The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1496: National Lampoon v.1 #76, July 1976

This one was really, really hard to read. The whole thing is a parody of Southern U.S. culture, skewering the Rebels and everything that their side of the Civil War stood for. So there's a lot (A LOT) of racist writing, a lot of horrendous social ideas, all presented under the shiny veneer of satire. The trouble is, seeing how the United States is currently deporting itself with regard to race, class, gender, everything, makes this satire distasteful. They may have thought they were making fun of a dying culture, but sometimes, in this case and in the case of facists/nazis, cultures should simply be left to die. Remember them, historically, sure, but let's stop using them as sites of entertainment. When we do this, we de-fang what is really a very brutal, destructive way of thinking. While satire in some ways connotes superiority in the presumed reader, that superiority, the ironic stance, can also obscure the danger of destructive cultures. If we get so used to laughing at it, how can we be ready to stop it when it rears its head again. To me, this is what's happening with the growth of white supremacy in North America - we spent so much time laughing at it that when it ran for president, we thought it was a joke.

"Remember, don't be fooled by ecology, environmentalism, or any of the rest of that crap!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1495: National Lampoon v.1 #72, March 1976

Some fun comics in today's issue, though I am looking forward to getting back to traditional comics. I feel bad flipping past all of the articles in this magazine. I only like it for the pictures ;D.

The "Turtle Farms of South America Expose," illustrated by Frank Springer is pretty hilarious. The real gem, however, is a full-colour "Trots and Bonnie," in which Bonnie gets quite naughty. This isn't the first full-colour, multi-page TnB I've seen, and they're always a welcome treat. I've been kicking around getting the collected edition. Perhaps when I've got a job.

The other content was quite excellent - the bar for comics in National Lampoon is pretty high, to be honest. There's some Spain, Gahan Wilson, and the usual ridiculous photo stories.

"You throw it into a pail with battery acid - then you stir it around with a screw driver."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1494: National Lampoon v.1 #71, February 1976

You'll notice up there on the cover the words "Clowning Around with Tits."

One thing I will say about National Lampoon is that you're pretty much always guaranteed at least on nice picture of breasts per issue. Now, before I'm shit upon, yes, it sucks that there aren't as many bare-chested men with rippling abs and lovely pecs. It sucks that there aren't more representative body shapes and colours as well. I'd love to see all of that just as much as you would. But in reading something that's now 40+ years in the past, especially something as contentious as National Lampoon, one has to see the positives where one can.

And I'm positive that there's always going to be some nice breasts to look at in National Lampoon.

Today's issue also had a comic in it about people who came to realize they were made of ink, and that their world was defined by panels, and it did some fucking wonderful, insane things with self-referential comics.

Actually, just read it. It's fucking great. From the mind of Ed Subitzky.

"Well, Solevitch believes it's all done for something called a 'reader'!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1493: National Lampoon v.1 #61, April 1975

Always a mixed bag with National Lampoon. Today's issue was so-so.

The comics section at the end of the issue is always fantastic. Those are A-list artists at the top of their games as far as I'm concerned.

The stuff in the magazine itself sometimes reflects too much the casual misogyny and racism that was deemed acceptable at the time. It's one of the reasons that, for this project at least, I'm only reading the sequential content of each issue.

I haven't mentioned the covers very much, either for this series or for any of the magazines that I've read. I noticed last night as I was adding yesterday's issue to the database, that the covers of magazines and the covers of comics have a very different design aesthetic. The database I use for my collection (Collectorz.com) allows one to view each listing as a small cover graphic. When I have something like National Lampoon or Heavy Metal sitting next to more traditional comics fare, it's easy to see the difference. But it's not something I'd noticed before.

A few months back I was deep into reading old 50s horror titles and got a crash course from the text features in Tales Too Terrible To Tell, the New England Comics pre-Code reprint series. George Suarez points to Avon Publishing's Eerie as one of the earliest horror comics, but notes that they had paperback artists design the cover, and it looks like it:

I love comics, but I have absolutely no concept of design. So to be able to see these differences is pretty neat for me.

"Ahh...wait, what, what's all dis dark shit?..Where da fuk is I at?!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1492: National Lampoon v.1 #59, February 1975

Jumping back through time, and back into the magazines, I'm going to continue just reading the comics in these issues right now.

This one was a bit tough to get through. The main comics feature, an insert like the "Son 'o God" comics, was called "Heil Love," and took the form of a 60s romance comic telling the story of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler.

There was a time that we could mock the Nazis, to a certain extent, and that was a time when the relatively insulated world of Western media thought that Nazis were a thing of the past. There's a naive hope evident in any of these kinds of media pieces (thinking here of The Whitest Kids U'Know's "Triumph of the Ill") that, really, this is a form of thought that we'll never see again, a sad, embarrassing moment of the human race's past.

Guess not.

