First Issue Special - Dingbats Of Danger Street!

As his disappointing contract with DC Comics ran its course, Jack Kirby was obliged to knock out fifteen pages a week or thereabouts. With the "Fourth World" cancelled, it meant a lot of random projects got the green light. Among those was Dingbats of Danger Street which ran in the sixth issue of 1st Issue Special. It's the third and final entry by Kirby in the series and in many ways his weirdest. The titular "Dingbats" are four young men ("Good Looks", "Krunch", "Non-Fat" and "Bananas") who live as a small gang of sorts on Danger Street, a part of an unnamed city which seems especially loaded with wild characters and zany criminals. They are not affiliated in any way but a cop named Lieutenant Mullins crosses their path and attempts to help them out from time to time. In the debut story two villains named "Jumping Jack" and "The Gasser" are running amok after stealing some tiny film canister. The film itself doesn't matter, only that the Dingbats come into possession of it and the villains are more than willing to kill to get it back. 

This story was produced when DC suggested that Kirby partner with is old colleague Joe Simon to fashion a new kid gang for the modern world of the 70's as they had done with great success in the 40's and 50's with Newsboy Legion, Boy Commandos, and Boys Ranch. But the two men didn't really want to work together anymore and so each created his own version of a modern kid gang. Simon knocked out three issues of The Green Team with artist Jerry Grandenetti and Kirby did three issues of Dingbats. Eventually Simon's work was published in a manner of speaking Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, but the two remaining Kirby Dingbat stories were not because frankly the artwork was apparently stolen and today is believed to exist in private collections in Europe. 

But the folks at Twomorrows Publishing had access to Kirby's copies and from those finally at long last published the two long-lost Dingbats of Danger Street tales just a few years ago in 2019. Those two tales focus on the background of two of the Dingbats. We learn that "Good Looks" lost his parents when they were murdered before his eyes by the villain "Snake-Meat". The second  Dingbats tale shows how he gets a measure of justice at long last. The third and final Dingbats tale concerns "Krunch", the strong man of the team and we learn that he is related to a devious man named "Birdly Mudd" who wants to imprison the youngster so that Mudd can have full access to rich estate. Krunch is able to escape his Dickensian trap and return to his friends on Danger Street. More stories featuring "Non-Fat" and "Bananas" were conceived but best evidence is they were not produced.

But we are lucky to have these Kirby classics. The Dingbats of Danger Street isn't the best comic Kirby ever produced by a longshot, but the three stories are fun and full of vim, vigor and excitement. Next time it's another superhero revival and the artist is none other than Steve Ditko. 

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Dojo Classics - Boy Commandos Volume Two!

The Boy Commandos was a hugely successful Golden Age comic book feature, and no small reason was its extremely timely setting. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made their bones on Captain America for Martin Goodman's outfit, but were seeking a better deal and so contracted with DC. What made Captain America stand out was the unusual confluence of real world events and a viscerally patriotic hero who for the most part battled spies and other criminals in the United States. With the Boy Commando, Simon and Kirby take the battle to the Axis powers with a rough and tumble team of tyros.

At Marvel Simon and Kirby had concocted the Young Allies which had Bucky and Toro ally themselves with regular kids to battle such enemies as the Red Skull. They took that formula and introduced an international team of youngsters who rushed into battle alongside the toughest soldiers, commandos who spearheaded the battle against Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Andre Chavard is French, Alfie Twidgett is British,  Jan Hasaan is Dutch and Brooklyn (no last name) is of course American. These four youngsters served as mascots of a sort, similar to Bucky, but were often on the battlefield across the globe. Their leader is Rip Carter, a sharp-chined classic good guy and all around role model for the boys.

The key to the success of the series was that as interesting as these characters might have been, they were often not the focus of the stories. Very much like Will Eisner's The Spirit, the stories of the Boy Commandos often focused on one-shot characters who demonstrated unusual bravery or cowardice or both. Very often the Commandos themselves would disappear in their own feature, showing up at the end to tie up the loose ends. This gave the stories a real variety and also downplayed the fundamental weakness of the series, the improbability that boys could effectively fight with such gusto on the war front. The stories wind across the globe, hitting all the theaters of war and invariably offered up a patriotic message of support and encouragement.

The Boy Commandos were very much a product of the times and captured the zeitgeist of the country. Simon and Kirby, who both served in the war effort (Simon in the Coast Guard and Kirby overseas under the command of Patton) really seemed to have a sense of what the moment required. They also reveled in the storytelling of comics, clearly to my eye adapting many of the popular tropes of movies to the comic book page, another similarity to Eisner's work. But where Eisner tapped into the film noir aspect of movies, Simon and Kirby seemed to really love comedies and adventures. When I read the dialogue of Brooklyn, I hear the voice of Curly of the Three Stooges ringing in my head.  Whatever the elements of the brew were, it's clear that Simon and Kirby and the members of their studio were pushing the limits of the medium and having fun doing it.

