Blog 2.0

Close your eyes---well, no, don’t close your eyes, because then you won’t be able to read this---but imagine that it’s almost exactly forty-six years ago.  It’s mid-January of 1966 and you’re a contestant on NBC’s quiz show, Jeopardy!

After you and your fellow players are introduced by Don Pardo and greeted by the genial Art Fleming, the game gets down to business.  You’re doing O.K., too.  You bombed out in the dreaded “Opera” category, but you made it back with “Famous Landmarks” and “Potent Potables”.  When it’s your turn to select the next clue, you look at the categories and decide, “’Fictional Journalists’ for $30.”

“And the answer is . . . ,” says Art.

 Smiling, you instantly ring in.  Confidently, you respond, “Who is Perry White?”  Of course.

Now, the clue-writers on Jeopardy! were really good and did their homework, and you’re stunned when that annoying “double buzz” signals that you’re wrong.  Art says, “Oh, sorry,” and your winnings drop by $30.  Neither of the other two contestants takes a shot at it, and while you’re standing there, open mouthed, Fleming states the correct response.

“Who is Van Benson?”

Bet you forgot about him, didn’t you?

For those of you who missed the Silver Age, you’re probably sitting there echoing Art Fleming, only with a different inflexion---“Who is Van Benson?”  Well, aren’t you glad that’s what I’m here to tell you.

It all began with Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane # 62 (Jan., 1966).  Traditionally, comics are post-dated by a couple of months; that issue actually hit the stands in the second week of November, 1965.  At first glance, the only thing unusual about Lois Lane # 62 was that, instead of the usual three unrelated stories of Lois Lane, the readers were given one long tale, advertised on the cover as “a 3-part novel, complete in this issue!”

The story is titled “Lois Lane’s Anti-Superman Campaign”, and the first indication of what’s to come occurs on page one, when Perry White collapses at his desk from overwork.  At the hospital, his doctor orders him to take a month’s vacation.  During his absence, Perry White appoints Clark Kent to serve as acting editor of the Daily Planet.

It’s actually a nice moment.  Kent didn’t wrangle for the job, nor did he try to avoid it, which is what he usually does in similar circumstances, for reasons related to his Superman identity.   This time around, that had nothing to do with it.  White put Kent in the big chair because, while Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen spent the day at the hospital fretting over Perry’s condition, Clark went back to the office and wrote up the story about the editor’s collapse.  It’s a rare Silver-Age occasion to see Clark Kent legitimately acting as a newsman.

Not much is made of Clark’s promotion, however, except for an early scene of Lois sucking up to the new boss by sending him a congratulatory wreath and purchasing a new nameplate for his desk.  The chief purpose is to get Perry White off-stage for most of the story.

The plot quickly shifts to its main thread.  One of the state’s U.S. senatorial seats is up in the current election, and the incumbent, Barton Schlumm, has a reputation as a do-nothing, “thumb-twiddling loafer”. Clark assigns Lois to cover a press conference held by Schlumm’s opposing party, which she writes off as a boring assignment---until the party spokesman announces that it has accepted Superman as a candidate for the Senate seat.  Lois pooh-poohs it as a publicity stunt, and then chokes on it when the Man of Steel swoops in and makes a rousing speech for his candidacy.

If Lois had been a veteran reader of DC mags, she would have immediately suspected that there was probably a sneaky-albeit-noble reason behind Superman running for office.  But since she wasn’t, the pretty newshen is indignant at the Man of Steel using his super-hero image to win the senator’s seat.  And she becomes outraged when, over the next few days, he blatantly uses every super-feat as a campaign opportunity.  In fact, she’s so put out that she decides to toss her hat into the ring, as well.

Lois campaigns hard, but when you’re running against the most popular hero in the world, the result is pretty much what you’d guess.  In the primary election for the party nomination, Lois gets only one vote.  The rest go to Superman.  So overwhelming is the Action Ace’s victory that even his eventual opponent, Senator Schlumm, withdraws from the race.

Just as Lois’ dreams of “Miss Lane Goes to Washington” go poof, who should turn up but that mischievous fifth-dimensional imp, Mr. Mxyzptlk.  Seeing it as a great way to get Supie’s goat, Mr. M offers to be Lois’ campaign manager.  She agrees, and Mxy goes to work, using his magic to increase Lois’ favour with the public.  As the election draws near, she’s a strong write-in candidate.  In fact, she’s running dead even with Superman in the polls.

Don’t bother wondering who wins, though.  On the day of the election, the unthinkable happens.  (Unthinkable, mainly because it would have been discovered long before this in real-world politics.)  Both Superman and Lois are disqualified from running by Constitutional requirements.  The Man of Steel is out because of residency issues.  (The cited technicality is shaky and wouldn’t hold up, but, hey, go with it; you didn’t really think Superman was going to be a senator.)  And Lois is under the age of thirty, the minimum age required for U.S. senators.

That’s just fine with the Man of Steel.  His candidacy was only a ploy to keep Mxyzptlk preöccupied until he could figure out a way to send the imp back to the fifth dimension.  As it turns out, Lois takes care of that by tricking him into saying “Kltpzyxm” from a coded message.

Since both candidates in the race are ineligible to win, the state governor declares the election invalid.  In the meantime, he will appoint someone to fill the vacant seat interim, until a special election can be held.  The governor’s choice---Perry White, well rested and back from his vacation!

Perry has some appointing to do of his own.  At the office farewell party, he introduces Lois, Jimmy, Clark, and the rest of the staff to Van Benson, the new acting editor of the Daily Planet.  Again, Lois is a little peeved that she doesn’t get the job, but she can’t argue with Benson’s credentials---he’s the former head of a national news service and a Pulitzer Prize winner, to boot.  The tale ends with her wondering how her life will change with Benson running things.

Now, DC fans of the day could be forgiven for presuming that Benson’s time with the Planet wouldn’t last beyond the next issue of Lois Lane, and then he’d be gone as quickly as he came.  The editor of the Superman family of magazines, Mort Weisinger, typically ensured that the details of the Superman mythos were consistent.  If something was established in the Man of Steel’s life within the pages of his own comic, then it was the same in Action Comics or World’s Finest Comics.

But Lois Lane had always been something of a bastard child.  It was a second-tier title in Weisinger’s stable, and outside of sharing the some of the same cast with the headliners, very little that took place in Lois’s magazine carried over into the others.  Even Jimmy Olsen, another second-stringer, was more tied into the Superman mainstream, thanks to Jimmy’s involvement with the Legion of Super-Heroes and Robin, the Boy Wonder.  Lois, however, seemed to exist in a private world inside her own title.

But Mort must have been paying particular attention to Lois Lane # 62.

The Lois Lane title did not publish in December, so the next issue---# 63 (Feb., 1966)---went on sale in the first week of January, 1966.  Though not advertised on the cover this time, the story within, “The Satanic Schemes of S.K.U.L.”, was also a “3-part novel”, and it took up right where the previous issue left off.

At newly appointed Senator White’s farewell party, Van Benson makes the rounds, glad-handing the Planet employees.  On the surface, he appears to be quite a bit different than Perry.  Benson is urbane, personable, and handsome (although he apparently ducked into the men’s room in between issues to rub a little Grecian Formula into his hair).  Where Perry has a bit of a middle-age spread, the youthful Benson is fit and trim, and he prefers a pipe to White’s smelly stogies.  Lois, in particular, is taken with him. 

“It might be fun,” she thinks, “taking orders from a dream-boat like that!”

After Superman arrives and flies Perry to Washington, Benson shows that he has one trait very much in common with his predecessor.  The “dream-boat” turns into Simon Legree’s meaner brother.  He shuts down the party and starts cracking the whip while the window curtains are still flapping from Superman’s slipstream.

Throughout the day, Benson finds fault with virtually everything that crosses his desk, raising standards and beating excellence over his reporters' heads.  Lois and Jimmy Olsen begin to miss their old slave-driver, Perry White.  Some of the other staffers are probably sticking pins in their Van Benson voodoo dolls.

Quitting time finally arrives, and because this was back in the “good old days” of American business, when the boss could hit on a female employee without fear of being slapped with a sexual harassment suit, Benson asks Lois Lane out to dinner.  And Lois, who despite claiming to be in love with Superman, always seemed to tilt her cap toward any good-looking guy who came her way, says “Sure!”

Out on the town, we learn a little more about Van Benson.  He squires Lois to the Kitten Club, Earth-One’s version of the Playboy Club, and she discovers that Van is on a smooch-and-tickle basis with every waitress and hat-check girl in the place.

Nevertheless, her jealousy fades away when Benson turns on the charm.  Despite her being smitten, though, Lois’s reporter instincts aren’t completely shut down.  A chance occurrence triggers a passing suspicion in her mind that Van Benson may not be what he seems to be.

Hold that thought for a moment.

This is where the intricacies of publishing several monthly books, under different writers, sometimes make a timeline a tricky thing.  Mort Weisinger knew that introducing Van Benson as the new editor of the Daily Planet was too significant a change to not be addressed in his other Superman titles.  That, and he probably didn’t want to deal with a bunch of letters from pesky fans wanting to know why Perry White was still editing the paper in this month’s issue of Superman.

That meant that Benson would have to show up in his other titles.  The problem was later developments, near the end of the story in Lois Lane # 63, would put too much of a twist on Benson’s rôle as the Planet editor.  For the readers caught up in such things, though, there was a way to square it.

Following Lois’ night out at the Kitten Club, several days, perhaps as much as a week, elapse before the big climax at the end of the issue.  Presumably, it is during this time that the other stories in which Van Benson appeared took place.  Mort probably didn’t plan it that way, but it’s the only way it fits.

Benson’s first appearance outside of Lois Lane occurred in Jimmy Olsen # 91 (Mar., 1966), on sale the second week of January, 1966.  In “The Dragon Delinquent”, Jimmy infiltrates a teen-age biker gang.  In the opening pages,  Benson has even less tolerance for the cub reporter’s antics than Perry White did and refuses to let him handle anything more significant than covering azalea festivals and society weddings.  Jimmy determines to cover the biker-gang story on his own time, and when he fakes an injury to his hand so he can get away from the office, Benson replies, “Bah!  You’re useless around here anyway, Olsen!  Take a week’s sick leave.  You won’t be missed!”

Naturally, he winds up eating those words, after Jimmy breaks up the biker gang and shuts down a foreign spy ring as a bonus.

In the last week of January, 1966, the pipe-smoking editor crossed over to Action Comics # 335 (Mar., 1966) for a two-panel cameo in which he rounds up Clark Kent and Lois and Jimmy at the request of Senator White, so they can answer a call from the President of the United States.

It wasn’t much, just those two appearances, but it was enough make Van Benson a legitimate, if minor, character in the Superman universe, rather than just being confined to the vacuum of the Lois Lane title.

Back to Lois Lane # 63 . . . .

As her history of trying to ferret out Superman’s secret identity had proven, Lois Lane never let affection stand in the way of her nosiness.  Despite her infatuation with her new boss, Lois’ flicker of suspicion takes flame.  The next day at work, she snoops around Benson’s office and finds evidence that the newsman is somehow connected to a criminal organisation calling itself S.K.U.L.

Even though Benson continues to be a really swell guy to her and seems to be on the ball as an editor, Lois keeps digging.  While Benson is attending a meeting of the Editors’ Association, she breaks into his upscale apartment.  There, she finds and plays a hidden video recording revealing a meeting of the S.K.U.L. inner circle.  She discovers the outfit’s headquarters is on a secret floor above the Kitten Club when the recording shows Benson donning a hooded robe and attending the meeting.

And she learns what S.K.U.L. stands for---the Superman Killers’ Underground League.  Its goal is to assassinate Superman and all of his closest friends.

Showing a rare moment of common sense, Lois decides to tell Superman what she has learnt and let him deal with it.  However, when she asks Clark Kent to get in touch with the Man of Steel for her, he tells her that Superman is away on a space mission.  (Yes, I know---why would Clark tell her that Superman is away when he is, secretly, Superman?  It’s actually a big clue to what’s going on, but it was so played down that many readers probably missed it.)

Now, Lois could have sought out Supergirl, or Batman, or told the police or the F.B.I. what was going on, but Lois, being Lois, decides to handle the problem herself.  With a clever stratagem, the plucky girl inserts herself into the next S.K.U. L. meeting, posing as one of its hooded members.  She becomes convinced that Van Benson is actually the head of the evil organisation.

Once safely away, Lois turns to Lana Lang for help.  She tells the whole story to her red-headed rival, including her suspicion that the acting editor of the Daily Planet moonlights as an arch criminal.  They decide to go public with the information, hoping that, somehow, somewhere, Superman will hear about it.

Before they can do so, however, Superman appears, and Lois blurts out to him everything she knows.  The Man of Steel angrily berates the gals, telling them how they nearly fouled up things up royally.  He does that just before revealing himself to be Van Benson, in disguise.

Dum de dum dum!

Surprise number two:  before Lois’ and Lana’s sphincters pucker so tight that they cut off the blood flow to their brains, Benson reveals that he is secretly working for the F.B.I., in an undercover effort to bring down the S.K.U.L. organisation.  He tells them that Lois’ snooping has put her in too deep, and the only way out is for her to help him destroy S.K.U.L.

The issue ends with Lois and Lana agreeing to help, but the readers are kept wondering if Van Benson is really a newsman or an F.B.I. agent---or a killer!

You see what I mean, now, about Benson’s appearances in Jimmy Olsen and Action Comics having to take place before the end of Lois Lane # 63.

After all of that build-up, though, the conclusion is disappointingly ænemic, coming in at a mere eight pages stuck in the back of Lois Lane # 64 (Apr., 1966), which showed up on the spinner racks in the second week of February, 1966.  “The Prisoner of S.K.U.L.” was clearly rushed, to get it out of the way of the two-part "Lexo and Lola" Imaginary Story (which was actually quite good, as far as those kinds of tales go).

Benson explains to Lois Lane and Lana Lang that two key pieces of information are needed before S.K.U.L. can be destroyed.  While the undercover newsman has posed as the chief lieutenant in the criminal cabal, he has yet to identify the hidden mastermind behind the organisation.  It’s also urgent that they learn the nature of “Weapon X”, the device with which it intends to accomplish its goal of murdering Superman.

When Lois asks why the Man of Steel himself isn’t handling the matter, Benson explains, “Because both Superman and the F.B.I. are using the S.K.U.L. threat as a pilot-program for developing techniques whereby F.B.I. men will be able to carry on without Superman’s aid in the event Superman is ever destroyed!”

The whole “Superman is away on a space mission” bit was a cover story designed to allay any S.K.U.L. fears of being detected by the Man of Steel and going to ground before Benson could learn the evil group’s secrets.

Benson reveals the time and place of the next S.K.U.L. meeting and instructs Lois to again attend as one of the members.  At the meeting, Benson, once more posing as the S.K.U.L. lieutenant, assigns Lois to assassinate Superman when he appears a couple of days later at a Metropolis Women’s Charity League function.  Afterward, Benson tells Lois when and where she’ll receive the mysterious Weapon X.  She’s to show up at the charity event and use the device on Superman.  And don't worry about it harming the Man of Steel, says Van.  He's got everything under control.

Weapon X is handed off to Lois without a hitch, and when Superman appears on stage at the charity function, the gal reporter zaps him with it.  To her horror, the weapon overcomes the Man of Steel and weakens him to the point that he’s easily defeated by concealed S.K.U.L. agents.  As the hooded thugs carry the unconscious hero away to be executed, the real mastermind of S.K.U.L. emerges and gloats over Superman’s impending death.

Van Benson appears, taking a place at the mastermind’s side, and a grief-stricken Lois concludes that the double-crossing editor had pretended to be a good guy in order to dupe her into setting Superman up for murder.

She’s still kicking herself from guilt when “Benson” reveals himself to be Superman in disguise and captures the villain.  The Man of Steel explains that he had been keeping an eye on Lois all along, and once she had possession of Weapon X, he had used his heat vision to disable it.  He had only pretended to be overcome by it when Lois used it on him.

It was all part of Benson’s plan to smoke out S.K.U.L.’s big boss.

Later, back in Benson’s office, he and Lois are tying up some loose ends when Perry White walks through the door.  Congress has just recessed, the grizzled newsman explains, so, he’s here to take back his old job.  Just like that, ace pipe-smoker Van Benson's tenure as editor of the Daily Planet was over.

“I hope he’ll return here, someday,” wishes Lois.  But he never did.  There hasn’t been so much as a mention of his name in any DC story in the forty-five years since.

But I understand that if you drop by the Metropolis Kitten Club, you’ll find a distinguished-looking old man sitting at a corner table.  He’ll be puffing on his pipe, pinching cigarette girls on the derrière, and regaling the patrons with stories about a screwball dame who used to work for him and how she had this whacky idea that Clark Kent was Superman.

I’ve always like sidekicks. Maybe it was because of a lack of self-confidence. I had a hard time imagining myself as Batman. But I could easily imagine I was Robin riding alongside the Caped Crusader. Maybe it was because of my affinity for the underdog. Sidekicks seemed to be mocked more often than not and I liked to see them prove themselves to their mentors, their foes and the fans. Whatever the reason, I like the scrappy sidekick, the young pal, the comic foil and so on.

Here is my list of the best sidekicks in comics. Your list is probably different. Heck, my list would probably be different if I did this again in a couple of months (so don’t fault me if the ranking doesn’t entirely match my earlier “best” lists).

1. Robin: Robin is the gold standard of comic book sidekicks. He was the first one on the stands, making his debut in April 1940. He was the light-hearted contrast with Batman. He demonstrated Batman’s humanity as we witnessed the Caped Crusader’s concern for the orphaned acrobat. Plus, Robin is well-regarded as both a sidekick and a legacy- the mantle having been passed from Dick Grayson to Jason Todd to Tim Drake to Stephanie Brown to Damian Wayne to, someday in the future, Carrie Kelley.

2. Bucky: I was not always a Bucky fan. I used to think of him as the generic sidekick and I had no interest in Marvel bringing back Bucky. And then Ed Brubaker brought Bucky back and completely changed my mind. He even changed my view of the 1940s incarnation of the character, pointing out that Bucky was a true soldier who used a gun on almost every comic book cover and showing that Bucky bravely fought beside Captain America despite having no powers of his own.

3. Jimmy Olsen: These first three choices are relatively easy- and relatively free of controversy. Jimmy Olsen was Superman’s pal. He was Clark Kent’s friend. He was often Lois Lane’s partner in mischief. He was eventually the star of his own adventures. Jimmy Olsen is an essential part of the Superman mythos. Yet his classic status has sometimes hurt Jimmy as it has prevented the character from growing and changing with the times.

