Happy 4th of July- Marvel Style!

I thought I'd celebrate our nation's independence by celebrating the Silver-Age debut of comicdom's greatest patriot- Captain America!

So, Happy 4th of July and SUCK IT, GEORGE III ! No Taxation without representation, BEE -YOTCH!!



Right off the bat, let me apologize. I had this post in mind for some time, thinking I had a reprint of Avengers#4. Turns out, the book I have that reprints it reprints a 6-page, abridged version of it. Near as I can tell, it mostly leaves out a big, Kirby fight.

In issue #4, The Avengers acquire a new member. A guy with all the charisma and leadership any superteam could ever ask for; Captain America.

This issue begins by reminding us of a big fight between the Avengers and the Sub-Mariner that took place last issue. We rejoin the Sub-Mariner on yet another rampage. After brooding about how much he hates the Human race, he decides to stop and hassle some Eskimos. These Eskimos are minding their own business, worshiping their idol; a dude frozen in a block of ice. Silly Eskimos.

Because he's just that big a jerk, Subby takes their idol and throws it into the ocean, where it just happens to drift into the Gulf Stream. The lump of ice slowly thaws out in the warm, Gulf Stream waters and reveals the floating body inside just as it happens to pass by a submarine (with the biggest interior any sub never had) filled with-you guessed it- The Avengers.

The Avengers marvel over the frozen corpse they've found and ponder his strange costume. Just then, the body springs to life and reveals himself to be Captain America.

When the Avengers question his authenticity, Cap challenges them to a fight. It's ALWAYS a fight with these people!

The Earth's Mightiest Heroes then get their asses handed to them by a guy who's been frozen for 20 years. You would think he'd have frostbite and muscular atrophy, at least.

Cap then recounts the strange tale of how he came to be there:

In 1945, while trying to defuse a flying bomb that is aimed at the U.S., Cap and his kid sidekick, Bucky are carried out over the North Atlantic Ocean. Something goes horribly wrong and the bomb explodes early, killing Bucky outright and throwing Captain America into the icy waters below. Cap is flash-frozen and slips into a state of suspended animation. He remembers nothing else, but, for some reason conjectures that he must have become frozen in a block of ice and then been found and worshiped by some Eskimos as a supernatural object...

Sure. Why not?

The Avengers dock their sub in New York Harbor and are greeted by a mob of reporters. Two seconds later, a bright flash occurs and the heroes are turned to stone. The ever-vigilant representatives of the Fourth Estate decide it must be some trick the Avengers used to dodge an interview.

Captain America emerges and puzzles over the odd poses of the "statues" of the Avengers, and then goes sight-seeing. At some point he checks into a hotel. I have no idea what he used for money. Cap does what any guy who just woke up in 1964 New York would do; he watches hotel TV.

His vegging out is interrupted by Rick Jones, who Cap mistakes for Bucky. Apparently Rick is a dead ringer for the late, lamented sidekick. I had just assumed that he looked similar because he was another Kirby drawing. To me, Rick always looked more like Snapper Car. Anyway, Rick has come to find Cap because the Avengers are missing.

The good Captain snaps out of his Rip Van Winkle funk and becomes a decisive man of action. Looking at photos taken at the dock that morning, Cap spots a guy with a device he's absolutely sure isn't a camera. Seems to me, since in Cap's mind people should be riding in flying cars by 1964, he would defer to Rick on that.

Cap is right, however, the "camera" is a ray gun in the possession of a stranded alien who was hired by the Sub-Mariner (Cap comments that he seems "to remember that name from the dim past"- "the dim past"? You mean the day before yesterday, when you and Subby were on the same side in WWII?) to turn the Avengers to stone. In exchange, The Sub-Mariner was to help the alien free his sunken ship from the ocean floor.

The alien explains that he has been stranded for thousands of years and gives hints that his frightening appearance and ability to petrify may have inspired the legend of Medusa. Oh! Good, I needed someone to rationalize Medusa for me.. now, where did we leave Thor??

Cap and Rick get the spaceman to revive the Avengers who help free his spacecraft and send him home. There are references to a big battle, but my copy skips all of that. *sigh*

For some reason, Captain America seems to act like he's really old. I mean, if you'd been frozen in a block of ice when you were 20 for two decades and suddenly revived with no memory of time passing, wouldn't you still be, like 20? Geez! at the most he's in his early 40's.

