Number 92

Secret Origins and Sky Bird #2

June, 1961 was a good month for me. On June 22 I got Superman Annual #3, and on June 29 I bought the first Batman Annual, which I thought was excellent, and still do! But a couple of weeks earlier, on June 15, I waited impatiently at Sunnyside Pharmacy for Gus the pharmacist to put out that week's comics, pouncing on the one special squarebound issue I'd been waiting for, Secret Origins. I'd been primed for it since seeing the ads in some DC Comics.

I was 12-years-old, would be 13 in less than a month. A teenager! Time to put childish things like comic books behind,* but not just yet. I just had to have something called Secret Origins. After all, it promised to show me the origins of the Superman-Batman team, which I followed in World's Finest Comics, Adam Strange, a terrific strip from Mystery In Space, Flash (one of my favorites), Green Lantern, and even lesser super-heroes like Green Arrow and J'Onn J'Onzz, the Martian with the stupidest name ever. I could have skipped the Wonder Woman origin, but I was especially interested in the Challengers Of The Unknown, by a "new" favorite artist, Jack Kirby.

I took the book home and with shaking hands started to read, only to find by the last page that I'd been screwed. It wasn't at all what I wanted or what I'd hoped it would be.Apparently Jim Harmon, who wrote the issue of Sky Bird#2 devoted to just that subject, felt the same way.

I showed you Sky Bird #1 back in Pappy's #26. Number 2 is a five-page fanzine produced like the first issue on a spirit duplicator. The cover artist, Ronn Foss, was a talented amateur who was expected to go places in comics. As it turned out he didn't--not the way he had planned, anyway--because by the time Ronn was ready for comics they weren't ready for him. Comic book companies by 1961 were closed shops; they had all the artists they needed or could keep busy. Ronn worked on fanzines, taking over The Comicollector and Alter Ego from Jerry Bails, and published his own 'zines for several years.

Jim Harmon wrote the book, The Great Radio Heroes, and was one of the first writers to take popular culture of the 1930s and '40s seriously. At the time I read this issue of Sky Bird** with its critique of Secret Origins I said a loud, "Amen!" in agreement. In the 46 years since I've softened my opinion. For its time the editors published what they felt was the most commercially viable material. They probably thought that no one would be interested in the early 1940s comic books.

I pulled out my original copy of Secret Origins (I still have it, along with the other DC squareback annuals I bought that month) and re-read it. I should say I skip-read it, since the stories were familiar enough to me. I agreed with Harmon in his original assessment of what should have been included, but neither he nor I had any idea that by the mid-1960s we'd see The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer, reprinting several great stories, which in turn begat book after book of comics archives and reprints. (That's not to mention the Internet and Pappy.)

In 1961 neither Harmon nor I could have dreamed that within the next few decades we'd be seeing all of the things that we wanted for Secret Origins and much, much more.

*I'm still reading comics nearly five decades later. So much for outgrowing them.

**Incidentally, I scanned Sky Bird #2 before selling it a few years ago on eBay for the outrageous winning bid of over $200. I'm still shaking my head over that one. It made me wish I'd held on to more of the old fanzines, which I thought were interesting, but to which I assigned no value either personally or financially.

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Green Lantern's Brother Jim

One oddity about comics is how seldom we encounter relatives of superheroes, especially siblings. Kal-El had no brothers or sisters; neither did Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Peter Parker, Barry Allen, Jimmy Olsen... it might save some time to mention characters that we know did actually have siblings in the Silver Age: Lois Lane (sister Lucy), Scott Summers (brother Alex), Sue Storm (brother Johnny), Quicksilver (sister Scarlett Witch) and Hal Jordan (brothers Jim and Jack).

The first three mentioned had a fair number of appearances in the Silver Age. Johnny Storm was the Human Torch, and he appeared in both Fantastic Four and Strange Tales. Havok appeared in the last dozen or so issues of the Silver Age X-Men. Lucy Lane became the permanent love interest for Jimmy Olsen during the Silver Age.