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Dojo Classics - Boy Commandos Volume One

I guess I never realized that the Boy Commandos were so popular. I first encountered the Simon and Kirby DC material when it was tapped to fill up the extra pages in the back of the Fourth World books after DC's ill-fated decision to jump its prices to twenty-five cents way back in those halcyon days of the early 70's. I loved those comics brimming as they were with vintage material but apparently it cost DC once and for all its lead role in the market

Of the Simon and Kirby material which was used, I liked Manhunter the best, Sandman the best after that and Newsboy Legion in third position. The Boy Commandos who appeared in the back pages of the Mister Miracle. The WWII adventures felt out of place. But getting hold of the series in bulk and reading them with a firmer feel for the whole of the Golden Age output, I have to say they age quite well.

The Boy Commandos debuted in the pages of Detective Comics #64 and got a cover appearance in the very next issue. But after that, despite their great success in terms of sales (apparently only second to Superman and Batman) they were relegated to the back up pages of Detective Comics and World's Finest. The boys were widely available but not cover featured much if at all.

The exception was of course when they got their own self-titled comic. Boy Commandos was a quarterly comic and each issue gave us four adventures featuring Brooklyn, Alfy, Andre, Jan along with their adult leader Rip Carter. The title last long after the war and long after both Simon and Kirby had effectively left it for other challenges at other companies.

The first volume of Boy Commandos showcases the debut and many stories from the series as well as the complete stories from the first two issues of the Boy Commandos comic.

More to come later. 

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First Issue Special - Manhunter!

When Jack Kirby's grand project of the "Fourth World" was shelved because of disappointing sales he was nonetheless required to fulfill his contract for DC which called upon him to create many pages of new comics material. Many great projects resulted such as The Demon and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. And there were several one-shots as well in 1st Issue Special such as Atlas in the debut issue of the try-out series. Now it came time for another Kirby creation and as he had done with The Golden Guardian in the pages of Jimmy Olsen, he plucked a hero from his halcyon days as a partner with Joe Simon during DC's  Golden Age. That hero was Manhunter. 

Manhunter had been like Sandman, a hero that Simon and Kirby had revised and polished up but alas they did relatively few issues with the hero. The "Manhunter" name was used by DC several times over the decades as in a one-shot issue of 1st Issue Special's precursor Showcase. More famously Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson  had revived Simon and Kirby's hero Paul Kirk in a much admired series which alas saw the demise of the tragic hero. Now it was Kirby's turn to bring back the "Manhunter" name and his hero is a well-meaning fellow named Mark Shaw. 

Shaw is a dedicated public defender who is frustrated that justice is so elusive for those without means and influence and that those who deserve punishment escape it too often. His uncle informs him of an ancient cult dedicated to justice called the "Shan" and their "Manhunters". Shaw makes contact and is a accepted into the still-thriving cult and becomes a Manhunter, wearing striking red armor and a blue metallic mask. He is successful in defeating a weird collector who enslaves people and severs their heads, and the story stops abruptly as he makes his way to confront an enemy named "The Hog". 

This Manhunter is seen no more until a few years later when Steve Englehart revives the character of Mark Shaw and the Manhunters, turning the concept on its head a bit and making them into robotic zealots who hide a dark secret as old the DCU itself. The Manhunters become a grand concept which supplied DC with some dandy storytelling twists for years to come in the post-Crisis era. 

Next time Kirby strikes again with a brand new kid gang. 

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Dojo Classics - Massive Manhunters!

Paul Kirk The Manhunter, a Joe Simon and Jack Kirby creation, debuted in Adventure Comics and ran for several issues. Some decades later this largely forgotten hero was first reprinted in a few issues of Kirby's Forever People and then revived and utterly revised completely under the auspices of Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, who turned this particular hunter of men into one of the most memorable comic book characters of all time. 

This cover art for this 2009 AC reprint comic Men of Mystery by Mike Machlan is a fun homage (or swipe if you will) of a Simon and Kirby classic. The irony of  course is that pictured above is "Manhunter", a guy named Dan Richards who fought crime in the Golden Age under the Quality Comics badge in a substantial run in Police Comics. The character, along with his other Quality mates was snatched up by DC in the 50's and eventually he was blended into the larger DC Universe. He would become just one more of DC's many Manhunters.

I stumbled across this scan of the original artwork here and wanted to share it alongside the full-color color. Gorgeous! There's a bunch of competition, but this one is on my short list as the best the S&K team ever did.

