Within the boom-and-bust cycles of
the comic book industry, you can in retrospect spot those moments when the
superhero idea has exhausted itself and been played out.
One such milestone was marked by
B’wana Beast (Showcase 66-67, Jan.-Feb.
1967).
The superhero fever accelerated by
the surprise success of the Batman TV
show in January 1966 was already starting to break, but delirium had apparently
set in. Ads in the Showcase issues
featuring the “Jungle Master” promoted the new feature Dial H for Hero (featuring a superhero who becomes everybody) and
Mattel’s Captain Action doll (featuring a superhero who becomes everybody).
And then there was B’wana Beast, a
new character concept created by Bob Haney and Mike Sekowsky that had
late-night coffee stains and cigarette ashes all over it.
Take Tarzan, slap a gaudy
superhero helmet on him and give him the power to telepathically command
animals and — to make it all just a little weirder — to COMBINE animals into OTHER,
LARGER animals.
Give him a secret hideout on top
of Mount Kilimanjaro and a purple gorilla pal, Djuba. Shrug off any
uncomfortable feelings you may have about yet another white jungle god, and
ignore the fact that “B’wana” is an East African term meaning “master, or
boss.”
For good measure, wrap things up with
a James Bond clinch in which a beautiful girl moans, “Beast … you beast!”
“B’wana Beast started out as game
warden Mike Maxwell, who got stuck in a cave on Mount Kilimanjaro,” comics
historian Don Markstein noted. “First, he drank water that had reached the cave
by being filtered through rock, which made him suddenly bulk up like Bruce
Banner turning into The Hulk, ruining the clothes he’d been wearing. Then his
pal Djuba, a gorilla, gave him a helmet that enabled him to order beasts around
like The Jaguar, or like The Fly could command insects. He's frequently been
compared to Aquaman, who did that with underwater fauna.”
“B’wana Beast was apparently
scheduled for the usual three (tryout issues). But reportedly Sekowsky quit
after two, citing racism in the concept as his reason for wanting no more to do
with it. He suggested another artist be found to continue it, but DC failed to
do so.”
But let’s not be too quick to
label B’wana Beast as a failure. Sure, he may have vanished from embarrassment,
and it took him 20 years to get the nerve to reemerge. But he’s since acquired a
more palatable successor, Freedom Beast, and been featured in toys and three
animated series.
There’s a comic book Valhalla for
even the spectacularly, stylishly bad characters, though not for the
forgettable ones. No one’s going to rescue The
Maniaks, Binky or Top Gun, the features that debuted in Showcase right
after B’wana Beast.
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