Number 453


The Scourge of London!


I get a kick out of old crime comics, especially the ones that throw around the word "true," as in "Based on a true story!" You drop your eyes down the splash page and come upon some boilerplate disclaimer that says the names and places are ficticious in this "true-to-life" story. "Any similarity between actual persons or places, blahblahblah..." There's a lot of difference between "true" and "true to life." So was there a Jonathan Wild, the Scourge of London? Did he invent organized crime? Who knows? Who cares? This is a crime comic book. The kids who were reading it weren't fact-checking.

It's from Justice #16, June 1950, a Marvel Comic. The artist isn't identified.

I'm also including an ad by Dan DeCarlo for My Friend Irma #3, and a full-page ad for a push-up bra, sexy stuff that segues into our next topic below.

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The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps is three anthologies combined into one, over 1100 pages of classic crime from the golden age of pulp magazines.

It includes authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Frederick Nebel, Horace McCoy, et al. Because this is a comic book blog, I'm showing the only comics material in the book, two Sally the Sleuth strips from Spicy Mystery, drawn by Adolphe Barreaux. There's a fascinating story told about the Spicy line at the DC's Other Comics website because Spicy was connected to DC Comics. Anyway, when you read a Sally the Sleuth strip (pun intended) you know it has one intention, to get Sally out of her clothes. I also enjoy the economy of storytelling. They just threw out all the unnecessary plot elements, then got Sally nekkid. My kinda comics!

The third volume of the All-New Atom series, The Hunt for Ray Palmer, improves on the second volume with a more traditional helping of Mighty Mite action. Granted, this trade is something of a picaresque pastiche, a collection of somewhat loosely connected Atom one-shot adventures in service to Countdown to Final Crisis, but writer Gail Simone offers so much imaginative action here that it's well worth the ride, even if the story doesn't go much of anywhere.

As with Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer, this Atom story is distinctly about the looking and not the finding. New Atom Ryan Choi searches such unlikely locations as the former Atom Ray Palmer's jungle home, the miniscule base of the alien race The Waiting, and a mock alien heaven to find his predecessor; not surprisingly, Ryan doesn't find him. Instead, Simone treats us to a double-dose of Ryan's winning personality, and this makes the trade. Whether brokering peace between two warring Ray Palmer cults, or defending an alien soldier from Jason Todd, Ryan Choi brings humor, a good heart, and a fresh perspective to the role of the Atom, trait's that have similarly made the new Blue Beetle and Aquaman so enjoyable.

Whereas I felt Atom: Future/Past dwelt too much on a de-powered Ryan Choi, Simone has Ryan growing and shrinking with the best of them this time. The name of the game seems to be madcap fun -- witness the excellent reveal of a long-time Atom foe, Ryan Choi donning a makeshift version Ray Palmer's "Sword of the Atom" costume, and need I say more: "Stupid Jetpack Hitler." Even the Godzilla monster fight in the end, though a bit cliched, runs on pure bizarre adrenaline. Some times you don't need much more from your comics than the sense that the writer is having fun, and Hunt for Ray Palmer has that in spades.

It's perhaps a credit to Gail Simone that her writing in All-New Atom seems tonally different (most of the time) from that of her writing in Birds of Prey. I mention Birds because it surprised me to find a false ghost of Blue Beetle Ted Kord in this book. After Simone wrote a lovely tribute to Ted Kord at the beginning of Birds of Prey: Blood and Circuits, I'm surprised she'd have such an off-the-cuff appearance by something proporting to be Blue Beetle's spirit, especially in a chapter that didn't amount to much more than a satire of crossovers. It's in this way that Hunt for Ray Palmer is somewhat scattered -- the hero going from adventure to adventure to the next crazy adventure. There's some appeal to this, but it doesn't necessarily hold up under heavy scruitiny.

