#270: James Bond 007 - Licence To Kill

Plot Synopsis of the Movie: Shortly after an important drugs bust, CIA agent Felix Leiter is married, but when the drug lord he arrested escapes, kills his wife and mutilates Leighter his old friend British agent James Bond seeks revenge. When "M" orders 007 to drop the matter and start a new assignment, Bond deserts Her Majesty's Secret Service and embarks on a world wide personal vendetta to kill those responsible.

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All credits go to Jaklar-DCP.

P.S. Removed earlier Tarzan post.  Soon I'll repost with better and more complete strips links contributed by Emile.

Trivia Quiz #37: Solve the Puzzle Cover

I've talked a bit in the past about Mort Weisinger's fondness for what I call puzzle covers. These covers show something bizarre and unexpected, which he hoped would compel the kid to at least take the magazine off the rack and flip through it to find out why the event depicted on the front was taking place. Here's your opportunity to match wits with Mort:

1. Why is this happening?

a. It's a plot to fool some aliens
b. It's the result of Red Kryptonite
c. It's actually a Bizarro Supergirl
d. It's a plot to fool some crooks

2. Why is this happening?

a. It's a plot to fool some aliens
b. It's an effect caused by a comet
c. It's an effect of Red Kryptonite
d. It's actually Bizarro Superman

3. Why is this happening?

a. It's a plot to fool some aliens
b. It's a plot to increase the Daily Planet's circulation
c. It's a plot to fool some crooks
d. It's an effort to save Superman's secret identity

4. Why is this happening?

a. It's a plot by Mr Mxyzptlk
b. Superman really likes Jimmy's guitar licks
c. It's an effect of Red Kryptonite
d. It's a scheme by a saboteur

5. Why is this happening?

a. It's a plot by Mr Mxyzptlk
b. Jimmy really has a secret super-punch
c. It's a plot to fool some crooks
d. It's an effect of Red Kryptonite

Number 639


Jann and her man can!


This is the second of five jungle girl stories I'll be posting this week.

Jann of the Jungle, yet another jungle princess, was published in Jungle Action, then the title was changed to Jann of the Jungle after the titular (smirk, smirk) heroine. Atlas' other jungle girl, Lorna, was fortunate to be drawn by Werner Roth, and Jann by Jay Scott Pike, both great girl artists. Both series were written by Don Rico, apparently the resident jungle girl scripter.

"The Jackal's Lair" is a fun little story from Jann of the Jungle #10, 1956, about Jann, her man, and a jungle monster. This comic also dispels a myth I've believed for years about Code-approved comics, that female breasts were supposed to be de-emphasized.

Pike left comics to do illustration and did some topnotch pin-up work. Here's a posting I did about Pike in Pappy's #334.

Grab the nearest vine and swing on over to Chuck Wells' Comic Book Catacombs Blog for another Jann story!






TOMORROW: The thrilla that is Camilla!

Welcome to the End of My Life

Or, I started another blog. This one's called Nothing But Batman, and you can probably guess the topic. I wanted to talk about all eras of Batman and with the Silver Age focus of this blog I thought it was only fair to my readers to put the discussion of the Caped Crusader and his buddies over there. Hope you enjoy it!

Number 638


Sheena in harem pants!


This week we're going to do something different...I've got all jungle girl stories lined up for this week. It's cold where I am...the first week of December, a bleak and cold month. Ugh. I need to go someplace warm, someplace where I can see babes in leopard-skin bikinis swinging through treetops and wrestling crocodiles. Unfortunately, for me such traveling to exotic places is done vicariously via the four-color world of jungle comics.

Chuck Wells at Comic Book Catacombs and I are in collusion. He is also showing jungle girls this week. Check them out here.

First up, Sheena, the original Queen of the Jungle. In this story some traders get the drop on Sheena and her idiot boyfriend, and sell them into slavery. You get to see Sheena wearing a harem outfit in this story, which is the main reason I chose it. We all have our fantasies.

It's from Sheena, the Queen of the Jungle #3, Winter 1943.








TOMORROW: Jann of the Jungle!

The Unknown Spiderman Story

Ross Andru pencilled a bunch of Spiderman stories in the 1970s, starting with ASM #125 (October 1975). But did you know that he also drew one Spiderman story in 1968? Well, to be honest with you, neither did I until I stumbled across this issue in a used bookstore around 1976. Stan explains the circumstances here:

That Stan didn't want to burden Andru with the plot threads of the Spiderman series is pretty obvious. Nothing in the story places it tightly in any continuity of the time; this is a story that could be slotted in anywhere from about ASM 60-120 and nobody would notice that it was out of place. Harry and Peter are roomies, and Gwen is his girlfriend; that's about all we know.

