Father's Day -The Super Sons!

The Super-Son stories by Bob Haney and Dick Dillin in some selected issues of World's Finest are a delight. Bob Haney had the uncanny knack to make even the most ludicrous concept click, and he did that with these tales of the offspring of the World's Finest team. The mothers of these fine young men are kept in the shadows but most likely are Lois Lane (of course) and Kathy Kane (Batwoman). The idea I guess was to keep the iconic looks of Superman and Batman but infused with a younger more unrestrained youthful vigor. Dick Dillin (assisted by a cavalcade of inkers - Henry Scarpelli, Vince Colletta, Tex Blaisdell, John Calnan) draws these two young heroes with the clean handsome faces he's so adept at depicting. These boys are heroes but brimming with idealism (not unlike the youth of their day) but often are betrayed by their lack of experience. 

The boys are revealed ultimately, many years after the actual end of the series to have been products of a computer program which predicted a world with the kids of the Cape and the Cowl. It's a nice rationale, but something in me prefers the Haney approach of unapologetic rip-roarin' storytelling. Haney didn't need to explain the hows because his stories rolled along at such a clip that you often didn't have time to ask.

Here are the covers for the appearances of the boys including some of their later post-crisis looks. The trade which reprints these stories is a real gem, something any fan of the DC Bronze Age can enjoy.

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B'wana Beast Day!

Bob Haney was born on this date in 1926. Haney was a delightful writer who did most of his work for DC and is most famous for his wonderful The Brave and the Bold stories featuring Batman. He created many of DC's characters in the Silver Ager including the focus of today's Dojo celebration -- the wacky B'Wana Beast.   

I have no earthly idea what prompted the creation of B'Wana Beast, one of the strangest characters ever to erupt onto the comics world. He appeared in two issues of DC's venerable Showcase and then was seen no more...almost. He appears to be a blend of classic jungle action and superhero craziness, cross of Tarzan and the Phantom. He's strange right down to the logo.

I never owned these two B'wana Beast comics, but I was transfixed by the ads for his debut. Like so many DC characters, which are peculiar and odd, there is a fundamental dynamic which is nonetheless fascinating. Created by Bob Haney and Mike Sekowsky, two of DC's most iconoclastic creators, B'wana Beast has a handsome pedigree   Apparently his "superpower" was the ability to communicate with animals and to blend two animals into one creature. It was an idea ideal for the visual feast of comics, but it was at best a limited notion.

B'wana disappears for years and years before surfacing during the Crisis on Infinite Earths alongside every other DC hero.

He did get a try-out of sorts in DC's offbeatChallenge comic, which featured scores of characters in a bonanza of weird stories by a gaggle of DC creators.

He shows up in Animal Man for a few issues, even making the cover once. This is a typically handsome Brian Bolland effort and makes the most of the design disaster which was B'wana Beast.

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The Viking Prince!

The Viking Prince is a creation by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert. The majority of the stories in this terrific little run were written though by Bob Haney and Bill Finger. Kubert is the artist throughout, though Irv Novick supplies many of the covers featuring the character. The feature debuted in the pages of The Brave and the Bold as part of a trio of features starring heroes from sundry historical eras. We have the Golden Gladiator from Rome, the Shining Knight from Medieval times and the Prince likewise from Medieval era but a bit further north.

The premise of the Viking Prince stories is pretty straightforward and originally quite formulaic, at least at first. Prince Jon is found by a village of Vikings and is suffering from amnesia. (They named him "Jon" but it turns out that was his real name anyway.) He stays with them and helps them out of one terrific jam after another and battles against an old rogue named Thorvald who apparently knows the secret of his birth but seems threatened by it. This goes on for a while with a lovely damsel named Gunnda. The early stories are adventurous but largely magic free with seemingly supernatural threats like a giant ice dragon having more prosaic explanations. I almost got the sense that Jon was rather like Adam Strange, a visitor from a distant land who arrived and helped the locals with his wits and skills to deal with threats which bewildered them.

Then the abruptly the story changes and we have Prince Jon and a mute companion named Bard traveling around while Jon performs the "Twelve Tasks of Thor". The stories pick up some length and some verve as real magic abounds. Jon goes to lands below the waves, beneath the Earth and even ends up shrunken in a Lilliput Viking kingdom. Always he reunites with Bard and they travel on. These are my favorites of the series, and it's a shame more of them weren't created. These stories fully qualify the series as a legit sword and sorcery series as there is no doubt that magical lands abound and that all sorts of demons and gods are out and about.

Then the premise changes again as we get the "origin" of Prince Jon and meet his dad King Rikk. There's another love named Asa, a blonde beauty who is betrothed to Jon for future benefit of two kingdoms. He though is obliged to rescue her and his father a few times while he battles all sort of threats to the kingdom. He is the loyal son now and must fight more than a few times to keep his rank as heir to the throne. Once again magic seems a bit more real as he gets a strange dragon-shaped mark in the final story which appears to have been a means to give him a specific weakness by deadening his arm in specific moonlight, not unlike Kryptonite or a Green Lantern's deficiency around yellow.

If the characters were clearly all the same "Viking Prince" these reboots would be clearly set ups for different series, but in the wacked out world of DC at the time, they were just all about the same character, continuity be damned.

Eventually Prince Jon ends up in the pages of a Kubert war book and battles alongside the World War II icon Sgt.Rock and his Easy Company. Here he gets silver hair not the blonde he's sported since the beginning and we find him trapped in ice in a cave. (Steve Rogers ring a bell?) He gets out and we learn he has been imprisoned by Odin himself and cast down from Valhalla because he was putting the moves on a Valkyrie. Lost in the WWII setting, he join Rock on a suicide mission, Jon himself eager to die fighting so that he can return to Valhalla. There is intrigue but eventually he gets his wish and yet a fourth premise is established for the series, but one which is never followed through upon. Stranger and stranger.

This post is dedicated to the late Joe Kubert. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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Summer Green #0 - The Brave And The Bold!

Without doubt one of the most significant series of comics in the history of the medium are those featuring the team of Green Arrow and Green Lantern as written by the late great team of writer Denny O'Neil and revolutionary artist Neal Adams. These stories famously brought a new sense of realism and relevance to a form which was then as always looking for new ways to connect with an ever-diminishing audience.

I want to take some time and take a closer look at these important and finely crafted stories over the course of the next several weeks. But as with many a story, the beginning is not always where you expect, and that's the case here.

Green Arrow, created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp debuted in the Golden Age pages of More Fun Comics. And for many years following the team of Green Arrow and Speedy battled crime with bows and quips with a nod to the classic heroics of the legendary Robin Hood. They were a somewhat lackluster duo who nonetheless managed to stay in print throughout the years, something only Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman accomplished. They even were part of the Seven Soldiers of Victory along with other DC small-timers.

For a short time, the great Jack Kirby took over the series and gave powerful sci-fi juice to the feature which ambled around from More Fun Comics to Adventure Comics to World's Finest Comics.

There were efforts to keep Green Arrow in the public eye with membership in the Justice League of America and later shots at team-ups in The Brave and the Bold.

But nothing seemed to make the Emerald Archer step out from among his peers and never did he ever headline his own comic.

That is until budding superstar Neal Adams got his mitts on the character in The Brave and the Bold #85. In a story scripted by the always reliable but often peculiar Bob Haney, Oliver Queen dons a new costume and grows his famous beard for the first time.

 

Immediately he goes from a drab Robin Hood wannabe to a slick modern hero who is as potent as his arrows if not more so. I immediately loved this version of Green Arrow and I wear a beard today because as a boy his magnificent golden goatee spoke to my vanity. 

(Unused art by Adams was used just this past year as a cover for Alter Ego.)

The story is a typically offbeat Haney affair with both Batman and Green Arrow revealing their secret identities to the same psychiatrist. Both heroes are torn between their costumed responsibilities and the seemingly greater good they can do as their rich high-profile roles as Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen. Wayne has been made a stand-in Senator who has a crucial vote for a necessary crime bill and Queen has a development which is crucial to the welfare of countless down and out citizens. Both are blocked by a villainous tycoon. Ultimately both manage to fulfill both roles successfully and realize that they can best help the world as both citizens and heroes. The psychiatrist conveniently uses hypnosis to wipe his memory.

Later in Justice League of America #75, Denny O'Neil plays with the personality of Green Arrow, making him much more irascible and committed to the needs of the common man and woman.

This is in no small part to the fact that Oliver Queen has lost his own fortune. The rich all too often live in the clouds, untouched by the rigors of daily existence and they often as well from facing up to uncomfortable realities until it strikes their own. Oliver Queen is humbled and from that experience rises a warrior for the downtrodden. After decades of wandering, the Green Arrow had found his way forward as a man and a hero. 

More lean green adventuring next week as Hal Jordan hits a rough spot too. 

This is a verdant vintage Dojo post. 

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Batman Illustrated By Neal Adams Volume One!

The late great Neal Adams was without question the most influential comic book artist of his generation and a few more besides. There have been great artists such Alex Toth, John Buscema, and Jim Steranko who have informed the way comic stories are told, but it's almost unique in the case of Adams. There is comic art before he arrived on the scene and after it, and the twain shall not meet. He brought a muscular realism to the comic page which had been lacking before. The dynamics of his pages are palpably different. 

I was fortunate in many ways to arrive on the comic book scene at about the same moment that Adams began to have his impact. The collections Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams document his evolutionary impact on that character and that influence begins with some of the very first comic books I ever came into contact with. The three volumes present all of his Batman work, the covers and the stories from the pages of The Brave and the Bold, World's Finest, Detective Comics, Batman and a few others. I want to savor these stories and glory in the covers all over again. All the covers are included in chronological order with snapshot reviews of the stories. We'll begin with volume one which begins itself in the year 1967. 