4. Kid Flash: Kid Flash is one of the few sidekicks who outshone his mentor. When the debate eventually became “Who is the better Flash?” it was easy for me to answer “Wally.” I liked Wally better even when he was the sidekick. He had a great costume, inverting the colors of his mentor. He had the cool open-scalp cowl that let his hair flow in the wind (several decades before Jim Lee borrowed the same look for Cyclops). Kid Flash was exciting, racing off on adventures with his uncle. But I also liked that, in the beginning, he had a normal Midwest family home to go back to.

5. Rocket: The title of the comic book may have been Icon, but Rocket was the real star of the series. Like Kid Flash, Rocket outshone her mentor and readers were more interested in her life and perspective. She was Icon’s teacher, explaining the realities of modern life on Earth to the long-lived alien. And she was the one who experienced the ups and downs of life- especially with her much publicized unplanned pregnancy and later status as a single mother.

6. Po-Po: A key quality for any sidekick is comic relief. Robin provided the light-hearted banter and quips that kept Batman from being too serious. Po Po was the sarcastic monkey who accompanied Boon on his adventures in CrossGen’s Way of the Rat. Po Po was convinced of his own superiority and often rightly so. He berated Boon for his stupidity. He mocked their many foes- yet, by doing so, he also alerted the reader to the serious threats. If Po Po was scared, we should be too. Po Po also mocked fans- much to their delight- by berating them in the letters page.

7. Jubilee: Jubilee is a rare addition to the company of sidekicks in that she came from a team book. At a time when the X-Men were fractured (and living in Australia), Jubilee slipped through the cracks and into the arms of the team. She was originally a stowaway but after Wolverine was crucified by the Reavers Jubilee became his rescuer. She nursed him back to health and became his new companion. Jubilee was a different sort of sidekick, prone to backtalk more than banter. Yet she served the same purpose as many of the great sidekicks before her- revealing a caring, human side in her mentor.

8. Altar Boy: You might say that Robin is such a cool character, he shows up on this list at least three times. Jubilee was reputedly based on the Carrie Kelley version; Altar Boy is clearly based on the original. Brian Kinney moved to Astro City with the hopes of becoming a hero. After he broke up an armed robbery as a busboy, he got his chance as Confessor took him under his wing. Brian eventually discovered the Confessor’s secret- he was a vampire- though it’s likely the Confessor wanted him to know as a potential confidant. The Confessor sacrificed his un-life to save the earth and, after years of further training, Brian took up the mantle of his mentor.

9. Rick Jones/Snapper Carr: They’re two of the most divisive characters in comics. Their fans would argue that they aren’t technically sidekicks- they’re partners and honorary members of a team. Their critics would also argue that they aren’t technically sidekicks- they’re mascots and nuisances. Rick Jones hung out with the Hulk, Captain America and Captain Marvel. Snapper Carr befriended the Justice League. Peter David and Tom Peyer tried to rehabilitate their reputations in the ‘90s in Captain Marvel and Hourman but they’ll always be divisive figures.

10. Woozy Winks: Golden Age comics were full to the brim with amusing sidekicks but the best of the bunch was Plastic Man’s constant companion, Woozy Winks. While Plastic Man provided the big laughs, Woozy provided a slightly put upon perspective. He was along for the ride but he didn’t have to like it. He was easily startled and confounded in the early adventures. Later on, he was more likely to let out a knowing sigh or to raise an arched eyebrow.

11. Kitten: Golden Age comics were also full of kid companions. It seems like every superhero needed a miniature version of themself running along behind them. But Kitten was different. She was a girl. That may not sound like much today but it was groundbreaking at the time. Kitten was Catman’s partner in Holyoke comics. At first, she was a squeaky clean kid. By 1944, Kitten had developed some curves. She prefigured Annette Funicello, growing from Little Orphan Annie to Katy Keene before the reader’s eyes.

12. The Newsboy Legion/The Little Wise
Guys: What’s better than a kid sidekick? How about a whole gang of them? Joe Simon and Jack Kirby developed the kid gang formula and perfected it with the Newsboy Legion. The team, filled with stock characters similar to Our Gang (aka the Little Rascals), accompanied the Guardian on many adventures. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that the Guardian accompanied them. Over at Lev Gleason, the Golden Age Daredevil picked up a crew of kids known as the Little Wise Guys. They kept him company for a while before eventually displacing him from his own title.

13. Tawky Tawny: What’s better than a kid sidekick? How about a talking tiger? Captain Marvel was already a kid in a grown up’s body so it didn’t make sense to have another kid trailing along behind him. That’s probably why Captain Marvel Jr. was spun off as a solo star. But the gravitational pull of the sidekick was too great and Captain Marvel was eventually given an associate: a talking tiger who walked upright and wore bowties. You don’t get much better than that.

14. Omni-Boy: You won’t find a lot of modern sidekicks as they’ve fallen out of favor. Yet they still show up from time and time and can be done well. Omni-Boy is the alien half-brother of Invincible. He fills one of the classic roles of the sidekick by illuminating the qualities of the hero through their differences. Omni-Boy comes from a planet with a higher birth rate and shorter life span so he has a more cavalier view of life than Invincible. Their partnership forces Invincible to become the teacher and the defender of life.

15. Dusty the Boy Detective/ Roy the Superboy: You may not have heard of them as they’ve faded into history but back in the ‘40s, they were two of the best in the business. They were the younger partners of the Shield and the Wizard at MLJ Comics. They had unique costumes rather than the copycat uniforms of most sidekicks. They also teamed up together without their adult mentors- the kind of star turn usually reserved for top sidekicks like Robin, Bucky and Jimmy Olsen.

I hope you enjoyed my little list of the best sidekicks. Come back in a week when I run down the best sidekicks outside of comics.

Kanjar Ro!  The Demons Three!  Despero!  Starro the Conqueror!  These were only some of the awesome threats to mankind that the Justice League of America vanquished during its illustrious Silver-Age career.  Terrible forces of evil so powerful that it required the mighty champions to band together to defeat them.

But, let’s face it.  Even fabled Silver-Age JLA scribe Gardner Fox had his off months.  After all, it’s difficult to come up with a world-shattering menace sufficient to challenge a gaggle of super-heroes eight times a year, every year, for eight years.  So, every once in a while, one of Fox’s villains might miss the mark, be not quite up to the fearsome standard of a Felix Faust or a Doctor Destiny.  For these wanna-bes, the Justice League could have taken the day off and let the Jimmy Olsen Fan Club handle it.

After pouring over my run of JLA stories from 1960 to 1968, I found seven bad guys for whom, if there were Golden Turkey Awards for JLA villains, they’d each have one decorating their prison cells.  I’ve listed them in descending order of competence, starting with the “sort of lame” and going all the way down to “wouldn’t give the Inferior Five a hard time.”

 7.  The Lord of Time   (JLA # 10 [Mar., 1962], et al.)

For those of you with fond memories of the first JLA continued story, you might be surprised to find that the Lord of Time made the list.  After all, he’s a “name” Justice League villain.  But, like Zsa Zsa Gabor, it’s more of a case of being famous for being famous---or in the Time Lord’s case, being infamous.

He started out impressively enough, I’ll give him that.  As we learn in his debut, “The Fantastic Fingers of Felix Faust”, he’s a twentieth-century scientist who’s unlocked the key to travelling through time.  Instead of doing what most of us would do if we could time-travel---jump ahead a week or so, jot down all the winning horses at Hialeah, then make a fortune at the track---the scientist decides to conquer the world.

Such ambition, and the power to back it up, should have put the Lord of Time into the same class as the Time Trapper, or Kang the Conqueror.  Instead, when we meet him, he’s already on the run from the Justice League.

The L. of T.’s plan for world domination, you see, was to bring hordes of rampaging armies from both the past and the future, through “time-gates” situated on opposite sides of the world.  Then he could just sit back and let them do the dirty work.  Unfortunately, the JLA was on to his scheme from the get-go, and when the conquering hordes come bursting through the gates, the World’s Greatest Heroes are standing right there to shove them back in.

The villain hasn’t got time to worry about that, though.  The Batman and the Flash have already tracked down his secret laboratory and have dropped by to pay him an unannounced visit.  The Time Lord throws a couple of death traps their way, but Our Heroes barely have to breathe hard avoiding them.

The only reason the L. of T. wasn’t cuffed and stuffed by the end of the page was due to the inadvertent interference by another villain, Felix Faust, who had his own designs on the Justice League.  Faust’s magical machinations dematerialise the Flash and Batman, along with the rest of the Leaguers, before they can get their hands on the Time Lord.

The rest of the issue is devoted to Faust’s plot, in which he is ably sponsored by the Demons Three---Abnegazar, Rath, and Ghast---who are tired of having been stuck in mystical prisons for the last billion years.  For that, the Justice League has been placed in Faust’s thrall, and frankly, that’s a bigger problem for them right now, than the Lord of Time.

By page twenty-six, though, the JLA has thwarted Faust---thanks mainly to Aquaman mentally ordering a school of flying fish to smack him down.  (Hmmmm . . . maybe Felix Faust should be on this list, too.)  And the issue concludes with the League getting ready to go back after the Time Lord. 

What Our Heroes don’t know is that Abnegazar and Rath and Ghast are waiting in the wings, and they’re going to have to deal with the three evil fiends next issue.  That’s not good news for the Lord of Time, though.

JLA # 11 (May, 1962), “One Hour to Doomsday”, kicks off with the JLA descending on the Time Lord’s citadel, which was easy enough to do since the villain hadn’t bothered to find a new hide-out while the good guys were busy with Felix Faust.  Unfortunately, the Leaguers discover that their foe is no longer at home.  A gloating image of the L. of T. tells them that he is already travelling to the far future, where he’ll recruit a new army and collect a grunch of super-scientific weapons.  Then, the plan is, he’ll come back to the present day and finish conquering the world.  And the Justice League will be helpless to stop him. Heh heh heh.

While I’m thinking about it, this illustrates a fundamental problem with comic-book villains who can travel through time.  They never seem to use their time-spanning powers to their best advantage.   If the Lord of Time wanted to conquer the world, no muss, no fuss, why come back to 1962, where a Justice League is waiting to fight him?  Why not take his futuristic armies and weapons back to 1952---eight years before there was a Justice League at all?  Or 1930, or 1900?  Any era before there would be any super-heroes around to give him trouble.

The big downcheck for the Time Lord, though, is leaving that image behind to brag to the Justice League.  It inadvertently informs the heroes of precisely the year to which the villain has fled, from a detail caught by Superman's power of total recall.  One manufactured time-bubble later, the JLA is speeding through the time barrier after their quarry.  They nail him in the year A.D. 3786.  He’s caught completely flatfooted, and Wonder Woman has him snared in her golden lariat by the top of page 6.

So much for the big, bad Lord of Time.

No back-up plan, no clever escape, nothing.  The rest of the issue depicts the JLA’s fight against the Demons Three, and the L. of T. spends the whole time locked in the time bubble.  Once Abnegazar, Rath, and Ghast are disposed of, the Leaguers return to 1962 and take the Time Lord to the hoosegow.

The problem was, of course, a scripting one.  The big baddies in this two-parter were Felix Faust and the Demons Three.  The Lord of Time was sandwiched between their threats and he had to be gotten out of the way so the main villains could take centre stage.  Even so, it leaves the Time Lord looking pretty impotent.  Particularly because, unlike the rest of the lame-o’s on this list, his ability to bring things back and forth across time was formidable enough to legitimately challenge the Justice League.  And he should have; instead, the JLA takes him out almost as an after-thought.

Superman transported a whole bubble-full of JLA members to the future, yet only two of them needed to get out of the thing to nab him.

On this entire list of losers, the Lord of Time is the only one to make a second appearance in the JLA title during the Silver Age.  That came four years later, in issue # 50 (Dec., 1966).  He didn’t do any better that time.  Only half the League bothered to show up to deal with him, and they took him out in one panel!

6.  Headmaster Mind  (JLA # 28 [Jun., 1964])

The only other costumed villain to make the list (if you can call a mortarboard and graduation robe a costume), Headmaster Mind had a more modest goal than many of the JLA’s foes.  He only wanted to steal money and valuables.  He wasn’t looking to rule the world or destroy the Justice League.  In fact, he needed the heroes alive for his scheme to pay off.  But he did need them out of the way, too, so they couldn’t stop him.  He found a way to accomplish both.

Mind was yet another rogue scientist.  (Why is it that scientists who go bad are the only ones characterised as “rogue”?  You never hear of “rogue architects” or “rogue insurance salesmen”.)  He had made a discovery---when the members of the Justice League utilised their super-powers, their hearts, which were especially adapted to the physical strain of doing so, generated a unique rhythmic force which Mind termed cardial vibrations.

Secretly observing the super-heroes in action, Mind absorbs this cardial energy into specially designed batteries.  Then he was uses the stored force to create disasters whenever the JLAers exert their super-powers.  Whatever actions the heroes take, Headmaster Mind ensures they just make things worse.  The public perception is that the heroes’ powers were out of control.

In response, the United Nations, in an emergency session, issues an injunction prohibiting the members of the Justice League from using their super-powers.

This is what Headmaster Mind has been waiting for.  Putting together a small gang of super-villains---the Top and the Tattooed Man and the Matter Master---he launches a campaign of robberies and hijackings.  And as we all know, comic-book police are helpless to do anything about that.

It all works quite well.  Mind has taken pains to avoid any connexion with the Justice League’s troubles.  He sends his three henchmen out to commit the crimes, while he sits back, safely hidden in his home in Edgewater City---and JLAers, resigned to spending the rest of their days in their civilian identities, read the papers and gnash their teeth in frustration.

Sounds like a pretty good plan, right?  So, why’s he on the list? 

Oh, just one little thing . . . .

He forgot that there were two members of the Justice League who did not possess super-powers---the Batman and the Green Arrow.  Well, he didn’t actually forget; rather, he dismissed them as useless.  

Trust the Masked Manhunter to come up with a plan.  The next time the Top and the Matter Master and the Tattooed Man go on a crime foray, the other Justice Leaguers will keep them busy, catch them if they can, without using their super-powers.  Meanwhile, he and Green Arrow will do the necessary detective work to track down the mysterious mastermind back of the whole thing.

Their sleuthing takes them right to a certain address in Edgewater City, and one blunt-tipped arrow and judo throw later, “The Case of the Forbidden Super-Powers” is closed.

I’m sorry, but you just aren’t much of a threat to the Justice League if its two weakest heroes can take you out before you even lift a finger.  At least the Top and the Matter Master and the Tattooed Man made a fight of it.

5.  Pete Ricketts  (JLA # 8 [Dec., 1961-Jan., 1962])

They may have been light in the strategic-planning department, but at least the Lord of Time and Headmaster Mind had enough brains to invent their own weapons.  Penny-ante crook Pete Ricketts couldn’t have invented a hat rack.  The gizmo which gave him the notion of taking on the Justice League of America dropped out of the sky---literally.

At the start of “For Sale---the Justice League”, Pete’s minding his own business---strong-arm robbery---when a couple of police officers spot him and chase him into a alley.  Running isn’t Pete’s strong suit and he trips, just in time to see what looks like a peculiar flashlight fall from above and clatter to the pavement.  The “flashlight” emits an orange beam which happens to bathe the approaching cops.

Instinctively, Ricketts yells for them to stop---and to his amazement, they do.  In fact, they freeze in mid-stance.

Cunningly, Pete figures out the weird device has something to do with it.  He picks it up, keeping the orange light trained on the officers, and tells them to scram.  The lawmen turn tail and run off.

Convinced he’s on to something, the crook walks a few blocks down and flashes the orange light on a passer-by.  Pete orders his victim to turn over his wallet and his wristwatch.  The man does so without hesitation.

The source of Pete Ricketts’ good fortune was scientist Caleb West, whose laboratory occupied a upper storey of one of the buildings which flanked the alley into which Pete had run.  West had developed a device which he called the cyberniray.  West intended the cyberniray to be an educational aid, by increasing a subject’s ability to learn and remember information.

While West was making the final adjustments to his invention, an accident hurled it out the window, to land at Pete Ricketts’ feet.  Dazed in the accident, West was able to crawl to the window and peer down, just in time to see Ricketts use the cyberniray on the police officers.  He shouted at the fleeing Ricketts to stop, but, yeah, like there was any chance of that.

The next day, West reads a newspaper account of Pete’s escape from the policemen by shining a queer orange light on them, and he realises that the cyberniray must somehow compel a person to do whatever he is told.  Realising the danger he has inadvertently created, West puts it all down in a letter to the Justice League of America and mails it to its Washington, D.C. post office box.

All Pete Ricketts knows is that it’s his lucky day.

After Pete pulls a few more hold-ups with the gadget, it finally dawns on him that there must be a way to use the cyberniray to pay off with big bucks, but damned if he can figure out how.

Meanwhile, over in the world of organised crime, the Mob is having troubles of its own.  The Justice League is putting their rackets out of business and their illicit profits are drying up.  The Syndicate’s ten top chieftains decide to put up a hundred thousand dollars apiece---a cool million---and offer it to anyone who can come up with a way to put the JLA on ice.

A few days later, when Ricketts gets word of this through the underworld grapevine, he figures that his orange flashlight is just the ticket to get that million dollars. 

Now, anyone who’s ever seen a season of The Sopranos knows what a bad idea it is to get involved with the Mob.  You or I, if we were of a less honest bent, could undoubtedly think of a dozen different---and safer---ways to make a million dollars with the cyberniray.  But like so many mouth-breathers, Pete thinks he’s smarter than he really is.

Ricketts waylays the Green Lantern at a charity event, then forces him to activate his JLA emergency signal, luring the rest of the League into falling under the power of the cyberniray.  Well, all of them except for Superman and Batman, whom Gardner Fox wrote out of this story by having them away on a mission in “Dimension X”.

Ricketts turns the six entranced super-heroes over to the Syndicate chiefs and collects his million-dollar payoff.  Now he does the smart thing, right?  He changes his identity and moves to a poor, obscure foreign country and lives like a king on his million.  Oh, no, not our boy Pete.

Instead, he decides to auction off the JLA members to the gangbosses for even more money.  When the winners start bragging over which one of them made the best deal, they decide to settle it in a contest.  To settle the issue, the enthralled heroes are set against each other in competition. Ricketts orders the Flash and the Green Lantern to both attempt to steal the Napoleonic Tiara, to see which one brings it in. Similarly, Aquaman and the Green Arrow are dispatched to rob the gambling ship, Deuces Wild; and J’onn J’onzz and Wonder Woman are sent after a million-dollar cache of radium.       