Jim Jordan, on the other hand, appeared in only a few issues of Green Lantern, becoming more or less an annual character. The interesting part of these stories was that Sue Williams became convinced because of an odd set of circumstances, that Jim was secretly Green Lantern. In her first appearance with Jim (GL #9), Sue's a magazine reporter determined to get the scoop on Green Lantern's secret identity. By the end of that story she's convinced (wrongly as we know) that Jim is actually GL.

Hal's brothers next appear in GL #14. By now, Sue's introduced as Jim's girlfriend. She discovers an old green lantern in Jim's hotel room and is convinced that it is the famed lamp that gives GL his powers. Earlier, Jim and Hal have accidentally switched rings, so he does briefly have super abilities, which just serves to confirm Sue's suspicions.

The Jordan brothers next appear in GL #22's Dual Masquerade of the Jordan Brothers. Red Peters, a criminal has just escaped from jail. As it happens, Jack Jordan was the prosecutor who sent him to jail, while Uncle Jeremiah Jordan was the judge who sentenced him, and Green Lantern captured him. Since Sue has written about her suspicions that Jim is secretly GL, she is concerned that Red will be gunning for the Jordans at Uncle Jeremiah's upcoming birthday party.

In one of those "convenient for the plot" moments, the birthday party turns out to feature a masquerade, although in a sloppy bit of art, Jim Jordan and Red Peters seem to be the only ones wearing a disguise. Hal decides to play along with his brother's impersonation of GL in the hopes that Peters will be scared away.

In GL #31, the Jordan Brothers return. This time Jim is about to be married to Sue, but then a villain appears with a bizarre threat:



Once again, Green Lantern comes to the rescue, and once again, circumstances conspire to convince Sue that her husband (they marry in the last panel of the story) is secretly Green Lantern.

Jim returns again in GL #44. He has started a new career as an image maker, and his first client is another uncle, this time millionaire Titus Jordan. Sue has enrolled Uncle Titus in a scheme to establish once and for all that Jim is secretly Green Lantern. Uncle Titus wants Hal to pretend to be a super-criminal named the Bottler (sheesh, what a scary name for a villain). But the real Bottler shows up and Hal, the real Green Lantern, once again saves the day, but leaves Sue more convinced than ever that her husband is secretly the Emerald Gladiator.

In GL #53, Hal babysits his new nephew, Howard Jordan, the son of Sue and Jim, while the young couple attends a play. But the theatre is robbed and when GL shows up to defeat the crooks, Sue is even more convinced than ever that he is secretly her husband.

Jim, Sue and Howard make a cameo appearance in GL #63. The whole family gets together for their final appearance in GL #71. In this story, they meet up with Doug Jordan, who somehow is a hippie from Tennessee. Sue is convinced Doug is up to no good, so she insists that Jim take care of him as GL. But Doug (who is indeed a bad 'un), konks Jim and takes him to a motorcycle gang he's trying to join. Fortunately the real GL arrives in time to save him. In the end, Jim extracts a promise from GL to come to the party to prove to his wife he's not the superhero she thinks he is. GL agrees, but only because he's already going to the party as Hal, and thus Sue remains convinced that her husband is the ring-wielder.

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Number 91



Frankenstein Friday: The Monster's Mate!


Pity the poor Monster. As Don Rickles used to say, "So lonely. I gotta find a broad."

In this pathos-heavy story, a mute and mutilated 7' circus woman wanders into the Monster's life, and he suddenly finds friendship and some sort of monsterly fulfillment in her companionship. Too bad the stupid and superstitious villagers--as all European villagers apparently are, according to old movies and comic books--don't see anything good about the Frankenstein Monster and 7' woman palling around together. They go after them with the usual tools of European villagers: rakes, clubs, torches…even some guns.

The story comes from The Monster Of Frankenstein #23, February-March, 1953.

Click on picture for full-size image.