There were a couple of photo features in here, one supposedly written in Spanish, but as if the writer had only a very, very basic knowledge of the language. Uncomfortably racist in the same way as the Hitler comic, really. I know this is all meant to be irony, and gonzo humour, but it's a bit hard to take in our current day and age.

That aside, the Wilson, Bode, Flenniken, et al. comics were amazing as usual. I look forward to seeing what other really and truly bizarre things the Lampoon throws at me next.

"Los dos hombres gladiola mortal."

The Faces of Glory - Alan Moore's Glory #1 [Wraparound Variant, Avatar Press]

I hope you'll forgive my attempt at stitching this picture. I'm not great at it yet. And, to be fair, the tech I'm using isn't the best either.

A bit more of the Mychaels work today. He's definitely got the sexy warrior vibe going in his pieces, less about the corporeal than Martin, but not quite the warrior that we see in Haley (wait until you see his issue #2 variant. Probably my favourite).

This is the wraparound variant of issue #1 of the Avatar Press series, art by Marat Mychaels. We'll see a bit more of Mychaels' art, and that villainess, and her utterly ridiculous cleavage, later on. I don't really understand this cover. Is the horned lady watching Glory getting angry at her readership? That seems weird.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1491: The Zaucer of Zilk #2, November 2012

Seriously. Look at that cover. That's got to be one of the best comics covers I've ever seen. And I want a pair of "fancy pants."

The Zaucer travels "behind the scenes" in his pants, exposing himself to ravenous consumers of content who float on clouds. I'm not sure there's a lot of social commentary in the story, but this part definitely is. The Zaucer must escape these creatures, who transform into a giant mouth, before they devour him.

And then he enters Dankendreer, Errol Raine's domain, and the McCarthy colours disappear. Pages and panels are streaked across with rain, bleeding from the panel borders right across our field of view. It's a lovely touch, to give us the impression that literally everything in this dimension is sodden and miserable. Such wonderful contrast to the psychedelic swirliness (that's the technical term) of the rest of the comic.

A nice thing that we see, and I like to these days call it The Squirrel (or Zquirrel?) Girl Effect, is that the Zaucer attempts to help the bad guy (who isn't who you might think), rather than simply defeating them. So much violence is born of fear and feeling powerless - if we can help people to not feel that way, we reduce the amount of violence in the world. I'm not trained in these sorts of things, but that seems pretty straightforward to me. Help people, don't hurt them = better world.

If only that were a majority sentiment.

"A thousand billion aeons of time burst from Charognae's every cell, to seep into the infinite mansion of Darkendreer --"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1490: The Zaucer of Zilk #1, October 2012

I don't know how it is for other comics fans, but I have a hard time walking past a Brendan McCarthy comic without at the very least having a flip through. He is, bar none, the most colourful and psychedelic artist working in mainstream comics, and everything he does looks amazing.

Today's comic could really be set in Pepperland (from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine). Both the tone of the series and the look of the series hearken back to that crazed wonderland. The Zaucer's realm is populated by bizarre and colourful characters, as you can see from the cover, and their adventures are, for the most part, exercises in randomness and chaos. At least, that's what it looks like to us. The Zaucer's realm is a very different place from ours, and all that randomness actually seems to work for the characters in the story, almost as if, from their perspective, it's not random at all.

My favourite scene in this issue is when the Zaucer has to get himself some "fancy pants" in order to walk between dimensions. He had to actually trap these free-roaming pants himself, jumping into them both legs at once, after luring a pair with a tasty piece of pocket lint.

And that right there tells you everything you need to know about the story. Its silly and weird and beautiful, and very much work a read.

"Merely a facilitator for those cosmic intelligences who've paid to watch your intrepid struggles."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1489: Steelgrip Starkey #6, May 1987

Sad to say, but I feel like this series fizzles a bit at the end. If we have a look at the publication dates, there's gaps between the second and third issues, and the fifth and sixth. These gaps coincide with shifts in the art team, and I get the sense that this was a terribly delayed book, perhaps owing to the fact that it was a single creator doing much of the work. I wonder what the series would have looked like if there hadn't been the pressure to conform to the monthly schedule.

Steelgrip's final mission involves saving the planet from a very nebulous threat from the magnetic field. And then he has to stop a nuclear meltdown that results from the magnetic field shenanigans. All this after finding out that "Mr. Pilgrim," who created the APPT was actually...someone else in disguise all along. I don't want to ruin it for you.

All in all, Steelgrip Starkey was a pretty good series, and not nearly as porny as the title suggests! Open-minded and forward-thinking, rare for a comic of this era, and it definitely has an original premise. It unfortunately falls prey to the problem of art on a schedule, one that the comics industry really has to have a good hard look at one of these days. It always irked me that Marvel would never wait for Frank Quitely's New X-Men, and substituted fill-in artists for him (especially because the execrable Ethan Van Sciver was one of them). Imagine what that series would have looked like if the schedule had even been bi-monthly. You can't rush good art.