After handling the Batman on several covers for Detective Comics, The Brave and the Bold, World's Finest Comics and Batman, Neal Adams was at long last commissioned to do his first Bat-story. It would appear in the pages of World's Finest #175. 

World's Finest #175 sports an outstanding cover. It does its work magnificently because who could resist buying this book to find out about these lurid versions of the world-famous heroes. I never saw this one on the stands, but I did see ads for it and craved reading it for many years before I was able to do so. It's a wild and crazy tale about these two outlandish groups concocting an outlandish scheme to blow up both Batman and Superman. It's so complicated I imagine even the bad guys got confused by the story's end. But that wasn't the fault of Neal Adams who brought a strange reality to this bizarre tale. 

I actually got hold of a copy of World's Finest #176. DC was promoting Batgirl like crazy at the time and in this wacky story she and Supergirl team up with the World's Finest team, but that team is feuding over a couple of aliens who tell different stories about their origins. Getting to the truth is the point of this one. Like many DC tales of the time, there are a lot of things that happen that make little sense but are given very thin excuses. The art looks great though. I know that in some reprint collections Neal Adams made refinements to his work, and a panel or two in this story seem to have had that treatment, but I can't swear to it. 

Adams slips over to The Brave and the Bold and brings Deadman with him in issue #79. The ghost guest-stars alongside Batman as he tries to coax the Dark Knight Detective to take on his murder case. This was one of my earliest B&B issues and made a huge impact on my budding tastes. Batman is busy chasing a mob kingpin dubbed "The King" but eventually finds that he and the late Boston Brand have some goals in common. Bob Haney becomes the fourth writer to tackle Deadman in his brief post-mortem career. 

The Brave and the Bold #80 gives the world the Hellgrammite is one of the weirdest villains I've ever seen. A giant grasshopper and man hybrid this critter hops across Gotham gathering up gang bosses for a mysterious purpose. The Creeper has dropped into town to warn of the threat but has to dodge both Batman and the police who want to jail him as much as the other guy. This Bob Haney and Neal Adams production was meant to boost the sales of Steve Ditko's character but like the same kind of guest-starring role in The Justice League of America it failed. 

The Brave and the Bold #81 gives us one of the all-time great titles - "But Bork Can Hurt You!" Batman joins forces with the Flash to try and stop a muscle-bound chap named Bork who is taking over the dock workers and is poised to go further. He is somehow invulnerable to injury and while Batman fights to stall his aims in Gotham, it is up to the Flash to get to the bottom of how Bork got so powerful. Haney wrote it and Adams drew it. 

The Brave and the Bold #82 teams up Batman with Aquaman. At the time of this story Aquaman is searching for his lost wife Mera and already upset falls under the spell of his brother Orm, the Ocean Master who is working a swindle in Gotham. Aquaman is being used as muscle. A beautiful dame is involved of course, and Bruce Wayne seems more than a bit smitten this time. I have to admit I found Bob Haney's story a little confusing in places. The cover is by Adams and Dick Giordano. 

(This over by Irv Novick is not included in this collection.)

The cover to The Brave and the Bold #83 is not included because Irv Novick drew it instead of Adams. But Haney and Adams did do the story titled "Punish Not My Evil Son". This story teams up Batman with the Teen Titans who at this time were made up of Robin, Speedy, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash. When a wayward orphan suddenly shows up on Bruce Wayne's doorstep, Bruce tries to do the right thing, but the young delinquent has other ideas, especially when uncovers the identity of both Batman and Robin. 

We dive deep into the "Haneyverse" with this one. DC continuity was a new thing overall and not very well developed, but even the stories of Bob Haney in The Brave and the Bold fell outside it. This story titled "The Angel, the Rock, and the Cowl" has Bruce Wayne of the modern day reflecting on his work during WWII which brought him into contact with Sgt. Rock and Easy Company. They are preparing the way for the greatest invasion in human history, but run into a deadly scheme to steal gold and use toxic gas. The work of Neal Adams really kicks it up a notch in this one, a story filled with mood and atmosphere. 

"The Senator's Been Shot!" by Haney and Adams for The Brave and the Bold #85 is one of the most important comics in DC history. This one blew me away when I was a kid, with a story that was breathtaking and tied into the turbulent news of the day. We encounter the new Green Arrow for the first, with is signature mustache and goatee. Both Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen are contemplating quitting as masked crimefighters as they work together to foil a villain named Minotaur. 

And that wraps up volume one of these great vintage Neal Adams stories and covers. Seeing them again is like traveling back in time when these images fired my imagination as never before. I take on volume two tomorrow. 

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