (Aug. 1967). Above its Brand Echh logo is the Stan Lee-added tagline, “Who says a comic book has to be good?” Note that the word “Not” is inserted before the logo in a different color and font. This was intended to be a clever play on words, but to anyone spying the cover, the “Not” prefix was read was part of the series’ title, and very quickly the book officially became Not Brand Echh.

I have to credit Not Brand Echh #3 (cover-dated Oct. 1967, which went on sale in July 1967) for being my gateway comic to the bulk (not the Inedible guy)

of the Marvel Universe. Back then, TV dictated my comic-book purchases, and since I watched Adam West’s Batman and the Saturday morning Superman, I read those heroes’ comic books and other comics they appeared in. (Grantray-Lawrence’s Marvel SuperHeroes syndicated show wasn’t among my viewing habits, and Saturday morning’s Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons were still two months away from their debuts.) I remember when Kurt, a slightly older kid down the street, tried to convert me to his Marvelmania by showing me an early issue of Amazing Spider-Man drawn by Steve Ditko. I was puzzled over Ditko’s now-classic (and oft-imitated) depiction of Peter Parker’s tingling spider-sense, with his drawing of a half-Parker/half-Spidey face. “Is that how he becomes Spider-Man?” I asked. Dumb gradeschooler me accepted a reality where a millionaire and his youthful ward could become costumed crimefighters by sliding down Batpoles, but was stymied by artistic interpretation. But the cover of Not Brand Echh #3 grabbed this nine-year-old and led me to plop down my hard-earned (actually, Daddy-begged) twelve cents for my first purchase of a Marvel comic.

And what nine-year-old could resist such an image, mirthfully and meticulously managed by marvelous Marie Severin? It featured the Mighty Sore, as musclebound as Marvel’s Thor but not as well groomed, his toes protruding through a tattered boot, a button popping from his tunic, and a wooden hammer instead of the vaunted weapon of myth. Then there was a rather panicked version of Marvel’s Star-Spangled Sentinel, Charlie America,

scurrying along a clothesline, bubblegum stuck to the sole of one of his boots. Like the kids who played Captain America, this guy carried a trash can lid as a shield. And lastly, there was the Inedible Bulk leapfrogging onto the cover. This drawing of Marie’s still cracks me up, with the Bulk’s bowl haircut, suspenders, and foot band-aids (including a bandaged corn on his little toe). Even the clothesline had sight gags (a laundered dollar bill and several items of clothing made to accommodate wearers with more than the average number of appendages).

Sight gags were one of the traits of Not Brand Echh. The book was saturated with cameos (from celebrities, political figures, and comic-book and comic-strip characters), background puns, incidental signs, and the like, in the humorous vein of the original MAD, gags created back-and-forth by the writers, working Marvel method (plot first), and the artists. Not Brand Echh was not a quick pageturner—to truly appreciate it, the reader needed to pore over each panel. As with MAD, those sight gags added another layer of humor. Here’s an example: In issue #1’s Fantastical Four story, Mr. Fantastic’s and the Invisible Girl’s—excuse me, Mr. Fantastical’s and the Inevitable Girl’s—FF “4” chest emblems subtly shifted from “4” to “?” to a backwards “4” to “IV” to “What 4?” to “Fore!” to “4 Sale.” Same with the book in the arms of Professor Echh in issue #4’s EchhsMen story: Throughout the tale its title chameleonic title changed from “Mechanix Infiltrated” to “Lord of the Rings by Cassius Clay” to “Yes I Can! by Richard Nixon” to “1984 by John-John Kennedy” to “My Life in Court by Jimmy Hoffa,” plus several other titles playing off then-current celebs and trends. Almost any character imaginable—some of them recognizable to their cartoonists but perhaps not to the unworldly kid reading NBE—might be found in a crowd scene: LBJ, the Monkees, Mia Farrow, Mr. Spock, Sammy Davis, Jr., the Munsters, the Flash, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bobby Kennedy, Superman, the Spirit, the Beatles, Snoopy, Li’l Abner, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Creepy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon… they, and many more, dropped in.

Stan’s directive for Marvel self-parodies drove the book through most of its thirteen-issue run. There were Marble origins, villain triumphs, and super-hero romances, just like in Marvel’s regular line. As soon as the second issue, the Marble characters were joined by lampoons of other companies’ heroes, such as #2’s Spidey-Man vs. Gnatman and Rotten; Ironed Man vs. Magnut, Robot Biter; and Knock Furious, Agent of S.H.E.E.S.H. (Secret Hang-Up for Evil Emissaries of Satanical Hyde-and-Jekylls) vs. the B.L.U.N.D.E.R. (Bedraggled League Uv Nations Defenseless Encroachment Reserves) Agents. Along the way, Not Brand Echh also targeted movies (Bonnie and Clyde as “Boney and Claude” in NBE #9, Aug. 1968), TV shows (The Guns of Will Sonnett as “The Puns of Will Bonnett” in issue #11, Dec. 1968),

and musicals (Camelot as “Comiclot” in NBE #12, Feb. 1969).

My personal favorite of the NBE stories is “The Origin of… Stuporman,” by Roy Thomas and Marie Severin, in Not Brand Echh #7 (Apr. 1968), a pitch-perfect DC Comics spoof that shows Roy’s vast knowledge and love of comic-book history.

Thomas skewers Superman’s most famous conventions, many of which are simultaneously endearing and ingratiating (such as Clark Kent’s disguise of eyeglasses and groomed hair, the amplification of Superman’s powers, and the ever-growing Super family of super-powered people and pets). Abetted

by Severin’s gorgeous artwork, Roy celebrates those Superman-isms as iconic but also exposes them as ridiculous, all with a Clark Kent-inspired wink at the reader. The story is dripping with “DC” puns (“Devilishly Correct,” “Despairingly Corny,” “Deliriously Choleric”), and includes appearances by Thomas’ former boss and co-worker from his infamously brief stint on DC’s staff, Superman editor Mort Weisinger (as “Mort Wienieburger,” a name coined by Stan Lee in an earlier issue) and beleaguered assistant editor E. Nelson Bridwell (as “E. Nelson Birdwell”). “We gave it our all, since we both considered the Harvey Kurtzman/Wally Wood ‘Superduperman’ in MAD #4 one of the best comics stories ever,” Thomas said. “…It remains my favorite of all the stories I wrote for NBE.” That issue’s cover—featuring the Fantastical Four and Stuporman (surrounded by a Legion of StuporPets including a dog, cat, pig, snake, and bird)— didn’t net the sales that Marvel had expected, a surprise given Superman’s then-current status as the number-one best-selling comic book on the market.

“I’ll admit that, since Superman was lampooned on the cover, and at that time the DC Comics-owned Independent News was distributing Marvel’s comics, Stan was a bit suspicious of skullduggery,” Thomas revealed. “But I don’t think publisher [Martin] Goodman ever pursued the matter. Maybe it was just an amazing coincidence.”

LEFT: Irving Forbush was the whipping boy of Marvel’s Snafu mag, but liberated by Stan Lee to become NBE’s mascot.

RIGHT: Forbush-Man’s origin in issue #5.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Marie Severin.

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Marvel artists not normally associated with humor, such as Gene Colan, knocked readers’ socks off with their Not Brand Echh work. From issue #5’s Revengers story.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RIGHT: The star of Sea Hunt beats Sunk-Mariner and AqualungMan in the election to rule Atlantis.

Original art page from writer Arnold Drake’s “Don’t Rock the Vote” from NBE #11 (Dec. 1968), drawn

by Tom Sutton (with Marie Severin touch-ups on celebrity and character faces). And look at all those cameos!

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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In looking back at Not Brand Echh not through the eyes of a boy who laughed out loud at its silliness and gags but from the perspective of an adult who has spent his life appreciating the comic-book artform, what most impresses me about the series is its art. In some cases, the same illustrators who held court with Marvel’s mainstream titles—such as Fantastic Four’s Jack “King” Kirby and the original Iron Man artist, “Dashing” Don Heck—poked fun at their own characters and art styles with NBE’s Fantastical Four and Ironed Man. Kirby popped in and out of NBE, but after his killer pairings with Frank “Inky” Giacoia in issues #1 and 3, the King’s layouts were cluttered by the heavy-handed work of mismatched inker Tom Sutton on a handful of outings before being re-teamed with Giacoia and paired with inker Marie Severin. Sutton’s solo NBE work, though, was a lot of fun, and as the series progressed he became the one of the book’s regulars.

Gene Colan was the big surprise here. Who would’ve thought that “Genial” Gene, whose portfolio was packed with smooch-crammed pages from the romance comics he had drawn not long before, and who at the time was the Iron Man and Daredevil artist, would have such a bent for comedy? Colan was first seen in NBE #4’s Scaredevil vs. Electrico story, a nice but slightly stiff freshman effort with “The Man Who’s Scared of Fear’s” clumsy pratfalls, but by the time he returned the next month for Not Brand Echh #5’s “The Revengers vs. Charlie America,” a Roy Thomas-penned farce poking fun at the landmark Avengers #4, Gene had loosened up and become a master humorist. His take-offs on Marvel’s mightiest are hilarious, from Giant Sam, a lumbering oaf, to Ironed Man, who looks ridiculous with a telephone receiver atop his helmet and a rotary-dial chestplate. (Of course, Roy was in fine form with this one, even breaking the fourth wall—

as the book would occasionally do—with characters identifying the just-revived Charlie America as “a famous person” because “He’s drawn in the middle of a panel!”) Colan returned later for Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell) and Dr. Strange spoofs, and in the Seventies would get another chance at humor as the artist of Howard the Duck.

Other stellar talent seen in the pages of Not Brand Echh: Ross Andru, John Severin, John Verpoorten, Jim Mooney, Frank Springer, and John Buscema, plus writer Arnold Drake, who had fallen out of favor at the Distinguished Competition and landed at Marvel for a short writing stint.

But the star of Not Brand Echh was Marie Severin. Mirthful Marie was a rarity during the Camp Age: a female comic-book artist. Other than Severin and Metamorpho’s Ramona Fradon, few women cracked this boys’ club, and at the time few wanted to. As a young artist in the Fifties, Marie made a name for herself coloring EC Comics series such as Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science, but later landed at Marvel, where she stayed for three decades, drawing comics, coloring comics, art-directing comics, sketching cover roughs, you name it. Her knack for humorous illustration was clearly evident in Not Brand Echh #1—too bad it was relegated to a mere four pages, in a Too-Gone Kid Western spoof. But with her eyegrabber cover for NBE #2 and her interior pencils on its lead Spidey-Man tale, “Peter Pooper vs. Gnatman and Rotten,” it was obvious even to the kid reader lacking artistic discernment that this lady knew what she was doing. Marie could draw over-the-top, datadrenched images when necessary but kept a tight

LEFT: Even when ribbing DC, NBE still poked fun at itself.

KRAZY LITTLE COMICS

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

leash on NBE’s excesses, her clean, accessible storytelling allowing the book’s often-dense panels to look attractive. Hers became the house style for the book—she drew most of its covers and its corner boxes, and sometimes re-drew celebrity caricatures for folks like Tom Sutton. Mention “Not Brand Echh” to anyone who read the book back during the Camp Age and chances are, it’s Marie Severin’s artwork they’ll be thinking of.

And let’s not forget NBE’s on-“screen” star, its mascot, Forbush-Man. He was first seen—from behind—on the Jack Kirby/Mike Esposito cover of Not Brand Echh #1. But his alter ego, Irving Forbush, had been Stan Lee’s imaginary whipping boy since 1955 in the short-lived Atlas (Marvel) humor mag Snafu. The name “Irving Forbush” was a running gag throughout Sixties’ Marvel lettercols and credits boxes. But it wasn’t until Not Brand Echh #5, in a tale concocted by Lee and Jack Kirby (inked heavyhandedly by Tom Sutton), that he got an origin.

Irving Forbush, the ultimate nobody whose face is always comically obstructed from the reader, is an unpaid, lower-than-low-level employee of Marble Comics who gets stuck with all the jobs no one else wants. Irv epitomizes the nerdish fanboy—he is trampled upon by Marble’s Bullpen, its super-heroes and super-villains (from whom he constantly begs for autographs), and his acid-tongued, go-go-ing Auntie Mayhem. Once Auntie Mayhem tries to knock some sense into her caped-crusader-consumed nephew by dumping a slop-filled pot onto his head, Irv is instead inspired by the dirty cookwear (“…it’s so stylish with the narrow brim!”) and cuts eyeholes into it, transforming it into the mask of… Forbush-Man, “The Way-Out Wonder.” Decked out in red longjohns, black galoshes, and a blue potato-sack cape (making him the sartorial cousin of Super Goof, Herbie the Fat Fury, and Captain Klutz), Forbush-Man begins a crimefighting career. Through incompetence and sheer luck he topples the stampeding villain known

© T.C.G. Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In 1967, trading card company Topps released Krazy Little Comics, a series of sixteen mini-comics measuring 2½ inches by 3½ inches each, lampooning popular comic-book and comic-strip properties.

Writers Roy Thomas and Len Brown and artists Wally Wood and Gil Kane were the line’s other contributors. Krazy Little Comics were sold alongside trading cards with a piece of Bazooka bubble gum included.

as the Juggernut, earning a formidable rep that makes super-villains quake in their boots. ForbushMan was on view in a few additional issues of Not Brand Echh.

With all that talent, its superlative satires, and its cordial kook of a mascot, why didn’t Not Brand Echh survive beyond its unlucky issue #13?

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RIGHT: BERRY interesting…

Fruitman in his own one-shot!

Cover art by Ernie Colón. © DreamWorks Classics.

Sorry, Stupie, but in NBE, the Marble heroes face front! From issue #7.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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NBE started out with a bang, published eight times a year in the traditional comic-book format.

But before long, its formula was altered. With issue #9 (Aug. 1968), the magazine went to a bimonthly frequency and its size was doubled, as was its price, from twelve cents to twenty-five cents. According to Roy Thomas, “I don’t recall if the extra length was Stan’s idea or [publisher Martin] Goodman, but this is around the time the Silver Surfer solo book debuted at double size.” This wreaked havoc with the production schedule, forcing issue #10 to become a reprint edition (“The Worst of Not Brand Echh”). In the three issues that followed, NBE’s requisite parodies were accompanied by so-so short features and advertising take-offs which felt like filler material.

Marie Severin’s cute “Stamp Out Trading Stamps!” cover for issue #13 brought the series to its end, although for the reader there was no indication that they were holding the final issue. In its lettercol—with its self-deprecating “This is a Letters Page?” title—it’s business as usual from Roy Thomas, although the writing was on the wall that NBE was in need of a tune-up. The column started with a “Bullpen Butt-in Dept.,” where Rascally Roy admitted that the “deadly monster Deadline” encouraged him to invite some of his friends from fandom— Bill DuBay, Ronn Foss, and Phil Seuling—to produce material for issue #13. Thomas then appealed to the readers—“our ever-lovin’ roving editors”—for their input into NBE’s direction.

There were no future issues. “It was simply discontinued,” Roy wrote in his Masterworks intro.

“If there was any material left over for NBE #14, I’m unaware of it.” A casualty of a price hike and the exhaustive process of producing such a high volume of gag-loaded comic stories, Not Brand Echh was no more, imploding under its own weight.

While Forbush-Man has returned on occasion, as have some of the Marble heroes, it’s never quite been the same. Not Brand Echh and the laughs it engendered— for its readers and its creators—was the proverbial lightning in a bottle.

At least that bottle has been uncorked with a Marvel Masterworks edition.

FRUITMAN

The Supermarket Superman I’ve had super-hero daydreams in a lot of places that invite mind wandering—classrooms, meetings, church, the DMV—but never at the grocery store, even though I find supermarkets comforting since my father worked at one. Never have I fantasized that I was the Astounding Stock-Man, or Captain Checkout, or Bagboy. And never once have I wished that I could become a piece of fruit.

That was Percival Pineapple’s superpower. This plump proprietor of a fruit stand could stop criminals by shape-shifting into a pear.

Or an orange.

Or a cantaloupe.

Yes, this was Fruitman, “the greatest crimebuster ever,” whose secondary superability was dropping fruit-related puns that were such groaners (“suPEARhero,” “a PEACHy idea,” “na-CHERRY-ly,” “GRAPE Scot!”), reading them was like sucking a lemon (sorry). As Percy Pineapple, he let the reader in on “the world’s best GOURDed secret,” often breaking the fourth wall with asides about his alter ego.

Percy called himself “the world’s busiest crimefighter,” although as witnessed in his stories he had ample time to comb the beach, take vacations and cruises, and go on dates.

Percival Pineapple looked a bit like Archie Comics’ Dilton Doiley, but with a mod haircut and a rounder waistline. In times of trouble, with a POP! and magic sparkles, Percy would transform into a piece of fruit that bore his bespectacled face—similar to the talking fruit from The Annoying Orange web and TV series. (That show’s creator, Dane Boedighemier, was born in 1979, three years after Fruitman’s last adventure, so unless he stumbled across a back issue it’s unlikely that Daneboe’s chatty citrus can count Fruitman as an influence.)

Yet Fruitman did more than chat—he apprehended bad guys. If he needed to hitch a ride to a crime scene, Fruitman could become a peach and bound

into a motorist’s grocery sack. By changing into a succulent apple at a streetside produce stand, Fruitman could entice the clutch of a suspected kidnapper he was trailing. As a banana, he could strip bare (while blushing, of course) so that fleeing thieves would slip on his peel. Fruitman also found his watermelon shape handy for bowling over enemy spies.

Luckily, he was never eaten in the line of duty (which may explain why a Fruitman/Fatman crossover never occurred).

You may be thinking that the notion of a fruitbased super-hero was crazy, even for the Camp Age. To be fair, there was a bit of Fruitmania going on back then. In 1964, Pillsbury introduced its Kool-Aid competitor, Funny-Face drink mix, sold in packets marketed with anthropomorphic fruit faces with names like Goofy Grape, Lefty Lemon, and Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry (stereotypes Chinese Cherry and Injun Orange were quickly replaced by Choo Choo Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange). This was a popular product line, heavily advertised on television. Pillsbury’s Funny-Face campaign ran well into the Seventies and included plastic drinking cups in the shapes of Freckle Face Strawberry and friends and a record album with the Funny-Face gang singing.

Fruitman first appeared in Harvey Comics’ GiantSize teen title, Bunny (“The Queen of the In-Crowd!”) #3 (Nov. 1967), in the back-up segment “The Bunny Ball Fantasy Theater.” For the rest of Bunny’s decadelong run (the title ended in 1976 with issue #21), Fruitman could usually be found in its back pages, occasionally being bumped for a different “Fantasy Theater” feature like Yvoorg Nam (that’s Groovy Man for those of you who don’t speak Zatanna), Sooper Hippie, and Captain Oink. But “the superPEACHy crime puncher” was Bunny’s most successful backup star, scoring a cover appearance (as a talking watermelon) on Bunny #8, as well as his own oneshot, Fruitman Special #1, in 1969.

No creator ever signed a Fruitman story, so the writers and artists behind the feature have remained a mystery. Let’s pick through the produce bin of comics professionals and see if we can get out of this Fruitman writer-artist jam.

There is Internet conjecture that Fruitman was produced by cartoonist Hy Eisman. That’s a logical assumption, since Eisman, renowned for his work on the newspaper strips The Katzenjammer Kids and the Popeye Sundays, started the Bunny title for Harvey in 1966—but it’s wrong. Eisman, an instructor at the Kubert School since 1976, told me in February 2016, “I was only responsible for Bunny. [I] have no idea who drew Fruitman.”

Sid Jacobson was a longtime Harvey Comics editor, but the Bunny and Fruitman projects were not his assignments. “Fruitman was edited by Bob Harvey’s older son, who also did The Cowsills [in Harvey Pop Comics #1],” Jacobson told me in February 2016. (Robert “Bob” Harvey was Harvey founder Alfred Harvey’s brother.) “I really do not know anything

SUPER KIDS As Harvey Comics expanded its Silver Age Sad Sack franchise, Jack O’Brien was one of the cartoonists enlisted to help creator George Baker keep up with the demand.

Among O’Brien’s contributions was “G.I. Juniors,” a nod to the kid gangs of the Thirties and Forties, which placed the prickly but likeable Sarge (not the same Sarge as in Sad Sack, by the way) in charge of Camp Wacky Wee’s pack of military academy recruits. G.I. Juniors headlined fourteen mid-Sixties’ issues of Harvey Hits—and in 1966, the boys went to boot Camp! Harvey Hits #110 (Nov. 1966) featured the comic-bookobsessed G.I. Juniors transforming into super-heroes: team leader Junior became the human fireworks show Rocket Boy; shaggy-haired Chubby became Rubberboy, a Bouncing Boy/Plastic Man clone; Tuffy the bully became Mosquito Boy, a flying, stinging super-hero susceptible to bug spray; and after proclaiming the magic words “Ala Kazee, Ala Kazam,” boy behemoth Ape became the Iron Man knock-off Robot Boy. Even Sarge got into the act as the powerless Super Sarge. After only two appearances, the Super Kids retired their super-guises… and before long, the G.I. Juniors feature itself was axed, with the final issue of Harvey Hits, #122 (Nov. 1967). about it. However, it did just occur to me that Ernie Colón might have done the artwork. Or it could have been Hy Rosen, who passed many, many years ago.”

Comics historian Mark Arnold, who has probably spent more time poring over Harvey Comics than anyone this side of Sid Jacobson, sweetens the Fruitman narrative by adding, “Bob Harvey’s son was Warren Harvey. He did write (and I guess also edit, according to Sid), Bunny.” Arnold also contends that Warren Harvey wrote Bunny’s Fruitman feature, at least initially, and believes that Warren came up with the idea. Regarding the art, Mark confirms Sid’s suspicion: “Hy Rosen (and also Ernie Colón) did Fruitman, not Hy Eisman. Eisman only did the first six issues of Bunny. Hy Rosen did the rest. People confuse them all the time. I used to, too!”

And what about Ernie Colón? “Yes! YES! I confess it!” the artist joked to me in February 2016.

“I did draw Fruitman, but thankfully cannot recall which ones, which issues, which life. He belongs in a lengthy pantheon proudly headed by Billy Bellhops.”

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Original Howie Post “Sooper Hippie” art from a tale that appeared in Bunny #7.

Courtesy of Heritage. © DreamWorks Classics.

RIGHT: The Boy Fiend has it out for super-heroes in Charlton Premiere #3.

Cover by Henry Scarpelli. © the respective copyright holder.

Blue Beetle and Peacemaker TM & © DC Comics.

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Colón had heard that Fruitman was actually created by Alfred Harvey, “though somebody told me it was one of his kids.” While the originator of the character remains unclear, Colón can’t forget Sid Jacobson’s reaction to Fruitman: “When this creation was mentioned to Sid, his immediate response was, ‘Great— what every boy wants to grow up to be.’” Colón also believes that Lennie Herman may have written the Fruitman scripts he drew.

So let’s take inventory: The Fruitman concept was brainstormed either by Alfred Harvey or his nephew, Warren; originally written by Warren Harvey; and originally drawn by Hy Rosen, with Ernie Colón, possibly illustrating scripts by Lennie Herman, taking over the later installments.

And let’s not forget the Fruitman Special: Its headlining hero was accompanied by back-ups plucked from Bunny’s “The Bunny Ball Fantasy Theater”: Sooper Hippie and Captain Flower. At face value, those two features seemed as innocuous as any other Harvey story, but both contained subtle drug humor. Sooper Hippie starred Stanley Humbert, a shaggy-topped peacenik who “soopernaturalized” himself into the high-flying Sooper Hippie, a superhero with an allergy to grass. If that wasn’t enough to get you feelin’ groovy, Captain Flower starred a boy named Freddie who sold flowers on the street. By sniffing a potted flower, Freddie would sneeze, triggering his transformation into the petal-powerman, Captain Flower. Freddie, incidentally, was employed by a florist outfit called the Flower Pot. The Sooper Hippie story was drawn by Howie Post, a Harvey regular also known for his syndicated strip The Dropouts and his DC Comics series Anthro. The Captain Flower tale was produced by Jack O’Brien, the talent behind Harvey Hits’ G.I. Juniors feature.

While forty years have passed since Fruitman’s final outing, the hero has become a bit of a cult curiosity throughout fandom. And despite his cavorting with women on several occasions, Percival Pineapple’s sexuality has also come into question, as bootleg Fruitman items can be found on eBay marketing the character as a “gay super-hero.” All this attention, for a minor character from the back-up feature in a B-level comic book?? Go FIGure.

SINISTRO, BOY FIEND

Charlton’s All-American Super-Hero Hater During the Sixties, all-American teenagers from Dick Grayson to Archie Andrews had afterschool jobs as super-heroes. And for those kids who weren’t super, they swooned over super-teens (heck, even Jimmy Olsen had a fan club!).

Not Jack Biceps. “Fate has cast Jack Biceps in the mold of the all-American boy… doomed to wholesome good looks, the admiration of his fellows, and the firm faith of his parents and teachers that young Jack will play the hero’s role in life!” Others expect that of him, too, from his groovy girlfriend Shirlee to his coterie of kooky, cool companions. Only Jack has other ideas. He’s rebellious, and rejects his destiny by turning his anger against society’s super-heroes.

And so Jack sets his sights on acquiring super-abilities so that he can wipe those super-namby-pambies off the face of the Earth—or at least kick ’em out of town. Jack’s first attempt to get super is from a serum concocted in his garage laboratory, a potion too

wretched to drink. So he becomes a “human” Wile E. Coyote, mail-ordering a “Simple Do-It-Yourself Kit” for a Highro-Gyro, shipped in a crate that looks as if it should bear an “ACME” logo stencil. The multi-piece kit is the Ikea furniture buyer’s worst nightmare, but Jack perseveres with its assembly and soon, as Sinistro, Boy Fiend, takes to the air in his HighroGyro—which is equipped with a Super Weapon Panel—to hunt down super-heroes.

And thus begins Sinistro’s first, and only, appearance, in the showcase title Charlton Premiere #3 (Jan. 1968). It was scripted by Richard “Grass” Green, the cartoonist behind some of Go-Go’s superspoofs, and illustrated by Henry Scarpelli.

Throughout the story, Sinistro uses his HighroGyro and weapons of his own design to assist crooks (“I’m sick of this business of good guys always winning!”) and tussle with (actually, cower from) super-heroes. Despite being characterized as an all-American boy and a whiz kid, he’s an absolute dolt, blundering through each of his attempts to get rid of caped crusaders. Along the way he bumps heads with original creations Superguy, Captain USA, and Green Spider (the LOL name “Aunt-Man” is also mentioned in a caption), plus “real” super-heroes from Charlton’s slate of “Action Heroes,” in cameos: the Peacemaker and Blue Beetle (now owned by DC Comics).

Like most of Charlton’s product, Sinistro lacked the polish of The Inferior Five or even Forbush-Man. Still, Green and Scarpelli managed to parody some of the tropes of super-hero comics, such as the collateral damage caused by super-heroes’ actions, with the same level of comedic sophistication found in comics’ Big Leagues. Most notable about Charlton Premiere #3, however, was its use of Blue Beetle in a humorous role, presaging the hero’s “Bwah-ha-ha” characterization in the Eighties’ version of DC’s Justice League.

FEARLESS FRANK

Jon Voight’s Little-Known SuperHero Movie “It was the first super-hero comic-book movie,” director Philip Kaufman said in an online interview with film scholar Marta Bałaga. “We made it even before Batman, the original series.” It was the first film role for Jon Voight, who would go on to give us Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, Coming Home, and Angelina Jolie. Kaufman followed it with a string of renowned films including The Wanderers, The Right Stuff, and

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was Fearless Frank, an art-house super-hero movie you’ve probably never heard of.

Fearless Frank was both ahead of its time and behind the eight ball. Shot in 1965 B.B. (Before Batman), it opens with Voight, a hick from the hills, as he arrives in the big city of Chicago and rushes to the aid of a chesty gun moll, Plethora (Monique van Vooren, later seen in Flesh for Frankenstein, a.k.a.

Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein), who’s being hassled by mobsters. He’s shot to death in the scuffle, his corpse becoming Play-Doh for a life-altering, eccentric scientist called the Good Doctor (Severn Darden), who remolds Voight into a superman, Fearless Frank.

Looking like a Sixties male model in his tailored, silver-gray suit and shades, Fearless Frank takes on the mob with his newfound super-strength, superflight, and swelling super-ego. He eventually battles his doppelganger, a Bizarro version of himself called False Frank (Voight in a dual role), the creation of the mob’s Bizarro version of the Good Doctor, Claude (Darden also in a dual role). From its cartooned, hand-lettered opening credits to its madcap criminals (including the not-yet-famous David Steinberg as a gangster called “The Rat”), this shoestring-budgeted cheapie is not only a screwy send-up of crimefighters but also a morality play, as the conduct code separating Fearless Frank from False Frank blurs.

Fearless Frank’s nonconformity was its kryptonite. The film took a couple of years for Kaufman to complete and even longer before he brokered a distribution deal with Trans American Films. The success of Voight’s Midnight Cowboy in 1969 helped Fearless Frank finally reach theaters, where it arrived too late to enjoy the Batmania buzz. Its publicity, which depicted Voight as a caped crusader, misled the audience into believing it was more of a traditional super-hero film. Trans American also released Fearless Frank as a double-feature with Madigan’$ Million$, a 1966 Italian–Spanish comedy import starring Dustin Hoffman which, like Frank, had collected dust pending distribution. Despite their onscreen chemistry as a dynamic duo in Midnight Cowboy, Voight and Hoffman’s pairing in this cross-promotion sold few tickets. However, Fearless Frank has developed a cult following among fans of avantgarde cinema.

“Grass” Green.

Everybody was talkin’ about Voight and Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, but this 1969 attempt to double-up their littleknown genre movies flopped at the box office.

Movie poster courtesy of Heritage. © 1969 Trans American Films.

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CAPTAIN COSTELLO AND CAPTAIN SPLENDID Steve Skeates’ Early Super-Hero Spoofs

In the mid-Sixties, Charles Santangelo took over the running of Charlton Comics from its cofounder, his father, John Santangelo. Charles had a hankering to add licensed titles to Charlton’s comic-book line—Dell Comics and Western Publishing (Gold Key Comics) had been adapting lots of Sixties’ TV shows and movies to comic books, so why shouldn’t Charlton? He brought two possibilities to Charlton Comics’ managing editor Dick Giordano: The Flying Nun and Abbott & Costello. The former, a sitcom starring TV Captain Costello is aware he’s in a comic book according to his word balloon on the cover of Charlton’s Abbott & Costello #3. © RKO General Inc., Jomar Productions Inc., and HannaBarbera Productions, Inc.

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Gidget Sally Field as a sister with a habit for aerodynamics, premiered on ABC in the Fall of 1967. The latter, based upon Hanna-Barbera Productions’ The Abbott and Costello Cartoon Show, adapting the film and early television comedy duo to animation (with Bud Abbott providing his own voice and Stan Irwin voicing Lou Costello, since Costello had passed in 1959), entered the syndication market in the Fall of 1967.

Giordano thought the funnymen would make a better funnybook, and in late 1967 Charlton launched the bimonthly Abbott & Costello series, drawn by Henry Scarpelli and written by “one of the funniest people in the world” (according to Dick, and I’m inclined to agree): Steve Skeates. (The Flying Nun was picked up by Dell for a four-issue run, its first three issues drawn by… Henry Scarpelli. Small world.) In an interview with John Schwirian published in Alter Ego #84 (Mar. 2009), Skeates explained what Giordano found so funny: “The thing I did with Abbott & Costello that was different from all my other scripts, the thing that generally tended to crack Dick up, is that I didn’t describe what was happening. I drew my own little pictures— [I] got quite good at drawing Abbott and (especially) Costello, and often, according to Dick, the simplistic way in which I pictured the gag would work far better than the more elaborate version the artist would develop.”

By the time Abbott & Costello #3 (cover-dated July 1968) hit the stands, Giordano had departed Charlton to become a DC Comics editor, with new editor Sal Gentile policing the book.

But Giordano had commissioned that issue’s (and #4’s) contents, including issue #3’s Skeates/Scarpelli superhero take-off that turned the famous comedy duo’s bumbling butterball into Captain Costello.

Of course, the last person you’d expect as a super-hero is lumpy Lou Costello—he’d be better suited to play Woozy Winks opposite Bud Abbott’s Plastic Man. But Lou’s childlike persona made him the perfect candidate for this straightforward comedy story. “The third issue contains an eleven-page super-hero parody dream sequence (starring Lou as Captain Costello) which isn’t bad at all; yet, in retrospect, I daresay it too is a tad too long and not quite as funny as I thought it was way back when,” Skeates reflected in 2009.

In the tale, Lou is reading a Zen Men comic book and falls asleep. He dreams that he, as Captain Costello, is battling the evil scientist Dr. Goldmind

and his super-henchmen while shrugging off the affections of his assistant, Maryjane, choosing duty over booty. It’s a generic plot, mind you, but there are nuances that offer a peek at the madcap imagination that would later provide zany super-heroics in the pages of DC’s Plastic Man and Marvel’s Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Dr. Goldmind’s minions—“sneaky freaks”—were wacky villain archetypes: Swiftsox, the Super Speedster; Beambrain, the Man with the Laser Forehead; Froggy, the Human Frog; and Brainchild, the Youthful Strategist, who— shades of Diaper Man!—was a baby. It’s a breezy read, funnier than many of the super-spoofs appearing in print at the time, and nicely drawn by Scarpelli.

From the writer’s perspective, Abbott & Costello took a downturn after its fourth issue, the last one with which Giordano was directly involved. Skeates contended, “This particular magazine (after its first four issues) suffered quite a bit from the absence of Dick Giordano.” The first issue on Sal Gentile’s editorial plate featured Dick Giordano leftovers. “Sal had inherited from Dick a fairly large inventory of ‘Abbott and Costello’ stories, tales that Dick (who generally quite appreciated my way-out-there outlandish sense of humor) thought were just a bit too outlandish,” Skeates said in 2009. “Sal may have disagreed about that outlandishness, or, more likely, he was mainly interested in cutting corners money-wise, but, in any event, one of the first things he did when he became the Charlton editor was to stop buying new ‘Abbott and Costello’ stories so he could use up this inventory.” The best of that inventory went into issue #4, but

“this left the worst of the inventory for the fifth issue, and said batch consisted of way too many one- and two-page stories, nine of ’em, to be exact.

Many of them weren’t bad, albeit droll and sort-of subtle, but all of those separate entities shoved together just didn’t work, making #5 a true loser.”

That “loser” issue, Abbott & Costello #5 (Nov. 1968), featured another super-hero parody, a sevenpage story titled “Whirligig.” Therein, Bud and Lou are working as lab aides to a mad scientist who creates a potion that turns him into a human top. Abbott and Costello race to find “the local super-hero, Captain Splendid,” through the hero’s girlfriend, newspaper financial editor Lois DeNominator (you’ve gotta love that pun!). When he appears, the priggish Captain Splendid winces at the notion of fighting a super-villain—he’s only accustomed to fighting nonsuper ones—and only gets his courage when the Whirligig loses his super-powers, pounding the powerless scientist at story’s end.

While neither super-spoof may be on a par with Wally Wood’s “Superduperman!,” the Captain Costello and Captain Splendid stories offer a workin-progress look at Skeates’ gift for satire. He said in 2009, “…at Charlton, I’d come up with an idea and just start writing, to some extent allow the story to write itself, allow various jokes that weren’t part of the original idea to worm their way in there, and just keep going until I was done, making the story as long or as short as I wanted it to be. You ask me, that’s the way that sort of stuff should be done.”

LEFT: The Zen Men are featured on this original art page from Abbott & Costello #3.

Courtesy of Heritage. © RKO General Inc., Jomar Productions Inc., and HannaBarbera Productions, Inc.

Steve Skeates.

Bud and Lou encounter Captain Splendid in Abbott & Costello #5. © RKO General Inc., Jomar Productions Inc., and HannaBarbera Productions, Inc.

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GHOST!

Detail from cover of Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #7. TM & (C) Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Chapter 4

CAMP RUNAMUCK SPAAAAA --

-- AAAAAAAAA --

-- AAACE

MEDIA HEROES OF THE CAMP AGE BONDMANIA

The Spy Craze and Comic Books Author Ian Fleming, who introduced the world to James Bond in his 1953 novel Casino Royale, originally intended his British secret agent 007 to be a bland, unnoticeable “blunt instrument” who covertly navigated the worlds of espionage and violence. A decade later, the shag-carpet-chested Sean Connery—who was about as bland and unnoticeable as a bikinied Ursula Andress glistening from an ocean dip—made the name “Bond, James Bond” internationally known in the first 007 motion picture, 1962’s Dr. No.

Bond certainly wasn’t the first fictional spy— nor was Connery the first actor to play 007—but Connery’s interpretation of the character spawned enough imitators to shake a nuclear warhead at, from clever (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) to chic (Honey West) to campy (Our Man Flint) to crazy (Get Smart) to corny (“Double-Naught Spy” Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies). Stirring the mania was the realworld anxiety of a Commie-launched nuke shower, with U.S. President John F. Kennedy dancing the Cold War-tusi with the shoe-slamming Soviet supervillain Nikita Khrushchev. But the end result was that secret agents became a genre that infiltrated Sixties novels, movies, television, cartoons… and comic books.

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER Surprisingly, the detonator of this spy-craze bomb— James Bond—kept a low profile in comic books of the Camp Age. Outside of gags and cameos in parody comics like MAD and Not Brand Echh, American readers got a grand total of one James Bond comic book during the Sixties—and, like the secret agent himself, it was a British import.

DC Comics’ venerable tryout title Showcase featured a tie-in to the film Dr. No in issue #43 (coverdated Mar.–Apr. 1963, going on sale January 31, 1963), the villain’s title spelled out as “Doctor” No. This 32-page, no-ads issue reprinted the Doctor No adaptation illustrated by Norman J. Nodel (and possibly adapted by Alfred Sundel, according to the Grand Comics Database) which was originally produced for the December 1962 issue of the British version of Classics Illustrated, in issue #158A. Nodel’s likenesses of nascent star Sean Connery were spot-on, and the frontispiece featured a montage of photos from the film.

DC’s first Silver Age movie adaptation was brought to the company by Jay Emmett, the nephew of National Periodical Publications’ publisher Jack Liebowitz, who knew a good thing when he saw it and snagged the comic-book rights (he would continue to nurture his eye for viable properties for years to come through the Licensing Corporation of America). The stuffed shirts in the editorial department didn’t agree

LEFT: In comic books, nobody does it better than spymaster Jim Steranko, as his iconic 1968 cover for Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4 proves.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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The cover and an interior page from Doctor No, the hardto-find DC Comics adaptation appearing in Showcase #43.

TM & © Danjaq and Eon Productions.

Some of DC’s responses to Bondmania: Batman foe Dr. No-Face, Green Lantern enemy Goldface, and the return of super-spy King Faraday.

TM & © DC Comics.

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with Emmett, the first sign that DC’s relationship with James Bond was headed nowhere.

DC’s Doctor No was hindered by the absence of a Connery likeness on artist Bob Brown’s cover, which depicted Bond as… well, bland and unnoticeable. Plus, he was only identified by his last name, the emphasis being on the bad guy. But the biggest factor working against this comic was its timing: Dr. No, the movie, premiered in the U.K. on October 5, 1962, then was distributed across Europe over the next few months, finally swimming across the big pond to U.S. theaters for a premiere on May 8, 1963.

By that point, American news dealers had removed Showcase #43 from the racks to make way for issues starring Tommy Tomorrow and Sgt. Rock. DC’s Doctor No comic book never got a chance.

For the next few years, a Connery Bond movie was an almost annual occurrence, and despite the franchise’s mature themes, a spate of 007 merchandising targeted toward boys was released. Some regard James Bond as a missed opportunity for DC Comics, and the publisher never pursued another 007 adaptation. Perhaps the naysayers on staff were right—such sexy material would have been an

awkward fit alongside DC’s other titles, which were unmistakably geared toward children.

Yet the Bond recipe was shaken, not stirred, by DC editors and writers. Shortly after Dr. No premiered in the States, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” an original spy concept starring archaeologist/master of disguise John Dandy as an American secret agent, was in the development to debut in Showcase #50, but went nowhere due to editor Larry Nadle’s untimely death in 1964. In the Showcase slots allotted for Yankee Doodle Dandy, DC dusted off reprints of its Fifties secret agent King Faraday in back-to-back issues branded as “I -- Spy.” Bond-isms were found elsewhere across the DC line. Who should tangle with Batman and Robin in Detective Comics #319 (Sept. 1964) but a faceless felon named Dr. No-Face? Once the film Goldfinger arrived in U.S. theaters in January 1965 and made that villain a household name, a gold-hoarding criminal named Keith Kenyon debuted in Green Lantern #38 (July 1965)—and in his next appearance, in issue #48 (Oct. 1966), Kenyon was cover-featured, with his new super-villain codename: Goldface! And through Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, who became “Agent Double-Five” (inspired by Jimmy’s viewing of actor Sam Connolly as Jamison Baird, Agent .003, in “a thrilling spy movie”), DC continued its flirtation with the most famous of secret agents.

THE BOND INFLUENCE IN COMIC BOOKS AND MEDIA While Bond didn’t become a Sixties comic-book regular, Dr. No and the Bond franchise imprinted comics in three significant ways: First, the movies’ Dr. No—portrayed by Canadianborn actor Joseph Wiseman, who was turned into a

Chinese master criminal via cheesy eye makeup— unfortunately re-popularized “Yellow Peril” villains, a stereotype that reacted to the fear of the spread of Eastern Asian Communism by demonizing “Orientals” with fangs, or Fu Manchu mustaches, or pointed ears and claws (or long nails), or all of the above.

Yellow Peril villains often were bald and spoke with thick accents, and in comic books and cartoons were colored a jaundiced yellow. While the Civil Rights Movement and evolving cultural mores in cinema and on television were loosening the stranglehold that Caucasians had long held on popular culture, slowly but surely representing a multicultural population, Dr. No encouraged the creation of such characters as Jonny Quest’s foe Dr. Zin, Wonder Woman’s enemy Egg Fu, and lesser-known adversaries like Undersea Agent’s Dr. Fang, villains deemed racially offensive by today’s standards. Even good guys evoked this stereotype, like Dick Tracy’s TV cartoon sidekick Joe Jitsu and the classic film detective Charlie Chan, whose spy-craze revival in comic books occurred long past the character’s expiration date.

Second, whatever evil medical school issued doctorates to super-villains had record attendance during the Camp Age. That university might have been located in Hollywood, which cranked out Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine on the heels of Dr. No (they also pitted Our Man Flint against Dr. Wu, Dr. Krupov, and Dr. Schneider).

Cartoon characters took on Dr. Gizmo, Dr. Goo Fee, and Dr. Yes. Ideal Toys’ Captain Action was given an adversary, Dr. Evil, when Austin Powers’ Mike Myers was still in a playpen. But comic books embraced the evil doctor during the post-Dr. No Sixties like no other medium, introducing forgettable, cookie-cutter crime-kooks like Dial “H” for Hero’s Dr. Cyclops

(not to be confused with the 1940 sci-fi villain of the same name) and Dr. Rigor Mortis, Blue Beetle’s Dr. Clugg, Son of Vulcan’s Dr. Kong, and Captain Atom’s Dr. Spectro.

At least Marvel’s Dr. Doom and Dr. Octopus and DC’s Dr. Light and Dr. Polaris—serious threats, all—raised the bar for the dastardly doctors of the Swinging Sixties.

And lastly, the Bond craze popularized the acronym, with the period replacing the exclamation point as the most-used comic-book punctuation mark (although the periods were often eliminated in acronyms when writers and comics letterers realized what a pain they were). A super-villain could no longer merely have a gang of henchmen or choose a moniker like “The Sinister Six” when banding together, nor could an evil doctor work autonomously. Now they had to be part of a vast, global organization with tentacles infiltrating every major metropolitan area, such as the scourge of 007’s existence, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion). Of course, the good guys got wise and formed their own acronymnamed groups, like the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) Agents, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (originally Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division), U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), and Derek Flint’s Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization on World Intelligence Espionage). And in comic books, you didn’t even have to be a secret-agent series to use an acronym, like Gold Key’s gutsy battle book M.A.R.S. (Marine Attack Rescue Service) Patrol, or O.G.R.E. (Organization for General Revenge and Enslavement), which tangled with the Sea King in the pages of Aquaman.

DC even used acronyms in house ads, such as the one in late 1966 promoting 80-Page Giant Superman #193, touted as “The Mag from S.U.P.E.R.” (containing “Sensational, Unusual, Puzzling, Exciting, and Rip-roaring” adventures). It got to the point where acronyms no longer had to stand for anything, like Get Smart’s CONTROL and KAOS networks, or the crime network THEM in the 1966 Marty Allen–Steve Rossi spy spoof, The Last of the Secret Agents?

Egg Fu, one of the campy but offensive super-villains that premiered in the wake of Dr. No, in 1965’s Wonder Woman #158.

TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: Original art by Frank Springer for the splash page of Dell Comics’ Charlie Chan #1 (Oct.–Dec. 1965).

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Fox Film Corp.

LIVE AND LET SPY For a while, almost every comic-book and cartoon character doubled as a secret agent: Archie Andrews as the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., Fred Flintstone as The Man from Flintstone (a full-length movie spinoff from TV’s popular Flintstones primetime series), 165

Spies like us? (LEFT) The Flintstones #36 adapted The Man Called Flintstone.

(CENTER) Super Secret Agent-ing in Mickey Mouse #109. (RIGHT) A spy spoof was part of the contents of Archie’s Soupy Sales one-shot.

Flintstones TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions. Mickey Mouse TM & © Walt Disney Productions.

Soupy Sales © Archie Publications, Inc.

Emma Peel— make that Diana Prince— and I-Ching, as seen on the Mike Sekowsky/ Dick Giordano cover to Wonder Woman #181.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope in their DC comics, Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame as “The Mouse from T.R.A.P.,” and even comedian Soupy Sales, who became “Philo Kvetch, Secret Agent O-O-Oh!… Oh!” in his 1965 Archie Comics one-shot. Hanna-Barbera Records produced a musical-adventure LP titled James Bomb starring Super Snooper and Blabbermouse, teaming its Snooper and Blabber TV characters with a super-spy on a mission to save Washington, D.C., from SQUISH (Society of Uncouth and Quarrelsome Idiots and Secret Horrors). Gold Key Comics’ Mickey Mouse #109 (Oct. 1966) made its star a “Super Secret Agent,” and Mickey moonlighted in more espionage tales in Gold Key’s The Phantom Blot, a series reviving a former Disney super-villain.

The most successful secret agent makeover took place at Marvel Comics. Introduced in early 1963 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the World War II-based combat title Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, the rough-and-tumble, cigar-smoking do-gooder Nick Fury was essentially Kirby’s fantasy version of himself (“Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me,” he famously said) in fictionalized accounts of Jack’s own WWII experiences. As Lee penned in

1975’s Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, a recurring theme in Marvel fan mail was “Is Sgt. Fury still alive today? If he did survive World War Two, what’s he doing now?” Stan and Jack first injected an older, modern-day Nick Fury into Sixties Marvel continuity as a C.I.A. agent in 1963’s Fantastic Four #21.

Then came the success of James Bond and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., inspiring the creation of Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. and the introduction of a new feature, “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” commencing in Strange Tales #135 (Aug. 1965). Stan and Jack’s super-spy Fury (now sporting an eyepatch) traded in his stripes for a suit while being bumped upstairs to front Marvel’s own espionage agency in its ongoing struggle against the sinister organization Hydra.

Kirby’s unbridled imagination and magic pencil gave the S.H.I.E.L.D. feature Life Model Decoys, a Porsche that converts into an air car, and countless high-tech weapons that continue to shape Marvel’s comicbook and cinematic universes today.

But it was newcomer Jim Steranko, fresh from his unproduced Super Agent X animated project at Paramount Studios and his creation of Spyman for Harvey Comics, who ramped up Strange Tales’ S.H.I.E.L.D. strip, earning the feature its own spin-off title. As Steranko said in Arlen Schumer’s 2003 book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, “When I took S.H.I.E.L.D. on, Fury was simply an older version of his wartime persona: rumpled, cigar-chomping, unshaven… I cleaned him up, gave him the kinky, black leather zip-suit rippling with clips, buttons, cartridge belts, and the shoulder holster—so he could compete visually with Marvel’s super-heroes. I gave him a personality and a sex life.” He also gave his stories a distinctive look unlike anything else on the stands, with trippy, pop-art imagery and mesmerizing, detaildripping full-page illustrations.

No comic-book spy conversion was more ambitious, however, than what occurred in the pages of “The New” Wonder Woman, DC’s long-running super-heroine title that had always been a tough sell in the male-dominated market. In 1968, writer Denny O’Neil and artist Mike Sekowsky stripped the Amazon

Princess of her powers, teamed her with a blind, Asian sensei named I-Ching (a name which later embarrassed O’Neil), and made her DC’s equivalent of The Avengers’ Emma Peel, a globetrotting martial artist. This interpretation of the character lasted through 1972, despite being decried by Ms. Magazine’s Gloria Steinem.

New characters emerged to exploit the spy craze, including frenemies Spy vs. Spy, created by Cuban expat Antonio Prohias, whose enmity began in the pages of MAD Magazine in 1961. DePatieFreleng’s series of The Inspector animated shorts were popular take-offs of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther movies, and the character later became a Saturday morning cartoon staple and a comic book in the Seventies. Saturday morning television also saw the likes of Secret Squirrel, Cool McCool, and Tom of T.H.U.M.B. A bonanza of brand-new “Bonds” bounded into Camp Age comic books. The American Comics Group introduced the title John Force, Magic Agent in 1962. Written by ACG’s editor Richard E. Hughes and illustrated by Paul Reinman, the eye-patched John Force plied a magic coin which gave him various telepathic abilities in his Cold War crusade against Commies.

John Force is not to be confused with John Steele, Secret Agent, star of a 1964 Gold Key Comics

one-shot produced by writer Paul S. Newman and artists Giovanni Ticci and Alberto Giolitti, under a dynamite painted cover by an unidentified artist. This rollicking Iron Curtain-crusher was seen the previous year in the one-shot Freedom Agent #1. Sciencefiction elements were common in Steele’s adventures, as he battled invisible saboteurs and a scientist who super-sized animals.