Sure, his slang and his world view would be different. But instead of acting all morose and grandpa-ish, wouldn't he be more likely to attack the staff at Benihana and make them pay for Pearl Harbor? Wouldn't he go to record stores looking for 78's of Glen Miller? Also, I don't remember anyone issuing you a discharge, Captain. Shouldn't you report for duty or something?

Not Really Silver Age... But Funny!

"I'm the best at what I do. And what I do is technically illegal in Georgia!"

Hypnosis. It Doesn't Work That Way!- Rawhide Kid #30

Anyone who's ever read any of Marvel's Silver Age comics series for any length of time knows that Stan Lee LOVES a good hypnotist. And Le's hypnotists are capable of convincing people to do ANYTHING! See for yourself:




Okay, I understand how he hypnotized the bartender into the free drink, but how did he accomplish finding a decent bottle of wine in an Old West saloon? Spade Desmond's antics attract the attention of the saloon owner, who he makes act like a monkey. The saloon owner is popular enough that a fight breaks out. Since everyone is packin', the outcome is not too surprising:


The Rawhide Kid is not one to stand idly by while people are endangering each other with reckless gunplay, so he logically stops them with some reckless gunplay:
Which draws the attention of the Hypnotist.

Spade Desmond sees the potential of having his own, personal gunfighter in his pocket,

And soon, he's making good use of his new toy:


Desmond takes things too far, however, when he orders the Kid to shoot the local Sheriff:


The Sheriff explains the Kid's sudden change of heart:


Maybe someone should explain to Stan Lee that "you can't make a man do something that he would never do normally!". Didn't we just see a cheap bartender give away a drink and a saloon owner act like a monkey? Is the Kid really a bank robber at heart?

I'm so confused. I can suspend my disbelief enough to pretend you can hypnotize people to do crazy stuff, but then to turn around in the next-to-last panel and tell me it's impossible?? What the Hell did I just read?

Gabriel Jones- A Big Step Forward.

During WWII, U.S. fighting forces were segregated, rather than integrated. This meant that Japanese Americans would serve in all Japanese-American units, African Americans would serve in all African American units. The U.S. Army was not racially integrated until President Harry Truman signed an executive order to the effect in 1948. This fact notwithstanding, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby decided to integrate their elite, fictional combat unit "The Howling Commandos".

In 1963, for the debut of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, Jack Kirby drew Gabe Jones as a realistic-looking black man. He gave Gabe the same human dignity he gave every other member of his commando squad (maybe more than he gave Dum-Dum Dugan). Only one problem: The printers thought there had been a mistake.


See, the printing company who printed the comics for Marvel were confused by why this one guy was brown. They thought it was a colorist's mistake and kept color correcting when they stripped the film for the color press plates. Finally the editorial office had to contact the printer and explain that Gabe Jones was a black man and was SUPPOSED to be brown. Since Jones had not been depicted as a stereotype, the printers had been horribly confused.

I think the preceding story illustrates how far America had come in it's understanding and treatment of it's African America citizens and how far it had yet to go.

Lee and Kirby Did WAAY Too Many Monster Comics- Rawhide Kid#22

There was a time when Westerns were some of the most popular comics series around. Heck, there was a time when Westerns, War, Romance and Horror all outsold superhero comics. Problem is, how do you do an interesting Western when the Comics Code won't let you show anybody getting shot??

Well if you're The Lone Ranger, you shoot the guns out of the bad guys' hands and move on. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby found other solutions. One was they threw in a lot of what we would now recognize as supervillains; hypnotists and magicians and the like. The other was a natural for Marvel c. 1960: Monsters.

Marvel had been making it's bread with monster comics for some time. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were drawing comic after comic, month after month featuring big, ugly lumbering monsters, all of which needed to be stopped to save the world from total destruction.

So, this issue of Rawhide kid took the logical step of making the Kid face a monster. Which is great, 'cause he's allowed to SHOOT monsters.

Now I'm going to let Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers tell you the story, through the miracle of Splash pages:


Okay, here's our setup. Rawhide Kid vs a walking totem pole. Pretty much a retelling of the cover. Incidentally, totem poles are only found amongst the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and are not indigenous to the Southwest where this story takes place. I like how the face in the middle looks a little embarrassed.



Now here's a classy, old-Hollywood composition. The monster is only hinted at as a shadow, leaving you to experience the horror through the eyes of the onlooker. Nice.



