Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!

For Luis Olavo Dantas; Frank Esposito; Louise Freeman; and Martin Shoemaker four correspondents, loyal and true.

This is -- hands down; case closed; no argument whatsobloodyever -- the second single most repeated inquuiry made of Your Humble Host Hereabouts, whenever some newcomer to our humble little online abode and Silver Age-centric car wash elects to e-mail an epistle my way "How can you sit there and make fun of the fanboys like that?"

(The most often-asked question -- for the record -- is "What the heck am I s'posed to call you, anyway? I mean... I can't very well call you "Cheeks," can I...?" My response to this straightforward and [doubtless] heartfelt request for information is, as always " 'Wild, Magnificent Pagan Stallion Love-Thing.' After all... it's what your mom seemed most... y'know... comfortable with...")

It's not all that unreasonable a query, however; this "making fun of the fanboys" business, I mean. After all I'm running this very site, f'chrissakes.

I suppose the truest answer is the bestest one, in this particular I can (and do; and -- I assure you -- forevermore will) "make fun of the fanboys like that" because I, too, once bore the stigmata.

Yes, boys and girls it's true. Your Unca Cheeks was once comics fandom's answer to Ray Milland, in THE LOST WEEKEND a crazed, frothing, four-color junkie; a twitching, jittering wretch of an obsessive, unapologetic, And-Stan-Lee-Did-Begat-the-World f-a-n-b-o-y.

Oh, God.

Oh, God... I... I feel so free, now

It was 1966.

I was but a wee, beardless plush toy of eight...

... and I was The Batman.

... or, rather I dreamed of being the Batman.

The Batman was, for me -- a painfully reclusive kid, growing up in (what we in the Deep South referred to as) "genteel poverty"; and whose parents got along only slightly less amicably than did, say, Martin and Lewis during the latter years of their overwrought "relationship" -- the very ne plus ultra of heroic, mack daddy C-O-O-L.

He was a detective, in a storytelling genre given over almost entirely to hulking, mesomorphic brawlers (I was a slight and "book-ish" lad).

He was filthy, stinking rich (whereas my only "trust fund" of note was whatever loose change I managed to ferret out from between the cushions of the living room sofa).

He was admired and respected by the populace entire of a fawningly grateful city (whereas --as the old joke goes -- Mom had to regularly tie pork chops around my neck, just so the family dog would play with me). [*rimshot*]

... and -- of course -- he had his own twice-weekly television show, to boot.

A television show wherein his breakneck adventures were portrayed by that world-renowned thespian extraordinaire and Breaker of Hearts Adam West.

(Now... I ask you how pathetic is that, f'chrissakes? I mean... when your overriding childhood ambition is to grow up to become more like Adam freaking West...?!?)

The naked, unvarnished truth if it was in any way "Bat"-related...

... I had to have it. HAD to.

The "BATMAN TV Show Board Game"...? Mine.

The matching "Batman" and "Robin" drinking mugs...? Scored.

The (oh, dearest Jesus) "Batman" PJs...? Lived in 'em. (Made my life a living hell during the 'Nam, too; I can tell you that much.)

So -- naturally -- when the Topps BATMAN Trading Card Set came out on the market, back in The Year of Our Lord, 1966...

... well that heavy, metallic clanging sound you may have heard, just now, reverberating over the span of decades long since agone...?

The sound of my juvenile fate being sealed, once and for all.

However collecting trading cards -- particularly those sorts of cards which are numbered (and meant to be enjoyed) in an especial sequence -- is (I'm here to tell ya) absolutely NOTHING like collecting comic books.

It is (in plain point of fact) the single most maddening; heartbreaking; and relentlessly anal pursuit ever devised by Man, and/or allowed by a less-than-benevolent God.

Come. Take my hand.

Let me be your guide down the twin paths of Madness and Obsession.

There. You see that card? That card right there, directly above this line...?

Nice, isn't it? Great, leering rendition of that most studiedly archetypal of "Bat"-nemeses; the Clown Caliph Of Crime -- the Joker.

I hate it.

Just seeing this card is enough to elevate my (already) constantly percolating blood pressure to nigh-China Syndrome-type levels. It is -- to me; even today, with three decades-plus serving as much-needed ameliorative -- as one with The Sigil of the Great BBeast...

... because at one time... I owned over two HUNDRED copies of it.