We get the usual megalomaniac introduction:

Hey, I'll test my powers against Spidey and see if I'm as great as I think. He has some sort of mental ability to give Peter major-league headaches, and I mean that literally, not figuratively:

Fortunately, the crooks that Spidey has been following decide that discretion is the better part of valor, after a few efforts at killing off the wall-crawler, so he's able to survive the experience.

We learn a little about the villain of the piece. He had shown great ESP ability, and became a researcher on the topic. He considers contacting Dr Strange and the Ancient One, but decides they would be too difficult to locate (never mind that many people went to Dr Strange's Greenwich Village pad with their problems). He traveled to Africa, to learn juju, the art of taking control of an enemy's mind. Now he's determined to make the entire world fear the power of the Sorcerer (as he dubs himself). In an odd bit, he sends off a voodoo doll addressed to Spiderman, with this comment:

Meanwhile, Peter's headaches are so bad, that he sends for Dr Bromwell, who can find nothing medically wrong with him. So Pete skips out on a double date with Gwen and Harry and MJ. But later he feels an odd compulsion:

He arrives as Mardi Gras is getting into full swing, but finds himself entering a warehouse, where his destiny awaits:

Say what? What was the point of sending Spidey down to New Orleans to face an android locked in a crate? He turns out to be something like the Sandman, able to turn himself soft or hard at will. So we get pages of them fighting, with Peter having to deal with his headaches at the same time.

In the meantime, the Post Office has sent back the package as undeliverable, and the postman rings once:

Causing a deadly feedback which kills the Sorcerer and renders his android harmless.

Comments: Yechhhh! The story makes little sense. We can understand how the Sorcerer is able to affect Spiderman with his mental powers, but where did he come up with the android? Did he just buy it at Androids 'R' Us? The idea of sending a package to Spiderman seems weird, as well, and if the object was to let the police know that he had killed Spidey, wouldn't leaving a return address on the object be a little too good a clue as to where to find him?

Fantastic Four Fridays: Let The Supervillain Team-Ups Begin!

Supervillain team-ups had been rare in the DC Golden Age. Batman had two that I'm aware of; in Batman #2, The Joker Meets the Catwoman was published. However, it was not really a team-up as such, just a story with two different villains. Then, in Batman #25, came Knights of Knavery, featuring the Joker and the Penguin. This was a real supervillain team-up; oddly it was not repeated. Superman #77 had a story featuring Luthor, the Toyman and the Prankster, and of course there were several supervillain team-up stories in All-Star Comics tales of the Justice Society of America. The famed Flash of Two Worlds (published exactly one year before FF #6) had featured the talents of the Fiddler, the Shade, and the Thinker.

So team-ups were not unheard of, but they were uncommon. Of course, Marvel changed all that. As the story begins, the FF is reading their fan mail. Reed discovers that a young fan is recuperating in a hospital nearby, and stretches over to meet him. This gives Stan the opportunity to explain how Mr Fantastic's uniform elongates with him (some mumbo-jumbo about unstable molecules).

The fan mail segment also features the first mention of the Yancy Street Gang, a long-running gag in the series. As you can see, they specialized in tormenting the Thing:

This gives Ben the opportunity to muse that he longs for a villain worthy of his great strength, like Dr Doom or the Sub-Mariner. And speaking of that duo, Dr Doom is, at the same time, encountering Subby:

Doom is determined to goad the Sub-Mariner into resuming his campaign against the surface world:

We also learn that the Sub-Mariner is still sweet on Sue, and that his feelings for her are returned:

But almost at that moment, Namor enters their quarters, having flown through an open window. We know from an earlier scene that Namor is carrying a device that Dr Doom will be able to use to pull virtually anything on Earth to him, and that anything in this case is the entire Baxter Building:

But this is a double-cross on the Sub-Mariner, too, as we learn here:

Dr Doom tugs them out into space, apparently intending to suffocate them. The FF put on a bunch of fishbowls (although there are no apparent oxygen tanks attached to them), as does Subby. The Torch is unable to fly, and Mr Fantastic finds that the cold of space reduces his stretching power. Ben's strength and Sue's invisibility are useless. So what can be done?