And here is fun re-do by Joe Simon himself of an earlier Manhunter cover he and Kirby did, along of course with the original. Sadly there has never been to my knowledge any comprehensive reprinting of all of the Golden Age Manhunter stories under a single cover. It's a significant gap in the Simon and Kirby legacy for the modern audience. 

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First Issue Special - Lady Cop!

I have enormous respect for the work of Robert Kanigher who likely wrote more comic book war stories than anyone ever, a difficult and perhaps sometimes grim task. But his story for Lady Cop in 1st Issue #4 is misfire. Despite some dandy pencils by John Rosenberger and adequate inks by Vince Colletta, this story never rises above the trite. The "Lady Cop" in question is Liza Warner who becomes a dedicated cop after suffering through seeing her two roommates murdered and finding herself unable to help. She knows a few key details about the murderer and I guess if this had become a series we'd have learned more ourselves about the identity of the killer. 

But in this debut we get to see Liza graduate and spend two days on her rather hectic beat. In the course of her short tenure she saves a young girl from sexual assault from two ruffians, lifts the spirits of a kid by buying ice cream, stops a robber who cuts her shoulder and then gives mouth-to-mouth to the victim saving his life, continues her shift despite the knife wound, bicker with her boyfriend about her dangerous job, give advice to the young girl she'd saved earlier about STD's and reconciles her with her dad, and battles a chain-wielding thug then saves his life when they fall into the river. It's a hefty schedule and you can figure why she didn't have time to hunt down the murderer. Alas to my knowledge she never does. 

This comic actually reads like a quasi-romance story which just happens to feature a woman who became a cop. Given the sexism of the 70's, especially in areas like policework it's actually a fairly forward looking feature, but it hasn't aged well at all over the decades. Liza never returns to comics apparently until early this century when she became police chief in Ivy Town in some Atom comics. She apparently also appeared in some episodes of Arrow.

In the next issue the "King" returns and so does a fellow called Manhunter. 

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The Sunday Funnies - Prince Valiant 1961-1962!

Fantagraphic's Prince Valiant Volume 13 1961-1962 begins with the family of Valiant and Queen Aleta of the Misty Isles in her kingdom tending to trade issues and attempting to set up a series of trade arrangements which will serve the kingdom well while Aleta is gone with her family and Val to Camelot. But before much can be done Prince Arn and two of his friends are kidnapped though it takes a fearsome Valiant not long to find them and to deal with the kidnappers as they deserved. He returns home to find a new son soon to be named Galen. Then it's off to the mainland to find more trade opportunities and this time Aleta suggests that Prince Arn is of an age to accompany his father. Soon the matters of business overwhelm the good knight and he finds an advisor who is less than trustworthy in the end. Also making things sticky is the arrival of a striking and ferocious girl from the steppes who has been banished from her tribe. She soon finds suitors but that leads to tragedy and Foster ends her story before we discover her fate claiming that history had lost track of her. After confronting dishonest tradesmen Valiant eventually returns to the Misty Isles where he is soon tasked by a messenger from King Arthur to look for a trade road from Rome to Camelot. This mission falls on hard times as Rome is falling apart and the barbarians are taking the place apart. But Valiant and Arn do find allies along their path as well a strange monastery where seeming monsters dwell though they turn out to be a product of a eccentric artist. Later a cruel despot is laid low by Valiant's efforts when the villain holds Arn captive and threatens him with torture. The family is reunited and sail for Camelot  where Valiant works to retrain his great horse Arvik. A devout monk and missionary named Wojan causes much trouble in the land of Briton when his zealous followers become too numerous to feed or control and his counselors turn to be dishonest. But in the end Valiant works to bring justice and to build a church. The story closes with Valiant telling Arn about his boyhood in the swamps and then rescuing Arn when the latter tries to emulate his father.    

Hal Foster's storytelling is lean and effective. Gone for the most part are the grand visions that often showed up, but we are treated to a few such as the splendor of the church when Galen is christened and later the vision of a giant "monster" inside a monastery. Arn becomes a much more able partner to Valiant and the duo are together through many of the adventures in this volume. Alas when Valiant and Arn stand together the fact they wear similar tunics makes them look a little like some superhero and his sidekick, but the visual cues are rock solid nonetheless. Despite having a child in this volume Aleta fades a bit into the background, making room for Arn, but nonetheless Foster does periodically remind the reader of the great romance which stands at the root of this comic strip. The story leaves you wanting to see more of Taloon and it seems that in more recent years Tom Yeates as delivered on the promise of that story. 

This volume also has an excellent essay by Charles Vess as he discusses the influence of Foster and Prince Valiant on his own work. He goes on to speak of his turn at the character in Marvel's 90's handling of the character. He even talks about how he turned down an opportunity to take over the strip. 

More to come. 

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