Well, maybe sometimes.

"Well! That lit up my ganglia!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1488: Steelgrip Starkey #5, January 1987

I'm a little confused by the character of Flyin' Ryan in this series. He's Steelgrip's faithful sidekick, a Vietnam veteran, and a bit of a bruiser. He also uses some racially-insensitive language that I find to be an interesting contrast to some of the other characters in the comic. Where you've got "bad" characters, who are dismissive of people based on race or sex, Ryan's sexism and racism is more of the casual kind, where he's using language that, to him, is not insulting, but definitely is to others. Even in the first issue, as the two meet Shari, Steelgrip admonishes Ryan for using terms that are racially-insensitive.

So what confuses me is how we're to take this character. Is the casual racism meant to be contrasted to the worse stuff, so that we can see the relative lack of harm that comes from Ryan's more playful or innocent racism (an ugly sentence to write, for sure), or is he there to demonstrate that even kind-hearted people can use racist language, and that it's just as bad? In an attempt to be optimistic, I'm going with the latter - the commentary on American culture that's happening in the series focusses on the damage that the culture itself does to people. The rival in today's issue (and, honestly, this story really reminded me of the set-up for a wacky anime) ends up going mad because he can't beat the Star Key team in a round the world construction race. Ryan sums him up as a "glory hog...just [in it for] the reward," to which Steelgrip replies that he "was a man...a hard working man...who lost his sense of perspective." Steelgrip is unfailingly forgiving of people who have been corrupted by a system that tells them they're worthless if they're not the best.

Sounds familiar.

I think what we've got here is a comic attempting to deal with social justice issues in a time when the language around such issues was just getting started. I'm finding it fascinating, in much the same way I do with Steve Gerber's writing, to see how relevant this comic, 33 years old this year, continues to be for our present day and age.

"An' the Star Key experiment ain't over yet!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1487: Steelgrip Starkey #4, December 1986

I have to admit, I was pretty stoked to see what the APPT would do in space, but I was a bit disappointed. The possibilities of an infinitely expandable machine in a zero gravity environment...I was thinking we'd get some Yog-Sothoth looking stuff:

Sadly, much more conventional. And the story was a bit much, in that an African dictator and a Middle Eastern terrorist team up and bury landmines on the Moon.

Yep.

This one was a bit racist. I can see what Weiss is aiming for, but the comic falls short of the target. I think he wanted to show how stupid these kinds of regimes are, fundamentally, but there was a bit much stereotype on display for my comfort level. Gotta remember, though, that in 1986, stuff from 1956 didn't age very well. It's just weird to see it within my own lifetime.

"Some general----I think he wet his bed!"

Some more Comic Book Resources articles

I'm having some fun writing these news articles.

Sliders: NBC Considering Reviving the '90s Alternate Reality Series

Doom Patrol Photo Reveals A Major DCEU Artifact

(First time I've been paid to write about The Doom Patrol!)

Todd McFarlane Shows Off His First Spawn Cover…From the '70s

New Service Brings Free Comics to Your Nintendo Switch

Fox Video Promo Celebrates Its New Future in Wake of Disney Sell Off

A bit outside my usual comfort zone, but it's definitely fun writing and researching these little articles.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1486: Steelgrip Starkey #3, November 1986

Ooooo...this one was pretty touch and go. I think I have to give it a pass because the story is very much on the side of the Indigenous people who are being ousted by a corrupt company. But the series is from the 80s, and the language around the conversation with Indigenous communities was simply unevolved. I'm finding very much the same things with the conversations going on in the series about race and sex. Creator Alan Weiss is using the only language he has at his disposal, but the conversations are quite positive, I think. Today's comic definitely questions who has the right to be on particular land, and outright calls attention to the way that the U.S. government blatantly ignored (and continues to ignore) the treaties signed with the Indigenous nations.

I think this aligns nicely with what I was saying about Steelgrip yesterday, in that he's meant, as Cap is, to represent what the dream of American is supposed to have been. What one still ought to be working toward - humanitarian, egalitarian.

"Steelgrip, why does Ryan have a plaster kit in his backpack?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1485: Steelgrip Starkey #2, August 1986

There's something really interesting going on in this comic with regard to its vision of America. I get the same feeling from the comic, and character, as I do with the best of Mark Gruenwald's run on Captain America in the 80s. In that run, Cap drives a motorcycle across America, trying to figure out just what "America" means anymore. There's this drive to grab onto the utopic, idealistic America in both comics - the trouble is that it's not something we can ever really achieve. It's the movement towards that utopia that's important. Both Cap and Steelgrip are icons of the idea that America is a place where anyone should be able to come and be helped onto their feet so they can make something of their lives. Sadly, these days, only certain people will be helped, and achieving the "American Dream" means climbing on the backs of others. Part of the utopic ideal was that everyone was equal, right? It's in that Declaration thingy, right?

