From Ghost Manor #28 (March 1976), “Voodoo Doll,” art by Charles Nicholas and Vince Alascia, lettering by the venerable A. Machine. The cover of the issue is by Steve Ditko. I don’t know why the natives of Tahiti are green. >Choke! Gasp!<
Tags: Charles Nicolas, Charlton Comics, Ghost Manor, Steve Ditko, Vince Alascia, Voodoo Doll
From “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper” (and you could rely on the fact that we made up damned near every word of it!), July 11, 2005.
And, this just in, from the May 23, 2005 issue:
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The third story of mine published by Charlton Comics, “That Personal Touch” in Ghostly Tales #120 (March 1976) with art by Charlton stalwarts Charles Nicholas and Vince Alascia. The cover of the issue is by Steve Ditko.
Bear in mind as you read it that I was very young and try to be kind.
Tags: Charles Nicholas, Charlton Comics, Ghostly Tales, Steve Ditko, Vince Alascia
In honor of Stupid Super Tuesday, here’s some political satire I wrote for Weekly World News in 2005. The more things change, the more they don’t, eh?
FOR SALE: ONE CONSTITUTION, SLIGHTLY USED (August 2005)
Washington, D.C. – Ever since its ratification on September 17, 1787 the Constitution of the United States of America has served as this nations’ blueprint for freedom.
Over the centuries, emerging nations have used this remarkable document as a literal blueprint for their own constitutions.
But one new nation has gone a step further. Instead of merely using America’s Constitution for inspiration and guidance in the drafting of one of their own, the Republic of Iraq has purchased the U.S. document outright.
“Lock, stock, and copyright,” affirmed Ibrahaim al-Jubburi, a lawyer for Iraq’s Ministry of Constitutional Concerns. “But we’re open to a licensing agreement so the U.S.A. can maintain its democratic ideals.”
“The boss kind of wanted to keep this one quiet,” Wayne Nugget, the Second Deputy Assistant to the Third Undersecretary of State admitted sheepishly. “The Secretary of State came up with the idea on the first day of a three-day meeting in Baghdad to discuss constitutional issues. He muttered something about having to spend two more days in ‘this hell-hole,’ then stood up and said, ‘Why don’t you just buy our Constitution? It’s worked pretty darned well for us,’ and then he caught the next plane home.”
Sharif al-Fahcokted, a member of Iraq’s 275-member Transitional National Assembly, said, “At first we thought he was kidding with us, you know? But when the Secretary didn’t come back after about fifteen, twenty minutes, we realized he wasn’t joking.”
His colleague in the Assembly, Mahdi Lazeei added, “Then we thought, well, what the heck? Their Constitution’s worked for them for almost 225 years, and we weren’t having any luck being able to come up with something of our own that all sides could agree on.”
“The price,” said Iraq’s Minister of Finance, Abdul Ot’thedouh, “was pretty reasonable, considering what we’re buying. And we did happen to have the six billion dollars in American currency on hand. In cash.”
Assemblyman al-Fahcokted hastened to add, “Of course, that price includes all the Amendments as well.”
“Look, I’m not telling tales out of the mosque when I say that things have been pretty messed up around here,” said Mahdi Lazeei. “We had the American governing commission, than the Iraqi Interim Government, now the Transitional National Assembly, and who the heck knows what’s next.
“So we spent a few dinars and bought a used Constitution to make things a little easier on ourselves. I mean, we don’t have running water or electricity, for crying out loud!”
“This is an outrage,” fumes Tom Paine, spokesman for Protect Our Constitution, Keep My American Republic Contained (P.O.C.K.M.A.R.C.). “The Constitution and the democratic ideals it outlines belongs to all Americans and can’t be bought or sold.”
“Guess again,” says U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits us from selling the Constitution. At least that what my staff tells me.”
Besides, the attorney general points out that should the administration push legislation through Congress strengthening the Patriot Acts, selling the Constitution to Iraq won’t really have an impact on American life. “I mean,” said Mr. Gonzales, “it’s not like we’re really been using it all that much these days, anyway.”
REINCARNATED GUNSLINGERS PATROLLING AMERICA’S BORDERS (2005)
Wyatt, Arizona—The Old West ain’t what it used to be. It’s moved south – south to the border, to be exact—where, on a typical night outside this sleepy little desert town dozens of illegal immigrants try to slip across the border from Mexico.
“It was out of control,” said Sgt. Mickey Carlin of the Arizona Border Guard. “We tried everything from razor wire to helicopter patrols and nothing worked. We even hired a guy who played the ‘Hat Dance’ on a pipe, said he could lure them back to their homes. Nothing worked.”
Until now.
The ground shakes under the thundering hoofs of a dozen horses. Wild shouts fill the night and, six-guns blazing, a posse of riders charge from the darkness to drive the invading horde back to their native land. It’s the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services deploying their newest weapon against illegal immigrants: reincarnated gunslingers from the days of the Old West.
“Yup, it’s true,” proudly said Buzz ‘Wild Bill’ Hooligan, Special Agent In Charge of the Southwest Region for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “We call it the Border United States Hindrance program.” Hooligan wouldn’t tell Weekly World News who authorized the B.U.S.H. operation. “All I can say is it came from the very highest levels of government.
“Our attitude is, when the law don’t work you got to go outside the law,” Hooligan says. “As in ‘out’ law. Ever since January of 2005 we’ve had a posse of genuine, reincarnated Old West outlaws ridin’ the 1400 miles of border between the U.S. of A. and Mexico
“We got Billy the Kid, Jesse and Frank James, the Clanton gang from the OK Corral, the Cole Brothers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, all workin’ to keep out illegals. And ya can’t argue with the results. Their first week in the saddle, illegal immigration fell a whoppin’ 62%.”
Dr. Sy Khosis, chief of the U.S.C.I.S., said the posse was an outgrowth of stem cell research.
“We discovered that stem cells were great for creating clones,” Dr. Khosis told us. “The government boys were okay with using them as long as we made gunslingers instead of fussing around with Alzheimer’s or something.”
Upon learning that stem-cell cloning works, B.U.S.H. scientists went to burial sites to find suitable genetic material.
“Fortunately, our nation celebrates crazy men with guns,” Dr. Khosis said. “Their graves are tourist attractions and were very easy to find.”
Ranger Bull rode briefly with one of the first ‘ modern day Wild Bunches, lead by Old West legend Billy the Kid. She still laughs at the good times they shared during her 24-hour ride-along. “You should’ve seen the faces on them border-jumpers when we came ridin’ full gallop. I’’ll bet they ain’t stopped runnin’.”
“What a load of malarkay,” says Wyatt Free Thinker-Picayune reporter Ivan Shersin, who has been following this story since it began. “Everything was a rousing success for the first six months. Then B.U.S.H. lost control of the cowboys,” Shersin continued. “They went rogue, setting up their own organization. These boys pretty much own the border lands now, controlling everything from illegal immigration to drugs and smuggling.” The reporter shook his head sadly. “What were they thinking, giving criminals and opportunists high-tech surveillance equipment, guns, and power? Personally, I think this whole plan could have been a bit better thought out.”
Neither the U.S.C.I.S. or the Texas Rangers would respond to the Free Thinker-Picayune’s allegations, but the World Weekly News has learned from an anonymous source in B.U.S.H, “We’re deep in a recovery situation, cloning the Earp brothers and Wild Bill Hickok to restore order to the program. It’s vital for your readers to remember that all armed conflicts have their ups and downs. What’s important is the big picture –stopping bad guys, even the ones we accidentally create ourselves.”
GOP UNVEILS LIBERAL-SNIFFING DOGS (April 2005)
Silver Springs, Maryland – The Republican Party is going to the dogs. And they’re proud of it! The GOP announced last week that scientists at the Newt Gingrich Institute, a conservative scientific think tank in suburban Maryland, has successfully trained dogs to sniff out liberals wherever they might hide.
“After years of research we discovered that liberals have a scent unique to their political persuasion,” said Conservative Psychologist Dr. Silo Barksley, D.V.M. “It’s the most important political breakthrough since the wiretap.”
Republican political operative Roseanne ‘Ro’ Virginia Waid was one of the first conservatives to applaud the Gingrich Institute’s achievement.
“We’ve been needing something like ‘The Checkers Project’ for the longest time,” Waid said. “Ever since 2000, when we started staging Republican campaign events that were closed to anyone who didn’t agree with us, liberals have had this annoying habit of sneaking into our rallies and town meetings and asking questions our candidates either couldn’t or didn’t want to answer. Frankly, such unscripted spontaneity was making our guys look incompetent.”
“There’s a problem with liberals that goes beyond their political ignorance,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Whit Bread, “Dress them up in nice clothes and cut their hair and you can’t tell what they believe just from their appearance.”
According to Dr. Barksley, however, liberals will no longer be able to fool conservative door-watchers with a simple disguise. “We conducted a detailed analysis of the problem starting with a simple premise: if you can’t see a difference, can you smell one? After all, you used to be able to smell Hippies. Assuming the answer was ‘yes’ we wondered, ‘What would a lefty smell like to a dog?’ Since canines have a sense of smell many thousand times more sensitive than humans we searched for, and found, a scent that set liberals apart.”
Dr. Barksley’’s research assistant, Selma Alabama, was in charge of analyzing the liberal smell. “Many ingredients go into the smell of liberalism. Some of it is easy to document, such as bargain-brand herbal shampoos, baby powder, compost, and Snapple tea. Others, however, were tougher to recreate, especially the odor of recycling centers.”
