The Sensational Character Find of 1950

Though I love Silver Age super-hero comics, I had until recently been pretty uninterested in the other funnybooks of the 50s and 60s, the war and romance and teen comics. How could they hold the same appeal? But then I encountered the perplexing comic oddity known to man as Kafloppos, and was semi-consumed with finding more of them, with ferreting out exactly what the hell they mean. And since Kafloppos was a semi-homeless strip that bounced from All-Funny to Batman to Action Comics to Boy Commandos, I've ended up reading a pretty wide variety of books recently. And hey, it turns out that The Adventures of Alan Ladd, say, is basically filled with exactly the same kind of gangster-slugging, tough-talking, ridiculous adventure that I love, only with a fictionalized version of Alan Ladd in place of, say, Johnny Double.

And even if I didn't enjoy reading them,  The Adventures of Alan Ladd would hold a special place in my heart thanks to these three panels from issue 2, in a story entitled "Sheriff Alan Ladd":

Specifically, that unnamed, unreferenced, unspeaking girl who mutely pines for Alan. There's something very nearly perfect about the way that she's been drawn.

She's just so... intent, and Alan is so oblivious, that for three panels her poignant little drama completely overshadows the ludicrous plot. 

And then she is gone forever, hopefully to a long and happy life in her strange little Wild West themed 1950s town.

Alan Ladd caught the stagecoach robbers, by the way.

Silent Piner, I salute you.

I Obviously Have a Lot to Learn About Dungeon Mastering

I try to take my guys on adventures filled with mystery and crazy monsters (and, lately, a lot of municipal politics), but recently I was looking through some old issues of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the late 80s and, well, I just don't know if I can compete with this, from issue 7:

Your eyes are not deceiving you: that is the magically reanimated and enlarged skeleton of a jester that has been sent to destroy the city of Waterdeep, fighting off that city's griffon-mounted airforce. And, might I add, the skeleton is able to breathe both fire and ice.

It's enough to make a man think about hanging up his dice.

The Unfunnies: Time Was, A Prison Was a Place For Laughter.

I've mentioned the legal-system themed cartoons that ran in the various Batman comics before, with their light-hearted looks at crime and punishment and strange interconnectedness. Here's Warden Willis, head of the prison featured in Jail Jests. Presumably Lefty Looie is somewhere in the background.

Aside from the general thematic strangeness of these comics, I recently realized that they are all from the late 50s/early 60s, which is also the time period that the Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke... basically most of the classic prison movies are set in, and it's messing with my perceptions. I keep picturing 2143 putting fishhooks in his enemies' food or 2130 getting throttled with his own tether because he back-talked a guard.

The Morgan Freeman narration does add a certain class, though.

- From Detective Comics no 261

Even When Stripped of His Fantastic Powers, John Buys Comics

I bought comics! And now you get to read about them!

Flashpoint No. 2 (and about a million miniseries) (DC)

 

Why it's Here: I'm honestly not sure. Is it because I feel like I should at least make a pass at reviewing DC's Summer crossover? Because I want to see what kind of tomfoolery is going to spark the Big Reset in September? Is it just that I'm a sucker for an alternate universe story? No idea.

Non Spoiler Summary: The Reverse Flash has messed with time and now Everything is Different and Crazy and Dark. Batman is Thomas Wayne! Atlantis done blowed up most of Europe! Dogs are marrying cats!

The Very Best Thing About It: There's a lot of decent alternate-universe-everything-is-different stuff going on: less-used characters like Shade the Changing Man and the Outsider rub elbows with interestingly-tweaked versions of old standards such as the five-kids-and-a-tiger version of Captain Marvel Thunder. Plus it's always fun to see Dr Thirteen.

The Very Worst Thing About It: It just feels a bit... tepid. A lot of the characters in this world have clear motivations (stop the war between Atlantis and the Amazons, don't get killed, steal things, etc) but the series itself lacks any sort of clear reason for being. The world has changed because Reverse Flash did... something, or a lot of things, right? And he did it to... mess with the Flash? To what end? Honestly, the Sadistic Mastermind Who Hatches Overly-Elaborate Schemes and Gloats All the Time villain archetype is near universally the most tedious and irritating thing in comics. Reverse Flash is Hush is terrible and the world that he has created has no dramatic reason to exist. If it wasn't being played up as a BIG! FAT! IMPORTANT! CROSSOVER! this could just be a standalone Flash story with no consequences outside of his own book, and not many there.

I might take all this back if some later issue reveals that, say, the absence of Barry Allen caused the heroes to lose during the original Crisis and this is the shitty final

Also, the entire series takes place at night or under heavy cloud cover. THE WORLD IS LITERALLY DARK and the symbolism heavy-handed.

Who Made It: A Geoff Johns joint. Plus a lot of artists and auxiliary writers.

