Elections and Comics

I'm as glad to be through the election (and the donation request texts and commericals) as much as anybody, but it seemed a good excuse to look back at comic book intersection with elections. I'm talking fictional ones here, not comics on candidates or "get out the vote" PSAs.

Most of the these are going to relate to presidential elections, likely because there are more dramatic stakes. What better place to begin than Prez #1 (DC, 1973) which starts with a young man named Prez winning the highest office in the land and getting into adventures once he's in office. It was written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jerry Grandenetti and is predicated on the notion of a Constitutional amendment lowering the age for eligibility for office (which may have been inspired by the 1968 film Wild in the Streets). The upshot is a teenager gets elected, and who better than an earnest and idealistic kid from Middle America whose mother even named him “Prez” ‘cause she thought he’d be President one day?

Over at Marvel, Howard the Duck ran for president in 1976 on the All-Night Party ticket. Here's the Special Bullpen Note announcing it :

The storyline accompanying this fan club campaign was by Gerber and Colan. Ultimately, a scandal over a (fake) photo of Howard in the bathtub with his girl Beverly, tanked his candidacy.

These were just the first two comic book candidates. Steve Rogers would run in the alternate universe of What If? #26 (April 1981) by Barr and Trimpe/Esposito. Lex Luthor runs for president and wins beginning in a oneshot called Superman: Lex 2000 #1 (2001) by Loeb and Harris. Most recently, Loki ran in a 2016 4-issue miniseries Vote Loki written by Christopher Hastings.

In the realm of elections other than presidential, Suicide Squad (1987 series) had a nearly year-long arc written by Ostrander and Yale leading up to issue 22, published on election day 1988. In this story, Cray, a Senator up for re-election and his crony blackmail Reagan and Amanda Waller with revealing the existence of Task Force X, unless they use the Suicide Squad to take out his opponent!

Ultimately, Cray gets assassinated himself by Deadshot on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the Suicide Squad's existence is made public. How's that for an election day surprise?

Horror Hosts

I've been meaning to check out this book. The whole multi-media phenomenon of horror hosts is interesting to me. Those horror-themed employers of terrible puns, making fun of (or perhaps having fun with) whatever B-movie or vintage horror film their program was showing that week. They likely reached their greatest exposure in hosting B-movies in late night or Saturday afternoons or various local (or later cable) TV stations, and even more recently on the internet. The internet tells me the first of these was Vampira in Los Angeles from 1954-55, but the first I encountered was Zacherley (on a cheap VHS tape). Well, perhaps the first I saw was Commander USA, but he doesn't really fit the standard mold.

At least one of these TV horror hosts, Elvira, made it into comics, but comics had its own horror host history, predating Vampira. The Black Witch (MLJ) first appeared in 1942 and the Man in Black (Harvey) in 1945. Probably the most iconic of comics' horror hosts are the three "GhouLunatics" from EC Comics. starting with the Crypt-Keeper in 1950, who ultimately broke out into TV and film.

The horror host tradition was perhaps suppressed by the arrival of the comics code but came roaring back in the Bronze Age. DC's Cain, Abel, and the Three Witches are only the most famous of their many hosts. I believe Marvel only had one hosted horror title, Tower of Shadows, but it had two hosts: Digger and Gravely P. Headstone. Warren Magazine's Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie hosts of the books bearing their name got an earlier start (1964 and 1966, respectively) thanks to not being bound by the code.

So where did the horror host get started? Radio. The witch Old Nancy hosted The Witch's Tale (1931-1938). Probably a big influence on their groaner, ghoulish pun style was Raymond, host of the popular Inner Sanctum Mysteries from 1941-1952.

The Crisis Companion

 

Recently, TwoMorrows released The Crisis Companion by Kevin Miller. This is an in-depth look at Crisis on Infinite Earths, its antecedents, its concept, how it plays out issue by issue, and its legacy. Given my ongoing reread of the period of Crisis's publication on my other blog, I was very interested in getting this as soon as I could.

I haven't had a chance to read it in depth yet, but overall, I'd say it looks quite good. At 250 pages there is a lot of detail, and just from browsing it, I've already learned interesting details like how the decision to kill Supergirl was made.

I enjoyed Miller's speculation on how elements of the Crisis story may be metatextual commentary on Wolfman's feelings about writing it. This sort of literary theorizing I liked a lot. I was less pleased with his swipe at the "overly long" "Trial of the Flash" arc wherein he suggests it is the cause "in no small part" of Flash's decline in sales since its inception in 1959. I share his opinion that "Trial" is overly long, but Miller provides absolutely no evidence that sales of Flash declined more precipitously in the years between April of 1983 and June of 1985.  A cursory search online suggests that in fact its sales declined by a greater amount between 1980 and 1982 than 1983 to 1984.  Regardless, absent evidence I'm forced to conclude that either Miller was making a joke that just appears as a statement of fact or he's just being slack about providing the evidence for his claims.

