Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS SO BLOODY LAME
AND AWFUL, YOU FEEL LIKE BLUDGEONING BABIES TO DEATH WITH A CLOTHES IRON
(PART ONE)
You kids. I swear. 
I try and try and try to... y'know... elevate the topics of
discussion, around this here joint. "Communism In the Comics." "Time
Travel In the Comics." "Political Dissent In the Comics," f'chrissakes
-- just try finding another web site which even attempts to cover stuff
like this; just go ahead and decently try, is all. I dare you.
I double dog dare you, even.
A little (quasi-)intellectual fare, every so often. Just for a change of bloody pace, mind. Is that so terribly, horribly wrong, then? Does it violate some hideous and unspeakable sort of cosmic law? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me...?
Okay. I got a little carried away, just then. I can admit
that.
But... y'see: I really, truly, honestly do try to vary the conversational
"meals," here in our little Silver Age-oriented rib shack. Because I don't
think it's all that good for you, really, to keep gorging yourselves
on the online equivalent of fast food whatsitburgers. (It's the yenta
in me, I suppose. "Papa... Papa, can you hear MEEEEEEEE...?")
... and what do you lot keep pestering and pleading for in the way of New Pages, in return...?
"Give us more feebs. We want more FEEBS."
Oy.
All right, then: just this one last time... and NEVER AGAIN, d'ya hear?
... and not a word of this to your father, when he gets home tonight.
"Bouncing Boy."
No, no; you just skedaddle yourselves right back here, dammit!
You've all just been bloody asking for this.
Bouncing Boy (a.k.a., "The Legionnaire With the Inflatable Derriere") was, in actuality, nebbish-y and none-too-bright Chuck Taine -- an "errand boy for a famed scientist," who managed -- through means too tortured and ridiculous to relate here, sans the usage of finger puppets -- to mistake a bottle of his employer's experimental "super-plastic fluid" for a bottle of soda pop.
Upon the accidental imbibing of same, ol' blubber butt gained the exciting, crime-whompin' ability to inflate himself like a hyper-thyroidal beach ball, whereby he might then...
... well: it's been close to nigh on umpty-gazillion LEGION OF SUPER-HERO stories between then and now... and no writer yet has managed to lucidly excogiate just how, precisely, such a ludicrous "super-power" might plausibly be parsed into an actual, y'know, advantage, combat-wise. Particularly within the context of a super-hero team including the all-but-omnipotent likes of Superboy; Supergirl; Mon-El; Ultra Boy; etc., etc., ad infinitum.
A good rule of thumb, I think, for any/all future comics scribes in attendance: if your proposed "super-hero" character is of such design that he generally finds himself looking much as if he ought to be tethered somewhere in the middle of the balloon procession of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade...
... don't. Just... don't.
Freakish and unsettling physical infirmities can be quite the tricky little things to convincingly explicate in adventure fiction, obviously. Take the correlative example of Captain Marvel, for instance.
No, no: not the "Shazam!"-shouting DC Comics, Inc. character...
... and not the (deceased) former alien "double agent" of Marvel Comics renown, either.
I mean this friggin' conceptual hashish dream, right here.
[See cover reproduction,
below]
Just kinda sorta makes you wanna dig your own eyes out with a spoon,
don't it...?
The creation of Golden Age comics great Carl Burgos -- who (as the progenitor of the original Human Torch) certainly ought to have known better than this -- the Captain Marvel of the (mercifully) short-lived "M.F. Enterprises" series of the same name was an android created by scientists on an alien world as some muddleheaded sort of "war deterrent," or some such nonsense. (The putative "origin story," itself, is scarcely any more illuminating, in this regard, than my own hasty explication of same.)
An early harbinger of their construct's effectiveness, overall: the alien
world in question is unceremoniously reduced to so much space rubble by Page
Five of the first issue.
The grief-stricken android hies himself hence to our own little mudball, and -- assuming the secret identity of "college archaeology professor, Roger Winkle" -- shifts his long-range career goals from The Total Cessation of War to Pointless Brawling With Grade-"Z" Super-
Villains with the same cheery, uncomplaining sort readiness one might just as readily value in a Third Assistant Fry Cook working the "graveyard" shift, at Hardee's.
The Captain's "super-power" (and never, ever have I employed the term so loosely as I do Right Here; Right Now) was this: upon shouting the word "Split!", he could...
... well... disassemble himself.
No. Seriously.
His disjointed head; arms; legs; and torso all careening madly about the room, under their own steam, the Captain's various and sundry bodily parts would just plain ol' pummel his/their opponents into shrieking, undergarment-soiling submission; about as stomach-churning a "super-
power" as has ever been conceived of and actualized within the four-color confines
of a children's comic book. (Used to put me right off my supper;
I can tell you that much, for free.)
(You know... I think I've only just now adduced what the letters M
and F must have stood for, in the acronym "M.F. Enterprises.")
Androids were sort of the flavor du jour for a while, there, back in the middle '60's. The long-lived Dell Comics Publishing company tried their own corporate hand at it with the even more short-lived (a scant four issues) SUPER HEROES comic. [See cover reproduction, below]
Four typical, happy-go-lucky suburban teen ciphers (Tom; Donald;
Rich; and Polly) happen to go a-wanderin' through "The Hall of
Heroes Wax Museum," one golden, sunshine-y afternoon, when they espy the immobilized
forms of a quartet of "super-powered androids." Just... y'know... sitting
there, like.
