No Time to Blog...

I don't really have time to write a real post.



I have a ton of papers to grade, and a few non-blog writing tasks I ought to address before I do anything substantial over here.

Please substitute me for longhair '70s Barry Allen in the picture above, and replace dinner with paper-grading, and slow things down about a million times. Also, put bags under his eyes. Or mine. And replace his manic look of inspiration with a weary thousand-yard stare. Ugh.

Thing vs. Hyperion: Four Remarks

I've been away from the blog a lot lately, which may have something to do with the usual cruelty of April in an academic schedule. In fact, I still don't really have time to be posting, but I also don't want to let the blog wither. And so, armed as I am with a stack of crummy comics sold to me cheap by the guy who runs my local comic store, I will dip once again into the lame comics of my youth.

For example, here's Marvel Two-in-One #67, from 1980, which guest-stars Hyperion and Thundra alongside the Thing. It's also got cameos by Quasar and Giant-Man, because it's in the middle of that run where Two-in-One was mostly concerned with Project Pegasus. Anyway, I've got three remarks about this cover:

(You can click to enlarge it.)

1.) There sure are a lot of words on this cover. The Two-in-One logo is always busy, because it puts the Thing's logo above someone else's, but this one's also got a title, an editorial talking arrow, and a banner ad for the "Mighty Marvel Win-Yourself-Some-Big-Bucks Contest" (which might deserve a post of its own some day). That just leaves half of the space of the cover for a dynamic fight scene. And it is dynamic, isn't it? Check out that dynamic three-point perspective!

2.) Well, actually, the linear perspective in this image is pretty terrible. Looking at it one way, it's a useful study in what sorts of imprecision you can get away with if you're trying to make an evocative or bombastic image; looking at it another way, it's just sloppy. Here are a couple of detail views so you can see what I mean:

Thundra (the barbarian woman with big hair and an asymmetrical belly-shirt) is depicted in the comic as being pretty tall -- nearly a head taller than Hyperion -- but compared to those people across the street from her, she's a giant, isn't she? They look like they'd come up to her waist.



Maybe that's supposed to be like a little camper-trailer under the Thing's toes, not a full-sized truck. But it sure is dwarfed by the bystanders in the negative space between his arm and his leg, just a few yards up the street.

It's also interesting to compare the height of the first floor of the central building to the heights of the six floors above it.

I know it's sort of unfair to nitpick perspective on a hacked-out drawing like this. As I said, in some ways, this is a study in what distortions can still "work," because the image certainly looks okay at first glance. Mainly I ramble on about this for the sake of anyone who is still working on his or her perspective skills: I invite such folks to look at the sort of mistakes that are easy to make, if not necessarily easy to avoid.

3.) You could always tell when the guest "star" in Two-in-One wasn't a major player in the Marvel Universe, if his or her logo was dull or if the headshot portrait in the upper left corner of the cover looked like a rush job.

Judging by the lines in his hair, Hyperion's portrait is just traced from the picture of him on the cover. Compare:


I also have one remark from inside the comic:

4.) It's fairly common knowledge (among the people who follow this sort of thing) that Hyperion is a semi-satirical Marvel version of DC's Superman. The two barrel-chested heroes have similar names, similar powers, and even a similar origin story. All of those Squadron Sinister / Squadron Supreme characters have their Justice League analogues, though this particular comic predates the Squadron Supreme series by a couple of years.

Anyway, while Hyperion is fighting with Thundra in Two-in-One #67, there's a nod to his status as a Superman knock-off:

If I'd read this comic as a nine-year-old, would I have understood that? Would I have been more likely to see what was going on in Squadron Supreme when I bought and read that series? Because I vaguely remember thinking how ironic it was that all these different superhero universes all had one guy with trick arrows, and one guy with wings, and maybe a warrior woman from a faraway island or a guy who can run really, really fast... I'm not sure why I didn't put the parallels together sooner.

Anyway, those are my four remarks about this issue of Marvel Two-in-One.

I leave it to you to speculate on why Hyperion, who is clearly ginger-haired himself, would mock Thundra's fab rufous locks. Why, the two could almost be siblings, if they weren't from different alternate Earths.

Of Droog and Doggerel

It seems only appropriate, after yesterday's post, that I speak to you about the sensational character find of 1975, Droog. According to this encyclopedia page Droog did appear one other time, but thanks to Joe Stinson and Wilkey Wong...

...I've read pretty much his entire history in Marvel Comics.

Apparently, Droog is a mutated dog belonging to the Gremlin, that Soviet son-of-a-supervillain descended from the Gargoyle, who was Hulk's first foe. He looks a lot like a Triceratops, and he talks a lot like Len Wein writing doggerel couplets. Everything that Droog says is in rhyme, and actually it's kind of endearing.