This issue aside and even with a limited read, I think it's a fascinating work and worth adding to your collection if you are a DC or 80s comics history fan.

DC in the Early 80s

 Over on my other blog, I've been chronicling the week-by-week offerings of DC Comics from January 1980 cover dates to the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in December, 1985 (cover date March 1988). I thought it would be interesting to compare the titles being published at the beginning of that period and those published at the end as an indicator of the change DC experienced over this period. 

So here are the DC publications in January of 1980 (cover date April 1980):

In this list, superhero titles share the stands with war, horror, Western, Sword & Sorcery, and science fiction titles. These make up over 40% of the total offerings. Batman and Superman titles make up over 50% of the 15 superhero comics.

In lists to follow, ongoing titles are in black, new ongoings are in green, limited series in blue, and series that were cancelled from one list to the next are in red.

Here are the publications in July of 1983 (cover date October 1983), halfway between my chosen start and end points:

Ten of the 1980 titles are no more, and 7 of those cancelled titles were non-superhero books. Only House of Mystery remains of the old horror line. Still, it isn't a complete shift to superheroes. Of the new titles we have Sword & Sorcery (Arak) and high fantasy (Amethyst and Arion), war (Blackhawk), and horror (Saga of the Swamp Thing). I suppose Omega Men could be considered a science fiction or at least space opera book of a sort, too. What is definitely disappearing is anthology books, though. G.I. Combat and House of Mystery are the only two left.

Limited series, a relatively new phenomenon, account for 4 of the current series (I miscolored Ronin).

Now, let's take a look at the comics being published in December of 1985 (cover date March 1986):

Sixteen of the series in 1980 are now gone, and those include Wonder Woman and World's Finest with runs back to the Golden Age, and Flash, that ushered in the Silver Age. Teen Titans, the Outsiders, and the Legion of Super-Heroes join Batman and Superman in the ranks of heroes with multiple books, though theirs exist to capitalize on the different tastes of the direct market. The Tales of books are also both reprint series.

Of the new titles in the '83 list, only the superhero or superhero adjacent titles (Swamp Thing and Omega Men) are still around. Of 31 ongoing titles, only 7 are non-superhero books (not counting the genre-straddling Omega Men).

Limited series are even more common than in '83 as are licensed books. There are two ongoing series (Star Trek and V) of licensed properties.

Before the Red Skies: The Waning Pre-Crisis Universe

 

Over on my blog, I've been, for years now, doing a week-by-week chronicle of DC Comics between the Implosion and the Crisis. Now in the last month of 1984 (cover dates! The 1984 of the calendar has a few more months to go.), it's worth reflecting on Crisis' effects on the DC Universe.

Every New Beginning...

The biggest beneficiaries of Crisis were DC's big-name headliners. Of course, they didn't all benefit equally. The Superman titles of the early 80s seem to me stuck in an outmoded way of telling stories that didn't capitalize on the more serial (and more soap operatic) storylines preferred by readers that had made X-Men and New Teen Titans hits. Superman is mostly engaged in done-in-one stories by frequently changing creative teams that are lower on action, drama, and stakes. There were attempts made at innovation, particularly by Wolfman, but these didn't amount to much.

Batman, in contrast, had decent runs in the years before Crisis by Conway and Moench, though mostly in harmony with the 70s revitalization of Batman. There are some shakeups to the status quo. Dick Grayson becomes Nightwing and Jason Todd the new Robin, with a somewhat new dynamic with Batman. Catwoman is pushed aside as both a heroine and love interest (though it won't be until Barr's run post-Crisis where she is fully returned to villainy), but Moench introduces Nocturna, a new adversary and potential love interest, for perhaps a fresher variation on the same old theme. Both Killer Croc and Black Mask debut in what seems to be an attempt to create new, major adversaries.

Wonder Woman is somewhere between the two. Her title is less stuck in a rut, because (presumably) poor sales seem to lead to a number of "new directions" in the early 80s, but none of these are particularly bold, and they tend to come across as flailing rather than innovative.

The marquee team of the Justice League gets a risky makeover with the Detroit League that doesn't really work. An attempt to follow the "Cap's Kooky Quartet" template and harness the soap opera stylings of X-Men and Teen Titans is hampered both by poorly conceived characters and Conway perhaps not being the right writer for the job. (Ironically, Batman & the Outsiders both builds a better team from the Kooky Quartet template and does the character drama a bit better.)

While not necessarily required by Crisis, the bringing in of new creators and a willingness perhaps by editorial to entertain bolder pitches leads to a revitalization of these titles, though not without a cost. The rich mythology of Superman was jettisoned in a desire to strip him back to basics. Wonder Woman also lost most of her mythos, but also her place of prominence within the DC Universe. Batman got a personality shift, altering his relationship to other heroes, and a personality ans origin shift for his sidekick set Jason Todd on a course to an ignominious and gimmicky death.