While Starkey is the strapping "all-American" white guy, the rest of the cast is kind of nicely diverse. Flyin' Ryan is a nutty Vietnam vet, a casualty of that war, rather than a hero. Shari is a Filipino lady with mad computer skills. Dr. Sartorius is a ginormous black man and one of the mysterious benefactors of Star Key Industries (see what they did there?). And then there's Dr. Pilgrim, the little old man who invents the technalchemic All Purpose Power Tool. I have my suspicions that he's an immortal Ben Franklin, but we'll see.

I'm not saying the comic is perfect by any means. But it's interesting to see two comics coming out at around the same time that are really questioning what the hell America really means. Alan Weiss, who writes and draws the series, has obviously been thinking about America's policies on war, it's racist and sexist attitudes, and the underlying promise of what America was supposed to be.

"He's give 'im the old steelgrip...and the Doc don't even notice!"

The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth, 2002, Scholastic Press

Though not strictly a comics-related story, the book, by the inimitable Mr. Muth, links by virtue of this amazing artist. If you've never read a comic illustrated by Muth, you're missing out.

The book beautifully adapts Leo Tolstoy's original story, bringing it, as Muth himself notes, to a younger audience. And it is an important story to bring to this demographic. The story, both Tolstoy's and Muth's, revolves around three questions asked by the main characters: When is the best time to do things?; Who is the most important one?; What is the right thing to do?

Young Nikolai asks these questions of his animal friends, before heading off to see the wise old turtle Leo, and becoming embroiled in a situation that finally provides the answers he's sought. It's gentle, beautiful, and very quick to read. But it's not so quick to leave the mind. As with most Zen stories, the tale invited contemplation, and application, in one's own life.

As far as the art goes, it's goddamn ridiculously beautiful. It's Jon J. Muth, for crying out loud. His Mythology of an Abandoned City is easily one of my favourite comics I've read. The book is every bit as rewarding as a piece of visual art as it is a story. Indeed, Muth's background in comics does rear it's head somewhat, in that the pictures we see are not simply illustrations of the words on the page. For example, when the dog, Pushkin, says that the right thing to do is "fighting," the picture shows him leaping up a tree and barking at Gogol the monkey. It's this narrative mixture of visual and verbal that makes comics, and that makes this storybook more graphic novel than picture book.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1484: Steelgrip Starkey #1, July 1986

Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool is the best name for a gay porn that I have ever, in all my life, heard.

And with such a strapping lead character, how could it not be fabulous?

Of course, the reality is much more mundane. Sort of. This comic really is about a guy who has a tool that can, almost magically, become anything he needs. Through the mysterious force of "technalchemy," Starkey and his pals are called upon to help when all else fails.

I was fully prepared to not like this comic. The name is almost too much for the series to live up to. But the story within is actually pretty good. Steelgrip is a genuinely nice guy who just wants to help, but he's not the throw caution to the wind superhero type. At one point, when the possibility of being shot arises during an important mission, Starkey freezes, terrified and unable to complete his task. He overcomes this, of course, but it's a nice reminder that this is a character who doesn't have unbreakable skin, and can't outrun a bullet. He's a construction worker, albeit one with a very generous and giving nature.

One thing that stood out in today's issue was the introduction of Shari Barrett, programmer of the All Purpose Power Tool. She's Filipino, and endures some awful racist behaviour from a site foreman as she tries to track down Starkey. Given the era of the comic, I was prepared for this racism to be casually ignored, but instead Shari beats gown on the guy and shoves him into a muddy pit on the construction site. She's a badass computer scientist ready to kick booty and take names. Surprising for a comic from the 80s, but a welcome surprise.

"The tool is good for more than just 'muscle' jobs?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1479 - 1483: Archie Giant Series Magazines

Ah, sorry, a bit of a cop out, I know. But I do need to get back on track.

The last five days of Jughead have been enjoyable, but not really anything special. There's lots of stellar Samm Schwartz artwork, but the stories are only so-so. Jughead's misogyny starts to get played down here, moving into the 80s, and there's even some hint of him having some interest in women, though this is an aspect of the character I never really liked.

For your perusal, Archie Giant Series Magazine #469 (Apr.78), 475 (Oct.78), 499 (Oct.80), 511 (Oct.81), and 531 (Sept.83).

"I'd like to spin him like a top on that long nose of his!"

New Article up!

I know, I know, I'm well behind on the comics. There's only so much one can say about these Jughead stories I've been reading.

But I suppose I should actually say it...

