#077.Spider Man 5

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel, all 1966)

Index.pdf



Issue 32 Jan 1966

Issue 33 Feb 1966

Issue 34 Mar 1966

Issue 35 Apr 1966



Issue 36 May 1966

Issue 37 June 1966

Issue 38 July 1966

Issue 39 Aug 1966



Issue 40 Sep 1966

Issue 41 Oct 1966

Issue 42 Nov 1966

Issue 43 Dec 1966

These comics are contributed by Dr. Krishna.

Number 409


Murphy Anderson's Star Pirate


Murphy Anderson has long been one of my favorite DC artists. I loved his work in the '60s, from the Atomic Knights in Strange Adventures to Hawkman, to his many inking jobs done over the pencils of other artists. I always thought any artist looked better when inked by Murphy.

Star Pirate is a swashbuckling s-f series from Planet Comics. This particular episode is from Planet #41, March 1946. Since Anderson was born in 1926, he was 19 or 20 when he drew this, and it shows a lot of sophistication for such a young artist. His inspiration from Lou Fine is apparent, too.

In 1948 Anderson drew Buck Rogers.

In 1987 Dragon Lady Press reprinted an episode in Classic Adventure Strips #10. As good as this is for a youngster, with age he only got better.

Single Issue Review: Doom Patrol #86

I have previously discussed the origin of the Doom Patrol, a team of freaks and outcasts which debuted in My Greatest Adventure #80. The DP continued to be featured in MGA through #85, when DC decided to award them their own magazine, which started with issue #86.

As you can see, the cover is a classic DC 1960s "Open Me" issue, with the heroes watching the villains on a giant-screen TV. That the villains include a talking ape with a submachine gun and a bubbling vat of fluid just makes it even cooler, and you can imagine how this comic must have flown off the shelves in March 1964, when it appeared.

The splash page is even better. I'll just transcribe the dialogue to you:

Elastigirl (thinks): "The Brain, the guiding spirit of the Brotherhood of Evil, has sent a giant robot to steal the Statue of Liberty! It's the most brazen theft in history!"

I mean, a giant robot, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brotherhood of Evil... how can you go wrong for 12 cents?

The story begins with the three members of the Doom Patrol (Negative Man, Elastigirl and Robotman) preparing gifts for the Chief. Since they don't know his birthday (indeed, he refuses to tell them anything about himself), they have decided to make today his birthday and give him gifts. We also learn that Larry (Negative Man) has scarred features:



Clearly a Dr Doom swipe; as I discussed in the prior post, the Doom Patrol ripped off Marvel's Fantastic Four while arguably Marvel's X-Men ripped off the Doom Patrol. We later learn that Rita (Elastigirl) is in love with Larry (Neg Man).

The story itself does not hold together very well. The Chief designed a giant robot named Rog (as in Roger?) for work on the moon that was stolen by a crook named Morden who used it to commit senseless acts of destruction. But it turns out that Morden was really trying to get into the Brotherhood of Evil.

We learn that the BoE is run by the Brain, a disembodied brain that lives in a jar of liquid. So smart is he that he trained the gorilla shown on the cover (Monsieur Mallah) to be a genius with a 178 IQ and a criminal. Now that Morden has the giant robot under his control, the Brain decides to execute a heist of the Statue of Liberty, but Rita has other plans:



Monsieur Mallah, featured so prominently on the cover, ends up with a very minor role in the story aside from a dramatic introduction. He ends up landing one punch on Cliff (Robotman) and gets decked in the payback. He never carries a submachine gun or straps on a few hundred rounds during the story, either.

Overall: Good art, good premise for the story, but mediocre and cramped execution.

Although the name of the comic had changed to Doom Patrol, there was a backup feature with nine pages of Howard Purcell art and story. Purcell was a DC artist from the Golden Age, perhaps best known for his work on Sargon the Sorceror, but his art here actually looks more like the 1970s than anything anybody else was doing in 1964:



Note the detailed coloring; very unusual for that era. In the story, the astronaut had been exposed to radiation from an atomic bomb blast, resulting in a mutation of his body into the whirlwind form shown on the splash. But in actuality, it turned out that he was not Major Reed, but an unrepentant Japanese war criminal from World War II, who had taken his place after splashdown (and who had actually been caught in the atomic bomb blast). The Japanese war criminal is greeted as a hero in the US, but he plans to seek revenge for "his emperor" for the humiliation of their defeat in World War II.