Major Danny “Bulldog” Domo, a retired U.S. military canine handler runs the Republican dog training program. “For some reason, those little prissy dogs like Shitsus, Pomeranians, and Lhasa Apsos are best for this work,” said Major Domo. “Guess it takes a yippy dog to know a yippy-liberal, you know what I mean? Anyway, trainers are sprayed with ‘the odor of sanctity,’ as I like to call it, and the dogs are taught to sniff them out.”
So far, ‘Ro’ V. Waid is wildly enthusiastic with the results of the program. “We held a town meeting in Boston last month. You know, Massachusetts is just crawling with liberals. Thanks to our liberal-sniffing dogs we were able to weed out dozens of lefties who tried sneaking in right at the door.”
Whit Bread agrees, saying, “That was probably the first totally liberal-free town meeting we ever held. In fact, we even managed to cull several left-leaning Republicans from the herd before they could make trouble. I’d venture to say there wasn’t a single dissenting voice or original thought in the whole place. It made me proud to be a Republican.” The Republican leadership is considering expanding the program. A spokesperson for Representative Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the party’s main attack dog, said, “Considering the partisan battles we expect to wage in the coming months over such issues as Social Security and Medicaid reform, imagine how helpful it would be to nip Democratic opposition in the butt – if you’ll forgive my bon mot.”
“My only concern is that the dogs will go for Ted Kennedy first,” Bread adds. “Chomping on him will keep our entire canine corps busy for days.” He paused. “Maybe even weeks.”
“EL PRESIDENTE” BUSH (September 2005)
Washington, D.C.—All the experts agree that it’s never too early to begin planning for your retirement. And with the end of his second term a little more than three years away, President George W. Bush is no exception.
Most ex-presidents spend their post-White House years writing their memoirs and books on politics and policy (or, in the case of Gerald R. Ford, playing golf), living out their years as respected elder statesmen or dying shortly after leaving office.
A few ex-presidents have remained active in politics and the law, including sixth president John Quincy Adams (the only other child of a president to also be elected to the highest office in the land) who served for 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives after his single term in office. Likewise, 27th president William Howard Taft, was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court after his term.
Weekly World News has learned that President Bush intends to follow the path of the second group by remaining in the political forum.
Just not in the United States.
Instead, a confidential source in the Bush White House has revealed, advisors have put together a plan that will allow the current U.S. president to run for the office of president of the Republic of Mexico after he leaves office in January of 2009.
“It’s not going to be easy,” the Weekly World News source admits. “According to Article 82 of the Mexican constitution, a candidate must be a ‘Mexican citizen by birth, in the full enjoyment of his rights,’ so right there we run into a problem, seeing as how the president was born in New Haven, Connecticut.”
“We thought about getting Mexico to change its constitution,” reveals Boyd Brayne, a constitutional attorney working with the Bush for Mexico 2010 campaign. “But that would have taken too long and cost more money than even the corporate oil lobby was willing to shell out to make this happen. So, instead we hit on the idea of making Connecticut a part of Mexico, retroactive to 1946, the year he was born, which would automatically make the president a Mexican citizen.”
The Bush-Mexico committee has encountered a surprising lack of resistance to their radical plan. The Republican controlled Congress has vowed to push this plan through both Houses. “And,” adds Senator majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee with a twinkle in his eye, “we’re only one more Republican nomination to the Supreme Court away from guaranteeing the annexation of Connecticut to Mexico is ‘constitutional.’”
“All things considered, it’s not that big a deal,” said House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) . “I mean, it’s a tiny little state. Only Delaware and Rhode Island are smaller. And then we can finally make Puerto Rico a state. That way we won’t have the extra hassle of having to change all the flags to 49 stars. Plus, it prevents Joe Lieberman from ever running for president again.”
Mexico Senator Manual Trepa, who is spearheading the Bush effort south of the border, said in an interview aboard his new $1.3 luxury yacht, “We in Mexico would welcome Connecticut into the confederacy of Mexican states. I understand it ranks numero uno in personal wealth. That should come in handy.”
When asked about his plans for a run for the Mexican presidency, President Bush would only say, “No commentario.”
Reports that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have begun taking Spanish lessons have yet to be confirmed.
BIG RATINGS FOR THE HOME LOBBYING NETWORK (October 2005)
Washington, D.C. – When you want to buy the latest line of Joan Rivers jewelry or the complete Heroes of NASCAR Autographed Collectible Card Set from the comfort of your Barcalounger, you tune in to one of many home shopping networks.
When you want to watch the behind-the-scenes minutia of the democratic process, you flip over to C-PANT (Cable Public Affair Network Television).
When you want to buy political influence, you turn to one of the many political lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.
But what about those who want to buy political influence from the comfort of their own Barcalounger?
Those are the ones who should check their local listings for the merger of these two cable-TV staples into PS-PANT (Political Shopping Public Affairs Network Television).