Anyway, I've recently started writing for Comic Book Resources, and my first article is up. I'm still learning the style a bit, so this is with generous help from the editors at CBR.

https://www.cbr.com/our-encounter-with-evil-mignola-johnson-cadwell/

Neato!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1478: Archie Giant Series Magazine #457, April 1977

Giant Series has a very odd numbering system. There are 332 issues (can you spot the oddness yet?), finishing up with #632 in 1992. Between #35 and #36, 100 was added to the issue count for some reason. Similarly, once we hit issue #251, it jumps 200 and the next issue is #452. So, really, we need to be subtracting 300 from the later issues in order to know properly which issue of the 332 a particular comic is.

It's odd, and I haven't found a decent explanation for it yet.

There are a lot of Winter stories in today's issue, including one in which Jughead ventures to the store for his mother in the middle of a blizzard. The depictions of Riverdale under ridiculous amounts of snow reminded me of Winters in Oakville years ago, when there were some days that you simply couldn't leave the house. Perhaps, though, given the temperatures of late, this was a bit too close to home to be relaxing this morning.

"The secret of Jughead's success is his awkward abandoned style!"

The Faces of Glory - Alan Moore's Glory #0 [Park Variant, Avatar Press]

Andy Park's Glory is the most superheroic of the bunch. This is a very important facet of the character, a remembrance of Wonder Woman from whence she sprang. I like this interpretation of the character - there's something of that Supermanesque nobility to her demeanour.

This is the Andy Park variant of issue #1 of Avatar's series. It apparently comes in a platinum foil edition, which I have to admit would look kind of cool. Fingers crossed.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1477: Archie Giant Series Magazine #245, April 1976

Three things:

First, why is it that the women that the gang try to set Jughead up with are always redheads? As with yesterday's post, I'm really starting to wonder about Jug and his desires for his best friend. Whether or not the writers knew it, through this interpretation we're seeing a good deal of the anger that, at the time, would have suffused the queer community, such as it was. Is Jughead a closeted gay man, hateful because he's unable to live the life he wishes? Perhaps.

The inside of the cover features one of my favourite ads from old comics: Charles Atlas. Of course I have an affection for this little comic strip, as it's the origin of one of my favourite superheroes, Flex Mentallo. Whenever I see this comic in an old issue I'm reading, it's like a little bit of the Doom Patrol coming back to say hi. My son and I have decided that, should Flex show up on the TV series, it has to be either Dwayne Johnson, Terry Crews, or John Cena. I'm okay with any of those choices.

The third thing: this is a terribly, terribly sexist comic. Setting aside the queer reading of Jughead, one also has to wonder if he was the character through which the writers at Archie Comics got out their anger toward women. This comic features two regular-length stories (approx. 5-8 pages) that are horrendously sexist. The first is Jughead giving women lessons on how to treat a boy on a date. It's amusing, but definitely playing on the consideration that women simply aren't as smart as men. Jughead's been known to say this himself every now and again. The last story in the issue is about a "Girl Watching" competition that Jughead almost wins through...disinterest, somehow? The descriptions of the women, as the men "spot" them, are awful: "A pony tailed yellow parka"; "A blue stretch pants flopper." All based on appearance, and with no concomitant "Boy Watching" competition going on.

The last story does have a kind of sweet ending. Jug spots Ethel on her way toward him and runs, forfeiting the competition, and allowing Archie and Reggie to win the competition. To thank her, they take Ethel out for dinner, and it's one of the few times we see Big Ethel happy and sympathetically. I've always thought that she's one of the worst put-upon characters in Archie Comics, so a happy ending for her is a lovely treat.

"Young lady, my methods work only on normal teen-age boys like myself!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1476: Archie Giant Series Magazine #227, October 1974

Every now and again I need a break from the extended stories and the angst of the superhero. And Archie Comics are always a good fix. I'm a big fan of the Archie Giant Series series, though after a certain point they're not actually "giant," but regular sized comics. I get the suspicion this happens as the publisher decides to go with digests. The upside of this is that I think the stories in this series start to be originals after the shrink in size, rather than reprints, as most of this issue is. The lead story (actually one of my favourite Archie stories, about a pool table and a warlock) is, according to the GCD, an original, with art that looks like it's by Jughead genius Samm Schwartz. The lack of credits in older comics drives me nuts, btw.

I try to read Jughead's woman-hating in these issues more in line with the recent idea that he's asexual, but sometimes he really is just hateful. And he says it himself, something I find difficult to reconcile with the character (such as it is) that Jughead presents. He's the calm, zen pool in the middle of rambunctious Riverdale. Only when food or Big Ethel rear their heads does he loose his cool. But the vitriol he spews about women in general is pretty awful. There are definitely a few moments where I was thinking that this all stems from Jug's desire for he and Archie to be an item. He does go on about how much he'd love it if his best pal hated women like he did, and the two of them just hung out together.