Well, not to spoil the drama, but the Sub-Mariner swims around in a pool of water for a bit, then makes a leap through a meteor shower to Doom's ship. Doom tries to electrocute him, but:

In his haste to escape, Doom hitches a ride on a passing meteor, to his (apparent) death in the vastness of space. The Sub-Mariner returns the Baxter Building to its original position. Namor flies off in Doom's craft, leaving the FF in something of an awkward position:

Comments: Something of an offbeat story; the FF only survives because one of the "villains" prevents the other villain from winning. This became a common theme in the Marvel team-ups.

Number 637


Spacehawk and Dork help the war effort


We've had some fun this week, and we'll end the week in the same way. Spacehawk was Basil Wolverton's creation, who started his run in Target Comics #5 as a strictly off-this-world spaceman who fought Wolverton-style grotesque aliens. As World War II began Wolverton's editors told him to bring Spacehawk to Earth so he could fight our enemies. Wolverton is said to have protested this change, and in retrospect he was right. Spacehawk didn't last long after that.

However, even after the theme of Spacehawk was changed there were still memorable stories in the Spacehawk canon because they're by Basil Wolverton, who never drew an uninteresting comic in his life. He was famous for his funny dialogue and funny names, and for an alien name "Dork" seems great. In 1942 when Basil drew this he was probably thinking of a good, punchy name, not realizing he would be making us laugh almost 70 years later for reasons he couldn't anticipate.

From Target Comics Volume 3 Number 1, March 1942:









Make sure you come back on Sunday for the beginning of a special Jungle Girl week. We're kicking off with a Sheena story, and will follow each day for six days with beautiful jungle babes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have remarked in the past how secular comics seemed to be in the Silver Age, and this was not exclusive to the Christmas season. Thanksgiving stories also were reduced quite substantially. According to the GCD, there were 16 stories published between 1940 and 1954 with the word "Thanksgiving" in the title, while from 1955-1970, there were only 8 such stories (and one of those was a reprint). I have already remarked on one of those stories, the Atomic Knights tale, Thanksgiving 1990. Here's another, from ACG's Forbidden Worlds #73, which is famous for another reason (which I'll give at the end of the post):

Harry was an ordinary guy with work pressures and not enough money to buy the things he would like for his family.

As he sits there on the park bench, he wishes that his financial problems would end. And:

Well, hey, a little idol, let's ask it for money. And a sackful of gold coins ($5,000 worth) appears in front of him. So he takes it to the racetrack, and asks the idol which horse to bet on. Sure enough, his horse comes in at 20-1 and now he's got $100,000! But you can see trouble ahead:

When his father confronts him over his changed behavior, he decides to throw away the idol. But it doesn't work; when he gets home the idol has magically returned to his pocket. So he sells his rental property and invests in the stock market, which (thanks to the idol's advice) does spectacularly well for him. But as he continues to pursue wealth:

He partners up with another businessman, and they agree that if either dies, the other will be able to buy back his share of the business. But inevitably, the partner becomes an annoyance to Harry and:

Your wish is the idol's command, and the next thing Harry knows, his partner has fallen out the window to his death. He's horrified but again finds himself unable to rid himself of the idol, or his pathological greed. His son is lonely, so he buys the boy a horse. But tragedy strikes as the boy, inexperienced at riding, is killed. His wife leaves him, and even his father, who had always expressed pride in his son:

Devastated, Harry comes to a critical revelation:

And sure enough, the idol disappears. Harry leaves his magnificent estate behind, and wanders back to his old neighborhood. He sees boys playing and realizes that if he had not found that idol, his son would be out there with them. And then suddenly, there's Bobbie, running up to hug him! And his wife, and his dad, who found the Thanksgiving turkey on the park bench. Yep, somehow Harry's been transported back to the start of the story.


Comments: Wow, what a terrific story! I confess, I got about halfway through it and wondered if it was going to be too depressing for a holiday post. Stories like these, almost certainly from the fertile mind of Richard Hughes (who wrote and edited almost single-handedly the entire ACG line of comics) are why I consider American Comics Group to be the great unknown publisher of the Silver Age.

Happy Thanksgiving Day, everybody!

Why is Forbidden Worlds #73 famous (and the single most valuable comic ACG published in the Silver Age)? It's because of this story:

Yep, it's the first appearance of Herbie Popnecker, considered by many to be the greatest character of the ACG line.