The Life of Pie, Part I

I have mentioned the character Pieface in Green Lantern before and always intended to get around to doing a couple of posts on him. At first blush he appears to be one of those racially insensitive (to our modern eyes) comedic characters, like The Spirit's Ebony, or Blackhawk's Chop-Chop.

But he was never really played that way despite the unfortunate nickname. And he has a pretty interesting history, so I thought I'd put together a post or two on Thomas Kalmaku, also known as Pieface.

He did not appear in the initial tryout run for Green Lantern (Showcase #22-24). That series featured Hal/GL and Carol Ferris. In Green Lantern #1, Julius Schwartz published an interesting (and slightly longer than shown) letter from a young man in Missouri:



Is this Roy Thomas' first created character? What do you know, in Green Lantern #2, a mechanic and confidant appears. We learn that Hal's mechanic, Thomas Kalmaku, is planning to resign from Ferris Aircraft. Hal goes off to try to convince him to stay on and:



Hal shows off an interesting fighting technique:



But Pie convinces Hal to stop when the guys run off. We learn that his father had discovered a great gold mine with a partner and they had split up a map to the fabulous treasure. But his father passed away (leaving his half of the map to Thomas) and the partner had not returned, which was why Pie was in the lower 48 to begin with.

Then Pie realizes that he's missing his piece of the map, obviously stolen by the crooks whom he bumped into. Fortunately, GL, who arrives after a convenient absence by Hal, can reconstruct it:



This is a cool and credible use of the Power Ring. GL and Pie resolve to pursue the treasure with only half the map. They come to a deserted mining town that turns out to not be quite as deserted as advertised. And in the heat of battle, Pie notices something:



Non-superheroes in the DC Universe who knew that a particular superhero had a particular secret identity at this time: Alfred. Now it is true that at times somebody had discovered a superhero's secret identity during a story, but traditionally those stories always ended with the discoverer either convinced that he'd been wrong, suffering from amnesia, or dead. Not here:



And having found the mine which will keep his people comfortable, Pieface is free to go on being Hal's mechanic.

In Green Lantern #3, Pieface plays a crucial if somewhat unbelievable role in the opening story. GL's power lamp is stolen, but Pieface happens to be adjusting his landlady's TV antenna and intercepts a broadcast from the thieves to their home world of Qward:



What are the odds that the only person on Earth who knows Green Lantern's secret identity would be the one to intercept that transmission?

In GL #4 Pieface makes a heroic effort to save his buddy:



He becomes poisoned by radiation and GL must visit the evil universe of Qward again to save him.

In GL #5, Pie got some pretty singular honors. His first cover appearance, for starters:



That's not Hal Jordan, but Tom Kalmaku in that spandex as we learn later:



Of course, the enjoyment of that moment is somewhat counterbalanced by this scene:



And a chimp is not the only animal poor Pie is turned into, for in the very next issue:



So if anybody asks you who was turned into a chimp and a seagull in consecutive issues of a DC comic, you know the answer: 3.14161....

The story itself sounds pretty gripping; an airliner under control of a gang of hijackers with both Hal, and Pie's childhood sweetheart Terga aboard. Unfortunately, GL conks himself out and so Pie, the bird, must crash into one of the plane's windows, survive, and... okay, we've established that the plot is a little shaky.

With Pie's considerable assistance, GL subdues the hijackers and eventually returns his Eskimo buddy back to normal. And we see that he and Terga are quite smitten with each other:



This seems like a good breaking point.

Goodbye, Green Lantern!

The late 1960s were a time of change for DC Comics. This became startlingly obvious in Green Lantern #49, the December 1966 issue. GL's main cast of characters had stayed steady since his introduction in 1959--sidekick Pieface (Tom Kalmaku), love interest Carol Ferris, and secret identity, test pilot Hal Jordan. But that all got shook up quite a bit in this issue, starting with the girlfriend:



I can't think of another DC comic where a hero had been thrown over permanently by a long-standing girlfriend in favor of another man. Oh, sure, Bruce Wayne's gals had a habit of dropping off the face of the earth every few years. Aquaman had gotten married, as had the Flash (mentioned briefly in this issue). So this was really something different. But that was not all the goodbyes in store for us in this issue.

Hal decides that he cannot stay in Coast City with Carol married to another man, and so he strikes out on his own, resulting in this poignant farewell:



I'll have to do a full post on Pieface sometime, but he was a pretty unique character in the DC universe. Although his name suggests the buffoonish sidekicks of the Golden Age, like Doiby Dickles or Winky, Blinky and Noddy, Pie was played straight, as a serious character.

And even this was not the end of goodbyes. An even more startling departure came at the end of Green Lantern #61 (June 1968). It wasn't announced other than with this small note at the end of the story:

Gil Kane, who had drawn every panel of every Silver Age Green Lantern story, was now out of the picture. This was part of great DC reshuffling of artistic duties in mid-1968 that I will have to cover in depth at some later date. Apparently, DC's artists and writers had been pressuring the company for health and pension benefits, and in an effort to head that off, DC decided to switch around the assignments, probably feeling that the long-term association of artists with characters gave the former too much clout.

Many of the switches worked, but this one appears to have been a failure, as Kane was back at the old stand by mid-1969, although he only got one more year with the character before the advent of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams.