This is the story of a Christmas present given in faith that it would be delivered fifteen years later.
Yeah, I’ve been rummaging through the dustbin of America’s cultural memory, again. It’s surprising how much of our way of life and the freedoms w
Read more…Before the holiday break, I had been talking about Aunt Harriet, the character introduced in 1964 by newly appointed Batman editor Julius Schwartz. The idea was to deflect accusations, first suggested by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, that Bruce Way
It’s that time of the year, again.
The season when the cable stations fill their time slots with holiday-themed films. The old black-and-white classics and the modern Technicolor wanna-bes. Usually leading off the seasonal schedule is the appropria
Read more…Raise your hand if you believe that the character of Aunt Harriet was created by the producers of the Batman television series, which ran from 1966 to 1968. The folks who frequent the Captain Comics site are, by and large, a comics-savvy bunch. Yet
Those of you with long memories and an interest in such a thing will remember Jeff of Earth-J’s thread on the television soap opera Dark Shadows. Jeff introduced it in 2010 and it picked up a good head of steam, running strong for years. Even five
Three . . . two . . . one.
Step back. Hands in the air.
Wow! Lots of comments on this one. I love that. Philip Portelli had posted his answers so fast---I mean, he’s usually fast, but this time, it was almost like he had been looking over my sho
Read more…Welcome back! We’ve been talking about unusual deviations that appeared in Silver-Age comics without an explanation---at least, not from an authoritative source. Last time out, we discussed the curious case of the adult Robin’s first costume, which
Red Ryan, loyal buddy of a million adventures, is dead! Sacrificed for a world that will not long remember him!
Challengers of the Unknown editor Murray Boltinoff and writer Arnold Drake had delivered a stunning blow to their readers. They killed o
Read more…Murray Boltinoff was going to kill off one of the Challengers of the Unknown. And Red Ryan was the Chall who had drawn the short straw.
As Boltinoff would discuss in subsequent letter columns, killing off one of the Challengers had been discussed fo
Read more…It’d only been five months and already it was the ugliest war in history to that point.
Soldiers hunkered down in trenches a football field apart from each other. Between them was open ground where men were chopped to bits by machine guns, repeating
Read more…What’s out there? Places we cannot see! Things we fear to touch! Sounds that do not belong to this world! Riddles of the ages lurking beyond the bridge without a name! Only men living on borrowed time would dare cross that bridge! Here are such
“Why does Hulk’s head hurt when Hulk tries to think?”
“Hulk smash!”
That was the Hulk I encountered every time I looked at an issue of Tales to Astonish in the mid-1960's. Whenever physicist Bruce Banner felt intense stress, he transformed into the
Read more…When it comes to television specials during the traditional holiday season, Thanksgiving gets the short shrift. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with Boris Karloff’s mellifluous narration; Rankin-Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; and A Charlie
As I mentioned once, a while back, I got into Marvel Comics late in the game. Outside of glancing at an odd issue or two on the coffee table at my barber shop, I didn’t start reading Marvel in earnest until 1965. One of the first things that struck
Sometimes, it’s not so hard to come up with ideas for my column. You guys bring them to me.
Case in point, last’s month’s entry, when Dave Elyea posted:
I’d love to see someone figure out when most of the Superboy stories were set---up until the off
Read more…"At present, we consider Superman to be about 32. Lois Lane and Lana Lang are a year or two younger."
In my last entry, I showed that, during the Silver Age, Superman editor Mort Weisinger established the ages of the Man of Steel and most of his su
Read more…Pencils down!
This is exactly the way I like one of my quizzes to play out. Everyone who took a shot at it did respectably well, either by getting the right answers to most of the list, or by being the first to nail one of the trickier posers. Betw
Read more…It always goes this way. I get an idea for a Silver-Age quiz because a couple of good questions pop into my head.
Now you might be thinking that I like it when that happens because doing a quiz is an easy way to knock out a Deck Log Entry.
Yeah,
Read more…Hey, they can’t all be gems, folks.
In 1938, National Comics (that which would become DC Comics) launched Superman in Action Comics # 1. In a phenomenally short period, he would become an icon of popular culture, not just in America, but around the
Read more…I’m not really an idea man, so when the notion of Lex Luthor taking Superboy to civil court occurred to me, I got excited. While I have my own opinion on it, I tried mightily to be fair in the proceedings. Any comics fan with a law degree, no doubt