A bit of context for today's quotation. One of the absolute worst moments in the first season of Riverdale was Jughead's "I'm weird" speech. Forced and just totally unnecessary. Imagine my surprise to find this lovely nugget from 40+ years before that scene aired. Jug sits alone at Pops', talking to the camera:

"I'm a loner! I go my way by myself! Solitude suits me! I want to be alone!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1475: The Doom Patrol #121, October 1968

Honestly, we weren't the ones who decided. The series was cancelled, and had there been a surge of interest maybe the characters would come back, but, honestly, how often does that happen? In comics, at least?

This is a great issue. It pulls together so many threads and ends the series on a note entirely in keeping with the rest of the run. This is a very rare circumstance in comics, the suiting ending. Usually when a series ends, there are questions left and threads left unpulled. But we have a nice wrap up of the Madame Rouge story, of the Brotherhood, and of the Doom Patrol themselves, showing that outcasts from society can be every bit as noble as the super-gods that surround them.

The Patrol has a weird publishing schedule until about 1977. For some reason in 1973 there were three further issues of this series published, all reprinting older stories from the run. Then four years later the New Doom Patrol debuts in Showcase, though they're relegated to guest roles for about the next 10 years. It's been a while since I read the new DP, and I don't actually remember enjoying it that much. It's one of the times in the history of the team that the writers tried to make them more mainstream, flashier and more superheroic. It doesn't really work.

On to something different tomorrow, though I may come back to the Doom Patrol sooner rather than later. With the new show on the air, they're in my head all the time these days.

"The we're agreed -- Codsville is dead! But our renamed village, Four Heroes, Maine, is just beginning!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1474: The Doom Patrol #120, August 1968

Oh, Cliff. If only you knew what was coming in the next issue.

The team (well, Larry and Cliff) investigate the absence of space debris in orbit around the Earth, and Rita and Steve go dancing. Have I mentioned that this is a very weird series?

The coolest part of today's comic is that Cliff switches around through a number of different bodies when his main one is destroyed. Though no one turns away from as this cover suggests. Sometimes the covers of these old issues really have very little to do with the story inside. It's a bit of false advertising, really, though the story turns out to be pretty good anyway. Cliff goes through a number of bodies over the years, though the "heavy metal" design of Caulder's from the Morrison run seems to have become the default. I'm glad of that, though his weird spider-body from the Insect Mesh storyline (seriously, just read it) is pretty sweet too.

"There goes the Wrecker's base -- rocketing home! And I wanna meet him in my Sunday body!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1473: The Doom Patrol #119, June 1968

This is a weird one. Well, they're all weird ones, but this one is really weird. The team falls victim to a "guru" who hypnotizes Cliff into being kind, Larry into being scared, and Rita into an infant. For...reasons.

Well, okay, he does it to distract the Patrol away from Madame Rouge so that he can undo the Chief's cure and return her to the Brotherhood. Again, because Brain and Mallah miss her so much, I guess?

This is an interesting take on the craze for gurus that seemed to sweep the late 60s in the US in the wake of Eastern philosophies making their way into the consciousness of Vietnam-era America. There was a lot of mistrust, with good reason, though I have to believe that there were some decent individuals out there who simply believed they'd found a better way to live. I keep looking for one!

It's at this point in reading through the series that I realized that the entire plot of the Chief curing Madame Rouge is set-up for the explosive finale of the series. I have to wonder if this had already been plotted and there was meant to be a follow-up, had the series continued, but that the death issue also made for a good final issue for a book with flagging sales. I wonder if Mr. Drake had any ideas for how the Patrol would have continued had sales improved. Would Rita have spent all those years dead?

"Me very little now...me just baby girl..."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1472: The Doom Patrol #118, April 1968

Madame Rouge shows some backbone in this issue, though I'm still not entirely certain why the Brain and Mallah want her back so badly. Especially in light of their single appearance in Morrison's run. (Just go read it.)

Once I'm done reading through these comics, I'm going to go back and have a look to see how many of the Patrol's villains only ever show up the one time. I'm pretty sure Videx, today's Brotherhood wannabe, never shows again, though I could be wrong.

I'm not sure if it's the same for other heroes, but it seems to me that their villains became more iconic than those of the Patrol. This likely has something to do with them be relegated to B-list status for much of their existence, though someone like Videx never shows up again in any of the subsequent series. Gargax only shows up in the mediocre Kupperberg years, and the Brain and Mallah become Titans villains. Well, until their finale. (Seriously, just go read it.)

I like to think that after being defeated by the Patrol these villains avoided crime again altogether because the heroes that stopped them were so much more weird and angry than they were.

"See you later, Interior Decorator Man!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1471: The Doom Patrol #117, February 1968

Niles lets his heart run away with him, and it costs him the Doom Patrol.

It's amazing to me how many times this "team" breaks up or dies over the course of their 4+ year run. And how many enemies Niles makes that come back to wreak havoc on his life. Perhaps we need to see a series called "Young Niles Caulder" - though given the Chief's propensities, perhaps that would be too dark a read.