Well, some stuff has clearly happened between chapters, since the lift is partly raised. Apparently being a living totem pole doesn't mean you are invulnerable to getting dirt thrown in your eyes. Who'd've thought?



Okay, now this one's my favorite! I especially love how the third guy from the left takes the time to shout "LUCKY WE GOT OUT OF THE COACH IN TIME AND HAD TIME TO UNHARNESS THE HORSES!" I know that's what I would say if I found myself suddenly fleeing for my life from a sentient, evil totem pole.



And finally. the last page, so you can all rest soundly, assured that everything came out okay.

See. You didn't even really have to read the comic. A whole story summed up in five pages.

Saturday Morning 1967- The Fantastic Four

In 1967, Marvel Comics licensed most of its comic book superheroes to animation company Grantray Lawrence Productions. Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, The Sub-Mariner, Thor, Even Spider-Man (the animated version of which debuted the same day as the Fantastic Four). But for some reason, Marvel licensed one of their hottest properties to Hanna Barbera- the Fantastic Four. As far as I'm concerned, it was a brilliant move.

The Hanna-Barbera FF were redesigned for TV animation by Alex Toth, who somehow manged to simplify the Thing's lumpy, rocky hide and still make him look like the Thing. The scripts were lively and pretty dead-on, many of them adaptations of FF stories from the comics. There are a few oddities -like an episode where the Fantastic Four travel to Atlantis and deal with a "King Triton". Triton looks suspiciously like Namor, The Sub-Mariner, who was licensed to a different animation company.



Sadly, although this still airs on Cartoon Network and Boomerang occasionally, this series has yet to come to DVD.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who are the "Strangest Heroes" of All?

So it goes like this: In September, 1963 Marvel Comics published X-Men #1 with the byline "The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!". Back in June 1963 DC comics published My Greatest Adventure #8o which debuted a new Super Team, the Doom Patrol with the byline "The World's Strangest Heroes!"

The X-men featured five teenage heroes with unwanted powers who answered to a mysterious leader in a wheelchair. A man named "Professor X". The Doom Patrol were three heroes with unwanted powers who answered to a mysterious leader in a wheelchair. A man named "The Chief".

There has been some controversy over the similarities of these two super-teams for the last 46 years. DC says Marvel, in essence ripped off the Doom Patrol, citing the wheelchair-bound leader and unwanted powers. Also, the DP fight the Brotherhood of Evil and the X-Men fight the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Marvel says that the Doom Patrol was just a rip-off of Marvel's Fantastic Four.

After all, there are FOUR of them and four members of the Doom Patrol. Negative Man is a little like the Human Torch, Robotman is similar to the Thing, The Chief has Mr. Fantastic's intellect, while Elasti-Girl is like the Invisible Girl but with a power sort of like Mr. Fantastic's...

Of course, if DC ripped off Fantastic Four creating the Doom Patrol, then Marvel certainly ripped off DC's Challengers of the Unknown when creating the Fantastic Four.

The Challengers were four men brought together by fate, united by a common accident (the crash of an experimental plane) who team up to combat, well, the Unknown. They even wear matching purple jumpsuits not unlike the spacesuits worn by the FF in their first appearance. Of course, Challengers was originally drawn by FF artist extraordinaire, Jack Kirby, so no big shock that the two books would look similar.

Another great similarity between the Doom Patrol and the X-Men is that both titles were cancelled due to poor sales. Of course, in the 1970's, the X-Men came back in a HUGE way with the New X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1.


The Doom Patrol also staged a come-back, but with far less success. But, fear not, DC managed to rip off the New X-Men with the New Teen Titans.

The Teen Titans were reinvented as an angstier group of young people, many of whom were not so keen on having super powers. Heck, even Doom Patrol alumnus Beast Boy (No relation to X-Men's Beast) joined the New Titans.

Not to be outdone, the good folks at Marvel brought us The New Mutants a comic about the teenage mutant students who were training to be future X-Men. The New X-Men, after all were no longer teenagers.



The thing is, folks- comics companies, writers and artists have ALWAYS ripped each other off. From Sub-Mariner to Aquaman. From Superman to Captain Marvel. From The Flash to the Whizzer...

Personally, I'm just glad I live in a world where I can read and enjoy reprints of BOTH the Doom Patrol and the X-Men