Like most poets, Droog is strong enough to smack the Hulk around.

I love this panel. It hits at least three of my childhood nostalgia centers: dinosaurs, superheroes, and Dr. Seuss.

Seriously, isn't that beautiful? Who needs Stegron?

Writing dialogue for the Hulk around this time was a piece of cake, I'd bet. As long as he got in one "Hulk is the strongest one there is!" per issue -- and maybe "Smashing is what Hulk does best!" -- you'd be all set.

But I imagine it'd get a little dull, which might explain the completely ridiculous Yiddishisms of Sidney E. "Gaffer" Levine elsewhere in the issue (I'll post those later), or the ridiculous smugness of a SHIELD agent named Clay Quartermain. Writing a monster that speaks only in rhyme seems like a nice counterpoint. That's probably what Alan Moore was thinking when he made Etrigan and Alexander Pope speak only in rhyme.

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Hulk knows that he's stronger than a sturdy wall, Droog. Are you throwing him at it just to complete your couplet?

No, wait, I'm sorry. I call shenanigans. I don't care whether it fills out the meter of your line nicely, Droog. If there's one thing the Hulk isn't, it's fragile.

And, as it turns out, it's the walls that give way, crumbling around Hulk and Droog. Wein takes the opportunity to turn out a couple of narrative captions filled with quatrains. This leads to a panel that shows three things: smoking rubble, a footnote from the previous panel, and a footnote on the footnote, attributed to none other than Smilin' Stan himself.

Probably Whitman is rotating because he was never much for rhyme himself.

As near as I can gather, after they rise from this rubble, Hulk and Droog get hit with some kind of bomb, and Hulk gets knocked under the surface of the earth. Droog is almost never seen again. I'm not sure what brought him into a single issue of Daughters of the Dragon, or who "Megacephalo," his new master, was.

But I got to thinking: brightly colored dinosaur, talks in rhyme ... Did Droog get some cosmetic surgery in the '90s and resurface with a new and even more friendly identity?


The only way to determine the truth, of course, is to have Barney fight the Hulk. Then we'll see who is the strongest one of all.

Special lettercol bonus: Just for Mike, from this issue's "Green Skin's Grab-Bag":

...And people wonder why we include a letters column in our comics.

Another Freakish Mutation

I'm having a pretty busy week for pretty much everything around here, which means a light week for the ol' blog.

Still, since I have a few spare minutes, let me favor you with a panel out of Iron Man #71, from 1974. I've already plumbed the Joe Stinson Collection for a slavering green paunch-bellied ape-spider tripod and a yellow Kryptonian mantis-bird-bat-dragon; here's a purple, spotted giant cockroach demon, courtesy of the Yellow Claw and his incredible collar. (The monster breathes radioactive flames, by the way, but I haven't scanned that page.)
(Please click to enlarge.)

"Don't you ever get bored with your unreal world?" Iron Man asks.

It's a question I've had to face many times myself.

The Mike Grell Extreme Stance

So, okay: last week I was complaining about some of Mike Grell's figure work in an issue of Superboy from 1975. Wikipedia tells me that Grell was in his late twenties when he pencilled this issue, but it still shows some of the quirks of an incompletely developed style.

First, as I mentioned, the men in their spandex have zero body fat, and their outfits look uncomforatbly clingy. I know that hyperfitness is a common trope in superhero comics, but I also know that drawing a figure as pure musculature is easier than putting realistic cloth garments on the same figure. I've often suspected that Superman's skin-tight suit was originally as much an effort to assist Joe Shuster's then-underdeveloped drawing ability as an effort to evoke circus strongmen. But I digress. My point is that Grell's figures are all lanky, taut, and anatomical to the point of awkwardness. Show the readers what I'm talking about, Superboy.


But the thing I want to show you, really, is the weird way that Grell has these guys stand with their feet a yard or more apart when they're trying to look impressive (or surprised). It's all over this story, and it's a pretty weird tic. Here's the opening splash panel, in which Superboy (in his pajamas) is menaced by two ghosts of dead Legionnaires. (This scene does not appear in the plot of the story.)

I hope he hasn't pulled a muscle, jumping out of bed into that pose! (This raises an issue: is Superman strong enough to tear his own ligaments or to strain his own muscles? Surely there's a webforum where people discuss this sort of thing.)