A historical side note: There seemed to be regular reports at the the time about Japanese soldiers who had gone into the jungle on various deserted islands during World War II and continued to labor on, unaware of the war's end or unwilling to accept surrender. How true these stories were I have no idea, but it was sufficiently well-known that it inspired an episode of Gilligan's Island. Update: Wikipedia reports that two Japanese holdouts were captured on Guam in 1960 and another in 1972. See also this terrific Gunner & Sarge story on the same theme.

Major Reed escapes from where the war criminal imprisoned him and decides the only way to stop the villain is to gain similar whirling super-powers. So he drapes himself in seaweed (the Japanese had been gathering seaweed when the atomic blast transformed him), and canoes a log to near a new atomic test site. Then a waterspout gets him twirling, and presto-change-o, he's another human top.

As dueling whirlwinds, they have a battle climaxing atop the Washington Monument (yet another landmark backdrop for a fight), and eventually the Major defeats the war criminal:



Comments: Although the story is nothing special, the artwork really stands out.

Overall Doom Patrol #86 is an entertaining issue. My chief criticism is that the Doom Patrol story should have been longer, and the interesting Monsieur Mallah character given more of a role. What's the point of giving a gorilla a 178 IQ if you're not going to use him as anything more than a fighter?

Counting Words

By the mid-1960s, both Marvel and DC were starting to reduce their page counts of story and art. Marvel pretty much settled on a standard page count of 20 starting around 1964 and stuck with that, while DC more commonly had 23-26 pages and gradually reduced that to a standard of about 23 pages by the end of the Silver Age.

But what about the number of words? Surely with all the anguished thinking going on in the minds of Marvel's tormented souls, Marvel comics had far more words per page than DC, thus making up for their lack of pages?

It's an interesting argument, and one I do not propose to settle with this post. But I thought I'd add a few data points to the debate, so I went back and picked (reasonably at random) Avengers #19 (August 1965) and counted the words on each page. Since the comparable DC comic is the Justice League of America, I picked JLA #37 (also August 1965) and performed the same task.

The results were somewhat surprising to me. The Justice League of America story had quite a bit more words than the Avengers tale, approximately 4,000 words compared to around 3,300, or about a 20% difference. The difference is largely caused by the additional pages in the JLA story; through page 20 (where the Avengers issue ended) the JLA story was only a little over 100 words longer, or about 3% more verbose.

Some other effects which are probably not surprising, but interesting nonetheless:

In both comics, the fewest words to appear on pages other than splashes or partial pages (the JLA story had three 2/3rd story and art pages with 1/3 page devoted to advertising) were the fighting sequences. In the JLA story, pages 12, 20 and 21 were the only pages aside from the splash not to have over 100 words, and those were the major combat pages. Who needs words when you've got one guy punching another? Ditto with the Avengers, where pages 4, 13, 16 and 17 featured characters more using their jaws to block fists rather than to talk.

I did not differentiate between dialogue and those scene-setting boxes at the top of panels, which was probably a mistake. Dialogue is always more interesting to the reader than exposition, and from a quick look it certainly appears that Marvel had more of the former and less of the latter than DC. Looking at the stories again quickly, the Avengers book had only 42 panels with scene notes, while the JLA story had 65.

Overall conclusions? There's not reall a significant difference between the number of words in Avengers #19 and JLA #37 beyond the obvious four additional pages of story and art. If I'd chosen two other issues I might have found something different.

Number 408


Two Dukes and Dopes


The Duke and the Dope was a feature from Giggle Comics, drawn and lettered, and also likely written, by animator/cartoonist Ken Hultgren.

If you Google Hultgren's name you find references to books on drawing he wrote, including one still in print from Dover Books, and animation he worked on, but I wasn't able to find any dates, like birth and (presumably) death. About all I know about his comic art besides these stories from Giggle is that he drew the Bambi Four-Color #12 for Dell in 1942. Here's a page scanned from the last Whitman Bambi reprint from 1984.


Hultgren worked for Disney for many years, including the years Carl Barks was with the studio, and probably when Walt Kelly was there, too. If you can confirm that or give me any other information on Hultgren please do.

I like these stories, scanned from Giggle Comics #52 and #54, April and June 1948, respectively. I think they're funny, and the artwork has a Walt Kelly touch to it, especially in the inking, and most especially around the eyes.

#076.Indrajal Comics 31

Hindi Indrajal is already available in this blog.

271-1977-Phantom-The Wonder Jewel

Password: bookscomics.blogspot.com

It's an Anonymous contribution.

184-1973-Phantom-Jinda Murde

Password: bookscomics.blogspot.com

It's an Ajay's contribution.


All thanks & credits go to both friends.

On the Dividing Line Between the Silver Age and Modern Comics

This came up tangentially in the most recent quiz. What is the Silver Age and what is the Modern Age?

I tend to go with the 1955-1970 timeline for the Silver Age, although there are numerous reasons why this doesn't always work. The key factor in my mind about Silver Age Comics is the influence of the Comics Code Authority, for the simple reason that it ceased to be a major factor after about 1970.

As evidence, consider the famed "drug" issues of Amazing Spiderman #96-98 (May-July 1971). They were the first comics by a major publisher to ship without the CCA seal of approval:



The series was almost ludicrously anti-drug, with the young man shown on the cover above falling off a roof because he was high on something (we are not told what). Harry Osborn becomes addicted (heh) to LSD by a guy who gives him his first batch for free. Stan clearly had about as much understanding of drug effects and distribution as Lawrence Welk did.

Contrary to expectations, the world did not end. Distributors still distributed the books, newstands (remember those?) still sold them, and the CCA was exposed as a paper tiger. And only a year later, DC would publish its famed Speedy on Smack series, with a much more nuanced plotline that managed to garner the CCA's approval.

So we can see that within a very short period of time, what the CCA was willing to endorse changed significantly.

Another indication comes in the kinds of comics issued towards the end of the Silver Age. For example here are the new comics that DC published in 1968 and the genres they fit into:

Secret Six (Adventure)
Beware the Creeper (Superhero)
Anthro (Adventure)
Hawk and the Dove (Superhero)
Brother Power the Geek (Superhero)
DC Special (Variety Reprints)
Bat Lash (Western)
Captain Action (Superhero)
Angel & the Ape (Humor)
Binkie's Buddies (Humor/Teen)
Date With Debbi (Humor/Teen)
Witching Hour (Horror)

(Note: Publication date used to determine whether the comic was published in 1968, not the cover date)

As you can see, a variety of titles were launched, but the focus still was on superheroes. Now let's look at the titles DC initiated in 1971:

Mister Miracle (Superhero)
Ghosts (Horror)
Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love (Horror/Gothic Romance)
Spirit World (Horror)
Weird War Tales (Horror/War)
In the Days of the Mob (Crime/Detective)
Sinister House of Secret Love (Horror/Gothic Romance)

Quite a difference there; only one new superhero book launched, and that was part of Kirby's Fourth World series. By contrast, the horror genre, which had been virtually eliminated during the CCA's heyday, returned with a vengeance. And even that doesn't tell the whole story; several DC mags also reverted from superhero to horror or other genres, including House of Mystery, House of Secrets and Strange Adventures.

To give a better idea, consider this: In 1968, DC published 365 comics, of which 206 or 56% were superhero. In 1971, DC published 352 comics, of which 169, or 48% were superhero.

Similar things were happening at Marvel, although I don't have as good a database of Marvel Comics to do the numerical comparisons. However, once again, here are the comics that Marvel initiated in 1968:

Captain Savage (War)
Captain America (Superhero)
Doctor Strange (Superhero)
Groovy (Humor)
Incredible Hulk (Superhero)
Iron Man (Superhero)
Mighty Marvel Western (Western Reprints)
Nick Fury, Agent of Shield (Adventure)
Pussycat (Humor)
Silver Surfer (Superhero)
Spectacular Spiderman Magazine (Superhero)
Sub-Mariner (Superhero)

And 1971:

Creatures on the Loose (Monster Reprints)
Kull the Conqueror (Adventure)
Marvel Feature (Variety)
Marvel Spotlight (Variety)
Monsters on the Prowl (Monster Reprints)
Savage Tales (Adventure)
Special Marvel Edition (Superhero Reprints)
Western Kid V2 (Westerns)

Again, a very decided move away from superheroes. Indeed, all of Marvel's long-running superhero mags had been introduced by 1968, and all of their major long-running features (the solo series heroes/teams as well as Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange, Hulk) had been introduced before that. The only new series Marvel launched in 1970 that had any staying power was Conan the Barbarian, which I'd classify as an "Adventure" comic with horror themes.

Now it's true that all these things happen in a continuum; it's not like people woke up one day and the comics had changed from Silver Age to Modern. But if you have to draw a dividing line, I'd be much more inclined to point to Amazing Spiderman #96 as marking the true beginning of Modern comics than ASM #121, which others have argued for. The death of Gwen, while shocking was not all that new--see Ferro Lad, Alfred the butler (temporarily), Lightning Lad (temporarily), Proty I, Frederick Foswell, Captain Stacy... the list goes on.