After a quick scene showing honorary JLA member Snapper Carr at the secret sanctuary, reading Caleb West’s letter, the action shifts to the three JLA pairs undertaking their larcenous missions.  In a trio of vignettes, we see each of the criminally compelled Justice League duos do battle with each other over their intended booty.  All three contests result in a draw.  Not that it matters, because each time, the prize intended for stealing is mysteriously taken out of their hands.

The Justice Leaguers return to the Syndicate bosses to report their failures. Clearly, they’re better crook-catchers than crooks.  Disgusted, the gangsters fall back on “Plan B”---killing the super-heroes in pre-arranged death traps. Still under Ricketts’ control, the Leaguers compliantly submit to the murder devices, a separate trap for each member. Helplessly, they await the end as the traps are activated.

Seconds away from death, each JLAer suddenly finds himself inexplicably free of Ricketts’ control. Able to think for themselves again, the Justice League members resort to their legendary teamwork. One hero frees another from his doom-trap, who then goes on to free the next, until all are safe. It doesn’t take much longer for the super-heroes to corral the gang-chiefs.

Desperately, Ricketts digs into his pocket for the cyberniray device---and finds that he no longer has it! And that’s when the answer to the League’s rescue becomes known. Snapper Carr!

It was the Snapster who secretly absconded with the loot from each of the three robberies attempted by the JLA teams. By using the captured anti-gravity discs of Doctor Destiny, their foe from JLA # 5, “When Gravity Went Wild”, Snapper had been able to zoom to each location and prevent the heroes from committing their crimes by taking the valuables first.

And how did Snapper know where each of the crimes was taking place? From emergency signals transmitted by the JLAers themselves! As a precaution, Ricketts had ordered the Leaguers not to use their own signalers, but he had neglected to command them not to activate each other’s.

Still, the credit for the game-save goes to Snapper.  Just how boneheaded does a crook have to be to have his master plot foiled by a finger-popping, English-mangling teenager?  

Speaking of planning, it would have been obvious to anyone with more than a grammar-school education that Pete’s scheme was ‘way overcomplicated.  Why bother to sell off the enslaved JLA for a simple million dollars when he could order them to do whatever he wished?  J’onn J’onzz or Green Lantern alone could have put a small fortune in Ricketts’ pocket.  Pete was a walking testimonial for that old cautionary adage---K.I.S.S. 

“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”  The accent, of course, on stupid.

In conceiving menaces to threaten the JLA, Gardner Fox created a whole sub-set of villains who were nothing more than cheap hoodlums who lucked into a powerful gimmick.  And, believe it or not, Pete Ricketts was the least incompetent of the lot.

We’ll take a look at who was worse next time out, when the countdown continues.                                     

Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

We’re entering the home stretch on the holiday season, and I’ve yet to scratch the surface on potential gifts for the beloved geeks among us. Here are some more:

* Archie Comics has been aggressively pushing the envelope the last few years, and one of the biggest headlines was when it posited two futures for Riverdale’s favorite redhead, one in which he marries Betty and another in which he marries Veronica (collected last year in the Archie Marries … hardcover and The Archie Wedding: Will You Marry Me? trade paperback). Those twin stories have continued in the new Life with Archie magazine, which are also being collected, and the first TPB of those tales has hit the bookstores.

Like the magazine, Archie: The Married Life Vol. 1 ($19.99) alternates between “Earth-Veronica” and “Earth-Betty”. I find this a little disorienting on first read, because there are enough similarities in both universes as to cause occasional confusion as to which alternate future you’re reading about. (In both, for example, Veronica’s father is up to something nefarious, and in both Midge Klump dumps the hot-tempered Moose Mason and marries Jughead.) The simple solution there, of course, is to simply read the stories from each “Earth” successively, not alternately. Problem solved.

And it’s worth the effort, because this is really fun stuff. OK, “fun” as in: Wow, this is grim. It’s the same old Archie, blundering through one problem after another, only now those problems are serious grown-up stuff like money problems, marital friction, death and unemployment. If that sounds terrible, it’s not -- I discovered that my love for the Riverdale gang is just as strong as it was in my teens, and I’m eager to see how the qualities that made me love them then (loyalty, courage, clumsiness, etc.) will help them beat the big, bad world outside the safe confines of Riverdale High.  Because you know they’ll win: It’s Archie!

It’s also fun to see the characters finally grow. Jughead falls in love, Mr. Weatherbee courts Miss Grundy, Moose takes anger-management classes, Dilton becomes … well, we don’t know about Dilton yet, but it promises to be good. There are hints that in both universes that Dilton the grown-up scientist has become aware that the universe is actually a multiverse, with different dimensions containing every Archie story ever written, no matter how contradictory, from spy spoofs (Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.) to superhero spoofs (Pureheart the Powerful). Now Prof. Doiley is lurking in the background, orchestrating events. But to what end?

Perhaps we’ll find out in Vol. 2. In the meantime, Archie: The Married Life Vol. 1 is an excellent read, abetted by top-flight superhero creators like Norm Breyfogle, Paul Kupperberg and Michael Uslan.

And speaking of things most of us grew up with, DC Comics has just released the Spy vs. Spy Omnibus ($49.99), containing every single cartoon of that name by creator Antonio Prohias for MAD magazine.

And as much as this book functions as a “Spy vs. Spy” collection, it’s also a celebration of Prohias, who fled Cuba after Fidel Castro took a strong dislike to his editorial cartoons. Finding safe haven among “the usual gang of idiots” in New York, Prohias turned his political experiences into one of the most beloved and long-running gags at MAD. So, located amid the shenanigans of the white-coated Spy and the black-coated Spy (and occasionally the female gray-coated Spy) are behind-the scenes artwork, Prohias family photos and essays on the great man by his friends and contemporaries, like Art Spiegelman and Sergio Aragones.

It’s a comprehensive and beautiful package, well worth the $50 (“cheap!”).

Another comprehensive package is going to take a bit longer to collect: the complete “Peanuts” library from Fantagraphics. Dedicated to collecting Charles M. Schulz’s beloved comic strip chronologically, Fantagraphics is releasing two books a year, with the project slated to finish in the next decade or so.

While the entire collection isn’t practical as a holiday gift, a couple of those books might be. Especially since pairs are released in boxed sets – after their release as “singles” – for $49.99. Currently the collection has progressed to the early 1980s, where the strip is at its peak, with beloved late-comers like Woodstock and Peppermint Patty already aboard, replacing some of the earlier, mostly forgotten characters like Violet and Shermie.

There’s nothing that says “holidays” like the Peanuts gang. Didn’t all of us watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving a thousand times?

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.

We’re getting close to the end.  Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men.  I wrote about some of the problems I had with his tenure.  But I wrote even more about the things he did right.  So here’s the third and final installment, dealing with the last three trades.  And feel free to take a look at Part I and Part II when you're done.

Assault on Weapon Plus

(Issues 139-145: Murder at the Mansion, Assault on Weapon Plus)

Grant Morrison’s greatest weakness is plotting.  Sorry, Morrison fans- it’s true.  He has a ton of ideas.  He’s good with characters and even dialogue.  But he is not the best at crafting a tight story or keeping track of a big epic.  During his JLA run, he would occasionally lose track of characters during a big story- forgetting that he sent Martian Manhunter off into space, for example.  Morrison managed to keep things together for most of his X-Men run, but his weakness is exposed in Murder at the Mansion.

Morrison tried to write a play-fair murder mystery.  Emma Frost was murdered and there are more suspects than answers.  Morrison even brings in Bishop and Sage from X-Treme X-Men as investigators.  Character-wise, it’s still a good story.  We see grief and frustration on the part of several students.  We get a greater glimpse into the growing rift between Scott and Jean.  Bishop’s interrogations enlighten us about many of the X-Men.  Morrison also rightly shifts suspicion from one character to another, one of the key hooks of any murder mystery.  

Unfortunately, Morrison never truly resolves the story.  He provides an answer and then undercuts it.  Perhaps, he was trying to create a cliffhanger.  Perhaps, he wanted to upend the reader’s expectations one more time.  But it doesn’t work.  The ambiguity isn’t intriguing; it’s annoying.  Morrison’s plot promised an answer he never delivered. 

I also had a problem with the second story, Assault on Weapon Plus.  However, this time, the problem may be more about me than it is about Grant Morrison.  I previously mentioned that Fantomex was part of an “Everything You Know Is Wrong” story- a comic book trope in which the previous understanding of a character or situation is completely overturned.  This can be done brilliantly and it can be done terribly.  For me, Morrison’s new take on Weapon Plus was unnecessary.  We already knew a lot about the Weapon X program and its ties to government agencies like Department H and K.  We had already met multiple Weapon X agents, like Deadpool and Kane.  I didn’t see what was gained by changing Weapon X to Weapon 10.  Instead, I could only see what was lost.

Looking back, I see more possibilities than I did at the time.  By changing Weapon X to Weapon Plus, Morrison was able to move Wolverine’s history out of the ghetto of Alpha Flight.  As much as I like Alpha Flight (I am a Canadian after all), they aren’t exactly major players in the Marvel Universe anymore.  Instead, Wolverine now has a stronger connection to pivotal figures like Captain America and new ties to villains such as Nuke.  Those old ties haven’t been erased either. 

Planet X

(Issues 146-150)

Back in the first installment, I mentioned a recent debate about Grant Morrison’s X-Men on the website Comic Book Resources.  This is the story that prompted that debate.  In this tale, Magneto reveals that he has been posing as Xorn this whole time.  He has been manipulating events within the mansion, working behind the scenes to turn things against Xavier.  Now, he takes charge of the outsiders- some of whom had previously fought at the side of Quentin Quire- and leads a new revolution.  He conquers New York and dares the X-Men to challenge him.  He also magnifies his magnetic powers with use of the mutant drug, Kick. 

The depiction of Magneto was the heart of that debate.  Magneto has had a lot of incarnations over the years.  He’s been a terrorist and a revolutionary.  He’s been tragic and noble.  He’s been a teacher and a dictator.  But he had never before been a drug-addled old man and apparently, a lot of fans, didn’t like it.  Personally, I found it fascinating.  Magneto has rejected so-called human morality before.  Why wouldn’t he use drugs?  He’s ambitious enough to want any power he can get and conceited enough to think he could master the drug.  Why wouldn’t he take advantage of a young woman?  Like Deathstroke and Terra, the relationship between Magneto and Esme is supposed to be creepy.  He’s a villain after all.  He’s not above manipulating a young girl to his own ends.

My objections concern a different character, although I admit they’re based on emotion as much as any objections to the depiction of Magneto.  I think it was a mistake to get rid of Xorn.  I know that there’s a long history of heroes and villains posing as other characters: Martian Manhunter was Bloodwynd; Booster Gold was Supernova; even in the X-Men, Cyclops was Erik the Red.  But Xorn was an awesome new character.  He was the best addition to the X-Men in a decade.  And I miss him.  I loved the idea of a mutant with a brain for a sun.  I loved the wide variety of things he could do, from gravity manipulation to healing.  I loved his calm and curious demeanor.  I think the X-Men are a more interesting team with him in it.  So I was disappointed to find out that it was all a sham.

Morrison knew that a lot of fans would share that reaction.  As a writer, you want people to be invested in your stories and you delight in eliciting an emotional reaction that strong.  He even gave voice to those emotions by having Ernst repeatedly mention that she missed Xorn.  But the clever ploy backfired.  While I can admire the craft of the story, I would have preferred to have a great new character kept in play. 

Here Comes Tomorrow

(Issues 151-154)

I honestly don’t have much to say about Here Comes Tomorrow.  It’s an alternate future story and we’ve seen a lot of them.  Some of them have been great, including Morrison’s Rock of Ages story in JLA.  Some of them have been lousy.  This one was somewhere in the middle.  It had a lot of action.  It had some good moments, like the new Phoenix.  But altogether, it was kind of mediocre. 

I think that part of the problem is that we were given an unfamiliar character as a protagonist.  It’s hard to get invested in his story when we don’t know who he is.  Another part of the problem is that the story didn’t have a direct connection to the present.  We didn’t have one of our characters trying to get back from the future, like Rock of Ages.  We didn’t have a future character trying to change things in our own time, like the classic X-Men story, Days of Future Past, which inspired this one.  It didn’t feel as if the outcome of the story mattered either way.  It was an interesting exercise.  And it answered a few questions.  But it wasn’t a compelling story.   

And that’s the end. 

I recently read the Stan Lee- Steve Ditko Spider-Man for the first time. It was an interesting exercise, to say the least. This is one of the revered hallmarks of comic books, the foundation of Marvel and the beginning of modern storytelling. At times, I caught glimpses of the greatness everyone else had seen at the time. I appreciated the way in which Peter Parker’s personal life and Spider-Man’s exploits intersected with each other. But, for the most part, I was underwhelmed. For every classic villain like Kraven the Hunter or the Green Goblin, there was a generic bad-guy like the Crime-Master or the Molten Man. Character motivation tended to be paper-thin.
However, my biggest problem was with Peter Parker himself.

Allow me to explain.

Years ago, I was assigned the task of mentoring a young man who was serving as a chaplain to several local high schools. I approved of his mandate, advocated on his behalf with local churches and looked in on his finances. Before our official relationship, I considered him a friend. I was happy to be the person he would turn to for encouragement and advice. But my estimation of him dwindled the more I became involved in his life.

This young man experienced a run of misfortune. At first, I was inclined to agree with him that he was the victim of bad luck. Yet as unfortunate events piled up, I had second thoughts about the original diagnosis. A lot of this misfortune was easily preventable. For example, he ran out of gas and had to pay for a tow truck to bring him back to town. Then he couldn’t afford groceries because he had spent his money on a tow truck. When someone gave him food, half of the groceries spoiled because he forgot to put them away.

We’ve all been in similar situations. When I was in college, I needed a tow truck after my car battery died. So I don’t want to sound unsympathetic. We’re forgetful people sometimes and accidents happen. But when the same kind of misfortune keeps happening to the same person, you begin to wonder if it’s not bad luck. Maybe, that person makes his own bad luck through a lack of planning or some other fault. In this case, I tried to be as encouraging as I could, to offer advice about planning ahead (and having insurance that offers free towing). But I was relieved when my term was over.

That’s kind of the way I felt about the infamous Parker luck. Sure, bad things happen to Peter Parker beyond his control. He’s late for dinner with Aunt May because a super-villain is tearing up midtown. He has to borrow a Spider-Man suit from a costume shop because his regular duds were ripped in a battle. However, a lot of the bad things that happen to Peter Parker are well within his control, especially in social situations.

Peter repeatedly complains about his money problems but he also admits that J. Jonah Jameson only pays him half of what his pictures are worth. Yet for some reason- his lack of initiative, his fear of inconvenience or some other issue- Peter never follows through on his threat to take his pictures elsewhere.

Peter is rude on a regular basis to people who are supposed to be his friends. He often has an ulterior motive that he considers altruistic. For example, he wants to get Betty out of the Daily Bugle building before a villain attacks. But there are other ways to achieve the same goal- methods that don’t involve browbeating and belittling the woman you supposedly love. Later, Peter is befuddled that Betty is mad at him and chalks it up to his typically bad Parker luck. Uh, no, Peter. That wasn’t bad luck. That was you being rude.

Peter also has problems with his classmates at Empire State University. They consider him standoffish, stuck-up and, once again, rude. Now, this is partially attributable to bad luck. Peter’s Aunt May is in the hospital when he starts a new semester and he’s consumed by his family concerns. That’s understandable. One of my college friends lost her father to cancer while we were in school and pretty much lost a semester out of the ordeal as well. But Peter compounds the problem of bad timing with his own bad manners. When Peter discovers his classmate’s poor impression of him, he doesn’t apologize or explain his personal situation. Instead, he lashes out at them, insulting them and accusing them of perfidy. Uh, Peter. That’s not the way to win friends and influence people. If you told them that you were distracted because your aunt was in the hospital, they would be a lot more sympathetic. They’d probably apologize and maybe even offer to help you out.

For a guy whose motto is “with great power comes great responsibility,” Peter regularly fails to take responsibility for his actions and their impact on other people.

I can understand how this wasn’t a problem at the time. For one thing, Peter Parker’s travails were a step forward from the bland personalities of prior superheroes. Despite his own flaws- and maybe even because of them- Peter’s travails are often as interesting as Spider-Man’s exploits. There’s a soap opera element to his home life that is as intriguing as any mystery villain. It’s a big reason why we come back issue after issue. We aren’t as concerned about Spider-Man beating the Scorpion as we are about Peter winning Betty back.

Secondly, Peter’s main audience at the time was made up of teenagers. They would typically share his self-centeredness, attributing misfortune to outside influences and bad luck rather than his own prickly personality and poor planning. Believe me, I’ve been there. I wince when I recall long rants to my friends about the problems caused by other people. Peter’s original audience might not have noticed this peculiar quirk or hold it against him.

Yet with the perspective of adulthood and of history, I found myself disappointed in Peter Parker. Sure, he’s the everyman of comics. But he’s not the heroic ideal that he’s often touted to be.

Finally, we reach the number-one spot on the list of Golden Turkey villains created by Gardner Fox to threaten the Justice League of America.

So far, we’ve taken a look at super-villains who had the brains and the power, but fell woefully short in the strategy department.  Guys like the Lord of Time and Headmaster Mind, who left holes in their plans big enough for the entire JLA to charge through.  And then there were fellows like Pete Ricketts and Joe Parry, who suffered from terminal stupidity.  When luck dropped nearly invincible power into their laps, they showed themselves to be so inept that it was almost an embarrassment that it took the JLA to defeat them.

So what does that say about the villain who stands in the number-one spot, the very worst of this line-up of losers?

Before I reveal the JLA foe whose performance places him as the lamest of the lame, let’s look at the factors which earned him that dubious distinction.

■  A genuinely menacing villain possesses the raw power, either innately or in the weapons at his disposal, to potentially overcome and eliminate the Justice League.

The Lord of Time, and even Pete Ricketts and Joe Parry, could claim this.  The others on the list had, at least, a good enough gimmick to have given a single JLA member a tough time.  Not so for the Number One spot-holder.

■  A true JLA foe is playing for high stakes.  We’re talking fate of the Earth, or the universe itself, in the balance.  At the least, there’s the threat of crime on a major scale.

Of all the villainy attempted by this list of losers, the crime attempted by the baddie I’ve rated as Number One was the most mundane---a routine matter for the police department, not the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes.

■  An evil-doer challenging the Justice League is willing, even eager, to destroy the super-heroes.