Later in the comic, a mysterious interloper destroys a building (by slamming into it at high speed), then rises from the rubble:


Still later, a second mysterious interloper rescues a sky-diver whose parachute didn't open:


,,, And the crowd below is simply agog:


Hey, that one guy is Clark Kent! And he's managed to assume a pose even more exaggerated than the one in the introductory splash! (To me, this actually looks sort of like "What if Steve Ditko drew The King Canute Crowd?" Because I'm sure that young Clark Kent has been replaced in this panel with the young Alec MacGarry.)

Wow, that's gotta hurt. He "look[s] like [he] saw a ghost," indeed! Apparently, that's the way someone stands when he sees a 30th-century ghost:

(Although, you know, it occurs to me: Superboy has seen these guys die, in the 30th century, but he also knows they're time travelers. Why doesn't he just assume that they've traveled back to his time from a time before they died? Instead, he's all, "But -- you're dead!" ... Couldn't that cause some kind of time-paradox? Ah, Cary Bates: you've done it again.)

Fortunately, Superboy assumes a different stance in the story's final panel, after he and the genetic mockeries of actual life destroy a robot that Superboy built just to test their willingness to die all over again. In this last panel, he casually reveals that he already knew that the interloping Legionnaires were merely auto-destructing 48-hour-lifespan clones.

Chillin' in a secret room in his parents' basement, talking on the "Time-Telephone," without a care in the world, and still looking like he has every single muscle in his body tensed to the point of explosion: that's how a Super-Teenager ends a night of self-imposed robot-fighting.

Super-Heroine or Space-Hooker?

Here's another sample from the crummy old comics I got for my students.

This copy of Superboy #206 is stained and warped, presumably from a water spill some time back in February 1975. The lead story, written by Cary Bates and stiffly drawn by Mike Grell, concerns (get ready for this) a pair of clones of dead members of a team of teen super-heroes who are sent a thousand years back in time (to the present) to test 30th-century cloning technology. They survive the test, but blow up when they return to the future, because clones blow up forty-eight hours after they are created.

I mentioned that the drawings in that story are stiff. The men in the story (and there aren't many women) all have zero body fat and a bad case of Spread-Eagle Syndrome: they tend to stand with their feet about four feet apart. I should scan a few of those images for you, just so you don't think I'm knocking Mike Grell for no reason.

But we are not here today to mock "The Legionnaires Who Haunted Superboy." Instead, I want to comment briefly on the thing that struck me most prominently in the back-up story, which features Princess Projectra (another member of that 30th-century teen super-hero team) and a series of unsettling illusions involving her family. The plot isn't important. I want to talk about the outfits.

Actually, that monster is kind of cool, at least in concept: it seems to be based on a sort of trilateral symmetry, which is an interesting idea. What makes it especially creepy is the combination of that three-part body plan with elements (like its pecs, or its mouth) of our bilateral bodies. It's the sort of thing you might see in our demon book, now that I think of it.

But have a look at Princess Projectra's outfit. I'm pretty sure this is one of Dave Cockrum's designs. When he started drawing Legion of Super-Heroes costumes in the '70s, he redesigned pretty much all of the costumes, moving away from the standard jumpsuit (or skirted jumpsuit, for the ladies) toward designs that looked more super-heroic in that swashbuckling, bold Cockrum manner. For the men, this meant v-shaped costume elements moving from the shoulders to mid-torso, and for the women it meant cutouts from skintight costumes. Some of these designs are real successes. You can see a nice study in contrasts, drawn by none other than Jaime Hernandez, in a recent blog post by Evan Dorkin, where Jaime draws Phantom Girl in her Cockrum gear (sassy!) and then in her previous, 1960s costume (simple!).

Cockrum designed the original costumes for most of the new X-Men back in the '70s, too, and the eight-year-old Isaac who filled spiral notebooks with his own superheroes used a lot of pointy epaulets, tall boots, and (consummate) v-shaped torso patterns. That stuff got into my head almost as much as Kirby's design sense, and it still shows up in my superhero doodles from time to time.


But this Princess Projectra stuff? This outfit is not one of the successes. Probably it at least looked lively when Cockrum drew it, but in Mike Grell's hands it looks awkward, improbable, and inappropriate for kids. It's hard to imagine a real person wearing such a get-up, outside of maybe some sort of go-go-themed '70s softcore movie. It does not look wholesome. Yes, it is cut out just as deeply in back as in front. Yes, the cape is actually just a really big choker necklace.

But what irks me is the sudden flash of yellow in her bikini area. Well, that and the elaborate arm cutouts. It's not a graceful design, except possibly when she's posed in a ramrod-straight posture that discourages the viewer from thinking about how the costume works.