John Steele is not to be confused with Sarge Steel, one of Charlton Comics’ Action Heroes, first seen in his own magazine in 1964. Created by Pat Masulli, Sarge Steel straddled the line demarcating the worlds of super-espionage and super-heroes: it was subtitled “Private Detective,” but the gumshoe’s metallic left hand looked like it could’ve rolled off Tony Stark’s assembly line. The book’s logo conveyed its ability to exist in two worlds: “SARGE” depicted a smoking firearm crowning the letter “A,” while “STEEL” was forged in riveted lettering that might have duped an inattentive Iron Man reader into buying a copy. And the first issue’s cover-featured super-villain Ivan Chung—who was half-Chinese and half-Russian, making him a double-threat Red!— suggested that Sarge Steel was more of a secret agent than a P.I. By issue #6, Sarge Steel’s “Private Detective” subtitle was replaced by “Special Agent,” signaling a shift to more fantastic adventures, and by the time the book ended its ten-issue run in 1967, it had been renamed Secret Agent. Sarge Steel’s first artist is the one most identified with the feature: Dick Giordano, who told me in 2002 that the super-spy was “one of the loves of my life, one that’s very close to me.”

Charlton’s other super-spy was the obscure Tiffany Sinn, “the C.I.A. Sweetheart,” first seen in Career Girl Romances #38. Her inclusion in that romance title may seem like a stretch, but her feature’s blend of espionage and soap opera made Career Girl Romances the perfect venue for Tiffany’s saga (“For a girl fighting for freedom and her life, it was like a scene out of an English spy epic!” she recanted in her third and final story). Tiffany’s origin echoed

TOP CENTER: 1964’s John Steele, Secret Agent #1, with its dynamite painted cover by an uncredited artist.

John Steele © Random House, Inc.

TOP RIGHT: Charlton’s iron-handed tough guy, Sarge Steel.

Cover by Dick Giordano.

TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: Original Prohias cover art from 1968 for an unpublished Spy vs. Spy paperback.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc.

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“Bonds” Abound! LEFT: 1962’s [John Force,] Magic Agent #1.

CENTER: Jet Dream and Her Stunt-Girl Counterspies were featured as the back-up in Gold Key’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. but eventually graduated to this oneshot. RIGHT: Marvel’s 1968 magazine Pussycat #1, with cover art

by Bill Everett.

Magic Agent © the respective copyright holder. Jet Dream TM & © Random House, Inc. Pussycat TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RIGHT: Tower Comics’ T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (Nov. 1965).

Cover art by Wally Wood.

TM & © Radiant Assets, LLC.

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Batman’s: She was led into the Agency after her parents were “executed by the Communists in East Berlin in 1954.” TV’s Emma Peel and Honey West certainly helped pave the way for her feature, but it was Peter O’Donnell’s British comic strip Modesty Blaise, which premiered in 1963, that inspired writer Gary Friedrich to create a female spy for Charlton— and editor Dick Giordano, a fan of O’Donnell’s strip, gave her the green light. After snagging a cover blurb on Career Girl Romances #39, her second outing, she was last seen as a back-up in Secret Agent (formerly Sarge Steel) #10. Friedrich wrote her first two adventures, which were illustrated by Charles Nicholas and Luis Dominguez, respectively, with her final story being written by David A. Kaler and drawn by Jim Aparo.

Another relatively unknown lady secret agent of Camp Age comicdom was stuck in the back pages of Gold Key’s Man from U.N.C.L.E. series: aviatress Jet Dream. Bond’s Pussy Galore reimagined as Blackhawk, Jet had at her beck and call her “Stunt-Girl Counterspies,” highly trained, high-flying “derring-do dolls” with campy names like Cookie Jarr, Ting-aLing, and Petite, who operated from their base on No Man’s Land. Jet Dream’s adventures ran a mere four pages in length, premiering in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #7 (July 1966) and continuing through the series’ end with issue #22 (although issue #21 was a reprint). Dick Wood was the Jet Dream writer, originally abetted by the art team of Mike Sekowsky and Mike Peppe but later joined by Joe Certa for a long run of stories, with a Jack Sparling issue along the way. The spy craze was cooling once Gold Key finally graduated the Stunt-Girl Counterspies into 1968’s Jet Dream #1, which featured a 26-page Wood/ Certa story involving the terrorist organization CYPHER.

Owing more to Little Annie Fanny than Emma Peel was the busty, lusty Pussycat, a risqué Good Girl Art black-and-white comic feature appearing in a handful of mid-Sixties’ men’s magazines from Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman. Launched

by Wally Wood in 1965’s Male Annual #3, Pussycat was an agent of S.C.O.R.E. (Secret Council of Ruthless Extroverts), a group locked in conflict with L.U.S.T. In 1968, once Marvel began experimenting with comics in the magazine market (the initial result being the Spectacular Spider-Man mag), a Pussycat one-shot was published in this format, reprinting a number of stories by Wood, Al Hartley, Bill Ward, and Jim Mooney, with Mooney also providing a new short story and art touch-ups, all under a titillating new cover by Bill Everett. “I enjoyed doing Pussycat very much,” Mooney told interviewer Jim Amash in Alter Ego #133 (June 2015). “And certainly she was a sexy girl.… They paid me very, very well for it. I was surprised. A hell of a lot better than most comic books.”

The most durable of the Camp Age’s super-spies were the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, created in 1965 by Wally Wood. During the super-hero boom of the Sixties, Harry Shorten, a Golden Age comics creator also known as the gag writer for artist Al Fagaly’s There Oughta Be a Law! syndicated one-panel comic, founded Tower Comics as an offshoot of Midwood Books, a publishing house in Brooklyn. Wood was handsomely paid to create a line of super-heroes for Tower, and he pulled from the spy craze and its penchant for gadgetry, using superscience as the engine from which super-heroes he-man Dynamo, spooky NoMan, big-brain Menthor, and speedster Lightning were created. Wood assembled a veritable who’s who of talent to work with him, including artists Reed Crandall, Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky, and Ogden

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

FROM TV WITH LOVE American and British television took aim at the spy craze, with many secret agent series becoming comic-book titles, presenting watered-down versions of their host characters, losing the sex and softening the violence for their young readership:

TM & © Independent Television Corporation (ITC).

Danger Man/Secret Agent

Danger Man was a 1961 British import produced by ITC (Independent Television Corporation) starring Patrick McGoohan as globetrotting security investigator John Drake. It spawned a comic-book oneshot, published by Dell as Four Color #1231 (Sept.– Nov. 1961); the comic featured a painted cover by an unidentified artist, while Tony Tallarico was the interior artist.

Once Bondmania hit, Danger Man was brought back in expanded episodes as Secret Agent, airing on CBS from 1965–1966. In the March 26, 1966 edition of TV Guide, reviewer Cleveland Amory wrote of the show’s star, “Mr. Goohan himself is eminently satisfactory, and he is literally brimming with complexities.” Secret Agent’s theme song, “Secret Agent Man,” written by Phil Sloan and Steve Barri and performed

by Johnny Rivers, became a hit, reaching #3 on Billboard’s Top 60. Gold Key published two issues of Secret Agent in 1966 and 1967, both with McGoohan photo covers. The comic was written by Dick Wood, with art by Bill Lignante (or, as blogged by comics historian Martin O’Hearn, Sparky Moore ghosting for Lignante) on issue #1 and Bob Jenney and Sal Trapani on issue #2.

TM & © Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment.

Whitney, the end result being some of the most attractively drawn super-hero comics of the Sixties.

Dynamo and NoMan spun off into their own books, and a companion series, Undersea Agent, was added, featuring the submariner spy Davy Jones as an agent of U.N.D.E.R.S.E.A. (United Nations Department of Experiment and Research Systems Established at Atlantis). As the spy and super-hero booms fizzled in the late Sixties, Tower Comics folded, but the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents have since been revived on numerous occasions.

The most successful of the Bond imitators, executive producer Norman Felton’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. started its four-season run on NBC on September 22, 1964. The “Man” was super-agent Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), chief operative for U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), headquartered in New York City, with Mr. Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) offering a new mission each week in U.N.C.L.E.’s ongoing war with international crime cartel CRUSH. Vaughn’s co-star was David McCallum, who, as Russian agent Illya Kuryakin, brokered détente to a Cold War-chilled America and induced date fantasies to the gaggles of girls who went ga-ga over his blond, Beatle-cut cuteness and exotic accent. McCallum became a sex symbol, his face dominating teen magazines and his popularity eclipsing headliner Vaughn’s.

Del Floria’s Tailor Shop was the storefront through which most operatives (and viewers) would enter U.N.C.L.E.’s headquarters via a secret portal.

Each U.N.C.L.E. case was an “affair,” reflected by episode titles such as “The Vulcan Affair,” “The Deadly Toys Affair,” and “The Pop Art Affair,” a gimmick employed in other adaptive media including comic books. The Man from U.N.C.L.E’s best-remembered phrase was “Open Channel D,” which agents would say when using their pocket communicators.

Season One was shot in black and white and was edgier than later seasons, and featured a guest-star who would be drawn into the story at hand.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. became a color show during Season Two, and became campier as well, partially in response to Batman’s popularity, with many of Solo’s and Kuryakin’s antics stretching credibility. The show boasted its strongest ratings during its second season, ranking 13th with a 24.0 Nielsen rating and producing a spin-off, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Were you one of the kids who barked, “Open Channel D” into your Man from U.N.C.L.E. walkie talkie?

Man from U.N.C.L.E. TM & © Warner Bros./ Turner Entertainment.

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RIGHT: Would you believe…

Steve Ditko drawing Get Smart? A test page done in 1966 by the Amazing Spider-Man co-creator for Dell’s TV tie-in comic.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Get Smart TM & © Home Box Office, Inc.

U.N.C.L.E.mania included the repackaging of TV episodes as movies, a series of novels, and enough toys and collectibles—walkie-talkies, a View-Master packet, coloring books, 12-inch action figures, Aurora model kits, and trading cards among them—to fill a curio cabinet.

As with all crazes, the mania began to fade and ratings dipped in Season Three. By the fourth and final season, the zaniness was ratcheted back and a new cast member was added, Barbara Moore as Mr. Waverly’s secretary, Lisa Rogers. The series made its final telecast on January 15, 1968. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has since spawned a 1985 reunion telefilm and a 2015 movie reboot.

Gold Key Comics published 22 issues of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from 1965 to 1969. Each issue featured a photo cover; scripts were by Paul S. Newman or Dick Wood and artists included Don Heck, George Tuska, Werner Roth, and Mike Sekowsky.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s one-season spin-off required double-duty of actor Leo G. Carroll, appearing again as Mr. Waverly, this time dispatching agent April Dancer (Stefanie Powers) on weekly missions. Joining her was British operative Mark Slate, played

by Noel Harrison. The short-lived show aired during the 1966-67 season and was accompanied by scattered merchandising, the most consistent being five issues of Gold Key Comics’ The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., written by Paul S. Newman and featuring art by Al McWilliams, Bill Lignante, and Frank Bolle.

Get Smart

“I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family,” funnyman Mel Brooks told Time Magazine, as reported in its October 15, 1965 edition. “No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.” Brooks didn’t do it alone—he co-created Get Smart, the spy spoof which ran for five seasons, with Buck Henry, who would then apply his Smart creds to another lampoon, NBC’s ill-fated Captain Nice.

Premiering on September 18, 1965, Get Smart was Brooks’ and Henry’s reimagining of James Bond as a nincompoop, the secret-agent equivalent of Mayberry’s bumbling, by-the-book deputy, Barney Fife. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than actor Don Adams in the role of its main character, Maxwell Smart, a.k.a.

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Agent 86, but Tom Poston “missed it by that much.”

Poston, a Steve Allen Show veteran (and star of William Castle’s 1962 comedy movie Zotz!, about a magic word that grants a man super-powers), was the intended Maxwell Smart when Get Smart was pitched to ABC. That network turned down the show after demanding that Brooks and Henry make numerous changes. NBC gave the series the green light, but cast Adams in the lead, rolling out the new series by commissioning a promotional illo from cartoonist Jack Davis.

Get Smart spoofed not only the suave spy archetype but also the trappings of its genre: Smart’s agency, CONTROL, fought the evil agency KAOS, while Agent 86’s secret weapons included a telephone in his shoe (which he had to remove from his foot to use) and the forever-malfunctioning “Cone of Silence,” under which Max and his boss, the Chief (Edward Platt), would hold their “private” discussions.

Smart’s partner was the lovely Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), although in the earlier seasons he was also joined by Agent K-13, a dog named Fang that was sorely in need of obedience training.

Adams was pitch-perfect—and typecast—in the role of Maxwell Smart, peppering the lexicon with several catchphrases including “Would you believe?” and “Sorry about that, Chief.” Get Smart featured an impressive supporting cast including Bernie Kopell as KAOS bad guy Siegfried, Dick Gautier as Hymie the Robot, and Dave Ketchum as the unlucky Agent 13, who always landed the most uncomfortable undercover assignments. Behind-the-camera greats

such as directors Bruce Bilson (Wonder Woman, The Flash) and Richard Donner (Superman: The Movie) also worked on the show. Get Smart was a hit, making a living cartoon character out of Adams (appropriate for the actor who was also the voice of Tennessee Tuxedo). The one-joke premise of the show began to wear thin in Season Four, and Get Smart jumped the shark by having Max and 99 marry.

In the final season, the show moved to CBS, and the Smarts had a baby—a far cry from Mel Brooks’ original vision. Yet Get Smart has endured as the apex of spy spoofs, its legacy continuing in later decades with revivals and reboots.

Dell Comics obtained the rights to produce a Get Smart comic book, publishing eight issues over a 17-month period from 1966 to 1967 (although issue #8 reprinted issue #1, even replicating its cover image and logo colors). As with all of its licensed properties from that era, Get Smart was produced by Dell with virtually no interference. “While I was there [at Dell], I don’t recall any licensed product that required approval by the licensor (there was some involvement by licensors, but my recollection is that it was minimal… [I] don’t recall specifics,” Dell’s comics editor, D. J. Arneson, told interviewer Jamie Colville in 2010.

Arneson tapped writer Joe Gill to launch the book and Alan Riefe to replace him beginning with issue

#3. The art team of Dick Giordano and Sal Trapani produced the first issue, with Trapani sticking around to ink Spider-Man/Dr. Strange co-creator Steve Ditko on issues #2 and 3. Henry Scarpelli illustrated Riefe’s stories in #3–7.

The Wild, Wild West

James Bond as a cowboy—what a concept! You can credit producer Michael Garrison for that. Garrison was fascinated by Ian Fleming’s 007, and shortly after the publication of Casino Royale he and partner Gregory Ratoff adapted that story for a 1954 broadcast on CBS, with Barry Nelson as Bond. A decade later, when Sean Connery’s Bond was flexing box-office muscle, Garrison developed the hour-long spy-Western The Wild, Wild West, which debuted on CBS on September 17, 1965.

Robert Conrad, previously seen on the P.I. show Hawaiian Eye, played James West, a U.S. Secret Service agent during the post-Civil War presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant. His partner-in-crimebusting was master of disguise/gadget guru Artemus Gordon, played by Ross Martin, who had distinguished himself in a series of small but standout performances in early Sixties TV dramas. The stars’ chemistry was undeniable, and the show’s clever era-appropriate take on high-tech spy weapons was part of its charm, including the Inyo, the 4-4-0 locomotive that chugged Agents West and Gordon from mission to mission.

Similar to The Man from U.N.C.L.E’s “The… Affair” titles, each Wild, Wild West episode was branded “The Night of…”—even those set during the daytime.

The Wild, Wild West provided the ailing TV Western genre a much-needed shot in the arm with its colorful costumes and criminals (most notably archfoe Dr. Miguelito Loveless, played by Michael Dunn), its bevy of beauties (Jim always got the girl, and often Artie did, too), and its pop-art title graphics. The show performed well in the ratings but was pressured off the air after its fourth season due to continuing criticisms of its violence. A decade later, Conrad and Martin reunited for two Wild, Wild West TV movies.

And this historical reckoning forces me to mention something I’d otherwise prefer to ignore: the ill-conceived Wild, Wild West reboot movie of 1999.

Gold Key Comics published seven issues of The Wild, Wild West between 1966 and 1969, each with a photo cover. Among the series’ artists were Al McWilliams, Sal Trapani, and Frank Springer.

LEFT: Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, as drawn by Murphy Anderson for an Aurora Model Motoring® ad appearing on the back covers of DC comics in 1967.

Get Smart TM & © Home Box Office, Inc.

Honey West

In the television world of 1965, the only programs headlined by women were sitcoms… until Honey West, America’s answer to The Avengers’ Emma 171

Peel. Played by Anne Francis, Honey could out-spy, out-shoot, out-kick, and outsmart just about any guy, including millionaire police detective Amos Burke (Gene Barry), earning this “private eyeful” her own series, spinning off from an April 1965 episode of Barry’s Burke’s Law. Honey was adapted from print, having originated in a series of crime novels written by “G. G. Fickling” (a pseudonym for the husband-andwife team of “Skip” and Gloria Fickling) published from the late Fifties through the Sixties. The half-hour Honey West show premiered on ABC on September 17, 1965. Fronting her own P.I. firm, Honey West’s arsenal had its feminine touches— such as a lipstick radio—and she was accompanied on her cases by her lovesick partner Sam Bolt (John Ericson), who usually played second fiddle to Honey’s pet ocelot, Bruce.

Gold Key Comics produced a single issue of Honey West during the summer of 1966, with a photo cover, a script by Paul S. Newman, and art

by Jack Sparling.

I Spy

Whereas The Man from U.N.C.L.E. bridged the international ideological divide between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., I Spy was trailblazing from a Civil Rights perspective, being the first domestic TV drama to costar an African-American actor. The world of competitive tennis provided a cover for the top-seeded Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) and his trainer, Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby), both secret agents for the Pentagon.

Prior to I Spy, Cosby was a successful stand-up comedian and was cast in the “Scotty” role by executive producer Sheldon Leonard (of The Andy Griffith Show fame). Kelly and Scotty’s friendship and snappy repartee propelled I Spy through three seasons of otherwise hard-hitting, real-world exploits. The ubiquitous Paul S. Newman scripted Gold Key Comics’ six-issue run of I Spy, published between 1966 and 1968, with art by Al McWilliams.

T.H.E. Cat

Robert Loggia, best known for his roles in movies including Big and Independence Day, starred as Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat in this innovative, barely 172

remembered one-season (1966–67) half-hour NBC crime drama. One-time circus performer Cat was a reformed criminal—a cat burglar, not surprisingly, having served a stretch behind bars—who used his prowess and martial-arts mastery for dangerous cases such as protecting marks from hired killers and defusing hostage crises. His base of operations was the Caso del Gato nightclub, in San Francisco. T.H.E. Cat’s creator, Harry Julian Fink, went on to co-create another San Fran anti-hero, Dirty Harry. The prolific creative team of writer Joe Gill and artist Jack Sparling cranked out three issues of T.H.E. Cat for Gold Key Comics in 1967, each featuring a photo cover spotlighting Loggia.

Mission: Impossible

So you’ve got a boss who doesn’t support you… things could be worse: If you were an I.M.F. agent and botched your assignment, the secretary would “disavow any knowledge of your actions.” Not that the Impossible Missions Force ever botched a job, despite nerve-wracking detours and sweat-inducing close calls, jackhammer-punctuated by Lalo Schifrin’s sizzling score.

Created by Bruce Geller (who followed M: I with the long-running P.I. show Mannix), Mission: Impossible premiered on CBS on Saturday, September 17, 1966. Its episodes’ setups are as engrained in the cultural psyche as the series’ theme: The team leader would play a tape explaining the super-secret mission at hand—quite frequently some remote Communist country whose uppity leader needed deposing before he became a global threat—with the tape then self-destructing in a puff of smoke, cuing the uber-urgent theme music. That leader—“Mr. (Daniel) Briggs” (Steven Hill) in the first season and “Mr. (Jim) Phelps” (Peter Graves) beginning with the second and enduring throughout the rest of the series’ impressive run—would assemble from the field a select group of agents with the appropriate talents to perpetrate an elaborate scheme to topple the villain of the week.

There was some give-and-take with earlier episodes, allowing for special guests to waltz through the show.

Before long, a consistent cast developed including sexy Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), super-thespian Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), electronics whiz Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and muscleman Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus); later in the show’s run, a post-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott, and Lynda Day George were among the I.M.F. operatives. Seven seasons of Mission: Impossible produced 171 episodes, a lateEighties revival, and a successful movie franchise starring Tom Cruise.

Five issues of Mission: Impossible were sporadically released by Dell Comics between 1967 and 1969, written by either the go-to master of adaptations, Paul S. Newman, or the man with the smoking typewriter, Joe Gill, with art by Jack Sparling. Dell’s Mission: Impossible had its challenges: The television series’ intricate plots were impossible to replicate in

TM & © ABC Television London.

TM & © Paramount Pictures Corp.

this kid-friendly format, and the comic relied upon the first season’s cast. Steven Hill as Daniel Briggs was cover-featured on issues #1 and 2, concurrent with his appearances on the television series. By the time issue #3 was published in September 1967, that issue quickly became dated once Peter Graves as Jim Phelps became the show’s lead. With issue #4, a half-hearted attempt was made to reflect the character change with Sparling drawing Graves as the lead character, but Gill’s script still referred to him as Briggs; confusing matters even more was the colorist, who colored Phelps’ hair brown, as he had done for Briggs, ignoring the salt-hued hair of Graves as shown on that issue’s photo cover. Dell’s Mission: Impossible #5, which finally trickled onto the stands in 1969, reprinted the Briggs-starring issue #1. The secretary has indeed disavowed the actions of poor Jim Phelps, at least in the pages of Dell’s comicbook series!

The Avengers (John Steed and Emma Peel) The Avengers, a sophisticated, sassy mix of secret agents and sci-fi, bowed on British television on January 7, 1961. The earlier episodes fiddled with growing pains until the emergence of Patrick Macnee in the lead as the unflappable John Steed, paired with a female partner—originally Bond girl Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, followed by Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel and Linda Thorson as Tara King. The Avengers would, by happenstance or assignment, encounter no end of idiosyncratic super-villains with superweapons, propelling the concept through six original seasons and 161 episodes. It was the chemistry between Macnee and Rigg that immortalized the series in the 1966–68 seasons, during which time The Avengers was imported to the U.S. (and dozens of other countries), becoming a cult favorite. Once Rigg left the series and was replaced by Linda Thorson, The Avengers faltered, surviving only one more season, ending its British and American runs in the fall of 1969. A short-lived Seventies revival followed, as did an unsuccessful movie reboot and several comic-

book revivals set in the Sixties and featuring the original cast.

In the summer of 1968, Gold Key Comics published one issue of The Avengers, cover-branded as John Steed and Emma Peel to avoid confusion with Marvel’s super-hero group, but nonetheless titled The Avengers in the indicia. Under a photo cover providing equal space to both Rigg and Macnee, the comic featured two stories comprising reconfigured Avengers comic-strip serials originally produced in the U.K. for Polystyle Publications’ TV Comic: the 14-page “The Roman Invasion,” from TV Comic #756–760, and the 12-page story “The Mirage Maker,” from TV Comic #761–766. According to the Grand Comics Database, Pat Williams drew the second story, but no other creator credits are available.

The Prisoner

The Prisoner was a psycho-drama produced in Britain and premiering on September 29, 1967, for a 17-episode run. Created by and starring former Danger Man/Secret Agent Patrick McGoohan, its mindbending premise involved a former spy—identified only as “Number Six”—held captive in the picturesque but Big Brother-regulated “Village,” populated by fellow inhabitants who may or may not be friendly.

Efforts by the Village’s puppet masters to extract secrets from the unwilling Number Six thrust the show through many surrealistic and psychedelic scenarios. The Prisoner’s themes of brainwashing and individualism (“I am not a number! I am a free man!”) imprinted many a movie and comic book in the decades to follow.

The Prisoner made its way to the U.S. as a summer-replacement series in 1968 and 1969, and among its loyal viewers was the King of Comics, Jack Kirby. Kirby paid homage to The Prisoner in Fantastic Four #84 (Mar. 1969), where the FF were trapped in Latveria and manipulated by its ruler, Dr. Doom. Kirby’s fascination with The Prisoner continued in the Seventies, when he unsuccessfully attempted to revive the concept as a Marvel comic, on the heels of another aborted Marvel Prisoner revival conceived by Marv Wolfman and started, but not finished, by Steve Englehart and Gil Kane. Dean Motter and Mark Askwith finally continued McGoohan’s concept in a 1988 DC Comics Prisoner miniseries, and since that time The Prisoner has been revived as a 2009 TV miniseries with a Marvel one-shot giveaway adaptation.

Kirby’s Prisoner fascination inspired the creepy tale in Fantastic Four #84 (Mar. 1969).

Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Tony and Doug take a chronal spin in this gorgeous painted cover

by George Wilson produced for Gold Key Comics’ Time Tunnel #2 (July 1967).

After success as a Hollywood radio producer and gossip columnist, Allen directed his first film in 1953, The Sea Around Us, an Academy Award®– winning documentary that heavily relied upon stock footage, a cost-cutting measure that would become an Allen hallmark. Several movies followed, with the emerging trend of Allen’s fascination with the world around us—and its dangers.

VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Courtesy of Heritage.

Time Tunnel TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

Dell’s Four Color #1230 (Nov. 1961) adapted Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea film.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

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IRWIN ALLEN’S FANTASTIC VOYAGES The Sci-Fi Master’s Creations on TV and in Comic Books

In the Seventies, he was dubbed “The Master of Disaster” once his star-studded blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) rocked theaters and ignited the disaster movie craze. But throughout the Sixties, he was television’s Numero Uno virtuoso of science fiction (sorry, Gene Roddenberry), the visionary behind a quartet of ensemble-cast shows that enraptured audiences with astonishing (and often campy) adventures in the depths of the ocean, the abyss of outer space, the perils of the time stream, and on a world not unlike our own (but super-sized).

His shows were known (and loved) for their pseudo-science, cheesy monsters, family dynamics, and happenin’ hot rods (in the forms of submarines and spaceships). He was Irwin Allen, showman extraordinaire, creator of Camp Age television’s fantastic four: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.

Allen produced, directed, and co-wrote the 1961 sci-fi/adventure flick Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starring former Screen Actors Guild president and unlikely action hero Walter Pidgeon as Admiral Harriman Nelson. Nelson was the film’s Jor-El, the disparaged scientist who believed he could save the world from the fiery skies which threatened to snuff out life by firing a nuclear missile from his atomic submarine, The Seaview, into the source of the threat. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea co-starred a big-name cast including Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Barbara Eden, and heartthrob Frankie Avalon, who sang the movie’s theme song (“Come with me, come with me, on a voyage to the bottom of the sea…”).

The movie earned $7 million and appeared in comicbook form in Dell’s Four Color #1230 (Nov. 1961), in a 32-page adaptation by Sam Glanzman.

Allen brought Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to television with the 1964–65 season as an hourlong adventure program airing on ABC. Many of the movie’s props, sets, and costumes were hosed off for the TV series, which was set in the near-future of the Seventies. Richard Basehart starred as Admiral Nelson, joined by David Hedison as Commander (later Captain) Lee Crane and Robert Dowdell as Lt. Commander Chip Morton, with other supporting cast members coming and going over the show’s fourseason, 110-episode run. The first season was shot in black and white and its plots vacillated between Cold War villains and Verne-ish sea creatures. The show switched to color with Season Two, introducing lots of new tech, the standout being the aerial minisub, the Flying Fish. Voyage was often a “monster of the week” show, with the Seaview crew battling aquatic beasts, aliens, dinosaurs, an evil brain, and even a werewolf.

Setting sail with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea #1 (Dec. 1964), Gold Key Comics published 16 issues of the title, many of which were written by Dick Wood. Gorgeous painted covers by George Wilson graced the book, with the exception of issue #14, which featured an outlandish line-art cover with the Seaview transforming into a sea monster. Photo insets from the show were common on the covers, often headshots of either Basehart or Hedison. After

Remco’s motorized Robot was among the many product tie-ins to Lost in Space.

issues penciled by Mike Sekowsky, George Tuska, and Don Heck, Alberto Giolitti became the Voyage artist beginning with issue #4. The comic outlived the TV show, which aired its last new episode on March 31, 1968 and made its last pre-syndication rerun telecast on September 15, 1968. Gold Key’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s final issue, #16, was cover-dated April 1970; the final two issues were reprints.

Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC.

LOST IN SPACE Irwin Allen’s next TV series was Lost in Space. While it lasted one season less than Voyage—three, from 1965–68—it’s easily the most successful of the visionary’s quartet. LIS contributed pop-culture catchphrases that endure to this day (the Robot’s “Danger, Will Robinson!” and “That does not compute!” and Dr. Smith’s “Oh, the pain…”) and enjoyed a merchandising bonanza, a comic-book continuation, a film remake, a Bill Mumy-scripted “The Epilogue” episode (produced in 2015 for the series’ fiftieth Anniversary Blu-ray edition), and a forthcoming (at this writing) Netflix reboot.

Lost in Space premiered on CBS on September 5, 1965, airing Wednesdays from 7:30–8:30 p.m.

The introductory episode whisked viewers to the future—October 16, 1997—when a family of colonists (the Robinsons), their pilot, and their robot were rocketed in the flying saucer Jupiter 2 on what was supposed to be a five-and-a-half-year expedition (much of it spent in suspended animation) to the Alpha Centauri star system. The Jupiter 2’s mission quickly went awry due to the machinations of doublecrossing Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris), a flight control member who was secretly an enemy agent.

Smith’s botched sabotage plot forced him to become a stowaway, his added weight putting the Jupiter 2 hopelessly off course. With Harris, the cast featured former TV Zorro Guy Williams as Professor John Robinson; former TV Lassie mom June Lockhart as his wife, Maureen; their children, Marta Kristen as Judy, Angela Cartwright as Penny, and Billy Mumy as Will; Mark Goddard as Major Don West, the space pilot; and Bob May as the Robot (voiced by Dick Tufeld). A short-lived character, Penny’s space pet, the chimpanzee-like Debbie, a.k.a. the Bloop, was played by Judy the Chimp, also known from her roles on Daktari and Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp.

Mirroring Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s first season, Season One of Lost in Space was shot in black and white and was darker in tone than what would follow. Seasons Two and Three relished its color with garish costumes and alien terrains, plus a growing reliance upon Camp, largely in response to its Wednesday-night competitor, ABC’s Batman, which debuted midseason in LIS’s first year. Its breakout stars were the Robot, Mumy as boy scien-

tist/action hero Will Robinson, and Harris as the flamboyant, narcissistic slacker Dr. Smith, whose bumbling and scheming became the focal point of many episodes. After Season Three wrapped, the cast assumed they would be returning for a fourth, but CBS cancelled the series, leaving the Robinsons and company forever lost in space (but its 83 episodes found in perpetual reruns). Like Voyage, it was a “monster of the week” show, with some of those monsters recycled by producer Allen from their earlier encounters at the bottom of the sea. Also like Voyage, Lost in Space featured a universe of outlandish villains, aliens, creatures, and spacecraft, plus a likeable space family—the perfect fodder for a comic book…

SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON …but unfortunately for Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space, that comic book already existed. The Space Race had every American kid’s mind on the cosmos, leading Del Connell to pitch to Western Publishing a futuristic (set in 2001) series featuring a family living on a space station, Space Station One. Eyeing the success of Disney’s 1960 movie Swiss Family Robinson, Western editor Chase Craig recommended the title Space Family Robinson for the project, the end result being Gold Key Comics’ long-running Space Family Robinson series, commencing with a first issue cover-dated December 1962 but going on sale September 13th of that year. (Editor Craig later recalled that the SFR title had earlier been proposed to him by legendary Donald Duck artist Carl Barks for an entirely different concept, and that he had subconsciously used Barks’ title for Connell’s new series.)

This 1968 issue (#27) bears the Space Family Robinson Lost in Space logo. Cover

by George Wilson.

Space Family Robinson TM & © Random House, Inc. Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC.

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RIGHT: Who knows what dangers lurk in the Time Tunnel? Gold Key’s Time Tunnel #1.

Time Tunnel TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

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To those only familiar with television’s Robinson family, Gold Key’s Space Family Robinson might seem like the Lost in Space of a parallel world. The parents weren’t John and Maureen, but instead Craig and June Robinson, whose children were son Tim and daughter Tam. Instead of the Bloop, these Robinsons’ pets came in the forms of Clancy the dog and Yakker the parrot. In issue #2 of SFR, the Robinsons were separated from their station in a story titled “Lost in Space,” and each subsequent issue chronicled their misadventures as they hopped from planet to planet.

Sound familiar?

A film treatment for Space Family Robinson was in the works while Allen was developing his own, different take on the Swiss Family Robinson-in-space concept. Once Allen’s Lost in Space hit the airwaves, Western Publishing, which struck first with its version of the Robinsons, reached a financial and legal settlement with CBS and 20th Century Fox, which was producing Lost in Space. Both Robinson concepts were allowed to coexist and Western co-opted the “Lost in Space” subtitle for its Gold Key comic, which officially became Space Family Robinson Lost in Space with issue #15 (Jan. 1966). Gaylord Du Bois had replaced Del Connell as writer beginning with issue #8. Dan Spiegle was the series’ artist throughout its run, with George Wilson providing its painted cover portraits. While Lost in Space, the television series, remained on the air until September 11, 1968, Space Family Robinson Lost in Space continued through issue #36, cover-dated October 1969. It was revived in 1973 and ran through 1977 and issue #54, then came back in 1981 for a brief stint as a reprint title, being cancelled, for good, with issue #59.

THE TIME TUNNEL Irwin Allen’s third series, the hour-long The Time Tunnel, lasted only one season, premiering on ABC on September 9, 1966 and running for 30 episodes.

Remember those Superboy stories where the timetraveling Teen of Steel would try to alter a past event, like the Lincoln assassination? The Time Tunnel’s premise was similar, with two handsome, young scientists—Tony Newman (James Darren) and Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert)—being dropped into significant moments in history, starting with a Titanic cruise in the series’ opener. Their chronal portal, the concentrically circled, pseudo-psychedelic tunnel into which they would run, was part of a U.S. government program called Project Tic-Toc, existing in the not-too-distant year of 1968. Tony and Doug were monitored from the Time Tunnel’s underground mission control, watched on time-viewing monitors by doctors in white labcoats, including Dr. Ann MacGregor, played by Lee Meriwether, which no doubt confused young viewers who had recently seen her

as Miss Kitka/Catwoman in the 1966 Batman movie.

Whit Bissell co-starred as Lt. General Heywood Kirk, who co-developed the Time Tunnel with Newman and Phillips.

Except for two episodes sending the stars to the future, Tony and Doug dropped in on the eves of such significant past events as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Custer’s Last Stand, Marie Antoinette’s execution, and the Battle of the Alamo, allowing each episode’s guest-stars to participate in costume galas (and affording Allen the opportunity to use stock footage). The audience was generally in on Tony and Doug’s impending peril—watch out for that iceberg, Titanic!—and enjoyed watching them interact with those who were often on a path to disaster. The concept, while clever, was restrictive, with the heroes tumbling in and out of stories without any satisfying resolutions. TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Armory didn’t care for the show, writing in the October 29, 1966 edition, “All in all, The Time Tunnel is one of the most annoying shows we’ve seen. There is imagination and inventiveness in the photography and gimmickry, but the acting is stilted and unbelievable, the dialog is soap-opera-ish.” When The Time Tunnel was cancelled after its single season, Tony and Doug were still lost in time.

Gold Key published two Time Tunnel issues, #1 (Feb. 1967) and 2 (July 1967), relatively faithful adaptations of the series’ premise and characters. The creative team was writer Paul S. Newman and artist Tom Gill, with painted covers by George Wilson. Each issue featured short stories of the chronal crusaders plus photo pin-ups from the television series.

LAND OF THE GIANTS Saturday morning’s King Kong was “ten times as big as a man.” He would’ve suffered from “Short Primate’s Syndrome” on Land of the Giants, as its denizens were twelve times larger than the folks back home.

Irwin Allen’s last show of the Sixties, Land of the Giants began its two-season, 51-episode run with its ABC premiere on September 22, 1968. As with his previous shows, Allen took viewers to the future—in this case, 1983—where they encountered the sleek, stylish, ready-for-merchandising Spindrift, a superspeedy, suborbital space plane zipping from L.A. to London. A cosmic storm booted the Spindrift to whoknows-where, and its crew and passengers—seven of them, just like Gilligan’s Island—crashed on a gargantuan planet where the castaways were the size of action figures. Gary Conway headed the cast as Captain Steve Burton, joined by Don Marshall as his co-pilot and Heather Young as his flight attendant. The passengers: an engineer (Don Matheson), a socialite (Deanna Lund), a kid (Stefen Arngrim) and his dog, and the sneaky Dr. Smith, I mean, Alexander Fitzhugh (Kurt Kasznar), a suspicious character whose motivations kept the others, and viewers, guessing. Typical plots involved the Lilliputian-sized castaways running from giant kids, animals, scientists, and a government agent on a mission to find them. Its stars frequently acted amid giant props, crawling over or ducking under colossal books, phones, cameras, and pencils, on a far-flung world where pushpins were deadly weapons and scotch tape was a tool of bondage.

Gold Key Comics published five issues of Land of the Giants, from issue #1 (Nov. 1968) through 5 (Sept. 1969). The uncredited creative team is thought to be writer Dick Wood and artists Ted Galindo and Tom Gill. Unlike Gold Key’s other Irwin Allen-based comic books, Land of the Giants featured photo covers, montages bordered by cast headshots. Another

Land of the Giants comic-book connection was an ad for Aurora’s model kit for the show, a terrifying portrait of tiny Earthlings wielding a safety pin to fend off a gape-mouthed rattler, that appeared on the back covers of DC comics in the late Sixties. The original image was painted by magazine and book cover artist Harry Schaare, produced for Aurora’s box art and for its sculptor’s inspiration, and also used as an ABC promo poster. Murphy Anderson reinterpreted Schaare’s painting for the comic-book ad.

Photo covers for Gold Key’s Land of the Giants #1 and 5 (note the Spindrift on #5’s cover).

Land of the Giants TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

THE IRWIN ALLEN LEGACY Allegations of plagiarism against Irwin Allen have surfaced over the years, particularly over the Space Family Robinson/Lost in Space matter (this was even the subject of a book published at the time the Lost in Space movie was in production in the Nineties).

Yes, each of Allen’s four Sixties TV shows were inspired by other material—in addition to LIS being Swiss Family Robinson in space, Voyage was Jason and the Argonauts in a sub, Time Tunnel had several forerunners, and Giants borrowed from The Incredible Shrinking Man. But what made each of them unique was their presentation, bigger-than-life razzledazzle packed with human drama that no one could deliver quite like Irwin.

Continuing interest in Irwin Allen’s fantastic four has included series collections on DVD and Blu-ray, numerous books and publications going behind the scenes of the shows, and deluxe collected editions of their comic-book series (including Space Family Robinson). What keeps the Allen factory running, decades after his 1991 death? As Angela Cartwright reflected in the September 15, 2015 Variety, Allen “knew how to bring excitement every week into peoples’ homes, while also giving them something to think about.”

LEFT: ViewMaster® reels, the Sixties’ version of TVon-demand, presented scenes from Irwin Allen’s fantastic four—in 3-D. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants TM & © Irwin Allen Properties, LLC/20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC. View-Master® TM & © Mattel.

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WILL ROBINSON, TV’S OTHER BOY WONDER

An Interview with Bill Mumy The Sixties offered no shortage of boy and teen heroes to look up to, from the globetrotting Jonny Quest, to the high-flying Superboy, to Robin and Jimmy Olsen, the best buds of Batman and Superman. But really, was

space family blasted off in the Jupiter 2 he had already logged years of screen time as an actor. In the half-century-plus since Lost in Space’s September 5, 1965 debut, Mumy has scored successes in virtually every imaginable spectrum of the entertainment business—in addition to his galaxy of work in front of the camera, he’s an accomplished musician, songwriter, voice actor, narrator, author, producer—even a comic-book scribe (including his co-creations The Comet Man, Dreamwalker, and Trypto the Acid Dog). Whether you know him as The Twilight Zone’s Anthony Fremont, the kid in the Dick Tracy Water-Power Jet Gun commercial, young Darrin Stevens, Babylon 5’s Lennier, or the narrator of A&E’s Biography, for those who grew up during the Camp Age, Bill Mumy will forever be TV’s other Boy Wonder, Will Robinson.

Interview conducted in February and March 2016.

Bill Mumy as Will Robinson, by and courtesy of artist Mike Hoffman.

Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC.

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there a kid hero more happening than Will Robinson? Sure, he may have been lost in space, but Will played guitar, had a groovy wardrobe and two hot sisters, feared no giant Cyclops, and palled around with not one but two sidekicks (a robot and a crabby but lovable man-child). Plus, Will was the smartest guy in the room.

While Bill (then Billy) Mumy may have been just a hair older than many of the children watching him each week on Lost in Space, by the time he and his

Before I ask questions of Bill Mumy, the adult creative artist, can we channel Billy Mumy, the child actor, for a moment? Tell me how you, as a kid, felt the day you first saw the elaborate Jupiter 2 set for Lost in Space.

I hate to disappoint people when they expect me to have reacted like I was really feeling like I was seeing a legit spaceship, or a real robot, etc., when I was a kid. But the truth is, I’d been on sets and locations and around lots of props and in all kinds of wardrobe for half my life by the time we started Lost in Space. I was a seasoned pro by then. The LIS sets were truly impressive… but remember, they were spread out over two separate soundstages on the 20th Century Fox

lot. The upper deck was on one stage, the lower on another… we had swing sets that connected and disconnected… no ceilings… big lights, cameras, and cranes and cables and crew always everywhere. I LOVED the look of the show. But I never got caught up in the feeling that it was anything other than just cool sets and props and acting.

Although you had been acting for several years and were quite experienced, Lost in Space was your first hit…

Well, I’d been in a ton of “hits” before LIS. Three Twilight Zones, three Hitchcocks [Alfred Hitchcock Presents], two Loretta Young Shows, the hit Westerns of the day, several major studio feature films, Disney films, etc.

We were all proud of the success Lost in Space achieved and we all paid attention to the ratings every week, but I don’t think we ever felt like we were a big hit at the time. Successful, yes. But, we certainly were no Bonanza.

Let me rephrase that—Lost in Space was the first show you started on from day one, and there was a lot of LIS merchandising, with your likeness on trading cards and toys and such. How did you, as a kid, process that fame?

The merchandise was very cool, and I used to go up to Irwin Allen’s office often and he’d allow me to take “one” of the current LIS merchandise stuff he had laying around. I dug it, but it never felt like much of a big deal to me at the time. I enjoyed being part of the Aurora Model kit… None of my real friends ever treated me special or acted like they were impressed by what I was doing when I wasn’t tossing a Frisbee around with them. Basically, I left my work at work and then became a normal kid. I didn’t think about processing fame.

Is it true that you were the first choice to play Eddie Munster?

Yes.

Ever have any regrets that that didn’t work out?

None. Not for a nanosecond.

Butch [Patrick] did a great job.

It didn’t work out because we didn’t want to do it. I did guest star on an episode of The Munsters, though.

How were you chosen for the role of Will Robinson?

It was offered to me. And I was totally 100% into it.

How involved were your parents with your career during your early years in the business?

My mom always went with me to work everyday. If I was on location doing a Western, sometimes my dad would come ’cuz he was a cattle rancher. My father invested my money wisely for me.

My mother never let me get a big head or anything like that. It was my own young energy that wanted to get inside the TV set, and I hounded them to make that happen. They supported my young ambition and they supported my talents and passions.

I’d have to say it worked out well. They did the best they could. But they never pushed me to do a show or do something I didn’t want to do. In fact, I remember a few times when we had planned small family vacations and then I was offered a show like a Dr. Kildare or something that conflicted with the family plans, and they just passed on the gig so we could go to Catalina or something.

When did you discover comic books?

Hmmm… Probably at the age of five. 1959. Off the rack at Super Drugs in Beverlywood. But I had been totally into The Adventures of Superman on TV since I was born, basically.

Back then, what were your favorite comics, and who were your favorite comic-book artists?

That was pre-Marvel… I guess, all the Superman and Batman

books were my favorites. Action, Superman, Batman, Detective, World’s Finest, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Adventure Comics… I liked The Flash a lot.

Artists that resonated the most with me back then were Wayne Boring and Curt Swan. Infantino’s Flash, Shelly Moldoff’s Batman stuff…

When Marvel first hit, I, of course, became a HUGE Kirby and Ditko fan. I bought ALL the books every week.

hood, and I’m not alone. How active a presence was he on the Lost in Space set? What was his personality?

Irwin was impressive.

Part Barnum and Bailey, part Cecil B. DeMille. He came on the set every day. Tapped his watch. “Time is money.” He assembled great teams. He was a big success. He liked his shows. He was a big kid, into fantasy and sci-fi concepts. He demanded control and respect.

His original vision for LIS was full of adventure, danger, dark, scary alien environments, creatures… He did a fantastic job directing our pilot. I really wish he’d directed more. I was always comfortable with him.

Gold Key’s Space Family Robinson co-opted Lost in Space as its subtitle because of your show, but the comic stayed on its course with its own Robinsons. To your knowledge, though, was there ever any consideration given to doing a TV adaptation comic book of Lost in Space while your show was in production?

No. Since Gold Key was publishing the Space Family Robinson Lost in Space comic back then, that rendered it moot.

During the show’s three seasons, did you have many interactions with fans?

I did lots of promotion for the show—parades, TV shows, radio shows, telethons, lots of personal appearances… I got tons of fan mail, but most of that was handled by other people. Once in awhile I read it and wrote some people back, but between working nine hours a day and having a “normal” life, practicing guitar, and goofing off with my friends, I didn’t deal with fan mail very much… there wasn’t enough time. Of course, I signed a ton of autographs and shook hands with thousands of fans… I experienced crowds chasing me and people getting excited if they spotted me once in awhile… but interactions? I didn’t take any of them home with me, if that’s what you mean. [laughter]

That’s too bad. The photo covers of a Lost in Space TV tie-in comic would have been cool.

Let’s talk about Irwin Allen, the creator of Lost in Space.

His world of imagination made a huge impact upon my child-

Other than brighter costuming, did the series’ switch to color with the second season affect you and the rest of the cast?

It didn’t. We just hit our marks and read our lines. Life is in color.

It was always color to me. (We

Did you ever read Gold Key Comics’ Space Family Robinson?

At the time? Nope. Once, maybe.

Didn’t dig it at all. I wasn’t into the Gold Key titles—Magnus, Solar, etc. But I liked what Jim Shooter did with them at Valiant thirty years later.

Bill Mumy.

2013 photo by Gage Skidmore.

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were always in velours right from the beginning, when we weren’t in the heavy hot silver spacesuits.) But I absolutely love the look of the early LIS blackand-white episodes. They are by far my favorites.

THIS PAGE: Lost in Space merchandise included trading cards, a lunchbox, and Aurora model kits.

Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC.

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There’s a famous photograph of Will Robinson shaking hands with Robin, the Boy Wonder. Tell me about that day.

Was that the first time you’d met Burt Ward?

Yeah. They had just started filming the Batman series and they were shooting close to us. I thought his costume looked great and I just said “Hi.” Angela [Cartwright, Penny Robinson] was with me. There’s a pic of the three of us, too. Burt hadn’t done much at that point and he was enthusiastic. It was just a moment that a studio photographer caught. It wasn’t a big, set-up publicity thing.

When Batman premiered, kids like me had a dilemma on Wednesday nights: What would we watch at 7:30, Batman or Lost in Space? Did you suc-

cumb to Batmania like so many other kids?

Not really. I had loved the comicbook characters since before I could really read. I thought the series made everything seem stupid and silly. Their villains were all fools to me. Changing clothes on a Batpole? Ridiculous. I wanted to believe in Batman and Robin fighting crime in Gotham City, and the TV show didn’t make me feel that way at all. But I watched it on Thursdays anyway. I didn’t dig the campy style at the time, though. Decades later, I grew to appreciate it for what it was. Adam [West] was always very nice. Yvonne [Craig] was sweet. The Batmobile was bitchin’, and I sat in it many times.

[Since] Batman was on opposite Lost in Space Wednesday nights, it was our direct competition. It became a huge hit for awhile. We were threatened by it in a way. I think it influenced the campy tone and direction we shifted to. But, as I reminded Bob Kane one night, Lost in Space was on first and we were still on after Batman was cancelled and gone. I liked the Green Hornet show much, much more. Bruce Lee and I were friendly when they were shooting the series. He was truly an exceptional human.

What other pop culture of the Sixties influenced you?

All of it. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Dylan, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Stones, Mission: Impossible, Bewitched, I Spy,

Marvel comics, the Bond books and films… It’s an endless list.

The most invisible member of the Lost in Space cast was the man inside the Robot, Bob May. Tell me about him—his personality, what type of person he was to work with.

Bobby was the hardest-working guy in showbiz. He never complained. He actually enjoyed being locked inside that dangerous, claustrophobic prop. He memorized and delivered all the Robot’s dialogue, even though it was re-recorded by Dick Tufeld in post-production. He discovered ways to give the Robot more personality through movements.

He never said a bad word about anyone. He was turbo-enthusiastic. He loved his job. Bobby was a dedicated family man.

Is it true that Bob would take smoke breaks inside the Robot suit?

Yes. I understand that the cancellation of Lost in Space came as a surprise to you. What do you remember about the day the news hit?

We had all been told we were coming back for a fourth season, so when we wrapped up the third, there was no closure, no goodbyes, just, “Seeya in a couple months!” When we officially were informed the series was cancelled, it hit hard. I cried.

If the show had continued into its fourth season, and maybe beyond, do you think the Robinsons would have found their way home?

Could have gone a thousand different ways. If you want MY resolution to the series, watch the cast performance of my script, “The Epilogue,” which was filmed last year [2015] and is included as a special feature-length bonus bit on the Blu-ray collection.

Kevin Burns does an amazing Dr. Smith.

Your TV dad Guy Williams was the first cast member to pass away, in 1989. While he was alive, was there ever any talk of a reunion movie or series?

Only talk that originated from me regarding filming “The Epilogue.”

Obviously, it didn’t happen back then. I took it as far as I could, and Irwin Allen decided he didn’t want to go back to his television projects at that time.