Said pasteboard (I don't even have to look it up; it's Number #9 in the total series of 143 "special collector's cards") was -- I assure you, one and all -- present in each and every package of Topps BATMAN cards ever bloody produced.

Literally. I mean it.

When you are (as was I, you might recall) a child of Limited Fiscal Means; and every sou or drachma forked over for a pack of five measly cards is that much less hard-won lucre available towards the purchase of -- oh, say -- comic books; a movie ticket; or a bottle of soda pop...

... the demonstrable and inarguable fact that some mean-spirited troll, somewhere deep, deep within the nightmarish bowels of The Topps Trading Card Company, was getting his cackling, cretinous jollies by imagining the shrill cries of dismay, nation-wide, as countless whey-faced urchins (such as myself) feverishly shredded the wrappings from their latest card acquisition(s); only to wail, heart-rendingly "... oh, @#$%!!! Not another 'Face of the Joker' -- !" serves as cruel proof positive, ultimately, that There Is True Evil In This World.

This much I know is true when the bombs do eventually fall, and all of human civilization is made barren, desolate ruin... only three things will survive the fire rain:

Trace levels of Strontium-90; roving, blood-crazed packs of giant, mutated Dalmatians...

... and this damned CARD.

This one, on the other hand, is one of my very favorites.

As lovingly (and -- really-- almost fetishistically) rendered by master draughtsman Norm Saunders -- the same lovably deranged whack-job whose artistic legerdemain made the 1950's MARS ATTACKS series of trading cards so wonderfully memorable -- the Topps BATMAN trading cards frequently featured either Batman; Robin ("the Boy Wonder"); or both trussed up and being submitted to various excruciating forms of A Fate Worse Than Death.

Just looking at some of the more ghoulishly-inspired of these (such as #17, reproduced above the much-prized-by-collectors "Spikes of Death") was enough to generate an involuntary (yet, oddly, pleasurable) frission of barely-repressed terror in those of us still soldiering our resolute way through our respective grade school years. "Robin In Peril" (a squirming Boy Wonder, strapped to a gigantic lathe and mere heartbeats away from an inopportune rendezvous with a particularly jagged-toothed buzz saw); "Boiling Bath" (a chained and manacled Batman, being lowered inch by agonizing inch towards a vat of some noxious-looking brew by a red-

robed Inquisitor); "Canape For a Cobra" (a rope-bound Batman, facing down a hissing, skull-backed serpent roughly the size of a freaking pack mule)...

... oh, yeah. Norm Saunders was, unquestionably, one mondo Sick Puppy Dog.

God love him and keep him.

No mean shakes when it came to the skillful rendering of things more pleasantly distaff, either, come to think.

The initial series of cards (i.e., the initial fifty-five in the series) told a series of four "stories," by means of some particularly lurid (if abbreviated) "copy" on the back of each one. #2 through #13 made up a complete "Joker" tale; #14 through #24, a "Penguin" opus; #25 through #35, "Catwoman" saga [that's #26, reproduced above]; and #36 through #46, a breezy "Riddler" escapade. (#1, #2 and #47 through #55 were all "single" shots of either various "Bat"-characters, or else "teasers" for what were [in all likelihood] planned future storylines, card-wise.

(A representative sample of what I mean by "lurid," in describing the relentlessly overheated [and mind-bogglingly ungrammatical] prosey accompanying each of these cards "As Robin is securely tied, within the secret hide-out of the Catwoman, the sinister villainess approaches him with a long blade. 'I have always had a fondness for you and the Batman, but I have also had a desire to revenge myself for the times I have been captured and sent to prison. Now I'll have a fitting revenge at last,' she says as she swings the sword towards Robin's vest.") [See card reproduction, below]

Now even at the tender age of eight, I entertained the sneaking suspicion that this stuff wasn't exactly Shakespeare, to be sure...

... but, by God and by damn it accomplished exactly what it set out to do.

Those initial fifty-five cards were mine, bay-bee.

"But... but, Unca Cheeks" (I hear you wail, in understandable consternation). "You said there were one hundred and forty-THREE cards in the series! What's with this 'initial fifty-FIVE' jive, for the luvva Allah...?!?"

Ah. Well... you'll just have to accompany me to Page Two of "Biff! BAMM! Ka-Pow My Pre-Adolescent Descent Into Madness and Obsession"... and discover the unholy, long-hidden secret of the remaining eighty-eight pasteboards.

Mind the panther, now.

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