For all their other failings, the other villains who made the list were more than ready to do this.  But not the Number One.  Oh, no---he wanted no part of the JLA and only fought when he was cornered.  That made him smarter than, say, Johnny Marbles.  But it hardly fills the reader with a sense of dread when the bad guy spends most of the issue trying not to get found.

It boiled down to this:  of the elements that a threat should have to justify the involvement of the Justice League of America---or even only five or six of the members, per Fox’s later formula---this particular criminal lacked them all.  Ace, the Bat-Hound could have caught this guy.

And, so, the countdown ends with . . . .

1.  “Bullets” Jameson  (JLA # 62 [May, 1968])

Like many of Gardner Fox’s scripts, “Panic from a Blackmail Box” is intricately plotted.  In this case, Fox weaves several different motives into one tight knot.  It’s smartly done, but younger readers of the day probably had a difficult time keeping the threads straight.

It begins with a splash-page flashback to 1945 and a man in a motorboat.  A sudden, violent squall overturns the craft, plunging the man into the cold depths of Lake Michamaw.  He clutches a metal box, refusing to let go of it, even as it drags him to a watery death.  Twenty-three years later, a fisherman’s hook snags the handle of the box and brings it to the surface.

Fast-forwarding to the present, we learn that two men residing in Lakeside City suddenly have had their lives upended.  One, Harold Loomis, wealthy C.E.O. of the Loomis Electronics Corporation, discovers that he is actually the son of Leo Locke, a notorious gangster killed twenty-five years earlier.  The other man is noted archæologist Homer Gridley, whose earliest historical discoveries have been uncovered as frauds, committed by Gridley himself to establish his reputation.

Both men receive the news from reporters for the Lakeside City Tribune.  The newsmen show Loomis and Gridley photocopies of documents which unmistakably establish the truth.

Things get worse for Harold Loomis, in particular.  A few days after the Tribune publishes both stories, the morning mail brings Loomis an unsigned message---a red bullet!  Loomis has checked up on Leo Locke, the man he now knows was his father.  A quarter of a century ago, the Mob had put out a contract on Locke and his family.  They got to Locke’s wife and Locke himself died in an accident.

The Mob had been unaware that Locke had had a son---until the Lakeside City Tribune published the story about Harold Loomis.  The scarlet slug is a message to Loomis that the contract is still open.  Determined to get revenge on the informer who sent the damning evidence to the newspaper, Harold Loomis reaches into his desk drawer for a gun.

On the other side of town, Harold Gridley, bitter over the ruin of his career, has the same goal.  He reaches for a pistol as well.

That night, as Tribune editor Marley Thorne walks home, someone fires at shot at him from the shadows of a near-by alley.  The attacker is startled when he sees a second gunman also take a shot at Thorne.  Both slugs narrowly miss their target and the terrified editor flees for his life.

Right about now, a reader might have been wondering what all of this had to do with the Justice League of America.  He was about to find out.

Thorne, it develops, is the brother-in-law of Barry (the Flash) Allen.  Barry and his wife, Iris, are visiting the newsman, who excitedly blurts out the details of his brush with death.

Now, if this were an issue of The Flash, Barry would have told Thorne that he was going down to the drug store for some ice cream, then once out the door, he would have changed into the Fastest Man Alive, and wrapped up this case before the letter column.

But since it’s an issue of Justice League of America, instead Barry simply studies recent issues of the Tribune.  Then, the next day, after the conclusion of an uneventful regular meeting of the Justice League, the Flash chats it up with the members who haven’t gone home, yet.  He suspects Harold Loomis and Homer Gridley of having something to do with the attack on his brother-in-law.

Not exactly a Batman-level deduction.

The Scarlet Speedster and the other lingerers---the Atom, the Batman, Green Lantern, and Hawkman---are about to break up when their police-band radio reports that a gang called the Pyrotekniks has just robbed a Lakeside City Bank.  Batman and the Atom and Hawkman take interest because the same gang has also hit their respective cities, as well.

They decide to accompany the Flash back to Lakeside City.  Green Lantern figures, “Oh, what the hell,” and goes along with them.

In Lakeside City, while the other Justice Leaguers go over the details of the Pyrotekniks’ bank hold-up, the Flash consults with Marley Thorne.  The Crimson Comet asks to see the metal box that contained the information indicting Harold Loomis and Homer Gridley.  That’s when Thorne discovers that the box has been stolen from his office safe.

Before the Flash can ask, “Hey, Batman, what do you make of this?”, word comes that the Pyrotekniks are in the middle of a jewel heist.  The JLA rushes off to intercept the criminal gang.

The Pyrotekniks are well named.  The crooks hit the approaching heroes with multi-colour blasts from their peculiar side-arms.  The discharges have a strobe-light effect and disorient the JLAers briefly.  Their worst effect is to render Green Lantern unconscious.

Not that the other four Leaguers have any real problem with the gang.  The pyrotechnic blasts jolt Our Heroes’ minds and bodies a bit, but nothing they can’t shake off.  Still, it’s a bit off-putting (and shows that Gardner Fox was padding the story) when the Justice League---who had readily dealt with such fearsome menaces as the Demons Three, Starro the Conqueror, and the Crime Syndicate---take a whole five pages to take out a half-dozen ordinary crooks carrying tricked-out flashguns.

Still, it sets us up for the big surprise.  The leader of the Pyrotekniks is---Leo Locke!

You may have noticed, gang, that we’ve nearly reached the end of the first half of the adventure, and there hasn’t been a glimmer of Bullets Jameson in the picture, yet.

Patience, friends.  We’re about to get to him.  Well, a mention of him, at least.  You see, Bullets Jameson wasn’t the kind of villain to take the spotlight in a major criminal production.  He’s just a simple mobster trying to do his job the best he knows how.  In fact, Bullets would have been just as happy if the Justice League had gone home and forgotten his name.

Behind bars, the very-much-alive Leo Locke ties together several of the dangling ends for the JLAers.

“Twenty-five years ago, I tried to take over this territory from Bullets Jameson and his Bulleteers gang by ratting on them to the police!  They escaped the trap---and put a death-curse on me and my family!  Although they got my wife, I managed to sneak away with my son---whom I left at the doorstep of the rich Loomis family, figuring that since they had no kids, they might adopt him!”

Locke goes on to explain that he staged his own death in an accident.  Then, he formed his own gang, which eventually became the Pyrotekniks.  He and his minions were ready to wipe out the Bulleteers and take over their territory, like he had planned years ago.  Until Locke and his men were caught by the Justice League.

Our Heroes are curious as to why the hardened gangster is so talkative.  It’s because Locke needs their help.

Not too long ago, Locke was fishing in Lake Michamaw and his line snagged a metal box.  Inside the box were documents dated 1945, obtained by a private investigator.  These were the records that named Harold Loomis’ true father and exposed Homer Gridley’s first successes as fraudulent.  (Here, Gardner Fox’s frequent reliance on convenient coïncidence appears.)

Locke was the one who sent the documents to the Lakeside City Tribune.  He couldn’t have cared less about Homer Gridley, but he deliberately exposed his own son’s identity in order to draw Bullets Jameson to Lakeside City---where Locke and his Pyrotekniks could kill him!

Now, with Locke and his boys in jail, there’s no-one to protect Harold Loomis from Jameson.  He begs the JLA to save his son.

Part Two opens with the Justice Leaguers discovering that neither Harold Loomis nor Homer Gridley have been seen for days.  Hawkman throws together a Thanagarian gizmo which enables him to track Loomis’ unique “body radiations”.  They pick up Loomis’ trail at the Tribune safe from which the metal box had been stolen and follow it to a cave in near-by Lakeside Mountain.

Here, the JLAers find Loomis and Homer Gridley, working out their next move.  What Our Heroes don’t know is that a couple of the Bulleteer mobsmen have also found the cave.  The crooks drive off to inform Bullets Jameson of Loomis’ hiding place.

Fortunately, the Batman intuits that, if the Justice League could find Loomis, then so could Bullets Jameson.  The super-heroes scour the region just outside the cave and find the footprints and tyre tracks left by Jameson’s men.  With the help of Green Lantern’s power ring, the JLAers follow the tracks down a country road that leads to an abandoned stone fort---the hide-out of Bullets Jameson!

Jameson has no desire to tangle with the JLA; he knows he’s not in their---er---league.  He and his five underlings huddle in the heart of the fortress, hoping that the death traps Jameson installed for protection will stop the approaching super-heroes.

They don’t, of course.  In fact, the only casualty suffered by the Leaguers occurs after they penetrate the central chamber---when a gimmicked ceiling tile conks Green Lantern on the noggin, knocking him cold.  Here, on page 19, Bullets Jameson makes his first appearance on stage.  With no place to run, their backs against the wall, he and his gang draw their guns, hoping that slugs will stop the advancing Justice Leaguers.

Yeah, right.

The Bulleteers scarcely make a show of it.  It only takes eight panels for the four JLAers still on their feet to put them down for the count.

The story would be over---except for the fact that Jameson had the foresight to booby-trap the room where he kept his stolen loot.  A low-level explosive device triggers, blasting Batman, Hawkman, the Atom, and the Flash into unconsciousness.

Jameson and his boys grab their guns and prepare to pump hot lead into the fallen super-heroes.  Before they can do so, Harold Loomis and Homer Gridley interrupt with their own weapons drawn.  The odds are six-to-two against Loomis and Gridley, but their guns are both aimed at Bullets.  No matter what happens, Gridley points out, Jameson won’t make it out of there alive.

This, naturally, inspires in the gangster a moment of personal reflexion.

While Jameson considers his options, Green Lantern, unnoticed, recovers from his bump on the head.  The Emerald Gladiator then ends the Mexican standoff by melting all of the guns with a burst from his power ring.

That brings us to page 23 and the usual smiles-all-around JLA ending.

It’s probably occurred to you that Gardner Fox wrote a corker of a mystery.  I agree; he did.  He even employed one of Lester Dent’s favourite plot devices in his Doc Savage novels, of having two criminal outfits working against each other.

Yes, it’s a great case---for Perry Mason or Rip Kirby or Joe Mannix.  But as a Justice League adventure, it’s underwhelming.  It lacks the Earth-shattering threat or overarching evil that one expects to be present in a case that requires several super-heroes banding together to defeat.  There’s no cosmic drama here.  It’s a crime novel, with the Justice League jammed in place of the usual detective hero.

And that’s why Bullets Jameson is the lamest of all the JLA’s Silver-Age foes.

It’s not that he was ludicrous, even slightly---like Nameless Nutt or Headmaster Mind.  Nor was he stupid, like Johnny Marbles. 

He just wasn’t a JLA-level villain.  Not even a little bit, for those times when only a handful of members participated in the case.

No super-powers.  No highly advanced intellect.  No laboratory full of death-dealing creations.  He didn’t even have a super-weapon fall into his lap, like Pete Ricketts and Joe Parry.  All he had was a gun.

The Earth certainly wasn’t in any danger from Jameson.  World-domination wasn’t on his to-do list.  He wasn’t even building a massive criminal empire; he was having a hard enough time just holding on to his Lakeside City territory.  Bullets was a run-of-the–mill gangster, going about doing typical crook business.  Commissioner Gordon wouldn’t even light off the Bat-signal for that.

Pitting the Justice League of America against Bullets Jameson was like calling out a S.W.A.T. team to tackle a litterbug.

In a letter to the JLA Mail Room appearing in JLA # 65 (Sep., 1968), David Lewin, of Lomita, California, commented on “Panic from a Blackmail Box”.  In criticising the lacklustre threat posed by Bullets Jameson and his Bulleteers, he said it best:

“I just hope that the next issue doesn’t find the JLA overpowering little Johnny who forged his parents’ signature to his report card.”

Unfortunately for Bullets Jameson and his standing as the most unworthy Silver-Age JLA foe, Gardner Fox never wrote a story about little Johnny.

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

Oct. 18, 2011 -- Batman: Year One is one of the most critically acclaimed and fan-revered stories about the Dark Knight. Wisely, Warner Bros. has hewed closely to the original for its animated adaptation.

Originally published as a four-issue miniseries in 1987, BYO was actually two stories: One dealt with how Bruce Wayne began his Bat-career; the other was the story of a young Lt. James Gordon rising through the ranks as he tackled corruption in the Gotham City PD. The latter answers the long-standing question of how a by-the-book, family-man cop comes to trust a masked vigilante.

Weaving in and through these parallel tales are a (possible) origin for Catwoman, a scene with assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (a Bat-ally, before he becomes Two-Face) and the introduction of Carmine “The Roman” Falcone’s crime family, an element that has become a staple of the Bat-books, cartoons and movies. All of these characters clash in a huge Shakespearean drama involving murder, infidelity, blackmail and lies.

BYO was penned by writer/artist Frank Miller (300, Sin City) at the top of his game, after he had written and drawn the game-changing Dark Knight Returns a year before. It was drawn by David Mazzucchelli, a brilliant delineator of gritty, atmospheric, street-level crime noir. Together they created a plausible, unforgettable origin not just for Batman, but for his entire milieu, most of which has been adopted by DC Comics as the official story. (The Catwoman origin, which posits Selina Kyle as a dominatrix and prostitute before becoming a cat burglar, is still held at arm’s length by the DC powers-that-be.)

The animated adaptation, released Oct. 18, was also created by an all-star team. Bruce Timm (Justice League Unlimited) brings his clear-eyed vision of the DC universe as executive producer. Veteran directors Lauren Montgomery (Superman/Batman: Apocalypse) and Sam Liu (All-Star Superman) are on board, as is Apocalypse screenwriter Tab Murphy. Andrea Romano does her usual amazing job casting voices, with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) as Gordon, Ben McKenzie (Southland) as Batman, Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) as Catwoman,  Alex Rocco (The Godfather) as Falcone and Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) as Det. Sarah Essen.

This talent pool is necessary, because bringing Batman: Year One to the screen successfully is no ordinary job. As noted above, there is a huge amount of story to pack into 64 minutes. Some elements (Dent, for example) get such short shrift that they depend on the audience’s knowledge of the Bat-universe to fill in the blanks. The story’s structure is a little shaky. And at times you’re being whisked along too quickly, as the film really could have used another 30 minutes to let this sprawling story breathe.

But Montgomery and Liu do slow down enough for some scenes to shine through. Batman vs. the Gotham SWAT team is epic. Gordon’s hunt for the man behind the mask lingers on Bruce Wayne long enough to become an instant classic. Every scene with the outraged Catwoman – whom the press initially characterizes as Batman’s “assistant” – is a keeper.

As to the animation, BYO is only ordinary, typical of what you see on Saturday morning TV. But it does seem to utilize Timm’s “dark deco” style that he developed for Batman: The Animated Series, and – despite the lack of detail – manages to capture the spirit of Mazzucchelli’s brooding original. Many scenes clearly used the print version as a storyboard, resulting in a thrilling shock of recognition for long-time comics fans.

In short, Batman: Year One is far too truncated, and some (especially newbies) might find it boring or hard to follow. But Warner Bros. has puts its best vets on a task Bat-fans have anticipated for years, and you can’t ask for better than that.

Batman: Year One is available as a Blu-Ray Combo Pack ($24.98) and DVD ($19.98), On Demand and for download through iTunes, Xbox Live, Zune, VUDU HD Movies and Video Unlimited on the PlayStation network & Sony Entertainment Network.

BYO is PG-13, for violence and sexual suggestion, especially in the Catwoman short included on the two-disc packages. One scene takes place in a strip club, which I’m beginning to think is mandatory in modern entertainment. But, as I’ve argued about Catwoman the comic book, she’s the one character I’ll give a pass to for being depicted in what I’d normally call a sexually objectified manner, because she does it on purpose – she’s the original femme fatale in comics, using her looks as a weapon going back to 1940.

Photos:

1. Warner Home Video's animated adaptation of Batman: Year One was released Oct.18. Courtesy Warner Home Video

 Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.

I couldn’t help it.  That's just the way my mind works.

During a recent bit of chatter over on the message boards, I was reminded of a couple of pieces of Silver-Age trivia that I’ve carried around in my brain for a half-century, and it started me thinking about tossing another quiz at you folks.  Before I knew it, I had the requisite list of ten posers.

Before I could do anything with them, the estimable Craig “Mr. Silver Age” Shutt posted his annual Silver-Age Trivia Challenge.  I look forward to his quiz every year, and every year, my forehead gets flattened another millimetre or so from slapping it and exclaiming, “Of course!” when I read the answers.  That’s what makes Craig’s annual puzzlers so enjoyable---it’s not so much a matter of what you know or don’t know; it’s more like connecting the dots.  His questions provide one end of the connexion and you have to come up with the other.  That gets the brain neurons firing. 

Craig’s challenge wasn’t any different for me this year; I’m rapidly coming up on needing a smaller hat size.

If you haven’t already done so, stop right here, and go click on the thread to his quiz and test your mettle on a real Silver-Age master’s work.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Good.  Fun, wasn’t it?

Now for the amateur production.

Hopefully, your brains haven’t burnt out from tackling Mr. S.A.’s questions.  Actually, I’m hoping a lot of you are the crazy types whose moods get whetted for more after something so challenging.  Which is why I’m going ahead with my own quiz, instead of writing an article on the Legion Espionage Squad or something.  As with my last two efforts, I’ve selected questions with two qualities in mind for the answers---they elicit a sense of “Wow, I didn’t know that!”, and they defy an easy Google-search.

The rules are the same as always.  All questions, and the answers you smart folks will hopefully provide, come from the Silver Age, as I define it---the fall of 1956 through to the end of 1968.  If your answer doesn’t come from a comic book published during this period, then it doesn’t count.

You guys are a sharp bunch.  That, combined with the fact that I’m rapidly approaching geezerhood, means that one of you may come up with an answer that I missed because I forgot to take my slug of Geritol to-day.  As long as it’s substantiated by information from a Silver-Age comic, I’ll give you credit for a correct response.

You’re free to use any resource you want to determine the correct answers.  As I said, I’ve attempted to make the questions relatively immune to search engines, but a fertile mind can accomplish wonders.  Each correct answer earns you ten points.  Incorrect answers cost you nothing.  After all, this isn’t Jeopardy!; all you win here are bragging rights.

Lastly, this particular quiz is limited to the DC universe.  You Marvel mavens will get your shot the next time around.

All set?  As always, I’ll start off with a lob . . . .

1.  Of the five services of the U.S. Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard), which one did Wonder Woman join as Diana Prince?

2.  What was the name of the asteroid where the ancestral home of Bron Wayn E7705---the Batman of 2967---was located?

3.  Who starred as Green Lantern in the Earth-One series about the Emerald Crusader?

4.  Speaking of television shows, what was the name of the television programme regularly hosted by Lana Lang for WMET-TV?