I'm glad to see that Rita is getting her time to shine in the new television series. As you may well know, we're coming up on the last issue of this initial run, and poor Rita dies at the end of the issue. Ostensibly, all of them die, but Rita is the only one who stays dead, pretty much from 1968 to the early 2000s and John Byrne's reboot of the team. I'm glad she's about in the Young Animal stuff now. Well, I'm assuming she is. We'll see if we get more Young Animal.

Another thing I'm grateful to the show for is for giving Rita a character. She's much less-developed in the original series, but reading her as a haughty, though soft underneath, movie starlet makes so much more sense. Even her marriage to Steve Dayton smacks of the celebrity marriages we see nowadays. Rather than the mother figure of the Doom Patrol, Rita is the occasionally shitty, but very often right, older sister.

One last thing - this is the first time in a long while in the series that the back-up feature has been a stand alone story, separate from the Doom Patrol. "The Man with 100 Wigs" tells the story of a thief who gains the powers of historical persons by wearing facsimiles of their hair.

Oh, and then there's the Native Americans in the story. They charge in, on horseback in the middle of a city, to rescue the team from the Black Vulture and have all the hallmarks of a disgusting racial stereotype. Until Rita speaks broken English to her rescuers, only to have them reply in proper English. It's revealed that the leader of the group is a teacher at Cal Tech. So we have a terrible visual representation, but a relatively nuanced narrative representation. The tribe owes Niles a debt for helping them to keep their land from falling into the hands of the Black Vulture. I wonder if Drake and Premiani did this purposefully - one of the major themes of the Doom Patrol is not judging books, and people, by their covers.

"Man, I pulled a real Custer! I underestimated the Indians!"

Weird, Weird Advertisements

Back with some more strange ads from comics from the middle of the 20th century. Seriously, people are going to look back at that century and be flummoxed one day.

I hope.

Anyway...

This first one is from Pep #226, and it's so great. I kind of which I had these. I would wear them over my existing facial hair.

Brilliant. I love the mismatch of the hair colours - they don't care. You'll have sideburns! It's a matter of the drapes not matching the little lace doilies on the coffee table.

I have forgotten where this next one came from, but it's almost certainly an Eclipse comic, maybe one of the issues of P.J. Warlock I read a little while back. It's an anti-SDI comic from the early 80s, demonstrating, somewhat heavy-handedly, the problems with Reagan's Star Wars initiative. It reminds me of the National Social Welfare Assembly comics I posted a while back, though perhaps more overtly political in nature. Unsurprising, for Eclipse.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1470: The Doom Patrol #116, December 1967

Another misleading cover, in that this character shows up in the last 5 pages or so, and doesn't really get into it with the Doom Patrol. He does beat on them slightly, which is weird given who this actually is (I'm not telling!).

The three nuclear mutants end up having to dive into Halley's comet to destroy it from within, which I think means that, canonically, Halley's comet does not exist in the DC universe. Well, reboots aside, I suppose, though I tend to think of the events of the Doom Patrol series as having taken place in all versions of DC reality, just as the team themselves seem to transcend reboots.

Not much else to say about this one. It was okay. But we're nearing the end. Only 5 issues remain of the original run.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1469: The Doom Patrol #115, September 1967

I should address something: we never get Rita's story. Of the five main characters in the series (I'm including Beast Boy), we get flashback stories for all but Rita. I've always felt that to be quite unfair, and I'm glad that the television series has attempted to rectify this error. Well, hopefully it will. Again, we've seen flashbacks for all of the characters thus far, except for Rita. And the revelation that prompts her blob attack in the first episode offers an intriguing glimpse at her story. Hopefully they'll do her justice in a way that she never really was in the comic.

But that's the thing about Rita's powers in the comic - I've never really understood how it keeps her from being a film star. I suppose the idea that her first transformation happens in front of an entire crew could be her reasoning for feeling outcast. And we see, in Larry's back story, that no one wants to hire him for him, but rather for his powers. The same would have been likely with Rita, and being a Hollywood starlet, she probably understood this better than most. By adding the complication that maintaining a human form is difficult for her, we start to understand her power as damaging rather than empowering. (I do hope they have her stretch or become giant at some point in the series.)

This is a terribly dated comic. The nuclear mutants (why does radiation always give these guys powers, rather than horrible, horrible burns?) attempt to destroy the Earth by telekinetically flying Halley's comet into it. A comet that is a burning ball of flame. And the U.S. government just decides to fire scores of atomic missiles at it. It amazes me that in a scant 52 years  our understanding of the world around us increased so immensely. Today's comic reminds me more of the old EC science fiction comics and all of the things they got wrong.

Oh, and one more thing. In the back up story, a Nazi scientist tries to restart the Reich by making gorillas into Nazis.

Yep.