...Some Other Beginning's End

More minor heroes, particularly those attached to the mythos of marquee characters were even less well served. The last issue of Supergirl and the last backup in Wonder Woman featuring the Huntress have editorials promising more to come for these characters, but both are erased in Crisis. While both returned, it's perhaps fair to say they've been hampered by too many revisions and new directions since. Power Girl, though she wasn't regularly featured pre-Crisis, has suffered a similar fate.

The Flash, whose title's sales struggled, I assume, died in the Crisis and got replace by his sidekick. Aquaman had a tough time before Crisis, and continues to do so after. Green Arrow and Hawkman are arguable brought to greater prominence (at least for a while) by the interesting takes in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters and Hawkworld, but at the cost of erasing much of their past. The grittier. more grounded take on Green Arrow also has the result of sidelining him for years in the DCU as the new version isn't really superhero team material, and the unfortunate decision to set Hawkworld in the present makes a hopeless tangle of the Hawks' continuity, and likewise, I think, sidelines them. It is true that none of these changes or poor editorial decisions were necessitated by Crisis, but the spirit of revision unmoored by any adherence to past continuity opened the door to them.

These new directions also condemned to obscurity the interesting stuff done in the Barr/von Eeden Green Arrow limited series, The Shadow War of Hawkman, Kupperberg's and Infantino's Supergirl, and the Cavalieri Huntress stories. Okay, maybe few of these are absolutely classics; Maybe none of them were! But they aren't universally worse than everything that's been done with these characters since.

World's Will Die

I was really only becoming aware of the DC Universe as an entity at the time just-pre-Crisis era, so Crisis sucked me in, and the just-post-Crisis period is one I have a great deal of nostalgia for. I'm certainly not one of those grumpy old fans (old at the time of Crisis!) that talked about the event and its effects with horror. However, it's fair to say that not every decision, in retrospect, was a good one, and every decision has unintended consequences. 

Like it's interesting to think about how the course of DC Comics might have been different had there been the courage to reboot at the end of Crisis, it's also interesting to consider how the DCU might have gone if a path to revitalization had been take that didn't entail wholesale revisions.

The Incredible Shrinking Particle [Omniverse]

In the waning days of Google+ (remember that site?) I did a series of superhero-themed posts inspired by Wold-Newton essays with the conceits that there was only one Earth (encompassing both the Marvel and DC and possibly other "universes") and the world tended to work like our own, despite its somewhat altered history. This served to both ground the characters in history--making them more "realistic" and making history stranger! The name for the series was taken from Mark Gruenwald's 1979 fanzine about alternate comic book realities.

Like baby Kal-El, those posts were rescued from the dying G+, and the Flashback Universe seems a good place for some of them to crash!

It took a bit of chutzpah for a guy who almost died in an ant-hill on the occasion of its discovery to name a physic-defying particle for himself, but that’s what Hank Pym did in 1961, and somehow, he got it to stick.

He didn’t get there first, of course. That mad genius Miguelito Loveless tortured James West with shrinking in 1875, but that incident was classified. It’s likely Pym’s own experimentation was spurred by the tragic case of Scott Carey, “the Shrinking Man,” a few years earlier. Or perhaps he had heard of Darrell Dane’s exploits as Doll Man in the 1940s? (The late thirties to late forties were the heyday of chemists and pharmacists inventing super-powering concoctions. They were churning them out like they had soft drinks and tonics in the late 19th Century. There was a brief resurgence of this in the late fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies, the FDA and DEA made sure this was only the province of major corporations and government agencies.). At Ivy University, Ray Palmer was making his discoveries around the same time, isolating the magical particles through a lens made from exotic “dwarf star matter.”

On the subject of dwarf star matter, it seems that South America has the largest supply. Alexander “Dr. Cyclops” Thorkel was shrinking things in his lab in Peru. The radioactive cloud that passed over Scott Carey off the coast of Southern California likely originated in South America. Ray Palmer would later discover a hidden civilization of shrunken alien humanoids in the Amazon rainfrost, purportedly made so by a malfunction in their ship’s drive which used dwarf star matter. Perhaps their crash is the ultimate source?

Comics for Christmas

I hope everyone is having a good holiday season, whatever you celebrate. My holiday gifts included several comics related items as did a few peri-holiday purchases for myself. Here's the haul:

DC Comics Style Guide. This one I had pre-ordered some months ago, but it happened to show up in the week or so prior to Christmas. It is gorgeous, though with the material available digitally online, it's prior not as revelatory as it would have been a decade ago. Still very glad to have it.

Mighty Marvel Calendar Book. I got this one as a gift. It's an imposing tome, prompting my inlaws to wonder if I had a shelf big enough! There were more Marvel calendars in the late 70s-early 80s than I realized and its good to see them all in this format. I wish we would get a DC volume, too.

American Comic Book Chronicles. This full-color hardcover series from TwoMorrows is a great overview of comics history. Just before the holiday I picked up the newly released 1945-1949 volume, but while I was ordering I also snagged the only other volume I didn't have, the 1990s.