5.  In what story/issue did Superman first meet Adam Strange?

6.  What story/issue marked J’onn J’onzz’s last Silver-Age appearance with the Justice League of America?

7.  Speaking of the JLA, per the by-laws of the Justice League, what was the schedule for its regular meetings?

8.  In what story/issue did Bizarro № 1 with his classic reversed “S-shield” insignia first appear?

9.  Speaking of Bizarros, what did the Bizarro-Flash have as a chest insignia?

10.  What was the last story/issue to show Hector Hammond as a normal man, before he enlarged his own brain?

I’ll be back with the answers in two weeks.  Good luck!

Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

Dark Horse gives illustration great Milo Manara the library treatment

Milo Manara is one of Europe’s most famous artists, known for his beautiful women, meticulous craftsmanship, sweeping landscapes, storytelling skills and even pornography. He’s been reprinted in America before, but Dark Horse is doing it in a huge and comprehensive way, commensurate with the Italian artist’s international stature.

The Manara Library is a proposed series of nine hardback volumes, two of which have already been published. And, yes, they are flat-out gorgeous.

Volume One ($59.99) contains two of Manara’s most famous stories, “Indian Summer” and “Paper Man.” Both are American historical pieces tempered by tons of artistic license: “Indian Summer” involves a conflict between Native Americans and Puritans in numbers that never existed and with weapons they didn’t have; “Paper Man” borders on being a comedy, a Western with eccentric characters and relationships that are unlikely, to say the least. Both end in tragedy that is both poignant and sobering, and Manara’s skill is such that you will read them twice – once for the story, and again just to drool over the art.

But why listen to me? Here’s Frank Miller (300, Sin City), from his glowing Foreword: “Milo Manara must live in a beautiful world. He certainly shares one with us. His work is not coy nor nor cute nor pretty. It is a joyous gift, a celebration.” It goes on in that vein for quite a while, and it’s hagiography I agree with.

Another big name attached to Volume One is Hugo Pratt, who is the author of “Indian Summer.” He’s the creator and writer of “Corto Maltese,” the comics adventure character who’s been sailing the world’s seas – and been a popular international seller – since 1967. As noted, Pratt isn’t big on historical accuracy, but he can tell a slam-bang story.

I admit to two caveats. One is that no Manara story is ever safe for the kiddies; “Indian Summer” is predicated on a brutal rape, and both stories involve a lot of sex and half-clothed women. The other is that there is a disturbing thread of misogyny just below the surface of Manara’s work, as female characters are generally subordinate (if not outright owned) by the men. In some sense that’s historically accurate, as “women rights” was an oxymoron until the twentieth century. Or maybe, after decades of cumulative female objectification in American superhero comics, I’m a little hypersensitive. But I feel a little twinge of patriarchal guilt now and then, so there’s something there.

The Manara Library: Volume Two ($59.99) contains “El Gaucho” and a series of shorts under the umbrella title “Trial by Jury.” Another famous creator, Neil Gaiman, writes another enthusiastic (and insightful) Foreword.

“El Gaucho” is another historical piece written by Pratt, this one set in the early 1800s, as the British Navy is making inroads into Argentina in competition with Spain. Once again Manara’s gift for sweeping landscapes (and seascapes) is on full display, as are his beautiful women (mostly in the form of Irish prostitutes brought along to amuse the British officers). Unfortunately, once again any woman that shows any backbone is relentlessly crushed by the consequences, leaving my conscience uneasy. I’m hoping for a slew of legitimate – and successful – heroines in future volumes to balance the scales.

The “Trial by Jury” vignettes are imaginary prosecutions of famous historical figures (Nero, Helen of Troy, Hernán Cortés, etc.), drawn by Manara when he was only 24 for Il Corriere dei Ragazzi (Boys’ Courier) magazine. What’s fascinating here is that Manara had at this time yet to discover and incorporate Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s illustrative style into his own, and shows a strong Spanish influence instead. Admittedly, Manara’s art truly blossoms after he begins to ape Moebius, but here we see a strong foundation already in place that hints at the likes of Esteban Maroto. It’s not Manara’s best work, but it demonstrates incontrovertibly that he is not just a Moebius clone.

I mentioned Manara’s pornographic work, and Dark Horse will reprint that as well. Wisely, I think, they’re separating it out into the Manara Erotica Library, whose first volume arrives in May. Needless to say, if you’re offended by pornography, stick with the “main” Manara library.

And, by all means, check it out! Suggestions of misogyny aside, Manara’s illustrations are so powerful and sweeping that it’s easy to forget the story and just fall into his panels. As Miller says, Manara is sharing the world in his head, and it’s one where you can gaze at a field of grass for hours.

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

Neal Adams changed how comic books were drawn in America.

I still remember the first time I saw his artwork. It was in the late 1960s, and I was familiar with the major artists at the bigger companies, the A-listers all the B-listers were copying. Jack Kirby was “The King,” and set the pace at Marvel Comics. Dan DeCarlo was the de facto house style at Archie Comics. DC Comics didn’t have a single house style, but several, split up by editorial office – Curt Swan on the Superman books, Joe Kubert on the war books, Carmine Infantino on the science fiction books, and so forth.

But those artists, while terrific, were basically cartoonists with excellent individual styles. Adams was something altogether different. He came from advertising, and was a master of the “photo-realism” school. His characters had weight and texture. Instead of “spotting blacks” where convenient, his people and objects threw shadows as you’d see in real life. And all his superheroes were anatomically accurate, bursting with the kind of power you see in professional weight-lifters.

For the first time, Batman truly became a creature of the night. For the first time, Superman really looked like he could bend steel in his bare hands.

Adams has reportedly said “if superheroes existed, they’d look like I draw them.” That may be apocryphal, but when I heard that remark as a boy, I could only nod in agreement. It wasn’t bragging; it was simply true.

Adams quickly moved from back-bench comics like Strange Adventures, where he drew Deadman, to big guns like Batman and Justice League of America. Where he didn’t have time to draw whole books – and Adams was notoriously slow – he did covers. He drew many books that remain famous today: the racism and drug abuse stories in Green Lantern/Green Arrow; the Kree/Skrull War in Avengers; the apocalyptic Sentinel story in X-Men. Everybody wanted to draw like Adams, and before long a lot of artists did.

But that was the 1970s. It’s been decades since Adams was a major player in comics, and other artists are the trend-setters now. But Adams isn’t really gone. When you look at work by superstars like Jim Lee (now co-publisher of DC Comics), you can see Adams. He’s still an influence, and will probably remain so for generations.

So it’s appropriate that Vanguard Productions has published The Art of Neal Adams ($24.95), an overview of Adams’ career. Written by Adams himself, the book has slick paper and high-quality printing to show the art to its best advantage.

Adams has done everything you can do with illustration: Advertising, comic strips (Ben Casey), every genre of comic books, an art studio, his own publishing firm (Continuity Comics), even movie posters. The Art of Neal Adams covers it chronologically, in Adams’ own words. If you want to understand why today’s comic-book artists draw the way they do, you need only glance through these pages.

Elsewhere:

Captain Britain was the first superhero created by Marvel UK – the British arm of Marvel Comics – back in 1976. Captain Britain Vol. 1: Birth of a Legend ($39.99) reprints roughly the first year of the character’s adventures, and it’s surprising how terrible they are.

Captain Britain was first written by Chris Claremont, who went on to fame in X-Men comics, but in these early days of his career basically strung together snippets of Stan Lee dialogue to poor effect. In the first story he gives Captain Britain a nonsensical origin and lame super-powers that amount to being kinda strong, kinda fast and carrying a stick.

The art was by Herb Trimpe, a second-stringer whose biggest claim to fame is a long run on Incredible Hulk in the ‘70s. And Captain Britain sported one of the ugliest costumes in a genre that’s seen a lot of horrendous haberdashery.

In short, early Captain Britain is just awful, a mish-mash of cliché, amateurism and worse. It gets marginally better when journeyman Gary Friedrich picks up the writing, and the art shifts to several other B-listers. But it’s still nothing to write home about.

Currently Captain Britain is a big player in the Marvel Universe, with A-list super-powers, an X-Men affiliation and a much spiffier outfit. But it’s easy to see why his earliest adventures weren’t included in the Captain Britain Omnibus that came out a couple of years ago, and why it’s taken 35 years for these stories to appear in the United States at all.

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com

Continuing the countdown of the most insipid Silver-Age bad guys to tackle the Justice League of America . . . .

By 1963, the ranks of the JLA had expanded to nine super-heroes.  It’s quite a task, coming up with villains formidable enough to threaten that many heroes at once, especially when a plot wasn’t padded over a multi-issue arc, as is common to-day.  JLA writer Gardner Fox had to come up with a new menace every issue.  Sooner or later, the well had to run dry.

To offset the problem, Fox employed a new plotting formula, beginning with JLA # 23 (Nov., 1963).  It was a format in which half the team membership would be sidelined from the main action.  Contrivances were found to get four or five of the JLAers out of the way early on, or else, bring them in at the end, cavalry-style.  For most of the adventure, the other half of the group dealt with the big bad on their own.

After several months, Fox honed the formula further by simply omitting many of the Justice League members from the story completely, under the excuse of “being tied up on urgent cases of their own.”  From 1965 on, it was a rare thing for the entire JLA membership to be involved in a case.

This approach had two benefits for Fox’s scripting.  If it was a truly Earth-shaking threat, then the sense of drama was heightened by the fact that only five or six super-heroes were on hand to confront it.  The other plus was that, now, every villain didn’t have to be a world-beater.  Fox could drop down to the minor leagues and throw a second-tier baddie at the JLA and still get a decent yarn out of it.

Unfortunately, for him---and fortunately, for this Deck Log entry---on a few of those, Fox scraped barrel-bottom.  This usually happened when, instead of going with an established super-villain, he opted for putting a super-weapon in the hands of a small-time operator.

That’s how the next three losers made the list.

4. and 3.  “Nameless Nutt” and Johnny Marbles  (JLA # 53 [May, 1967])

Numbers Four and Three on the list both appeared in the adventure, “Secret Behind the Stolen Super-Weapons”, taking on the Justice League separately, but stumbling over each other to do it.

The tale’s opener presents us with two mysteries.  At the Midway City Museum, while curator Carter (Hawkman) Hall is preparing to attend this month’s regular meeting of the Justice League, his wife, Shierra, shows him an imperfect counterfeit of a rare ancient coin.  Somehow, the phoney had been substituted for the genuine article, without opening its display case or setting off the special Thanagarian alarm-system installed to protect the exhibits.

Carter notes that several other art galleries and museums across the country have suffered similar thefts.

Later, at the secret sanctuary, for once, it’s an uneventful JLA meeting.  There’s no old business, no new business, nor even any requests for help in the mail.   Snapper Carr reports that the absent Green Lantern and J’onn J’onzz have sent word that they’re---say it with me, gang---tied up on urgent cases of their own.

With nothing official to discuss, the heroes talk shop.  The Green Arrow mentions that, earlier in the day, he was confronting some armed bandits and discovered that his famed trick arrows had, somehow, been mysteriously replaced by non-working duplicates.

An astonished Wonder Woman reports that she recently experienced something similar, when she rounded up a band of foreign spies and found out that her magic lasso had been unaccountably exchanged for an ordinary golden rope that resembles the real thing.

Ever the worrier, the Batman checks out his utility belt and finds that, while it looks like his belt, the gadgets it holds are worthless.  Hawkman draws a connexion between the stolen super-weapons and the puzzling coin-swap at the Midway City Museum.

While the Leaguers put their heads together to address the situation, the scene shifts to a cave stuffed with antiquities and rare treasures.  In a gloating soliloquy to no-one in particular, the mastermind responsible for the looting brags about being “the greatest thief in the criminal history of the world!”

You see, he has invented a matter transporter.  The device can instantly transport any object to his cavern hide-out and leave in its place, a reasonable, but inexact copy---“an operation made necessary by the law of the conservation of matter and energy . . . .”

Actually, that’s not too bad, as villains go.  Certainly, he might give the Atom or the Batman or Hawkman a hard time in their own magazines.  But a couple of things put him on the list.  First, his over-inflated ego, which eventually leads to his undoing from an unexpected quarter.

Second, it’s just hard to take him seriously as a bad guy---or anything else.  Appearance-wise, he looks like he just stepped off the set after playing the lead in an episode of Dr. Who.  And he conducts himself with all the high-camp exaggeration of a Special Guest Villain on Batman---which explains the two full pages spent talking to himself about his master plan and how great he is.

Incidentally, writer Gardner Fox never bothers to give this dandified do-badder a name.  In a letter of comment about this story that appears in a subsequent JLA Mail Room, fan Leonard Rosenberg, of the Bronx, New York, makes note of this.  The evil collector, says Mr. Rosenberg, “for all I know, was called Nameless Nutt . . . .” 

Meanwhile, back at JLA HQ, Hawkman has made use of a Thanagarian detector.  The Winged Wonder aims the gizmo at the counterfeited art objects from the victimised museums and picks up a radiation signature that he can trace.  The three JLAers who had their weapons substituted ask the other members to sit this one out, while they and Hawkman get first crack at the hidden mastermind.

In short order, the Justice League quartet tracks down the secret cave.  Startled by Our Heroes’ appearance, Nameless Nutt (if it’s good enough for Leonard Rosenburg of the Bronx, it’s good enough for me) pulls out another gadget.  With it, he animates some of the stolen statuary and sends it on the attack.  The stunt gives each of the four JLAers a page to strut his stuff---and an opportunity for polymath Fox to show off his knowledge of obscure folklore in four lengthy editorial footnotes.

It doesn’t take long for the Leaguers to reduce the giant bric-a-brac to so much rubble, but it delays them enough for ol’ Nameless to make a run for it.  The heroes give chase, but when they catch up to him, they find the crooked inventor lying unconscious. 

“He must have tripped and fallen---knocking himself out!” concludes Green Arrow.

The JLAers confiscate the gadget in N.N.’s hand, then turn him and his stolen booty over to the authorities.

That’s the last we’ll ever see of Mr. Nutt, but the story is far from over.

When JLA foursome rejoins the others in the secret sanctuary, they realise that there are still a couple of pieces missing from the puzzle.  For one thing, there was no sign of Batman’s real utility belt in Nameless Nutt’s cave.  Nor Green Arrow’s shafts or Wonder Woman’s lasso.

Next, the device they took from N.N. is simply an ornate metal shell, with no inner workings whatsoever.  There’s no way it could have been used to commit the thefts.

Before Our Heroes can look into it further, Batman, Hawkman, and the others who tackled Nutt in his cave suddenly keel over in their council chairs and turn invisible.  By feel, the others can tell that the sticken members are still alive, but their pulses and breathing are growing weaker by the minute.

The unaffected JLAers deduce that this is an after-effect resulting from the four heroes receiving too much exposure to the radiation emanating from the real tele-transporter.  And there's going to be fatal consequences---unless they can find the genuine device and, somehow, reverse its effects. 

Then it’s Good News/Bad News time.

The Good News:  They can track down the real transporter using Hawkman’s radiation detector.

The Bad News:  Hawkman’s radiation detector turned invisible when he did and they can’t operate it.

The Good News:  If Hawkman has a radiation detector, then so will Hawkgirl.

The Bad News:  Hawkgirl isn’t a Justice League member; they don’t know how to reach her.

The Good News:  Yes, they do---the Atom knows Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s secret identities.  (An editor’s note helpfully reminds the readers that the Tiny Titan and the Winged Wonders exchanged knowledge of their true identities in Hawkman # 9 [Aug.-Sep., 1965].)

Leaving Aquaman behind “in case our stricken members recover consciousness,” (and because Fox couldn’t think of anything else to do with him), the Atom, Superman and the Flash super-speed to Midway City and Shierra Hall.  Strapping on her wings and grabbing the spare radiation detector and a handy mace, Hawkgirl leads the Justice Leaguers straight to . . . .

Mobster Johnny Marbles and his gang!

Gardner Fox often wrote convoluted plots, but this one was so byzantine that, when I first read this issue forty-five years ago, I had to go over it twice before it finally made sense.  It didn’t help that the explanation came from Johnny Marbles himself, who talks like a gangster from a 1930’s B-movie.

In regular English, here’s what happened:  Marbles suspected that the art thefts were being committed by someone with an unbeatable gimmick.  Figuring that the best way to put the finger on this somebody was to sic the JLA on him, the gangster ordered his underlings to secretly steal the weapons used by Batman and Green Arrow and Wonder Woman and substitute them with imitations.  It’s never explained how the thugs accomplish this; all we find out is that the effort resulted in most of Marbles’ men winding up in the jug.

Since Marbles doesn’t seem bright enough to know which end of a pencil to use, the notion that his henchmen could succeed in relieving three super-heroes of their personal gear is a huge honkin’ pill to choke down.  For that matter, the whole scheme seems beyond him. Maybe one of his captured men was the real brains behind the operation. That would explain a lot.

As Marbles hoped, the heroes assumed that the same mastermind robbing the museums was also behind the thefts of their weapons, and when they tracked him down, Johnny and his boys were following close behind.

They lied in wait until Nameless Nutt made his run for freedom.  Before the pursuing heroes could round the corner, the hoods waylaid the flamboyant robber and took his tele-transporter, leaving a fake in its place.

Now in possession of the transporter, Marbles tests it out on the front door to his apartment.  He just happens to activate the device just as the Justice League members and Hawkgirl come bursting in.  Instantly, the four super-heroes are frozen shock still.  (“There must have been an element of kryptonite in that thing to have it affect me,” says Superman later, trying to save face.)

Instead of doing something smart like, oh say, running for the hills, Johnny Marbles ignores the petrified super-heroes.  He’s more interested in teleporting the entire gold reserve of Fort Knox right there into his living room.  He orders his men to move the furniture out of the way, not stopping to think that materializing over five thousand tons of gold on a simple hardwood floor is going to give the people in the apartments directly below quite a surprise.

Before the gangboss can flip the switch, the tele-transporter is slammed out of his hands---by Hawkgirl’s mace!

Her radiation detector absorbed the energy holding her paralysed, and now free to move, she tackles the hoodlums with gusto.  Marbles and his remaining two lackeys grab for the Justice Leaguers’ weaponry that they stole earlier, to make a last stand of it, but all they manage to do is foul each other up.  The Female Fury takes them out, neat as you please.  Aquaman could’ve done it.

Once Superman and the Flash and the Atom are unfrozen, they zip back to the secret sanctuary and, reversing the polarity of the transporter, restore the dying JLAers to health and visibility.  Then it’s smiles all around, as Hawkman gives his wife a big hug and promises to do the dinner dishes every night for a week.  (O.K., I made that last part up, but I bet he did.)