Cable TV mogul Hubert Morlock announced PS-PANT at a press conference held in the Capitol rotunda. “I became an American citizen as much for my love of democracy as for tax purposes,” the Australian born Morlock told reporters. “PS-PANT makes paid political influence available right on your TV and gives everyone access to affordable democracy.”
PS-PANT will continue to air its usual fare of Senate and House sessions, speeches, and call-in talk shows…but in a box inset in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The rest of the screen will show the new political influence sales programming.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” said programming director Brian “Red” DuMont. “PS-PANT will sell a lot of different stuff. Collectibles. Memorabilia. Political art. And, yes, political influence.”
Hugh Smiley is host of Influence Peddlers, the nightly four-hour prime-time program featuring genuine Washington lobbyists offering their services for sale to the home viewer.
“It works just like any other home shopping channel,” Mr. Smiley said. “We present the product—in this case, the lobbyists who know who to go to in order to get things done in Washington—and you call in to buy it.
“For example, you might have a problem with, say, the high price of milk. So you’d call in when we have on a dairy industry lobbyist and hire him to lobby on your behalf to get higher subsidies for dairy farmers, thus keeping down the cost of milk.
“However, if you’re against increased subsidies, we’ll also feature lobbyists you can hire to work against them. We’ll have lobbyists on for every budget and political belief, as well as special local programming to help you buy influence in your area.”
Influence Peddling is just one of three daily four-hour political influence shopping shows on PS-PANT. “As much as we’re about political influence peddling for the masses, we haven’t forgotten the heavy rollers,” chuckled Mr. Smiley. “Every night at midnight, we bring out the big guns. I’m talking big oil, big steel, the high-end tech companies, pharmaceuticals and the like. You’re gonna need your gold card to buy into this club, my friend.”
“We’re revolutionizing politics and TV,” Hubert Morlock said when he announced PS-PANT to the nation. “It’s our hope that before too long, you won’t be able to tell the difference between the two.”
Way back in 1975, I made my first professional comic book sale to editor Nick Cuti at Charlton Comics. It was a one-off five-page sword & sorcery story entitled “Distress.” The story appeared in Scary Tales #3 (December 1975) and was drawn by a fellow newbie, Mike Zeck.
“Hanging Offense” was the second story of mine to see print, in Creepy Things #5 (April 1976). Like “Distress,” “Hanging Offense” was one of those Comics Code mandated morality tales with a Twilight Zone-like “twist” ending, the villain hoisted on his own petard by the last panel, cue the horror host with his wrap-up and (chuckle!) parting pun. “Oh, my lord!” “Gasp!”
“Hanging Offense” was the issues cover featured story, nicely done by Rich Larson. The story itself was drawn by Jose Recreo, an artist from Spain, where, I guess, women traditionally go looking for their missing boyfriends in cocktail dresses and heels…
Note: The comic was laid square on the scanner bed, but in typical Charlton Comics fashion had been printed off-kilter. Bad printing on ancient presses that led to colors being off-register and any other sin of the old printing process you can imagine was practically the company’s trademark.
Tags: "Hanging Offense", Charlton Comics, Charlton Neo, Creepy Things #5, George Wildman, Nick Cuti, Recreo
Another of the columns written for Bookgasm.com in 2008:
First off, “Blighty” is a slang term for England that comes from a Hindustani word meaning “foreign.” I looked it up so you don’t have to.
Second, did you know Ol’ Vilayati has a comic book industry all its own, with an original roster of homegrown heroes, comic book titles and formats. (Being American and the world revolves around me, it wasn’t until much later, thanks to the reportage of fan publications like Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego, published by TwoMorrows, that I began to learn just how extensive was native comic book publishing in the years after World War II; not only in England, but France, Canada, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and Mexico, to name a few off the top of my head.) British comics, which date back to the 1880s, consisted largely of weekly magazine-sized publications with names like Beano, Dandy and Eagle, featuring humor and adventure stories aimed at kids. In 1977, 2000 A.D. was launched, introducing in its second issue a feature called Judge Dredd, created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and (British) comics weren’t, as people in comics like to say sneeringly, “just for kids anymore!”
This hardcore, by-the-book cop who was empowered to shoot down jaywalkers if he thinks them a danger, was set in a bizarre 122-years in the future society consisting of massively overcrowded Mega-Cities dotting a radioactive-wasted Earth full of mutants, aliens and savage inhumanity. In this overpopulated, insane world, cops are judge, jury and executioner. Dredd doesn’t just live the law, he, as he says “is the law!” Dredd was a hit and made 2000 A.D. a bestseller, which in turn elevated many of the other features sharing the magazine with Judge Dredds to hit status, including Robo-Hunter, Tharg’s Future Shocks, and Strontium Dog. It also made stars of many of its writers and artists (Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, John Wagner, Alan Grant, Kevin O’Neill, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar et al) there and in the ‘80s and ‘90s British Invasion of American comics.