You got the chance to explore the further adventures of the Robinsons in the early Nineties by writing several issues of In-

novation’s Lost in Space comicbook series. Did you help bring that spin-off comic to life?

Long story. I didn’t have anything to do with Innovation getting the rights to the comic book. I was asked by Dave Campiti, the publisher, at the San Diego ComicCon, if I wanted to come onboard and join the project as a character- and story editor. I quickly became the main writer of the series. Eighteen issues were published before Innovation closed shop.

What’s the story behind the book you co-produced with Angela Cartwright, Lost (and Found) in Space?

It was a true labor of love and people are absolutely loving it.

It’s 200 pages of rare and neverbefore-seen photographs of behind-the-scenes shots, and it’s filled with true anecdotes and memories that Angela and I have written about our years working on the series. I think it came out great. It’s published by TV Classic Press, a division of Micro Publishing Media, INC, and can

be ordered from www.lostandfoundinspace.com.

In 2015, you celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Lost in Space, and in one way or another the show refuses to fade way. What is it about Lost in Space that has maintained the public’s interest for so long?

The endless potential of adventure… to encounter anything you can imagine while exploring unknown deep space…the family values the Robinsons exhibited… the mix of humor and danger that Dr. Smith brought to it… the fantastic sets, props, and practical effects… the campy pop art fantasy episodes that capture the mid-Sixties energy so uniquely… the music by John Williams certainly endures… I don’t know.

The Bloop, I guess. [laughter]

ABOVE: Innovation’s first issue of its Lost in Space comic book. LEFT: Cartright and Mumy’s wonderful Lost (and Found) in Space book.

Lost in Space® TM & © Legend Pictures, LLC.

Special thanks to Bob Schreck and Deborah Herman.

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A 1966 poster of the Dynamic Duo from the animated opening credits to the Batman TV show.

Courtesy of Heritage. © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

AMERICA GOES BATTY

The Batman TV Show

RIGHT: Camp-fests showing the 1943 Batman movie serial became a 1965 art-house fad.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

It’s a classic Hollywood success story: a television producer, desperate for reading material for an airline flight, chances across an issue of Batman (issue #171, with the Riddler) and—Holy Brainstorm!—an idea lightbulb flashes over his head and he realizes that the Caped Crusader can be TV’s Next Big Thing.

This is a tale that has been told repeatedly by well-intentioned journalists, comics historians, artists, and by Batman editor Julius Schwartz in his autobiography. It’s certainly a crowd-pleaser. Too bad it isn’t true.

Actually, there is an element of truth therein: the producer, William Dozier, was reading Batman comics on an airplane. But instead of a lightbulb, a dark cloud of embarrassment loomed over his head: “I felt a little bit like an idiot,” Dozier confessed in 1986 in The Official Batman Batbook.

So how, then, did Batman, the comic book that only recently had been spared the axe, become Batman, the programming and cultural phenomenon?

It all started, according to one account, when a television executive spent an evening with Batman and Robin.

THE FIRST “ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” “Made in 1943… discovered in 1965! Columbia Pictures presents An Evening with Batman and Robin. The greatest serial ever filmed… now the IN-tertainment scoop of the year!”

That’s how Columbia Pictures touted its rerelease of the 1943 movie serial Batman; its fifteen chapters were edited into a single motion picture 182

and retitled An Evening with Batman and Robin.

Starring the plump Lewis Wilson and gawky Douglas Croft as the Masked Manhunter and Boy Wonder, this black-and-white low-budget romp was replete with ridiculously broad performances, a scenerychewing Japanese villain named Dr. Daka, spinetingling narration, and cliffhanger action. What passed for escapism to World War II-era audiences was perceived as the “in” thing by the trendy sophisticates of the swinging Sixties. In the twenty art houses where An Evening with Batman and Robin was booked, it was greeted with chuckles and guffaws, plus cheers for the heroes and hisses for the villains, the same type of rambunctious audience interaction that later became popular with midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A version of Batman’s television genesis places Yale Udoff, at the time ABC-TV’s director of late night programming, at a screening of An Evening with Batman and Robin at Chicago’s Playboy Club, where he allegedly took note of the crowd’s response to the characters he had read in comic books as a child. (A variation on this story sets it at Hugh Hefner’s Chicago Playboy Mansion, with both Udoff and Batman creator Bob Kane among Hef’s guests for a Batman showing.) It’s unlikely that director Lambert Hillyer intended his 1943 Batman to be anything short of “serious” thrills, but his retread serial proved that the dashing Dynamic Duo were good at getting laughs in 1965. While Udoff was connected, at least peripherally, with Batman’s development at ABC, his attendance at a Playboy showing of this serial is apparently another urban legend that has evolved from a distortion of the facts.

It had only been a year since a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag had popularized the term “Camp.”

William Dozier guarding the Batcave.

Real-world unpleasantries had shellshocked Americans salivating for such unrestrained escapism: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were anointed the patron saints of the art world, cartoonist Jules Feiffer was venerating early super-hero comic books, and television was becoming the stomping grounds for nonsensical, high-concept programs featuring such unorthodox characters as mountaineers in Hollywood (The Beverly Hillbillies) and a magic housewife (Bewitched). What a perfect time to pack up a pair of super-heroes and ship them off to Camp!

William Dozier Papers, American Heritage Center.

NUMBER THREE AT BAT During the mid-Sixties, ABC was television’s thirdrated network—dead last, since in those days there were only three majors on the tube. Its programming department, led by director of West Coast development Harve Bennett (also known for executive-producing The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) got the notion in January of 1965 that a cartoon might be perfect for a 7:30 p.m. halfhour show, which was then prime time’s lead-in slot, a time period dominated by children viewers.

“They had a research outfit question people in supermarkets, churches, schools, and so on, about which shows they would rather see on television,” William Dozier recalled to Joel Eisner in The Official Batman Batbook. And per the public’s decree, according to Dozier, the top-five Ready for Prime Time characters were: Superman, Dick Tracy, Batman, the Green Hornet, and Little Orphan Annie. (Dozier’s memory might have been faulty here, since in 1965 the Green Hornet had been out of the public eye for some time.) If Superman was indeed considered by ABC, at the time the Man of Steel’s rights were fortressed due to the Broadway musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman. It has also been reported that Dick Tracy was Harve Bennett’s recommendation; nevertheless, Dick Tracy became untouchable once NBC outbid ABC for creator Chester Gould’s comic-strip flatfoot (for a show that was never produced).

It is at this point that Yale Udoff entered the story. Udoff was indeed a Batman booster, even admitting in the February 1994 edition of Cinefantastique Magazine, “because I have these very distinct, Russian cheekbones, people used to call me the Joker.”

Edgar Sherick, ABC’s programming chief at the network’s New York office, initially thought Udoff was joking with he lobbied for a Batman show. “We threw him out of the office,” said Sherick to Cinefantastique, but Udoff’s persistence caused Sherick to reconsider. Douglas Cramer, then-assistant to Sherick and later executive producer of the network’s Wonder Woman, was an aficionado of pop art and realized that Batman would translate well to color television.

ABC’s board of directors took some convincing, but

out of respect for the players involved got behind the development of a Batman show. So Batman, the number-three character on the researchers’ list, was picked by TV’s number-three network not because of an airport newsstand discovery, but because of a grassroots support campaign.

FROM GOTHAM TO HOLLYWOOD ABC obtained the Batman rights from National Periodical Publications and Cramer contracted 20th Century Fox to produce Batman. As William Dozier revealed in 1966 on the Canadian TV news program Telescope, hosted by Fletcher Markle, he was invited out to lunch by Cramer, who offered him the opportunity to oversee Batman. Dozier was flummoxed.

“Batman was simply not in my ken,” the longtime programming vet remarked to TV Guide in 1966. “I have always been associated with loftier projects.”

(Prior to Greenway Productions, Dozier’s Fox–based production company formed in 1964, Dozier was the vice president of Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems television division from 1959 to 1964. Under his watch, Screen Gems produced two “lofty” comics–inspired family sitcoms, Dennis the Menace and Hazel, as well as television classics The Donna Reed Show, Gunsmoke, and Bewitched. Previously, Dozier had been executive producer of dramatic programs at CBS, head of production at RKO, and head of Paramount’s writing and story department. He began his career as a literary agent—as did Batman editor Julie Schwartz.)

“Moreover, ABC had bought the concept without any idea what to do with it,” Dozier continued to TV 183

Lorenzo Semple, Jr. was Dozier’s choice to bring a campy Caped Crusader to life in this Batman series pilot script.

Courtesy of Heritage. © Greenway Productions/ 20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

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Guide. As reference, Dozier “bought a dozen comic books and felt like a fool doing it.” On Telescope, Dozier elaborated, revealing that he purchased a mixture of current and vintage Batman comics, commenting that “it took a bit of doing to get some of the older ones. They cost three or four dollars apiece.”

It is here that the airplane story originated. While traveling cross-country for a Batman meeting, Dozier was spotted with a lapful of Batman comics by a television colleague on that same flight who cracked, “I guess those scripts do get a little dull after a while.”

The mortified producer’s lips were sealed by a confidentiality agreement and he couldn’t reveal to his friend why he had those comics in his possession.

“After a day or so,” as he told Telescope’s Markle, the producer got the idea—Holy Brainstorm!, this time for real—that the right way to translate Batman’s surreality to broadcasting’s reality was by “overdoing” it, making it “so corny and so bad that it would be funny.”

To achieve Batman’s offbeat balance of adventure and humor, Dozier needed a writer with what he called “a short-circuited mind.” He flew to Madrid, Spain, to meet with the “very erudite writer” Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who was working on a project there.

(Earlier, Dozier and Semple had concocted an unsuccessful Charlie Chan pilot called Number One Son.) Semple at least once also stated that it was his idea to play Batman as Camp. The writer said in 1989 in the magazine Filmfax that Dozier “told me rather shamefacedly that they’d given him some character he knew nothing about called Batman.

I had read Batman as a kid and the minute he told me I knew it couldn’t fail. We decided to try and make it funny by seeming to take ourselves and the show seriously. It’s difficult to do because the minute the show looks as though it’s aware of being funny you’ve slipped into a tedious kind of farce.” In 1994, Semple remarked to Cinefantastique that “not a comma was changed” in his Batman pilot script, and that Dozier presented his script, not the idea for a campy Batman, to ABC. Semple—whose later projects included his screenplays for the big-budget movies Papillon (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), King Kong (1976), and Flash Gordon (1980)—was not Dozier’s original choice as the Batman pilot writer. At the urging of William Self, Fox’s head of television production, Dozier first offered the pilot to spy novelist and mystery TV show writer Eric Ambler, who declined.

This suggests that Dozier’s original conception of Batman might have been as a more serious show, and that Semple may indeed have been fundamental in the Batman-as-Camp idea. No matter who first

thought of this over-the-top take for Batman, making Batman campy was the “in” idea.

ADAM AND BURT’S BIG ADVENTURE The animated cartoon first requested by Bennett was now, in Dozier’s mind, to be a campy live-action show. When Dozier informed his associate producer Charles FitzSimmons that Batman would star live actors, FitzSimmons “got goose bumps,” as he told Cinefantastique, and thought it was “a fantastic idea!”

The first Batman role cast was a character that Julie Schwartz had recently killed off in the comics: Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, whom Dozier felt was necessary to the show. As a result, Dozier strongarmed DC Comics into returning Alfred to the comics so that both versions of Batman would be compatible.

Dozier’s associate producer, Charles FitzSimmons, was fundamental in the hiring of British thespian Alan Napier as Alfred, having previously worked with Napier’s agent; Dozier described Napier as “the absolute essence of the perfect English manservant or butler.”

(Batfans who fondly remember Ace the Bat-Hound should take note that Napier frequently brought his miniature dog Tippy to the Batman set. Tippy wasn’t alone—Dozier’s poodle McElroy was also a frequent set visitor.)

Rounding out the supporting cast: Madge Blake as Aunt Harriet (created for the comics by Julie Schwartz to counter Dr. Frederic Wertham’s allegation that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson personified an idyllic gay lifestyle, despite Dozier’s claim that she was an invention of the TV show), Neil Hamilton as Commissioner Gordon, and Stafford Repp as the made-for-TV Chief O’Hara. Another “character,” the Batmobile, was commissioned from top Hollywood car customizer George Barris. And, of course, the roles of Batman/Bruce Wayne and Robin/Dick Grayson went to Billy Anderson West and Bert John Gervis, Jr. West, better known by his stage name of Adam West, was a “working actor” in 1965, with a string of TV guest-shots (Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, Hawaiian Eye, Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip), movies (1963’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars and the Three Stooges vehicle The Outlaws is Coming), and a co-starring role opposite Robert Taylor on the weekly dramatic series The Detectives under what soon would be his utility belt. Dozier was unaware of that body of work at the time of casting Batman; he had only seen West on screen once, as Captain Q, a Bond send-up from a series of Nestle’s Quik commercials. (West winked to the readers of the 1997 Adam West Remembers Batman magazine, “Interestingly, after Batman, Bond producer Cubby Broccoli offered me the Bond role, but I wasn’t comfortable that the public would accept

program. This Batcave was quickly cobbled together for the screentest by using prop pieces from other programs, including Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The actors wore prototype costumes; the Robin suit was close to the version Ward would soon immortalize, while the Batman costume was not the familiar one made famous by West on the series, but a guise that harkened back to the Batman movie serials of the 1940s, with pointy cowl ears and no yellow oval around the Bat-insignia. A relatively subdued production when compared to the farce that would soon evolve, the screentest verified Dozier’s casting selections, and Batman was officially a go(-go)!

THE MEN WHO WOULD BE BATMAN that part played by a non-British actor.”) While it has been widely reported that it was West’s 007 spoof that earned him the Batman role, Dozier told a different story on TV’s Telescope in 1966, saying that West was recommended to him by the agent of Ty Hardin, the producer’s first choice to play the Caped Crusader, who was unavailable due to another commitment. Once West was invited to audition for Batman, “My reaction was Echh!” the actor told The Saturday Evening Post in 1966. At the time he was striving for a serious career and had no interest in such a potentially typecasting project. But at the encouragement of his agent, Lew Scherell, Adam West ultimately heeded the call.

One-time child skating star Jervis, nicknamed “Sparky,” was just shy of his twentieth birthday when he auditioned for the part of Robin, the Boy Wonder.

His martial-arts training worked in his favor, but it was his ebullience that persuaded Dozier that Jervis was “what we really imagine Robin to be,” as the actor was told. Jervis took the stage name “Burt Ward,” Ward being his mother’s maiden name as well as a nod to Dick Grayson being Bruce Wayne’s ward, and “Burt” being a more cinematic spelling, as in Burt Lancaster. Nearly destitute at the time, Ward, a parttime realtor with no real acting experience, had the Robin role for over a month but didn’t know it—his agent and the studio each assumed the other had informed him that he had been chosen.

West and Ward acted together in late summer 1965 in a Batman screentest. Its script, an excerpt from an earlier draft of Semple’s Batman series’ pilot, featured two sets: Bruce Wayne’s study in Wayne Manor, and the Batcave, an eerily lit, rather creepy command post, certainly not the kaleidoscopic subterranean funhouse that ultimately appeared on the

LEFT & BELOW: Adam West as Batman was no stranger to magazine covers once Batmania hit, and numerous articles took viewers behind the scenes of television’s newest smash. © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics. TV Guide TM & © CBS Interactive. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

If the Bat-stars in the Hollywood heavens had aligned themselves differently, viewers might have experienced OOF!s and WHAM!s with not one but three other men in Batman’s tights.

Lyle Waggoner—best known to TV viewers as the suave ladies’ man in the ensemble cast of The Carol Burnett Show and as steely Steve Trevor to leggy Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman—was also considered by William Dozier to play Bruce Wayne and Batman. Waggoner went as far as to screentest for the dual role, opposite Peter Deyell as Dick Grayson and Robin. Dozier said in several interviews that West was his choice for the role, but Waggoner was

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The suit worn by actor Frank Gorshin from his opening Riddler scene in the January 1966 Batman pilot episode.

Courtesy of Heritage. © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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tested to give the network an option (or the illusion of such).

A snippet of Waggoner’s test footage was aired on the 2003 TV movie Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt. Both Dynamic Duos screentested with the same script, on the same sets, and in the same costumes.

Waggoner’s Wayne was rather cosmopolitan, his delivery more emotional than West’s. This might have been the deciding factor that tilted the scales against him, since West’s poker-faced delivery was a crucial component in the show’s campiness. When wearing the Batman costume, however, Waggoner looked and even sounded very much like Adam West.

Deyell—a Tinseltown jack-of-all-trades, having worked as an actor (in Mr. Novak in the Sixties and the daytime soap Santa Barbara in the Eighties), makeup artist (Planet of the Apes and Ice Station Zebra are on his résumé), assistant director, producer, and screenwriter—certainly looked the part of tidy teen Dick Grayson and his Boy Wonder alter ego. His voice, however, was ingratiatingly high-pitched, and he lacked the zeal for which Burt Ward was famous.

Also missing was chemistry between Waggoner and Deyell. (Perhaps this is why Deyell went unmentioned

by Dozier and FitzSimmons in interviews that discussed Waggoner’s test.) By comparison, West and Ward worked more in tandem as a Dynamic Duo, and Dozier was wise in his casting choice.

Ty Hardin was the actor Dozier originally had in mind for Batman. The chisel-featured Hardin’s career exploded in 1958—he appeared in four films released that year, including the schlocky sci-fi favorites The Space Children and I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and was cast as TV cowboy Bronco Layne on the weekly series Bronco, which ran for 68 episodes through 1962. Hardin’s Bronco Layne was actually a spinoff of the series Cheyenne; when Cheyenne star Clint Walker temporarily walked from the show in a salary dispute, Hardin stepped in as a different character, Bronco, and was awarded his own series once Walker was placated and returned. (Hardin also guest-starred as Bronco Layne on episodes of the TV Westerns Maverick and Sugarfoot.) After the Bronco series wrapped, Hardin acted in a few high-profile military movies including PT 109 (1963) and Battle of the Bulge (1965), but continued to play cowboy roles in spaghetti Westerns filmed in Europe. He was busy on such a shoot when approached about Batman, and was unavailable for the series.

While fate didn’t allow Hardin to play the Caped Crusader, the actor did appear on

comic-book photo covers as Bronco Layne, for Dell Comics’ Cheyenne title.

William Dozier had also considered former L.A. Rams linebacker Mike Henry to play a more serious version of Batman before the producer hit upon the Camp idea; at the time, Henry was the Tarzan of the movies. It has been said that Henry was under consideration by Dozier to play the Caped Crusader in what became the 1966 Batman theatrical movie, the idea for which came about prior to the television show. Adam West enjoys telling the tale of how Dozier kept West’s ego in check during Batman’s heyday by reminding him that there had been thirteen Tarzans, or that “Tarzan No. 13” was waiting in the wings to replace him.

There is another story linking Mike Henry to Batman. In the early Sixties, Ed Graham Productions had reportedly optioned Batman to develop as a liveaction adventure series, allegedly with Mike Henry starring in the role. This would have aired on CBSTV on Saturday mornings, but plans for the series fizzled.

THE RIDDLER: LIBERATED FROM LIMBO It is widely assumed that one of the comics Dozier read on his legendary flight was Batman #171 (May 1965). Since that issue went on sale the first week of March in 1965, the same time ABC-TV was executing its Batman plans, this is indeed possible.

Making it probable is its use of the comic book’s lead story, Gardner Fox’s “Remarkable Ruse of the Riddler!,” as the spine of what Lorenzo Semple, Jr. scripted as the Batman pilot, the twopart “Hi Diddle Diddle” and “Smack in the Middle.” Batman #171’s kitschy Carmine Infantino/Murphy Anderson cover shows the Riddler—previously one of writer Bill Finger’s more obscure Batman villains, with only two prior appearances, in 1948—laughing insanely, spinning back and forth like a punching bag, unharmed, between Batman and Robin’s fists.

“What lunacy!,” Dozier must have thought.

He tapped impressionist Frank Gorshin to portray the Riddler. Gorshin was a familiar face to TV viewers of the day, having meandered through guest-appearances galore (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Untouchables, Combat!). He also found no shortage of work as a character actor in a diverse range of films including Hot Rod Girl (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), Studs Lonigan (1960), and That Darn Cat! (1965). After

reading Semple’s wacked-out screenplay, Gorshin’s reaction was, as he told TV Guide in 2000, “This is never going to work. So I’ll do it!”

After a number of script revisions, shooting for the two-part Batman pilot began on October 20, 1965, under the direction of Robert Butler; the shoot lasted 21 days, three days over the scheduled 18.

As the Riddler, the lean and uncontrollably manic Gorshin cackled an infectious but chilling laugh he developed at Hollywood parties. Juxtaposed against Batman, delightfully played by West as the squarest of squares, Gorshin’s Riddler seemed all the more dangerous, like a powder keg just waiting to go BOOM! “I’d always felt that, of all the villains, Frank’s Riddler was the most ‘villainous’,” West revealed in the Winter 1997 publication Adam West Remembers Batman. “I always sensed in Frank’s characterization that, while the other bad guys were more interested in taunting Batman, Riddler was the only one who might actually get violent—he was living dangerously close to the edge.”

The pilot tested poorly to audiences, who were expecting a traditional adventure show and didn’t understand its humor. ABC added a laugh track and played Batman for a different test audience, with similar results. There was panic growing among ABC executives that this extremely costly show might flop, but those attached had faith in the program and persevered.

BRINGING THE COMICS TO LIFE From numerous Batman and Detective Comics issues, old and current, Greenway Productions lifted villains, several plots, and an element particular to the comic-book language: “hand-drawn” sound effects.

Batman’s fight scenes glorified their sound effects with pop-art graphics flashing across the screen, tightly orchestrated POW!s, ZAP!s, and CRUNCH!es punctuated by the brass bleats of Nelson Riddle’s soundtrack. (Those sound effects were often plastered over Batman and Robin doubles Hubie Kerns and Victor Paul, the stars’ stand-ins during the action sequences. It should be noted that the thick-waisted Kerns gave birth to another fable attached to the show: that Adam West had a “spare tire.” West was fighting trim during Batman, but the Paunchy Powerhouse spotted by viewers was actually his double, Kerns.) Tilted or “dutch” angles, a throwback to the film work of Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale, were used for the villains’ scenes to convey, according to Adam West, that “criminals’ minds are ‘distorted’.” This technique also gave many shots a comic-book perspective.

Neal Hefti composed the surf tune Batman theme, whose lyrics contained one word—

“Batman”—repeated over and over. Dozier used to joke that he wanted to give the composer the credit “Word and music by Neal Hefti.” The animated intro to the show clearly established Batman’s comics roots, and depicted a cluster of criminals (mostly generic thugs, but including the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, and one comics villain not seen on the show, Clayface) crushing toward the Dynamic Duo, only to be BAM!ed and ZOWIE!ed away.

The giant props that peppered many of Batman’s Golden Age adventures were perfect for exploitation on television, as were the elaborate deathtraps which had become a frequent feature in the Bond-era Schwartz-edited Batman books. Art director Serge Krizman, with illustrator Leslie Thomas, ran amok with an eye-popping palette in their set designs.

Color was also the key for costume designer Jan Kemp, who had the challenge of making hand-drawn fictional clothing into hand-sewn functional clothing.

Most of the TV costumes closely mirrored their comics counterparts, down to the accessories (like the Penguin’s trick umbrellas), but Catwoman’s obsolete green-and-purple Golden Age dress and cowl were out, and a slinky black catsuit was in. Ed Graves was the set designer who brought the Batcave to life as a fifty-plus-foot stage that included a turntable for the Batmobile. After developing the pilot, Dozier became Batman’s executive producer, bringing on 77 Sunset Strip’s Howie Horwitz to produce Batman. Around the set, day-to-day bossman Horwitz was nicknamed “Batleader”; similarly, chief writer Lorenzo Semple became “Bat Bard,” while all hailed to the “Super Bat Chief” Dozier.

Batman was at first planned as a one-hour show.

ABC opted to take it full circle to the source material

Batman’s official soundtrack album contained Nelson Riddle-conducted music from the show interspersed with audio clips from early episodes. © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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The fanzine Batmania got its start in 1964, just as DC editor Julius Schwartz was reinvigorating the Batman comics with a “New Look.”

Two years later, some Batmaniacs used the ’zine as a forum to rant about their dislike of the campy TV show.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

RIGHT: Holy Hot-Line, Batman! The TV show gets a plug on the cover to DC’s Batman #183 (Aug. 1966).

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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for An Evening with Batman and Robin—the multi-chaptered movie serials, known for their cliffhanger endings designed to lure audiences back into the theaters the following week. Batman was transformed into two half-hour programs per week, shown on back-to-back nights (Wednesday and Thursday), the first part’s cliffhanger leading in to the second part’s conclusion.

(The ABC network had a track record with producing multiple episodes per week with its hourlong primetime soap opera Peyton Place, shown twice and even thrice a week during its five-season run.)

Also taken from the serials was the sober narration. After auditioning a number of potential voice actors for the part, Batman’s associate producer, Charles FitzSimmons, realized that the perfect speaker to intone each episode’s narration was his boss. Although reluctant at first, William Dozier became the voice to introduce each episode and entice spellbound viewers to “Tune in tomorrow, same Battime, same Bat-channel.” As Dozier stated on TV’s Telescope, Greenway Productions had a pet name for this announcer, who went uncredited: “Desmond Doomsday.”

Batman was originally intended for a Fall 1966 release. Ratings for ABC’s Fall 1965 line-up were lackluster, however, so Edgar Sherick decided to buy thirteen weeks of episodes of Batman as an anchor for the “second season” (i.e., mid-season) beginning in January 1966, hoping that the Dynamic Duo would race to the network’s rescue. This forced Batman to operate at a production deficit, with episodes churned out at a breakneck pace. Post-pilot, Season One began production in November 1965—with the show debuting a scant two months later!

“NEITHER ART NOR CULTURE” Batman premiered on Wednesday, January 12, 1966, with a concluding episode the following evening. It instantly struck a chord with American viewers across the demographic spectrum. Kids were mesmerized by its colorful characters and frenetic action. High schoolers formed local chapters of Batman Clubs. College students congregated in TV rooms and dorms for twice-weekly Batman viewing parties. Robin, the Boy Wonder’s catchphrase “Holy (fill in the blank)!” became a watercooler buzzword.

Hundreds of Batman merchandising items, as diverse as bedroom slippers and ashtrays, flooded the market.

A new Batman comic strip was syndicated into news-

papers. Adam West was an instant sex symbol, and Burt Ward, a teen idol. Hefti’s theme was recorded by a number of artists. And you couldn’t pick up a magazine or newspaper without an article covering this fever, most of which used “POW! ZAP! BAM!” or a derivative thereof in their titles or introductions— or even on their covers, such as with the April 25, 1966 edition of Newsweek, whose cover addressed the pop-art phenomenon with a giant “POP!” sound effect.

The first two-part episode also put the Riddler on the map, making the recently resurrected, almostforgotten Bat-baddie the TV series’ most popular villain—and one of the “Big Four” Batman villains of the comics. Gorshin’s success in the role, and the unforgettable portrayals of the Penguin by the versatile Burgess Meredith, the Joker by Latin lover Cesar Romero, and Catwoman by the slinky Julie Newmar, made playing a Bat-villain the “in” thing in Hollywood.

Dozier was besieged by celebrities and their agents vying for villain bookings. (Ultimately, the response was so great that the “Bat-climb” was created, where Batman and Robin, “scaling” a wall, would have a brief dialogue with a celebrity who poked his head out a window. Among those guests were Jerry Lewis, Dick Clark, Edward G. Robinson, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the Green Hornet and Kato.)

In its first season, both of Batman’s twice-weekly episodes scored in the Nielsen top ten for the year.

DC Comics’ Batman titles experienced dramatic sales surges, their numbers even surpassing Superman’s for the first time in the company’s history.

Not everyone succumbed to Batmania, however. Most media critics treated the program harshly.

Telescope’s Fletcher Markle, when introducing his program’s Batman segment, noted its pop-art roots and pop-culture appeal but called it “neither art nor culture,” even accusing Bob Kane of planting “the virus of Batmania in Detective Comics #27, exactly 27 years ago.” His was one of the kindest assessments.

Some comic-book fans disliked Batman’s approach as well, especially many of the Batmaniacs of the Batman fanzine, Batmania. In Batmania #10 (Apr. 1966), Ronn Foss, one of fandom’s pioneers, remarked, “The TV Batman is about as athletic and acrobatic as an over-fed cow, and hardly sacred! And the TV Robin is simply too much.”

Also in that issue, famous Batfan Tom Fagan printed a letter he had written to William Dozier, where he informed the executive producer, “Frankly, I am disappointed. What is more important, others are too!” Fagan cited comments garnered from his polling of children and adults about Batman, whose responses included, “Who are they writing for—twoyear-olds?” and “Even the comic book stories aren’t that bad, and they’re pretty poor.” Fagan’s major beef was with the writing of the program: “The main objection, Mr. Dozier, is DIALOGUE. Perhaps, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. was commissioned to write the show the way it was done. But if so this is a mistake.” Ironically, that same Batmania issue printed the results of the 2nd Annual Batmania Ballot, with Batman #171’s “Remarkable Ruse of the Riddler!”—the inspiration for the Batman TV pilot—selected as Favorite Story of the Year.

THE BAT-BUBBLE’S SLOW LEAK As the first season wrapped, the dormant concept of a Batman theatrical movie was revived and rocketed into production for a summer 1966 release. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson and written by Lorenzo Semple, Batman began filming on April 25, 1966, and wrapped on May 31, premiering just two months later, on July 30. Its plot involved a union of four villains— Riddler, Penguin, Joker, and Catwoman—teaming to hold the world hostage by dehydrating its leaders.

Gorshin, Meredith, and Romero reprised their villainous roles, joined by Lee Meriwether, who temporarily stepped into the Catwoman part since Julie Newmar was unavailable. The larger budget afforded the film allowed the creation of vehicles which would be used on the show’s second season: the Batboat, the Batcopter, and the Batcycle (although the latter actually premiered on the show near the end of its first season).

It was with the theatrical Batman that Dozier and company received their first signs that the Batman

fad was running out of steam. The absurdity of the television show was better suited for the small screen (although Batman’s movie line “Somedays, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!” remains one of the funniest to spew from Semple’s typewriter).

The film’s box office was disappointing, with viewers not wanting to pay for a bigger version of what they could watch at home for free on TV. Adam West’s sex appeal was played up for Batman’s international release, puzzling amorous European movie-goers who weren’t expecting a trip to summer Camp.

Season Two of Batman started on September 7, 1966 with a misfire two-parter starring Art Carney sleepwalking through his role as the made-for-TV villain the Archer. Ratings were still strong, but failed to match the first season’s. That drop continued, and as story supervisor Semple became less involved, many scripts lost their campy edge.

Bill Finger was the only of Batman’s comic-book writers to pen a screenplay for the series. His Clock King two-parter, co-written with Charles Sinclair and aired on October 12 and 13, 1966, was an uncomfortable experience for him. Finger complained to convention attendees at New York’s Con-Cave ’66 about the show’s Camp: “That’s what they wanted. When you write a script for TV, you run into quite a number of people. Then the story has to be approved by the ABC network, and every one of them contributes something… By the time the writer gets it, he goes absolutely out of his mind trying to please everybody!”

Dozier ordered the creation of a Batgirl to pep up the show with girl and men viewers. He first produced a Batgirl pilot for an intended spin-off, but as Season Two Batman ratings were in decline, the character of Batgirl was folded into the Batman series. Dancer Yvonne Craig turned the Dynamic Duo into a Terrific Trio in Batman’s third and final season, which began on September 14, 1967. By this time, the former top-ten hit had been demoted to a onceweekly program. In an attempt to recreate the edgeof-your-seat cliffhanger excitement of the twiceweekly episodes, Season Three episodes ended with a teaser featuring the next week’s villain or villains.

Camp had been replaced by silliness, and America been cured of its Batmania “virus.” Episode 120, the last of the series, aired on March 14, 1968, and Batman went into reruns.

ABC bulldozered the expensive sets once the show wrapped. This killed a proposed new lease on

The Batman movie of 1966 failed to create box-office magic but helped spread Batmania across the globe, including Japan. © Greenlawn Productions/20th Century Fox Film Corporation/DC Comics. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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One of the many Batspoofs of the day appeared in MAD #105 (Sept. 1966).

Cover painting

by Norman Mingo.

Batman TM & © DC Comics. MAD TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc.

RIGHT: Part music, part comedy sketches, Jan and Dean’s March 1966 concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman was a Bat-blast.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

life when NBC jumped in at the last minute with an offer to give the show a fourth season. Batman was dead… …until 1978, when HannaBarbera filmed two hour-long TV specials featuring a gathering of DC Comics super-heroes and super-villains, including West and Ward as the Dynamic Duo (and in one, Gorshin as the Riddler).

The first to tape but second to air was a super-hero roast, which was based upon an idea by Batman artist Sheldon Moldoff. The specials were intended to launch a regular series but failed to find a sufficient audience to do so.

IN DEFENSE OF BATMAN Batman evokes either adoration or hatred from comic-book fans. Many of the show’s dissenters have accused it of ruining the character, or of mocking him. As Adam West defensively but diplomatically stated in his Back to the Batcave autobiography, “At the time we did our show, the comic books themselves, the magazines that I and Dozier and others had gone to the newsstand and bought, were sillier than anything we created.” No argument there: even though editor Julie Schwartz dumped previous Batman editor Jack Schiff’s bizarre Bat-transformations and extraterrestrial encounters, TV show characteristics such as the punning between the Dynamic Duo and criminals with inconceivable weapons were in fact lifted right off the “New Look” comics pages.

Television’s Batman helped cement the Caped Crusader’s status as one of the most significant heroes of Americana, and indoctrinated hundreds of thousands of comic-book readers, and for those contributions has become an invaluable chapter of Batman’s history.

A variation of this essay originally appeared in the 2009 book The Batcave Companion.

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HOLY VINYL!

Jan and Dean Meet Batman Nearly every facet of pop culture benefited from the overnight sensation that was ABC-TV’s Batman. Products bearing the likenesses of Batman and Robin instantly flooded the market, and manufacturers who attempted to profit from Batman merchandise without obtaining a license soon gasped, “Holy Copyright Infringement!” once DC Comics deployed its Bat-barristers.

Neal Hefti’s jazzy “Batman Theme” was nearly as popular as the Caped Crusader himself, and Batman records were part of this phenomenon, filling the radio airwaves, record shops, and department stores.

Both Hefti and the Marketts released versions of the da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-Batman theme song.

There were authorized Batman soundtrack albums, children’s story collections, and even a Batman Fan Club box set including a record, comic book, membership card, and other ephemera. There were instrumental LPs with music inspired by Batman and his mythos. Four Batman cast members cut records to capitalize on the craze: Adam West’s “Miranda,” Burt Ward’s “Boy Wonder I Love You” (written and arranged by Frank Zappa), Frank Gorshin’s “The Riddler,” and Burgess Meredith’s narration, as the Penguin, of Batman’s children stories (what, no “The Joke’s On You” tune by Cesar Romero?). There were novelty singles (Seeds of Euphoria’s “Let’s Send Batman to Viet Nam”) and blatant rip-off records (like the LP “The Batman Theme” from Bruce and the Robin Rockers, its album cover featuring poorly redrawn comic-book swipes with Batman and Robin’s costumes altered… as if no one would notice). In 1966, if you had a group of guys, a bunch of Batman T-shirts,

and electric guitars, you had a Bat-band. Artists like the Batmen and the Gotham City Crime Fighters came and went (check out Mike Dugo’s website 60sgaragebands.com for more info on these Batbands and songs).

Flashing high above this stack of vinyl like a bright Bat-beacon was Jan and Dean Meet Batman, a comedy concept album performed by one of the Sixties’ most popular music acts. In early 1966, Jan and Dean targeted Batman as the perfect vehicle for the next phase of their career, a merger of music and sketch comedy. The earliest episodes of ABC’s Batman had barely flickered off the screen before the duo released the single “Batman” in January 1966.

Written by Jan, with Don Altfeld and Fred Weider, “Batman” is the surf duo’s variation on Hefti’s TV show theme, bolstered by Jan and Dean’s tight harmonies, spoof lyrics, and comedic bits throughout.

“Batman” shows familiarity with comic-book lore: its chorus calls out, “We need the Batman” and includes a re-enactment of Batman’s origin with a bat flying through the window of Bruce Wayne’s study.

Racing into the market on the single’s heels was the Liberty Records LP Jan and Dean Meet Batman, a cross-section of songs about the Darknight Detective (including “Flight of the Batmobile,” “Mr. Freeze,” and “The Joker is Wild”) and a series of hilarious sketches written by Berry, Altfeld, and Weider starring Captain Jan and Dean, the Boy Blunder. Originally, Jan and Dean had recorded the sketches as Batman and Robin until legal pressure from National Periodical Publications forced them to redo the routines in their newly created super-hero guises. As Dean admits in the interview following, he and Jan had more fun with recording the first time around, but listeners had no inclination of this.

Jan and Dean Meet Batman is a spot-on spoof of the campy TV show, with the Captain Jan and Boy Blunder roles encouraging the duo to push the envelope even further than they could have “as” Batman and Robin. Their transformation from singing duo Jan and Dean into “the Titanic Twosome” Captain Jan and Boy Blunder is triggered by their singing of the refrain from “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” allowing the boys to incorporate their own music into this Bat-mix. Captain Jan’s straight-laced soliloquys are punctuated by alliterations, while Dean, the Boy Blunder pummels the listener with a relentlessly funny barrage of “Holy…” gags (my favorite: Holy Pertussin!”). Roger Christian, the famous radio jock who co-wrote some of Jan and Dean’s hits, narrates the sketches with William Dozier panache, and in addition to lampooning the super-hero culture (with original villains Dr. Vit-A-Min, Garbageman, and the Fireman), the surf culture is also in play, with the heroes gallivanting to crime scenes in their atompowered Woody. Co-writers Altfeld and Weider, along with Jill Gibson, provide additional voices. Liner notes by Bruce Roberts bring the listener up to speed on “The Legend of the Batman—Who He is and How He Came to Be!” According to Jan Berry’s website, music critic Dave Marsh called Jan and Dean Meet Batman “a precursor of some of the brilliant stuff that Firesign Theatre, Richard Pryor, and Lily Tomlin (more often) did later … really intricately worked-out sketches, descended from [Stan] Freberg and Dickie Goodman but going way past them.” While it may be easy to regard Jan and Dean Meet Batman merely as one of many such super-hero take-offs of its day, the album is a window into what fate has cruelly determined to be an alternate future of the surf duo.

Some of the stars of Batman went into the recording studio to cut records of their own.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

LEFT: Jan and Dean in 1964.

Courtesy of Heritage.

(C) Jan and Dean.

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THE BOY BLUNDER SPEAKS! An Interview with Dean Torrence

Dean Torrence and Jan Berry met in high school in Los Angeles and gigged together in several doowop groups until finding fame as the surf-music duo Jan and Dean, starting in 1963 with the

known for TV’s Bewitched. In the works was the weekly series Jan and Dean on the Road, planned for a Fall 1966 premiere on ABC. The show would whisk Jan and Dean to a different tour destination each week, allowing them to parody other TV shows along the way. The series—and Jan and Dean’s partnership—was derailed on April 12, 1966 when an auto accident nearly took Jan’s life.

Berry took years to recuperate, during which time Torrence reestablished himself as a successful graphic designer, producing Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning album covers for numerous successful acts through his company, Kitty Hawk Graphics. In the late Eighties, Jan’s condition had improved enough to allow the duo to reunite for concerts and new recordings, a second act they enjoyed until Berry’s 2004 passing.

Interview conducted in October 2015 and transcribed

by Steven Thompson.

Holy Hype, Batman!

This Billboard ad from January 29, 1966 promoted Jan and Dean’s “Batman” single.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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single “Surf City.” Hits including “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” and “Ride the Wild Surf” followed. Jan and Dean’s popularity led to their co-headlining their own comedy movie in 1965, Easy Come, Easy Go, an ill-fated production that Torrence discusses in this interview.

As their concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman made its way into stores in March 1966, the boys had just finished shooting a television pilot for Ashmont Productions, in association with 20th Century Fox Television, for director William Asher, best

You and Jan released the single, “Batman,” in January of ’66, then the album. I played the grooves off of Jan and Dean Meet Batman when I was a kid.

That’s my wife’s very, very favorite Jan and Dean LP. And she’s fifteen years younger than me, so she wasn’t around when it came out. Somehow she heard it. It’s not as though I sit around and play any of this stuff, but somehow she heard bits and piece of it and it became her favorite LP. Your “Batman” song was a riff on the TV show theme… but interspersed throughout was a little of your comedy. The single was recorded first, then the album, isn’t that right?

The single was probably done first. I know it was right around Jan’s accident, and Jan’s accident was in April of ’66, so that sounds about right. So it was the last project we worked on.

It sounds like it was a fun project.

We had a lot of fun with that. We kind of understood that most of our music had some sort of humor in it. And sometimes it was a lot more subtle. I think even some folks weren’t even sure if we were serious or if it was tongue in cheek, you know? But, yeah, we always had some sort of little humorous thread going through most of our music. “Batman” was one of the first times we were making it more overt.

The songwriters you were working with, Don Altfeld and Fred Weider, did some of the sketch writing for this album. They co-wrote the LP, but whoever wrote that first song really knew their Batman lore. The chorus said, “We need THE Batman.” Now, this was back then he was Batman, not THE Batman. It had been a long time since he had been THE Batman, which is how we see him today.

And even the single’s vignette of the reenactment of Bruce Wayne’s origin—that really spoke to the comic-BOOK fan, not just the kid who might have been swept away by all of this stuff on TV at the time. So, which of the songwriters was the Batman fan?

I’d guess it was probably Weider.

I don’t even remember him. Don [Altfeld] was a high school buddy and co-wrote a few of our tunes, including “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” Don was in pre-med at UCLA with Jan—and they were also friends from high school, as I said. In 1966, I don’t think they had a lot of time to sit around and research all the stuff you’re talking about. So I’m guessing it was probably the other guy. At least the detail stuff.

Had you ever read comics?

Were you familiar with Batman before this?

Not at all. I wasn’t a comic-book reader and I don’t think Jan was either. We understood the campiness of the television show. We probably would’ve been interested in the comic books, but once we were aware that there was actually gonna be a television show and we understood—again—the humor of it all, that’s probably what hooked us more than our prior knowledge about Batman.

Had there not been a TV show, we probably wouldn’t have been interested.

We would always try to pay attention to any sort of art movement or television movement, movies, all that stuff, because we always understood that if you had some other entity that was gonna help market this, you were much better off. It’s like “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” We had figured that Dodge-Chrysler would get involved… which they never did.

Not even to this day! They still haven’t figured it out. It still could be a clever marketing campaign if they ever got behind it. We could have done a whole tour. It’s interesting how they never grasped it.

I know we sent them the recording, just giving them a heads-up, but nothing ever came of it.

Anyway, I’m just explaining this in terms of how we came upon certain subject matter. [Batman] wasn’t necessarily something that we would pick just because we liked it. I mean, that may have had a lot to do with it.

I’m not saying we ever did anything we didn’t particularly care for. But… the important factor was, “Geez, this is going to be a television show.” This was before cable, so you’re thinking, “Even if it’s a minor hit, twenty or thirty million people are gonna see it,” ’cause there’s only three networks. [Michael laughs] “And then, if it’s a major hit—Hell, we could sell at least a million or two units of this… if we’re one of the first out.” So we intended to be one of the first.

And you were. You were pretty close to being right out the gate, with the show itself.

You had to have produced that fairly quickly.

Yeah, as I remember, it went along fairly quickly, from beginning to end. And the LP probably wasn’t even quite as good as the original LP that we did that National Publications—was that the name…?

National Periodical Publications, better known as DC Comics, they were the people you dealt with—or at least, their legal counsel.

You and Jan originally recorded the album “as” Batman and Robin, right?

Exactly. And that was because we weren’t under kind of as much pressure because of timing. Our timing would have been just exactly dead-on, with a little bit of room to spare, but after spending a couple weeks recording it and then sending it to them and then having them turn it down because they didn’t like that we were calling each other “Batman and Robin.” So they made us change the whole thing. I mean, we had to start all over!

And so, “Batman and Robin” became “Captain Jan and Boy Blunder,” and you had to redo the comedy bits. In the sketches on the LP, you have original villains like Garbage Man. Did the original sketches that you recorded involve traditional Batman villains like the Joker or the Penguin, or were your original villains part of the mix with Batman and Robin?

I don’t remember exactly, and I don’t know that we changed it all that much. The scripts were probably basically the same, but what we had the most fun with was the spontaneous stuff. I think we were a lot more spontaneous in the first one because I remember really liking the first one and being okay with the second one, but I just could relate to being under more pressure now be-

cause now we’re three weeks to four weeks behind. And you’ve already done the jokes, so you’re not as spontaneous to laughing at your own jokes or having somebody else crack up. It just wasn’t as good. There were moments, but I thought the original was just real special so it was a shame that we had to redo it.

Does that recording still exist somewhere?

I know it does, but I can’t seem to remember where. I know I had an acetate of it at one time, and I think somebody really, really wanted it very badly and bought it from me a long time ago. I could probably find out through the fan club and see if I could find that person. I’d just love to have a copy of it. It would have been fun to be able to have had the two together, and then probably the average person listening to it would not find much difference between the two.

Dean O. Torrence today.

Courtesy of Dean Torrence.

There were original songs on the LP about Batman and the villains and such that you were legally able to do.

Oh, I got a kick out of all those songs. I thought Jan did a terrific job of arranging all the musical parts and all the little cues. He did all the Batman cues that were run in between everything—really, he did a great job! And while going to med school! [laughs] At the same time! I thought it was really clever, too, that the catalyst for your transformation from Jan and Dean to Captain Jan and the Boy Blunder was the singing of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” The musical equivalent of product placement!

We were very good at product placement and branding. That was kind of my job, the branding stuff, and I was always looking 193

Jan and Dean’s first album, The Jan & Dean Sound, released in 1960 from Doré Records.

Autographed copy courtesy of Heritage. © Jan and Dean.

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at the visuals and at the written word and making sure that they all fit our brand. The only time I ever had any complaints about a song we were doing… the fans didn’t understand it when I said I didn’t like a particular song.

And I didn’t really know how to explain it at the time because I was naturally doing the branding that I didn’t have a name for. But I should have explained it to the fans a little bit better. “The song’s okay, but I just don’t think that Jan and Dean should be doing that kind of a song.” Especially love songs. In the doo-wop days, we did more—in quotes—“love songs.” But as we started doing records about the Southern California beach culture and car culture, that’s where we really had a great following, and I just always wanted to stay in that part of it.

And that part of it could have— and did—include rolling into being able to do something like Batman or doing satirical stuff about whatever else culturally was happening at the time.

So this was a big deal, the Batman thing, just to experiment with doing a satire on other cultural things that were happening. Maybe we might have even gotten involved with politics, but I kinda doubt it.

We had a TV pilot all sold that would have debuted the same time as The Monkees did.

You know, the Monkees were a

brand-new group that didn’t have any hit records to speak of, but we had already had hits. So I’m assuming our show would have done really, really well. When I looked back to see what the pilot was about and notes of future stuff, I realized—only maybe ten years ago or so, looking back on some of those notes—that we were kind of dabbling in something close to Saturday Night Live, with the mix of music, our hit records at the time, Top Ten records, and being involved directly with the music business but married with the kind of humorous, almost sitcom, stuff that we were dabbling in. It was all kind of satires of other peoples’ shows. Route 66—of course, we were gonna do “Route 69.” And we did have Corvettes, so we were driving Corvettes. Sometimes we would drive to concerts that we were doing if they were within a couple hundred miles, just to drive our cars. But often we would get lost. Or arrested.

[Michael laughs] Got arrested at least a couple of times. So that was all incorporated into “Route 69,” where we would have new titles come on and it would actually be us heading out to a concert and then all the trouble or the funny situations we would get into going to a concert. When I look back, that would have really been a nice formula.

Yeah, absolutely!

And then we would have done Batman, too, as well, and there were many other shows that were popular at the time. We’d have done out own satires of those shows, including game shows!

We had one about a game show.

They were always trying to put us on game shows of some sort that would have sort of a little bit older audience. And we would only go ones where you would be humorous, so there were things like What’s My Line? Do you remember that show?

Sure do!

We had “What’s My Job?,” and

we’d have a set that looked just like their set, and do a whole take-off on it where… you know, a guy would be dressed up in a fire outfit with the hat and all that, and we’d have guest-stars that were with you trying to guess what this person’s job was.

It’s really unfortunate that it didn’t happen.

Yeah. The bottom line is that we did not get to exploit Batman as much as we had hoped to do. Jan crashed two and a half months later. We did produce a Batman medallion that we gave away to disc jockeys for playing our record.

A Batman medallion?

Look it up. Go to jananddean. com and click on the Merchandise section. I didn’t want to get into T-shirts and CDs, so I’m selling one-of-a-kind things that are definitely worth my time digging out of storage for somebody. It is a nice Batman medallion, and I designed it at my school, at USC, and then I took it to a manufacturer. This was before I kind of knew much about trademarking, which would have gotten me in huge trouble. But I wasn’t sellin’ ’em! I was giving them away for a promotion. There’s a stamp on the back that says, “Jan and Dean Productions.”

The most exposure I got [for Jan and Dean Meet Batman] was, one of my buddies at USC [AllAmerican Richard Wood] was on the football team and they were playing in the Rose Bowl. So that must have been that Rose Bowl coming right then in January. He was an All-American, so people were always talking to him. And he was called “Batman,” because he would just show up just in the nick of time to tackle somebody. [Michael laughs] And he was ferocious, too. He had pads on his elbows, and I said, “That’d be a great place to put the Batman logo, and I’ll give you a little Batman medallion you can wear around your neck.” And he actually did a television interview

before the game and he had the Batman medallion hanging out and he even explained, you know, “Jan and Dean gave us this…”

He’d elaborate on it, and then the guy would go on and ask him questions about football. But they’d ask that little side stuff that was always fun to try to incorporate into whatever you were doing. You’d try to figure out every way you could to get some recognition for it. It’s a shame that we never quite got around to finishing it off like we should have.

