Dr.Wonder In Old Town!

Old Town Comics was a one-book publisher from the mid-90's, showing up at the end of the great speculator boom, near the end of the bubble before the comics world became quite dark indeed. Their one book was titled Dr.Wonder and it was a proud throwback comic, an attempt to recapture the froth and fun of Silver Age Marvel Comics. To that end the company employed Dick Ayers to illustrate their flagship character. They also used Irwin Hasen on a few back-up stories, but these don't have the Marvel flavor, which ain't unusual since Hasen never worked for Marvel to my knowledge. Ayers though certainly did for a long spell and his work here is the loose action stuff he was famous for.


Dr.Wonder is a scientist who is befriended on the internet (a new invention at the time and still not well understood I'd guess by many who were the target audience for this comic) by a thug who steals his secrets and makes supervillains. These supervillains are a gang of throwbacks with names like Hellhawk, Magneton, Crucible and Strongarm. Each has a specific power, sometimes a power so specific that the explanation of it bogs down the proceedings. Dr.Wonder himself becomes endowed with the ability to mimic the powers of these baddies to a lesser degree, but it gives him the might to stall their threats.


There's a girl interest though she disappears pretty quickly and dramatically. Her dad becomes yet another hero called "Cad-Man" because though a paraplegic he can used the computer to create weapons and other things from a what looks for all the world like wood pulp. A third hero shows up, this time a chick who eventually gets the name Waterfall. One story has this defacto team hunt up yet a fourth hero named Powerhouse a 50's hero who has fallen on hard times after serving hard time for his role in the deaths of two innocents during a battle.

There seems to be a desire to evoke a hero-in-a-real-world setting. That it does but I have to say the motivations of the heroes comes off as a bit clunky at times. The villains though are a varied lot and really are the most interesting characters in the show for my money. Most are thugs but complicated thugs, or at least more complex than the format usually allows. The dialogue is a touch wordy, but that's in keeping with the Silver Age feel so I won't fault that.


All in all Dr.Wonder is an intersting experiment of a comic. It's necessarily limited by its format which changes with the fourth and fifth issues becoming larger until it reaches magazine proportions. Added to the comics mix (in the absence of Hasen's stories in the first two issues) is a Silver Age articles section that touches on Marvel monsters, the Beatles, and other such things of note for fanboys of the right generation. David Alliakis is the guiding light behind this project and he has several pointed editorials expressing his disinterest in comics of the day.

If you can find these, I recommend them, but be warned the story ends on a cliffhanger and I don't forsee ever seeing another installment. It's just not in the cards I suspect.

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