Virgin Books published nine Judge Dredd novels around the time of the oft-and often-justifiably-maligned Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd (1995) movie, but, much like the film, the books didn’t go over with the public. (The movie barely made a ripple; the action figures were remaindered before the last reel had run and Judge Dredd disappeared from the mainstream American consciousness except as the punchline to another Stallone joke. At the time, I was editor of the DC Comics licensed Judge Dredd comic book, including the movie adaptation drawn by Dredd co-creator Ezquerra.)
The movie was novelized in Judge Dredd by noted science fiction and fantasy author Neal Barrett, Jr. (based on a screenplay by William Wisher and Steven E. De Souza). The story, Dredd’s downfall and his hunt for his evil clone (played by Armand Assante*) who’s responsible is well written and Barrett, a consummate professional, does what he can with the material at hand. But, as with many such adaptations, the end result can only be as good as the source material. And little, fan-boy things rankle me as a reader. Take for instance, this simple passage: “Even if he could make a wild guess at the Chief Justice’s reasons, Dredd knew he’d probably be wrong. Fargo’s mind was like one of those antique boxes. The secret in the first box was another box. And within that box…” Abstract-poetic thought from Joe Dredd? I don’t think so.
Also, readers would be hard-pressed to find the British sensibility that informed the original comic series—that, in fact, made it work at all—in either the movie or novel. Dredd’s Mega-City One was always clearly identified as being New York (and most of the rest of the northeast corridor), but its stories were based on contemporary British experience, a reaction to economic troubles and a sharp turn to the Conservative Right, leading to Margaret Thatcher. In this case, however, Dredd was clearly a product of the very American Clint Eastwood/Man With No Name/Harry Callahan mold. (No one knows what Rob Schneider was supposed to be.)
More on point were those Virgin novels, many of then written by 2000 A.D. veterans like David Bishop and Dave Stone, including one book by Dredd co-creator John Wagner. In 2003, Britain’s Black Flame Books acquired the 2000 A.D. license, eventually publishing nine new Dredd novels over the next four years. The first was Dredd Vs. Death by Gordon Rennie, another veteran Judge Dredd scribe (based on the storyline of a Xbox game by Rebellion Studios). Rennie is too good a writer to let the one-dimensional aspects of a videogame confine his story. He takes the reader through this futuristic world and its Draconian legal system with care and attention to continuity and character, his Dredd far more reactionary than Barrett’s thinking man’s cop (well, y’know, in comparison). This action-packed adventure takes Dredd and his colleague, the psychic Judge Anderson, on the hunt for the Death Cult responsible for letting loose a virus in Mega-City One that turns people into vampires. And, as any good Death Cult will do, this one summons the four Dark Judges to our realm, pitting Dredd and company against Death, Fire, Fear and Mortis in a battle for their souls.
Another popular 2000 A.D. feature is Strontium Dog, created in 1978 by the same folks who brought you Judge Dredd, John Wagner (as T.B. Grover) and Carlos Ezquerra. The Dogs are intergalactic bounty hunters, one of the few jobs available to Strontium-70 created mutants of Earth, post-Great War of 2150. The Strontium Dog of the title is Johnny Alpha, possessor of mutant eyes that allow him to see through walls and read minds, and the most famous and respected of all the mutant bounty hunters. Bad Timing, by Rebecca Levene, a British author and editor, takes Johnny Alpha to far-off Epsilon 5, a world where time has sped up to hundreds of times its normal speed. As the back cover copy says, it’s “a literal race against time” to save the quarantined planet and that is accomplished with all the usual bizarre aliens and mutations that’s made Strontium Dog a consistent favorite.
Last on this installment’s list, but first in the alphabet, is ABC Warriors, a band of battle-hardened robot soldiers built to withstand Atomic, Bacterial and Chemical warfare around the universe, created by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill in 1979. The Medusa War by Mills and Alan Mitchell, was the first of two ABC Warriors novels from Black Flame, and it sent the sentient robots with names like Hammerstein, Deadlock, Joe Pineapples and Mek-Quake, to Mars where the humans who have spent the last two thousand years terra-forming the red planet to make it habitable have awakened Medusa, an ancient life-force determined to prevent Mars from being turned into an alien world by these human invaders. Mills brings his robotic creations to life, a rich mix of human foibles in metal form (think the Metal Men with lots and lots and lots of really big guns and things that blow up), pitting them against a supernatural menace that will really test their…mettle.
(Sorry.)
* And, excuse me, Rico is Dredd’s clone, so why didn’t Stallone just play both parts, that way he could have kept the helmet on the entire movie as Dredd—who was never without it in the comic—and still had all the face-time he wanted as Rico? Just asking.