How did the Batman album do commercially?

I don’t remember, quite honestly.

I mean, two and a half months later, my whole life changed quickly and dramatically. We could tell by Jan’s injuries and coma that if he ever woke up, he was probably not going to be the same. Luckily, I’d been going to school, so I just started thinking about—and doing—what I was trained to do, graphic design.

I really wasn’t watching what was happening to that record or somehow helping the record company. We should say the record company we were with was not a great record company. They were okay with singles, but they had trouble selling LPs, for whatever reason. Had we not been in a crisis with Jan in a coma, I’m sure we would have done television and radio to help support the LP a lot more. And there was talk that we would actually be in an episode of Batman!

Yeah. I can definitely see you guys poking your head out the window during one of their “Bat-climbs”…

Whatever, something to do to tie us directly with the Batman show, while we were still promoting the LP, until we were ready to move on to the next one.

This period was definitely a difficult one for you…

I didn’t know when, but I knew that sooner or later, music was probably not going to be my

focus in life. But then again, [laughs] when Jan did get well, thirteen years later, we went out and did another twenty years!

And we probably made a lot more money the second time than we did the first time around.

It all worked out pretty well. Jan did get to be involved, to be in front of people, and people really appreciated the fact that he wanted to be there, even though it was hard for him to go on the road. We never did tours per se.

But we were really good for going out for extended weekends or sometimes two weeks at the casino or something. And it worked out great. People appreciated it up until he passed away in ’04.

So all in all, it was okay.

I’m glad you had that second act together. That was great.

Yeah, it was.

And you’ve personally had a second act, as a graphic designer. Your company is called Kitty Hawk Graphics. Are you an aviation buff?

I kinda liked the Wright Brothers.

I liked that whole story.

By the way, I got a Grammy!

In the graphic design category.

And I got three nominations… I never got a Grammy or any nominations for any music. So maybe they were telling me something. [laughs] Oh, I don’t know about that.

Let’s talk about Easy Come, Easy Go. That was originally supposed to be a Jan and Dean movie, and the name ended up getting usurped by an Elvis movie. What can you tell me about that?

Yeah, we held out doing movies.

Our friends were all doing movies—parts in all those Hollywood exploitation movies, you know, surf movies, R movies, and whatever. We certainly got offers to do all those, and we turned ’em all down until we could find the right one to do—a full-on comedy.

We’d not particularly have to do a whole lot of music. Just use our

comedy—well, I hate to even say talent, because we weren’t quite as talented as I thought we were, although we had a dry-sense-ofhumor-thing going that people seemed to react to, but we were not professionals.

What we did do was wait long enough to get a project where we could be the central characters, but we could have our favorite comedians—kind of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World type ensemble. God… we had half of those people that were in that movie [Easy Come, Easy Go] that were our favorites—including Terry-Thomas! Terry-Thomas flew from England to be in our movie.

Wasn’t Mel Brooks involved?

Mel Brooks was involved. Stan Freberg was gonna be involved at one time. [sighs] We read with those guys. We did a lot of prep stuff during summer, because that was the only time we had to do this, so we did it over the summer and they were gonna try and get the film done in the summer before school started. Our first day of shooting, they were gonna shoot the last scene of the movie. I guess that’s an eerie thing. I never thought about that.

In the movie, a train…

Long story short: Jan and I are walking down the railroad tracks trying to figure out what to do. In the beginning of the movie, we were experimenting. We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do musically and we were experimenting with being softshoe dancers. We learned how to do a soft-shoe thing. We actually went to a class and learned how to do a soft-shoe, and then, of course, that didn’t work out for us and we became surf musicians.

[Michael laughs] So anyway, we’re walking on some tracks—I don’t know why— and talking about what we were gonna do next, and a train comes along and runs over us. And we thought that was funny. And then they were gonna animate that part, and our pieces were going to be blown in the wind across 195

the desert to Mexico, Simi Valley—like the desert sands being blown to the horizon. Again, I don’t know why we thought it was funny.

It sounds very Sixties, though.

It was funny at the time. Certainly, teen idols weren’t talking about getting run over by trains.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s the norm. [laughs] That’s probably why we liked it.

Everybody else was doing something totally different.

Unfortunately, we were never quite able to actually fulfill any of this stuff. We had little glimpses of it and started it and something would always derail us somehow. And that train—that kind of ended it—and it was the first day of shooting! I used to like to say, “We didn’t even make it to lunchtime.”

And I was the last man standing, because… I know this is kind of a long story. The chase train that was to be the one that ran us over actually ran into the train that was towing the flatcar with the camera on it. And I was on the flatcar. We’d already shot our scene, which was our reactions to hearing a train whistle and then realizing we’d better run for it. And then they were going to film the train coming closer and closer. It would be our point of view, looking over our shoulder and watching it bear down on us.

So we were all kinda done with our part, and we were invited to sit on the flatcar with the rest of the folks—the camera people and the sound people and the people from the railroad. I just remember they were telling me there were seventeen people on that flatcar.

And there were eighteen at one point—and that was me! They kept shooting this scene and they couldn’t get the chase train to get up close enough, and so then they would signal the train that was chasing us. We had a walkie-talkie: “Let’s try it again.”

Then we’d back up and we’d do it again. And by the second time, 196

we’re goin’, “We’re on the same track with this huge locomotive coming at us. It seemed to me if you had a zoom lens, at a certain point when you saw it wasn’t coming any closer, you could just zoom it in.”

So as we’re backing up to do take three, I find the director and I go, “Don’t you have a zoom lens or something? So as that train comes up really pretty close, you could crank it the rest of the way.” He wanted to fill up the whole frame with the front of the engine! And he looks at me and goes, “I’m making the movie and you need to go and sit down and stay out of this.”

Well, sounds like he was nurturing a climate of collaboration there. [chuckle] Yes, and we’re the stars! Our names were over the title. We were told that we would have as much input as it took because we were the ones they were shooting the movie around! And if anybody knows our characters well enough, it’s us.

Now, this was a technical issue, so it wasn’t like talking about a line in the movie that we didn’t like or didn’t wanna do. This was moviemaking. Had I ever made a movie? Well, I made an 8MM movie once at school, long ago.

But he made me go sit down, so I sat down until the train stopped.

The train stopped and the other train kept going down the track because it was to go way down and then get bigger and bigger.

At that point, I guess the director came up and apologized. He said, “Look, this is the first day of shooting and I can’t be explaining stuff every single take that we’re doing for whatever we’re doing, but I’ll just respond to what you just said and then don’t ask me again.” So I said, “Okay.” He said, “You can’t zoom because all the background comes up, too, so that’s why you can’t do that.”

Meanwhile, I’m looking around. We’re out in the desert and it’s all blue sky. So it isn’t as though you have some mountain

ranges or anything. If you did, it was way in the background.

And probably blue sky you’re not gonna really notice. Do I tell him?

I said, you know, “Who’s gonna give a crap anyway?” So I went to get off the train because I was hungry. I went to Jan and I said, “I’m gettin’ hungry.” And I did notice as we drove in here there was a place that sold burgers and root beer about a quarter of a mile down the road there. It was hot! It was out in the desert, and I was thirsty. “I’m gonna go there and get some root beer and get a burger.” And Jan goes, “Hey, the people are setting up all the catering. The catering’s gonna be right there and that’s half an hour away. Why would you go pay for an A&W root beer when you don’t have to?” I said, “’Cause I’m hungry right now, so that’s what I’m gonna do. You don’t wanna go?”

He said, “No. I’m gonna wait for the catered lunch.” I said, “Okay.”

I got off—the only one to get off the flat car. And fifteen minutes later, the chase train ran into the flatcar, knocked everybody off of it, everybody on the flatcar went to the hospital, including Jan. Jan got a compound fracture in the leg. I was the last man standing, so I ran back to the scene because I had headed off and then I heard it hit, then turned around and saw what happened and ran back towards the accident. And who do you think I came to first? The director.

Face down. I asked him what I could do for him. He said his face was in the sand and he was having trouble breathing face down, so I kind of lifted his head out, propped it up somehow, and he said he was hot. So I was looking around. The only thing that I could find that could create some sort of shade for him was the script. So I tore out the pages of the script and kind of put ’em all over his body and I took the title page, Easy Come, Easy Go, and put it right on his head.

Aw, man!

Meanwhile, all these guys were laying around waiting to be picked up and it was gonna be a while. Of course, you didn’t have cell phones in those days. Jan drives by in some guy’s car and he yells at me that he had broken his leg and that he was heading to the nearest hospital. He, being a med student, looked and saw his compound fracture and knew that he was bleeding—a lot.

Jan knew that he could bleed to death very easily if he waited for the ambulances… and they were gonna have to pick up seventeen people. So he conned—well, he pleaded for a couple of the grips on the train that hit ’em to help him get to a car. They were waiting for the train to go by and then when the crash happened, the arms hadn’t lifted up to let the cars go yet. The grips tried to put him in somebody’s car, some older people. He said, “They’ll both panic.” But he saw some kid in a hot rod and he said, “Put me in that car.” And they just grabbed open the door and shoved him in. And, of course, the kid was shocked at what was going on and at this man who was bleeding. Jan said, “I’m Jan of Jan and Dean. I’ll pay you, but please get me to a hospital.” The kid got him there! Jan was probably in the operating room getting his leg put back together before the other people got picked up. Once all the people were picked up, there were some serious broken bones, but nobody died. And that was it for our film career.

But the humorous part was, I walked back to the catering and the catering had all been set up for all these people, and I was about the only one left except for a couple of makeup people...

You were the last man standing.

And, of course, there were cops there, and the fire department, and I said, “Hell, we’ve got all these lunches here. Anybody wants to stay, it’s my treat.” [laughs] So, about fifteen or twenty people stayed and had lunch.

I had a great old time, and then a limo came out and picked me up and took me back to the studio.

The people at the studio all gathered around my car and wanted to know what happened and they were so sorry. And I was looking at my watch going, “I could make the beach before the sun goes down!”

What a wild and fascinating story. Was Jan in a cast when you guys did the Batman record, or was he healed by that point?

Yeah, he got his cast off—I think it was in July or something. August, September, October, November...

He had his cast on when we did the pilot for the TV show.

Really?

For part of it. Then he actually had a crutch and they had to shoot around it. So that was just before Christmas, so he probably had it off in January. As I told you, he was in med school, but because of the compound fracture, he wasn’t able to get to school, so he took a leave of absence. And as soon as he took the leave, the draft board— he had a deferment because of being in med school—the draft board drafted him! He went up to the draft board—this was the day of the accident—and I think he was really pissed off. He rolled up his pant leg to show ’em the pins were still in and stitches and all that. And he said, “I can still barely walk on this leg. That’s how come I got a leave of absence from med school. That’s the only reason why I’m not in med school. Come Spring I’ll be back in med school.” I don’t really know what that conversation was about, but obviously he couldn’t be in the Army being like that. People speculate that he was still kind of pissed off when he got in his car, and about a half hour later, ran into the back of a parked truck in Beverly Hills.

Wow. That’s horrible.

It’s life.

What a year that was for you both.

Never a dull moment.

Let me bring this back to Batman to wind it down.

What do you think it is about your concept album that makes a guy like me contact you fifty years later? Why are people like me and your wife interested in this record?

I think that the record itself was more about the Jan and Dean part and the humor than it might have been about Batman. I’m not sure. What I get nowadays, whenever I listen to it, I enjoy hearing a bunch of people in a studio—because they’re mostly friends of ours—having one hell of a good time, and we did such a good job with the music that it wasn’t embarrassing. It was pretty sophisticated. The skits were fun to do. I don’t know if we followed the scripts word for word. I don’t think we did. We had a lot of fun just winging it and cracking ourselves up, leading to some other spontaneous laughter about stuff. The most fun for me was that it was a hell of a lot more fun doing skits with some humor than it was to work on a real recording where you have the pressure of trying to make it sound professional and good.

This was just… it was fun.

The liner notes of the Jan and Dean Meet Batman LP definitely catered to the comicbook fan.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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IT’S A BIRD… IT’S A PLANE… IT’S SUPERMAN

The Man of Steel on Broadway When DC Comics readers saw the Man of Steel “strut the Krypton Crawl” in Jimmy Olsen #88 (Oct. 1965), little did they know that in just a matter of months, their hero would become a Super(song and dance)man—on Broadway, to boot! But then again, with his World’s Finest friend Batman appearing on television two nights a week, Superman wasn’t about to be upstaged.

RIGHT: The musical’s soundtrack album from Columbia Records, featuring the original Broadway cast.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

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The timing of the March 29, 1966 Broadway premiere of It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman might suggest that it was one of the many super-hero projects rocketing onto the pop-culture landscape after Batman’s January 12, 1966 premiere and meteoric success. But this musical’s trajectory was far from faster than a speeding bullet. Superman’s transformation from the comics page to the Broadway stage began with composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams, Tony winners for Bye Bye Birdie. In 1964

they had just finished the Sammy Davis, Jr.-starring Golden Boy, a musical about different kind of superman, a scrapper from Harlem who punched his way out of the ghetto as a pro boxer.

As Adams told writer Lynne Stephens in Comic Scene vol. 1 #11, he and Strouse were looking for a sunnier vehicle for their next project and approached Esquire magazine writers David Newman and Robert Benton to gauge their interest in co-writing a musical comedy. “They came back to us with the idea of doing Superman, and we thought that sounded pretty good,” Adams told Stephens. The musical duo could have asked for another idea: the heyday of television’s The Adventures of Superman was long gone (although the show could still be found in syndication), and eight Sadie Hawkins Days had passed since Broadway’s last adaptation of a comics character, 1956’s Li’l Abner. Instead, they forged ahead, obtaining the Superman rights from National Periodical Publications and spending eighteen months writing the musical. The project became more powerful than a locomotive once they partnered with super-producer Harold (Hal) Prince. Prince’s string of hits (as coproducer or producer) included Damn Yankees, West Side Story, Fiorello!, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and at the time, his Fiddler on the Roof was a long-running smash.

While the Strouse/Adams/Newman/Benton/ Prince version of the Man of Steel would, like that Jimmy Olsen cover, feature a musical Man of Steel, the child-catering silliness of your average Mort Weisinger-edited Superman comic book was nowhere to be found in It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman—except for its portrayal of Lois Lane, who only had eyes for the big blue guy and who, in the words of New York Times reviewer Stanley Kauffmann, “would like to be his altar ego.” There was no Bottle City of Kandor, no giant key to unlock the door of the Fortress of Solitude, no Jimmy Olsen with a Superman signal watch, no Superbaby flashback, and no Bizarro, Lex Luthor, or Brainiac. There were

two bad guys in It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, both original characters unique to this production: the tousle-topped Dr. Abner Sedgwick (played

by Michael O’Sullivan), a scorned scientist who plotted revenge against the world by depriving it of its favorite hero, and debonair, duplicitous Daily Planet gossip columnist Max Mencken, played to the hilt by the production’s marquee-mighty star, Jack Cassidy. Spicing up the proceedings were future TV Alice Linda Lavin as Max’s saucy assistant Sydney, and Cirque du Soleil-like acrobatics from a troupe called the Flying Lings. The determined, delightful Lois Lane was played by Patricia Marand, who replaced Joan Hotchkis in the role after pre-Broadway performances of the show in Philadelphia in February 1966.

Anchoring the cast was Bob Holiday, in the dual roles of Superman and Clark Kent. Although he had previously appeared on Broadway in Hal Prince’s Fiorello!, Holiday was—like those cast to play Superman before and after him—a relative unknown. When the statuesque, blue-eyed, raven-haired singer-actor walked into the room to audition—almost looking as if he had stepped out of the pages of Curt Swan- or Kurt Schaffenberger-drawn Superman story—Lee Adams knew that this was their Superman, although through the audition process they would have fiftyone other actors to choose from. Holiday didn’t just play Superman—he became Superman, devoting himself to a strict physical training regimen and shunning vices which might not seem Supermanly, especially within eyeshot of children. As Clark Kent, Holiday perfected a slouch that made Superman’s alter ego seem to be an entirely different person, as opposed to the previous man in the red cape, actor George Reeves, whose Kent was merely Superman in a business suit and glasses. At the direction of Hal Prince, who directed as well as produced the musical, Bob played Superman straight. Although It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman employed elements from the funnies such as a background set configured like comic-book panels (complete with a “Meanwhile” caption), the musical mostly eschewed the campiness found in its contemporaries. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the Times, “A careful course

has been steered between doing it straight… and doing a broad burlesque, which would soon have run dry.”

It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman opened at the Alvin Theatre at 250 West 52nd Street in New York City on Tuesday, March 29, 1966. With few exceptions, critics raved. Audiences, however, didn’t pack the house, despite Holiday’s promotional appearances as Superman on television shows and in ads. Reduced prices were offered for matinees, and enthusiastic kids would get to meet Superman after the shows. But after 129 performances, the musical closed, on July 17, 1966.

There are many theories suggesting why It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman failed to catch on.

Some have blamed Batman for creating the expectation of a campy Superman, or the audience’s rejection of paying Broadway prices for watching a superhero when they could get one for free at home on TV. Others have cited the show’s stiff theatrical competition, or theatergoer confusion over the intended target audience.

It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman was nominated for three Tony Awards: Jack Cassidy for Best Actor in a Musical, Michael O’Sullivan for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, and Patricia Marand for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. The show was twice revived in 1967, with Holiday reprising his roles.

It became a staple of dinner and community theater and continues to be performed to this day. It was updated and performed on television in 1975, with David Wilson as Superman/Clark Kent, Lesley Ann Warren as Lois Lane (Warren would later audition for the Lois Lane role in 1978’s Superman: The Movie), Kenneth Mars as Max Mencken, Loretta Swit as Sydney, and in the role of evil scientist Dr. Sedgwick, actor David (Batman’s Mad Hatter) Wayne. After It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, the writing team of David Newman and Robert Benton would make their mark as screenwriters, beginning with 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde; along with Newman’s wife Leslie, they would return to the Metropolis Marvel to punch up Mario Puzo’s screenplay for 1978’s Superman: The Movie, and the Newmans were back as the screenwriters of Superman II and III. Despite its short original run, It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman was a creative success and an important part of the legacy of Man of Tomorrow.

LEFT: This is the Alvin show! The site of the musical’s original performances. © New York Public Library.

Cast illustration by Al Hirschfeld from the New York Times’ review by Stanley Kauffmann.

From The Amazing World of Superman #nn, courtesy of John Trumbull.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

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Bob Holiday as Superman signed autographs as part of the musical as well as off-stage.

From The Amazing World of Superman #nn, courtesy of John Trumbull.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

THE SIXTIES SUPERMAN An Interview with Bob Holiday

Fifty years after being hoisted over a stage on wires, Bob Holiday still takes Superman seriously. He’s unfortunately overlooked by those who only consider Hollywood when counting the actors who have played the Man of Steel. But for the Camp Age generation, Holiday was the “real” Superman—especially for the awestruck kids who met him backstage in 1966—having appeared as Superman on Broadway, on TV shows and commercials, and in print ads.

Interview conducted in January 2016.

It’s not every day a fella gets to chat with Superman! Are you ready to fly down memory lane?

Michael, I want to thank you for including me in your book. It’s nice to be remembered. Let’s do this!

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Superman made his debut in comic books when you were a small boy. Did you read Superman comics as a kid?

I sure did! I loved reading the comics, and I loved watching the movie serials. I was a huge Superman fan.

A lot of kids played Superman by tying a towel around their necks as a cape. Were you one of them?

No, I didn’t ever do that. I think that started more when the George Reeves TV show aired.

Kids had a better visual of Superman and they wanted to look more like him. The comics were small pictures. It was different.

Lyricist Lee Adams once said in an interview that you were the first actor who auditioned for the lead in It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman. He felt that you were too good to be

true, but they kept auditioning actors before finally settling on the best of the bunch, the first guy to walk through the door!

Were you aware at the time that you were the first person to audition for Superman?

I knew I was early, but I didn’t know I was the first. It all happened so fast. I saw the ad in the New York World Telegram that Hal Prince was looking for a Superman. And I fit the physical requirements—six-foot-three-inches, 200 pounds, black hair, and blue eyes. It was overwhelming. I knew I had to audition. I wanted the part so bad. I knew I had to do my best and completely believe in Superman. I raced over to Hal Prince’s office, and I ran into Hal and Charles Strouse coming out of the elevator. I loved their greeting, “Bob Holiday, Bob Holiday! Are we glad to see you!” But I was on pins and needles during the whole audition process. I had no idea whether or not I’d get the part.

What was required of you when you auditioned for the Superman and Clark Kent roles?

First and foremost, I had to sing. I chose two songs that I’d done in

the touring company for Camelot, “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “C’est Moi.” I felt like these songs showed my range, and were different from “On the Side of the Angels” that I’d done in Fiorello! for Hal [Prince].

But I prepped more than that. I read Jules Feiffer’s book The Great Comic Book Heroes and I started working out at the gym. And I kept believing.

I got called back, and this time read some dialogue along with singing. Then I got called back a second time, and by now it was down to one other guy and me. At the end of this audition, they dismissed the other guy and told me I had the part. I had the chills!

It was a multi-faceted role: the hero and his alter ego, plus singing, comedy, and physicality.

What kind of physical training did you have to undergo to play Superman?

Well, all on my own, I put in hours at the gym. You’ve seen the costume, right? And I’d been singing all my life. Comedy? Part of the comedy was to play Superman absolutely on the straight and narrow. They did that in the Christopher Reeve movies, too, they treated Superman with dignity. That’s what we tried to do.

That’s what Hal Prince always told me, “Play him true, play him real.”

Now, for fight scenes, the actors playing “the Flying Lings” were all trained acrobats. We had a gas with back flips and jumps.

We made a great team.

What material was your Superman costume made of? Was it comfortable?

You know, it really was. I think it was wool, but light. They fitted me for the boots first, which had to stay on the whole show. Then they worked on the rest of the costume. And I came up with an idea for Clark Kent’s business shoes. We took some rubber rain shoes and cut the backs off so I could just slide into them. It was

a great illusion, and saved all the clumsiness of putting real shoes on.

Were you self-conscious the first time you saw yourself in the Superman suit?

It was a sight, I’ll tell you. But we’d been rehearsing for a while in street clothes. So I was working hard on feeling like I was Superman. The costume was kind of the final touch. And it was great. It felt good, seeing myself in the Superman costume.

Stage audiences had seen Peter Pan fly, in the petite form of Mary Martin. But at six-footthree you were the biggest actor to take to the air when It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman premiered. Describe the process used to make you fly on stage.

They actually used the Peter Pan folks to make me fly. I wore a leather harness and they’d at-

tach me to a wire. And they had a big guy backstage who would jump off a platform to lift me up.

Another guy would swing me forward. I loved it. The hardest part was keeping my legs extended as I flew. That’s where all those hours at the gym paid off. The flying people did a marvelous job. They got it right every single time. We didn’t get a second take

the way they do in the movies.

Movie Superman Christopher Reeve remarked of back pain from the harness used to suspend him on wires. Did you have any physical discomfort, or lingering problems, from the flying scenes?

I’m glad to tell you, I didn’t. There’s a big difference between movie flying and Broadway stage flying. I’d only be off the ground for a few seconds, flying on or off the stage. Then I’m back on my feet… Boom! I heard that Christopher Reeve was hanging in the air for hours while they’d do all those second takes. It had to be brutal.

We did have a mishap or two. Once, the wire came off the harness and swung right out into the middle of the stage.

I walked over, grabbed it, and said, “Excuse me” to the audience. They went wild. And another time, the wire detached when I was about six feet off the ground. I hit the stage like a rock, bounced back up, and said, “That would have hurt any mortal man.” I got a standing ovation. I was glad I’d put in all that time at the gym!

Bob Holiday in 2010.

Courtesy of Toni Collins.

LEFT: You’ll believe a man can fly! Holiday describes the challenges of stage-flying in this interview.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

Actress Joan Hotchkis was originally cast as Lois Lane, but after a lukewarm performance in Philadelphia, she was recast, with the Lois part going to Patricia Marand. What do you recall about that performance 201

in Philly, and why didn’t Hotchkis click as Lois?

You know, it’s a good question, and people have asked me that before. I just don’t remember why they replaced her. I will tell you, though, that Patty was a good choice. She had class, and she was sweet at the same time.

When she would say, “I love you” on stage, everyone believed it.

I’d say that recasting worked to the show’s advantage, since Patty got a Tony nomination

Do you have any specific memories or anecdotes about opening night?

Hal Prince had me pull a sight gag on Jack Cassidy. While we’re at the Daily Planet, Hal had me eat cookies and milk at my desk while Jack—who played a gossip columnist who’s jealous of Superman—was saying his lines.

Now, I didn’t just eat cookies and milk, I ATE cookies and milk.

Yeah, I upstaged the great Jack Cassidy, and it got a huge laugh.

Bob as Clark Kent in this 1966 Uniroyal ad. With him is the original stage Lois Lane, Joan Hotchkis.

Do you have any anecdotes to share about your cast members? Since we were talking about Lois Lane, let’s start with Patricia Marand.

I got to be good friends with Patty and her husband. We had a lot of fun together, and were really pals. And forty years later, my daughter and I met up with Patty and her husband, Irv, at a revival of…It’s Superman. It was great to see her again. Irv kept me in the loop when Patty got so sick.

He and I really grieved together.

[Note: Patricia Marand died of brain cancer in 2008.]

How about Jack Cassidy?

Well, I’ve told you about our back-and-forths. Jack and I had a great time during the run of the show. We had that good kind of camaraderie where it was okay that we kept trying to upstage each other. He was a good guy. I was devastated when he died so tragically. [Note: Jack Cassidy died in a house fire in 1976.]

Courtesy of SupermanBobHoliday.com.

Superman TM & © DC Comics. Ad © 1966 Uniroyal.

for her portrayal of Lois Lane!

It was good, and I was so happy for her. I think that was a highlight of her career.

Can you believe that fifty years have passed since It’s a Bird…

It’s a Plane… It’s Superman opened at the Alvin Theatre?

Amazing, isn’t it?

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mail this for me?” Well, I reached out, and I managed to grab that envelope right out of Jack’s hand.

That was a job for Superman!

But my favorite story is actually about closing night. Opening night, everyone plays it pretty straight. But on closing night, you try to get away with a prank or two. Jack Cassidy tried to pull one on me. As I flew off stage, calling out, “Up, up, and AWAY…” Jack held up a white envelope and said, “Hey, Supes, would you

And Linda Lavin?

Linda was a part of another great gag. Her character, Sydney, falls in love with Clark Kent and sings this great song, “You’ve Got Possibilities,” which was the hit song from the show. All through the song, Sydney is pouring herself over Clark. She sings, “Though you’re horribly square, I see possibilities, Un-der-neath, there’s something there.” And she pulls back Clark’s tie and tries to unbutton his shirt. Okay, now the audience is scared for me. But the trumpets give this huge blast, I jump back, and the whole audience feels like, “Whew! He dodged that bullet.” It was classic.

Of your numbers in the show, did you have a favorite song?

Oh, that’s a tough one. I loved opening the show with “Do-

ing Good.” I’d opened Fiorello! by singing “On the Side of the Angels” and felt good about the rhythm of singing the opening number. We had a lot of sight gags in “Doing Good,” like a phone booth following me around the stage, and my Clark Kent clothes flying to me on wires. It was great. And “The Strongest Man in the World” was such a powerful, emotional bit. I’ve had fans tell me that it broke their hearts when I sang that. It’s a good thing to be remembered for. And “Pow! Bam! Zonk!” was a gas. It was physical, we were fighting while we were singing, and it took everything you had to make that work. If I really have to pick, I’d pick “Pow! Bam! Zonk!”

I knew that was going to be a hit with the kids.

You took the role of Superman seriously, even signing backstage autographs for kids after the performances. A lot of actors wouldn’t have done this.

What motivated you to meet with these kids?

Becoming Superman for the kids who saw the show was the most important thing in the world to me. I’d stay in character, I’d give the kids advice, and I’d let them try to punch me in the stomach.

They didn’t know that I still had the flying harness on, so they’d feel like the Man of Steel was real. It was marvelous. You know what’s even better? I still hear from some of those kids today.

They’re middle-aged now, but they tell me they still remember how great it was to meet Superman. One of those fans, Toni Collins, runs my website for me now [Note: SupermanBobHoliday.com]. It’s good to know that my being Superman had a lasting impact on people.

What did you, as an actor, bring to the role of Superman?

I hope I brought my belief in the character. That’s what I tried to do more than anything else. I wanted the audience to believe in Superman. I wanted the kids who saw Superman to always try their best. And I wanted the adults who saw the show to smile and feel good.

Same question, but for Clark Kent?

Now, playing Clark was fun.

There was always this little secret between the audience and me.

They knew I was Superman and I knew I was Superman, but no one else knew that. So I played Clark like a timid little guy. I tried to shrink inside my own clothes.

But everyone out in the audience knew there was a big red “S” under that shrinking white shirt.

Who was more fun to play, Clark or Superman?

That’s just it, I was always playing Superman. Clark was the disguise, the secret. I got to share that secret with the folks in front.

But I was always Superman.

During the run of…It’s Superman, you did four matinees and five evening performances a week! You must have been a superman to keep up with that schedule! [laughs] Thanks for that! I was young, I was in shape, and I believed. I never missed a performance. I loved it all. This was what I’d waited my whole life for, and I was going to give it my all.

Despite mostly good reviews, It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman closed after 129 performances. There are a lot of theories as to why it didn’t click with audiences. What’s yours?

Michael, I’ve never understood why ticket sales fell off. I went to talk with Hal [Prince] about it after the show closed. He told me that it had nothing to do with me, that I’d done a good job. [Lyricist] Lee Adams once said that the mystery is really why any show succeeds. We had all the right elements. But I suspect that the popularity of the Batman TV show ate into our ticket sales.

People could see a super-hero on TV for free, so they didn’t see why they should pay to see one on stage.

It’s also the case that there was a lot of good Broadway that year. Some of the greatest Broad-

LEFT: Clark, don’t let meddling Max Mencken (Jack Cassidy) push you around!

From The Amazing World of Superman #nn, courtesy of John Trumbull.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

TOP: It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman’s Man of Steel and Lois Lane (Patricia Marand).

From The Amazing World of DC Comics #7. Superman TM & © DC Comics.

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Meanwhile, the citizens of Metropolis sing the praises of their favorite super-hero.

I read his book Still Me, and I was really touched by something he said. He talked about how every decade, someone new is called on to keep Superman alive. I’m still proud to have been that actor in the Sixties.

From The Amazing World of Superman #nn, courtesy of John Trumbull.

Superman TM & © DC Comics.

way shows were staged at the same time as Superman: Sweet Charity, Mame, Man of La Mancha, Hello Dolly!, Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel, Barefoot in the Park. We were in good company, but people can only buy so many theater tickets.

You played Superman offstage in a handful of appearances, from TV’s I’ve Got a Secret to an Aqua Velva commercial.

Any stories to share about those extracurricular Superman appearances?

Working with Steve Allen [on I’ve Got a Secret] was a blast. The secret was that I was going to teach Steve how to fly. He went right with it. And they let him hang there like nobody’s business. Everyone was laughing and Steve played it to the hilt. And I still get a kick out of watching the episode [on my website]. You can see Bess Myerson flirting with me. I’m not sure I realized it at the time; after all, I was in character as Superman. But to watch it now is great.

And when I watch the Aqua Velva ad, I laugh at how my New York accent comes out so strong when I say, “Gooood.” You can’t always get the New York out of a boy, even when he’s supposed to be from Krypton!

I also got to play Superman again in 1967. Two different light opera companies staged revivals of the show, and both cast 204

me as Superman. Charles Nelson Reilly played the mad scientist Dr. Abner Sedgwick, and we palled around together in between shows. They used a crane to fly me over the stadium, and I was close to 100 feet in the air. I don’t know why I was never scared, but it’s good that the harness never broke in that production!

Are you aware that you played Superman more times than any other actor? In second place was George Reeves, who starred in 104 episodes of TV’s Adventures of Superman.

Not a lot of people realize that.

And because it was theater, with no filmed record, people really need to figure it out. So thanks for recognizing that!

It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman was performed on television in 1975. Were you asked to reprise your role?

Oh, no. By then I was over forty! I wouldn’t have been right for role at all. The Sixties were definitely my time.

Of the various screen actors who have played Superman, who’s your favorite, and why?

I think everyone’s favorite screen Superman is Christopher Reeve.

We all loved him, and he went through so much at the end of his life. He was a real hero in his real life. No one could surpass the trials he went through.

After you left show business you had a successful career as a custom home builder. Were any of your clients aware that you were once Superman?

Oh, sure. I started the business using a Superman-like figure in my ads! I wasn’t going to hide that. Eventually, though, I had made a big enough name for myself as a builder. I decided it was time to stand on my own two feet, and I redesigned the logo.

A half-century after It’s a Bird…

It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, fans like me keep asking questions about it. Its revivals aside, what is it about the musical that has maintained the public’s interest for so long?

Great question. I’ve never really thought about that before. I’ve always grateful that people remember me, and I didn’t stop to ask why. I hope it’s because I helped them to believe in everything that Superman stands for. I hope I touched some lives. I know that the music was great, so that’s got to be a part of it.

But here’s the best part.

After fifty years, fans still touch my heart. People saw me and remember me, and they take the time to reach out. Other people have only seen my website or heard the cast album, and they still reach out and say I meant something to them. That’s magic.

That’s good theatre. That means that all of us, Hal, the boys [Charles Strouse and Lee Adams], Patty, Jack, and the rest of the cast, we were part of something lasting. What could be better?

Very special super-thanks to Toni Collins and John Trumbull.

Mr. Holiday passed away on January 27, 2017, as this book was going into production; this was his final interview.

TARZAN

TV’s Most Famous Swinger Guess what happened to Tarzan during the Swinging Sixties? He got Bonded.

For the general public, whose impression of the Ape Man was rooted in the black-and-white Johnny Weissmueller oldies that were weekend staples on local TV stations, Tarzan was a beefy but big-hearted family man with a limited vocabulary. But for two television seasons (and reruns after that), NBC’s Tarzan gave Camp Age audiences an erudite Lord of the Jungle, in the spirit of the character as presented by Tarzan’s creator, author Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In the late Fifties, executive producer Sy Weintraub began reshaping Tarzan’s image in a franchise of films, shooting in exotic locations and dropping the hackneyed “Me Tarzan, you Jane” dialogue—dropping Jane, as well—in favor of an articulate, sophisticated hero who singlehandedly took on megalomaniacs and cutthroats. Weintraub’s Tarzan was Agent 007 in a loincloth. After filming Tarzan movies with he-men Gordon Scott and Jock Mahoney, Weintraub cast former football star Mike Henry—an early contender for the TV Batman—who bared most of his 228-pound, six-foot-three frame as the Ape Man in three Tarzan movies filmed back to back in 1965 (but released one per year from 1966–1968), beginning with 1966’s Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. During the early Sixties, while still active in football, Henry had moonlighted in bit parts on Warner Bros. TV series including Hawaiian Eye and Surfside Six. As the Ape Man, he withstood filming in inclement weather conditions, multiple physical injuries, dysentery, a liver infection, food poisoning, and even a monkey bite when an attack from a primate “co-star” caused him to require twenty facial stitches. Enough was enough, he decided, suing Weintraub and refusing to reprise the Ape Man role in Weintraub’s next project, the weekly Tarzan TV series.

That role went to future movie Doc Savage and Miss America pageant host Ron Ely, a trim, six-footthree Adonis who at first was hesitant to become TV’s most famous swinger. He reminisced in a 2013 interview, “I met with them on a Monday and when they offered me the role I thought: ‘No way do I want to step into that bear trap. You do Tarzan and you are stamped for life.’ Was I ever right! But my agent convinced me it was a quality show and was going to work. So on the Friday I was on a plane to Brazil to shoot the first episode.”

NBC’s Tarzan premiered during the Fall of 1966, airing on Friday nights at 7:30 p.m., opposite CBS’ Wild, Wild West and ABC’s Green Hornet and the first half of the hour-long Time Tunnel (kids had

tough choices in those pre-DVR days). Ely’s Lord of the Jungle took on ivory poachers, warlords, big game hunters, diamond thieves, and the wild’s most dangerous beasts, fearing no stunt and enduring sweltering temperatures on location shoots in South America and Mexico as well as lion bites and broken bones. The hero was a big brother to the young orphan Jai, played by Manuel Padilla, Jr., and a trusted friend to the local tribes. Ely’s bronzed, lithe Tarzan looked nothing like Weissmueller’s chunky Ape Man—as my wife cooed recently when watching Tarzan episodes on DVD with me, the handsome actor, whose skimpy costume left little to the imagination, was “easy on the eyes,” adding sex appeal to the show without crossing the line that would send the network’s Standards and Practices folks off the deep end. Although it offered a fresh look at the classic hero, NBC’s Tarzan did have two carryovers from the Weissmueller classics: Tarzan’s sidekick, Cheetah the chimp, and Weissmueller’s iconic jungle cry.

Gold Key Comics’ popular Tarzan comic-book series at the time was graced by extraordinary painted covers by George Wilson, and adaptations of ERB material courtesy of writer Gaylord Du Bois and one of Tarzan’s all-time great artists, Russ Manning. But the media popularity of TV’s Tarzan was too great to ignore, so editor Chase Craig introduced the Ape Man’s “TV Adventures”—every third issue of the title featured a photo cover and a story set within the TV continuity. Du Bois continued on as the writer of the TV Tarzan tales, with artists Doug Wildey (Tarzan #162, Dec. 1966), Dan Spiegle (#165, Mar. 1967), and Alberto Giolitti (#168, June 1967 and #171, Sept.

TV Tarzan Ron Ely, on the cover of Gold Key’s Tarzan #162 (Dec. 1966).

TM & © ERB, Inc.

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Original art page from Tarzan #162, with a solid Ely likeness by artist Doug Wildey.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © ERB, Inc.

RIGHT: Aurora’s Tarzan model kit.

TM & © ERB, Inc.

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1967) providing excellent work on the stories but a so-so job at rendering actors’ likenesses.

Kids reading competitor DC Comics saw a back-cover ad, drawn by Murphy Anderson, promoting Aurora’s Tarzan model kit with a “Me Tarzan, you build!” tagline.

Other Tarzan merchandising of the era included an Aladdin lunch box, a Colorforms cartoon kit, a Big Little Book, and a magic rub-off coloring kit.

NBC was taking Tarzan seriously, but others scampered to lampoon him. A 1967 pilot called Walter of the Jungle, starring Jonathan Daly, Bernard Fox, Rose Marie, and Nipsey Russell, was made but failed to be picked up, and another proposed spoof, Alfred of the Amazon, went nowhere. Tarzan made chest-beating appearances in the parody comics, even managing a Tarzan/Monkees gag in an issue of Marvel’s Not Brand Echh where the Ape Man grunted, “People say I monkey around.” Of course, were it not for the TV Tarzan’s popularity, Saturday morning’s George of the Jungle and Ray Stevens’ “Gitarzan” might never have been produced.

That popularity was short-lived, but Ron Ely’s Tarzan succeeded at introducing a literate Jungle Lord to the general public.

It also put Tarzan on equal footing with the era’s superheroes and secret agents, quite a feat for a guy without shoes. The ultimate irony of the Camp Age Tarzan, however, was its tone: While every other hero was going ape, Tarzan was the most civilized fella around.

THE GREEN HORNET

TV’s Non-Campy Camp Age Crimefighter Trivia time: When did William Dozier’s Batman and Green Hornet first appear together?

You might guess in the Season Two Batman episodes guest-starring the Green Hornet and Kato (“A Piece of the Action” and “Batman’s Satisfaction,” original airdates 3/1/67 and 3/2/67), where both Dynamic Duos tangle, then team up, with each other as they try to stamp out the counterfeiting Colonel Gumm.

You’d be wrong.

Of course…! Now you remember! Earlier that season, the Green Hornet and Kato made “Batclimb” window cameos in the Batman episode “The Spell of Tut” (original airdate 9/28/66).

But you’d be wrong there, too.

It happened during the summer of 1966, in the Batman movie that was shot not long after the first season of Batman wrapped. You didn’t see the Green Hornet on screen, but you heard his voice—Texas drawl, and all.

Confused? You certainly don’t remember the Green Hornet, secretly millionaire playboy/crusading big-city media mogul Britt Reid, sounding like a good ol’ boy. But in Batman (the movie), he did, as his portrayer, actor Van Williams, provided the offscreen voice of one of Texas’ favorite sons, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a phone chat with the Caped Crusader in that cult classic.

That accent came naturally for Williams—born VanZandt Jarvis Williams—a Fort Worth, Texas, native who was raised on a cattle ranch and worked with a drama coach to lose his twang for Hollywood.

His father remarked in a 1966 TV Guide interview that he thought his son would never “do anything but ranch. He’s about as good a cattleman as I know.” While Pop Williams may have had a hard time accepting his boy playing a comic super-hero, it might have salved the wound if he knew that the Green Hornet was related to the galloping do-gooder the Lone Ranger, both masked men being the radio-drama creations of George W. Trendle and Fran Striker.

That type of shared continuity shadowed Williams, whether or not he was even aware of it. Beyond the Green Hornet/Lone Ranger and Green Hornet/Batman connections (the Batman crossover episodes established that Britt Reid and Bruce Wayne were longtime rivals), the actor’s first major TV role, as investigator Kenny Madison, was part of a universe of handsome-detective shows produced by Warner Bros. from the late Fifties through the early Sixties, all airing on ABC. Van

Williams, Richard Long, and Andrew Duggan were handsome detectives in New Orleans in Bourbon Street Beat, which premiered in 1959, the same season Warner Bros. debuted Hawaiian Eye, about handsome detectives in the newly minted fiftieth state.

Bourbon Street Beat lasted only one season, but Williams’ Madison character was relocated to the ABC startup Surfside 6, about handsome detectives on a houseboat… and Richard Long’s Bourbon Street Beat character Rex Randolph found a home on the popular 77 Sunset Strip, about handsome detectives in L.A. So when Bill Dozier grabbed The Green Hornet as his follow-up to Batman, the charismatic 32-yearold Van Williams, who had logged several years as a handsome detective on TV, was Dozier’s choice to play his masked handsome detective on his new series. Williams took a couple of days to mull over the offer before accepting it, but then committed himself to the role, sold on Dozier’s decision to play The Green Hornet straight, not campy like Batman. As Dozier told the L.A. Times in its April 30, 1966 edition, “It would be foolhardy to try to copy Batman. Batman is in a class by itself and any imposter would fall on its Batface.” Williams told TV Guide in 1966, “The Green Hornet is a pretty dead-pan guy.”

The series hurried into production—just like Dozier’s Batman had, not long before. In addition to Batman’s twice-weekly and The Green Hornet’s weekly schedules, Dozier was executive-producing a third weekly series for ABC for a Fall 1966 launch: The Tammy Grimes Show, a sitcom starring Broadway actress Tammy Grimes as a wealthy wastrel. Dozier

was also developing pilots for Dick Tracy and Wonder Woman, coveting more comic-based properties to strike while the Bat-iron was hot.

The Green Hornet premiered at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 9, 1966. Dozier set the tone of the show with his narration, opening each episode with: “Another challenge for the Green Hornet, his aide Kato, and their rolling arsenal, the Black Beauty. On police records a wanted criminal, the Green Hornet is really Britt Reid, owner-publisher of the Daily Sentinel—his dual identity known only to his secretary and the District Attorney. And now, to protect the rights and lives of decent citizens, rides the Green Hornet.”

Then came the show’s jazzy theme song, an upbeat reworking of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” arranged by Billy May and performed by trumpeter Al Hirt.

Other than The Green Hornet’s opening narration by Dozier and its swinging score, the show was the polar opposite of Batman. Batman and Robin were “duly deputized” law officers, with Gotham City’s inept police force routinely turning to them.

The Green Hornet and Kato were outlaws, adopting that ruse to infiltrate crime cartels, then set them up for a fall. Batman mostly took place during the day, and the Batcave was lit up like a discotheque.

The Green Hornet mostly took place at night, and the garage where Kato maintained the duo’s wheels was dimly lit and threatening, with an eerie jade glow.

The sleek, ebon, gadget-loaded Batmobile looked like a hot rod. The sleek, ebon, gadget-loaded Black Beauty looked like a tank. Batman and Robin fought kitschy super-villains who seemed like rowdy frat boys and girls on a crime-spree spring break. The Green Hornet and Kato fought hired killers with silent guns, ruthless racketeers, and insurance scammers.

Other than gun moll Molly in the opening two-parter, no one ever died on Batman. On The Green Hornet, people lost their lives to gunshot wounds and leopard attacks. The fights on Batman were cartoonish, a splash of sound effects, surf music, and choreography. The fights on The Green Hornet were street-level and believable, from the Hornet’s swift punches and disorienting hornet-stings to Kato’s unpredictable, blur-of-motion kicks and chops.

Oh, you were wondering when I’d get around to Bruce Lee, the Chinese-American actor who introduced martial arts to a mainstream audience, weren’t you? Lee, a child actor in Hong Kong cinema, was performing martial-arts demonstrations in Southern California in the mid-Sixties when he caught the eye of Dozier, who cast him in his failed Charlie Chan pilot, Number One Son. Two years later, Dozier

Album cover to Al Hirt’s The Horn Meets “The Hornet,” depicting Van Williams as the Green Hornet with the chops-master trumpeter.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc.

LEFT: The Dynamic Duodark, on the photo cover of Gold Key’s The Green Hornet #1 (Feb. 1967).

TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc.

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The popular Black Beauty got its own Aurora model kit, among other merchandise.

TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc.

picked the 26-year-old Lee to play Kato. The POW! and ZOWIE! mock-fights that had swept school playgrounds were replaced by pretend-karate chops and kung-fu kicks, with boys emulating Kato’s lightningfast moves. In his dual role on The Green Hornet, Lee brought an air of dignity to Kato, Britt Reid’s manservant, and mesmerized viewers with his remarkable control of his body as Kato, the Green Hornet’s chauffeur and partner.

Joining Williams and Lee as the third “star” of The Green Hornet was the Black Beauty, the creation of Dean Jeffries, who customized the outlaw heroes’ “rolling arsenal” from a 1966 Chrysler Imperial. It was one of two iconic TV show cars produced by Jeffries that year, the other being The Monkees’ Monkeemobile.

Dozier was hopeful for another Batman ratings smash with The Green Hornet. A windfall of merchandising ac-

Among the many Hornet items buzzing into stores in 1966: playing cards, a Magic Rub Off playset, flicker rings, and the ultra-rare Green Hornet costume for Captain Action.

Courtesy of Heritage. The Green Hornet TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc. Captain Action TM & © Captain Action, LLC.

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companied the show: flicker rings sold in vedning machines, a Black Beauty model kit, a View-Master set, a bendy figure of the Green Hornet, a Colorforms playset, a lunch box, trading cards and stickers, three issues of a Gold Key comic-book series (written by Paul S. Newman and drawn by Dan Spiegle, all with photo covers), and a Green Hornet uniform for Captain Action are among the items now highly prized by collectors.

The Green Hornet failed to find its footing with a large viewership. Many super-hero-frenzied children watched the show religiously (like me), but big kids and adults still grooving the Batman Camp vibe were turned off by its gravity and tuned out. By its second and third episodes, The Green Hornet was ranked 53rd in the Nielsens. Its competition was fierce and seductive, with The Wild, Wild West and Tarzan luring viewers from different demographics who were fatigued by the burst of super-heroes on the screen.

This was not a good time for executive producer Dozier, who was spreading himself too thin. Early Season Two episodes of Batman did a freefall down the Nielsen Batpole from their lofty Top Ten perch of the previous season, and The Tammy Grimes Show was an embarrassing bomb, yanked off the air by ABC after only four episodes.

The Green Hornet had a tremendous amount of potential, but it was conceived at such a breakneck pace that characterization was virtually nonexistent.

As Van Williams remarked on the Friday @ 8/7 Central blog, “We really didn’t have time to develop anything except a stern guy who was out to do good. There was no scope to it.”

Despite these strikes against the show, ABC was interested in renewing The Green Hornet for a second season. Dozier lobbied for expanding the show to one hour for better character and dramatic development, but he didn’t have his heart in the fight, weary after a year of budgetary battles with the network over The Green Hornet’s skyrocketing costs and the problems with his other productions. The Green Hornet was cancelled after its first and only season, with a total of 26 episodes.

Van Williams, a self-professed “tightwad” (according to his 1966 TV Guide interview), held a variety of business and real estate interests and continued acting until 1982, but never fully placed his faith in the craft, admitting in 1966 that “I’d never count on it—it’s too harum-scarum.” Bruce Lee went on to become… well, Bruce Lee, international sensation, the star of martial-arts classics like Enter the Dragon, and a folklore legend after his death in 1973 at age 32.

But for a generation of kids like me, they were, and will always be, our Dynamic Duo-dark, the Green Hornet and Kato.

BATTY AND THE GREEN GRUMBLE The Green Hornet was a good guy pretending to be bad, but the Green Grumble was the real, rotten deal. So was his partner, Batty. They were the stars of Gold Key Comics’ “Batty and the Green Grumble” feature, a funny-animal take-off of Batman and the Green Hornet—but as goofy crooks—with Batty being a bat and the Grumble being a green hornet (although he looked more like a cartoon bee). Theirs was a back-up feature appearing in Little Monsters, Gold Key’s entry in the Sixties monster craze, a comedy title about Frankenstein-ish children ’Oribble Orvie and Awful Annie and their freaky family and friends. Batty and the Green Grumble’s strip ran from Little Monsters #6 (Oct. 1966) through 11 (Aug. 1967). The back-ups were reprinted in 1970 issues of Gold Key’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

DICK TRACY

Sixties Super-Cop Dick Tracy, Chester Gould’s squarejawed crime-crusher, could have easily turned in his badge and mothballed his yellow trenchcoat during the Swinging Sixties. After all, Tracy had been fingerprinting felons since 1931, and his generation of grim gangbusters had been replaced by glamorous gumshoes like those found on TV’s Surfside Six and 77 Sunset Strip.

Yet it was television that helped Dick Tracy earn a berth in Camp Age culture… with mixed results. In 1961, UPA, the cartoon house known for Mr. Magoo, that Jim Backus-voiced nearsighted roadhog-hater, produced 130 five-minute animated episodes of The Dick Tracy Show for syndication, from producers Henry G. Saperstein and Peter DeMet. The episodes were often shown in local markets’ children’s programs (in my case, it was on WSOC-TV’s Joey the Clown Show in Charlotte, North Carolina), and kids who watched those shows could become “Dick Tracy Crimestoppers”—and win a Crimestoppers badge, too!