2.  Joe Parry  (JLA # 31 [Nov., 1964])

“Riddle of the Runaway Room” is remembered principally for being the story in which Hawkman joined the Justice League of America.  The Winged Wonder’s induction into the League is the best part of the tale, and it’s over by page 6.

While that happy event was taking place in the secret sanctuary, the issue’s villain, Joe Parry, was carrying out his “master scheme”---robbing a bank.

Not that Joe himself was doing the dirty deed, mind you.  He sent some gun-toting friends to do it.

But, to be fair, there was a little more to it than that.

Joe Parry, like Pete Ricketts, was a penny-ante crook who lucked upon a weapon of tremendous power.  In Joe’s case, it was a pancomputer from the planet Pthisthin, a monochromatic world in which everything was coloured yellow.

Resembling a Chinese lantern with a handle, the Pthisthinian device was capable of drawing material from another dimension and creating anything which its operator wished.  It had lied buried after a Pthisthinan spaceship had crashed on Earth, thousands of years earlier.  Until an earth tremour delivered it to the surface and into Joe Parry’s hands.

After accidentally discovering how the machine worked, the first thing Joe asked for was money.  Lots of it.  The pancomputer complied, showering him with cash.  Cold, hard, yellow Pthisthin cash.

Realising that the alien machine could only create things in terms of its home planet, Parry sought a way to capitalise on the immense power in his grasp.  When it came to plotting, however, Joe made Pete Ricketts look like Lex Luthor.   Joe’s grand scheme was to rob a bank.

He recruited three of his lowlife buddies.  Then he asked the pancomputer for something which would protect them from all harm.  It responded by producing a set of “time-field hoops”, worn by Pthisthian space-explorers to protect them from harm.  The hoops hovered around the wearer’s waist and surrounded him with a “time-field”.  Anything that entered the field was projected ten minutes into the future.

Parry sent his three knuckle-dragging pals, thus armed, off to near-by Shore City to rob a bank.

Meanwhile, back at JLA headquarters, after the cake and punch, half the Leaguers duck out early, to get back to important cases they’re working on.   This leaves Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and rookie member Hawkman to answer a police-band announcement of the Shore City bank robbery.

“If crooks have a weapon that unusual,” says Batman, in response to reports of the mysterious time-hoops worn by the bandits, “we’d better look into it.”

The super-heroes arrive in Shore City just as the crooks are leaving the bank.  Swooping in, Green Lantern finds his power beam useless against the crooks.  When the beam enters the time-field, it gets sent ten minutes into the future, and the hoops themselves are yellow.

But nothing else the JLAers try works, either.  Super-speed whirlwind, magic lasso, or plain old fists, they all disappear as soon as they enter the time-field around the crooks.  The Justice Leaguers can only watch helplessly as the hoods get into their car, also protected by the time-field, and drive off.  Ten minutes later, when the effects of their efforts materialise, Our Heroes figure out what’s going on.

Now that they know the secret of the hoops, the group overtakes the getaway car and use the time-shunting gimmick against the crooks.  Green Lantern’s power ring discovers that the robbers’ minds have been wiped clean of any knowledge of the hoops or how they got them.  And the time-hoops themselves have been rendered inert.

The Justice Leaguers head back to the secret sanctuary to dope out the mystery.

Back in his beachhouse, Joe Parry panics.  He’s seen the whole thing on a pancomputer-provided monitor.  He orders the device to kill the Justice League members before they can track him down.  Unfamiliar with the physiology of Terrans, the machine asks Joe to tell him how Earth people die.

“Die?  Why—er---“ Parry replies.  “We die when we stop breathing!”

Gotcha, says the alien gadget.  The next thing the JLAers know, the mountaintop of their secret sanctuary explodes and the section of flooring containing Our Heroes around the council table blasts upward into space.

Naturally, this is only a moment’s pause for the super-heroes.  Once they catch their breath, the Emerald Crusader power-rings a protective air canopy over them, while Hawkman reverses the controls of his anti-gravity belt to drop the broken sanctuary flooring back to Earth.  As a bonus, the Winged Wonder tells his new teammates that the special contact lenses built into his headgear have detected an “invisible yellow force beam”.

Once back on Earth, Hawkman, with the other members in tow, follows the invisible yellow beam to Joe Parry’s shack.  In desperation, Joe orders the pancomputer to create an amalgamated being consisting of Wonder Woman’s head and magic lasso, Batman’s torso, Green Lantern’s arms and power ring, the Flash’s super-fast legs, and Hawkman’s wings.  Joe dubs his creation “the Super-Duper” and sends it out to destroy the oncoming JLA heroes.

Incredibly, the hodge-podge creature gives the Justice Leaguers a thorough drubbing, until only Hawkman is left standing.  The Super-Duper trains its power ring on the Pinioned Paladin at point-blank range.

Let’s review here for a moment.  The Super-Duper was created by a yellow pancomputer from the planet Pthisthin, where the only colour in existence is yellow.  Everything created by the pancomputer is yellow and it even gives off invisible yellow energy.

And what do we know about the colour yellow and Green Lantern’s power ring, hmmm?

Despite the other members’ long association with the Emerald Crusader, only Hawkman tumbles to the fact that a power ring created by a yellow force will not work.  (Gardner Fox was clearly giving Hawkman centre stage in his JLA debut.)

The Winged Wonder takes advantage of his deduction and plays possum to lure Joe Parry out of hiding.  One clever stunt later, and Joe is decked by the Justice League’s newest member.  When they get their hands on the Pthisthinian machine, the JLAers discover that it has run out of power and the Super-Duper fades from existence.

Like Pete Ricketts, Joe Parry was done in, more than anything else, by his own ineptness.  Parry had at his control a device of almost unlimited capability and the best plan he could come with was a simple larceny.  His thinking on the fly was even worse, as shown by his half-baked doom-traps for the League.  In the end, even Joe himself knew it.

“The trouble with me was I wasn’t smart enough to use that machine to my best advantage!”

“Cheer up, Joe!” replies the Flash.  “You don’t have to be smart---in jail!”

Next time out, the countdown ends with the all-time lamest Justice League foe of the Silver Age . . . .

Any guesses?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been reading all of the X-Men comics in historical order. Along the way, I picked up a few odds and ends that I hadn’t purchased the first time around.

The project itself has been a blast. I’ve enjoyed reading so many of my favorite stories over again, whether it’s Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, Joe Madureira and Scott Lobdell or Joss Whedon and John Cassaday.

The side project- buying the mini-series I skipped the first time- has been interesting as well, although for different reasons. For the most part, these supplementary series have been predictably mediocre. I have a good sense of my own taste- and I like to think I have a good sense of quality- so there are solid reasons why I skipped these series in the first place.

Even though these odds and ends have been mostly mediocre, I don’t feel bad about reading them. I was able to pick up most of them for a dollar so I’m a little more tolerant than if I was paying cover price. They can be interesting as historical artifacts. Plus, they’re the X-Men so I’m always going to like them a little bit.

However, every once in a while, a comic surprises me by being better than I expected. Those previously undiscovered gems are the one of the real joys of this reading project.

I recently read Magneto’s second and third mini-series from 1999 and 2000. The second series, Magneto Rex, was predictably awful. In the X-Men comics of the time, the United Nations had handed the island of Genosha over to Magneto so that he would relent from re-aligning earth’s magnetic field. It was a dumb idea at the time and the mini-series doesn’t make it any better. U.N. representatives and SHIELD agents are constantly second-guessing the reasons for giving the mutant terrorist Magneto a nation of his own. Huxley’s defenses fall flat. They fail the answer the problem behind the basic premise of the story. The Magneto side of the story is pretty boring, too, with as many boardroom scenes as anything else.

After reading Magneto Rex, I had incredibly low expectations for the third mini-series, Dark Seduction. But I figured I’m committed to this reading project and I might as well see it through. I’m glad I did. Fabian Nicieza impressed me with a surprisingly strong story. First of all, he set aside the problem with the premise. The question isn’t “How did Magneto gain control of Genosha?” The real question is “What will Magneto do now that he has it?” Whether Magneto received the country as a gift or invaded of his own accord was immaterial to the issue of subduing opposition, establishing order and rebuilding a nation wracked by war.

Second, Nicieza smartly focused on the main characters. He reduced the roles of Philip Moreau, Jenny Ransome and even Huxley. The story centered upon the relationships between Magneto, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Polaris. Their family struggles took center stage. Dark Seduction was a personal affair as much as it was a geopolitical crisis. Later stories, like House of M and Jeff Parker’s Exiles, wisely followed Nicieza’s lead. The underlying problem of the premise is still present in Dark Seduction, but Nicieza allows it to fade into the background while he focuses on more interesting issues like filial resentment, familial rivalry and lust for power.

I also read a couple of mini-series about Domino. The 1997 series was another clunker. It was one of the most laughably poorly plotted stories I had ever read. Domino was in Brazil when she received a warning that her former lover Milo was in trouble back in the United States. Meanwhile, Lady Deathstrike steals Milo from his prison for unknown purposes. When Domino arrives at the prison, the guards are lying slumped on the floor and Lady Deathstrike is standing in his cell. Milo, however, is long gone, having been shipped to a secret facility in Alaska. That’s right. In the time in which Domino flew from Brazil to the U.S., no one cleaned up this super-secure prison or even noticed that it had been infiltrated. And, oh yeah, Lady Deathstrike had apparently been standing around for hours while other characters traveled across continents but then she expresses surprise that Domino found her before she made her escape. This wasn’t supposed to be a comedy series, but I had a good laugh anyway.

Once again, I had pretty low expectations going into the second Domino series. But the 2003 series was a marked improvement. Brian Stelfreeze gave us a taut spy thriller. Domino is a mercenary and thief for hire. However, we soon discover that her payment isn’t money. It’s information about her long-lost mother. Domino is quickly caught up in a web of intrigue that leads her from one location to another. One ally betrays her. One enemy assists her. And the secret weapon she thinks she’s looking for turns out to be something completely different. By the end, Domino finds her mother and, in a poetic moment, makes one of the same choices her mother did when she was young.
One of the best moments is actually a little one. At one point, Domino realizes she’s in over her head and she does something we rarely see in solo superhero comics: she calls a friend. However, Cable is tied up with his own adventures and chides her to handle it on her own. It was a quick moment, but it answered several questions while simultaneously raising the stakes.

This wasn’t a perfect comic. There is a small editorial mistake early on when Stelfreeze can’t remember if Domino is fighting five or six goons in a room. But those little mistakes can be easily forgiven when the tone is right and the story is compelling.

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

If you thought Hollywood strip-mined comic books for movie ideas in 2011, you ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.

Which is not to say that all you’re going to see is superhero movies. Actually, so many genres, media and themes repeat this year that it makes me wonder if Hollywood screenwriters all get drunk in the same bar. I mean, do we really need two movies about riots on an orbiting space prison? Two movies based on board games? Three movies about Navy SEALs? Six sports movies? At least nine ghost/haunting stories? Don’t get me started on con men-who-learn-a-lesson tales, coming-of-age stories and quirky rom-coms.

But if you’re a comics fan, there’s a lot to love in 2012. Here’s a quick overview of the genre films – comics-based and otherwise – that are prominently marked on the calendar in the Comics Cave:

* Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: Why not? (It’s based on the genre mashup novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, and not to be confused with Lincoln, a movie based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals,coming in December.)

* Amazing Spider-Man:Yes, Sony is rebooting this franchise because it’s greedy. But also because the rights will revert to Marvel if they don’t. Regardless of the reason, this looks way awesome, not just with a high school Peter Parker, but finally giving us a major Gwen Stacy turn.

* The Avengers: Black Widow! Captain America! Nick Fury! Hawkeye! Hulk! Iron Man! Thor! ‘Nuff said!

* Bullet to the Head: This is based on Alexis Nolent’s graphic novels, which bodes well; it stars Sylvester Stallone, which bodes the opposite.

* Chronicle: Three high school students get super-powers, and it goes real, real bad. How long before this is adapted to comics, you think?

* The Dark Knight Rises: I don’t have to describe this one, do I? The trailer alone set a download record in December.

* Dark Shadows: I was never a big fan of the 1960s soap opera, but how can you go wrong with Johnny Depp as reluctant vampire Barnabus Collins?

* Dredd: Based on the UK comics, and produced by a UK company, who are likely to do it better than 1995’s alarmingly awful Judge Dredd.

* Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance: Yeah, Nic Cage is getting a little long in the tooth, and the first Ghost Ridermovie was kinda by-the-numbers. But it looks like they’re going for dark humor and spectacle this time, and a flaming biker skeleton gives you a lot to work with!

* G.I. Joe: Retaliation: No surprise, as G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobramade $300 million worldwide.

* The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: You know you’re going.

* The Hunger Games: This story of teenagers forced to fight to the death in a dystopic future is adapted from the young adult novel by Suzanne Collins, and has “franchise” written all over it.

* Iron Sky: You can’t go wrong with space Nazis on the moon.

* John Carter: Someone’s finally adapting the Edgar Rice Burroughs series that began with A Princess of Mars,and it’s about time!

* The Lorax: The words “animated Dr. Seuss tale” are enough for me.

* Men in Black III:  Do Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones just need the money?

* Parker: Based on the 1960s gangster books by Donald Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark), which are being adapted into top-flight graphic novels by Darwyn Cooke.

* Prometheus: It looks like a prequel to “Alien,” although everyone involved vehemently denies it.

* Raven: Edgar Allen Poe investigates a serial killer in the final days of his life. To quote the great philosopher Butt-head: “Uh, what?” Too weird to pass up.

* Red Tails: George Lucas reportedly had trouble getting this movie made because it didn’t have a white guy in the lead. What th-? It’s World War II and genuine American heroes, so I’m there, dude.

* Skyfall: Daniel Craig returns for his third James Bond outing.

* The Three Stooges: Probably the worst idea for a movie I’ve ever heard … but the trailer looks hilarious.

* World War Z: This movie is adapted from the Max Brooks novel, which shows real-world consequences of a zombie apocalypse, like The Walking Dead.That puts me in a seat!

* Wrath of the Titans: As you might guess, it’s a sequel to Clash.

Photos:

1. CHRISTIAN BALE as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures' and Legendary Pictures' action thriller "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES," a Warner Bros. Pictures release. TM and © DC Comics. Photo by Ron Phillips.

2. Andrew Garfield stars as Spider-Man in Columbia Pictures' "The Amazing Spider-Man." Photo by Peter Tangen. Copyright Columbia TriStar Marketing Group Inc. All rights reserved.

3. (L-r) JAMES NESBITT as Bofur, MARTIN FREEMAN (front) as Bilbo Baggins, STEPHEN HUNTER as Bombur, GRAHAM McTAVISH as Dwalin, WILLIAM KIRCHER as Bifur, and JED BROPHY as Nori in New Line Cinema's and MGM's fantasy adventure "THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY," a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by James Fisher.

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Volume One
by Don Rosa
(collecting Uncle Scrooge #285-290, 1994-95)

In the mid ‘90s, Don Rosa took up the monumental task of illustrating The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. He wrote a 12-issue epic that covered the pivotal moments from Scrooge’s younger days before he became the richest duck in the world. This volume collects the first 6 issues. Even better, it also includes notes from Don Rosa in which he reveals the thought process behind story choices and reflects upon the clues to Scrooge’s past that were planted by Carl Barks.

The stories are excellent. Rosa gives each installment a unique flavor, whether it’s Scrooge’s boyhood in Scotland or his adventures as a young man on a Mississippi steamboat. For the most part, they’re well paced with sufficient obstacles to keep the reader interested and a few side gags to keep the reader entertained. However, I’ll admit that a couple of tales got bogged down in secondary details or dragged out a scene until it became repetitious.

My favorite story was from the fourth issue in which Scrooge joins a cattle drive. There’s a famous image in which several parties chase each other around circular buttes in the South Dakota badlands. It was a treat to see how Rosa set up all of the conflicting characters and then brought them together as part of one wonderful farce.

The panels are visually interesting as well. Rosa provides numerous memorable scenes such as a fiery ghost on horseback and an underground cavern that doubles as a steamboat stateroom. Of course, there’s also the aforementioned circle chase in the South Dakota badlands.

I was particularly fond of Rosa’s reflections. It was interesting to have him describe how he formed a complete story around a small tidbit mentioned in an old duck story by Barks. And I was impressed by the way in which Rosa would seamlessly work other small details into a larger narrative. Best of all, his love for the character clearly shines through in his reflections.

However, I was also amused to compare my reactions as a reader to Rosa’s reaction as a writer. Rosa’s least favorite story was the cattle drive. He noted that he prefers stories that take place in a single setting and a single day. He cited the fifth issue when Scrooge returns to Scotland to fight for Castle McDuck as a good example. My reaction is pretty much the opposite. “The Life and Times” suggests an epic and that’s what I was expecting- not only in the volume as a whole but also in the individual installments. I was especially fond of the cattle drive story that spanned several months and several states. My least favorite story was the castle story from the fifth issue. In my opinion, it contained a lot of filler that stretched it to a full issue, particularly an extended dream sequence that occurred while Scrooge was drowning.

Even so, that’s a difference of opinion about the relative merits of individual stories. My opinion of the epic as a whole remains quite favorable.

Wolverine by Greg Rucka: Ultimate Collection
by Greg Rucka, Darick Robertson and Leandro Fernandez
(collecting Wolverine #1-19, 2003)

Greg Rucka was given the task of re-launching Wolverine in a new solo series in 2003. This ultimate collection contains the complete Greg Rucka run, 19 issues in all.

Rucka’s approach to Wolverine is stripped down. Wolverine doesn’t wear a costume. He’s more like a rural vigilante, running around in jeans and a ripped shirt. His adventures are also more down to earth. He investigates a Montana cult that’s been kidnapping women, a smuggling operation that uses illegal immigrants to bring drugs across the border, and rumors that a wild, almost feral, escapee from the Weapon X program is living in the mountains.
There aren’t a lot of other superheroes either. Nightcrawler makes a couple of guest appearances, but he doesn’t actually help in the adventures. Instead, he shows up as a confidant and drinking buddy. Sabretooth is the only supervillain to pop by and he doesn’t appear until the final story arc. Plus, he’s similarly stripped down, wearing civilian clothes instead of a costume.

This approach often works well with Wolverine. Chris Claremont and John Buscema took a similar tack when they launched Wolverine’s first solo series. And other writers have followed similar routes. Wolverine is just as effective without costumes and the flashy baubles of superheroes. Rucka’s vision of Wolverine as a rural vigilante is consistent with the character.