...Of course, when you combine the Cockrum "boldness" with Grell's apparent trouble in getting a head to match up with a body, any character can start to look like a space-hooker. I've seen plenty of drawings of this Saturn Girl costume that looked fairly innocent, even though the design itself is pretty racy...

...but Grell's version seriously looks like she's waiting to get paid.

And so, dear diary, I sign off, dedicating this post to Blockade Boy, who has a lot to say about super-hero couture...

Mad Science the Sivana Way

Just so you won't think I'm 100% hater when it comes to silver-age science, let's have another look at a book our friend at Alternate Universe sold me for cheap. Here, my friends, is Shazam! #11, welcoming in the year 1974.

It's a three-story comic, opening with a queasy-making story about a flood of cherry Jell-O that threatens to overwhelm the city (not even Captain Marvel can eat it fast enough). Second is a fairly amusing tale about a mailman who dresses up as Cape-Man (a tubby Superman with a ski mask) in order to get respect. Both of those stories, really, deserve some attention, and maybe after I've worked my way through the rest of the Joe Stinson Collection I'll come back to them.

But this evening we are here to discuss the Sivanas and their hatred not only of the Big Red Cheese but that other jolly red-clad hero, Santa. This is the story of how Dr. Sivana, "The World's Maddest Scientist," with his children Sivana Junior and Georgia, tried to ruin Christmas. How can you not love these ugly mugs?

I love the hereditary overbite, the horrible nose, and the habitual scowl. The art in this story is by Kurt Schaffenberger, and I have to say it's really charmingly lively, silly, and fun. I wish more modern comics looked like this.

That giant clock Sivana is sitting at? It's a machine that controls the speed of time.

You might think that I'd object to that. "What? The Sivanas can control the speed of time, and all they want to do is to ruin Christmas? Why not use that sort of crazy-scientist chrono-knowhow to do something more practical?" But that's not the sort of story this is trying to be. It never asks you to take it seriously,* and it never asks you to believe that Sivana is motivated by anything other than a perverse desire to spoil other people's happiness. If he used the big clock to rob banks, I'd call stupid on that, but to me this is just fun.

I mean, what reason is there for Georgia Sivana to be blowing bubblegum in the background of that panel? This is a story really written for kids. (There's even a point when the narrator in the captions tries to imply that despite any doubts you might be starting to have, Santa really might exist.)

Once time speeds up and the Marvel Family tries to solve the problem, they bump into Santa and he tells them that the Sivanas are behind it. (He knows when you've been bad or good, after all, so he knows what the Sivanas are up to.) The Marvels quickly burst into the Sivana lab and, with their combined strength, yank the clock hands back around so that time moves backwards and Christmas starts all over again at the normal pace.

This is the kind of world we're in: a machine so complicated that it can change all of time is also so simple that physically forcing it to run backwards will make all of its mechanisms reverse their effects. Maybe that's a little naïve, even for this sort of comic, but if the problem couldn't be solved by brute force, Captain Marvel would be up a creek, right?

(Another thing that seems impossible to imagine in today's comics: notice the way that Mary Marvel, despite some really awkward positioning, is not set up in a cheesecake pose.)

Of course, Sivana doesn't get to make that escape he's hoping for...

And although on the next page he's already threatening to break out of jail again, confident that 1974 is going to be his year, we don't hear any more from him for the time being. The Marvels give him a Christmas present, which seems to soften his heart a little bit ("Golly gee whiz!" he exclaims, "No one's ever given me a present before!"), and you wind up feeling a little bit sorry for him. Sivana really seems like a kid's fantasy of supernatural spite, when you think about it, and I think that's just the way he ought to be.

In my moment of sympathy for the devil, however, let me point out that this image really makes me flinch.

Talk about your unfair fights! It's the Superman-vs.-Luthor problem, made even worse because Sivana is a shriveled little old man. There's no way he's walking away from that blow. The poor little gnome. I hope he knows a good reconstructive surgeon.

*At least one of the readers didn't quite get the point. The first letter in this issue's "Shazamail!" begins, "Dear editor: Like fellow Kentuckian James McCoy, I find it hard to take the character of Captain Marvel totally seriously. But I still enjoy reading the stories..." This reminds me of the readers who wrote to the first publishers of Gulliver's Travels, complaining that some of the elements of the story seemed a bit implausible.

Flash Science

I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but the Silver-Age Flash had a peculiar rogue's gallery. With the exception of Gorilla Grodd, I think that every one of them was a genius inventor who had come up with a handheld device that defied the rules of physics. These ingenious weapons or other specimens of strange science (or possibly magic) were then used to rob banks. The Weather Wizard could control the weather with a little wand, but he couldn't come up with a better career idea than robbery (something that can be done with a pistol).