Tracy’s cops-and-robbers noir world surely lent itself to animation. That was evident in the cartoon’s Untouchables-like intro, trailing Tracy’s police car— siren blazing—as it careened through the city, with the title “Dick Tracy” being machine gun-riveted onto the screen. The comic strip’s grotesque rogues’ gallery (Flattop, Pruneface, Itchy, B.B. Eyes, et al.) were also animation-ready, and the cartoon’s interstitial “Crimestoppers’ Tips” segments hosted by Tracy felt like a Chester Gould comic strip come to “life.”

But there were two problems with The Dick Tracy Show, the first being the secondary role of its title star.

Imagine tuning into Batman but watching the Caped Crusader disappear after dispatching Robin, Alfred, Batgirl, or Aunt Harriet on a mission. That was the premise of the Tracy cartoon shorts: Each episode opened with Tracy at his desk, receiving an intercom assignment from Chief Patton but summoning one of his operatives into action via a 2-way wrist radio call: “Dick Tracy calling (fill in the name of that episode’s character here)…”

Those operatives were the second problem with The Dick Tracy Show.

Original art, by an unknown artist, to Aurora’s Dick Tracy model kit.

Courtesy of Heritage. Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

LEFT: Panels from Batty and Green Grumble in “The Dud Diamond Deal” in Little Monsters #7.

Scan courtesy of Steven Thompson. © the respective copyright holder.

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A Dick Tracy picture jigsaw puzzle based upon the cartoon show.

Joe Jitsu is the Asian head inside the magnifying glass, Hemlock Holmes is the cartoon dog, and Go-Go Gomez is in the bottom left corner of the main image.

Courtesy of Heritage. Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

LEFT: Another Tracy cartoon show puzzle, this one including an image of Heap O’Calorie (under logo, at left). RIGHT: Tracy cartoon characters continued to be merchandised as late as 1968, as with these bendies from Multiple Toymakers.

Courtesy of Heritage. Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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They were goofballs strictly played for laughs, stereotypes considered funny at the time (at least by some white viewers): Go-Go Gomez, a diminutive Mexican detective with the thickest accent this side of Speedy Gonzales; Joe Jitsu, a Japanese martial artist who apologized while judo-tossing crooks (“So sorry!”); Hemlock Holmes, a buffoonish Keystone Kops character who happened to be a bulldog with a Cockney accent; and Heap O’Calorie, a spoof of raspy-voiced actor Andy Devine, a policeman with an uncontrollable appetite. In one fell swoop, The Dick Tracy Show managed to offend Hispanics, Asians, Brits, and people with eating disorders (and Andy Devine, too)!

Of course, the kids like me who watched these cartoons didn’t realize at the time that Go-Go Gomez and his pals were offensive. The characters’ designs were funny, as were their vocal characterizations and mannerisms, and television and the movies had no shortage of such stereotypes. But in the decades that have followed, sensitivity toward such ethnic portrayals has rendered The Dick Tracy Show untouchable by contemporary audiences.

The episodes concluded with Tracy arriving at the scene of the arrest and congratulating his agent for a job well done.

One wonders how this cartoon might have turned out if the same producers had dumped the slapstick characters and started each episode with “Calling Dick Tracy” instead of “Dick Tracy calling.”

The cartoon did help Chester Gould’s top cop grow a wider audience, with a barrage of merchandising following, including Dick Tracy puzzles, home movies of episodes, toy weapons from Mattel, a Soaky bubble bath figure, an Aurora model kit, and Ideal Toys’ handpuppets of Tracy, Hemlock Holmes, and Joe Jitsu. If you looked at the toy racks, you might’ve believed that the non-super Dick Tracy was one of those super-heroes starting to appear all over the place.

The animated Dick Tracy made another television appearance in 1965, joining forces with… Mr. Magoo! UPA’s 1964–65 cartoon The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, on NBC, placed the myopic miser in a variety of literary and fable settings, with Magoo encountering everyone from Noah to Robin Hood. In an episode airing February 6, 1965, “Dick Tracy and the Mob,” Tracy calls on Magoo to masquerade as a hoodlum in a ruse to snuff out some of Tracy’s foes (villains previously seen on The Dick Tracy Show).

Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip enjoyed a renaissance during the Sixties. Space-Age elements were added to the feature, including Magnetic Air-Cars (which looked like high-tech garbage cans), the Space Coupe, and an ongoing series of adventures on the Moon, where Tracy’s son Junior married Moon Maid—soon producing a daughter, Honey Moon.

Those sci-fi elements weren’t on the mind of television producer William Dozier when he set his sights on developing Dick Tracy as a live-action prime time series. Tracy was Dozier’s pre-Batman

Three screen captures from the ill-fated TV Dick Tracy pilot, featuring the show title, Dozier’s credit, and Ray MacConnell as Tracy. series choice, but when Tracy’s rights weren’t available at the time, he went for the Caped Crusader— and made history.

But after Batman became a hit and quickly begat The Green Hornet, Dozier finally was able to produce a Dick Tracy pilot. In the summer of 1966 he met with Chester Gould, and a deal was struck for Dick Tracy to be a co-production of Dozier’s Greenway Productions and 20th Century Fox Television, just like Batman.

The press, still high on Batmania, caught wind of Dozier’s Tracy live-action project. According to the Television Obscurities website, Chicago Tribune columnist Herb Lyon polled his readers for their choices to play Tracy. The top vote-getters were Chester Morris, best known for bringing novelist Jack Boyle’s crook-turned-crimebuster Boston Blackie to life in fourteen films during the Forties, and the versatile Victor Mature, a toga-wearing staple of Bible epics like Samson and Delilah and The Robe. Of the latter, Dozier told the Tribune, “[Mature] couldn’t be more wrong for the part.”

The Tracy lead went to actor Ray MacConnell, who spent the Sixties as one of the stars of the daytime drama The Edge of Night. MacConnell took a hiatus from that soap opera in mid-October 1966 to shoot the Tracy pilot. Also featured in the pilot were Ken Mayer as Chief Patton, Monroe Arnold as Tracy’s partner Sam Catchem, Jay Blood as Junior Tracy, and Jan Shutan as lady cop Lizz. Shown in the credits, but not acting in the pilot episode, were cast members Davey Davidson as Tess Trueheart Tracy and a very young Eve Plumb—soon to be forever known as Jan Brady—as Bonnie Braids. As with Batman and The Green Hornet, executive producer William Dozier was also Dick Tracy’s narrator.

In tone, Dick Tracy was an amalgam of Dozier’s darker Green Hornet and campy Batman. Directed

by Larry Peerce, the half-hour pilot, titled “The Plot to Kill NATO,” was written by Hal Fimberg. It involved Victor Buono as Mr. Memory, the episode’s “Special Guest Villain” (a guest-star gimmick borrowed from Batman—and a villain borrowed from Batman, too, since viewers knew the scenery-chewing Buono as King Tut), masterminding the kidnapping of ambassadors headed for a peacekeeping NATO mission.

Chief Patton called in—no, not Joe Jitsu, thank goodness, but Dick Tracy, and with the no-nonsense Tracy on the case, NATO would soon be forgetting Mr. Memory.

The Dick Tracy credits were similar to Batman’s opening, featuring animation and cartoon headshots that dissolved into the live-action versions of the characters. Batman’s Bat-Signal credits motif was parroted with Tracy’s squad car’s floodlight, flashing Dozier’s Executive Producer title at the end of the opening credits as well as a silhouette of Tracy’s identifiable profile behind the end credits. Dick Tracy’s theme song was composed and performed by beach favorites the Ventures, but its pulsing, onthe-prowl guitar rhythm would have been better serviced without its ridiculous lyrics: “Dick Tracy, he’s a good cop.” The end credits also noted, “Based on an Idea and Characters by Chester Gould and Henry G. Saperstein,” Saperstein being one of the producers of the UPA Dick Tracy cartoon.

Hopes were high for Dozier’s Dick Tracy—it was anticipated to be a mid-season replacement, and at least one merchandising item, a Marx Toys bagatelle (plastic pinball game), was produced bearing the likenesses of the show’s cast. But Dick Tracy’s timing could not have been worse, as the bottom was falling out of Dozier’s world, with Batman dropping in the ratings, The Green Hornet underperforming, and The Tammy Grimes Show flopping. As a result, both ABC and NBC passed on the Dick Tracy pilot, and Ray MacDonnell stuck with soaps, following The Edge of Night with a forty-year stint as Dr. Joe Martin on All My Children.

Dozier’s Dick Tracy was a promising cop show that unfortunately didn’t get a chance (Tracy should have busted Tammy Grimes for her role in ruining his series’ chances). One wonders how the pop-culture world would have differed if Tracy had received the green light and gone on to enjoy a long run. Would the era’s super-stars like Lee Marvin and up-and-comers like Charles Bronson have guest-starred as Chester Gould’s rogues’ gallery?

Would there have been a Batman/Dick Tracy crossover (imagine a Joker/ Flattop team-up)? And with Eve Plumb appearing as Bonnie, who instead would’ve whined “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” on The Brady Bunch?

Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Dick Tracy TV show © Greenway Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, Chicago Tribune and New York News Syndicate.

Marx Toys’ Dick Tracy pinball game, a rare tie-in to the unreleased Dick Tracy pilot.

Courtesy of Heritage. Dick Tracy TM & © Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Dick Tracy TV show © Greenway Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, Chicago Tribune and New York News Syndicate.

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RIGHT: Bill Dozier’s superhero kiss of death: his 1967 Wonder Woman TV pilot.

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

Wonder Woman TV show © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

WHO’S AFRAID OF DIANA PRINCE?

William Dozier’s Wonder Woman Pilot

RIGHT: Standard Sixties silliness in DC Comics’ Wonder Woman comic books. Covers

by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Perhaps the wildest and looniest of DC Comics’ midSixties’ series was Wonder Woman, helmed by writer/ editor Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. This was an era of continuity-confusing characters (Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot), nutty storylines (“I Married a Monster,” “Wonder Woman— Gorilla”), an attempt to recapture the charm of the Golden Age, and embarrassingly bad new super-villains (the Phantom Fisher-Bird, Paper Man, the Crimson Centipede). For fans of Camp, this era of Wonder Woman certainly has its charm, but for those devoid of a funnybone, it’s tough to imagine anything worse.

Except for the 1967 Wonder Woman television pilot, that is.

Another of Batman executive producer William Dozier’s grab-’em-up comics-to-TV projects, Wonder Woman was one colossal mess. As reported by Les Daniels in his book Wonder Woman: The Complete History, Bob Kanigher was called into DC publisher Jack Liebowitz’s office to discuss Dozier’s desire to turn Wonder Woman into his next Batman. “Wonder Woman is already [C]amp,” a defiant Kanigher contended.

Yet Dozier sallied forth, lassoing MAD Magazine writers Stan Hart and Larry Siegel into penning a Wonder Woman pilot script titled “Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?,” its title playing off the then-recent film version of the play Who’s Afraid

of Virginia Woolf?, a movie co-starring the bawdy, beautiful, and bickering Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Hart and Siegel’s Wonder Woman is Captain Nice as the Amazing Amazon. Diana Prince lives at home with her magpie mother, who’s mortified that her daughter—a girl of “her age”—isn’t married.

The harping Mama Prince nags her daughter to eat (“Where do you think all that strength comes from?

Those gods?? My cooking!”) and doesn’t want her to go into action during a thunderstorm (“This is no kind of night for you to be flying around in that outfit of yours”). The conceit of the show is that Wonder Woman is actually a plain Jane, and that her legendary beauty of Aphrodite is only in her mind. So when Diana finally changes into Wonder Woman, we see an average-looking gal in a baggy star-spangled swimsuit, while she sees a perfectly proportioned knockout who fills her costume better than anyone this side of Lynda Carter. This scenario is played out in front of a mirror, as Diana/WW primps and postures to a refrain of “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” with her imagined ideal WW posing back at her. (Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.)

Dozier shot only four minutes and 45 seconds of the pilot as test footage. It opens with a low-budgeted title card reading “Ellie Wood Walker as,” cutting to the cover of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman #156 (Aug. 1965), the first issue of the comic to herald its re-creation of its Golden Age. That cover depicts Wonder Woman bound to a dartboard, with giant darts perilously hurtling her way, ironically suggesting the danger the heroine was about to face in this nowin Hollywood adaptation. The short pilot was sufficient to prove to anyone who had the misfortune of watching it that this was a bad direction for a Wonder Woman show.

The cast was not to blame for this misfire. Playing the “real” Wonder Woman (in the mirror) was Linda Harrison, who soon would attract the attention of Charlton Heston in her iconic role as Nova in the 1968 sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes. Playing the

of Diana Prince? She went on to bit parts in the films Targets and Easy Rider before dropping out of Hollywood and, apparently, off the face of the Earth.

The writers weren’t entirely to blame for this misfire, either. Hart and Siegel’s not-quite-a-Wonder Woman concept might have worked as a MAD parody, or as a Carol Burnett sketch, the latter of which might have happened since both writers later worked on that show.

This one’s failure rested on the shoulders of its executive producer. Dozier set his sights on becoming the Irwin Allen of comic-based television but was attempting to produce too much, too quickly. And in the case of Wonder Woman, he lacked a clear understanding of the character’s virtues.

Could TV’s Wonder Woman have worked, if played straight? Obviously, in the Seventies we learned the answer to that question, but it’s interesting to ponder the missed opportunity of a 1967 Wonder Woman action series starring Linda Harrison— or even Ellie Wood Walker, for that matter. Gender trailblazers like Pussy Galore, Emma Peel, and Honey West had opened the door for such a treatment. Too bad William Dozier’s misstep bolted it shut.

LEFT: Screenshots from the Wonder Woman pilot, showing Ellie Wood Walker as Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, Maudie Prickett as her mother, and Linda Harrison as the mirror Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

Wonder Woman TV show © Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television/DC Comics.

It wasn’t all bad for the Amazon Princess during the Camp Age! She enjoyed a merchandising wave including an Aurora model kit, a Super Queens figure from Ideal, and a board game.

Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

doting mother was Maudie Prickett (not Hope Summers, as Daniels stated in his Wonder Woman book), one of the most durable character actresses of Sixties’ television and the possessor of its most tightly wound hair bun; you might remember her as the maid-next-door pal of the title star of Hazel, and she also portrayed no end of usually one-off characters on programs including The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. And who was Ellie Wood Walker, the pilot’s Diana Prince/“ugly” Wonder Woman? Wood had only one screen credit prior to Wonder Woman as part of the ensemble movie cast of The New Interns, director John Rich’s 1964 sequel to the hospital drama The Interns. Wood was an attractive newcomer with a flair for comedic timing, and deserved a better vehicle than Who’s Afraid 213

Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Underdog #1 (Mar. 1975). TM & © Classic Media.

SATURDAY MORNING SUPER-HEROES Cartoons’ Coolest Camp Age Crime-Crushers

Long before streaming, DVRs, and binge watching— before VCRs, even—there was Saturday morning, a hallowed time for children. This was when television’s three networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC—devoted a programming block to kids, no grown-ups allowed!

Mom and Dad slept in on Saturdays while electrified boys and girls vaulted out of bed, gobbled bowls of sugar-laced breakfast cereals, and binge watched— Sixties style!—animated cartoons and occasional live-action shows tailored specifically for them. This now-archaic Saturday morning demographic courtship dated back to the movie serials of the Forties and Fifties, when theaters were crammed with screaming pre-teens frenzied by a deluge of adventure and comedy shorts.

Beginning in 1966, comic-book ads touting the TV networks’ Saturday morning line-ups were one of the funnybook fan’s most anticipated annual events.

These promos, illustrated and lettered in the style of the comics themselves, whetted appetites by announcing the new super-hero and comedy animated series that would be premiering in September.

Second only to Saturday morning as a television block for children was the weekday afternoon. Having thrown the kiddies a bone on Saturdays, in the afternoons the major networks catered to stay-at-home 214

mothers addicted to the guiding light of daily soap operas, which filled the dark shadows of the days of their lives with searches for tomorrow until the edge of night (dinnertime). Luckily, independent TV channels picked up the slack, distracting schoolkids from their homework by airing syndicated cartoons and live-action adventure shows. (Ever noticed how both soap operas and adventure cartoons feature roguish bad guys with eyepatches?)

Some of the credit for the wave of campy superheroes of Sixties animated television must go to Gene Deitch and Jay Ward. In 1957, Deitch began producing Tom Terrific, a (barely) animated series of shorts for Terrytoons, aired as part of the Captain Kangaroo morning children’s show on CBS. Tom was a silly, shape-shifting super-hero who wore a funnel hat, palled around with the apprehensive Mighty Manfred, the Wonder Dog, and fought the “rotten to the core” Crabby Appleton. In 1959, Ward introduced the world to Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose in an ABC series originally titled Rocky and His Friends. Like Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes theatrical shorts that preceded it, Ward’s show took cartoons and applied layers of humor that would appeal to viewers of all ages—even adults. While Rocky and His Friends changed titles and networks over the years, its characters (some of which would break out into their own shows) and ready-for-primetime voice talent (Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees, Daws Butler, Hans Conried, Edward Everett Horton, and Charles Ruggles) made the series a classic. Also predating the Camp Age was Mighty Mouse, Terrytoons’ former star of theatrical shorts whose Mighty Mouse Playhouse had been a Saturday morning staple on CBS since 1955.

The advent of cable television’s round-the-clock children’s networks, followed by TV on demand, choked the life out of these beloved pop-culture rituals. Today, the once-revered Saturday morning is the domain of golf and weekend editions of news programs, and afternoon is home to sassy TV judges.

This section of Hero-A-Go-Go dials back to the Sixties, when many of our favorite super-heroes and secret agents originated not in the comic books, but on the flickering images of our televisions.

BATFINK First Appearance: Batfink, syndicated, 4/21/66 Number of episodes: 100 Secret Identity: none Super-powers: steel-reinforced bat-wings, supersonic sonar radar Catchphrase: “Your bullets cannot harm me—my wings are like a shield of steel!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Hugo A-Go-Go, Skinny Minnie, Daniel Boom, Fatman, Kitchy Koo, Queenie Bee, Judy Jitsu, Brother Goose

Batfink © Hal Seegar Productions.

Synopsis: Hal Seegar Productions’ spoof of TV’s Batman also borrowed its martial-artist chauffeur from The Green Hornet (Karate, a dimwitted, bucktoothed Asian stereotype) and its star’s name from “Big Daddy” Ed Roth’s hot rod character Rat Fink.

Batfink—“that valiant vanquisher of vile violence”—is a crimefighting cartoon bat who operates from his split-level cave until called into action by the Chief via his Hotline, a Bat-shaped TV monitor. Karate drives Batfink’s vehicle, the Battillac (which is actually a Volkswagon bug with batwing fins).

Frank Buxton voiced Batfink, with Len Maxwell co-starring as both Karate and the narrator. Batfink’s six-minute episodes are known for their fast pacing and reliance upon reused footage, plus their liberal use of TV and comic-book Batman-isms including SFX graphics and “Meanwhile” captions.

Batman’s legion of lawyers might have scared off publishers interested in producing a Batfink comic book, as did the character’s visual similarity to Mighty Mouse (both wore yellow and red costumes), but Batfink was the subject of a 1967 Halloween costume and a pinback button.

COOL MCCOOL First Appearance: Cool McCool, NBC, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 40 Cool McCool and 20 Harry McCool shorts shown three per episode for 20 total episodes Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: none Catchphrase: “Danger is my business!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Owl and Pussycat, Dr. Madcap and Greta Ghoul, Jack-in-the-Box, the Rattler, Hurricane Harry Synopsis: Cool McCool was show co-creator Bob

Kane’s animated answer to Get Smart, which premiered in primetime a season earlier, mixed with a liberal dose of Batman— a transforming Coolmobile, a young sidekick (Breezy), and wacky super-villain analogs of Bat-foes (the Owl = the Penguin, Pussycat = Catwoman, Dr. Madcap = Mad Hatter, Jack-in-the-Box = the Joker).

Co-creating the show with Kane was King Features’ Al Brodax, the man behind the made-fortelevision Popeye cartoons and the Beatles animated series.

Cool is cool in appearance, with a mod haircut, trendy trenchcoat, and bellbottoms, plus a cat-whiskers moustache that prickles whenever danger is near (like the Elongated Man’s nose, which twitches at the sign of a mystery). He is also cool in demeanor, nonchalantly strolling through whatever bombs and weapons his enemies toss his way. But he is inept in deed, bumbling through his crime-crushing while still managing to save the day.

His assignments come from Number One, the big boss of Secret, Inc., whose face is always hidden from the viewer, but whose puffs of cigar smoke punctuate his words and emotions.

Two Cool McCool segments were shown in each episode, bookending a Harry McCool short starring Cool’s dad and brothers Tom and Dick McCool in goofy antics in the vein of the old Keystone Kops shorts. Bob McFadden provided the voice of Cool, with the majority of the other voices coming from Chuck McCann.

Box illustration by an unidentified artist for a 1990 videocassette collection of Cool McCool.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Cool McCool TM & © King Features.

COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE First Appearance: Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, syndicated, 1960 Number of episodes: 130 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: none Catchphrase: “Courageous Cat to headquarters!

Courageous Cat to headquarters!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Frog (Chauncey Frog), Professor Shaggy Dog, Robber Rabbit, Black Cat, Foxy the Fox, the Great Hambone, Big Shot and Little Shot Synopsis: Bob Kane was comicdom’s ultimate idea man and dealmaker. Luckily for him, he had a secret cave full of ghostwriters and ghost-artists willing (at the time) to flesh out his ideas while Kane retained the credit. In comics, Kane’s generic, domino215

sode… then quickly shifted gears once the episode began and a cartoon villain—usually the ubiquitous Frog, voiced as an Edward G. Robinson gangster impression—began hamming it up. Dal McKennon voiced both title characters; many sources, including my own The Batcave Companion (co-written with Michael Kronenberg), had previously credited Bob McFadden for Minute Mouse’s voice, which has since been proven erroneous by McFadden’s own admission. Despite their repetitiveness, the cartoons, each averaging five minutes in length, were fun diversions and a playful take on Batman unseen like anything until William Dozier took charge of the property.

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse left the air in 1962, but resurfaced in 1966 once Batmania struck.

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse merchandise included the story album “Around the World in a Daze” from Simon Says Records, a sliding puzzle, and a Courageous Cat Halloween costume.

An undated commission of Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse

by Sheldon Moldoff.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse TM & © Trans-Artists Productions.

RIGHT: Fearless Fly co-starred in this 1966 Gold Key Comics Milton the Monster oneshot. © Hal Seegar Productions.

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masked, winged “Bat-Man” became the Batman we know once the uncredited (and long-suffering) writer Bill Finger ascribed certain characteristics, from a cowl with pointed bat-ears to a billowing, scalloped, batwing cape, as well as his boy wonder sidekick, which made the hero identifiable. Among the many artists who drew Batman comic books “as” Bob Kane was Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff, who quietly went along for the ride in 1960 when Kane brought Batman and Robin to television.

Wait a minute! Everyone knows that TV’s Batman premiered 1966, not 1960! Yet in 1960, Kane took his Batman and Robin idea and recycled it as a funnyanimal cartoon show: Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, a campy take on Batman and Robin long before anyone had heard of Adam West and Burt Ward.

Working with Sam Singer (The Adventures of Pow Wow, Sinbad Jr.) to bring the syndicated show to TV, Kane called upon his then-Number One Ghost to do most of the work. “Shelly, I need storyboards and [for you to] write the stories,” Moldoff remarked in a 1994 interview published in 2006 in Alter Ego vol. 3 #59. “I said I could handle it, and I did.”

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse are the protectors of Empire City, answering to a police chief (a bulldog), operating from a Catcave, driving a Catcar, and flying a Catplane in their war against silly supervillains prone to monologues and outrageous crimes (such as pulling heists with an atomic water pistol).

Instead of a gadget-loaded utility belt, Courageous Cat wields a gun (a weapon that Batman would never use!) that can fire just about anything (except bullets) needed to propel a story: adhesive tape, rope, ray beams, even the cartoon’s opening titles.

Speaking of the opening, that was Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse’s best moment. While the camera swept across the midnight sky over the sprawling Empire City, a walking bass line, trailed by a jazzy horn orchestration by composer Johnny Holiday, evoked the menacing mood of a Peter Gunn epi-

FEARLESS FLY First Appearance: The Milton the Monster Show, ABC-TV, 10/9/65 Number of episodes: 26 Secret Identity: Hiram Fly Super-powers: super-strength (“more powerful than a speeding rocket”), super-speed (“faster than a beam of light”), flight, and X-ray vision Catchphrase: “My glasses! Without them, I’m helpless!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Dr. Goo Fee and Gung Ho, Ferocious Fly, Spider Spiter, Fatty Karate, Lady Deflylah, Napoleon Bonafly Synopsis: Hal Seegar Productions’ counterpart to Hanna-Barbera’s Atom Ant, Hiram Fly, during times of trouble, darts into a matchbox, dons his supersonic helmet and eyeglasses, and emerges as Fearless Fly. Flopping the cliché of the bespectacled alter ego removing his eyeglasses to become a super-hero, Fearless Fly relies upon his specs for his powers.

Bob McFadden voiced Fearless Fly and his chief adversary, mad scientist Dr. Goo Fee, and Beverly Arnold voiced the hero’s girlfriend, Flora Fly. In addition to appearing as an animated short on The Milton the Monster Show, Fearless Fly shared a 1966 Gold Key one-shot comic book with Milton. He was also featured on a sliding puzzle, a plastic kite, and bubble gum.

The first of the two-issue run of George of the Jungle from Gold Key Comics.

TM & © Bullwinkle Studios.

GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE First Appearance: George of the Jungle, ABC, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 17 Secret Identity: none Super-powers: above-average strength, belowaverage intelligence Catchphrase: “Watch out for that tree!” (a frequent warning to George) Rogues’ Gallery: Tiger Titherage and Weevil Plumtree, Dr. Chicago, Ungawa the Gorilla God Synopsis: If Ron Ely’s Tarzan made Johnny Weissmueller’s Ape Man look dumb, then the numbskull George of the Jungle made Weissmueller’s Tarzan seem brilliant by comparison. Created by Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Jay Ward and Bill Scott and based on an idea by writer Allan Burns, George of the Jungle is the most famous of Tarzan spoofs, its tympani-driven theme song permanently drummed into the popculture psyche.

George of the Jungle was the headliner of a half-hour show featuring three six- or seven-minute shorts, the others being super-hero parody Super Chicken and racer Tom Slick. Jay Ward hired composer Stan Worth and lyricist Sheldon Allman to compose themes for all three cartoons, which they did in a three-hour window in one afternoon.

George (voiced by Bill Scott) lives in a treehouse with his mate, Ursula (June Foray), called “Fella” by the jungle dunce. The ape man’s best friend is his dog-like elephant Shep, with an academic gorilla named Ape and a crowing Tooky Tooky bird being his other companions. George is dispatched onto missions by District Commissioner Alistair, voiced by the versatile Paul Frees, who also played Ape, effecting an impression of Oscar®–winning English actor Ronald Colman for the talking gorilla. George of the

Jungle’s main shtick was George’s vine-swinging into the colossal trees.

In 1969, Gold Key Comics published two issues of George of the Jungle, each featuring a Paul Fung, Jr.-illustrated stories. George has since been revived in live action and in animation.

HASHIMOTO-SAN First Appearance: Hashimoto-San, theatrical short, 9/6/59; first aired on television as part of The Hector Heathcote Show, NBC, 10/5/63 Number of episodes: 14 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: judo master Catchphrase: “I am Japanese housemouse.”

Rogues’ Gallery: numerous cats Synopsis: Created and directed by Bob Kuwahara, the Tokyo-born, one-time Disney animator, Terrytoons’ Hashimoto-San was, at first glance, a cartoon about a mouse martial-artist. Actually, Kuwahara’s Hashimoto shorts were a primer in Japanese culture for an American audience that had previously viewed the Land of the Rising Sun as a wartime enemy.

Hashimoto-San is the patriarch of a family that also includes wife Hanako, son Saburo, and daughter Yuriko, plus a mouse friend from the U.S.A. called G.I. Joe. The episodes’ formula generally involves slice-of-life activities at the House of Hashimoto, which are upended by a pesky cat soon put in his 217

Terrytoons’ judo master mouse is assisted by co-star Dinky Duck on the cover of their 1965 Gold Key one-shot.

TM & © CBS.

place by the mouse’s judo, which Hashimoto only uses for self- (or family-) defense. John Myhers voiced the characters, and Ralph Bakshi was one of the animators.

Uncredited writers and artists produced several Hashimoto-San comic-book short stories, first for Dell’s New Terrytoons title and later for the Gold Key one-shot Deputy Dawg presents Dinky Duck and Hashimoto-San #1 (Aug. 1965). Bakshi revisited an older Hashimoto-San in a 1987 episode of TV’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.

KING KONG RIGHT: The cartoon Kong was colored brown in his sole comic-book appearance in America’s Best TV Comics.

TM & © Classic Media.

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First Appearance: King Kong, ABC-TV, Tuesday, 9/6/66 in an hour-long premiere, followed by Saturday morning airings beginning 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 25 (26, counting the pilot) Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: Does whatever a King Kong can.

Catchphrase: “Rrrroooaarrrrr!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Kraken, Dr. Who, MechaniKong, Ulrich von Kramer, aliens, various prehistoric and giant creatures Synopsis: Dell Comics’ attempt to make super-heroes out of monsters may have bombed, but Rankin/ Bass Productions’ (originally Videocraft International) was a larger-than-life hit. Well, Rankin/Bass didn’t do it alone. Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, the men behind the perennially popular holiday classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the

Snowman, acquired the Kong license in 1966 from RKO General, Inc. for animation and film rights. They brought in illustrator Rod Willis and two MAD Magazine artists, Jack Davis and Paul Coker, Jr., for character designs, plus animation writers Bernard Cowan (known to many for his work on TV’s Spider-Man), Lew Lewis, and Ron Levy, to help create a new narrative for Skull Island’s menacing monarch from the 1933 movie classic. While American talent was behind the creation of the show, with scripts and voice talent being handled in the U.S., King Kong was produced in Japan by Toei Animation.

In this version of the lumbering legend, it is a boy, not a beauty, who tames the beast: Bobby Bond (voiced by Rudolph him/herself, Bille Mae Richards), a slightly younger “Jonny Quest,” the son of a famous research scientist, Professor Bond. The widowed Professor Bond (voiced by Carl Banas, Spider-Man’s Scorpion), like Dr. Benton Quest, keeps his family close by despite his perilous explorations of Mondo (a.k.a. Skull) Island, a remote land that time forgot.

The island is rife with gigantic beasts that by this time should have been relegated to natural history museums and Ray Harryhausen movies. Also along is Bond’s teenage daughter, Susan (voiced by Susan Conway), adding a little estrogen to this otherwise all-male cast, which also includes supporting cast member Captain Englehorn, the seaman who brought the Bonds to the island.

In the pilot episode, aired in primetime the Tuesday night before the show’s Saturday morning premiere, Bobby was imperiled by a T-Rex but saved

by King Kong, forming a Timmy-and-Lassie—no, make that Jimmy Sparks-and-Gigantor—dynamic that would propel the series’ adventures. This Kong was Boy’s Best Friend, a gentle giant that helped out Bobby and the Bonds around the island—but when-

ever Bobby was threatened, or whenever the pesky Sivana-like Dr. Who (no relation to the British sci-fi character) dropped in to make trouble, Kong would revert to the chest-thumping Eighth Wonder of the World that feared no man, beast, nor mechanical monster.

While the majority of King Kong’s episodes were set on the mysterious Mondo Island, a few took Kong and company offshore, including the pilot, whose climax in New York City featured Kong scaling the Empire State Building, and excursions to Egypt and Paris.

The King Kong show featured two Kong shorts, between which an episode of the secret agent comedy Tom of T.H.U.M.B. was shown. Tom is a three-inch-tall operative for T.H.U.M.B. (Tiny Human Underground Military Bureau) who lives in a filing cabinet drawer at the bureau and is dispatched onto missions by Chief Homer J. Chief. Tom’s sidekick is the similarly sized Asian martial artist Swinging Jack. Their formulaic adventures pitted them against goofy agents of M.A.D. (Maladjusted, Antisocial, and Darn mean).

What most people remember about King Kong is its theme. There was no shortage of surf music crimefighter and spy songs during the Sixties, but Kong’s theme was as different from the pack as the skyscraping super-hero himself. Composed by Maury Laws—who also delivered the jazzy Mad Monster Party score for Rankin/Bass that same year—the King Kong theme had an underlying sense of danger, punctuated by startling French horn flourishes that widened a few young eyes. As did so many themes of its day, King Kong told a story, through Jules Basspenned lyrics sung by a deep-throated male chorus of British studio musicians.

King Kong’s success kept it on the air for three seasons, followed by syndication. There was no shortage of King Kong merchandise, including a Milton Bradley board game, a playset, a Give-A-Show projector reel, and Mattel’s talking King Kong puppet and stuffed doll (with an affixed Bobby Bond figure which is difficult to find still intact with the Kongs remaining in the collector’s market). For much of this merchandise, King Kong was colored a kid-friendly blue instead of his ominous gray hue from television.

Curiously, there was no King Kong comic book during Kongmania, although Marvel Comics produced one Kong short story for its America’s Best TV Comics anthology, covered elsewhere in this volume.

The Rankin/Bass King Kong legacy includes two movies. In late 1966, Japanese film company Toho released Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, which was originally written as a King Kong movie. The next year, Toho’s King Kong Escapes, noted for its Kong vs. Mechani-Kong battle, was a live-action reimagining of the animated show, appropriating Dr. Who, his abduction of Kong, and his creation of a robotic Kong directly from the cartoon. The Bonds didn’t escape Saturday morning TV to join them,

The “hero of song and story” in his own comic book, The Mighty Hercules #1 (July 1963).

TM & © Classic Media.

but the movie featured a Susan Bond stand-in in the form of Lt. Susan Wilson (actress Linda Miller), the only person who could control Kong, returning the concept to its original, and frequently replicated, Beauty and the Beast parable status.

MIGHTY HERCULES First Appearance: The Mighty Hercules, syndicated, 9/1/63 Number of episodes: 122 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: super-strength, archery skills Catchphrase: “Olympia-a-a-a!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Daedalus, Wilhemine the Sea Witch, Murdis, the Mask of Vulcan Synopsis: Mixing gods and super-heroes wasn’t new by the time animator Joe Oriolo—the co-creator of Casper the Friendly Ghost and the creator of the Felix the Cat TV show—brought this Greek hero of myth to television, but The Mighty Hercules did it with style, despite its very limited animation. Also involved were writers George Kashdan and Jack Miller, better known as DC Comics editors.

With the backdrop of Ancient Greece, particularly the kingdom of Calydon, The Mighty Hercules stars the strongman whose magic ring boosts his strength to that of ten men (or so goes the catchy theme song written by Win Sharples and crooned by Johnny “I Can See Clearly Now” Nash). Instead of charging his ring with a power battery like Green Lantern, Hercules 219

TM & © Centaur Distribution Corporation.

raises his ringed finger skyward for a magic lightning charge from big daddy Zeus. Herc also relies upon his bow and arrow and his H-insignia super-shield during heavy-duty tussles. His main cohort is Newton the boy centaur, who has a habit of saying things twice, plus a cutesy satyr named Tewt and Herc’s trusty winged steed, Pegasus.

The episodes, which were five and a half minutes long, routinely ended with Hercules hauling a vanquished bad guy—usually evil wizard Daedalus— off to Mount Olympus for imprisonment (security must’ve been light, considering how many times Daedalus popped up).

Among the merchandising of The Mighty Hercules were two issues of a Gold Key comic-book series published in 1963, with contributions by writer Paul S. Newman and artist Reuben Grossman, a record album, a board game, and a toy magic ring bearing Herc’s “H” insignia.

ROCKET ROBIN HOOD First Appearance: Rocket Robin Hood, syndicated, 10/9/66 (in Canada), 1/2/67 (in the U.S.) Number of episodes: 53 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: super-archery (using “a quiver full of futuristic arrows”) Catchphrase: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” (These were the Merry Men, mind you.)

Rogues’ Gallery: Prince John, the Sheriff of N.O.T.T. (National Outer-space Terrestrial Territories), Dr. Medulla, Warlord of Saturn Synopsis: Rocket Robin Hood, a Space Age updating of the classic hero of lore, is set in the farflung future of 3000 and stars a direct descendent of the original rob-from-the-rich champion.

Robin’s rag-tag group of freedom fighters operates from Sherwood Forest Asteroid, “that futuristic headquarters of that swashbuckling, cosmic highwayman of the 30th Century.” The gallant, wavyhaired hero—who bears a startling resemblance to actor Dick Gautier (who would, in 1975, play Robin 220

Hood in the short-lived Mel Brooks sitcom, When Things Were Rotten)—is backed up by the Merry Men, a quirky band of brothers (and one sister) who are descended from the original Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Will Scarlet, etc. (think: Robin Hood and His Merry Men: The Next, Next, Next Generation). They soar around with jetpacks, “electro-quarterstaffs,” and individual spacecrafts, and often unite in Blackhawk-like formation.

Rocket Robin Hood’s blend of super-science and medieval customs presaged later projects such as the animated series Masters of the Universe and the comic-book maxiseries Camelot 3000, but the cartoon’s meager budget resulted in extremely limited animation and reliance upon character-introduction vignettes that slowed the pacing of the stories. In the original pilot for the series, Rocket Robin Hood wore a mask and space helmet, face- and headgear that were abandoned once the show got the greenlight.

What was most interesting about Rocket Robin Hood, however, did not occur on screen.

The behind-the-scenes workings of this Canadianproduced series, which ran three seasons, was as tumultuous as any conflict between the robust Robin and “the cruel space pirate,” Prince John. The Toronto-based Trillium Productions Ltd. produced the program, which was distributed by Krantz Films Inc., best known to comics fans for its Spider-Man cartoon. A legal dispute between Krantz’s Steve Krantz and Trillium’s Al Guest led to Krantz’s firing of the show’s original executive producer, animation pioneer and educator Shamus Culhane, and his hiring of The Mighty Heroes’ Ralph Bakshi, who created a darker tonal shift during Rocket Robin Hood’s second season, with monsters being used to supplant some of the clownish foes seen in earlier episodes. Animation on the final season of Rocket Robin Hood was produced by Bakshi from his New York studio, with voice work remaining at Trillium’s Toronto studio. Under Bakshi’s watch, the show’s animation became even more limited, with lots of black or frequently reused backgrounds becoming obvious to viewers, and enraging some fans. Yet as Ralph discusses in his interview elsewhere in this book, Steve Krantz’s slashing of the show’s budget was the cause of those changes, leaving Bakshi very little to work with. In retrospect, Bakshi doesn’t regard Rocket Robin Hood with fondness.

Chief voices on the show included Len Birman as Rocket Robin Hood (replaced by Len Carlson in the last episodes) and Bernard Cowan as the narrator. Fans of Krantz Films’ The Marvel SuperHeroes and Spider-Man cartoons will notice crosspollination of voice talent between those shows and Rocket Robin Hood, examples including Friar Tuck’s Paul Kligman (also the Red Skull and J. Jonah Jameson), Little John’s Ed McNamara (also the Titanium Man and the Rhino), and the Sheriff of N.O.T.T.’s Gillie Fenwick (also Baron Zemo, Radioactive Man, and the Leader).

ROGER RAMJET First Appearance: Roger Ramjet, syndicated, 9/11/65 Number of episodes: 156 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: the strength of twenty atom bombs (for twenty seconds), via Proton Energy Pills Quote: “Roger Ramjet, internationally famous good guy, devil-may-care flying fool, and inventor of the Proton Energy Pill, which (when taken as directed by a physician) gives me the strength of twenty atom bombs for twenty seconds, reporting for duty, sir!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Noodles Romanoff and N.A.S.T.Y. (National Association of Spies, Traitors, and Yahoos), Jacqueline Hyde, Red Dog the Pirate, Dr. Ivan Evilkisser, Tequila Mockingbird Synopsis: At first glance, producer/director Fred Crippen’s Roger Ramjet looks like a kid-friendly spoof of the classic Blackhawk comic book, with its super-hero flying ace and his sky team, the American Eagles Squadron (children named Yank, Doodle, Dan, and Dee). But Roger Ramjet was a full-tilt, playfully subversive cartoon with rapid-fire jokes and media references from writers Gene Moss and Jim Thurman that often whizzed over the heads of kids but skewered everything from the U.S. Congress, Hollywood, Tarzan, the Beatles, and even crossdressing.

General G.I. Brassbottom of the Pentagon’s Counter Bad Guy Division often summons Roger, a blustery bonehead whose unbridled patriotism makes Captain America look like Benedict Arnold, into action on the Hotline. Popping his Proton Energy Pill (PEP) to give him twenty seconds of super-powers, the inept Ramjet inevitably finds himself in some sort of jam that requires a rescue from his junior allies, whose rallying cry is, “One for all and all for one, the Eagles fly ’til the job is done!” The supporting cast includes Roger’s girlfriend, Lotta Love; Roger’s rival for Lotta’s affections, the Burt Lancasterinspired Lance Crossfire; and Roger’s acid-tongued mother, Ma Ramjet (a take-off of Jonathan Winters’

saucy old lady, Maude Frickert), who peps up herself with her Atomic Vitamins.

Anchoring this maelstrom of madness as Roger was the pre-Space Ghost Gary Owens. Another Roger Ramjet M.V.P. was Bob Arbogast, who voiced Noodles Romanoff, General Brassbottom, Ma Ramjet, and other characters; a renowned radio and television broadcaster, among Arbogast’s many distinctions was voicing the original “What would you do for a Klondike Bar?” commercial.

In the merchandising world, Roger Ramjet missed out on getting his own comic book (truth is, a comic might not have worked without Gary Owens’ voice), but among the collectibles produced were a frame tray puzzle, record album, coloring book, and ultra-rare bendable figure.

LEFT: The cast of Roger Ramjet, in a 1965 publicity cel.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Classic Media.

SINBAD JR. First Appearance: Sinbad Jr., syndicated, 9/11/65 Number of episodes: 102 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: super-strength and stamina Catchphrase: “That’s ‘mad doctor’ spelled backwards,” a line spoken by the narrator and various characters when introducing the evil scientist Rotcoddam.

Rogues’ Gallery: Rotcoddam, Blubbo, Captain Sly, Bad Guys Inc., the Mummy Synopsis: When young Sinbad—the son of the legendary sailor—yanks his belt, his waistline shrinks to Barbie proportions and his chest inflates into pecs that would shame Sixties fitness guru Jack LaLanne into hanging up his jumpsuit. Since the teen mariner and his wisecracking parrot Salty travel the Seven Seas, encountering bloodthirsty pirates and beasts, Sinbad Jr.’s super-strength often comes in handy.

This little-known cartoon was created by animator Sam Singer, best known for his Adventures of Pow Wow segments on Captain Kangaroo. Lukewarm response to Singer’s earliest Sinbad Jr. toons, along with legal problems related to a 1962 Sinbad animated project,

Dell’s Sinbad Jr. #1 from 1965, with cover art by Tony Tallarico. © AIP.

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led Singer to step aside and assume the role of executive producer. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were then hired to produce the five-minute Sinbad Jr. shorts, which were distributed by American International Television and rebranded Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Tim Matheson (then Mathieson) of Jonny Quest fame replaced Dal McKennon (better known as the voice of Gumby and as Filmation’s Archie) as Sinbad Jr. Animation super-star Mel Blanc voiced Salty. Watch a Sinbad Jr. episode and close your eyes while Junior and Salty are talking: It’s almost like listening to a conversation between Jonny Quest and Bugs Bunny!

Dell Comics produced three issues of a Sinbad Jr. comic book from 1965 through 1966, illustrated by Tony Tallarico.

mission to one of the six, who is then featured in his own short.

The Super 6 are:

THE SUPER 6

TM & © DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.

First Appearance: The Super 6, NBC, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 20 Heroes on call: Captain Zammo, Elevator Man, Granite Man, Magneto Man, Super Bwoing, Super Scuba Secret Identities: unrevealed Super-powers: flight, super-strength, time travel (Captain Zammo); size manipulation (Elevator Man); invulnerability, super-strength (Granite Man); magnetic attraction/repulsion (Magneto Man); moderately enhanced strength, laser eyebeams, flight via super-guitar (Super Bwoing); super-swimming and enhanced speed and strength (Super Scuba) Rogues’ Gallery: Coldpinky, Dr. Zabbo Teur, the Eel, the Slasher, the Man from T.R.A.S.H., the Karate Kid, the Fly

Synopsis: The Super 6 was actually six cartoon shows in one—seven, when you add its support feature, The Brothers Matzoriley.

The first television series produced by DePatieFreleng after their successful Pink Panther theatrical shorts, The Super 6’s premise involves the Super-Service, sort of a Heroes for Hire organization manned by the stogie-chomping Chief (a.k.a. Super Chief, voiced by Pat Carroll), who looks more like a bookie than the head of a super-organization. When a call for help is received, Super Chief assigns the 222

Super Bwoing: Even though this bumbling benchwarmer is considered “an apprentice with the firm,” the wiry Super Bwoing (voiced by Charles Smith, doing a Jimmy Stewart impression) is the star of The Super 6, his adventures opening each episode. His guitar, the Super Bwoinger, is his mode of transportation, allowing him to soar the skyways. His catchphrase, which is also heard over the show’s theme song, is “Zip, Zam, Zowie, and Swoosh!”

Captain Zammo: This musclebound narcissist (voiced by Paul Frees) is often dispatched on time-traveling assignments. His loyal subordinate, Private Hammo, does most of the heavy lifting each episode. Zammo’s catchphrase is “Thither, Yonder, and Away!” The character’s name was originally Captain Whammo, but quickly changed to Zammo after the threat of legal action from toy manufacturer Wham-O. Elevator Man: This size-shifting hero’s episodes are played straight and are a nod to noir, with Elevator Man (voiced by Paul Stewart) even narrating his own adventures à la cinema gumshoes.

His shrinking and growing powers are triggered once he presses a button on his belt buckle.

Granite Man: This Hercules is actually a park statue, animated to life by the Super-Service’s Percival the carrier pigeon’s incantation, “Granite Man, o’ rock of power, awake and face this dangerous hour.” Granite Man (voiced by Lyn Johnson) is known for his criminal-crushing uppercut.

Magneto Man: A suave, Cary Grant-ish British super-hero voiced by the legendary Daws Butler (the actor behind Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and many other cartoon greats), Magneto Man is a human magnet, his name being pronounced “mag-net-o,” as opposed to the X-Men villain’s Magneto’s “mag-neat-o.” Diana Maddox, also known as the voice of Mera in the Filmation Aquaman cartoons, voiced Magneto Man’s sidekick, Cal. Super Scuba: This waterlogged wonder man, voiced by Arte Johnson (who would soon rise to acclaim in his “Verrry In-ter-esting” role on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In), is The Super 6’s answer to Aquaman, an undersea crime-solver headquartered in an ocean cave. Animation giant June Foray (Rocky the Flying Squirrel) voiced Super Scuba’s Gal Friday, Bubbles.

The Super 6’s swinging theme was recorded by pop sensations Gary Lewis (son of comedian and DC Comics star Jerry Lewis) and the Playboys. Each episode opened with a Super Bwoing short, followed by a Brothers Matzoriley short featuring the bickering Three Stooges-like, three-headed character originally

Cel of Super Chicken and his unlikely sidekick, Fred.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Bullwinkle Studios.

seen in an Inspector theatrical cartoon. Next would be gag bumper featuring Super Bwoing and one of the other characters, and the episode would conclude with a rotating installment of one of the other heroes’ adventures. Among the show’s writers was Jack Miller of DC Comics. Super 6 merchandising included a coloring book and boxed jigsaw puzzle, the latter featuring the Brothers Matzoriley.

SUPER CHICKEN First Appearance: George of the Jungle, ABC, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 17 Secret Identity: Henry Cabot Henhouse III Super-powers: moderately enhanced speed and strength, via “super-sauce” Catchphrase: “Fred, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Zipper, Appian Way, the Oyster, Wild Bill Hiccup, Dr. Gizmo, Rotten Hood, the Geezer, Merlin Brando Synopsis: Super Chicken and Captain Nice were plucked from the same hero-henhouse: both were spindly nebbishes who guzzled a super-power potion, then blundered their way through costumed crimefighting. But whereas Buck Henry’s Captain Nice’s “super juice” quickly lost its potency with viewers, Jay Ward’s Super Chicken’s “super-sauce” was boosted by perpetual Saturday morning airings, syndication, and cult fandom.

Fred, millionaire pullet Henry Cabot Henhouse III’s lion aide and often-unwilling super-hero sidekick, administers the super-sauce to his boss in times of trouble, often getting the formula wrong. Henry’s

feathers-ruffling transformation into Super-Chicken leaves him a little wonky—but being from the same animation master who brought us the Camp-laced adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, “a little wonky” is what viewers expected. Super Chicken and Fred’s aerial vehicle is the egg-shaped Super-Coop (“To the Super-Coop, Fred!”), a dome-topped super-car reminiscent of the flying autos in The Jetsons.

Jay Ward Productions legends Bill Scott and Paul Frees voiced Henry/Super Chicken and Fred, respectively, with Frees also narrating the episodes.

Super Chicken was one of the three six- or sevenminute shorts airing as part of the half-hour George of the Jungle show.

Phoenix Candy released a Super Chicken Candy & Toy product in 1968, hard candy and a cheap toy in a decorative box. In 1969, Gold Key Comics published two issues of George of the Jungle, each featuring a Paul Fung, Jr.-illustrated Super Chicken story adapting a TV episode.

SUPER PRESIDENT First Appearance: Super President, NBC, 9/16/67 Number of episodes: 30 Secret Identity: U.S. President James Norcross Super-powers: super-strength, flight (with jet belt), molecular reconstruction Catchphrase: “I must change to granite [or some other form or compound]!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Billion-Dollar Bomber, the Steel Man, the Chameleon, the Monster of the Atoll Synopsis: In 1966, Metamorpho was prematurely announced as a cartoon from Filmation. While the Element Man missed his chance at TV stardom, his 223

TM & © DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.