Closing Comments: I'm going to give this thing a couple of more chances. This means that I am part of the event problem. I feel terrible about this.

The Tooth (Oni)

 

Why It's Here: It's an original graphic novel about an anthropomorphic tooth that fights monsters. That's amazing.

Non Spoiler Summary: Think old Man-Thing or Swamp Thing: the travels and travails of an improbable creature and its human cohorts in a world crawling with demons and monsters and dark science. And it's framed as a story arc in a long-running series, complete with letters pages and callbacks to non-existent continuity. Fun!

The Very Best Thing About It: That it's a pretty much perfect recreation of the Weird Wandering Monster subgenre from days of yore, complete with purple narration and crazy monsters and an internal mythology that makes things like a tooth monster that splits its time between killing things and living in a dude's mouth make sense.

The Very Worst Thing About It: My boss just expressed interest in the odd book sitting on my desk, whereupon I realized that there was no way for me to explain it to a layperson without sounding like a crazy man. That's unfortunate.

Who Made It: Cullen Bunn and Shawn Lee wrote it and Matt Kindt drawed it.

Isle of 100,000 Graves (Fantagraphics)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: It's a Jason comic. Do you like those? Then you will like this. Do you not like those? You won't like this. If you have no idea what I'm talking about... Do you like the idea of a slice-of-life story in a very strange setting where all of the characters are idiosyncratically-drawn anthropomorphic dogs and birds? Well there you go then.

50 Girls 50 (Image)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: Because there's only so much you can say about this story if you're not getting mad about it. It's got a dumb title (at least I think it does, because that's the way it's written in the indicia) and a generic sci-fi story with really nice art - the only really remarkable thing about it is the number of plot hoops that Doug Murray and Frank Cho jumped through in order to set up their cheesecake-fest. "Earth is starving and we need to find another planet! Look, a wormhole that messes up the Y chromosome - better send a spaceship full of hot science-babes to look for one." "Oh, no! This jungle planet we landed on has a crazy atmosphere that dissolves plastic! We are forced to wander around in tiny scraps of cloth and spear-fight giant insects until we can find a way off!" And so on. If Frank Cho's jungle ladies appeal to or repulse you, this book is likely to do the same.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent (Icon)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: Because I foolishly have not read any Criminal before and I have no idea if discussing the plot of this issue will be spoilery. Succinctly, it is excellent.

Kirby: Genesis #0

 

More than just the most prolific and influential creative mind in comics history, Jack Kirby is pretty much a genre unto himself these days. Entire series have been devoted to trying to capture and distill his technomythological superhero adventure style (like Joe Casey and Tom Scioli’s Godland and Scioli’s own self-published The Myth Of 8-Opus), memorable issues of comics have paid loving tribute to his achievements (Supreme: The Return #6 by Alan Moore and Rick Veitch is probably the finest example), and his depictions of action, energy, and technology in superhero comics have led to entirely new terminologies being named after him (Kirby Krackle, Kirbytech). Of course, the entire Marvel Universe as we know it wouldn’t have existed without him, not to mention various still-viable sub-sections of the DC Universe. Now, in the new series Kirby: Genesis, Dynamite Publishing is laying claim to pretty much everything else that doesn’t fall under the purview of the Big Two—lesser-known Kirby creations like Captain Victory, Silver Star, Galaxy Green, and a whole host of other concepts still owned by the Kirby estate—and folding them all into a shared-universe adventure that kicked off with a $1 Issue Zero this past week. One might be tempted to accuse Dynamite of trying to cash in on the Kirby name, re-heating some leftovers that may not have been all that fresh to begin with (as fun as Kirby’s 1980s output was—his Super Powers series was my first exposure to his work as a kid—you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that would call that period their favourite). Even the announcement of Kurt Busiek as writer and Alex Ross as cover artist/art director wasn’t enough to dissuade my skepticism, initially at least. But if the Zero issue is any indication, Kirby: Genesis looks to be a fun, heartfelt tribute to the King of Comics, one that successfully captures the style and feeling of Kirby at his most cosmic.

 The series begins in a universe somewhat parallel to our own, where, in 1972, the Pioneer 10 Space Probe ventures out into the cosmos bearing a plaque illustrated by a familiar comics craftsman—a plaque that depicts humanity in the form of a male/female duo of Kirbyesque superbeings offering a friendly wave to whomever might greet the spacecraft (an afterword by Busiek explains this story point—Kirby was one of several artists asked by the Los Angeles Times how they might convey humanity to extraterrestrial beings via the Jupiter Probe, and this exact illustration was Kirby’s response). Reaching deep space, the Probe is sucked into a wormhole, and proceeds to zoom through a series of distant galaxies occupied by godlike superbeings engaged in various life-or-death struggles, all bearing the distinctive design tropes of the King of Comics. Among these are the aforementioned Captain Victory, Galaxy Green, and Silver Star, but eagle-eyed Kirby acolytes will also be able to pick out Destroyer Duck and several characters from the short-lived Kirbyverse of the early Nineties as well (not to mention various other unused Kirby concepts straight out of his sketchbooks, some of which were originally intended for his magnum opus, The New Gods). As the Probe finally begins making its way back to Earth, its passage is noted and followed by a pair of divine beings named Jerek and Spring, setting the stage for Kirby: Genesis #1.  