It's hard to believe, I know, but have a look at the cover of Flash #288, featuring Dr. Alchemy.

That's the Philosopher's Stone in Dr. Alchemy's right hand. It can transmute any element into any other. In his left hand, we see a briefcase full of money. Dr. Alchemy could change that stately tree into solid gold (or solid Californium), so I'm not sure why he bothers carrying that much cash. But I'm not Cary Bates, and it's not 1980, so I don't get to write this issue of Flash.

Despite the written emphasis on chemicals and elements, Dr. Alchemy is really a magical foe, not a scientific one. The Philosopher's Stone doesn't really transmute elements; it does whatever the comic's writer wants it to do. Here, for example, Dr. Alchemy invents a new element that makes people more susceptible to hypnosis.

I was eight years old when this comic was on the newsstand, and I think I could have told you that was ridiculous. I wouldn't have been able to say then that the problem has to do with the sorts of chemicals that usually are psychoactive, or the fact that a "new" element was almost certain to be radioactive... But I think I'd have known that we were looking at wishful writing and not real science or reasoning.

And this, in my opinion, is the real disappointment of Silver-Age Flash comics. Barry Allen was a scientist, and so were a lot of his supervillain foes. A writer with a decent sense of scientific reasoning and a decent knowledge of how physics and chemistry work would have been able to make the book genuinely educational for the kids who read it. I can imagine a comic that regularly featured ingenious high-speed solutions to intractable problems, based on real physical principles—or detective-work based on the scientific method. (The current All-New Atom written by Gail Simone gets pretty close to this sometimes, but of course that's a book for today's comic-reader, not for the eight-year-olds of 1980.) Anyway, I can pipe-dream about a scientist superhero who thinks like a real scientist, but Barry Allen is emphatically not that superhero.

Consider the sequence the front cover foreshadows: Dr. Alchemy catches Flash in the park and turns him into a human cloud:

I'm not sure, but it sounds like Dr. Alchemy has just used the Philosopher's Stone to turn water into water.

Or maybe he has changed all of the Flash's other component parts into water. How will our scientist resolve this dilemma? Well, fortunately, he still seems to be able to think, even though his brain is made of water vapor.

...And he seems to be able to control the movement or the agitation of his molecules. He can even create friction between individual water molecules. He heats part of his water vapor here, so that it's even warmer, then somehow propels his "warmer upper half" toward his "drifting, uncontrollable lower half"...

... and precipitates.

Since something about this strictly physical process returns Flash to his normal chemical makeup, he's free to run off and look for Dr. Alchemy.

Probably he isn't going to search all of the caves near Central City, because if you could use magic to alter and reconstitute matter, you would have your hideout in a penthouse or a lab or something, right? You probably wouldn't shackle your "astral twin" to a cave wall in front of a TV (plugged in to a magic outlet, probably) and a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Flash.

But let's not ask the comic to work logically now. And let's not bother to ask what an "astral twin" is. My head is already hurting.

The lesson learned from this comic: superhero comics about scientists are no place to look for scientific reasoning.

Pile of Crazy Old Comics

So: I'm planning for the first few weeks of this semester's course on the graphic novel now. I'm changing the course slightly, asking the students to write a few short essays for me instead of only taking exams, because I want to get them thinking critically about their reading from the very beginning of the class.

The first of these essays is going to be a very brief paper contrasting A Contract with God (which is their first assigned reading) with a mainstream comic book published around the same time. Long-time Satisfactory Comics supporter Joe Stinson, the owner of Alternate Universe (the comics shop nearest to Yale campus), very graciously sold me a pile of old comics from the 1970s and early '80s that are, well, not all in very good shape. And some of them are not very good at all. But he sold me the whole stack for a dollar, and I think they're going to work very well for this assignment.

Before I hand them over to my students, though, I'm going to skim them and scan a few pages, to offer a few points of my own about the differences between comics then and now.

For example, here's World's Finest #237, which is dated April 1976. (I was buying and reading comics by this point, but I don't remember this comic or its selection of ads.)

Notice the speech balloon on the cover. You don't see that very much any more. And notice the recurring theme of Superman threatening his friends or ranking their safety below that of a stranger. Also notice the red bulbs at the end of the tails of those Giant Metal-Eating Space Locusts. They become important later...



...When Superman is explaining why his father Jor-El sent this weird Giant Space Bird-Mantis-Dragon to Earth (without a rocket, just in a big irregular hunk of metal), and why Superman's powers aren't any good against the locusts.

The lesson we may learn from this issue: weird stuff used to happen in superhero comics, and it happened for some weird reasons. By the way: the author of this particular opus? Bob Haney.