RIGHT: It was after the Camp Age when Underdog finally got his own comic book. Cover to Charlton’s Underdog #1 (July 1970) by Frank Johnson.

TM & © Classic Media.

powers were ripped off—by the President of the United States!

DePatie-Freleng’s Super President features Chief of State James Norcross (voiced by Paul Frees, who was also the narrator), who receives super-powers after exposure to a cosmic storm. His sole confidant is his aide Jerry Sayles, sort of a male Etta Candy, whose close proximity to the POTUS often places him in jeopardy from ethnically stereotyped terrorists and various and sundry monstrosities, leading President Norcross to whoosh to the rescue as Super President, sometimes in his multipurpose vehicle, the Omnicar.

While this animation oddity tapped into more sources than the boys at Watergate, two elements of Super President were fun eye candy: its opening title sequence’s graphics zoomed toward the viewer from an outer space, an effect that would become popular over a decade later with Superman: The Movie, and the planet rings of Super President’s chest insignia would rotate whenever he began a transformation.

Each half-hour episode featured two Super President shorts and one short starring the super-secret agent Spy Shadow. Spy Shadow is a secret agent, Richard Vance, who can will his shadow to separate from his body and control its actions. Ted “Lurch” Cassidy was the voice of Spy Shadow.

UNDERDOG First Appearance: The Underdog Show, NBC, 10/3/64 Number of episodes: 124 Secret Identity: Shoeshine Boy Super-powers: super-strength, flight, super-speed, fluctuating degrees of invulnerability, super-hearing, X-ray vision, cosmic ray vision, atomic breath Catchphrase: “There’s no need to fear! Underdog is here!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Simon Bar Sinister and Cad Lackey, Riff Raff and his gang, Overcat, Fearo the Ferocious, Battyman, the Electric Eel, Tap-Tap the Chiseler, miscellaneous alien invaders and monsters

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Synopsis: Sorry, Jason Lee (the voice of Underdog in the live-action remake of 2007), but Wally Cox—not Shoeshine Boy—was the true identity of this canine crusader. Cox was one of TV’s all-time great milquetoasts, from the nebbish science teacher in the Fifties sitcom Mister Peepers to a string of mousey gueststars in random Sixties series; he was also a semiregular on the game show The Hollywood Squares.

Little did we know that Wally, in his off-screen secret identity, was an Army vet, the caretaker of his invalid mother, a sinewy sportsman, and best buds with Marlon Brando. As Underdog creator Buck Biggers put it to Mark Arnold in a 2007 interview for Hogan’s Alley #15, “His voice was well known to a lot of people,” making this sheepish everyman the perfect choice to bring to life the character Biggers called the “champion of the underdogs of the world!” Biggers lifted the hero’s name from the sports page: “America loves an underdog. It’s hard to read a sports section of a newspaper without seeing the word ‘underdog’.”

Underdog was created not to save the day, but to sell breakfast cereals. W. Watts “Buck” Biggers was an ad agency account executive who joined forces with Chet Stover, Joe Harris, and Treadwell D. Covington as the braintrust of Total TeleVision productions (yes, with a capital “V” and lower-case “p”), an animation house often confused with Jay Ward Productions. Total TeleVision (TTV) also created the cartoon features King Leonardo and Odie, Tennessee Tuxedo, The Hunter, Go Go Gophers, The World of Commander McBragg, and other features for sponsor General Mills’ Saturday morning programming.

But it was the Dog of Steel that became TTV’s biggest hit, premiering on NBC in The Underdog Show on Saturday, October 3, 1964. “Underdog was the one on the network longest,” according to Biggers.

“Nine years on the network. That set a record for kids’ shows on Saturday morning.” (Underdog shifted to CBS during its long run and ran until September 1, 1973, then continuing on in syndication.)

Operating in the nation’s capital, Underdog is secretly “humble and lovable” Shoeshine Boy, who, in times of crisis, darts into a telephone booth and emerges as the mighty Underdog… destroying the telephone booth in the process (and you wondered where they all went). The super-energy pills stored in his ring give him his powers, and ultimately gave the network a Valley of the Dolls-sized headache, with Underdog’s pill-popping later being edited out of most episodes. Underdog’s “Lois Lane” is TV journalist Sweet Polly Purebread (voiced by Norma MacMillan), whose siren call for a rescue is her singing, “Oh, where, oh, where has my Underdog gone?”— prompting Shoeshine Boy’s dog ears to perk up: “When Polly’s in trouble I am not slow, it’s hip-hiphip, and away I go!” Yes, Underdog not only popped pills, he was TV’s first rapper, speaking in verse. His main adversaries are super-scientist Simon Bar Sinister (whose crimes were prefaced by his uttering, “Simon says”) and cartoon wolf-gangster Riff Raff.

Allen Swift voiced both, basing them on Hollywood legends: Simon on Lionel Barrymore and Riff Raff on movie heavy George Raft. Even Cad Lackey (Simon’s assistant) borrowed from Tinseltown, with actor Ben Stone basing his voice on Humphrey Bogart.

Curiously, despite Underdog’s television longevity during his original run, there was very little merchandising of the character during the Camp Age. As historian Mark Arnold told me in January 2016, Peter Piech handled the licensing for both TTV and Jay Ward Productions, the latter’s properties (particularly Bullwinkle and Rocky) seeing more products than the former’s. “For TTV, there was a King Leonardo comic book that lasted a few issues,” Arnold said. “They probably didn’t sell well enough to go back to try a Tennessee Tuxedo or Underdog book, but I’m really not sure why they didn’t do one at the time. There wasn’t a Hoppity Hooper book for Jay Ward either, so it probably was just a case of Piech not paying attention to comic books after about 1962. Strangely, the next TTV comic was the Colossal Show one-shot in 1969 for a cartoon show that was never made!”

Underdog eventually got his own comic series, starting in 1970 courtesy of Charlton Comics; in 1975, the license was picked up by Western Publishing’s Gold Key Comics—at which time Underdog products including a board game, a Halloween costume, a jigsaw puzzle, and children’s dinnerware hit the market.

“There was far more Underdog merchandise made in the 1970s than in the 1960s,” according to Arnold. “I think the show actually was more popular in syndication than in first run, kind of like Star Trek.”

Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #3 (Oct. 1968).

Space Ghost TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

HANNA-BARBERA HEROES A Universe of Super-Adventure

Flash back to 1988: I was working my first editorial job, at (the now-defunct) Comico the Comic Company in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and was on the phone with the extraordinary Steve “The Dude” Rude, who at the time had become a fan-favorite on the sci-fi comic book Nexus. We were discussing a story he was illustrating for a one-shot I was co-editing, The Comico Christmas Special.

From the receiver, in the background behind Steve’s voice, I heard a familiar sound effect, a quavering, high-pitched whistle.

“Dude, are you watching Space Ghost?” I asked.

“How did you know?” Steve gasped with glee.

“Michael, that’s amazing!”

Amazing? Nah. I’m just a guy who grew up on Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Of course I recognized the sound of Space Ghost’s Power Bands’ Force Ray! Back in the Sixties, no one did TV toons better than Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera and their team of writers and animators. Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was the first company to make a cottage industry of producing cartoons specifically for television.

While their programs were kid-friendly, some of them, like The Flintstones, were skewed toward an adult audience and aired during primetime. H-B’s shows were smartly written, and their gags (in comedies) and thrills (in action shows) were expertly timed. While their animation was limited, their characters—from the anthropomorphic animals and five o’clock-shadowed men of its “cartoony” universe to the semirealistic humans of its “high adventure” universe— sparkled with individuality, enlivened by some of the industry’s best voice talents. H-B’s set designs were imaginative and impressively rendered. Tremendous thought was invested into storyboarding, with tricks employed to make the viewer think there was more animation going on than was actually being seen.

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RIGHT: These double-page ads appeared in the centerspreads of DC Comics during the summers of 1966 and 1967, announcing CBS’ HannaBarbera-rich Saturday morning cartoon line-ups.

All characters TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, except: Superman, Aquaman, and Aqualad TM & © DC Comics. The Lone Ranger and Tonto TM & © DreamWorks Classics.

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Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were masters of manufacturing cartoons on the cheap, without their cartoons ever appearing cheap. One cost-cutting measure that became a Hanna-Barbera staple was the Repeat Pan, where a background would replay on a seemingly endless loop, such as when Fred Flintstone, being chased by his adoring pet Dino, would run past the same chair, table, and window over and over again in the Flintstones’ living room.

Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons boasted some of the best music on Sixties television. Most folks who watched those toons remember their bouncy or jazzy themes (move over, Miles and Mancini—Hoyt Curtain’s swinging Jetsons and Jonny Quest themes were some of the best jazz of the Sixties), but the underscores and incidental music truly brought to life the world of H-B. If I mention a classic Hanna-Barbera scene—say, the mummy Anubis shuffling toward a victim in my personal favorite Jonny Quest episode—you will probably remember the soundtrack that accompanied each of his lumbering steps, a brooding orchestration of tympani beats and horn bleats that steadily built to a crescendo which spelled doom for the poor schmuck who ended up in the mummy’s undead grip.

Hanna-Barbera also had the coolest array of sound effects on the tube. The mere mention of some of their wacky noises—like “Scrambling Feet” or “Bongo Feet and Zip”— will conjure up cartoon chuckles from your childhood.

H-B’s dramatic sound effects created the illusion of menace, so by the time a giant robot finally tromped into the frame, kids were already nervously peeking through their fingers. These sound effects might pop up in a range of different Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

So would voice actors, like Vic Perrin, who spooked kids with his portrayal of bad guys like Dr. Zin, the Creature King, the Red Ghost, and Vulturo.

These sci-fi sound effects got a lot of airplay in the Sixties, as Hanna-Barbera hopped on the Camp Age’s super-hero craze faster than Yogi Bear on an unattended pic-a-nic basket. Some folks consider Space Ghost, which premiered on CBS on Saturday morning, September 10, 1966, to be H-B’s first super-hero show. If you subscribe to the strictest interpretation of the word “super-hero,” that’s true.

But a year before Space Ghost flew into action, Hanna-Barbera’s Atom Ant premiered, on a special on Sunday, September 12, 1965, followed shortly

thereafter by a Saturday morning cartoon show. And the season before that, The Adventures of Jonny Quest—not exactly a super-hero show, but one with lots of the genre’s tropes, from high-tech weapons to megalomaniac masterminds—started as a primetime animated series, bowing on Friday, September 18, 1964. Among the many hallmarks of Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest and Space Ghost cartoons were the designs of the characters and their realms, both of which brought comic strips and comic books to life, thanks to the cartoonists behind their looks, Doug Wildey and Alex Toth.

But even before Jonny Quest’s 1964 debut, in the early Sixties Hanna-Barbera dabbled in superheroics with the Zorro spoof El Kabong, an occasional identity of Western lawman Quick Draw McGraw (who’s a horse, by the way, for those of you who don’t speak H-B). El Kabong swung into action on a rope and clobbered his foes on the noggin with a guitar, enhanced by the discordant sound effect “Kabong!”

Another H-B do-gooder was Touché Turtle, a halfshelled swashbuckler in his own comedy show that

first aired in 1962 (over two decades before a quartet of teenage mutant ninja turtles would kick their way into the popular culture). Also in 1962, two episodes of The Jetsons were super-hero-themed: “Elroy’s TV Show” featured the youngest Jetson as a TV hero called Spaceboy Zoom, and “Elroy’s Pal” involved the boy’s hero worship of a TV super-hero named Nimbus the Great. A Season Five episode of The Flintstones airing in February 1965 featured Fred standing in for a popular Stone Age super-hero named Superstone. And on the itty-bitty, atomic-energized heels of Atom Ant’s Fall 1965 debut came not one but two episodes of The Magilla Gorilla Show featuring costumed crimefighters: “The Purple Mask” and “Super Blooper Heroes.”

After ABC’s Batman became a hit, Hanna-Barbera stopped dabbling in super-heroes and started delivering them wholesale, developing a universe of new characters, frequently crossbreeds of superheroes and another genre. This first push was at the urging of Fred Silverman, head of CBS-TV’s Daytime Programming, for the Fall 1966 Saturday morning season; Silverman was heavily involved with show designer Alex Toth and H-B in roundtable discussions during the development of the Space Ghost and Dino Boy cartoons for that season. One year later, Hanna-Barbera was cranking out super-hero and adventure-hero shows not only for CBS but also ABC and NBC, expanding their H-B universe but also producing the first animated version of Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four. Merchandising deals were struck, with Atom Ant and Space Ghost being particularly popular on store shelves. Gold Key Comics produced Jonny Quest, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles, and Space Ghost oneshots, followed by seven issues of the title HannaBarbera Super TV Heroes, an anthology which rotated the adventures of Birdman, the Galaxy Trio, the Herculoids, Mighty Mightor, Moby Dick, Shazzan, Space Ghost, and Young Samson and Goliath.

Once the Camp Age ended, the Hanna-Barbera super-heroes disappeared, with master illustrator Alex Toth staying on board to design a new wave of adventure heroes such as the Arabian Knights (before long, Toth would get another chance at designing a super-hero show, with Super Friends). In one way or another, however, the H-B heroes have managed to return, and return again, in syndication, comic books, new animated series, and collector-oriented toys; as of this writing, DC Comics has reintroduced the heroes in a new comic book titled Future Quest. Some Baby Boomers were rubbed the wrong way when two of their childhood super-heroes were played for laughs in the adult-oriented cartoons Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, but hey, you don’t see anyone clamoring to do a Batfink or Mighty Hercules revamp, do you? This is proof positive that of the countless costumed crimefighters birthed in the Camp Age, Hanna-Barbera’s heroes had legs—and in one case, antennae.

ATOM ANT First Appearance: The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, NBC, 9/12/65 Number of episodes: 26 Secret Identity: none Super-powers: flight, super-strength, super-speed Catchphrase: “Up and at ’em, Atom Ant!” Rogues’ Gallery: Big Fats Dynamo, Ferocious Flea, the Glob (Crankenshaft’s Monster), Mr. Muto (Karate Ant), Dr. Von Gimmick Synopsis: Hanna-Barbera’s smallest super-hero is one of its mightiest. Originally co-starring with the spy spoof Secret Squirrel in an hour-long show, Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel split into their own half-hour series in 1967. The companion features Precious Pupp and The Hillbilly Bears rounded out Atom Ant’s program.

Atom Ant is the keeper of the Crook Book, bustling with dossiers of do-badders. His anthill home, with a mailbox, leads to his underground headquarters containing weightlifting and crimefighting equipment. He is often called into action by the authorities, his tiny antennae picking up their distress signal. A popular gimmick for Atom Ant’s animators was to show the tiny hero’s super-deeds from a distance, with Atom barely visible as a speck, then cutting to a close-up. Howard Morris originally voiced Atom, followed by Don Messick.

Atom Ant was heavily merchandised, including a Gold Key Comics one-shot, a View-Master set Gold Key Comics’ Atom Ant #1 (Jan. 1966).

TM & © HannaBarbera Productions.

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(shared with Secret Squirrel), a push puppet and Tricky Trapeze from Kohner, a Transogram board game, and a Halloween costume, among other items.

was reimagined as Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.

DINO BOY

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

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BIRDMAN First Appearance: Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, NBC, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 40 Secret Identity: Ray Randall Super-powers: flight, energy blasts, formation of energy shield Catchphrase: “Bir-r-r-r-r-rdman!”

Rogues’ Gallery: F.E.A.R., Number One, Dr. Millennium, Vulturo, Morto, X the Eliminator, Nitron the Human Bomb Synopsis: While Hawkman was fluttering about on Saturday mornings in CBS’ The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, Hanna-Barbera introduced its own Winged Wonder, designed by Alex Toth and voiced by Keith Andes.

Birdman, the super-hero incarnation of the Egyptian sun god Ra, is solar-powered, his energy waning during prolonged exposures to darkness. He is dispatched on missions for Inter-Nation Security

by Falcon-7, his bossman who sports an eyepatch.

Headquartered in the Bird Lair, deep inside an inactive volcano, Birdman is accompanied into action by his golden-eagle companion Avenger and occasionally, a kid sidekick named Birdboy.

This super-hero was actually Hanna-Barbera’s second Birdman. One of the super-criminals to fight Frankenstein, Jr. was the Birdman, a dumpy, costumed crook who commanded robotic birds.

Merchandising of Birdman was limited, although the hero did appear as a 1967 Ben Cooper Halloween costume and in Gold Key Comics’ Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes (according to the Grand Comics Database, the Birdman/Galaxy Trio team-up in issue #2 of H-B Super TV Heroes was scripted by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel). The character

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Birdman title cel.

First Appearance: Space Ghost, CBS, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 18 Secret Identity: Todd (last name unknown) Super-powers: none Rogues’ Gallery: Vampire Men, Rock Pygmies, Treemen, Ant Warriors, Worm Men, Bird Riders, Sun People Synopsis: Officially titled Dino Boy in the Lost Valley, this series was reminiscent of the works of master of adventure Edgar Rice Burroughs, albeit with contemporary overtones. Designed by Alex Toth, Dino Boy’s primitive landscape provided a dramatic departure from its host series, Space Ghost (Space Ghost starred in two episodes per half hour as opposed to Dino Boy’s one).

Dino Boy is Todd, whose life is spared once he parachutes from a doomed aircraft. Lost in a dangerous world he never made (an uncharted South American village which has inexplicably remained mired in the Stone Age), he is rescued and befriended by a hulking caveman named Ugh, and embarks upon a series of Lost Valley adventures riding atop Ugh’s brontosaurus, Bronty. The young voice actor playing Dino Boy was Johnny Carson, who soon became known as John David Carson to avoid confusion with the famous Tonight Show host.

FRANKENSTEIN, JR. First Appearance: Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles, CBS, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 18 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: flight via astro boots, superstrength, various powers from mechanical body parts (battering ram from head, power beams from fingers, electrical energy from fists, elongating arms, etc.)

THE GALAXY TRIO

Catchphrase: “Alakazoom!” (uttered by Buzz Conroy when riding Frankenstein, Jr. into action) Rogues’ Gallery: Dr. Shock, Spyder Man, Plant Man, Junk Man, Manchurian Menace, the Birdman, Dr. Spectro Synopsis: For Frankenstein, Jr., Hanna-Barbera Productions and CBS-TV’s Fred Silverman graverobbed Mary Shelley’s classic horror story for a name and appearance, and the boy-and-his-giantrobot motif from the Japanese import Gigantor for a concept, the result being this mechanical, towering super-hero. The Gigantor element was an add-on, however, as the original concept for the cartoon starred “Dr. Frankenstein, Jr.” as a second-generation not-at-all-mad scientist who created a monster called “Uggle Dubbly.” The premise was soon refined to add the boy and make Frankenstein, Jr. his “pet” mechanical monster.

“Frankie,” as he is nicknamed, is a thirty-foot super-robot (voiced by The Addams Family’s own Lurch, Ted Cassidy) created by Professor Conroy (conceived as “Professor Conrad”) to protect Civic City and beyond. The giant stands dormant in a mountaintop laboratory until summoned by the professor’s courageous son, Buzz (voiced by Dick Beals), whose beam-emitting Radar Ring activates and controls his pal Frankie. As one might expect with a super-sized super-hero, Frankie is usually called in to giant menaces.

Frankenstein, Jr. enjoyed a brief period of merchandising which included a Gold Key Comics one-shot, a Kenner Give-A-Show Projector slide, and a Big Little Book.

First Appearance: Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, NBC, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 20 Team members: Gravity Girl, Meteor Man, and Vapor Man Secret Identities: n/a Super-powers: manipulation of gravity (Gravity Girl), ability to shrink or grow (Meteor Man), and transformation into gaseous forms (Vapor Man) Rogues’ Gallery: Computron, Drackmore the Despo, Growliath, Zakor, Titan the Titanium Man Synopsis: Whereas Space Ghost followed the intergalactic adventures of one super-hero (and his sidekicks), this Alex Toth-designed show involved three super-heroes from different planets, sort of a smallscale version of DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes.

Unlike the Legion, whose heroes’ planets of origins often bear unusual names, the Galaxy Trio’s homeworlds’ names are easy to remember: Gravity Girl (voiced by Virginia Eiler) hails from Gravitas (!), Meteor Man (voiced by Ted Cassidy) comes from Meteorus, and Vapor Man (voiced by Don Messick) is a native of Vaporus.

As agents of the Galactic Patrol, the Galaxy Trio traverse the cosmos in their Condor 1 spacecraft, assigned by “the Chief” onto missions against a variety of alien menaces including renegade robots, tyrants, space pirates, war machines, and monsters. They wear individual costumes that are unified by chest insignias with Roman numerals: I (Vapor Man), II (Meteor Man), and III (Gravity Girl).

One Galaxy Trio episode was bookended by two Birdman episodes on their shared half-hour series.

LEFT: Gold Key Comics’ Frankenstein, Jr. #1 (Jan. 1967).

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Bumper cel from The Galaxy Trio.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

THE HERCULOIDS First Appearance: The Herculoids, CBS, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 36 Team members: Zandor, Tara, and Dorno; with beasts Gloop and Gleep (protoplasmic blobs), Igoo (a stony Mighty Joe Young), Tundro the Tremendous (a rhino with ten legs), and Zok (a flying dragon) 229

Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #1 (Apr. 1968).

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

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SHMOO ARE YOU? Alex Toth took a cue from Al Capp’s Shmoo in his design of The Herculoids’ beloved blobs, Gloop and Gleep. The Shmoos (or Shmoon, a plural variant) looked like walking bowling pins, but these rapidly reproducing creatures lived to serve man—and be served to man, as food. First seen in 1948 in Capp’s Li’l Abner, the Shmoo were heavily merchandised in the late Forties and early Fifties, including comic books.

Hanna-Barbera resurrected The Shmoo as a cartoon in the late Seventies. the show broken into three shorts; there were two Herculoids installments per episode, each slightly longer than the average H-B toon.

THE IMPOSSIBLES First Appearance: Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles, CBS, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 36 Team members: Coil Man, Fluid Man, and Multi Man Secret Identities: real names unknown Super-powers: spring-action appendages (Coil Man), transformation into liquids (Fluid Man), and splitting into numerous duplicates (Multi Man) Catchphrase: “Rally-ho!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Spinner, Paper Doll Man, the Bubbler, Professor Stretch, Cronella Critch, Ringmaster, the Inflator, Dr. Futuro Synopsis: High concept: The Beatles (minus one) as comical super-heroes. A typical episode’s set-up: The long-haired Impossibles, “just another singing group,” wow audiences of screaming teens and teenyboppers. But when “Big D” (voiced by Paul Frees) summons them through a guitar video monitor, warning them of a super-villain menace terrorizing Empire City, with their rallying cry of “Rally-ho!” they transform into the mop-topped Impossibles, a superteam consisting of Coil Man (voiced by Hal Smith), Fluid Man (Paul Frees), and Multi Man (Don Messick).

TM & © Capp Enterprises, Inc

Secret Identities: n/a Super-powers: shape-shifting and blastdeflection (Gloop and Gleep); super-strength and imperviousness (Igoo); firing energy-rocks from horn, retractable extending legs, super-drilling (Tundro); and laser blasts from eyes and tail, protective nega-beam blasts from eyes (Zok) Rogues’ Gallery: Krokar and the Beaked People, Sta-Lak, Sarko, the Mole Men, Gorvac and the Android People, Mekkano the Machine Master Synopsis: The Herculoids might be considered a sci-fi version of the classic movie version of Tarzan.

Zandor (Mike Road, who also voiced beasts Igoo, Tundro, and Zok) is the near-naked monarch of Amzot on the “savage world” of Quasar. In his earliest model sheets for The Herculoids, show co-creator Alex Toth had named the hero Zartan, a far-from-subtle anagram of Tarzan.

Zandor and his wife Tara (“Jane”) and son Dorno (“Boy”) are constantly imperiled by their barbaric world’s—or other worlds’—grotesqueries and invaders. But instead of having Cheetah the chimp or Tantor the elephant at their beck and call, Zandor’s clan are backed up by a menagerie of super-powered, otherworldly monsters. Not that they are pushovers, this royal family—they’re a knockabout bunch, each adept at slingshots and other primitive weapons, including Tara, one of the first forceful femmes of Saturday morning television.

Dorno also has the habit of referring to his parents by their names, matter-of-factly, not disrespectfully.

Toth’s mark was delightfully on display in the designs of The Herculoids, especially the simplistically rendered weird creatures; they could look alternately threatening or docile, depending upon their function in a story. Unlike Hanna-Barbera’s other super-hero programs, the Herculoids did not share their series with companion features, nor was

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Their bandstand also converts into sleek all-terrain vehicles, usually the Impossi-Mobile or Impossi-Jet. While appearing to play second fiddle to the topbilled Frankenstein, Jr., two Impossibles episodes were actually featured to Frankenstein, Jr.’s one in each installment of the half-hour cartoon, the end result being twice as many Impossibles episodes made. During the show’s development, the group was originally called “The Incredibles,” then “The Amazing Impossibles,” before the name “The Impossibles” was selected.

Episodes featured musical numbers performed by the band. As animation historian Greg Ehrbar wrote on CartoonResearch.com, “The music for The Impossibles was cut from the same cloth as ‘The Hanna-Barbera Singers’ heard on the HBR [HannaBarbera Records] ‘Cartoon Series’ records and the Way-Outs on The Flintstones, very likely recorded during the same time period with studio musician/vocalists that included Ron Hicklin, Al Capps, and Stan Farber.”

The Impossibles appeared in a smattering of merchandising including a sliding puzzle and a frame tray puzzle. Although they shared co-billing on the 1966 Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles one-shot from Gold Key Comics, they were not shown on the cover and only appeared in one story inside, with five stories featuring Frankie. The rarest Impossibles collectible is a record with two of the band’s songs, “Hey You (Hiddy Hiddy Hoo)” and “She Couldn’t Dance,” a test recording made in 1966.

Hanna-Barbera recycled the Impossibles’ superpowers for the 1979 cartoon The Super Globetrotters, with three of the Harlem Globetrotters becoming the super-heroic Spaghetti Man (instead of Coil Man), Liquid Man (instead of Fluid Man), and Multi Man.

JONNY QUEST First Appearance: The Adventures of Jonny Quest, ABC, 9/18/64 Number of episodes: 26 Secret Identity: n/a

Super-powers: n/a Catchphrase: “Sim, Sim, Salabim!” (Hadji’s magical incantation) Rogues’ Gallery: Dr. Zin, Dr. Ashida, Baron Heinrich von Freulich, Lizard Men, Anubis, Turu the Terrible, the Invisible Monster, the Gargoyle Synopsis: As with other Hanna-Barbera Heroes, Jonny Quest was inspired by an outside source.

Some might assume it was Hergé’s classic European graphic novel series The Adventures of Tintin, which starred an adventurous Belgian boy, his dog, and their extended family. In Ted Sennett’s 1989 book The Art of Hanna-Barbera: Fifty Years of Creativity, Joe Barbera cited Milton Caniff’s legendary comic strip Terry and the Pirates as the inspiration for Jonny Quest. Cartoonist Doug Wildey, who developed the series for Hanna-Barbera, noted in interviews that Jonny Quest grew out of a planned animated revival of the one-time radio hit, Jack Armstrong, the AllAmerican Boy. (Wildey’s original name for the series was The Saga of Chip Balloo.) And Jonny Quest’s recurring nemesis, Dr. Zin, who deviously cackles at our heroes through video monitors, was clearly inspired James Bond’s Dr. No. Whatever the sources, however, Jonny Quest’s intoxicating mixture of action, espionage, sci-fi, and humor made an indelible mark upon its Camp Age audience.

Jonny Quest never seemed stale, despite its basic formula: Dr. Benton Quest (first voiced

by John Stephenson, then by Don Messick), the brainiac widowed father of eleven-year-old Jonny, is, through a government summons, happenstance, or misfortune, lured into a thrilling adventure at some exotic port of call. Joining their globetrotting are bodyguard Roger “Race” Bannon (think: James Bond in private employ); Jonny’s friend and unofficial foster brother, the orphan Hadji (“loosely modeled on the Indian actor Sabu,” Wildey told Ted Sennett); and Jonny’s cute, pudgy bulldog, Bandit. Jonny was voiced by Tim Mathieson (later Matheson), whose lifelong acting résumé includes roles as diverse as an over-aged, oversexed frat boy in National Lampoon’s Animal House and the Vice President of the United States in The West Wing. Race was voiced by Mike Road, Hadji by Danny Bravo, and Bandit’s yaps and yips were courtesy of Don Messick.

Wildey’s realistic designs for the characters and their locales were trailblazing. “The whole idea behind Jonny Quest when I put it together was the idea that we could do shows in this medium that could not be done in live action,” Wildey told interviewer Howard Whitman in 1987 in Comico the Comic Company’s Jonny Quest Classics #1. “There was no way that they could move camera crews all around the world. We could do this with painted backgrounds and characters who looked like people who lived in these countries.” Since the show was created for and originally aired in primetime (Friday evenings), its level of violence was unlike any other animated series— savages and monsters constantly tried to kill the 231

Gold Key Comics’ Jonny Quest #1 (Dec. 1964).

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

RIGHT: Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #6 (July 1969).

Mighty Mightor TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

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Quest team, bad guys (and some good ones) routinely died, and super-weapons created by Dr. Quest and his adversaries created big booms.

“Many shows on television at that particular time, 1964, were not all that concerned with non-violence,” Wildey said.

“Jonny Quest was running against liveaction shows which were also violent, and I think that you would pretty much have to have violence in a high-adventure series.” Also energizing the show were Dr. Quest’s futuristic gizmos, torn from the scientific journals of the day. Young Jonny may have only owned one clothing ensemble (a black turtleneck, jeans, and white sneakers), but he got to zip around on a jetpack and in a hovercraft!

The cartoony Bandit was the fly in the ointment, from Wildey’s perspective, wedged into Jonny Quest

by Joe Barbera, who wanted to exploit the commercial potential of adding a dog to the cast. Wildey resisted and tried to get the boss to use a different animal, like a monkey. “I kind of got stuck with a cartoon dog,” Wildey remarked in Jonny Quest Classics #2.

“The dog was heavily involved because the animators could work with stuff like that.” While Wildey never warmed up to Bandit, audiences did—the li’l pug not only provided comic relief to Jonny Quest’s tense moments but also created a cartoon dog/“real” humans template that Hanna-Barbera would later exploit, most notably in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and its many iterations.

Jonny Quest merchandising was limited, but featured striking graphics, most notably on a MiltonBradley card game and a record.

The most visible marketing tie-in to the show was a magic decoder ring offered in a promotion with P.F.

Flyers shoes, advertised on a TV commercial. Gold Key Comics published a Jonny Quest one-shot that was released on October 5, 1964, a few weeks after the show’s primetime premiere; it adapted the series’ pilot episode, “The Mystery of the Lizard Men”— which did not include cast member Hadji, who was introduced in the second episode.

Jonny Quest originally lasted only one season in primetime, its 26 episodes then finding their way to a long run on Saturday morning, where parental watchdog groups later complained about their level of violence. Animated revivals eventually came along in the Eighties and Nineties, and the show has been emulated and spoofed on occasion. Live-action remakes have also been rumored from time to time.

THE MIGHTY MIGHTOR First Appearance: Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor, CBS, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 36 Secret Identity: Tor, a prehistoric teenage boy Super-powers: flight, super-strength, invulnerability, energy blasts fired from club Catchphrase: “Mi-i-i-i-ghtor!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Korg the Monster Keeper, the Serpent Queen, Brutor the Barbarian, the Tusk People, Vultar and the Vulture Men Synopsis: Hanna-Barbera’s Stone Age answer to Marvel Comics’ The Mighty Thor (with a tip of the horned pelt-cowl to the original Captain Marvel for good measure), Mighty Mightor is actually a teenager named Tor who is awarded a magical club. When a prehistoric peril endangers the loinclothed denizens of the Village of Cave Dwellers, Tor raises his club overhead and shouts his heroic name as a battle cry, then transforms into a super-strong, adult flying hero, a gimmick cartoon watchers of a later generation would observe whenever young Prince Adam would scream “By the power of Grayskull!” when wielding the sword which would change him into He-Man. Mightor’s energy blastfiring club also transforms Tor’s pet dinosaur, Tog, into a flying, firebreathing dino-dragon. For comic relief, Tor’s younger brother, Li’l Rok, sometimes tags along as a pintsized version of Mightor.

Paul Stewart voiced Mightor and Bobby Diamond voiced Tor. Alex Toth produced the series’ character designs. Mightor was one of the rotating features sharing space in Gold Key Comics’ Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes during its seven-

issue run in the late Sixties, with Mike Royer and Tony Sgroi among the strip’s illustrators.

What little merchandising that exists featuring the prehistoric hero includes a Kenner Easy-Show Projector film reel from 1968 and a twelve-inch action figure produced in Europe in the Seventies. In more recent years, Mightor has been seen as Judge Hiram Mightor (voiced by Gary Cole) in episodes of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

MOBY DICK First Appearance: Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor, CBS, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 18 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: super-strength, super-speed, elongation, telepathy with sea creatures Rogues’ Gallery: Shocktopus, Crab Creatures, Aqua-Bats, Toadus, Moraya the Eel Queen, Soodak the Invader Synopsis: While it would’ve been cool to see Alex Toth adapt into graphic-novel form Herman Melville’s epic of Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of the great white whale, this wasn’t it. It was, instead, Toth’s reinterpretation of Moby Dick as a benevolent behemoth and bodyguard to the two shipwrecked boys he rescues from near-doom at sea.

Those venturesome kids, Tom (voiced by Bobby Resnick) and the non-PC-named Tub (Barry Balkin), in their sherbet-and-white-colored, flipper-footed scuba gear, swim through the deep, encountering no end of monsters and miscreants which require a heroic rescue from good ol’ Moby. Were H-B’s softening of the once-terrifying white whale not enough, Moby Dick’s cast includes a darling denizen of the deep played for laughs, an impish seal named Scooby. Before long, Hanna-Barbera’s mysterysolving, scairdy-cat Great Dane Scooby-Doo would punt H-B’s original Scooby into relative obscurity.

Moby Dick starred in a 1968 Whitman coloring book, a 1968 Kenner Easy-Show Projector ensemble, and stories in Gold Key Comics’ Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes anthology.

SAMSON AND GOLIATH (A.K.A. YOUNG SAMSON) First Appearance: Samson & Goliath, NBC, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 26 Secret Identities: Samson (a teenage boy), Goliath (a dog) Super-powers: Samson: super-strength; Goliath: super-strength, super-leaps, super-claws, earthshattering roar, laser vision, energy blasts Catchphrase: “I need Samson power!”

Rogues’ Gallery: Monatabu, Agents of P.E.R.I.L., Zargo, Salamandro, Baron von Skull, Dr. Zuran, Dr. Desto Synopsis: It’s a good thing the original Captain Marvel wasn’t in print in 1967, since HannaBarbera liberally appropriated from the hero’s teentransformation shtick. With Samson and Goliath, the would-be super-heroes are Samson, a scooterriding adolescent, and his cartoonish dog Goliath.

Whenever they are besieged by aliens, sinister agents, or monsters (which is each installment), Samson crisscrosses his wristbands over his head and proclaims, “I need Samson power!” And in a thunderous instant, he is transmogrified into the mighty Samson, a contemporary version of the powerful Old Testament champion. His bands also alter his loyal mutt into the regal lion Goliath. While Samson becomes a muscleman, Goliath gets the… lion’s share (sorry) of the series’ super-powers.

Ironically for a super-hero that took a cue from the Bible, Samson had problems with the Lutheran Church. After seven months on the air as Samson and Goliath, the show’s title was changed to Young Samson to avoid confusion with the church’s longrunning stop-motion children’s show, Davey and Goliath.

Roughly two years after the debut of NBC’s Samson and Goliath, Marvel Comics’ Captain Marvel—the super-hero/sci-fi book starring the spacefaring Kree soldier Mar-Vell, not to be confused with the aforementioned original Captain Marvel— introduced a storyline where Marvel’s roaming young sidekick, Rick Jones, swapped positions in the Negative Zone with Mar-Vell by striking together his two wristbands (Nega-Bands) over his head.

Title cel from Samson and Goliath.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

LEFT: Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #5 (Apr. 1969).

Moby Dick TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions

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SECRET SQUIRREL The two Camp Age Secret Squirrel comic books, both produced

by Western Publishing.

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

RIGHT: Detail from the cover of Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes #2 (July 1968).

Shazzan TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

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First Appearance: The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, NBC, 9/12/65 Number of episodes: 26 Secret Identity: none Super-powers: n/a Quote: “I suppose they have another daring heroic exciting mission cooked up for me.”

Rogues’ Gallery: Yellow Pinkie, Captain Ahab, Masked Granny, Dr. Dangit, Double-Ex, Scuba Duba, Hy-Spy Synopsis: Of the many animated spy spoofs of the Sixties, Secret Squirrel is the most successful, becoming a favorite in syndication after its original run and enjoying a couple of revivals as well. Secret Squirrel originally shared an hour-long show with the funny-animal super-hero Atom Ant until the two shows were split into their own half-hour series in 1967. One Secret Squirrel episode aired per show, with companion features Winsome Witch and Squiddly Diddly rounding out each half-hour.

Secret Agent 000—“sometimes called Nothing Nothing Nothing,” better known as Secret Squirrel—is the bucktoothed top spy of the International Sneaky Service, answering to his boss, Double Q. Joining Secret is his fez-topped chauffeur and loyal confidant, Morocco Mole. Secret’s arsenal would make Maxwell Smart green with envy. His bulletproof trenchcoat is his answer to Batman’s utility belt, housing anything he needs to get out of a predicament, all at the discretion of his writers: a rocket, a Lazy Laser, a Reducer, a mosquitostopping Skeeter Beater, a SuperAtomic Neutralizer Bazooka, even a flyswatter. Weapons also pop out of the top of his fedora or from his wristwatch. Even his SS-monogrammed briefcase is a weapon, expanding into his sleek red sedan (often with Morocco waiting behind the steering wheel) or a white dome-topped flying car.

Mel Blanc provided Secret Squirrel’s voice, while Paul Frees evoked Peter Lorre’s slimy intonations as Morocco Mole. Secret’s chief adversary was the Goldfinger spoof Yellow Pinkie, Frees’ take-off of Hollywood heavy Sidney Greenstreet. Yellow Pinkie premiered in the seventh episode and returned on numerous occasions, usually with a scheme to steal

some type of gold object such as a crown, an idol, or bullion. Frees also voiced Secret’s boss, Double Q. The usual suspects of licensed products lined up for Secret Squirrel, with a stuffed doll, a puzzle, a coloring book, a push puppet, and a Tricky Trapeze among the items produced, as well as a View-Master packet and lunchbox shared with Atom Ant. H-B’s super-spy starred in two Camp Age comic books, both from Western Publishing in 1966: Gold Key’s Secret Squirrel #1 and the Secret Squirrel Kite Fun Book, a giveaway distributed by regional electric companies.

SHAZZAN First Appearance: Shazzan, CBS, 9/9/67 Number of episodes: 18 Secret Identity: n/a Super-powers: magic with little, if any, limits Catchphrase: “Ho-ho ho-HO!” Rogues’ Gallery: Master of Thieves, Black Sultan, Evil Jester of Masira, the Demon in the Bottle, Sorceress of the Mist Synopsis: Shazzan is a sixty-foot magic genie who towers over, and routinely rescues, twin teens Chuck and Nancy. The kids first encounter the jumbo jinni after discovering a treasure chest in coastal Maine that contains two halves of a ring bearing the inscribed name “Shazzan.” Once joining together the two ring halves and saying the word “Shazzan” (which phonetically comes about as close to Billy Batson’s magic word “Shazam” as any lawyer would allow), Chuck and Nancy are whisked to the

Gold Key Comics’ Space Ghost #1 (Mar. 1967). Front cover by Dan Spiegle, back cover by Alex Toth.

age of the Arabian Nights, where they are frequently imperiled by wicked wizards, terrifying beasts, and disgusting bandits. The teens fly from adventure to adventure on Kaboobie, the winged camel given to them by Shazzan.

Shazzan’s thunderous voice was provided by Barney Phillips, a TV and film actor known for roles in Dragnet, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Twelve O’Clock High, and one of the most popular Twilight Zone episodes, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” Jerry Dexter, who was also voicing Aqualad at the time for Filmation’s Aquaman series, played Chuck, while animation great Janet Waldo voiced Nancy and Don Messick voiced Kaboobie.

In Ted Sennett’s The Art of Hanna-Barbera, CBS’ Fred Silverman, fundamental in the development of Shazzan, lauded the look of the show (the handiwork of Alex Toth) but cited its star’s omnipotence as its biggest weakness. Nonetheless, Shazzan was licensed for several products including a jigsaw puzzle, a Big Little Book, a coloring book, and comicbook appearances in Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes.

Hanna-Barbera twice repurposed Chuck and Nancy’s ring-transformation gimmick: with Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna touching fists in Super Friends, incanting “Wonder Twins powers, activate,” and with young Benjy Grimm merging two ring halves in Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, speaking the phrase “Thing ring, do your thing!” to become the Thing of Fantastic Four fame, of sorts.

TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

SPACE GHOST First Appearance: Space Ghost, CBS, 9/10/66 Number of episodes: 42 Secret Identity: unknown (at least originally) Super-powers: invisibility and flight from InvisoPower button on belt; Power Bands that fire numerous types of blasts, including but not limited to the Force Ray, Destructo Ray, Vibro Ray, Stun Ray, Pile Driver Ray, Heat Ray, and Freeze Ray; traverses galaxy in his Phantom Cruiser spacecraft, operating from his base on the Ghost Planet Catchphrase: “Spa-a-a-a-a-a-ce Ghost!”

Rogues’ Gallery: the Heat Thing, Zorak, Brak, Moltar, Metallus, Spider Woman (Black Widow), Creature King, Lokar, Lurker and One-Eye, Sandman, the Schemer Synopsis: Some might call Space Ghost “Batman in space” (those two heroes finally met in a 2011 episode of the Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold, by the way). Created during CBS-TV exec Fred Silverman’s push for new, realistic superhero programming, Space Ghost, like Batman, has since been reimagined for subsequent generations, but it’s his original two-year run on Saturday morning that continues to haunt fans to this day.

Space Ghost was the perfect example of an animated series firing on all cylinders. Let’s start with Alex Toth’s character designs. Space Ghost’s sleek costume is a curious balance of intimidating and comforting imagery, from an ebon cowl that resembles an executioner’s hood to an ethereal white 235

HannaBarbera’s super-heroes, revitalized in 2016 for DC Comics’ Future Quest series.

TM & © HannaBarbera Productions/ DC Comics.

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bodysuit that makes the hero look both spooky and messianic. This is iconography at its most classic, akin to Carmine Infantino’s costume design for the Silver Age Flash or Gil Kane’s for the Silver Age Green Lantern—but unlike those DC Comics heroes, whose costumes have been modified to suit the times, Space Ghost today looks exactly like he did when we first met him in 1966. Just as the vibrantly hued Robin, the Boy Wonder softened the Batman’s jagged edges, Space Ghost’s young allies Jan and Jace, decked out in primary colors, make the intergalactic mystery man seem more approachable—and borrowing a cue from H-B’s own Jonny Quest and its cartoony pet Bandit, Space Ghost’s Blip the monkey adds the spice of comic relief. Space Ghost’s arsenal (his Power Bands) and “wheels” (the Phantom Cruiser) might have even been coveted by a certain Gotham Guardian.

While Toth’s Space Ghost universe was compatible with the other H-B heroic realms he imagined, with its respective aliens, robots, supervillains, and sound effects that might also feel at home in episodes of The Herculoids or Birdman, Space Ghost’s cosmic backgrounds and surreal environments gave the show a unique look, especially the starry spacescapes, from which Space Ghost’s gleaming costume stood out like a beacon. Space Ghost’s pacing was breakneck, beginning with its opening, announced by the hero’s triumphant rallying cry cuing an eerie, almost hypnotic siren’s call of a theme. Each second of Space Ghost’s seven-minute episodes was skillfully timed to keep the viewer glued to the screen. Also elevating the series above the one-and-done, easily forgettable episodes of most super-hero cartoons was its landmark six-part Space Ghost “Council of Doom” storyline from Season Two, where a sinister sextet of villains from previous installments—Metallus, Creature King, Zorak, Moltar, Brak, and Spider-Woman—united to attempt to destroy Space Ghost, hurtling him through space and time in chapters which also featured his team-ups with the newest members of HannaBarbera’s Saturday morning pantheon: Mighty Mightor, Moby Dick, the Herculoids, and Shazzan.

Lastly, the voice talent truly made Space Ghost special. The teen twins, Jan and Jace, came to life courtesy of actors Ginny Tyler and Tim Matheson (him again!), with Blip’s eeks and ooks cheerfully chirped by the alwaysamazing Don Messick. But make no mistake about it, the star of Space Ghost was Gary Owens.

His piercing baritone defined the super-hero just as much as Alex Toth’s illustrations did. No stranger to Camp and caped

crusaders—among his many credits: Roger Ramjet, Dynomutt’s Blue Falcon, and the hand-cupped-overhis ear announcer of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In— Owens was tapped by the show’s producers to lend voice to Space Ghost. “Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna, and Fred Silverman, the president of CBS [Daytime] at the time, were the ones who chose me as Space Ghost,” Owens told interviewer Richard A. Scott in 2008 in Back Issue #30. “I had been doing the promos for every Hanna-Barbera show, from Jonny Quest to you-name-it… [and] then Joe called me one day and said, ‘You know, Fred and Bill and I were talking and because of your marvelous projection on every adventure show that we have, we’d like for you to be the Space Ghost character.’ And I said, ‘Well, thank you.

I’d love to do it.’ And that’s how I got the job. I didn’t have to audition for it or anything.”

Paired with a Dino Boy installment per threesegment episode, Space Ghost enjoyed strong ratings during its two seasons on Saturday morning and was heavily merchandised. The hero starred in a Gold Key Comics one-shot and was one of the headliners in Gold Key’s Hanna-Barbera Super TV Heroes anthology. Parental watchdog groups pressured Space Ghost and other similar action shows off the air in the late Sixties, but Space Ghost has refused to die. New Space Ghost cartoons were produced in the early Eighties, Comico’s aforementioned one-shot was released in 1987 (with a follow-up co-starring the Herculoids planned but later aborted), the irreverent late-night talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast premiered in the mid-Nineties, and in 2005 DC Comics published a five-issue Space Ghost miniseries providing a real name, backstory, and origin for the hero. Still, for the children of the Camp Age, our super-specter will always be the one who knew how to make a grand entrance, belting out a hearty “Spa-a-a-a-a-a-ce Ghost!”

FILMATION’S DC SUPER-HERO CARTOONS A Big Day for Ted Knight

Superman and Superboy. Aquaman, Aqualad, and Mera. The Atom, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Justice League of America, and the Teen Titans. Batman, Robin, and Batgirl. Filmation Associates—the animation company that brought the DC Comics pantheon to television beginning in 1966— boasted the world’s most famous super-heroes in its stable. But its biggest star was one that Saturday morning viewers never saw: Ted Knight.

Yes, that Ted Knight, who would, in a few years, rocket to fame and Emmy Awards as dim-bulb newscaster Ted Baxter on the long-running The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and would later star as—coincidentally—the artist of the comic strip Cosmic Cow in Too Close for Comfort. Ted Knight, the vicar of vocal modulation, the earl of urgency, who could read any copy and give it the importance of a vital news bulletin, such as this title voiceover for an episode of Filmation’s The Flash: A scarlet costume ejects from his ring, and in a blur of motion, police scientist Barry Allen becomes…

The Flash, world’s fastest human!

Flash! Whose speed enables him to vibrate through solid walls and conquer the barriers of time and space in the pursuit of evildoers.

The Flash—Scarlet Speedster of justice!

With Ted’s voice in mind, that gives you goosebumps, doesn’t it?

Before he stepped in front a microphone to narrate a DC super-hero episode, Ted Knight played a pivotal role in the origin of those cartoons.

“The studio was now down to two employees— myself and Hal [Sutherland, former Disney animator]—and a shutdown was imminent,” wrote Lou Scheimer, a one-time animator of Bozo the Clown, in his biography (with Andy Mangels), Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation. “Norm [Prescott, radio jock-turned-animator] was doing his best to try to raise money from someone, somewhere, somehow.” Filmation Associates, co-founder Scheimer’s fledgling animation company headquartered in California’s San Fernando Valley, was on the verge of closing its doors in 1965—until Superman saved the day! A phone query from DC Comics’ Superman

editor Mort Weisinger in New York about the possibility of Filmation producing a new Superman cartoon for CBS’ Saturday morning schedule led to an appointment for a studio visit from DC’s Hollywood dealmaker, Whitney Ellsworth… and panic, since Filmation was on the verge of bankruptcy and had scaled back to a deal-killing barebones operation.

To create the illusion of a thriving animation house, Scheimer called in friends and colleagues to fill the studio’s workstations, including his friend Ted Knight. Out of Ellsworth’s view, Knight spoke in numerous voices, manufacturing enough hustle-bustle to impress Ellsworth to move forward with Filmation.

The end result was The New Adventures of Superman, an animated series that put DC cartoons and Filmation on the map. It was the first time Superman had appeared in animation since the celebrated Fleischer Studios theatrical shorts of the early Forties (discounting the animation used in the Superman live-action movie serials to compensate for the era’s special-effects inadequacies), and was Superman’s return to television after actor George Reeves’ purported “suicide” brought one of the classics of Fifties’ television, The Adventures of Superman, to a tragic end.

Weisinger became involved as story editor of the series, as Ellsworth had been with the live-action Adventures of Superman TV show during the previous decade, keeping the cartoons as true to the comics as possible, bringing along comic-book scribes Leo Dorfman, Bob Haney, and George Kashdan as writers. Familiar villains from the comics appeared (Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Titano, Toyman, the Prankster, and Mr. Myxzptlk), and new rogues were created for the show (including the Warlock, the Sorcerer, lots of alien invaders, and a host of monsters assuming the shapes of fire, ice, trees, and lava). While the animation was produced in Hollywood, “they actually recorded the Superman voices in New York, at the same radio studio in which they had recorded the Superman radio show,” wrote Scheimer. Filmation’s

The voice of Filmation’s DC cartoons, Ted Knight.

Autographed photo courtesy of Heritage.