As the four teenagers gape in stupefied adolescent awe at these motionless
mechanical marvels, "an atomic power feedback surges through the room."
(This sort of thing, of course, used to happen all the time, back in
the '60's. Building contractors were notorious for "cutting corners,"
cost-wise, on the safeguards for atomic-powered museum displays. People
were just keeling over left and right, really. It was a major scandal;
the newspaper headlines of the day were positively lurid.)
Quicker'n you can say "Idiot Plot Contrivance": the four teens find their minds [Insert Joke Here] residing within the bodies of the aforementioned androids. El (the blue-and-yellow one) had both prodigious strength and "laser vision"; Hy (the red one) sported sonic-
based abilities; Crispy displayed cryogenic powers; and (God help me) Polymer Polly could fly, and... you know... get into trouble, an' stuff.
The kids (who later discovered that they could shift their rudimentary consciousness'
in and out of the android constructs, at will) kept their inanimate
"hero" bodies secreted within the musty confines of "an old, abandoned opera
house" when not in use, and routinely referred to themselves as "The Fab Four."
No matter how many death threats I kept mailing to the editor.
Another minor "vogue" amongst the lesser comics publishers of the era was that of taking a well-known character from the annals of literature -- preferably (but not always) one already in the public domain, copyright-
wise -- and transmogrifying them into peculiarly harebrained and inept "super-heroes." Way, waaaaaaaay at the very tip-top of this particular Most Wanted Felons list, of course, was Dell Comics' (they just kept on trying, didn't they?) infamous...
...DRACULA. [See cover reproduction, below]
I absolutely refuse to go so much as a single step farther,
until you all stop that silly shrieking and blubbering.
DRACULA was one of a troika of similarly-themed and -executed comics of the day, actually; accompanied (much as, say, the Black Plague of Europe was "accompanied" by piles and piles of unsightly cadavers) by the equally dire FRANKENSTEIN and WEREWOLF... but: this one was, hands down, the absolute worst of the three, in that I've always held Bram Stoker's signal literary creation in especial high esteem.
"Count Dracula," in this shoddy little auctorial enterprise, is the filthy, stinking rich scientist descendant of the original vampire of the same name. While testing out a potential "cure for brain damage" by chugging down the contents of the vial himself -- doubtless, in a moment of painful clarity and self-awareness -- he gained the tres formidable combat ability to transform himself into... a bat!
All right, then; maybe not all that damned formidable, when you actually
stop and think about it.
Equally as appalling, in its own dreadful way, was the similarly cavalier treatment afforded Walter B. Gibson's classic pulp-era crime-fighter: THE SHADOW. [See cover reproduction, below]
This total abomination unto the minds of both God and Man was the much misguided handiwork of Archie Comics Publishing (in general), and -- for the greater portion of its eight-issue run -- writer and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, in particular. In it, the Shadow swapped his trademarked ebon greatcloak and snap-brim hat for a perfectly ridiculous skin-tight green-and-blue number... complete with requisite domino mask and cape.
One scarcely even knows where to decently begin, in cataloguing the conceptual miscues inherent in this comic's conceptualization and execution.
Ultimately, perhaps: it is best not even to try.
Either one instinctively understands why such a thing is wrong... or:
one does not.
The original Shadow had more than a little in common, attitude-wise, with writer Don Pendleton's popular (and much imitated) "Mack Bolan" character, whose bloody, one-man war against organized crime is chronicled in the EXECUTIONER paperback series. While I've never been overly enamored of Mr. Pendleton's creation, myself... even he deserved far better than the wholesale swiping of his conceptual mainsprings enacted by comics scribe Gerry Conway (during his lengthy tenure on Marvel's SPIDER-MAN series), re: The Punisher.
Quite simply: "Frank Castle" (a.k.a., The Punisher) was lifted, wholesale -- origin; motivation; and motif -- straightaway from the better-known (and immensely popular, at the time) EXECUTIONER series of novels. A man whose family is wiped out during a "mob" crossfire; the near-psychotic obsession with (and totemization of) "the holy, cleansing power of firearms"; the hag-ridden quest to rid the world of all gangsters, everywhere -- preferably, one bullet at a time. "And so" (in the words of the immortal Vonnegut) "it goes."
Stuff this shameless and opportunistic goes well beyond any reasonable definition of the word "homage"... particularly when the original creation (to say nothing of its author) is never afforded so much as a tipping of the hat by latter-day parvenus. Were I Mr. Pendleton's legal counsel... this sort of thing would have occasioned a hefty little lawsuit decades ago.
More of the unspeakable; the wretched; and the just plain vile, on Page Two of 1,001 USES FOR A DEAD SPANDEXED GOOBER, immediately following.
Oh, you'll all bloody pay for this.
The All-Time Lousiest Super-Hero Comic Ever Made
More of The All-Time Lousiest Super-Hero Comics Ever Made
Still More of the All-Time Lousiest Super-Hero Comics
Ever Made
"1,001 Uses For a Dead Spandexed Goober": PAGE
TWO
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