In his transition from funny Frankenstein to the Monster of Frankenstein, with a style change from comedy to horror, our favorite creature has perhaps forgotten he was once married. That story was posted in Pappy's #27. Unfortunately, the Monster's new girlfriend, with whom he shacks up in a cave, isn't much better looking than his ex-wife. The guy can't catch a break.

Next week: The next-to-last Frankenstein Friday: "Death O'Clock!"

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Number 90


Bob Powell's The Man In The Hood!


The truly great Golden Age comic book artists were the artists of whom it could be said, "that guy could draw anything.*" Bob Powell could draw anything, and he drew anything extremely well. It didn't matter the genre: crime, science fiction, jungle, western, horror, romance, super-heroes…he could draw it.

My favorite period of his is in the mid-to-late Golden Age, circa 1947 to 1954. Powell never worked for the biggest of the bigs in the publishing industry. During his time in the 1950s he was active with four publishers, mainly Magazine Enterprises (ME), Fawcett, Harvey and St. John. My favorite stories of Powell's from this early 1950s era are his horror stories. He did some fine ones. Luckily some of the original art from those stories still exists, found in a warehouse for Harvey Comics.

I'm posting a story scanned from original art (courtesy of Heritage Auctions, to whom I am grateful) that I think is topnotch Powell. The story, "The Man In The Hood," from Chamber Of Chills #13, 1952, is a gruesome story set in the period of the French Revolution, involving the guillotine and the executioner, a man who stays safely inside his mask.


The artwork in this story is superb. Powell did use assistants--he'd have had to or he'd never have been able to produce as much work as he did in those years--and they did a wonderful job, but he had the control. The art always looks like Powell.

A characteristic of Powell's artwork was to give the color artist a light blue watercolor wash in areas he wanted emphasized with color. I'm sorry that wash doesn't reproduce better in my scans.

*Or, well, almost anything. One of my all-time favorite artists, Jack Davis, couldn't draw love comics. He could draw everything else, though.

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Quick Trivia

Quick, name a DC series that started out in Mystery in Space, then continued in Strange Adventures in the 1960s.

Did you say Adam Strange? Wrong! Adam Strange did start out in Mystery in Space, but the Strange Adventures stories were all reprints with the exception of #222, which featured a new Adam Strange story, but which was dated Jan-Feb 1970.

The answer, and it's a tough one, is Star Rovers. The Star Rovers were a trio of space explorers and adventurers. Glamorous Karel Sorenson was a former Miss Solar System and expert shot, while playboy Rick Purvis was a big game hunter. The final member was novelist and sportsman Homer Glint.

The series seems in some ways the Atomic Knights equivalent in Mystery In Space, in that they did not appear in every issue, but every few issues. However, unlike Atomic Knights, Star Rovers was more traditional in some ways and yet more offbeat. It was traditional in that the stories were formulaic. The Star Rovers would be asked to solve some mystery and each would come to a conclusion that debunked the others, and yet in the end all three would be proven wrong.

Indeed, within a few stories they were all remarking on that fact:



The titles to the stories were all questions:

MIS #66: Who Shot the Loborilla?
MIS #69: What Happened on Sirius-4?
MIS #74: Where Is The Paradise of Space?
MIS #77: Where Was I Born? Venus? Mars? Jupiter?
MIS #80: Who Saved the Earth?
MIS #83: Who Went Where? and Why?
MIS #86: When Did Earth Vanish?

At this point, though, Julius Schwartz, the editor of MIS ran into a problem that was actually fairly common at DC over the years: he inherited a new feature. Hawkman, who had been having trouble earning his own title despite a pair of three-issue tryouts in Brave and Bold was assigned to Mystery in Space, which left no room for the Rovers. So they scurried over to Strange Adventures #159 and #163 before finally being retired. They never made the cover of any magazine they appeared in; they were strictly backup material.

And yet there is a certain charm to the series. Gardner Fox tinkered with the formula a bit, and so the Rovers were not always wrong despite frequent initial misconceptions. Sid Greene's artwork was perfect for the slightly humorous sci-fi settings. And it cut against the grain of DC's typical heroes who always figured out the most cryptic mysteries on their own.