Filmation’s Norm Prescott, Hal Sutherland, and Lou Scheimer.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

Superman was a talent reunion from radio’s Superman, with Bud Collyer as Superman/Clark Kent, Joan Alexander as Lois Lane, Jackson Beck as the narrator and as Perry White, and Jack Grimes as Jimmy Olsen. The half-hour episodes featured two The New Adventures of Superman segments sandwiching one The Adventures of Superboy segment, marking the Boy of Steel’s first appearance on TV (although a Superboy live-action pilot produced a few years earlier failed to earn a berth on the schedule). Voicing Superboy and teenage Clark Kent was Bob Hastings, best known as Lt. Carpenter on the sitcom McHale’s Navy. Ted Knight—in his first foray into the DC animated universe—narrated Superboy and yapped the role of super-dog Krypto. Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman debuted on Saturday, September 10, 1966 and was a ratings smash for CBS, elevating the network from last (third) to first place in the war for Saturday morning viewers.

With Superman’s success, Filmation raced to develop new projects. They announced an animated version of The Marx Brothers and a cartoon musical titled Three Billion Millionaires, both of which failed to reach production. A similar pall was cast over Filmation’s fruitless pilots for the teen secret agent show

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The Kid from S.P.Y., the weirdo super-hero show The Adventures of Dick Digit, and the spy spoof Bulldog Bound. Continuing their relationship with DC Comics (credited on TV by its official name, National Periodical Publications, or N.P.P.), Filmation also announced Green Lantern as having his own show.

Numerous DC characters were in development, with announcements being made to the trades in early 1967 that Aquaman, Batman (to begin production after the live-action show ended), and Green Arrow were also in the works. At one stage, Aquaman was to team up, in Brave and the Bold fashion, with a rotating roster of DC heroes including the Atom, Blackhawk, the Doom Patrol, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and—showing Bob Haney’s involvement with the growing TV franchise— B’Wana Beast. Also under development were the Challengers of the Unknown, the Metal Men, Plastic Man, and Wonder Woman, with Metamorpho under consideration as well, sparking an urban legend that a Metamorpho pilot was produced. An infamous DC Comics house ad in 1966 excited fans

by prematurely, and erroneously, announcing that Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, and Metamorpho would be coming soon “in colorful animation!”

This ambitious fishing expedition eventually netted a streamlined DC super-hero show titled The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, premiering during the Fall of 1967. Many of the aforementioned characters never made it onto the screen. Filmation eventually opted for a group of characters that were, according to Scheimer, “all visually very different from each other”: the Atom (voiced by Pat Harrington, Jr.), the Flash (Ray Owens), Green Lantern (Gerald Mohr), Hawkman (Vic Perrin), the Justice League of America (starring the aforementioned heroes and Superman, but not Aquaman, although the Sea King was shown in JLA bumpers), and the Teen Titans.

Three shorts for each of those features were produced, rotating in a “guest hero” spot. Each Hour of Adventure installment consisted of two Superman episodes, one Superboy, two Aquaman episodes, and the guest hero episode, plus a secret code seg-

This promo for Krantz Films’ Marvel Super-Heroes was produced for newsdealers, to display within view of their comicbook racks.

ment and bumpers. While some changes were made to simplify the concepts for animation—Kid Flash’s costume and hair color were different from the comic books, the Flash wore yellow gloves, Kairo was a substitute for Green Lantern’s friend “Pieface,” etc.— The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure is historically significant as the first appearances in cinema for many of DC’s characters.

With Hour of Adventure, Ted Knight picked up the narration duties for Aquaman and each of the guest hero segments. While Grantray-Lawrence’s Marvel Super-Heroes show introduced its characters with novelty songs, the intros to the super-hero toons comprising The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure featured an electrifying music bed, over which Knight would narrate a character introduction, as illustrated previously with the Flash.

For the Fall of 1968, another change was made to Filmation’s DC series, with Batman and Robin— now cancelled from their live-action incarnation— joining the Filmation line-up. Aquaman was excised from the package and moved to a half-hour slot on Sunday mornings, while the Saturday morning show became The Batman/Superman Hour, with essentially the same format as The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, save for Batman segments replacing Aquaman’s. Olan Soule and Casey Kasem lent their voices to the animated Dynamic Duo, becoming so identified with the characters that they would return to voice them in the Seventies in Super Friends. Batgirl transitioned to animation, as did many Bat-villains (Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, Mr. Freeze, and one unseen on the live-action show, Scarecrow), and new villains were introduced (Simon the Pieman and Dollman). That was the final season for the Hour series, with Superman and Batman splitting later splitting into half-hour shows, and all of the cartoons eventually winding into syndication. Today, Filmation’s DC super-hero cartoons seem primitive when compared to what’s followed in the decades since, but during the Camp Age, they were the most exciting toons a kid could hope to watch—and you can thank Ted Knight for that!

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MIGHTY MARVEL MARCHES TO TELEVISION

TM & © DC Comics.

Marvel Cartoons of the Camp Age

“One of the secrets of Marvel’s success is its ability to draw action right into the panels,” film and television producer Robert L. Lawrence told writer Ron McGrath, as reported in the Winter 1966–67 issue of the animation trade journal The World of Cartoons #3.

“Marvel’s art is like no other penciling in comics, because its artists and production people understand the principles of arrested motion.” That “arrested motion” was paroled for a new audience by Lawrence and Steve Krantz, a former programming executive for NBC and Screen Gems, with their Marvel SuperHeroes animated series, the first cinema adaptations of four of Marvel’s characters (Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Sub-Mariner), and the second for Captain America, who had previously starred in a fifteen-chapter live-action movie serial in 1944.

Lawrence and Krantz had been eyeing Marvel’s steady rise during the Sixties. Steve’s company Krantz Films negotiated a sweetheart deal to bring 239

This set of Marvel flicker rings was one of several licensed items from 1966 to tie in to the TV cartoons.

This package is also noteworthy for its inclusion of artist Jack Kirby’s signature.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

the Marvel characters to the small screen, one that was negligibly profitable for Marvel, then a neophyte in licensing negotiations.

The first Marvel project from Krantz Films was Marvel Super-Heroes in 1966, with production by Grantray-Lawrence Animation, a company formed in 1954 by Bob Lawrence and animators Grant Simmons and Ray Patterson, the trio combining parts of their names for their business’ name. GrantrayLawrence employed a technique called Xerography for the animation, taking actual images from Marvel Comics original artwork and adapting them into cels. While the animation itself was severely (and at times laughably) limited, it made the cartoons true to form—they were literally Marvel Comics come to life.

Having the cartoons cheaply produced but widely distributed generated huge profits for Krantz Films.

Premiering in syndication on September 1, 1966, Marvel Super-Heroes presented the adventures of one Marvel character per day of the week in a total of thirteen three-chapter episodes for each: Captain America on Monday, Hulk on Tuesday, Iron Man on

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TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Wednesday, Thor (appropriately) on Thursday, and Sub-Mariner on Friday. These cartoons provided Marvel fans with their first opportunity to hear their heroes speak. Voicing Captain America was Sandy Becker, a popular New York City children’s television show host. Voicing Iron Man and Sub-Mariner was actor John Vernon, perhaps best known for his role as the double-secret-probation-threatening Dean Wormer in 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House; the Hulk was voiced by Canadian radio show host Max Ferguson; and Thor was handled by Canadian actor Chris Wiggins. The Marvel Super-Heroes episodes were directed by Patterson, Simmons, Don Lusk, and Sid Marcus. June Patterson headed up the “Story Adaptations,” the addition of talking lips and limited movement to the comic-book art.

While there was limited money for Marvel Comics from the distribution of these cartoons, the de facto storyboard artists—Gene Colan, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, who had drawn the comic books adapted into animation—received an acknowledgment on an end-credits title but no financial compensation.

What is best remembered about these cartoons is their theme music, silly little jingles that succinctly established the backstories and personalities of each character—in a matter of twenty or so sing-along seconds. “I wish I could claim to have written the [theme song] lyrics, because I think they’re brilliant,” Stan Lee admitted to interviewer Adam McGovern in The Jack Kirby Collector #47 (Fall 2004). According to the cartoons’ end credits, “original music and lyrics” were by Jacques Urbont.

Steve Krantz’s original presentation for Marvel Super-Heroes included the Amazing Spider-Man, until he realized Spidey’s potential and withheld him as a solo property. That potential was realized at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on September 9, 1967, when Spider-Man premiered as part of ABC’s Saturday morning line-up, its “does whatever a spider can” theme song by Bob Harris and Paul Francis Webster quickly becoming a pop-culture anthem. Spidey’s costume was simplified for animation (underarm webbing? I don’t think so!), and reused footage was com-

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

mon, particularly Spider-Man’s web-swinging across the city, with Ray Ellis’ dramatic score diverting the viewer’s attention from noticing the sameness of the shots. The hero’s cast was streamlined for Season One’s adventures, mainly focusing on Peter Parker’s work life at the Daily Bugle and his battles with supervillains, some translated from the comics (including Dr. Octopus, the Rhino, and the Vulture), others created for the show (such as the Fantastic Fakir, Dr. Magento, and Dr. Noah Boddy). Grantray-Lawrence produced Season One under a bigger budget than they had on Marvel Super-Heroes, with Spider-Man’s animation being vastly superior to the previous Marvel show (but still primitive by contemporary standards).

Story and art consultants were none other than “Smilin’” Stan Lee and “Jazzy” Johnny Romita. Voice actors included Paul Soles as Peter Parker/SpiderMan, Paul Kligman as the crusty J. Jonah Jameson, and Peg Dixon as Betty Brant.

Spider-Man was a hit, but with Season Two a dramatic change occurred. Grantray-Lawrence was gone, with Steve Krantz’s Krantz Films taking over production. According to Ralph Baskhi, whom Krantz hired to helm the program, Krantz slashed the show’s budget to bare bones in order to maximize its profit.

Ratings remained healthy, but during Seasons Two and Three, Bakshi’s limited budget forced the removal of most of the Marvel villains and supporting cast, with generic threats and aliens added for Spidey to fight. More footage was recycled—even some from Rocket Robin Hood—and the show took on a darker palette. With 52 episodes under its belt, Spider-Man ended its run on June 14, 1970, but became a longtime staple of afternoon syndication.

Premiering a half-hour before Spider-Man on Saturday, September 9, 1967 was Marvel’s other Camp Age super-hero cartoon, The Fantastic Four, “based on an idea by” (according to the end credits) Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Stan and Jack’s vision was intact, as this series, produced and directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, adapted many of their stories into episodes, with their characters reinterpreted

for television by the astounding Alex Toth, making Hanna-Barbera’s Fantastic Four the stylistic cousin of such fare as Space Ghost and The Herculoids. Of all the Marvel cartoons of the Sixties, Fantastic Four lacked a theme song with lyrics, instead featuring a jazzy, riveting instrumental score by Ted Nichols, accented by various sound effects from the H-B library, all under a fast-paced sixty-second intro showcasing each character and his powers plus recognizable FF staples such as the “4” flare, the Baxter Building, and villains including Galactus and Dr. Doom. Voicing the characters were cartoon stalwart Paul Frees as the Thing, durable screen and TV actor Gerald Mohr as Mr. Fantastic, winsome television and film actress Jo Ann Pflug as the Invisible Girl, and Jack Flounders as the Human Torch. Many of Hanna-Barbera’s go-to voice performers played FF foes and friends, including Ted Cassidy as Galactus, Janet Waldo as Lady Dorma, Vic Perrin as the Red Ghost and the Silver Surfer, and Hal Smith as Klaw. The show’s twenty episodes ran on Saturday mornings for three seasons before being squeezed off the air by a wave of antiviolence advocacy, but enjoyed a healthy afterlife in syndication.

A Spider-Man cel, autographed by GrantrayLawrence animation director Ray Lawrence.

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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AMERICA’S BEST TV COMICS

Marvel Comics Meets TV Guide

Sol Brodsky. © Marvel Comics.

You’ve got to hand it to Mr. Fantastic—he knows how to pick a cartoon line-up!

Fantastic Four and Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Casper the Friendly Ghost TM & © DreamWorks Classics. Journey to the Center of the Earth © 20th Century Fox Television. King Kong TM & © Classic Media.

George of the Jungle TM & © Bullwinkle Studios.

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In 1967, an incognito Marvel Comics, in conjunction with the ABC Television Network, published a special edition that one-upped the two-page house ads promoting CBS cartoons in competitor DC Comics’ titles. It was in the same format as Marvel’s King-Size Annuals: 68 pages (72, counting covers), squarebound, at a price of twenty-five cents. At a quick glance it looked like a Marvel comic, with a Jack Kirby-drawn Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards elongating a welcoming hand toward the reader.

Also in view were the entire Fantastic Four and the Amazing Spider-Man. But there was no “Marvel Comics Group” corner box identifying the publisher.

Confusing matters even more were the other cover stars: these were not denizens of the House of Ideas, but instead were culled from sources as diverse as Harvey Comics, an RKO Pictures horror classic, a Jay Ward-produced Tarzan spoof, and the fiction of Jules Verne.

This was America’s Best TV Comics, a “Saturday Morning Cartoon Carnival!” showcasing—in comic-

book stories—“an all-star ABC animated powerpacked line-up you just can’t miss!”

Contemporary readers might be surprised that characters from a variety of producers and publishers shared ink under one collective cover— why, Marvel’s America’s Best TV Comics even featured an appearance by DC’s Batman! But what better way to promote a Saturday morning animation line-up than a special comic book targeting the kids who would tune in to the programs?

America’s Best TV Comics offered ten-page samplers of ABC’s Saturday morning programming, running in order of their airtimes, from the 9:00 a.m. lead-off show, Casper the Friendly Ghost, through the 11:30 show, George of the Jungle. The “Saturday Spectacular on ABC” inside front cover also depicted the animated version of The Beatles, which aired at 12:00 noon but was not included in a comics story (too bad—wouldn’t that have been cool?). Also blurbed was ABC’s 12:30 p.m. live-action dance show, American Bandstand, but readers were spared an artist’s rendition of America’s oldest teenager, Dick Clark.

The Casper, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man stories hailed from their respective publishers and were edited to fit the ten-page-per-feature format (which seriously truncated the FF and Spidey adventures, since they were originally 22 and 20 pages, respectively). The other tales were produced by the Marvel Bullpen, under the direction of Sol Brodsky. While those stories were uncredited, the penciling (and perhaps inking) on the Journey to the Center of the Earth installment was unmistakably the work of artist Paul Reinman.

The stories were, in publication order: Casper the Friendly Ghost in “The Flying Horse” Reprinted from The Friendly Ghost, Casper #17 (Jan. 1960) The Fantastic Four in “Prisoners of the Pharaoh!”

Reprinted from Fantastic Four #19 (Oct. 1963) Writer: Stan Lee

Artists: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers The Amazing Spider-Man in “The Birth of a Super-Hero!”

Reprinted from The Amazing Spider-Man #42 (Nov. 1966) Writer: Stan Lee Artist: John Romita, Sr. Journey to the Center of the Earth (no story title) Writer: unknown Artist: Paul Reinman King Kong (no story title) No creator credits.

George of the Jungle (no story title) No creator credits.

Of these new features, only George of the Jungle continued as a comic book, scoring two issues from Gold Key Comics in 1969. Journey to the Center of the Earth, a Filmation Associates cartoon that ran 17 episodes, was a good candidate for a comic book but no publisher picked up the rights.

The oddities inside America’s Best TV Comics were its ads for ABC’s new primetime live-action series, all drawn in comic-book style.

Promoted in the comic were: Cowboy in Africa Starring Chuck Connors as rodeo cowboy Jim Sinclair, Cowboy in Africa was inspired by the Ivan Tors-produced movie Africa–Texas Style.

The one-hour drama aired Mondays from 7:30– 8:30 p.m. and ran only one season. Gold Key Comics published one issue of Cowboy in Africa in late 1967; it featured a Connors photo cover and interior art by Giovanni Ticci and Alberto Giolitti.

The Second Hundred Years Gold prospector Luke Carpenter, who went missing in 1900, was thawed out of ice in 1967 and adjusted to life in a time he didn’t understand in this half-hour sitcom. Monte Markham played the dual roles of Luke Carpenter and his now-adult grandson, Ken, and Arthur O’Connell played Luke’s son Edwin, who was now much older than his father. The Second Hundred Years was cancelled after its one and only season.

Custer Wayne Maunder starred as the famous cavalry lieutenant colonel in this hour-long Western series set after the Civil War. Custer’s TV fate was not unlike the real Custer’s at Little Big Horn—the show was quickly axed (after four months). That was long enough for Dell Comics to publish a tie-in one-shot, The Legend of Custer #1, featuring a Maunder photo cover and Jack Sparling interior art.

Batman This ⅓-pager (sharing a page with Custer) touted the third and final season of the Adam Weststarring Batman, the season in which Batgirl was added to the cast. The ad, showing Batman and Batgirl (sans Robin), was drawn by George Tuska.

Off to See the Wizard

This hour-long children’s program, which ran only one season on Fridays from 7:30–8:30 p.m., featured animated versions of characters from The Wizard of Oz hosting the broadcast of a variety of children’s movies and documentaries, including Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion.

The Flying Nun On the back cover of America’s Best TV Comics was an ad for the sole hit of ABC’s 1967–68 premieres, The Flying Nun, which ran for three seasons. Sally Field starred as Sister Bertrille, who lifted hearts with her buoyancy and lifted off whenever a wind gust caught her winged cornette. Dell Comics released four issues of The Flying Nun, the first three issues featuring Henry Scarpelli art.

Rounding out America’s Best TV Comics was its inside back cover, “Sunday is Fun Day on ABC,” blurbing the network’s Sunday kid fare, mostly cartoons which had been on the air for a few seasons and were no longer popular enough to continue in children’s “primetime” (Saturday mornings).

This bizarre marriage of a Marvel comic and TV Guide makes America’s Best TV Comics one of the weirdest, but nonetheless pleasurable, comic-book treats of the Camp Age.

DC and CBS didn’t monopolize the double-page comic-book ad concept: ABC’s 1967 line-up was featured in this promo.

Fantastic Four and Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Casper the Friendly Ghost TM & © DreamWorks Classics. Journey to the Center of the Earth © 20th Century Fox Television. King Kong TM & © Classic Media.

George of the Jungle TM & © Bullwinkle Studios. The Beatles © Apple Corps.

LEFT: America’s Best TV Comics’ ads for primetime series. Seeing Batman in a Marvel-published comic was quite a surprise in 1967!

Cowboy in Africa © Ivan Tors Films, Inc. Custer © 20th Century Fox Television.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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Chapter 5

Jimmy has started a Beatle craze here in the ancient past! He’s as popular as RINGO!

Detail and dialogue from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #79. TM & (C) DC Comics.

GREAT KRYPTON!

BAND CAMP

TEENS-A-GO-GO BEATLEMANIA

The Fab Four’s Four-Color Invasion They descended upon us like a plague, those mop-topped, madcap, musical lads from Liverpool.

Evangelists had only recently stilled their tsk-tsk-ing tongues in protest to Elvis’ pelvic gyrations. Flattopped fathers’ eyes had not stopped rolling from the most recent “long hair” to drive their teenybopper daughters wild, that ginchy comb-master of 77 Sunset Strip, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes (who inspired the Justice League of America’s hipster sidekick, Snapper Carr). And now this. A second British invasion?

Wasn’t that thing with the Redcoats bad enough?

WE LOVE YOU, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH Sunday, February 9, 1964 was the Day the Earth Went Shrill, as millions of American girls shrieked at such an eardrum-erupting decibel level that a nationwide outbreak of tinnitus followed. That was the night the Beatles made their first live appearance on U.S. television on The Ed Sullivan Show, attracting a viewership of 73 million and making Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr household names. The bomb that was Beatlemania had detonated, its mushroom cloud unfurling from coast to coast. No radio station, record shop, toy store, department store, or magazine rack was immune.

The Beatles’ initial success was a confluence of music, attitude, and fashion. Their songs were too raucous for Grandma but catchy enough for Mom to hum along with while washing dishes. The Fab Four playfully mocked authority figures without tipping into disrespect. Their threads were straight off the rack at Carnaby Street’s hottest boutiques but presented enough polish to ready the boys for an audience with the Queen.

And then there was their hair—it wasn’t as shaggy as those unwashed beatniks but was still long enough to make Floyd the Barber wonder if his days of administering Butches and Ivy Leagues were a thing of the past.

Beatlemania was everywhere. TV weathermen donned Beatle wigs for cheap laughs. Alvin and the Chipmunks cut an album of hyper-modulated Beatles hits. Network sitcoms guest-starred the Beatles’ fellow British Invaders (Patty Lane, who was known to lose control over a hot dog, flipped her wig over Chad and Jeremy) and introduced their own Fab(ricated) Fours (remember when the Mosquitoes touched down on Gilligan’s Island?).

The Beatles themselves lent their likenesses and their music to a successful cartoon series that aired on Saturday mornings beginning on September 25, 1965. The Beatles, from executive producer Al Brodax, featured kid-friendly caricatures of the lads’ early-Sixties’, mop-topped appearances, ignoring the continuing evolution of the real-life Beatles’ style and music. Each episode was built around a Beatles song The Fab Four’s first official comic book, Dell Comics’ The Beatles #1, from 1964.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps.

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TOP: Comicbook ad for ABC’s Beatles cartoon.

BOTTOM: The rare LP released in conjunction with the Saturday morning cartoon The Beagles.

Smothers Brothers. Their speaking voices, however, were a riff on the Martin–Lewis comedy duo, with Mort Marshall playing Stringer à la Dean Martin and Allen Swift doing a Jerry Lewis impression as Tubby.

Swift also voiced The Beagles’ other major character, concert promoter Scotty, a Scottish terrier. Charles Fox was the show’s musical director, producing Here Come the Beagles, an album of the band’s music released in 1967 on Columbia’s Harmony Records label. Reruns of The Beagles’ one-and-only season of episodes were shown on ABC the following year, after which time the show faded from view—and from most viewers’ memories.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps.

The Beagles © TTV.

HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE

and the show included sing-alongs. Just like their real counterparts, the cartoon Beatles traveled the world.

In the tradition of the campy Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, the boys would be chased (by cartoon monsters, leprechauns, wild beasts, wizards, and cutthroats), with a Beatles tune accompanying the mayhem. John and George were portrayed by versatile voiceman Paul Frees, while British comic Lance Percival played Paul and the cartoons’ comic relief, Ringo. The Beatles ran on ABC on Saturday mornings for three seasons, with 39 episodes produced, and during its fourth season, which aired reruns, it shifted to Sunday mornings.

Animation house Total TeleVision rolled out The Beagles on CBS on Saturday, September 10, 1966 in the 12:30 p.m. time slot, just as ABC’s The Beatles was entering its second season. Both were humorous adventure cartoons about musicians, but other than confusing TV Guide’s least-attentive readers, The Beagles did little to infringe upon the Beatles’ territory other than the similarity of the bands’ names. The Beagles were a harmonious pop/folk duo of anthropomorphic pooches, acoustic guitarist Stringer and upright bassist Tubby, the cartoon equivalents of the 246

Beatlemania also invaded the world of four-color comic books.

Dell Comics dashed to obtain the rights to produce the authorized story of the Fab Four. The end result was the Dell Giant The Beatles #1, which began production in Spring 1964 and steamrolled toward a release date of July 2, 1964 (although cover-dated Sept.–Nov. 1964 for maximum retail display time). Written by Paul S. Newman, The Beatles featured photographs and a 64-page biography in comic-book form, including individual chapters revealing the personal histories of Paul, George, John, and Ringo, concluding with a chapter chronicling their partnership. Its illustrator was Joe Sinnott of Marvel Comics fame. As Sinnott explains in the interview following, he had only one month to produce this double-sized periodical.

Throughout the mid- to late-Sixties, comic books were jammed with unofficial appearances of the Beatles—from quiet cameos to hilarious homages to blatant cover exploitations—which longtime fans remember and collectors covet today. The Fab Four were no strangers to parody titles like MAD, Sick, Not Brand Echh, and The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, but the Beatles, or Beatle references, tended to pop up where readers would least expect them.

Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #79 featured the Man of Steel’s time-traveling buddy as “The Red-Headed Beatle of 1,000 B.C.!” The Thing was given a Beatle wig in Fantastic Four #34, then wore it in Strange Tales #130 while he and the Human Torch frantically tried to attend a Beatles concert. Archie Comics’ elementary school-aged back-up character Li’l Jinx was looking for a Beatle wig to wear with her new band in Laugh #162. The “Fat Fury” put a mop on his head when meeting “The Beetles” in Herbie #5.

Ringo asked DC’s super-hero robots to autograph his drum in Metal Men #12. Betty and Veronica listened to a satellite-broadcast Beatles concert on the cover of Pep #179. Romance comics built stories around

Beatles obsessions, including Summer Love #46’s “The Beatles Were My Downfall!”

The Beatles so permeated comic books of the Sixties that their tunes were sometimes referenced, without identifying the band by name. Marvel’s World War II heroes, the Howling Commandos, battled Hitler in Sgt. Fury #67, but writer Gary Friedrich titled that issue’s tale after a Beatles’ song: “With a Little Help from My Friends.” And witness the second appearance of the Teen Titans, in 1965’s The Brave and the Bold #60. As the enormous, floating ear of the “Astounding Separated Man” was eavesdropping on the plans of the Titans and other kids conspiring against the giant villain who could split his body into ambulatory parts, the youths dispelled the nosy ear by cranking up the volumes on their transistor radios, with a deafening broadcast of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” (“I think I’m deaf now, too!” quipped an adult on the scene.) DC also introduced regular characters that would not have gotten their starts were it not for Beatlemania: Super-Hip and Scooter. From other comics publishers, there was no dearth of Beatles knock-offs making the scene, including the Gears, the Mad House Glads, the Termites Five, and the Lumps.

Even more obscure than Saturday morning’s The Beagles was a comic-book music group with the same name. The Beagles (Nigel, Stanley, Harold, and Frederic) were a “blast-your-wit-ish British rock group” that premiered in Harvey Comics’ Bunny #1 (Dec. 1966), in the story “Bunny Meets the Beagles”

by Warren Harvey and Hy Eisman. The Beagles, managed by Garson Goldentripper, continued as supporting cast characters throughout the run of the book and were Bunny’s favorite band (although other groups such as the Soular System and the Marmalade Mirage found their way into Bunny’s universe as well). Their musical mishaps were usually innocuous, like Harvey’s fare itself, and stories often featured a problem with a gig or the cast’s interactions with the band. The Beagles even performed at Superman’s favorite amusement park, Palisades Park, in Harvey Pop Comics #2. But a particularly far-out Beagles adventure was published in Bunny #16. “Lotus Bogus” showed Frederic in a deep meditative trance from a yoga session. Unbeknownst to most of the kids reading that comic, ol’ Freddy was quite clearly stoned, his “yoga” being a veiled reference to Sixties drug culture and the Beatles’ own experiments with LSD that had become common knowledge.

Over a year before Bunny #1, another band named the Beagles appeared in a Harvey Comic.

Richie Rich #34 (June 1965) featured a story called “Little Lotta and the Beagles,” where the plump Lotta helped a popular band (Don, Jon, Lon, and Ron Beagle) avoid a fan mob.

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD The Camp Age’s second authorized Beatles comic book was published by Gold Key Comics in the form of an adaptation of the trippy animated film Yellow Submarine. Directed by George Dunning and produced by the man behind the TV Beatles cartoon, Al Brodax, Yellow Submarine was a United Artists/ King Features co-production released in the U.S. on November 13, 1968. The plot involved the Beatles in their flying submarine defending groovy Pepperland from the attacks of the music-loathing Blue Meanies. Voices for the movie were provided by John Clive (John), Geoff Hughes (Paul), and Paul Angelis (Ringo, and also George in the film’s second half, replacing Yellow Submarine’s original George, Peter Batten).

The origin of the movie’s surreal visuals has been the subject of controversy. Germany’s Heinz Edelmann, whose neo-Art Nouveau style was captured in advertising and posters in the Sixties, was the movie’s art director and is credited with establishing Yellow Submarine’s look. In the September 2012 edition of Westchester Magazine, however, American psychedelic pop artist Peter Max told interviewer Carol Caffin that he designed the film, although he had nothing to do with its production. “I was very, very close friends with the Beatles, and they were going to make a movie,” Max said. “I remember getting a call from John, saying they wanted me to do it. So I designed it.” Max further claimed that he opened the

LEFT: Cover to Gold Key’s adaptation of Yellow Submarine.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps. Yellow Submarine © King Features-Subafilms, LTD.

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LEFT: The Thing gets a Beatle wig in Fantastic Four #34. RIGHT: The Torch has one, too, on the cover of Strange Tales #130.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

door for Edelmann to take over because his family responsibilities would not allow him to commit to Yellow Submarine’s year-plus production schedule.

Whatever the source, Yellow Submarine’s hallucinogenic imagery was distinctive enough for artist Jose Delbo to mimic from production stills for the Gold Key adaptation of the movie, which went on sale on November 26, 1968, just under two weeks after the film’s release. Penning its script posed a greater challenge for Paul S. Newman, returning to the Beatles four years after writing Dell’s biographical one-shot. As Newman told Pat S. Calhoun in Comic Book Marketplace #43 (Jan. 1997), he was scripting The Dynamic Duo meet the Fab Four in Batman #222.

TM & © DC Comics.

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the comic from an earlier draft of the film, leading to some inconsistencies between the comic book and the movie it adapted.

Fans were shocked—many were heartbroken— by the break-up of the Beatles when it was publicly announced on April 10, 1970. Coincidentally, that same month, on April 21st, DC Comics released a Beatles-related story that was in the works prior to the revelation of the band’s dissolution. Batman #222 (cover-dated June 1970) featured the Frank Robbins/Irv Novick/Dick Giordano story “Dead…

Till Proven Alive!” Based upon a late-Sixties’ urban legend about a dead Paul McCartney being replaced by a singing look-alike, Robbins’ script introduced the rock band the Oliver Twists, with Batman and Robin investigating a rumor that its lead singer, Saul Cartwright, had been killed, with an impostor taking his place. I won’t spoil its twist ending here for those wishing to discover this classic on their own, but I will note that Batman #222’s Neal Adams cover is worth the price of admission.

In the decades since the Beatles’ break-up, comicdom has continued its fascination with the Fab Four through tributes, biographies, and take-offs, many of which have been produced by artists born long after the original wave of Beatlemania. The Fifth Beatle, Vivek Tiwary, Andrew Robinson, and Kyle Baker’s 2013 graphic novel revealing the tragic story of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, made the New York Times bestseller list and is, as of this writing, being developed for film, proving that Beatlemania has no expiration date.

HELP! HOW TO DRAW A BEATLES COMIC IN THIRTY DAYS An Interview with Joe Sinnott

Listen… do you want to know a secret? Joe Sinnott was comicdom’s first official Beatles artist.

For most comics fans, Joltin’ Joe is best known as one half of the art team of Marvel’s flagship title, Fantastic Four, inking Jack Kirby’s FF pencils beginning in 1965. In the years that followed, Sinnott’s name would become synonymous with Marvel Comics, and over time his work would grace almost every title published by the House of Ideas, as well as the Amazing Spider-Man syndicated comic strip. His career dates back to 1950, when Joe landed an assignment for St. John’s Publishing while still a student at New York City’s Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now known as the School of Visual Arts). Throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, Sinnott penciled and inked stories in a variety of genres for several publishers, earning kudos for his accurate likenesses on biographical comics starring public figures as diverse as Pope John XXIII, John F. Kennedy, and Mickey Mantle.

Sinnott’s flair for drawing celebrities got him the gig to draw Dell Comics’ 1964 Beatles biographical one-shot, with a deadline that would require eight days a week for any other artist to meet—64 pages due in one month! How did this fan of the music of Bing Crosby complete such a Herculean task? Let’s find out…

Interview conducted in February 2016.

Let’s set the stage with your career just before Dell Comics’

The Beatles one-shot: You were drawing romance stories for Charlton, war comics for Dell, and some biographies and other stories for Treasure Chest. How did you get the Beatles assignment?

A friend of the editor, a cover illustrator named Vic Prezio, saw some of my stuff where I did some pretty good likenesses.

He really liked them, and recommended me to his editor friend.

Naturally, they wanted someone that did good likenesses. That’s how I got the Beatles assignment.

How familiar were you with the Beatles and their music when you got the assignment?

I had never heard of the Beatles or their music at the time. I don’t even recall seeing a picture of them. I was from the old school, a big fan of Bing Crosby and his music, and the Big Band era.

You sure did!

Did the Beatles or their agents have likeness approval?

If so, were there any problems, or was there any redrawing required?

None whatsoever! I never had to redraw anything, although they did Photostat one panel that I did, and flipped it. I had drawn a sports car with the steering wheel on the left, but as you know, over in England, the steering wheel is on the right. It was so easy to make that mistake. I once did the life story of Babe Ruth for Treasure Chest comics, and drew a panel of him with the glove on his left hand. Babe Ruth was left-handed [and wore his glove

Joe Sinnott and Jack Kirby in 1975.

Courtesy of joesinnott.com.

Meet the Beatles… by Joe Sinnott.

Detail from page 1 of Dell’s The Beatles.

Note Joe’s signature in the bottom right corner.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps.

With its backstories of each of the four Beatles, plus their beginnings as a band, you had to have a lot of reference. What type of reference were you provided?

They did not provide any reference whatsoever. I had to scrounge around for the only magazine or two that was available, so I knew what they looked like, and their instruments, etc.

This was a real handicap, as I had so little to go on for such a long book. However, towards the end, I had drawn them so often that I needed very little reference. The instruments and guitars are what was really the most time consuming. I feel I did a nice job on them, getting down to the finest detail.

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his pages to John Tartaglione, another friend of mine, because it looks a lot like John’s work.

Did you have any other help on the project?

No, none whatsoever! But I sure could have used some! It was Easter time, and I had to burn the “midnight oil,” as they say, to get this done.

Was The Beatles a traditional work-for-hire project, or was there a special rate for it?

I was paid a simple page rate from Dell, but a very good one, and they loved the work. I consider it one of my favorite stories that I’ve ever done, mainly because of the little time that I had to do it in. It wasn’t the likenesses that took time, but the guitars and drum set. All that attention to detail.

The band’s early days revealed, with drummer Pete Best.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps.

RIGHT: Chapters devoted to each band member told their personal histories.

Here’s a detail from the title page to the John Lennon chapter.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps.

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on his right hand], so fortunately they caught the mistake and corrected it.

Who was your favorite Beatle to draw?

Ringo Starr was by far my favorite Beatle to draw. He was the most interesting-looking of them. He was the easiest to draw, and his chapter in the book was my favorite.

A 64-page comic, pencils and inks, is a big, big undertaking.

But you had a very short production window…

I had a thirty-day deadline to get this done. That was a very tight schedule to get this project done in. That’s the reason that I had Dick Giordano help me out by penciling a few pages.

What made you choose Dick?

Dick and I had been friends and had often worked together on some books for Radio Shack, General Electric, and some other industrial projects. I would do the pencils on these, and Dick would ink them. I always felt that on the Beatles book, Dick farmed out

Do you know how well Dell’s Beatles comic sold? It’s easy to assume that it would have sold well, but since it had a 35-cent price tag—a hefty price, for its day—that might have worked against its sales.

I have no idea how well the comic sold, but I was confident it was one of Dell’s big issues because of who the Beatles were at the time. I know Dell was happy with the end result.

Did you receive any publicity as the “Beatle Artist” when the book came out?

No, none. Dell didn’t do anything that I can recall to promote it. It just sold on what it was. On the splash page is all the publicity that I got, and you can see that I even signed my name quite small.

What’s your favorite Beatles’ song?

I really don’t have

a favorite song, but I have always liked “When I’m Sixty-Four.” That song to me sounds like it came out in the Forties.

Are you ever asked to do Beatles commissions?

Rarely, which is a surprise, actually. I have signed many Beatles comics at conventions, but not asked to do commissions of them. I’ve done countless super-heroes, and I would have enjoyed doing some Beatles.

Have you ever met any of the Beatles?

No. I certainly wish that would have had the opportunity to. I’m sure that we would have had quite an interesting conversation.

For example, I’m told that John Lennon was very interested in drawing. That would have been a great chat.

Are there any anecdotes about your drawing The Beatles that you’d like to share?

As in any 64-page comic, there are always panels that you are proud of, and some that you wish you could do over. But you can only do so much with the time you have to do it in. I also would have liked to ask the Beatles why they dumped Pete Best. I have heard that Paul was jealous of the attention that he got from the girls, because he was more handsome than McCartney… could be!

SWING WITH SCOOTER

The Beatles Comic That Wasn’t a Beatles Comic During its long publishing history, DC Comics has produced titles starring several celebrities. The Adventures of Jerry Lewis takes the prize for logging the most issues—124, from 1952 to 1971 (although Jerry shared the first forty with his one-time co-star Dean Martin)—with The Adventures of Bob Hope on its heels with 109 issues, running from 1950 to 1968.

At one time or another, Dale Evans, Pat Boone, and Prince were also DC super-stars.

And so was Paul McCartney.

No, don’t burrow through your Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide searching for that one. DC didn’t really publish a Paul McCartney comic book—but during the Camp Age, they got away with the next best thing.

Look at artist Joe Orlando’s cover for DC’s Swing with Scooter #1 (June–July 1966). See that mop-topped mod riding the sporty Vespa scooter?

Remind you of anyone? Yes, it’s the “cute Beatle” himself—or a darn close approximation!

“Robby Reed,” whose Dial B for Blog is one of the Internet’s most entertaining sources of comics nostalgia, agrees.

He blogged a multi-part installment detailing the links between the Beatles and Swing with Scooter, defining the DC series’ premise as: “What if Paul McCartney had quit the Beatles during the height of their fame, and come to America to live a ‘normal’ teenager’s life?” Sounds like a winning premise, doesn’t it? Too bad DC couldn’t sustain it.

Swing with Scooter #1 was co-written by its editor, Jack Miller, and associate editor, Barbara Friedlander, and illustrated

by Joe Orlando. After introducing its cast, the first issue starts with a

hullaballoo at an American airport. A throng of girls is going ga-ga over the arrival of “that famous English singing star, Scooter, who has deserted his British group, the Banshees, to come and live in Plainsville, U.S.A. The big question is—why??” asks a newsman on the scene. After ducking those wild-eyed followers, Scooter answers that question, as he tells his Aunt Hatta, with whom he’ll now be living, “This is the life! No screaming chicks trying to tear me to pieces!” On that comedic cue, his reverie is broken by clamor outside his window—why, it’s screaming chicks, trying to tear him to pieces! And thus, Swing with Scooter #1’s formula is established, with Scooter narrowly escaping hordes of teenage girls, zipping away on his scooter (which is, according to Robby Reed, Orlando’s rendition of a 1963 Vespa Zundapp Bella 200).

Mixed into those frothing fans are Scooter’s supporting cast. If you think Miller and Friedlander were gutsy with their arrogation of Paul McCartney as Scooter, the rest of the cast are thinly disguised denizens of Archie Andrews’ Riverdale: Sylvester, Kenny, Cookie, and Penny are stand-ins for Jughead, Reggie, Betty, and Veronica, and the weirdo Malibu, framed by a full moon and bats in his introductory headshot on page 2, is an analog for both Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and the creepy crawlies that populated the pages of Archie’s Mad House (don’t forget, there was a monster craze going on at the same time). The supporting cast either digs or dislikes Scooter, with anyone of the female persuasion considering him “the absolute end”—except for Cynthia, who’s impervious to the erstwhile Banshee’s charms (because she’s his sister). Add to that lots of teen-speak (including the series’ buzzword, “Zippsville”), plus “Cookie’s TigerBait,” a page of fashion tips written by Barbara Friedlander, who penned the same type of advice columns in DC’s romance comics, and Swing with Scooter #1 comes to an end.

If DC Comics had followed its original plans, that previous sentence would have concluded, “… and Showcase #62 comes to an end.” As revealed in a DC house ad in the spring of 1966, Swing with Scooter was to premiere in the 62nd issue of the company’s tryout title, Showcase. That berth, as

LEFT: From 1966, Swing with Scooter #1.

TM & © DC Comics.

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An alternate, unused cover concept by Joe Orlando for Scooter #1.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

detailed elsewhere in this book, went to the launch of editor Jack Miller’s Inferior Five, with Swing with Scooter getting his own title a month later. Whatever Scooter’s point of origin, in that house ad the Man of Steel himself heaped high praise upon this British invader, with Superman telling an inquisitive Lois Lane, “…it’s DC’s newest swingin’ star—Scooter!

Everybody’ll dig him!”

With the second issue, writers Miller and Friedlander become aware of the limitations of the girls-chasing-Scooter formula and propel Scooter and friends into the first of a series of wild, unpredictable adventures. Stories over the next few issues include Sylvester selling girls a love potion that will win Scooter’s heart, a Hulk knock-off called Superman digs Scooter, whose series was originally planned to launch in Showcase, as seen in this DC house ad from 1966.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Zekefreak stalking Scooter, the gang tangling with crooks determined to nab Aunt Hatta’s auctionacquired statue, a polka-dotted Martian asking for Cynthia’s hand in marriage, a clash with modernday pirates, a spooky production of Hamlet, a mad scientist who transfers brains into vegetable people, and the gang being reduced to the size of mice (and chased by a cat—shades of The Incredible Shrinking Man!). Scooter’s mega-fame isn’t forgotten, as we’re often reminded of it and his musicianship, most notably with issue #5’s “A Day in the Life of Scooter,” where a reporter trails the ex-Banshee for a day, dodging teenyboppers, only to encounter at story’s end a quintet of Justice Leaguers (Superman, Batman, the Flash, Hawkman, and standby member Adam Strange) who want the singer’s autograph!

(Also in that story, Scooter reveals that he’s an American teen, not a Brit! But didn’t Malibu call him an “English import” on the cover of Swing with Scooter #1? Miller and Friedlander’s story settings were unpredictable, and so was their continuity!)

Swing with Scooter #2 welcomes Mike Esposito as the inker of Joe Orlando’s pencils. Joining “Cookie’s Tiger-Bait” is the “Scooter Scoops” text feature by Friedlander, celebrity pieces about teen idols and music stars of the day including the Beatles, Cher, Ann-Margret, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Nancy Sinatra, the Monkees, Tom Jones, and Dino, Desi and Billy. Also added are one-page gag comics starring various members of Scooter’s supporting cast, the type of stuff you’d find in Archie Comics.

Those one-pagers were a harbinger of an impending change in Swing with Scooter, what blogger Robby Reed calls the “Archie-fication” of the title. Let’s fast-forward to 1968 here in the real world to learn more: The shrieking girls suffering from Beatlemania have quieted and the Beatles have tripped into their experimental music phase. Monkeemania is on the decline, too, as are Batmania and the Camp Age itself. But as one fad fades, another rises, this one being Archie Comics.

Riverdale’s redheaded teen and his pals and gals are headed for stardom in a Saturday morning cartoon and in the bubblegum music market as the Archies. So DC Comics begins churning out Archie copies, from a revival of its formerly crewcut teen Binky, contemporizing the characters’ hair and fashions; a similar repackaging of its early-Sixties The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis TV tie-in as the groovy duo Windy and Willy; and its new title Date with Debbi, which at times seems possessed by the soul of the DC oldie A Date with Judy.

With its twelfth issue (Apr.–May 1968), what was

SUPER-HIP

That Disgusting, Swingin’ Teen Super-Hero

special about Swing with Scooter evaporates as the title begins a two-issue transformation into an Archie clone. The team of Miller and Friedlander are gone, with Scooter artist Joe Orlando now helming the book as well as drawing its covers and some of its stories (along with Bob Oksner and other artists).

Issue #12 also institutes a dramatic logo change that parrots the Archie Comics house font. The logo’s words “Swing with” are demoted to a tiny point size that almost requires a magnifying glass to be noticed, with the emphasis on the title star’s name. By issue #14, cartoonist Henry Scarpelli is on board as the new Scooter artist. He’s an excellent illustrator and makes the title a pleasure to look at, but by this point, this book that started out as a clever fusion of two popular fads has degenerated into a blatant imitation of just one. Swing with Scooter continued in this vein, with another logo change along the way, until issue #35 in 1971, with a final issue, #36, sneaking onto the stands in 1972.

You’ve got to wonder, what would’ve happened if DC hadn’t mutated Swing with Scooter? Would E. Nelson Bridwell, writer of The Inferior Five and the Maniaks, have been tapped to guide the singin’, swingin’ star’s adventures after Miller and Friedlander? Or Arnold Drake, creator of Super-Hip in the pages of Bob Hope? Writer Steve Skeates was up-and-coming in 1968, his wicked sense of humor on display at Charlton in the pages of Abbott & Costello—he might have kept Scooter revving. It’s unfortunate that DC’s Scooter took such a dramatic detour, from Plainsville to “Riverdale,” because along the way, Swing with Scooter became Zippsville.

Super-Hip scored an invite to the wedding of ElastiGirl and Mento in 1966’s Doom Patrol #104, while Aquaman, the King of Atlantis, was snubbed from the guest list! “Man—like, this wedding swings better than a graduation gig at Benedict Arnold High!” he beamed. Rita Farr (Elasti-Girl) and her DP teammates split the ceremony after the “I Do”s to tend to a bomb threat, leaving behind a perturbed groom, but one can only imagine that with Super-Hip and his guitar on the scene, Mento had a boss wedding party, even without his bride.

It was his writer, Arnold Drake, not his coolness, that earned Super-Hip this cameo. Super-Hip was among the super-hip characters (including the famous-monster faculty of Benedict Arnold High School, from its dean, Dr. Van Pyre, to its coach, Frank N. Stein) that Arnie, with artist Bob Oksner, added to the cast of DC Comics’ feeble celebrity tie-in humor title, The Adventures of Bob Hope, in an effort to connect with those kids of today.

Super-Hip was imported into the feature in issue #95 (Oct.–Nov. 1965) as Tadwallader Jutefruce, a straight-laced sophisticate who’s so square, he’s “an octagon,” according to Lisa, one of those Oksner-drawn coquettish cuties at Benedict Arnold High. “Tad,” the son of an old chum of Hope’s, has come to live with his “uncle” Bob. Bob and his talking dog, HarvardHarvard III (don’t blame Drake for that—Arnie inherited this chatty canine), try to get the poetry-reading, “rubbers” (that’s

LEFT: In the course of a few years, Scooter had been transformed into an Archie knock-off.

TM & © DC Comics.

It’s a monster mash on the cover of The Adventures of Bob Hope #95, introducing Super-Hip. The Adventures of Bob Hope © the respective copyright holder. Super-Hip TM & © DC Comics.

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The Adventures of Bob Hope © the respective copyright holder. Super-Hip TM & © DC Comics.

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desired demographic led to DC’s cancellation of The Adventures of Bob Hope with issue #109 (Feb.–Mar. 1968).

Having been shoehorned into a continuity tied to a licensed property for which DC Comics no longer had the rights, Super-Hip was stored in the cryogenic freeze of comics limbo for decades. Even when his fashion cousin, Austin Powers, became a pop-culture phenomenon, Super-Hip stayed on ice. In the early 2010s, nostalgic comics writers thawed him out for a couple of appearances, one of which portrayed an aging, nightclub Elvis-ish Tadwallader Jutefruce. I hope that’s the last we see of Super-Hip, though. We can look in the mirror to see what time does to Camp Age survivors. I’d rather remember Super-Hip as the eternally young, tousle-topped “sickest super-hero of ’em all.”

CAMPY CHAMP Sandwiched between chapters three and four of Spyman #3’s four-part adventure was a two-pager by Otto Binder and Carl Pfeufer starring Campy Champ, “the Terrific Teen”!

Kevin, a teenage nebbish, can’t score a date with Chikkie. But once he plays his “Campoozi Wozzzi” record too fast, he is sucked into the platter, then spins out as a long-haired super-hero: “Somehow, that super-fast rock-n-roll record changed me into the Campy Champ!” Campy Champ uses his super-speed and ability to fly (“Up… down… back… forth, and away!”) to bust up Chikkie’s date with another guy and lead her back to Kevin’s place. At story’s end, Chikkie, bored as she dances with that drip Kevin, wishes, “If only the Campy Champ would Watusi with me… (sigh!)” Fortunately, the recent resurgence of vinyl among music aficionados has not sparked a revival of this stinker.

© the respective copyright holder.

Super-Hip’s super-powers are previewed on this title page from his first adventure.

galoshes)-wearing teen to “loosen up” before shipping him off to high school. It’s there that starchy Tad, taunted by cool, cruel classmates (especially another new character, Badger Goldliver, a graduate of the Reggie Mantle/ Flash Thompson School for Jerks), reveals his inner hipster: Whenever he gets angry, Tad hulks out into Super-Hip, the super-cool superhero who can fly (his pointy-tipped Italian boots have wings) and change his shape into anything he needs to strike back at bullies (from a stretching arm to a giant hair clipper). Super-Hip also possesses a super-guitar that allows him to do whatever Drake’s stories require, like making the creepster teachers at Benedict Arnold High shimmy to the “Faculty Frug.” To show just how with-it he was, Arnie gave Super-Hip a weakness his young readers could relate to: Super-Hip’s “kryptonite” was the champagne music of bubblemaster Lawrence Welk! (Makes you wonder if Tim Burton, who gave the alien invaders of Mars Attacks! a vulnerability to Slim Whitman’s music, read Super-Hip when he was a kid…)

Drake and Oksner seemed to be having a good time with Super-Hip, and the character infused some direly needed energy into Bob Hope. SuperHip quickly dominated the series, with Bob Hope’s adventures now hinging upon his antics (or Tad’s): Super-Hip and the freaky faculty form the rock band the Benedict Arnold High Five, Tad is goaded into a hotrod race with Badger, Super-Hip becomes the U.S. President for a day (earning an LBJ cameo), and Super-Hip creates a matchmaking super-computer.

Poor Bob was demoted to a supporting cast member in his own book, even donning a wig and mod threads to stand in for Super-Hip in one story.

But as with any trendy character, Super-Hip quickly became stale. By mid-1967, he was squeezed off the covers by the monsters, save one last appearance—as Tadwallader Jutefruce—delectably drawn

by Neal Adams, on Bob Hope #108. He still appeared inside, but as one meager voice in the way-out, cacophonous character jam session that Bob Hope had become. By late 1967, the gig was over—the comic’s slipping sales and its title star’s lack of appeal to the

SURF’S UP!