Unfortunately, Rucka’s approach to storytelling is similarly stripped them. This re-launch occurred at the height of the decompression fad and the three previously mentioned tales make up the whole of the volume. That’s right. This 19-issue volume contains only three stories. That isn’t automatically a problem. It’s theoretically possible to tell a compelling story over 6 or 7 issues. But that doesn’t happen here.

There aren’t enough twists or obstacles to keep a reader’s attention over that length. There are a few twists. The villain of the drug operation is a bit of a surprise. And there’s a nice moment in the third story when Wolverine preemptively betrays Sabretooth. But those major moments are too spread out. The stories drag and I frequently wondered when we would move on to something else.

The art doesn’t exactly help either. I’ve enjoyed Darick Robertson’s work in other places yet I wasn’t impressed with it here. It was often unimaginative. It’s like he was a cinematographer who forgot that his camera could move. Leandro Fernandez was much better on the middle arc, though I think he inked himself a little too heavily at times and obscured his otherwise fine pencil work.

Overall, this was a very disappointing volume. On the bright side, I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for the individual issues. I could at least console myself that I waited to buy the trade at a much more friendly price point.

I’m usually on the lookout for interesting new comics and this past spring seemed especially promising with a number of new projects by familiar creative teams. Indeed, some series exceeded my expectations and are quickly becoming new favorites. However, others didn’t click right. They’re not horrible comics; they’re even well crafted to some extent but, for one reason or another, they weren’t what I was looking for.

The first and probably biggest disappointment is Fairest. I’m a huge fan of Fables and I loved the idea of a spin-off that would focus on that series’ rich mix of female characters. But that’s not exactly what we got from Bill Willingham and Phil Jimenez.

I was surprised that the preview issue didn’t include any female characters. It told the story of the young thief Ali Baba and his genie guide as they broke into a goblin camp to free a princess from a deep slumber. It was a well-crafted tale but I thought it was a poor story-telling choice. It may have worked as an installment of Fables but it didn’t fit with the mission statement of Fairest. I was further disappointed when that preview turned out to be an accurate reflection of the first issue. Yet I was still willing to give the series a chance based on my prior appreciation for Fables.

The second issue, however, confirmed my poor impression. In this issue, Briar Rose is at least fully awake and on the run with Ali Baba. The scenario has potential and the arguments between the two characters have a nice Moonlighting element to them. However, that characterization is undercut by Jonah the genie’s diatribe about wo

m

en. Briar had argued that she could keep up with Ali, an argument that is patently false based on their relative fitness. B

ut rather than noting that a pampered princess can’t outrun a trained thief, Jonah 

launches into a rant about how 

women aren’t as good as men. As he says, “That’s why marathons give out two awards, one to the real champion and another to the first female finisher.” I was dumbfounded. I thought Billie Jean King had settled this issue in 1973 when she defeated Bobby Riggs. Ali Baba is faster and has more endurance because he’s in good physical shape and Briar Rose is not.

One might defend Fairest by noting that a character makes this statement and not necessarily the writer. However, I’m not sure that defense holds in this case. The genie is generally deferred to as a knowledgeable, almost omniscient character. Plus, Bill Willingham didn’t have to include the diatribe at all. It speaks poorly of him that he chose to write it when it has little to do with either the story or the main characters. Instead, it reads like an anti-feminist statement in a series that’s supposed to appeal to those who are interested in rich female characters.

The other unexpected disappointment was Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra. Hickman and Pitarra were responsible for last year’s excellent mini-series The Red Wing and this new series was specifically promoted as coming from the same creative team.

Manhattan Projects does provide some of the same crazy science based adventure as The Red Wing. There are parallel dimensions and teleportation tubes and all kinds of interesting objects. Unfortunately, The Red Wing had one thing that Manhattan Projects does not: characters that we can care about.
The premise is that Manhattan Projects takes place in an alternate dimension where Robert Oppenheimer’s team of scientists invented a lot more than an atomic bomb. However, in this dimension, Oppenheimer has been replaced by his evil twin. We’re not talking about your garden variety bad seed here; we’re talking about a Jeffrey-Dahmer type of sociopath. This is also a different version of Albert Einstein. It’s not the lovable, slightly wacky version we’re used to from most depictions. This Einstein is surly and cruel. There’s also a German scientist who is recruited into the project after the defeat of the Nazis. I don’t think he has an exact historical counterpart but he’s presented as a version of Joseph Mengele, willing to experiment on live humans in the name of science. As I said, there aren’t a lot of likable characters to care about.
There are a few nice moments. In the second issue, I enjoyed a humorous scene in which a young scientist sent to Germany surrenders before he realizes with relief that he actually arrived at an American military camp. Yet those joyful moments don’t outweigh the ugly ones. Other readers may enjoy Manhattan Projects more than I did. But for me, the balance between the ugly and the beautiful was off-kilter and it’s not something I want to read on a regular basis.

That’s not to say that everything new has been disappointing or underwhelming. A few new series have turned out to be quite excellent. The first is Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Vaughan is the creative mind behind earlier hits like Ex Machine and Y: The Last Man. Staples demonstrated her artistic flair on the recent mini-series The Mystery Society. So I was definitely looking forward to their new sci-fi epic. My biggest concern was that it wouldn’t be able to live up to my anticipation.
I needn’t have worried. Though it’s very early, Saga has been everything I could have hoped for. A galaxy at war. A central romance. A parade of bounty hunters. Interesting new species, including one that’s a television/human hybrid.
Saga was promoted as Brian K. Vaughan meets Star Wars. That’s a pretty hefty billing to live up to. But Saga is no Star Wars rip-off. There are superficial similarities but Saga draws from classic literature like Romeo & Juliet and modern communication theory as much as it does from popular science fiction.
Perhaps the best thing about Saga is the way in which it keeps the focus on its central couple while using the entire galaxy as a backdrop. This isn’t the story of a galaxy at war. Rather, it’s the story of two young people who are trying to survive and start a family. The galactic conflict provides an epic feel and numerous moments of awe. Yet the personal element is what draws us into the story.

The other pleasant surprise has been X-O Manowar. X-O Manowar is not a new concept. It’s one of the characters from the original Valiant line and it debuted 20 years ago. This version is brought to us by Robert Venditti, who I didn’t know before this, and Cary Nord, an artist who impressed me years ago with his work on Conan.
X-O Manowar is Aric, a barbarian who fought against the Romans before being abducted by aliens. He eventually gained control of one of their exo-suits, escaped and returned to Earth. In the original series, Aric was a fish out of water. As a barbarian who had survived to the present day, he was occasionally disgusted by modern conventions. But he also had control of a technologically superior suit and a major corporation.
In the new series, Venditti and Nord have decided to explore Aric’s origins in much greater depth. The origin isn’t simply a backstory for a modern superhero. Instead, it’s the central narrative of the comic book. The comic provides historical background and reference for the battles between the Romans and the “barbarian” Visigoths. The Romans have superior wealth, arms and tactics but the Visigoths are indefatigable foes. Aric is part of this ancient conflict, the underdog fighting against the superior enemy.
This becomes the setting for an alien incursion. Venditti does a great job of getting into Aric’s head. He isn’t a modern comic book fan who has watched X-Files and read War of the Worlds. He has no concept of aliens from another world. He originally mistakes the aliens for Romans and then for magical creatures. The series explores concepts like technology and military strength. It also deals with human themes like captivity and freedom. It has a rich texture and a unique setting. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I’ve been reading Jay Faerber’s new crime noir series, Near Death.  (Full disclosure: I’m a big Jay Faerber fan from his earlier series Noble Causes and Dynamo 5.)  The premise is that a killer for hire named Markham has a change of heart after a vision in which he sees all of his previous victims.  He doesn’t suddenly become an altruistic do-gooder or a pacifist.  Rather, he pragmatically decides that he should to try to save as many lives as he’s taken as some sort of a metaphysical balance.    

            The first issue moves along at a brisk pace.  We see Markham’s vision and are present for his change of heart.  We even see Markham’s first mission as a new man. 

The second and third issues also move quickly.  In each issue, Markham takes a job.  He presents himself as a problem solving soldier of fortune and a bodyguard.  He finishes the job but there’s always a twist along the way, showing that the job isn’t quite what he was told from the beginning.  Yet Markham manages to fulfill his responsibilities while also staying true to his new ethic. 

Three issues, three stories.  Near Death is an excellent example of a done-in-one comic.  Yet Near Death also left me wanting more.  You see, after three issues, the formula was already becoming stale.  Markham will take a job.  There will be a twist.  Markham will finish the job.  Despite its interesting premise, I was concerned that Near Death would become an excellent example of the limitations of the done-in-one or stand-alone comic. 

There’s a long-standing debate in comic book circles as to what is the right length of a story.  Many Silver Age aficionados will argue for the supremacy of the single-issue story as that’s what they grew up with.  Former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter infamously decreed that no story should last more than three issues, since Jack Kirby’s famous Galactus story was only three issues.  And in the last decade, most comic book publishers pushed for six-issue stories so that they could more easily be collected in trade paperbacks. 

I’m not going to argue for a six-issue standard.  It’s difficult to sample new comics when you’re only getting a sixth of a story.  Plus, one ill-conceived story could last for half a year.  The publishers have pretty much admitted that it was a mistake as they’ve abandoned that mandate in recent years.  The first story in the new Captain America series lasted 5 issues; the new Uncanny X-Men went for three.

I’m not going to argue for the done-in-ones either.  Sure, the reader gets a completed story in every comic.  However, the brief nature of that story leaves little room for complexity.  There’s one twist, maybe an obstacle or two.  But there’s scant room for character development or growth. 

That was my concern about Near Death.  We didn’t know Markham any better by the end of issue three than we did at the beginning of issue one.   And while each story had an interesting or surprising twist, they didn’t have time to build a lot of tension.

I would argue that the right length for a story is relative to that story.  And I would also argue that the length of story within a series should vary. 

Admittedly, I hold this view partly because of the comics I grew up with.  I came of age during the Bronze Age.  I started out with Wolfman and Perez on the New Teen Titans.  That title serves as an excellent example of variable story length.  Issue 20 is a stand-alone story.  Issues 21 and 22 are a two-parter.  22 through 24 are pieces of a four-part story, including that year’s annual.  26 and 27 are another two-parter.  28 and 29 are both technically stand alone stories, though they help to form a much longer arc concerning new character Terra. 

Yet, while I acknowledge the basis and possible bias behind my opinion, I honestly think that’s the way comics should be.  The length of a story shouldn’t be determined arbitrarily by convention- whether it’s one, six or three.  It should be determined by the needs of that particular story.  Plus, in order to keep the reader both entertained and surprised, the length of the story should vary.  Variety is, as they say, the spice of life.

I should have remembered that Jay Faerber grew up reading the same comics that I did and watching many of the same television shows.  (He’s written about many of them, including the New Teen Titans, in his “Under the Influence” afterword).  The stand-alone stories in Near Death were the way in which he got the series off to a quick start.  However, the fourth issue changed pace and answered many of my concerns. 

This time, Markham finished the current job before the half-point of the issue, complete with the now-expected twist.  That gave Faerber room to include a scene in which Markham discusses the implications of his new life with a close acquaintance.  Faerber deepened and developed Markham, without hitting us over the head to tell us that’s what he was doing.  One of the implications of his new life is that Markham’s old associates don’t approve.  Those old associates return at the end of the fourth issue, introducing the first cliffhanger to the series. 

 It looks like Near Death isn’t going to be a done-in-one series, even though it started out that way.  Faerber is already varying the length of his stories, giving himself the room to include more character development and more complicated plots.  He’s not tied to either single issues or to story arcs.  And that’s a very good thing. 

By Andrew A. Smith

Scripps Howard News Service

Ever since Neil Gaiman’s astonishingly literate Sandman series ran from 1989 to 1996, I’ve wanted someone to point out the cool stuff I missed. And now, with DC/Vertigo’s lavish The Annotated Sandman Volume One ($49.99), that project has begun.

As should be obvious to anyone who reads comics regularly, writers from the UK make far more literary allusions than American ones. Maybe UK kids receive a more comprehensive literary education, or maybe it’s a cultural thing. Whatever the reason, it is manifestly true, and no UK comic-book writer does it more than Neil Gaiman. And even he never did it more than in Sandman, which wove together myth, folklore, literature, DC Comics and pop culture into a seemingly seamless whole that served as a backdrop for compelling (and often horrifying) stories.

This was the stuff, ahem, that dreams are made of. The Sandman series has been reprinted in a variety of formats and remains a critical and commercial bonanza, an evergreen seller for DC’s Vertigo line.

But even as I reveled in the smart, moving stories in Sandman, I was fully aware that there were aspects of the book I was flat-out missing. There were throwaway bits here and there, lurking in the background, referring to things I didn’t know about, or simply didn’t connect. They weren’t of sufficient importance that I failed to understand or appreciate the stories, but enough that I was aware of them. And I wanted to know what they were, both out of curiosity, and in case they added another layer to the already multi-layered stories.

And I wasn’t the only one, which explains the existence of The Annotated Sandman. Gaiman tapped Leslie S. Klinger to do the annotations, an expert on Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, and in general an experienced hand at taking an academic approach to pop culture. It also helps that Gaiman provided Klinger the original scripts and correspondence from when Sandman was being created.

The result is a huge (12” by 12”) hardback, with page-by-page, panel-by-panel notes explaining the minutiae that is not readily apparent in Sandman #1-20. (Three more volumes will cover issues #21-75, and presumably annuals and specials). It’s in black and white, as opposed to the original color comic book, but the lack of hue doesn’t seem to hurt anything and probably prevents the book from being prohibitively expensive.

And, of course, it’s fun. Re-reading Sandman is by no means a chore, especially now that experience is enhanced by the explanations, addenda and et cetera found in the annotations. I was surprised by how much I did catch the first time around, but it’s comforting to get the rest – references to G.K. Chesterton, the English “poll tax” rebellion, Geoffrey Chaucer, and so forth. There are even references to the Erinyes – the Furies of Greek myth – that I missed the first time around, whose mention foreshadows the important role they play in the series finale. 

Many books that are widely praised turn out to be a disappointment when finally read. Sandman is not one of those, and fully deserves this treatment.

And while I’m discussing DC Comics, this is a good place to plug Batman: The Black Mirror ($29.99) by writer Scott Snyder and artists Jock and Francesco Francavilla.

Snyder made his bones with American Vampire, an ongoing Vertigo book with a clever take on bloodsucker mythology – that just happened to have Stephen King as co-writer on the first five issues! Snyder then took over the venerable Detective Comics for its final 11 issues before being re-launched with a #1 issue (along with all of DC’s other superhero books) last September.

Snyder did so well on Detective #871-881 that he was awarded Batman with the September re-launch. And it is those issues collected in Black Mirror, stories featuring an evil underworld society, a whale corpse in the lobby of a prestigious bank and former Robin Dick Grayson’s final turn filling in for the Dark Knight. It also contains, running from the start to a horrifying finish, the return of Commissioner Gordon’s possibly sociopathic son, Jim Junior.

The Batman franchise was one of the few that continued virtually unchanged through the aforementioned September re-launch, so in comic-book terms, what happens in these issues “count” in current continuity. And as you’d guess from Snyder’s Vampire origins, the legacy he leaves for Gotham City is chilling.

Black Mirror is simply Batman comics as they ought to be – no matter who’s under the mask.

Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics@aol.com.

The Games are finally over. 

            More than 20 years in the making, Marv Wolfman and George Perez have finished their New Teen Titans original graphic novel.  For a long time, Games was one of those lost projects that comic book fans fantasized about.  But now, the Titans have defeated writer’s block, artist’s burnout, other creative obligations and a stalled-out restart.  The Games are here.

            “Was it worth the wait?” Anacoqui asked me after I finished reading it. 

In a word, “Yes.” 

“Games” is a classic Titans story.  It features the familiar, favorite characters and the ideal creative team.  Yet there’s more than nostalgic appeal to this graphic novel.  It’s a solid story in it’s own right.  It may not quite live up to “The Judas Contract,” “The Terror of Trigon” or “Who Is Donna Troy?” but it’s reasonably close. 

That isn’t to say it’s a perfect story.  There are a few noticeable weaknesses:

1. A Slow Start

            “Games” takes a while to get going.  There’s a good opening scene in which the Gamesmaster destroys an Arctic base in Greenland as his opening move against CBI agent King Faraday.  But the second scene is redundant.  Wolfman even repeats the line “Your Move, Faraday” at the end of it.  We then see all of the villains get into place as well as each of the heroes in their private lives.  The cuts between heroes and villains could build up tension, but with this many characters it takes too long to get through all of them.  It would have been better if Perez had given a half page to each character.  That would have created stronger contrasts, while moving the story forward at a quicker pace.  Faraday doesn’t meet with the full roster of Titans until page 21.  Nightwing asks the question we’re probably all thinking, “Now can we get started?”

2. King Faraday’s Strong Armed Recruitment Drive

            Surprisingly, the answer to Nightwing’s question is “No.”  After Faraday tells them about the Gamesmaster’s plots, the Titans initially refuse to help him.  This leads to a second round in which Faraday harasses the Titans in their private lives in an effort to coerce them into helping him.  The sequence doesn’t make any one look good.  Faraday is a bully.  And the Titans get bullied.  The menace of the Gamesmaster was significant enough that the Titans could have gotten involved right away.  It’s not a good sign that they needed to be coerced.  But if the Gamesmaster wasn’t a significant foe, it’s not a good sign that they gave in to threats.  

3. Tenuous Ties

            The eight villains are supposed to be a part of one grand plot.  And there are vignettes in which Dick and the rest of the Titans decipher clues that lead them to the villain’s targets.  But there’s not a consistent theme among them.  Are they trying to isolate Manhattan by attacking bridges and ports?  Are they trying to make a statement by attacking points of interest like museums?  Or is their target the Titans themselves as some of them are attacked in their personal lives?  The afterword reveals that there was an original connection based on an anagram but that was discarded for being verbal instead of visual.  Unfortunately, nothing replaced it and the various villain plots remained unconnected. 

4. Uninteresting Villains

            Wolfman and Perez created eight all new villains for this graphic novel.  On the one hand, it makes for a unique story.  After all, the Titans aren’t fighting the Brotherhood of Evil or Brother Blood again.  On the other hand, some of the new villains are little more than ciphers.  They’ve been hired to fight the Titans and that’s about all we know.  They’re not all awful- and I’ll get to the good ones later- but it’s not the strongest line-up.