"Then it was raining -- pouring -- gorillas!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1468: The Doom Patrol #114, September 1967

This story is kind of cool in that it has shades of Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Patrol must stop a rampaging Neanderthal with a laser gun (sounds like a bad B-movie) who emerges through a gateway that is combining time periods. This kind of combination occurs in the latter issues of Crisis, so I head-cannoned that this was a ripple of that, which made an otherwise run-of -the-mill story a bit better.

Though I should clarify the term "run-of-the-mill." There is nothing normal about any of the Doom Patrol's adventures. In his text piece as he takes over the series, Morrison says that they're a team that he found scary. And they kind of are. They don't fight the usual supervillains. They fight a brain in a jar and a talking Gorilla. Or the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. Or a caveman with a laser gun. They fought the weird stuff that you really can't imagine Superman or Wonder Woman dealing with. If we consider the runs of the series that have been less-successful, they're the ones that forget this and treat the team like any other superhero team. But they're not a superhero team. They're a support group who, by virtue of their weirdness, get sucked into very bizarre situations.

Which is, of course, what we love about them so much.

"A genius, a man of peace -- and your caveman!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1467: The Doom Patrol #113, August 1967

I'm going to be a bit snarky here - the cover should read "Who cares who dares to challenge the Arsenal?" Though it's the main story, and has some nice action pieces with the team, the far more interesting story in this issue is the Chief's infatuation with Madame Rouge. And it really due to the reasons I pointed out yesterday - SPOILERS!!!! -




If you've read Morrison's and the subsequent versions of the DP, you have a different take on Niles. It's one of the things I'm finding most interesting about watching the current television series with my wife. She's never read the comics, so her take on Timothy Dalton's (masterful) interpretation of the character is different from mine. I'm suspicious, whereas she sees him as kind and benevolent. And, of course, we don't know who he is, or who he's going to be, really. But reading Niles' experiments on Madame Rouge, regardless of the excuse he makes of righting a wrong, as simply a continuation - it's chilling.

Oh, just for completion's sake, the back-up stories have been sort of "Meh" thus far. Larry's stuff was okay, and actually kind of cool read as the experiences of a gay man in denial. Note that Larry's story is happening at the same time that the original series was being produced, so it's easy to read the character as the original Larry Trainor. But the Beast Boy baby-in-the-jungle stories are just bad. I really think it's the pseudo-toddler dialogue that's given to Gar. It's almost as bad as his pseudo-hip lingo in main stories. Comic characters in the 60s talk to themselves too much. Action makes just as good an exposition.

"Thank you, Mr. King -- but me want no new Daddy! Me live here in own tree house with monkey friend!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1466: The Doom Patrol #112, June 1967

Can it possibly be? The Brotherhood and the Doom Patrol working together?!

Actually, this is the result of one of the more realistic moments in any Doom Patrol comic ever: an alien overlord decides to destroy the Earth. In response, the Brotherhood realize that they need to team up with the Patrol because otherwise everyone dies. And, to top it all, the Brotherhood actually sticks to the deal, and doesn't try to undermine the Patrol in some way while also saving the world. It's a nice touch, showing that regardless of the differences they have, both teams have a vested interest in saving the world they inhabit. It's just for very different reasons. This, I think, is a lesson conservatives around the world (and especially the oil-hungry pieces of garbage here in Alberta) could stand to learn. We're all in this together.

What confounds me about this story is that Zarox-13 literally does everything for himself, even though he's ostensibly got an army awakening on his ship. We see his soldiers very briefly at the beginning of the previous issue, and again at the end of this one. And they're useless, very A New Hope Stormtrooper.

As I noted yesterday, the more interesting story is Madame Rouge's story. We get an origin for her this issue, and it seems she is a victim of some evil science. A car accident victim left with two personalities, she is tricked into thinking that a new procedure will remove the evil personality. Of course, she is tricked by the Brain and Mallah, and they erase her kind personality. Or do they? Perhaps it's returning, thanks to her smittenness with the Chief.

Okay - SPOILER time. If you're not familiar with the events of Morrison's run, you should probably stop reading.



This is really a pretty great revelation, especially if we inflect the earlier stories with the events from later comics. And with the Doom Patrol, there's no reason not to. They seem to exist through revisions, maintaining their history despite universal resets. Niles' wonder at the Brain's experiment with Madame Rouge can be read very sinisterly here. The two are linked by a shared history, so it's not a stretch (ha! Madame Rouge humour!) to think that they'd have similar approaches to their experiments. This one looks an awful lot like what Niles does with the original members of the Patrol. He's a difficult character to read in these early stories. Even though there's no hint of the betrayal he perpetuates, he's not the most trustworthy character, despite what the team says.



One last thing: nothing even remotely like that cover happens in this issue. The Brain never commands the Doom Patrol to do anything, and much of the action takes place at a uranium mine. Not entirely sure where this cover image comes from, apart from the brain of Bob Brown, I suppose.

"'Dear reader' -- no, make that 'Greetings fellow swingers--' No!"