Tags: 2000 AD, ABC Warriors, Alter Ego, Gordon Rennie, Judge Dredd, Mega-City One, Neal Barrett Jr., Rebecca Levene, Strontium Dog, Sylvester Stallone
Where were you on Wednesday, January 12, 1966 at 7:29 p.m. EST? Me, I had my ass planted firmly in front of our TV set, warmed up and tuned to ABC, channel 7 in New York, ten and one half years old and breathlessly awaiting the debut of Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward.
By 7:35 p.m., I was hooked. I was a kid, the very age, in fact, that kids like me formed attachments to our pop culture that usually follow us the rest of our lives. Batman would breath life back into DC Comics and the comic book industry in general, as well as help launch the mid-1960s Pop Art revolution.
But there was one thing I hated…
Excerpted from my essay for Gotham City: 14 Miles, 14 Essays on Why the 1960s Batman TV Series Matters, Edited by Jim Beard (Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, 2010):
“Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Bomb”: The Legacy of Batman
“Oh, my.” — Leonard Goldenson, ABC Television President, in response to the pitch for the Batman television show
When that first episode of Batman aired on January 12, 1966, I was ten and one-half years old. I was already a hardcore comic book reader and something of an accumulator, if not quite yet a collector, of as many comics as I could lay my hands on.
I was the audience for that show, eager, no dying to see another of my four-color heroes come to life on the TV screen, like The Adventures of Superman, the 104-episodes of which originally aired between 1952 and 1958 and continued on and on in daytime syndication during my childhood on New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11.
Pow! Zap ! Bam!
Yes, I recognized they were making fun of Batman, but so what? Grown-ups always made fun of comic books. My father, himself a reader of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan, and G-8 and His Battle Aces in the pages of the ten-cent pulp magazines of the 1930s, who brought home the 1960s Ace Books editions of the Tarzan novels with the gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers for his sons to read, who nurtured the creative instinct in the three of us, all of whom went into some sort of creative field, my father, who must have understood the appeal and certainly never discouraged our interest in comic books, nonetheless called the four-color pamphlets my older brother and I separately hoarded by the hundreds “Popeyes,” as in Popeye the Sailor Man, whose name became the noun for all comic books. “You left a pile of your Popeyes in the car,” he would say. “When you’re finished reading your Popeyes, would you take out the garbage?” Most adults just called them “funny books.”
And even in the ghetto of Pop Culture, comic books were the lowest of the kid stuff. Dangerous, even, if the doomsayers of the 1950s witch-hunts against the evils of comic books and their damaging effect on young minds were to be believed. And even if not dangerous, certainly disposable. To modern collectors in their Mylar bags sealed between slabs of plastic, the notion that a comic book was rolled up and stuck in the back pocket of an eleven year-olds jeans before and after being read (repeatedly, and by many kids) is sacrilegious, but that was exactly what we did. That issue of Spider-Man I romped around with in my back pocket in 1964 is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars today, but back then, it was the center of my universe and, until I learned better a couple of years later, I ran around with it, or another one like it, rolled up in my pocket, where I could bring it out any time to read again. A copy of a Flash Annual from around the same period will forever carry the grit of New York’s Reis Park beach sand ground into its square-bound spine from that summer when it was the comic book I could not go anywhere without.
Pow! Zap! Bam!
Comics did not get respect before Batman and, aside from the recognition of comics during the run of the show, was no better off after than before. Respect was too much to ask of a funny book. The comics had been effectively neutered by the 1950s and were unlikely to feature anything capable of offending anybody (although there’s always someone to be offended by anything), but Senator Kefauver’s Congressional hearings into the link between comics, juvenile delinquency, and childhood emotional problems were only a decade in the past. These hearings were inconclusive and came up with no result other than the creation of the industry’s self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority of America. The bad taste had nonetheless been left behind in everybody’s mouth and, in their memory of the hearings, comics had been officially stamped “garbage” by the U.S. government. What other proof did they need?
When it came to picking from this heap, Hollywood had not always approached it with such trepidation. In the 1940s, superheroes were successful on the radio (Superman on a three-times a week program on the Mutual Network) as well as on the big screen as serialized adventures, 10 or 12 15-minute weekly shorts, each with a cliffhanger ending to draw the kids back to the theater to see how the hero gets out of this one! Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Blackhawk, and others from the comics were made into serials, while a series of Superman cartoon shorts produced by the Fleischer Studios (creators of Popeye and Betty Boop before the Man of Steel) for Paramount are still considered classics of animation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was, despite, the nostalgic chuckles it elicits today, a very faithful and, for the most part, straight adaptation of the Superman then in the comic books, scaled down from his skyscraper-lifting level of four-color power to a syndicated TV program’s budget. But, of course, the program was produced by DC Comics, its stories overseen by comic book editors-turned-producers Whitney Ellsworth and Mort Weisinger. They were company men playing with company toys and they were very careful not to break anything.