5. Gar Logan’s Hair

            Wolfman and Perez started work on “Games” back in 1987 or ’88.  In a lot of ways, the story feels timeless.  Yet there are a couple of ways in which it feels dated.  The most irritating is Gar Logan’s mullet.  I know that it’s the hairstyle he had at the time.  And I realize it’s a minor complaint.  I get annoyed when reviewers spend too much time on hats or haircuts instead of the focusing on the heart of the story.  But I don’t think anyone would have been upset if the inkers had turned it into a buzzcut.

            With the weaknesses out of the way, it’s time to tell you what I liked about this story.  “Games” has real strengths.  Some of these strengths recall the Titans’ glory days.  Others are the product of a well thought-out modernization: 

1. Modernization

            Earlier, I complained about the lack of motivation for some of the villains.  But the main villain, the Gamesmaster, has a great back-story.  He’s a former writer who was hired by the CBI to dream up terrorist scenarios.  When his warnings were ignored, the Gamesmaster went rogue.  Now, he’s putting his own plots into action.  It’s a wonderfully timely take on a villain.  It brings the story into the post 9-11 world.  Yet at the same time, it’s kind of timeless as the Titans are fighting a terrorism-inspired super-villain rather than real-life terrorists.  Plus, we know that the CIA and FBI actually hire writers like novelist Brad Meltzer. 

            Marv Wolfman also does a great job of updating the dialogue to reflect the changes in gaming culture.  There are still references to Dungeons & Dragons style role-playing.  But there are also references to first-person shooter video games.  If anything, games have become a bigger part of our culture than when Wolfman and Perez first dreamed this story.  

2. Set in the Past, Not Stuck in It

            “Games” is set in the Titans’ past.  That’s part of the charm.   Fans want to see George Perez draw Nightwing, Cyborg and Raven.  But, unlike a lot of stories set in the past, “Games” has an astonishingly significant impact on continuity.  This isn’t merely a trip down memory lane.  The status quo is not the same by the end of the story and that makes “Games” a very compelling read.  This is partly because the story was originally conceived in the late ‘80s.  Wolfman and Perez were moving their characters forward and that’s reflected in the final tale.  The result is some major changes to the Titans, their supporting cast and their setting.

3. The (Partial) Redemption of Danny Chase

            Marv Wolfman acknowledges in his foreword that fans didn’t like Danny Chase.  He was written to be a typical annoying teenager and that rubbed fans the wrong way (shocking, I know).  But Chase was part of this story and Wolfman had to find a way to make him work.  He played up Danny’s connection to the CBI.  And he gave Danny a star turn when he selflessly disregards his own safety in order to save everyone else.  It’s not a complete redemption of the character.  He’s still annoying and his rivalry with Gar Logan makes Gar look bad.  But Wolfman at least gives Danny Chase a good exit. 

4. George Perez Art

            George Perez is a modern master and his artistry is on display on every page.   There are stunning angles, like a bird’s-eye view of the Guggenheim museum.  There are creative page layouts, such as a jogging scene in which Dick Grayson is alternately depicted in full color and shadow.  There are the distinctive facial features and varied body types for which Perez is renowned.  Perez wows us with intricate details like a mountain of skeletons.  He amazes us with visual playfulness such as a villain who is made out of TV screens.  Perez is one of the best, and he’s at his best in “Games.”

5. Seamless Transition from Old to New

            I know that George Perez had finished drawing 70 pages back in 1988.  I know that he had started up on the project again about 5 years ago before being called in to help Phil Jimenez finish Infinite Crisis.  So I know that this story was drawn during three separate periods spread over more than 20 years.  But I can’t tell by looking at the story.  A lot of the credit has to go to the three inkers: Al Vey, Mike Perkins and George Perez himself.  They create a seamless transition from one era to another so that the book has a strong, consistent look.

6. Azarath

            One of the most memorable stories in Titans’ history was their journey to Azarath.  George Perez utilized a new artistic style so that the other dimension would stand out as something truly different.  He skipped black ink, opting instead for a rich red color.  With “Games,” Perez did it again.  However, he did it differently.  This time, Azarath is depicted in black and white charcoal.  Once again, the artistic change conveys the sense that this is an otherworldly dimension.  Plus, Perez did it by using a new trick instead of repeating an old one.  

7. Hero Specific Foes

            I admit that I didn’t like all of the villains.  Danny Chase’s antagonist didn’t have much going for her.  And Knight and Squire seemed like an odd choice for Jericho.  But I did appreciate the way in which Wolfman and Perez paired the heroes up with villains who would challenge them.  Cyborg, who is both man and machine, fought Mekken, who is a man inside a machine.  Nightwing squared off against a fellow strategist.  Raven fought a dark version of herself.  And Gar Logan, the former television star and frequent comic relief, faced cartoons come to life and a villain made out of TVs.  The specifically chosen villains were good foils who highlighted the heroic qualities of their opponents. 

8. Heroes Helping Heroes

              After setting up the individual clashes, Wolfman and Perez did a good job of avoiding the same well-worn rut.  When one hero had defeated their own villain, they quickly rushed to the aid of the nearest Titan.  That mentality moved the story along- the second half of the book had a much better pace than the first.  It also demonstrated the Titans’ teamwork.  We witnessed the creative use of powers in combination.  Yet we never got the impression that some Titans were weaker than others.  It was apparent than any one Titan would have defeated their specific villain in time but they were happy to rely on help.

9. The Twist

            I don’t want to say too much.  There should be some surprises.  I will say that Wolfman and Perez do a good job of upending our expectations before the story is done.

10. The Extras

            This is a hardcover original graphic novel.  Like the DVD set of a television season, we expect more than the story.  “Games” delivers.  There’s a great foreword by Marv Wolfman, recalling what made him fall in love with the Teen Titans in the first place (mostly Nick Cardy and Wonder Girl).  There’s an excellent afterword by George Perez.  However, the greatest treat was the original treatment as typed up by George Perez.  It was interesting to read the initial ideas, and it was informative to read Marv Wolfman’s footnotes detailing the changes from 1988 to today.  It would have been nice to get a few art extras as well, like some pages comparing Perez’s initial pencils to the final inks.  But there’s no question that DC did a lot to make this book feel special.

The fifty-pound turkey stood on the grass, panting nervously.  It was as if the fearful creature knew that Thanksgiving was only a little more than a week away.

That, of course, was impossible.  More likely what was giving the turkey fits was the small throng of low-level officials and spectators and newsmen---naturally, newsmen---that hovered around it.  Upon receiving a signal, the bird’s handler lifted it up and placed it on a small stand near the White House lawn.

A minute or so later, the man who resided in that house came out.

There was nothing new in the President of the United States receiving the gift of a turkey for Thanksgiving.  The gesture had started many, many years before, first by private citizens, then by civic organizations and commercial interests getting in on the act.

And if it was a slow news day---no wars or fires or floods going on---then a report of the event was good for a few column inches in the papers.  It was the kind of press Presidents like.  Some light-hearted remarks about cooking or carving or eating the bird.  Maybe some not-so-light-hearted jabs at the opposition party, which is easy to do when talking about turkeys.  And the public would get to see that the President and his family were “just folks”, like the rest of us.

However, this particular Thanksgiving occasion would be different.

The President approached the stand and inspected the turkey, still ruffling its wings and squawking anxiously.  The Commander-in-Chief pronounced it to be a fine specimen and thanked the party responsible for donating it to the First Family’s dinner table.

Yet, as hearty and, no doubt, as tasty as this turkey would be, it would not wind up in an oven in the White House kitchen, declared the President.  Instead, he announced that the bird had “been granted a Presidential pardon.” 

Thus began a tradition.

Of course, you all know about the annual Presidential Pardon of the White House Turkey.  It’s grown into a more formalised event since the day when it was started by the first Chief Executive to do so.  It makes the evening news on television.  There’s footage of it on YouTube. 

There are two birds now, and we’re told their names and their weights. The idea of two turkeys was intended as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too measure.  One gobbler would get the pardon; the other would get the axe.  But PR-savvy Presidents who didn’t want to piss off the animal-rights groups soon resorted to pardoning both turkeys.

One episode of the television series The West Wing---“Shibboleth”, first aired on 22 November 2000---used the annual turkey-pardon as a sub-plot.

But I wonder how many of you could tell me which President started the tradition?  The man who came out and, for the first time, declared that the White House turkey would receive a Presidential pardon.

That is, can you do it without Googling for the correct answer?  Oh, come on . . . it’s not like I’m expecting you to pick the right one out of forty-three guys from blind luck.  Especially at this time of the year.  Local news programmes and talk shows, not to mention the Food Network, love to toss out this fact.  You’ll probably hear one of the announcers mention it to-day while you’re watching football .

On the other hand, nearly all of them will get it wrong.  It’s what separates a "factoid" from a fact.

So go ahead and take your best shot.  If you want to discuss it amongst yourselves, I’ll wait.

Got your answer?  O.K., let’s see how you did.

Some of you may have thought of Abraham Lincoln.  Honest Abe is a pretty good answer for a lot of Presidential firsts.  As a matter of fact, if you’ve been reading my Deck Log long enough to remember my first Thanksgiving entry, you’ll recall that it was Lincoln who established Thanksgiving as a national holiday. 

If you said Lincoln, a lot of people agree with you.

As the story goes, in 1863, President Lincoln received a turkey as a holiday gift from one of his supporters.  The President’s ten-year-old son, Tad, grew attached to the bird and adopted it as a pet.  He named it “Jack” and gave it run of the White House.  The boy was blissfully ignorant of the fate intended for the gobbler until the day before the feast, when one of the cooks carried it off to meet its date with the chopping block.

Horrified, Tad burst in on Lincoln in the middle of a Cabinet meeting and tearfully begged him to spare the animal.  The tender-hearted father acquiesced and Jack lived out his natural lifespan as the boy’s pet.

There you have it.  Case closed, right?  Well, not so fast.

There is a question of whether the story is true or apocryphal.  I tend to believe it really happened.  White House correspondent Noah Brooks, of The Sacramento Union, reported the events in a dispatch a year later.  But the validity of the tale is not the issue.

First, Lincoln did not issue a pardon for the bird.  He simply scratched out a note to the cook, telling him to spare Jack and find something else for the holiday dinner.

Eh, what’s that?

“You’re splitting hairs, commander.  The note Lincoln wrote, ordering the turkey not to be killed, was essentially a pardon.”

Well, maybe so, maybe not.  It doesn’t really matter because I forgot to mention---Lincoln received the turkey as a gift for Christmas, not Thanksgiving, which had come and gone by then.  Jack was slated to grace the First Family’s Christmas dinner.

And, in any event, it did not start a tradition of sparing turkeys from the holiday feast.

As I noted, the practise of donating a turkey to the White House was not an uncommon one, even back then.  But it became a regular thing during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending the finest of his well-stuffed birds to Grant.  Vose continued to do so with each of Grant’s successors.

“Poultry King” Vose selected the Presidential bird with great care.  They never weighed less than thirty pounds and sometimes topped the scales at fifty.  And they were guaranteed “good eatin’”.  Vose’s annual turkey donation became an anticipated event for those occupying the Oval Office and his farm enjoyed widespread publicity because of it. 

The only parties that didn’t benefit from the annual gesture were the turkeys, which wound up on a silver platter in the White House dining room.

Horace Vose’s yearly offerings continued for forty years, until he died in 1913.  But, by then, the Thanksgiving turkey donation had become established as a national symbol of good cheer, so there were plenty of civic groups to pick up the slack.  It also became something of a spectacle, a mixture of patriotism and showmanship.  In 1921, President Warren G. Harding received a Thanksgiving turkey supplied by the Girls’ Club in Chicago.  The gobbler was bedecked as a flying ace, complete with helmet and goggles.  And to make sure the bird travelled in style, its crate was decorated in red, white, and blue bunting provided by an American Legion post.

In 1925, First Lady Grace Coolidge did the honours, accepting a Thanksgiving turkey from a troop of Girl Scouts from the President’s home state of Vermont.

Some of these birds may have escaped the oven---if so, no particular note was made of it---but most of them ended up satisfying the stomachs of the President, his family, and guests on Turkey Day.

Things didn’t change much during the Hoover and Roosevelt years.  The turkeys arrived and the turkeys were eaten.

And that brings us to President Harry S. Truman.

If you cheated and ran the question through a search engine, Harry Truman probably popped up in most of your hits.  And to be sure, Truman did have a lasting effect on how the annual Thanksgiving turkeys were donated to the White House.

And, wouldn’t you know, the reason was political.

In 1947, President Truman established a new foreign-aid task force, the Citizens Food Committee.  The committee’s goal:  to find some way of conserving one hundred million bushels of domestic grain for redistribution in war-ravaged Europe, as part of the Marshall Plan.  The committee determined that the most efficient way of doing this was to reduce the national consumption of meat and eggs.  It proposed a campaign of encouraging Americans to observe “Meatless Tuesday”, “Poultryless Thursday”, and a somewhat vague “Wasteless Everyday”.

Dutifully, the President made a radio address in that October, asking families to prepare their Tuesday meals without meat and their Thursday meals without poultry or eggs.  Just as, Truman assured, would be done at the White House.

It was Poultryless Thursday that caused all the trouble.  Not too surprising, given that Truman made his radio address seven weeks before Thanksgiving, which of course always falls on Thursday.

The first salvo of protest came from an irate chicken farmer, who sent a crate full of live hens to the White House.  The crate bore a sign:  “Hens for Harry”.

But it was the National Turkey Federation, a consortium of poultry producers, which left an enduring mark.  It sent a forty-seven-pound turkey to President Truman just before the Christmas of 1947.  The public had shown a resentful backlash to the Citizens Food Committee’s recommendations, and Truman saw this as a chance to rehabilitate his popularity.  He graciously accepted the National Turkey Federation’s donation in a Rose Garden ceremony, with plenty of press photographers on hand.

It’s this photo op that many confuse with the first Presidential turkey-pardoning.  But none of the reports of the event, nor any of Truman’s personal records, indicate that anything happened to the gobbler other than providing the main course for the Trumans’ holiday table.

And, as in the case of Lincoln, it was not a Thanksgiving turkey, but one given for Christmas.

For the next year’s Yule, the NTF provided Truman with two turkeys.  It pretty much sealed the fates of the Presidential gobblers when Truman remarked that he would take the birds to his home in Independence, Missouri, where they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner.  His twenty-five relatives, the President explained, “require a lot of food.”

So the tradition of the Presidential Pardon of the White House Turkey did not begin with Truman, either.  What did start with Truman was the National Turkey Federation’s involvement.  Realising that the turkey was more symbolic of Thanksgiving, the Federation adjusted the timing of its annual turkey delivery to mid-November.  And it has remained the official source of the Presidential turkeys ever since.

So let’s keep going.

President Eisenhower succeeded Truman and got his birds from the Federation.  Ate ‘em.

The turkeys John F. Kennedy received in the first two Thanksgiving seasons of his presidency wound up on the White House dinner table.  The 1963 bird was luckier.

The poultry industry pulled out all the stops that year and presented President Kennedy with a fifty-five-pound broad white tom.  The monster fowl sat on a pedestal, trembling.  Despite the sign saying “Good eating, Mr. President!”, JFK took one look at the frightened bird and said, “We’ll just let this one grow.”

But no announcement of a pardon, even in jest.  After the ceremony, the turkey was quietly returned to the Federation officials, who placed it on a farm for breeding.

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, wasn’t so easily swayed.  A rancher by avocation, he was more sanguine about the final fate of livestock.

Johnson won the 1964 election handily, gaining the presidency in his own right.  “I hadn’t been quite sure what I was going to eat Thanksgiving,” said LBJ of that year’s turkey donation, “but I’m glad I can eat turkey instead of crow.”

Richard Nixon may have been the first Chief Executive to not make a meal out of any of the turkeys provided to the White House.  But he never announced pardons for any of them, either.

Each Thanksgiving during his time in office, President Nixon accepted the bird with the now-customary formalities, made a few noncommittal comments, and posed for the press.  After everybody went home, Presidential aides would send the gobbler to a petting zoo near Washington.

Presidents Ford and Carter followed suit.  And that brings us to Ronald Reagan.

At his first turkey-receiving ceremony, in 1981, President Reagan looked almost incredulous when a reporter asked him what he was going to do with the handsome bird.

“Eat him,” the Gipper replied, straightforwardly.

Now, he was the first President to use the word “pardon” in connexion with a turkey.  That was six years later.  By then, the popular Reagan was enmeshed in the unfamiliar territory of a scandal---the Iran-Contra affair---and the media took advantage of the occasion to ask him questions that he didn’t want to answer.

Reagan’s former national security advisor, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, and his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had both been indicted as Iran-Contra conspirators.  When reporters asked the President if he intended to pardon the two men, he dodged the question by pointing out that the NTF-donated turkey was destined for a petting farm.

“If not, I’d have pardoned him," quipped Reagan, indicating the turkey.

So once again, we get close to determining the first President to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey, but no cigar.  The Gipper simply joked that he would have pardoned the bird, but it wasn't necessary.

I can guess what some of you are thinking . . . .

“Commander, you’ve taken us from Lincoln of the 1860’s to Reagan of the 1980’s, and you still haven’t identified the first President to issue a pardon to the Thanksgiving turkey.  It’s been such a long-standing tradition, you must have missed somebody.”

Well, no.  I haven’t.

You see, this traditional act, which everybody thinks has gone on forever, didn't occur for the first time until the autumn of 1989.

That was the first holiday season in the presidency of George H. W. Bush.

On 14 November 1989, the first President Bush attended the usual ceremony on the White House lawn and accepted the yearly contribution.  Present were the usual assembly of aides, NTF officials, reporters, and photographers.  A more distant group of spectators probably didn’t escape Bush’s notice, though.  A troupe of sign-carrying animal-rights activists was picketing in front of the Executive Mansion. The President was already in hot water with the pro-animal people for his hobby of hunting quail.

That may have been what led Bush to make a more committed choice of words when asked about the future of the plump fowl presented to him.

“Let me assure you---and this fine tom turkey---he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table,” declared the President.  “Not this guy.  He’s been granted a Presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here.”

The film footage played that day on local news broadcasts all over the country.  Sometimes all it takes is a creative turn of a phrase to captivate the public’s interest.

For his next three years in office, George H. W. Bush proclaimed a Presidential pardon for each of the White House Thanksgiving turkeys, thereby cementing the custom---one that has been followed by all of his successors.

But it’s not an old American tradition, as such things are usually measured.  In fact, if you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been around longer than it has.

 From Cheryl and myself, to all of you, our fondest wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving Day, and many more of them.