The Secret Agent Wore a Bowtie

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Hai, 31 tháng 3, 2008

Comic publishers were ever alert for the latest trends among adolescent boys. When the secret agent craze hit in the mid-1960s with James Bond and his many imitators the comics were not far behind. Marvel made a terrific entry with Nick Fury, Agent of Shield.

DC responded with... Jimmy Olsen.


Now, you can probably see the problem here already. James Bond was suave, cultured, handsome and the epitome of cool. Whereas Jimmy was naive, unsophisticated, homely and as square as the Bizarro World.

The story (from Jimmy Olsen #89, December 1965) starts with Jimmy and Lucy on a date to see a movie featuring "Jamison Baird, Agent .003". As was common in the DC universe, things were changed just enough to avoid lawsuits, although it seems a bit odd in this case. DC had published a story featuring James Bond only a few years earlier (Showcase #43).

As Jimmy and Lucy watch the movie, he provides running commentary about the gimmicks that Bond--errr, Baird--uses in the movie. After the show, they see a man get shot trying to escape from a ship. He dies on shore, but not before he gives Jimmy a clue. Tell Superman to find a Doctor Juarez in the Latin America country of Andulia.

But in his typically zany fashion, Jimmy decides to become a secret agent himself and pursue this great mystery on his own. He comes up with a kit full of gimmicks and dubs himself Secret Agent Double-5, because... try not to laugh now, both his first and last names have five letters.

Jimmy shows up in Latin America, where a comely senorita gives him a very friendly greeting:

Hey, maybe there's something to be said for this secret agenting business. But of course she tries to kill him:

This gives Jimmy a chance to use his "parachute flashlight", one of the gimmicks he created. It somehow doesn't get ripped out of his hands when it deploys.

He changes his hair color, but now that he's in Latin America he needs something more of a disguise than his green suit and red bow-tie, so he does the noble thing:

Say what? Jimmy stealing clothes from a "peon"? Couldn't they have had him dropping a fiver in front of the poor guy? Terrible characterization, and even worse the poncho disguise works for about five seconds. Jimmy's thrown in a cell with another lovely senorita (one admires the unisex nature of Latin American prisons), and they escape as shown in the splash panel at the top. But of course, she betrays him as well (this spy business is starting to resemble my love life in college), and so he must escape yet again using one of his gimmicks:

Jimmy and Superman eventually solve the mystery, and free Dr Juarez, who turns out to have been working on an artificial heart that the dictator of his country wanted because it would let him rule for another hundred years as a despot. And in the end, Jimmy encounters another "dazzler":

It is this constant tension between the notion of Jimmy as the hero of his magazine, and yet a buffoonish teenager like Archie that creates some of the charm of the Silver Age Jimmy Olsen. They would show him being ultra-competent in one panel and goofing off in the next; gee, can't imagine how that might resonate with adolescents. ;)

Well, Agent Double-Five returned in Jimmy Olsen #92, and this time they showed him kicking some pretty iconic DC superhero butt:

An agent of S.C.A.R. has broken into Jimmy's apartment. But our hero reveals one use for his bow-tie:

I'd try to explain this story but it's virtually incomprehensible. Jimmy catches his double trying to burgle the apartment, then pretends to be the double, then encounters the Robin double who warns him to stay away from a particular location before being disintegrated, where of course Jimmy immediately heads and gets an operation that puts a deadly device in him like the one that killed Robin. Errr, the Robin double. And there are Superman, Supergirl and Batman doubles as well, but they're just basic crooks with similar features, which explains the front cover when they fight him, but the main villain, an alien, (who calls himself Nero) wants to burn the Planet Earth. Jimmy manages to save civilization by preventing Nero from killing the ersatz double superheroes.
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Number 282



Burke and Hare


"To burke" is to kill by smothering or suffocation. The verb comes from this pair of miscreants, Burke and Hare, immoralized…heh-heh, I mean immortalized, in "Ghoul's Gold" from 1946 in Crime Does Not Pay #43. It's written by Robert Bernstein, who later worked for EC, writing the entire run of the title Psychoanalysis. He was an all-purpose guy. A couple of years later he did Aquaman stories for DC.

Jack Alderman was the artist of "Ghoul's Gold." Jack had a very heavy-handed style. I don't think I've ever seen anything drawn by him in any but Lev Gleason's crime comics. His figures are stiff--get it? stiff?--and his inking is heavy and dark. In other words, just about perfect for this little tale of a couple of infamous murderers…







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Stanhope's Libraries

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Chủ Nhật, 30 tháng 3, 2008

Most of DC's teen heroes showed some signs of aging, although obviously at nothing like the calendar's pace. In Action #270, (November 1960), Supergirl celebrated her 16th birthday. Four years later, in Action #318 (November 1964), Supergirl graduates high school and begins to attend Stanhope College, so she's aging at about half the normal rate.

Stanhope would be her home for the next seven years. It was a nice, small college, with apparently quite a substantial building budget. In Action #318 Linda Danvers (Supergirl's secret identity) pledges to Alpha Lambda sorority. But she has to pass several initiation tests, one of which involves the new library:



She has to find some way to transport the books from the old library to the new one. Linda implores students to each withdraw ten books from the old building and return them to the new one. A neat little solution, although some might be a little concerned at a library which only has ten books for each student.

But given that, what are we to make of this panel from Action #349 (April 1967), only two and a half years later:



Okay, so Stanhope had three libraries during Linda's undergraduate years. And it was lucky that was all; in Action #366-368 a pair of futuristic fiends named Alpha and Beta threatened to blow up the entire campus with a bomb.