The one thing all of the above have in common is that they were created as and always intended to be for kids. Serials were shown on Saturday mornings, along with cartoons and other kid stuff. The Adventures of Superman radio program ran for 11-years in a late afternoon timeslot. The Adventures of Superman TV show, though its first two seasons, in black and white, are darker and more serious than the later color seasons, was always a kids show, right down to its sponsorship by Kellogg’s cereals.
Comics only started getting into on-screen trouble when someone decided to do a TV show for grown-ups without first getting over their embarrassment at what they were doing.
One always has to start from the premise that the people adapting comics to the screen, big or little, do not have any respect for the material, certainly not then and, comics overall public relations progress to the contrary, not still.
The people who make movies and television shows, who stage Broadway shows and publish literature are embarrassed by the source material, whether they will admit to it or not. They voice a love and admiration for this true American art form, but if what has hit the movie and television screens is the result of love, hate me, please. Even the best of them can not help metaphorically winking uncomfortably in acknowledgment of the source. The subtext may be Shakespearean in scope, but the brilliance is clad in primary colored spandex that overwhelms even the strongest message. (These same dramatists forgetting that Shakespeare himself was little more than a TV writer of his time, the legends and tales of the era serving as the source material for his plays, themselves pandering to the lowest common denominator in the cheap seats.)
But no message, as it turned out, would ever be stronger than this:
Pow! Zap! Bam!
It made the show. It was, the first time it hit the screen that January night in 1966, a self-announcing visual punch in the nose. It made mom and dad laugh. It was kitschy, campy, and in tune with the “pop art” movement popularized by such commercial artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both influenced by comic art, Lichtenstein, indeed, lifting, without credit or remuneration, entire panels from romance and war comics to recreate as such paintings as Drowning Girl and, more to the point of Pow! Zap! Bam!, Whaam! Marvel Comics, which, under the creative direction of Stan Lee and his co-writing artist cohorts like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and others, had bumped up the level of comic book sophistication with continuing stories and heavy doses of soap opera elements inflicted on superheroes whose secret identities lead less-than-perfect lives, even went so far as to change its corner symbol identifying their titles as “Marvel Pop Art Productions” for four or five months during 1965, riding the wave of a trend their existence helped to set rolling.
“Pow! Zap! Bam!” was brilliant, an inclusive nod to the source material. Sound effects have long been a vital part of the vocabulary of comics. A picture of a fist in the vicinity of a chin is only half the story. The “WHAM!” of the knock-out punch or the “whoosh!” of the fist sailing past its target tells the rest. Hand-lettered onamonapia was straight out of the newspaper comic strips and comic books the chuckling adults had read as children. It was self-referential and precious and it was exactly the right touch of gentle mockery to catapult Batman into a full-blown, two-year long bona fide fad.
The only problem was, even after Batman was gone from the airwaves, it left “Pow! Zap! Bam!” behind.
To learn more or to order Gotham City, 14 Miles, click on the image below:
Tags: Batman, Batman TV series, DC Comics, Gotham City 14 Miles, Jim Beard, Sequart
I’ve had this on my iPhone since the Charlton Comics Movie Panel I did with filmmakers Keith Larsen and Jackie Zbuska at the Rhode Island Comic Con on November 8, 2015. We talk about the movie project, Charlton Neo, and the increasingly fascinating history that they’re unraveling about Derby, Connecticut’s Charlton Publishing. Have a listen.
Tags: Charlton Comics, Charlton Comics: The Movie, Charlton Neo Comics, Jackie Zbuska, panel discussion, R. Keith Larsen, Rhode Island Comic Con
In the 1980s, Ehapa, the publisher to which DC Comics licensed its German (other other countries) reprints, was asking DC Comics for as much new Superman material as the company could provide. At the time, Superman was appearing in Superman, Action Comics, DC Comics Presents, and World’s Finest, but there was apparently an insatiable appetite for more Man of Steel for this part of the European market. DC put Superman editor Julie Schwartz on the job, and between 1981 and 1985, he produced twenty-one forty-six page “Superman Quarterly” specials. Ehapa published these stories in oversized album editions in Europe. The stories were written in such a way that they could be broken into two pars for later “reprinting” here in the U.S.A in Superman and Action Comics. Not all the stories would be reprinted in America; post-Crisis and Byrne’s Superman relaunch, they no longer fit into continuity.
Julie went to his usual well of talent for the “Superman Quarterly” stories, including Curt Swan, E. Nelson Bridwell, Bob Rozakis, Gil Kane, Cary Bates, George Tuska, Alex Saviuk (who pencilled two-thirds of them), Keith Giffen, Irv Novick, and others…myself included. Bob Rozakis and I co-wrote the first two, and I wrote seven more solo. DC did try publishing the first story, “The Startling Saga of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue” by Rozakis, me, Adrian Gonzales, and Vince Colletta as Superman Spectacular 1982, a forty-six page stand alone 8.5″ x 11″ album priced at $1.95, but it apparently didn’t do well enough for them to follow through with more.