Comic Books Catch the Wave In the Sixties, everybody was surfin’. Jan and Dean put Surf City on the map, and if you listened to the Beach Boys, that map extended across the whole U.S.A. Surfing, whose roots dated back centuries, made its splash in the popular culture beginning in the late Fifties when surfboards became affordable for the masses. Soon, surfing songs filled the airwaves and surfing movies hot-dogged the box office. To puritanical grandparents, whose youthful halcyon days at the beach had trussed them in swimwear trumped only by Hazmat suits for their flesh-censoring, this surfing craze was anything but swell. After all, it enticed bronzed, half-naked young people to wiggle with shameless abandon at sandy shindigs where kids… >gasp!<… had fun! Why, even the former Disney princess, Annette Funicello, had fallen prey to this madness!

And so had comic books.

Where else could an incidental char-

acter called the Silver Surfer eventually become a household name (well, at least in households where geek culture is spoken)?

But Marvel Comics’ chrome-domed Surfer, nee Norrin Radd, the noble soul who sacrificed his relationship with his one, true love to spare his world from the menu of the hungriest super-villain of all, the planet-consuming Galactus, wasn’t the first surfing super-hero.

Back in the pre-Frankie and Annette days of the Forties, when the Golden Age of Comics was in full swing, comic-book covers were generally pin-ups that often had nothing to do with the interior contents of the magazine. Occasionally, a surfing cover would appear. One example was World’s Finest Comics #36 (Sept.–Oct. 1948), whose Win Mortimer-drawn image showed the magazine’s co-stars—Superman, Batman, and a head-standing Robin—surfing. This was a much cheerier scene than the surfing cover of Master Comics #39 (June 4, 1943), published a few years earlier during the waning years of World War II; gorgeously rendered by one of the era’s comic art virtuosos, Mac Raboy, it depicted Captain Marvel Jr. wave-riding a torpedo!

Once the Sixties’ surfing craze hit, it seemed like almost every character in comic books was hanging ten, from Magilla Gorilla to Wonder Woman to the sand-slumming pals and gals at Archie Comics. Batman and Robin hit the waves again, on the “Surfing Sleuths” card from the 1966 Batman trading card set from Topps. Magazines popped up like Surftoons, sort of a surfing alternative to MAD. But leave it to Jack “King” Kirby, whose unbridled imagination was responsible for much of what you know as the look of Marvel Comics, to sneak a character on a flying surfboard into Fantastic Four #48 (Mar. 1966), the first chapter of the epic Galactus story. It’s an oft-told tale, but one worthy of repeating, and I’ll do so in the words of “The Man” himself, writer Stan Lee, who recalled the following in his 1975 book Son of Origins of Marvel Comics: “When

LEFT: Frankie and Annette hold on to their wakeboards on the cover of Dell Comics’ 1965 adaptation of Beach Blanket Bingo.

TM & © 1965 American International Pictures.

BELOW: The MAD-like Surftoons mag. BELOW LEFT: The Dynamic Hot-Doggers hang twenty on this 1966 Batman Topps trading card featuring art

by Bob Powell (layouts) and Norman Saunders.

Surftoons © Petersen Pub. Co. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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Pencil art to Jack Kirby’s high-flying Silver Surfer, produced for the 1975 Comic Art Con Program.

surfboard runs on a compressed air jet cushion,” an accommodating Aqualad informs a group of concertgoing teenagers, and while Joe’s land-skimming surfboard certainly didn’t traverse the cosmos like Marvel’s so-called Sentinel of the Spaceways, this easy-to-overlook comic-book oddity bears mention.

Still, I’ll give Kirby his due for a creating a shimmering comic-book character who surfed the sky.

But, then again…

Nightmare, Harvey Comics’ cartoon steed who was spared the gluepot to become the Galloping Ghost, surfed a lightning bolt on the cover of Nightmare and Casper #3 (Feb. 1964), which went on sale in late 1963, two years before the Silver Surfer’s first ride. That certainly doesn’t diminish Kirby’s creation,

Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

RIGHT: Joe, of the Flips, sky-surfs in the Teen Titans’ third appearance in Showcase #59.

TM & © DC Comics.

[Jack] brought [the issue’s pencils, produced from a plot by Lee and Kirby] to me so that I could add the dialogue and captions, I was surprised to find a brand-new character floating around the artwork—a silver-skinned, smooth-domed, sky-riding surfer atop a speedy flying surfboard. When I asked ol’ Jackson who he was, Jack replied something to the effect that a supremely powerful gent like Galactus, a godlike giant who roamed the galaxies, would surely require the services of a herald who could serve him as an advance guard.”

A flying surfboard? Surely, no one other than Jack Kirby could have imagined such a thing.

But, then again…

While I’m quick to give Kirby his props for envisioning all sorts of stuff that would one day become reality, in this case it was writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy, of Marvel’s Distinguished Competition, who first came up with an aerial surfboard (or at least got it into print first). It was in the pages of Showcase #59 (Nov.– Dec. 1965), the third and final tryout appearance of the then-new Teen Titans, which went on sale September 30, 1965—ten weeks before FF #48 hit the stands on December 9, 1965. In the story, the Titans, like other teens, were going crazy over “that latest music group,” the Flips: Jack, a stunt cyclist; Jill, a baton-twirling acrobat; and Joe, a surfer… on a jet-propelled board! “You see, the 256

and it’s unlikely that Jack ever saw that funnybook, but it’s another rarity that’s worth noting.

By the time Adam West’s Caped Crusader and Cesar Romero’s Clown Prince of Crime competed on boards in the shark-jumping Season Three Batman TV episode titled “Surf’s Up! Joker’s Under!” (original airdate: 11/16/67), America’s surfing fad hadn’t wiped out, but it was certainly on the ebb. Charlton Comics arrived at the beach a little late when launching its Surf n’ Wheels title in late 1969.

The Silver Surfer’s own comic book, spawned by the character’s popularity in Fantastic Four, came to an end in 1970… although the Surfer has had several comebacks since. Numerous Archie Comics covers and even DC Comics’ time-hopping Waverider have kept the spirit of surfing alive in comic books. Still, the endless summers of the Sixties, where Bob Hope and Mutt and Jeff joined Betty and Veronica on surfin’ safaris, remain a cherished memory of the Camp Age.

HERE WE COME…

Monkeemania and Comic Books On Tuesday, July 11, 1967, I saw Jimi Hendrix—but I don’t remember the experience.

Before you assume I was in a stupor during the legendary rock guitarist’s gig, let me assure you, that wasn’t the case. I was only nine years old, and any purple haze influencing me was an overdose of Nehi Grape soda.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, an up-and-coming psychedelic-rock band fronted by an electrifying artist who would later be anointed the number-one guitar player of all time, forged the most unlikely partnership since U.S. super-spy Napoleon Solo joined forces with Russian agent Illya Kuryakin: Hendrix opened for one of pop music’s biggest acts, the Monkees, for a handful of concerts during the Monkees’ 1967 American and British Tour. And I was there!

My wonderful mom, a professional woman, dedicated wife, and mother to two sons (one of them not quite two at the time), fought the masses to buy four Monkees concert tickets and cart me and two of my friends (Allen and Benji) to the Charlotte (North Carolina) Coliseum, a drive that in those days took

around an hour each way from our home in nearby Concord, North Carolina. We didn’t have the best seats in the house—in fact, we were in the nosebleed section, near the clattering air-conditioning units, so far away from the Monkees that I remember saying, “M-a-a-a-ahm, they’re bigger on TV than they are from here” (smart-mouthed kid)—but, hey, I saw the Monkees, live! A half-century later, the concert is just a warm blur of nostalgia that includes no recollection whatsoever of Hendrix, whose performance I probably fidgeted through. But my mother, the coolest mama this side of Barbara Cowsill, so loved her son that she herded our posse through the packed house of 13,000 screaming kids—and still went to work the next morning at 8:00 a.m.! (And they call Diana Prince “Wonder Woman”!)

Whereas the Beatles whipped teenage girls into a frenzy, the Monkees did the same for preteens. Kay Reimier of the Charlotte Observer, in her report of the concert in the next day’s edition, described the sardine-can-crammed madhouse as “a show that began like a confused kindergarten recess and ended in what felt like 120-degree psychedelic mayhem.

The two Red Cross stations set up in the Coliseum treated about 14 cases of hysteria and exhaustion.”

While I didn’t keel over from either malady that night, I was stricken with Monkeemania. And what kid with a TV wasn’t? Marcia Brady was so infected, several years later she sweet-talked her way into getting Davy Jones to sing at her prom!

Jones, plus Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, and Peter Tork, the made-for-TV fab four, became instantly famous once their weekly comedy-music show, The Monkees, premiered on NBC-TV on September 12, 1966. Their hiring came in response to an ad posted in September 1965 in the Hollywood trades: “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Rock MusiciansSingers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” (Ben Frank’s was a 24/7 Sunset Strip restaurant, a happening hangout for Sixties celebs.)

GTO-a-go-go!

MPC’s model kit for the Monkeemobile.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

LEFT: The TV fab four’s first official comic book, Dell Comics’ The Monkees #1, from late 1966.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

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Sounding that casting call were producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who were looking to create a television alternative to the Beatles. Legend has it that real bands the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Dave Clark Five were at one time considered to star in the show, and a helter-skelter urban myth contends that Charles Manson auditioned to become a Monkee.

Once Rafelson and Schneider signed their “4 insane boys,” the producers proved that lightning could strike twice in the same year. The Monkees was a perfect storm of dead-on casting, quirky but likeable lead characters, experimental camera angles, offbeat bad guys, Camp humor, and a boss set of wheels (the Monkeemobile, modified from a 1966 Pontiac GTO by customizer Dean Jeffries)—the same attributes that boosted Batman to stardom a mere eight months earlier.

In the TV show’s continuity, the Monkees were trying to make a go of becoming a successful music act. In the real world, the band’s overnight success might have seemed far removed from their sitcom travails, but behind the scenes Micky, Mike, Davy, and Peter wrestled for credibility as musicians. Originally under the thumb of hit-maker Don Kirshner, the Monkees lent their voices to their earlier records while seasoned studio musicians handled the accompanying instruments. Before long, the newly minted superstars demanded more control of their music, leading to a contentious split from Kirshner.

At its peak, this wave of Monkeemania lasted only two television seasons and 58 episodes (although it could be found in reruns for years to follow). But, boy, did it infect comic books!

A very young Micky Dolenz, star of TV’s Circus Boy, in his TV tie-in comic, Dell’s Four Color #759 (Dec. 1956).

Circus Boy © Norbert Productions/Screen Gems.

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THE FIRST MONKEE SIGHTING! The first comic book to feature one of the Monkees was published in 1956. No, that’s not a typo. But two issues of Dell Comics’ long-running “showcase” title, Four Color, featured a very young Micky Dolenz in its adaptations of the adventure TV series Circus Boy. Circus Boy’s backstory was similar to the origin of Dick Grayson, a.k.a. Robin, the Boy Wonder. The eponymous character played by Dolenz (then billed as Mickey Braddock) was a child named Corky, whose aerialist parents, the Flying Falcons, died in a trapeze accident. Corky was taken in by not by a millionaire with a secret identity, but by a clown named Joey (Noah Beery Jr.), and became the attendant to the traveling circus’ elephant, Bimbo.

Batman did appear in Circus Boy’s cast, however: Robert Lowery, the second actor to play the Caped Crusader (in the 1949 Batman and Robin serial), costarred as the attraction’s owner, Big Tim Champion.

Circus Boy ran for two seasons, from 1956–58, with 49 episodes filmed. After that it continued in reruns on Saturday mornings for two consecutive seasons.

Dell Comics’ Circus Boy editions appeared in Four Color #759 (Dec. 1956) and 813 (July 1957). Both sported photo covers depicting young Dolenz and featured artwork by Dan Spiegle.

PEOPLE SAY WE MONKEY AROUND A decade later, when Circus Boy was barely a TV history footnote, Micky and his pals were the hottest thing since the Beatles—and publishers wasted no time taking the first train to Clarksville.

As you’d expect, the teen mags flipped over the Monkees, and Davy, Mike, Peter, and Micky began to dominate their covers. Special Monkees publications raced into production, from magazines to paperbacks, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Three Monkees paperbacks from Popular Library are of special interest to comic-book fans. The Monkees, a quickly produced volume featuring blackand-white comics stories written by Howard Liss and illustrated by Gene Fawcette, was issued in 1966 on the heels of the TV show’s premiere. The writer and artist were working from the series’ earliest available materials, most notably the pilot episode, evidenced in the interior stories with Mike Nesmith being called “Wool Hat,” his name in the pilot. Fawcette’s caricatures of the band were sharply rendered, although since the Monkees were new at the time

of this publication, we’ll forgive the cover colorist for making Mike’s wool hat red instead of green. (In 1967, this paperback was reissued in England by the Daily Mirror as The Monkees Crazy Cartoon Book.) Also in 1967, Bill Adler, who had CRASH!ed the Batmania party the previous year with Bill Adler’s Funniest Fan Letters to Batman, collected more “new, wild, mad, groovy” fan mail and produced Love Letters to the Monkees, featuring hilarious illustrations by the incomparable Jack Davis. Lastly, another 1967 paperback was The Monkees Go Mod, a far-out collection of short features about the band, including some Monkees cartoons by Richard Hodgens.

Second only to the original Fab Four’s comics appearances, unauthorized cameos of and references to the Monkees were all over the comics racks.

The boys were spoofed in the parody comics of the day, including Marvel’s Not Brand Echh, where you might find the Monkees cavorting with celebrities and super-heroes; NBE also featured Monkees jokes,

such as the Ecchs-Men listening to the Monkees’ theme in issue #4. Not to be outdone by their “Marble Comics” counterparts, Marvel Comics’ “real” mutants’ magazine also featured a Monkees reference: in X-Men #31, Scott Summers, a.k.a. Cyclops, was surprised to discover that his hangout, Pizza Paradise, had been turned into a discotheque named the Monkee’s Paw. At Archie Comics, an “Archie’s Dad” one-page gag had the bald patriarch playing guitar because it might stimulate Monkee-length hair growth.

Tower Comics’ Tippy Teen and its spin-off, Tippy’s Friends, Go-Go and Animal, featured Monkees photos on covers, and inside you could find information fan pages like Tippy Teen #13’s “Meet the Monkees” page, introducing the new band to its readers. One of the most unusual publications in DC Comics’ long and storied history also made good use of the Monkees. Swing with Scooter’s Jack Miller and Barbara Friedlander rolled out the title Teen Beat #1 on September 5, 1967, a week before Season Two of TV’s The Monkees began. Teen Beat was 16 Magazine in comicbook form, not unlike Charlton’s Go-Go but without Go-Go’s spoofs. With its second issue, DC changed the book’s title to Teen Beam, after teen zine Tiger Beat’s objection to the original title. That effort was for naught, as it was discontinued with that second issue. Both issues of the series cover-featured the Monkees, and interior material included Teen Beam #2’s Monkees pin-up by Joe Orlando and the illustrated feature “The Monkees Family Album.”

Charlton Comics, whose meat and potatoes was its magazine line, warehoused no shortage of publicity photos and promo materials of music artists for use in publications like Hit Parader and Teen

LEFT: Cover to 1966’s The Monkees paperback and an interior page. Art

by Gene Fawcette.

Courtesy of Al Bigley.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

Bill Adler’s Love Letters to the Monkees, with interior peeks at Jack Davis’ rendition of the band and a letter featuring Davy Jones.

Courtesy of Al Bigley.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company. Love Letters to the Monkees © Bill Adler.

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Joe Orlando’s rendition of the Monkees, from Teen Beam #2.

Tunes and Pin-Ups. Some of this was fed into Go-Go, and Charlton wasn’t opposed to a little side profit from selling Monkees photo posters, advertised in Charlton comic books.

TM & © DC Comics.

HEY, HEY, WE’RE THE MONKEES Amid this monkey business emerged the authorized comic book starring the fast-rising super-stars who were “something else”—not to mention, “groovy,” “boss,” and “outa site.” On December 1, 1966, Dell Issue #14 of Dell’s Monkees comic.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

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Comics released the first issue of its ongoing series, The Monkees. It was part of a new wave of TV- and film-related titles produced by Dell—other new Dell comics sharing a March 1967 cover date with The Monkees #1 were The Mighty Heroes #1, Rat Patrol #1, and T.H.E. Cat #1, with Mission: Impossible, Daktari, and other media adaptations soon following.

D. J. Arneson, Dell’s comic-book editor, had recently negotiated to scale back his hours on staff and supplement that with writing assignments, one of which was The Monkees. As comics historian Martin O’Hearn uncovered and reported on his blog, The Monkees #1 was penciled by Mo Marcus, and inked by Dick Giordano, Sal Trapani, and Frank McLaughlin. The assignment first went to Giordano, but Dick subcontracted it to Mo, pulling in his studio mates Sal and Frank to help complete the job. (A little bit me, a little bit you.)

The art on Dell’s Monkees stabilized with the second issue, as Arneson hired Jose Delbo for the book. Delbo drew the series in a cartoony style, suiting the nonconformity of the scripts Arneson was producing, which featured the Monkees tangling with spies, the Monkees as cowboys, the Monkees as super-heroes (the Supermonkees, incidentally, not the Monkeemen made famous on the TV show), the Monkees encountering an abominable snowman, that sort of thing, all produced without licensor interference or approval. Each issue featured photo covers and interior short stories. The Monkees was one of Dell Comics’ saving graces during a shaky period when the publisher’s once-mighty comic-book line was shrinking. When Monkeemania was on the decline, Dell’s comic was cancelled with issue #16 (Nov. 1968), although around a year later, one more issue, #17 (Oct. 1969), was released, reprinting The Monkees #1.

Concurrently, a lesser-known but intriguing comics version of the Monkees was published by Charlton in 1967—not in Go-Go, where you might expect, but in one of its song lyrics magazines. Teen Tunes and Pin-Ups #3 featured a two-page, blackand-white Monkees strip written by Steve Skeates and drawn by future Batman artist Jim Aparo. Issues #4 and 5 of the mag also featured Monkees stories

by Skeates and Aparo, and all three Charlton short stories bore the title of a Monkees tune. Skeates skillfully aped the frenetic pacing of television’s The Monkees, and Aparo confirmed what he had shown on Go-Go’s “Miss Bikini Luv” feature—that he was a dynamite cartoonist. Skeates reminisced about Teen Tunes’ Monkees comics in 2014 in the pages of Charlton Arrow #3 (published by Charlton Neo); that issue stated that Charlton had the Monkees comicbook license but lost it to Dell. Actual publication dates bring that recollection into question: Dell’s Monkees #1 hit the stands less than three months after the TV show’s September 12, 1966 premiere, while Charlton’s Monkees stories were published in 1967. I might be daydream believing, but it’s

more likely that these were two separate licensing agreements, one for color comic books, the other for the black-and-white music magazine.

HEY, HEY, WE AREN’T THE MONKEES If the official and unofficial Monkees comic-book appearances weren’t enough to satisfy your Auntie Grizelda, then the Monkees clones offered her more chances to listen to the band.

The most ambitious of the batch, and probably the best known, was the Maniaks, DC Comics’ fictional rock band/adventurers that appeared in three mid-1967 issues of Showcase, produced by the creative team of The Inferior Five: writer E. Nelson Bridwell, penciler Mike Sekowsky, inker Mike Esposito, and editor Jack Miller. The Maniaks— Gilbert “Jangles” Jeffries, guitarist and impressionist; the golddigging Silver Shannon, “the go-go girl with the golden voice,” lead singer; Byron “Pack Rat” Williams, drummer and hoarder; and Philip “Flip” Folger, guitarist and contortionist—premiered in Showcase #68 (May–June 1967), in a story set at Superman’s favorite amusement park.

In that tale, the Maniaks were gigging at New Jersey’s Palisades Park, singing a tune Monkeemaniacs might find familiar: “Take the last train to Knoxville—they are cutting off the service, ’cause the line’s been losing money and it makes them pretty nervous! It’s a mess, yes, yes, yes,

yes…” On the next page, Bridwell’s caption explained that the Maniaks were “not to be confused with the Beatles, the Monkees, or anyone in their right mind!” As the Maniaks scurried to avoid a swarm of music lovers, they accidentally observed a mob hit (remarked Flip: “Flash! Something tells me we’d have been healthier being loved to death by our fans!”).

For the rest of the story, the Maniaks were comically pursued throughout Palisades Park by the gangsters who want to rub out these witnesses.

In their second appearance, in Showcase #69, Silver got engaged to the filthy-rich Richard Pipdyke XIV, but her bandmates began to suspect that the millionaire was not exactly what he appeared to be. Their final appearance, in Showcase #71, was their oddest, featuring guest-star Woody Allen, who had written a new musical as a starring vehicle for the Maniaks. All three stories featured Bridwell in fine form, strumming through puns and showtune satires, and as with Inferior Five, Sekowsky stretched his comedic wings, especially with the insanely caricatured gangsters in the first story.

Predating the first Maniaks story by almost two months, Charlton introduced a Monkees parody in Go-Go #6 (Apr. 1967) by an unknown writer and artists Mo Marcus and Rocke Mastroserio. The story was titled “Introducing the *”—no, they weren’t “the Asterisk,” but an asterisked footnote explained that Charlton couldn’t “think of a name for this mod, zany singin’ group,” allowing editor Dick Giordano to host a contest inviting readers to suggest their names.

The band’s faces looked a lot like the Monkees’

LEFT: Steve Skeates and Jim Aparo collaborated on three Monkees black-andwhite comics for the Charlton music magazine Teen Tunes and Pin-Ups. This title page is from issue #3’s story.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

The Maniaks, DC Comics’ answer to the Monkees, in their second appearance in Showcase #69.

Art by Mike Sekowsky and Mike Esposito.

TM & © DC Comics.

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LEFT: The cover to Charlton’s Go-Go #8 shows both the Monkees and the notyet-named Modkees.

RIGHT: Gold Key’s Monkees/ Scooter amalgam Modniks #1.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company. Go-Go TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Modniks TM & © Random House, Inc.

(although their “Peter,” not “Mike,” wore a hat), and as the opening panel showed, they couldn’t keep a gig, like TV’s Monkees. These boys were Brits, however, named Henry (called ’Enry by his mates), Alfie, Gabby, and Otto. In their first adventure, they tried to raise money by pushing Alfie into the wrestling ring as the Mod Mauler. They returned in Go-Go #8— and on its cover, “Whoever they are!” were pictured beside a photo of the Monkees themselves! The band was back in Go-Go #9, where Giordano announced that Gerald Smith of Erie, Pennsylvania, had come up with the winning name: the Modkees! Unfortunately, that issue’s Modkees story was the band’s last, as Go-Go was cancelled.

While Charlton readers scratched their heads to come up with a name for *, on May 25, 1967, Gold Key Comics unveiled its own Monkees clone. The Modniks #1 (Aug. 1967) coincidentally had the same gender ratio as DC’s Maniaks, which had premiered two months earlier: three guys and a gal. Not so much of a coincidence was the group’s frontman, Wheels, a motorcycling mod à la Scooter. Rounding out the quartet were guitarist/go-go girl ’Scot (who rode with Wheels), plus a Big Moose-sized bassist named Lump and a guitarist Li’l Bit, both of whom sported around on their own scooters. One of a long line of slightly out-of-date Sixties comics produced by grown-ups trying to be cool, The Modniks died after one issue.

But not for long. A second issue of The Modniks was published in 1970, after which time the cast was retooled in a more realistic manner by artist 262

Jack Sparling and repurposed into a retread of DC Comics’ Hot Wheels (based upon the popular Mattel toy cars), titled Mod Wheels. Gold Key’s Mod Wheels sputtered on and off the stands for a 19-issue run that ended in 1975.

Dick Giordano had transitioned to an editor’s desk at DC Comics and was overseeing one of its Archie knock-offs, Debbi’s Dates, by the time the next Monkees knock-off, the Ding-A-Lings, premiered. One of the reasons Dick was hired at DC, he told me when I interviewed him for his biography, was to bring along talent with him. And so Go-Go’s Mo Marcus got the Ding-A-Lings assignment, with Giordano himself providing a much cleaner ink line than Mastroserio had done at Charlton. The DingA-Lings were four young, happenin’ friends—gogo girl Bingo, sponge-haired Jinks, groovy Denny, and dorky Yo-Yo—who decided to form a band in Debbi’s Dates #4 (Oct.–Nov. 1969). The writer was Henry Boltinoff, known to longtime DC readers as the cartoonist of filler features such as Super-Turtle and Cap’s Hobby Hints. The Ding-A-Lings hung out for three more issues, with Vinnie Colletta replacing Giordano as inker, and an inventoried story finally saw print in 1972’s Date with Debbi #18, a single issue of that title published a year after the series had been cancelled. The Ding-A-Lings suffered from both a claustrophobic page count (stories were only a few pages long) and teen-music-group fatigue.

HE’S A BELIEVER

An Interview with Jose Delbo Artist Jose Delbo might be best known for his long stint on DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, which he illustrated from the midSeventies through 1981, including the era of the Wonder Woman television series starring Lynda Carter. But long before Carter was lassoed into that role, Delbo, a native of Argentina, was inching his way into comicdom, beginning with super-hero comic books published in South America. After moving to the U.S. in the mid-Sixties, Charlton Comics’ Billy the Kid Western series was his steppin’ stone to bigger projects. Delbo’s art caught the eye of Dell Comics’ editor/writer D. J. (Don) Arneson, who recruited him to illustrate many of Dell’s TV tie-in titles.

Then came Monkeemania.

Arneson hired Delbo to be the artist for Dell’s new Monkees title, beginning with its second issue.

Jose loved the assignment, staying on the title until the end of its run. Then he switched from one

Fab Four to another, illustrating the Paul S. Newman-scripted adaptation of the Beatles’ animated movie Yellow Submarine, published by Gold Key Comics.

In the decades since Beatlemania and Monkeemania, Jose Delbo has illustrated many animation-inspired comic books including ThunderCats, The Transformers, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, 101 Dalmations, and The Little Mermaid, plus Marvel’s ambitious NFL SuperPro series. He is a former Kubert School instructor and a 2013 Ink Pot Award winner… but amid his storied career, he regards The Monkees as one of his favorite projects.

Interview conducted in September 2015.

Before we discuss The Monkees, let’s start with some background. You were born in Argentina and became a professional artist in your teens. Tell me about your art studies, your teacher, and your earliest work.

Well, I went to several schools, but my comics teacher was Carlos Clemen, one of the greatest cartoonists of Argentina—great artist, great man.

When did you move to the States, and how did you break in to the U.S. comic-book market?

I came to the States in 1965. My first chance to do comics was with Charlton Comics. That same year I got Billy the Kid. I really enjoyed

it because I love to do Westerns.

Pat Masulli was the editor of Billy the Kid. What was working with Masulli like?

I never met Pat Masulli. I worked through an agent.

You were working for a number of publishers, but found a lot of work at Dell Comics. How did you get started there?

I was called by Don Arneson to work for Dell. My first assignment was Hogan’s Heroes.

Jose Delbo.

Courtesy of Cincinnati Comic-Con.

Charlton was known for its notoriously low rates. Did the Dell work pay better?

The payment was much better!

Where were you living when you were doing this mid-Sixties work?

I was living in New Jersey with my wife and two kids.

Did you visit Dell’s office much?

What was the office environment like there?

Well, I went very often, because I was doing a lot of comics for them. The environment was very good. I had a great relationship with Don Arneson.

Before The Monkees, you followed Hogan’s Heroes with The Big Valley, and before long, you were also drawing other Dell TV comics like The Rat Patrol, Gentle Ben, The Mod Squad, and The Brady Bunch. You obviously had a flair for likenesses. What type of reference were you given for these TV comics?

I was given a lot of photographs for references.

So, how did you get the Monkees assignment?

I don’t remember how I got it.

I assume the usual way, they needed an artist and they liked me.

LEFT: A Delbodrawn splash page from issue #2 (May 1967). In April of 2016, art from Delbo’s Monkees comic books was used for the official lyric video for “She Makes Me Laugh,” the first release from the band’s Good Times reunion album.

The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

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You drew most of The Monkees’ run, issues #2 through 16. So, for a lot of readers and Monkeemaniacs, you were THE Monkees artist. And you’ve said in other interviews that The Monkees was one of your all-time favorite assignments.

What made it so enjoyable?

I really enjoyed doing the Monkees book because Don allowed me to be very creative with the material.

What’s your favorite Monkees song?

“Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees”!

Delbo original art from The Monkees #4, featuring the Supermonkees.

Were you aware of the Monkees band and the TV show before getting the assignment?

No. I had never heard of the band.

Courtesy of Heritage. The Monkees TM & © Rhino Entertainment Company.

You drew The Monkees in a lighter style, with caricatures of Mike, Davy, Micky, and Peter, instead of a more realistic, likeness-heavy style. Was this your decision, or were you directed to draw it in that style?

I asked about the possibility of doing the guys a little more funny, and they approved.

RIGHT: Delbo’s splash page to Gold Key’s Yellow Submarine.

The Beatles TM & © Apple Corps. Yellow Submarine © King Features-Subafilms, LTD.

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Your editor, D. J. Arneson, was also the writer of The Monkees.

But did anyone other than Don write Monkees scripts for you?

The [only] writer was Don Arneson, and also the editor and writer of most of the [Dell] books.

A great person!

Back when you were drawing The Monkees, comic conventions were pretty scarce, but I wonder, did you ever have any encounters with crazed Monkees fans?

In those days, I wasn’t going to conventions. I was too busy working!

Partway through the series, the look of the comic started to shift more toward hippie fashions to mirror the TV show. Do you remember this change?

My memory is old… don’t remember that, either.

No need to apologize—I am

asking you about a job you did fifty years ago! [laughter] Did you ever meet any of the Monkees when the show was in production? Or have you met any of them in the years since?

I’ve never met any of the guys.

Do you autograph a lot of Monkees comics at conventions today?

Sometimes.

Are you ever asked to do Monkees commissions?

Not too many.

After Dell’s The Monkees, you drew the Beatles in Gold Key’s adaptation of Submarine. Did your work on The Monkees help you get that gig?

I think so… I believe it did.

What type of reference were you provided for Yellow Submarine?

Pictures from the movie and photographs of the Beatles.

Was it a challenge to draw in that psychedelic style?

Not really. It was easy because I like drawing funny stuff!

THE RAIN, THE PARK, AND COMIC BOOKS The Cowsills in Comics

“Play ‘The Happy Song,’ Mick!” my toddler brother John would plead to me back in ’68. He was too young to load the 45 onto my portable record player but wise enough to know which of those black vinyl platters would bring a smile to his cherubic face. The song that made John, and me, so happy was “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things,” the breakthrough hit by the singing family from Newport, Rhode Island, the Cowsills. If you owned a radio back in the late Sixties, you no doubt remember this cheery little tune about a young man’s rainy day encounter with a flower girl in a park (“But I knew she had made me happy, happy, happy…”). Some people call it “The Flower Girl” or “I Love the Flower Girl.” I call it one of the best memories of my childhood, and still, to this day, one of my all-time favorite songs.

While I liked the Beatles and loved the Monkees, I adored the Cowsills (originally siblings Bill, Bob, and Barry Cowsill, later joined by brother John, mother Barbara, sister Susan, and brother Paul).

Their harmonies were as tight as the Beach Boys’, but there was something special about their music that set them apart from the other crooning clans of the Sixties: the Cowsills’ music always made you happy. Even their bluer songs, like “Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools” and “Newspaper Blanket,” offered a glimmer of hope for the unfortunate souls whose stories they told. And the uplifting “We Can Fly” could buoy the most cantankerous curmudgeon out of his doldrums. I credit the Cowsills’ music for helping nurture my positivity during my childhood.

In recent years, I’ve discovered that the happiness engendered by the Cowsills’ music didn’t

always exist in their own lives, as revealed in Family Band: The Cowsills Story, a 2013 documentary by Louise Palanker. The Cowsills may have seemed all smiles when leading us down “The Path of Love” or to “Indian Lake,” or while flashing their pearly whites in ads for the American Dairy Association, but behind the scenes, their manager father, Bud Cowsill, was an inflexible taskmaster—pop music’s counterpart to the ironfisted Superman editor of the Sixties, Mort Weisinger—who badgered his children, eventually ripping apart the family and the band. Yet none of that was ever evident to us kids warbling, “I love the flower girl” along with the Cowsills.

In 1968, as their popularity was escalating, the Cowsills, having scored Top 40 hits and television appearances, tackled a new medium: comic books.

Let’s flash back to the comics racks of July 1968: The Caped Crusader was Bat-roping away from the POW!s and ZOWIE!s of TV as visionary artist Neal Adams’ second Batman tale, a shadowy team-up with the freakish Creeper, saw print in The Brave and the Bold #80. A mysterious, standoffish android named the Vision shimmered into the pages of The Avengers #57. DC Comics introduced a nontraditional Western anti-hero, Bat Lash. The crazy, carefree Camp Age was pulling a disappearing act— luckily, the Cowsills flew in to bring us a one-way ticket to happy.

During that month, Harvey Comics released the 64-page Giant Harvey Pop Comics presents The Cowsills #1 (cover-dated Oct. 1968). Released under its “Harvey Teen” imprint and marketed toward a slightly older crowd than most of Harvey’s kiddie fare, Harvey Pop Comics #1 capitalized on the budding

The Cowsills make the scene in Tower Comics’ TeenIn, from 1968.

(C) the respective copyright holder

Detail from “Making It Happen,” from Harvey Pop Comics presents The Cowsills #1.

Art by Ernie Colón. © 1968 CowsillsStogel, Inc.

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Cover to Harvey Pop Comics presents The Cowsills #1 and its production mock-up.

Art by Ernie Colón.

Cover mock-up courtesy of Becky Presley (cowsill.com). © 1968 CowsillsStogel, Inc.

popularity of both the Cowsills’ music and Archie-like teen comics.

The contents of Harvey Pop Comics #1: an illustrated introductory page; “Clever Fans,” a 16-page comic story featuring Bill, Bob, Barry, and John’s efforts to outfox determined teenybopper fans; psychedelic pin-up pages interspersed throughout, starring (in this order) Barry, John, Bill and Bob, Barry (a second pinup), Bob, John (a second pinup), and Bill; “Exclusive Interview with the Cowsills,” a fourpage text feature (with illustrated headshots) featuring Q&As with Bill, John, Barry, Bob, Barbara, Susan, and Paul; “Winner,” an eight-page comic story spotlighting Bob’s antics during a lake outing; “Latest Cowsill Hit Lyrics,” a text page featuring the lyrics to “Mr. Flynn,” “In Need of a Friend,” “We Can Fly,” and “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things”; “News Scoops from the Cowsills,” a page of fan news; “Making It Happen,” a nine-page comic story featuring the band’s origin, with Bud’s travails toward making stars out of his singing kids; a one-page Cowsills/Harvey Comics questionnaire; Barry and Susie in “A Trip to Mars,” a fourpage comic story about the Cowsill kids’ close encounter; 266

“Where You Can See the Cowsills,” an illustrated one-page map showing tour dates for June through December 1968; “The Cowsills Answer Your Fan Mail,” a twopage letters column with replies from the Cowsill family; and Bob and Bill in “The Flip,” about the elder brothers’ coin toss to see who gets stuck with granting the last interview of a busy day.

Today, Harvey Pop Comics presents The Cowsills #1 might seem hokey to anyone not of Sixties vintage. But for those of us who grew up during that swinging decade, especially for fans of the Cowsills and their music, it’s a wonderfully trippy time machine.

There are no credits listed in the comic—not unexpected, as credits weren’t a Harvey Comics standard. Sid Jacobson, who edited much of Harvey’s line, told me in January 2016 that he had nothing to do with The Cowsills, citing Warren Harvey as its editor. Warren, son of Bob Harvey and nephew of Harvey founder Alfred Harvey, is thought to have written the issue as well. The lion’s share of the Cowsills artwork is the work of Ernie Colón, who confirmed to me in January 2016 that he drew the comic but remembers nothing of the assignment: “I’m a tabula rasa with it, Michael. Can’t recall a single incident. I did like their rendition of ‘I Love the Flower Girl.’ They were a cute group… good harmonies, and gap teeth.” The comic’s cover was produced from a Photostat of Colón’s last panel to the “origin” story, “Making it Happen!”

The last two Cowsills stories appear to be the work of artist Hy Rosen. Rosen, artist of Harvey’s Bunny (after the original Bunny artist, Hy Eisman, left the strip) and Fruitman, also drew the second (and last) issue of Harvey Pop Comics, starring Bunny but titled Rock Happening. Comics historian Mark Arnold theorizes that the Cowsills comic was at first intended to be 52 pages—which Colón drew, abetted in several spots by Warren Kremer—then expanded to 68, necessitating additional material, which Rosen provided.

In addition to their Harvey one-shot, during the summer of ’68 the Cowsills dropped in for a handful of appearances in teen-zine comics published

by Tower Comics. Their names were blurbed on the cover of Teen-In #1, a short-lived title headlined by Tower’s Tippy Teen. Inside, an illustrated one-page feature revealed “The Secret Family Feuds of the Cowsills,” and another text piece, “The Girl That I Marry,” included a quote from Bill Cowsill (as well as Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, and several other teen heartthrobs du jour including, bizarrely, Jim Morrison of the Doors and Eric Clapton of Cream). The Cowsills returned in a one-page illustration in Teen-In #2. Also, the back cover of Tower’s Tippy Teen #20 (Sept. 1968) featured a photo of the family band.

The Cowsills had another comic-book connection in 1968. MGM Records’ release of the LP The Best of the Cowsills featured front and back cover art by the one and only Jack Davis. Davis began to make a name for himself in the early Fifties at EC Comics on titles ranging from Tales from the Crypt to MAD. It was on the latter that his ability to caricature helped make him legendary, and his cartoons have in the decades since have graced everything from TV Guide covers to advertisements to movie posters (including the Camp Age classic, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). Davis’ color rendition of the Cowsills on the album front cover nicely captures their likenesses while playfully riffing on

youthful exuberance with its exaggerated poses and overall chaos (a toppled cymbal, an unplugged amp, a flying piano key, etc.). His back cover features more traditional poses of the family.

And were it not for a twist of fate, the Cowsills might have starred in another comic book—based upon their television show. It’s no secret that the Cowsills were the inspiration for ABC-TV’s The Partridge Family, the sitcom created by Bernard Slade that ran for four seasons from 1970–74 and gave us television’s most recognized vehicle since the Batmobile: the Partridge Family bus. The sitcom was envisioned to star the Cowsill kids but with Shirley Jones in the role of the singing mom, an idea nixed by Cowsill management. So Slade and Screen Gems Television created its own Cowsills— not unlike what was done just a few years earlier with the formation of TV’s own Beatles, the Monkees— and The Partridge Family was born, rocketing its breakout cast member, David Cassidy, to stardom.

Charlton Comics published 21 issues of a Partridge Family comic book between 1971 and 1973, plus 14 issues of a David Cassidy title. If Bud Cowsill and his brood had said yes to the TV deal, you might have seen Bill, Bob, and siblings in the pages of Charlton Comics, and maybe even a Barry Cowsill spin-off title. This also may have deprived the world of Danny Bonaduce (it’s your call as to whether that’s a good or bad thing).

It’s ironic that The Partridge Family’s TV theme told not only a thinly disguised version of the Cowsills’ “origin,” but it also repeatedly evoked the family’s musical mantra by imploring viewers to “Come On, Get Happy!” Happy song, indeed!

Splash panel to the “Barry and Susie” story, with art believed to be

by Hy Rosen. © 1968 CowsillsStogel, Inc.

LEFT: Jack Davis art graces the cover of the LP, The Best of the Cowsills. © MGM/CowsillsStogel, Inc.

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This Archies record was a cut-out available on the back of Post’s Super Sugar Crisp cereal.

It featured four songs: “Everything’s Archie,” “Bang-ShangA-Lang,” “Boys & Girls,” and “Hide and Seek.”

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

RIGHT: Jughead’s wearing his blue suede shoes on 1957’s Jughead’s Folly #1, while (FAR RIGHT) Archie’s all shook up in 1961’s Life with Archie #8.

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

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THE ARCHIES

The Comic-Book Roots of the Cartoon Singing Sensations In 1968 A.M. (After Monkees), mega-talented music producer Don Kirshner, along with producer/ songwriter Jeff Barry, gathered musicians and singers to become the Archies, a studio band in the roles of Archie Comics characters Archie Andrews (guitar and lead vocals), Reggie Mantle (bass), Veronica Lodge (keyboards), Betty Cooper (tambourine), and Jughead Jones (drums). The lead vocalist, as Archie, was Ron Dante, a veteran singer/songwriter/ producer who got his start in the business working as a staff writer/demo maker at Kirshner’s Aldon Music in New York. Dante also sang most of the Archies’ background voices through overdubbing, with Toni White originally providing the female voices.

“I knew we had the best chance in the world [to be a success],” Dante remarked of the Archies in a 2008 interview with Mark Arnold in Back Issue #33. “Don Kirshner headed the most successful music-publishing company of the [Sixties] and Jeff Barry was the top songwriter of the [Sixties] with such hits as ‘Be My Baby,’ ‘Chapel of Love,’ ‘Da Do Ron Ron,’ ‘Hanky Panky,’ and ‘River Deep, Mountain High’.”

The Archies’ music was featured on television beginning on September 14, 1968, when Filmation Associates’ The Archie Show, an animated series, premiered on Saturday mornings on CBS. The speaking voices for the Archie gang were provided by Dal McKennon (Archie, Hot Dog, and the adult males), Jane Webb (the female voices), Howard Morris (Jughead, Dilton, and Big Moose), and John Erwin (Reggie). The cartoon was a mixture of Archie humor stories and music, with a featured dance of the week.

On TV, the Archies were sometimes under the direction of Jughead’s cartoon canine Hot Dog, but in the real-world studio, the Archies were under the control of

Kirshner, recording on the labels Calendar Records and Kirshner Records. Unlike the Monkees, the Archies, generally faceless studio musicians, provided Kirshner with no creative squabbles, and the hit-maker led the make-believe band to the top of the charts.

The Archies released six albums between 1968–71, with a reunion Christmas album in 2008. Four of their songs hit the Top 40, starting with their first hit, “BangShang-A-Lang.” Many kids were introduced to the Archies’ music via a giveaway cut-out record printed on the back of Post’s Super Sugar Crisp Cereal in 1968.

Their biggest success, “Sugar, Sugar,” reached #1 in 1969. At the same time the Archies hit gold with “Sugar, Sugar,” Dante had another Top Ten hit with “Tracy,” which he recorded anonymously with a band called the Cuff Links. Singer Donna Marie, nee Marie La Donna, who had made the charts with the early Sixties tune “Bobby Baby,” was brought into the studio by Jeff Barry in 1970 to provide lead vocals—as Veronica—for the Archies’ “Who’s Your Baby?”

Filmation and Kirshner share kudos for popularizing the Archies for a mass audience, but neither created the idea for the band—that distinction goes to the comic books themselves.

Archie or Jughead strumming a guitar had for years been an occasional cover theme in Archie Comics, even dating back to Elvismania. Jughead’s Folly #1 (1957) showed “Jughead the woman-hater making like Elvis,” while 1961’s Life with Archie #8 had Archie puttin’ on his best Presley moves as the entire town of Riverdale became starstruck when a Hollywood production was being filmed there.

During the eras of Beatlemania and Monkeemania, the concept of an “Archies” band began to evolve. The cover gag of Archie’s Joke Book #102 (July 1966) depicted electric guitarist Archie and drummer Jughead, plus two unnamed musicians, as the four-member band “Archie and His 3-Piece Rockers,” the joke being that the group only knows three tunes. Those nameless musicians had been replaced by Reggie by the time Laugh #189 (Dec. 1966) was released. Its cover featured Archie,

Jughead, and Reggie as the Archies prototype the POW Trio, a band so loud they drowned out nearby dynamite blasters.

Life with Archie #60’s (Apr. 1967) “Once Upon a Tune,” written by Frank Doyle and drawn by Bob White and Jon D’Agostino, commenced a new, ongoing feature, “The Archies,” starring the musical antics of Archie, Jughead, and Reggie. As Doyle had earlier put his spin on super-heroes with Archie as Pureheart the Powerful and secret agents with Archie as the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., the writer’s Archies were his answer to television’s Monkees. The Archies performed for giddy Riverdale teens (starting at Pop Tate’s Discotheque in Life with Archie #60)

but experienced larger-than-life, sometimes surreal adventures: in this first story, the boys helped fight a fire in Riverdale and there was a fantasy sequence with a prehistoric Archie.

From there, the Archies feature got wilder and wilder: the boys retrieved Mr. Lodge’s stolen disintegration weapon, the Go-Go-Gun; defended Betty and Veronica from thugs; battled a musicloathing super-villain, Sinister Sid; and searched for the missing Pop Tate. On the cover of LWA #63, the boys sang a tune reminiscent of The Monkees’ theme (“Oh yeah, we’re the Archies…”), and on issue #65’s cover, they did a riff on Maxwell Smart’s “Would you believe?” routine from Get Smart.

The Archies’ Life with Archie series was short-lived, and it relegated Betty and Veronica to dancing to the boys’ music. An unusual incarnation of the band was shown on the cover of Archie’s Pals ’n’ Gals #47 (Sept. 1968), with Big Moose making the Archies a quartet—and while Moose still wore his crewcut hairstyle, he sported a tattoo on his right shoulder! Moose was dumped, but Betty and Veronica were finally liberated from go-going to becoming full members of the band the following year once the Archies became a television and pop-music sensation. Filmation’s The Archie Show would become a powerhouse for CBS, dominating Saturday mornings for many seasons while transitioning through a range of format changes and introducing spin-offs such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and The Groovie Goolies. Ironically, the Archies, Archie Comics’ spoof of the Monkees, became the Archies, the virtual band created by the man originally behind the Monkees’ music.

LEFT: The Archies (version 1) debuted in Life with Archie #60 (Apr. 1967).

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” gold record.

Courtesy of Heritage. © Don Kirshner Music, Inc. Archie TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

The Archies spoof (LEFT) the Monkees and (CENTER) Get Smart, while (RIGHT) Moose jams with the band.

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincere thanks to my interview subjects, who graciously withstood my interrogations about work they produced a half-century ago: Ralph Bakshi, Dick DeBartolo, Jose Delbo, Ramona Fradon, Bob Holiday, Bill Mumy, Joe Sinnott, Tony Tallarico, and Dean O. Torrence, plus Vince Gargiulo, whose knowledge of Palisades Amusement Park is astounding.

Special thanks to the following, who provided new quotes and/or information: D. J. Arneson, Cary Bates, Alan Brennert, Ernie Colón, Hy Eisman, Donald F. Glut, Sid Jacobson, Steve Skeates, Roy Thomas, and Ted White.

Quotes from the following were culled from interviews conducted for several of my earlier books: Murphy Anderson, Jim Aparo, Nick Cardy, Dick Giordano, Gil Kane, Bob Oksner, Larry Reiner, Jim Shooter, and Stan Weston.

My heartfelt thanks to Will Murray, for contributing his superb “Nice–Terrific War” essay to my book, to Jon B. Cooke, for allowing that to happen, and to Keith Carter, for its amazing illustration.

Thanks to Mark Vogel, whose incredible 2015 book, Monster Mash, made me think, “Hey, I’d like to do a book like that about campy heroes!”

Thanks to John Morrow for allowing me to revisit my childhood by publishing Hero-A-Go-Go, and for loaning me some Camp Age comic books necessary for my research. Also, thanks to my brother, John S. Eury, for the loan of a few books.

Thanks to John Wells and Mark Arnold, who kindly allowed me to pester them with questions about DC Comics, Harvey Comics, and cartoons, and Steven Thompson, for his transcriptions of three of my interviews and for providing helpful newspaper clippings for my research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooks, Tim and Marsh, Earle. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946– present (Revised Edition) (1981, Ballantine Books) CartoonResearch.com Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Characters (1995, Bulfinch) ---. Wonder Woman: The Complete History (2000, Chronicle Books) King Kong Cartoon Series Guide, SciFiJAPAN.com Lyrics on Demand.com Misiroglu, Gina, with Roach, David A., editors. The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes (2004, Visible Ink Press) Rovin, Jeff. The Encyclopedia of Superheroes (1985, Facts On File) ---. The Encyclopedia of Super Villains (1987, Facts On File) Sennett, Ted. The Art of Hanna-Barbera: Fifty Years of Creativity (1989, Viking Studio Books) Solomon, Charles. The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings (1989, Alfred A. Knopf) TVobscurities.com

Thanks-a-go-go to Scott Saavedra, for translating my jam-packed manuscript into this fab, gear, and boss book.

Tye, Larry. Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (2012, Random House)

Very special thanks to my wife, Rose Rummel-Eury, for putting up with me for the past year as I immersed myself into Sixties pop culture.

Wells, John. American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960–1964 (2012, TwoMorrows Publishing)

And thanks to the following, who provided information or illustrations, access to an interview subject, permissions, or helped in some other fashion: Jim Amash, Michael Ambrose, Ger Apeldoorn, Michael Aushenker, Greg Beda, Al Bigley, Bob Burns, Dewey Cassell, Toni Collins, Jamie Coville, Silvana Delbo, Greg Ehrbar, Mark Evanier, Rich Fowlks, Stephan 270

Friedt, P.C. Hamerlinck, Deborah Herman, Mike Hoffman, Martin O’Hearn, Becky Presley, Bob Schreck, John Schwirian, Scott Shaw!, Mark Sinnott, Mike Tieffenbacher, John Trumbull, and Mike Vasallo. If I’ve forgotten anyone, I hope you’ll forgive my oversight.

---. American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965–1969 (2014, TwoMorrows Publishing) Wikipedia Zeno, Eddy. Last Superman Standing: The Al Plastino Story (2014, self-published)

TM & © Archie Publications, Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Eury is the Eisner Award-nominated editor-in-chief of TwoMorrows’ Back Issue magazine. He has worked as a writer or editor for a variety of diverse companies including Arcadia Publishing, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Nike, and Toys R Us. Hero-A-Go-Go is his fourteenth non-fiction book.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-073-1 ISBN-10: 1-60549-073-3 53695

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ISBN 978-1-60549-073-1

$36.95 in the USA Printed in China