Marvel - August 1961!

This is a fun little time capsule which takes a keen comics fan back to that epic month when Marvel Comics was pretty much birthed. August 1961 saw the publication of titles from the company which had been "Atlas" such as sundry Millie the Model and Patsy Walker books and westerns such as The Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt Outlaw and romances such as Teen-Age Romance and Love Romances. Monsters ruled the roost in titles like Journey into Mystery, Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales and many more. But two new books hit the stands that month, a title called simply Amazing Fantasy, and its companion dubbed The Fantastic Four. The former faded but gave birth to a certain arachnid hero, but the latter became the ground floor for a whole new universe. Below are the covers of the titles available in this epic month in the order they are presented in this volume. The editors have taken care to identify the talent for each story and cover.  

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Madame Xanadu Day!

Mike Kaluta was born on this date in 1947. I first noticed Kaluta's work on DC's adaptation of Carson of Venus and on The Shadow. He was one of the four members of "The Studio" alongside Barry Windsor-Smith, Berni Wrightson, and Catherine Jeffrey Jones. He created some outstanding covers for DC, and none more entrancing than his work on Madame Xanadu for Doorway to Nightmare. 

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Deadly Nightshade Day!

Jim Aparo was born on this date in 1932. Aparo first made his mark at Charlton Comics on features such as The Phantom and Nightshade, the focus for today. Later he shifted over to DC Comics where he took up residence on The Brave and the Bold and other Batman-related titles. Aparo supplied his own lettering, giving his work a distinct look like no other. 

The Darling of Darkness, the Deadly Nightshade is the only female member of the Charlton Action Heroes line-up. She never had her own self-titled comic book like Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Judomaster, Thunderbolt or even Peacemaker, but she was in many ways a central figure in making various disparate elements of the Charlton Universe cohere. I'll explain in a moment.

Nightshade debuted in Captain Atom #82 plotted and written by her co-creators Dave Kaler and Steve Ditko,and of course drawn by Ditko with inks by Rocke Mastroserio.

She is a government agent, soon revealed to be the beautiful Eve Eden, the daughter of a United States Senator and a part of the Washington, DC jet set community which serves as a convenient cover for her espionage work for the U.S. government.

She is partnered with Captain Atom as they try to stop the super-spy The Ghost. Captain Atom is of course Captain Adam and since Nightshade is Eve Eden we get "Adam and Eve" no less as our light and dark partners in crimefighting.

Some issues later in Captain Atom #85 in another story by Kaler, Ditko and Mastroserio, she is again teamed up with the good Captain, this time with a slight costume alteration that allowed her beautiful hair to flow freely as they duo battle the super-villainous team of Punch and Jewelee.

Formerly Nightshade had been merely an adept hand-to-hand fighter but in this appearance it is shown that she has the uncanny ability to transform into a shadow.

The battle against The Ghost continues into Captain Atom #86 and again Cap and Nightshade take on the elusive criminal.

Nightshade gets a focus as she uses some new tools, specifically Ebony Bombs to battle the slippery spy. 

And that's that until Captain Atom #87 when after the departure of Steve Ditko's Blue Beetle, Nightshade takes up residence as the back-up feature. Written by her creator Dave Kaler, the series enjoys the considerable artistic talent of the great Jim Aparo, who brings a whole new level of grace and power to Nightshade's adventures.

In the opening two-part adventure which continues into Captain Atom #88, she battles The Image, a foreign agent who can use mirrors to travel instantly from place to place.

His ability seems to have some connection to the very origin of Nightshade and her own weird talent for becoming a shadow. But the origin will have to wait.

We finally get the answer in her final Charlton appearance in Captain Atom #89, the final issue of the run.

We learn that Eve and her brother were the hybrid progeny of their human father and an otherworldly mother from another dimension, a dimension of shades and shadows.

We further learn that Eve has gotten her training from a familiar face, Tiger from the pages of Judomaster. This series set in the then modern day was some decades after World War II, so Tiger is an adult now, but this bit of connection does a great deal to suggest that the sometimes disparate storylines of the Action Heroes all take place in a single universe.

Of course, that universe, named Earth-4 when it makes its official DC appearance during the Crisis on Infinite Earths is clearly a world in which the heroes all mingle, but when little Charlton tried to do it, it was a whisper of what that superhero universe might have become had they found more marketplace success.

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Repent Prankster!

The Prankster was a one-shot back-up hero who has a lot of charm, mostly because of the delicious artwork of Jim Aparo. As you can see above this wacky yarn deals with a colorful hero who is a freedom fighter in the dystopic city of Ultropolis which is ruled by a ruthless dictator named Bane. 

The Prankster was created by "Sergius O'Shaugnessy" (Denny O'Neil) and Jim Aparo for what turned out to be the final issue of Charlton's Thunderbolt, issue #60. No more T-Bolt, and alas no more Prankster would ever be created for the Derby Publisher. We would never know about "The Vengeance of the Wratt!". 

The Prankster though clearly seems to have been inspired by Harlan Ellison's classic short story "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" which was first published in Galaxy in 1965.

It was adapted to comics in 1975 in the third issue of Marvel's Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. The story was adapted by Roy Thomas and drawn in his own highly exotic style by Alex Nino. I love Nino generally, but I find his storytelling lacking here, much too difficult to follow. I'll take Jim Aparo's more straightforward approach anytime. But that's not all. 

"'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman!" is maybe my favorite Harlan Ellison story. As a parable of the modern day this dystopic tale captures the soul-destroying incessant race to nowhere which typifies most of modern life it reminds us, one and all that apple carts are made mostly to be upturned. It's the best way for any of us, all of us to find ourselves and others in a reality which seems increasingly bent on its own self-immolation. I savor the jellybeans the Harlequin sends down in a rain of delirious nonsensical pointlessness save for the utter necessity of pointlessness itself. Jim Steranko caught some aspect of that always instant in time when he attempted to capture the sheer madness of the story and convert it images which made you feel the same sort of thing.

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