Correction: I originally said Sid Broome. My bad!

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Number 89


Alley Oop And The Epics Of Homer!



I always thought of Alley Oop as the best comic strip I never got to see. As a kid in the 1950s I was aware of it. I'd seen some comic books here and there, so I was familiar enough with the character that when the popular song by the Hollywood Argyles came out in 1960 I knew what it referred to. What fascinated me about it was the science fiction idea of time travel.

V. T. Hamlin, created Alley Oop in the early 1930s, and it's still running today, almost three-fourths of a century later. Now that's time travel!

Oop has been popular enough for continuous publication, but didn't have the kind of distribution other popular strips had. It was syndicated by NEA, which wasn't King Features or Chicago Tribune, both of which had strips in thousands of newspapers, popular in all kinds of formats, from movies to radio to comic books. I have wondered if Alley Oop wouldn't have been twice as popular as many of the other comic strips of the era had it been given their syndication.

Reprints of Alley Oop have been sparse, but there have been some. My favorite reprints so far have been those of Kitchen Sink, but especially Dragon Lady Press in the mid-to-late 1980s. I don't know how hard these are to get now; I bought them off the stands from my local comic book shop when they came out. Dragon Lady was one of my favorite reprint publishers of the era, but may have been submerged by a comic book glut during that time.

Besides the historical reprinting of the first Oop strips in #1, "The Legend Begins," the real historical (in both senses of the word) reprinting started with #2, "Enter The Time Machine," with the introduction of Doc Wonmug and his fantastic invention.

Oop is plucked from the prehistoric world he had inhabited for the past six years of his strip's lifespan, and suddenly the whole world of plot ideas opened up. The sense of wonder the strip had for me was not in the caveman era sequences, but in the time travel elements.

The first time travel sequence had a brief tease a few days before the strip did its abrupt turn in plot, a sequence where Ooola and Oop witness a camera, sent back through time, materialize and dematerialize before them.
"Enter The Time Machine," and its follow-up in #3, "Oop Vs. Hercules," contain an uninterrupted 15-month story of Oop's adventures outside of his own time in Moo. Hamlin picked two epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to kick off his new look for the strip. Oop and friends are in on the Trojan War, end up with Ulysses on his voyage home, then on their own odyssey with Hercules.

Oop was a strip with humor, suspense, good storytelling, and above all, great artwork. As you can see from these two strips, Hamlin (and his assistants) didn't cheat the reader when it came to perspective or detailed drawings. Most artists just wouldn't go to that much trouble, not then, not now. Excellent drawing was a big part of the strip's appeal.

Besides the perspective in drawing I like to put things into perspective. In 1939 comic strips were a major popular culture force. During World War II paper rationing caused strips to shrink and they've never stopped. In 1939, just before the start of their steady decline, they were full-size, and they were wonderful. Think of the titles of even a fraction of the popular strips of the era: The Phantom, Mandrake The Magician, Terry And The Pirates, Wash Tubbs, Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy, and the list goes on and on. It was almost an embarrassment of riches. As far as I'm concerned, Alley Oop held his own with any of the major comic strip players of the era.

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Number 88


Frankenstein Friday: World of Monsters!


Dick Briefer's Frankenstein series went on hiatus for about three years. The last issue of the  cartoony Frankenstein, #17, was in 1949. In 1952 the character was revived to be more like he was conceived in the movies, an inarticulate, grunting beast, not totally human. This was during the horror comics boom of the early '50s. Frankenstein isn't quite like other horror comics because of the recurring character, but also because there isn't a whole lot of horror going on!

This story, "World Of Monsters," is a tale incorporating elements from H.G. Wells' The Island Of Dr. Moreau, (the human girl created from a wildcat), and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, (a mesa with dinosaurs). There's also a panel of the Frankenstein Monster in hand-to-hand combat with a dinosaur, which brings King Kong to mind.

From Frankenstein #21, Oct.-Nov. 1952:

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