I wasn't much sold in the last trade on the art of Eddy Barrows, which overall I find a little dark for my tastes, and I was glad to see Mike Norton return for the entirety of this volume. Norton's art is wide and clean, leaving room for plenty of color, and it fit quite well with all the (micro)cosmic action that Simone has prepared.

[Contains full covers, brieft character bios]

So a fair review of All-New Atom: The Hunt for Ray Palmer -- I like this series, and I enjoy it every time I read it, and I'll be sorry to see it end after the next trade, even as it was never quite at the top of my To-Read list. Join us next time for All-New Atom: Small Wonder, and then more reviews follow from there.

Number 452


Wood Panic!


I have some unfinished business I need to clear up here...last spring a reader sent me scans for this Wally Wood story. He said he read about my box of loose pages of old comic book stories and that he had some of the same, which he shared with me. In late June my hard drive crashed, and I thought the scans were lost. But I had saved these scans to a disk, which I recently found. I am sorry I've forgotten the name of the reader, but I believe his e-mail name was Woodsman.

So, Woodsman, (and I hope I'm remembering that name correctly), here are your scans for "'S a Tragic Air Command," a satire of the old movie, "Strategic Air Command." It has the distinction of being the last story in the last issue of EC Comics' Panic, #12, from December '55-January '56.

Number 451


A Heap of trouble


Don Markstein's Toonopedia gives information on the various incarnations of The Heap. About the only one he misses is the one from Mad #5, illustrated by Will Elder in "Outer Sanctum."

The Heap, as Markstein explains it, was derived from Theodore Sturgeon's classic 1940 short story, "It," originally published in John W. Campbell's Unknown. It was too good an idea to contain itself to a single story, and the (unauthorized) descendants of "It" rose up from swamps all over the place. More modern versions are Swamp Thing and Man-Thing.

This particular story, from Airboy Comics Volume 3 Number 4 (in that annoying way Hillman Publications had of numbering their comic books), we find The Heap making his way to America. According to the Grand Comics Database, this 1946 episode of the soon-to-be-defunct Sky Wolf feature was the fourth appearance of the creature who was once the German air ace, Baron Von Emmelmann. The GCD doesn't know the artist, nor do I.

Number 450


Terry gives it away


Who made Popped Wheat? If it's anything like Puffed Wheat, which was produced by my father's employer, the Quaker Oats Company, then Popped Wheat was basically packing material in a cereal box. In the 1940s and '50s, before sugared cereals became common, cereals like Popped (and Puffed) Wheat were more common. I hated those cereals. The only taste I could determine from a bowlful of those products was from the milk and sugar I poured on them to disguise their disgusting consistency.

Ah, but enough about my youthful culinary dislikes. Popped Wheat gave out Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates as a premium, part of a series of weekly 16-page comic books. Sig Feuchtwanger is listed as publisher, producing comics from the Chicago Tribune syndicate, which included Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Terry, and Smilin' Jack. I bought a set of the four in the mid-1970s for $6.00. I believe someone made a warehouse find. As far as I know, the four I have are the only four issues produced. Even though the copyright date is 1938, the Popped Wheat giveaways were put out in 1947.

At long last, all done! Can't tell you how many of those little puzzle pieces nearly got lost on the floor.



Observations from the Heroes of the DC Universe puzzle:
I've been thinking about it, and I believe we can imagine this "group shot," if you will, was taken just before the Genesis crossover. Consider Roy Harper in his pre-Red Arrow Arsenal suit; Lobo, the Spectre, and Hitman, who all had series at that time; and Artemis in her post-Wonder Woman #100 Requiem costume.

We've been talking in the comments about two issues of Green Lantern Corps, #21 and #22, that aren't being collected in the Green Lantern Corps trades. These issues deal with the Alpha Lanterns, who also appear in the forthcoming Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns.

Right now, those two Green Lantern Corps issues don't appear in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns, but I wanted to post this note just to reiterate Green Lantern fans' hope to see these issues collected ... probably I'll have to find these in the back issue bins, but you can always hope.