I was around one day when Julie was clearing out his office after his retirement. His personal tracking sheets for “Superman Quarterly” was just one of the artifacts I saved from the trashcan, many of which I turned over to the DC library/archive.
I have, either in printed German or American album format or as bound Xerox copies of six of my nine stories (as well as those reprinted in the monthly titles). I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in the ones in German, but none of the scripts for these stories survive.
Tags: Action Comics, Alex Saviuk, Bob Rozakis, Cary Bates, Curt Swan, E. Nelson Bridwell, Ehapa, George Tuska, German comic books, Gil Kane, Irv Novick, Julie Schwartz, Keith Giffen, Superman
In 2008, I was doing a freelance-staff gig in DC Comics’ Collected Editions department. I was brought in to do all the prep work on the next couple years worth of (then) scheduled Showcase Presents volumes. I would create dummy books (essentially Xerox copies of all the stories in the book in their proper order), book maps (the complete list of all the stories), and Tables of Content, so that when that book came up on the schedule, all they had to do was pull the appropriate binder from the shelf to get that particular volume immediately into production.
One afternoon, I received a call from Tony Romando, V.P. and editor-in-chief of WWE Magazine. Tony wasn’t specifically calling me, but the receptionist at DC would often forward such cold calls to me, knowing I knew my way around the joint. He said that World Wrestling Entertainment was launching a kids magazine and was calling to see if we could recommend a good editor with cartooning and comics experience to help bring in quality illustrators and to launch a comics section. I told him I knew just the guy for him: Me.
Long story short, I went in and interviewed (WWE is located in Stamford, Connecticut, about a fifteen minute drive from where I was living at the time) and was hired. The magazine’s art director had been trolling the internet for cartoonists and came up with a truly wretched pool of talent whose contributions I wouldn’t have considered using in a fanzine. So I trashed what they had commissioned, wrote a whole new crop of strips, and broke out my Rolodex to replace it with better:
The Mighty Krozor, art by Rick Burchett, color by Lee Loughridge
Time Rumble With Ric Flair and Maria, art by Steve Lightle, color by Loughridge
Turnbuckle & Tag, art by Joe Staton, color by Matt Webb
The Hardys In Space, art by John Byrne, color by Loughridge
I also lined up a few artists to provide illustrations for other parts of the magazine, including by Craig Rousseau for the article, “Is Your Teacher A Luchador?”, Jason Armstrong (“Suitcase Scramble”), and Craig Boldman, who was to draw a comic strip starring WWE wrestler, Hornswoggle.
Tony and the rest of the editors loved the strips and the art. Then, after the first issue was published, they did a focus group study on it with a dozen nine to thirteen year olds. WWE Kids scored pretty well overall, except for one surly kid who said he didn’t like the comics, which another kid half-heartedly agreed with, so they decided to drop the section. This was cited as the excuse for letting me go ten weeks after they hired me; I later learned that Tony had gone horrendously over budget on the launch and needed to cut my salary and then some, so me being the last hired, I was the first fired. There were no second episodes of any of the strips I started in the next issue or, as far as I know, ever, all the way through the mag’s demise in 2014, when WWE shut down its entire magazine publishing division.
My gig at WWE had its good and its bad. On the good side, the money and benefits were aces, the company cafeteria was delicious, and the office was the aforementioned fifteen minute drive from home, and the work was not all that taxing. On the other hand, I didn’t care about or like wrestling (which I now needed to watch hours a week of in order to keep up with the current story lines), the office, with its hideous open floor plan, staffed with was mostly twenty-somethings (I was the oldest guy on staff at fifty-three; Tony was something like forty-one, the deputy editor in his early thirties, and everybody else in their twenties), and I never got the sense that anyone was actually in control or that Tony knew what came next.
Plus, my desk was right across from the office of WWE heir and blockhead, Shane McMahon; it seemed to me like if not for his assistant, Shane couldn’t have found his own ass with both hands, much less make it to the right airport for the correct flight. Boxer Floyd Merriweater was somehow affiliated with WWE at the time, and he would sometimes try to squeeze his ego into Shane’s office, but I doubt there was room in there for both of them. Overall, the place was a clusterfuck, but I suppose if you’ve got eight or ten hours a week of live, lucrative television events to broadcast and frequent high-end pay-for-view specials, profits kind of take care of themselves.
Tags: Craig Rousseau, Hornswoggle, Jason Armstrong, Joe Staton, John Byrne, Lee Loughridge, Matt Webb, Ric Flair, Rick Burchett, Steve Lightle, The Hardys, Tony Romando, WWE, WWE Kids Magazine
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