 More than anything, this book positively glows with affection for the life and work of Jack Kirby, and for a devotee like myself, that goes a long way. However, Busiek’s script uses that anecdote about the Pioneer Probe to hang an intriguing story idea on, one that is appropriately, wildly cosmic, but has a human element to ground it (after the Probe’s launch, we are briefly introduced to the series’ human protagonists, a couple of stargazing inner-city youths named Bobbi and—of course—Kirby). This melding of the fantastic and the real was the key to the success of both of Busiek and Ross’s previous collaborations, Marvels and Astro City, and it’s a formula that seems to bring out the best in both creators. The paintings of Alex Ross have always done a remarkable job of adding a patina of believability to Kirby’s designs, and his work here is no exception. While Ross mainly provides covers and art direction, the lion’s share of the interior artwork is handled by newcomer Jack Herbert, whose solid work here recalls the art of Astro City penciller Brent Anderson (with just a hint of Norm Breyfogle). The lead story feels fairly packed, despite being only 12 pages, but it’s hopefully a good indication of what’s to come. I’m fairly excited to see where this story goes, but I’m hoping it will stay contained to the pages of Kirby: Genesis—rapid overexpansion seems to be a fatal mistake for the comics industry in general and Dynamite Publishing in particular (Green Hornet, anyone? Project: Superpowers?). I’d hate to see this promising series diluted by a slew of spinoffs; the onslaught of variant covers promised for issue #1 is overkill enough. Still, if the quality of this Zero issue can be maintained into the regular series, it’ll make for a welcome return of the King.

Adscape: Wildroot Cream Oil

Here are several facts about Wildroot Cream Oil:

1) Roughly zero people use Wildroot Cream Oil today.

2) If one goes by the ads alone, approximately one hundred percent of people used to use Wildroot Cream Oil.

3) This is possibly because Wildroot Cream Oil had one of the greatest jingles of all time. If I had the opportunity and/or the hair, I would be sporting a cream-oiled coiffure this very moment. I sometimes find myself singing it while going about my day, and I cannot help that I am doing so.

4) Not content to rest on their musical laurels, the folks down at Wildroot had their fingers in a multitude of advertising pies, and evidently comic books were a fertile source of cream oil customers, because they sport such ads up until at least the mid-Sixties.

4a)The most basic of these ads took the form of one- or three-panel gag strips, wherein users of Wildroot Cream Oil might get the girl:

Or non-users might be set up as an unflattering mirror to the un-cream oiled reader. How will you every get the girl if you look like this, after all?

Or - and perhaps more disturbingly than intended - Wildroot Cream Oil could be portrayed as more important than the girl, as a necessity of life to be considered before all other things.

4b) About the time that Wildroot was sponsoring the Sam Spade radio program, the company's print advertising started featuring the detective as well. The number of crimes solved due to the absence, application or in one case aerial bombardment of hair tonic reached levels unheard-of before or since.

Notably, however, since this was the radio Sam Spade and not the novel or movie version, there was never an instance of Sam ruthlessly manipulating a collection of colourful underworld characters into betraying and murdering one another over a bottle of Wildroot. Which is a shame, because advertising needs more melancholy tales of moral ambiguity and bittersweet revenge.

4c) And then, presumably, Wildroot's Sam Spade contract ran out, because there was a new perfectly groomed detective in town: Charlie Wild.

Charlie Wild's adventures tended to be a bit more abbreviated than Sam Spade's, but they conveyed the same basic message: if your hair is messy then you have two basic career paths, criminal...

... or loser. Conversely, of course, an application of a certain popular name-brand hair tonic both signified virtue and raised esteem.

 

Even Charlie Wild, however, was not immune to the eerily addictive effects of Wildroot.

4d) And finally, there's Fearless Fosdick.

Fosdick, of course, was Al Capp's parody of Dick Tracy that existed as a comic-within-a-comic in the strip Lil' Abner - which is possibly the most convoluted explanation of a licensed property that I have ever had to give - and as such was probably the source of some of the most absurdly entertaining of the Wildroot ads.

 

His most endearing feature as a corporate shill, though, is that he's just as dang fond of the jingle as I am.

(Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie...)