And I'd suspect some substantial repairs to the third building were required after this incident in Action #371 (January 1969):

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Fables. Volume 1. Number 70

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Fables. Volume 1. Number 70
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Gravel. Volume 1. Number 1

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Army @ Love. Volume 1. Number 12

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Army @ Love #12 (Season Finale)
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Jimmy Olsen's Ape Girlfriend

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Bảy, 29 tháng 3, 2008

DC played lots of tricks on Jimmy Olsen, but this certainly takes the cake:


And on the splash panel for the story it's played for comedy, but there's a disturbing subtext:


It may seem hard to believe the CCA let this stuff through, but this sort of offbeat humor was a staple of country comedy in the USA at the time. We do learn that yes, it is a "bride" for Jimmy, so it's not like this is "unnatural" love, heh. Let me add here that despite the timeframe (late 1966), this does not appear intended racially. It's just an attempt at a normal goofy Jimmy Olsen story placing him in an embarrassing situation, which ends up looking either perverted or racist to us today, but would not have been seen as such at the time.
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The Fortress of Stalkertude

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Sáu, 28 tháng 3, 2008

Mark Engblom has been covering Superman's rather creepy Fortress of Solitude in a series of entertaining (and revealing) posts. Highly recommended!
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Number 281



The Starving Ghoul



This is a screwball story from Eerie Publications' Terror Tales #7, March 1969. The title, "Gravestone for Gratis" has nothing to do with the story. Neither does the splash. They look like they've been stuck on from a different story. Other than that it's pretty typical of an early '50s horror comic from which it was reprinted. I don't have the information on its original appearance.

The writer could have let us know early in the story the main character had a medical problem so the plot device at the end wouldn't be so jarring. And speaking of "jarring," the cover is a gruesome Eerie Publications classic.


Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7

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Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. Volume 1. Number 6

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Năm, 27 tháng 3, 2008

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Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Tư, 26 tháng 3, 2008


Number 280



Sexy John Stanley



Besides strips about little kids, Little Lulu and Nancy, in the early '60s John Stanley did some teenage books, including Around The Block with Dunc & Loo and Thirteen Going On Eighteen.

This is an example from Dunc & Loo #2, Jan.-Mar. 1962. Stanley pokes some sly fun at teenage hormones with a story about Dunc's plot to take some sexy pictures of his girl, Beth, with a typically hilarious Stanley outcome. While the layouts and script are by Stanley, the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide credits the art to Bill Williams.

As a teenager in 1962 I had a problem with Dunc & Loo. Even in that distant and long ago year teenagers didn't dress like Stanley's teenagers. They had a style more from the 1940s than the 1960s. Dunc has a bowtie, which would have had him laughed out of my high school, and the hat Loo is wearing is strictly, well, old hat!





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Slightly Off Topic, But

Người đăng: vanmai yeu em on Thứ Hai, 24 tháng 3, 2008

I had to comment on this comic:



The Incredible Hulk #141 is dated August 1971, so it's just outside my normal focus, but it's such a gas that I couldn't resist talking about it anyway. Done as an homage to Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic, it's a superb collaboration between Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe and Johnny Severin.

In the story, we meet Malicia and Reggie, a wealthy liberal couple who are looking for a socially responsible cause that they can support. Their daughter has the obviously trendy one featured on the cover, but:



So they decide to take up the cause of the poor, misunderstood Hulk. Now that is a positively brilliant premise for a story, and the execution is near perfect. Severin's inks help set the lighthearted tone, and before you know it, the charity fundraiser for old Greenskin is under way:



I get the feeling the gal in the blue dress is supposed to be Barbra Streisand. The blond-haired fella in the background is Tom Wolfe himself, making his second guest appearance in a Marvel comic.

But you can tell that the bull is about to start knocking over the china. Sure enough, the daughter, who turns out to be pretty good at fighting, leads a protest.



The Enchantress has been watching all this and decides to lend a hand, turning Samantha into the Valkyrie:



Val became a regular in the Defenders series as well, although this issue ends with both her and the Hulk transformed back into their normal, socially-oppressed selves.

Highly recommended!
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All-Star Batman & Robin. The Boy Wonder. Issue 9

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Number 279



The Twisted Mr. Twisto



There's no secret to Charles Biro's approach to comic book writing. Focus on the bad guys. Villains are intrinsically more interesting that goody two-shoes good guys. The last time I showed classic Biro was a Daredevil story in Pappy's #229.

Biro's best covers are classics of pulpish sleaze. The cover to MLJ Comics' Zip Comics #9, November 1940, from which this Steel Sterling story is scanned, is a good example. Headless men, their brains in see-thru tubes, are having a punch-up with Steel. There's no story like that, but as a cover it's worth a lot of sales.


As for Mr. Twisto, the bad guy from this circus-based story, he's a villain firmly in the Biro tradition.

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*******


Harry Shorten was involved with MLJ Comics from its earliest days. He worked on Archie and other features. He is probably best known to a later generation of comics fans for publishing Tower Comics and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He even published the infamous Midwood Books. With Al Fagaly, also an MLJ alumnus, he created the There Oughta Be A Law! newspaper comic strip, which ran from 1944 to 1984. Like Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time, the strip that inspired Law, Shorten's strip was a combination of irony and funny names. In these examples check out "Cringely," "Glandula," "Polyp," etc. These strips come from a 1969 Belmont Books collection.

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