Hey Kids! Know Your Weather Birds

A  feature page from DC Comics' Brave and Bold 34, which saw the debut of Hawkman

Strange Adventures: When Turtles Attack!

Thanks to The Mad Artist for the image scans of Strange Adventures 118

In their DC science fiction anthology title Strange Adventures, editor Julius Schwartz and his staff demonstrated an understanding of the dreamlike quality of the childhood mind.

As an example, let’s take issue 118, appearing on newsstands early in 1960 and cover-featuring the tale The Turtle Men from Space by writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky.

Boys in 1960 often had pet turtles in little plastic water dishes that sported a plastic palm tree, and even more frequently owned green plastic “army men” (sold in bulk for as little as a penny apiece in clear plastic bags during the decade, before the Vietnam war eroded their popularity).

Massage those interests a while in your subconscious, and you might come up with the idea that turtles are armored, and military tanks are armored, so…

In that issue, you also got the stories Threat of the Planet Wrecker and The Indestructible Menace and a full page ad for the first issue of a new comic called Green Lantern. A Spotlight on Science feature answered questions about whales and water pressure, how to test water for hardness and the phases of the moon. This was back before Americans began to regard verified, factual knowledge as a threat. You got your dime’s worth.

The Trump Card's a Joker, And the Joke's on Us

The Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump is not a disease in the American body politic. He is its symptom, a festering sore finally so obvious that even the disease’s deniers find denial impossible.

Trump has marched ahead of the other GOP presidential candidates by out-fascisting them. He has been rivaled only by the equally fascist torture lover Ben Carson. In a political party in which fascism is fashionable, the most flagrant fascist is Il Duce.

Trump speaks approvingly of the Russian habit of having journalists murdered. Proto-tyrants like Trump resent constitutions and the rule of law as impediments to their will. Absolute power must arbitrary. That’s what gets them hot.

For 15 years, since the stolen election of 2000, I have endured sneers from people who pooh-poohed my observation that the Republican Party was aimed straight at full-blown, totalitarian fascism, complete with torture and summary execution. Where are their “centrist” sneers now that insulting the disabled and torturing the helpless are favorite GOP hobbies. Trump is, in that sense, the fulfillment of the Republican dream.

It's so odd. Ever since I've been aware of Trump, for decades now, I've recognized him as a dimwitted vulgarian with a needy ego, the kind of person you feel a little sorry for because he constantly embarrasses himself but is too unaware even to know that. What astounds me is that his fans can't see something that is so glaringly obvious. Trump's pathological insecurities are apparent, but only to relatively secure people. Donald Trump’s ego would eat the entire world if it could, burp, and then remain hungry. Something so empty can never be satisfied.

Above the Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 2016.

Audio Book 8: Death Echoes for Bond

You can probably thank Bill Paley for For Your Eyes Only.

During the summer of 1958, CBS commissioned Ian Fleming to write a TV series based on James Bond (partly inspired by the success of the 1954 one-shot CBS television adaptation of Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale).

Fleming wrote outlines for several episodes before CBS dropped the idea. CBS Chairman of the Board Bill Paley’s biographer Lewis J. Paper reported that Paley “…rejected any suggestion that the network make use of Ian Fleming’s stories about James Bond, believing that the American public would have no interest in the escapades of a British spy.” Not Paley’s best moment.

In 1959, working at his home Goldeneye in Jamaica, Fleming adapted four of the TV plots into short stories. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett noted that “…Ian’s mood of weariness and self-doubt was beginning to affect his writing,” as evidenced in Bond’s internal monologue of thoughts.

The short stories became Fleming’s 1960 Bond book, For Your Eyes Only.

The title story, according to Wiki, was originally called Man’s Work and was “…set in Vermont, where Fleming had spent a number of summers at his friend Ivar Bryce’s Black Hollow Farm, which became the model for von Hammerstein's hideaway, Echo Lake. The name of the villain of the story, von Hammerstein, was taken from General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (1878–1943), one of Hitler’s opponents. Fleming also considered calling the story Death Leaves an Echo and based the story on Rough Justice, which was to be episode three of the television series.”

The other stories in that collection — Quantum of Solace, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity — are not included in this BBC adaptation, but two later stories are.

The Property of a Lady was written in 1963 as a commission for Sotheby’s for use in their annual journal. Fleming was disappointed in the tale, a bit of business about a double agent who is to be paid by KGB through the auction of Peter Carl Fabergé’s “Emerald Sphere.” Of more enduring interest was The Living Daylights, published in 1962 as Berlin Escape. Bond gets a surprise, and is inspired to bitter moral musings, when he is assigned sniper duty to help British agent 272 escape from East Berlin by killing a KGB assassin codenamed Trigger. 

Audio Novel 4: James Bond in Sin City

Signet paperback art by Barye Phillips

Bond versus the American vulgarians — that’s Diamonds Are Forever, Ian Fleming’s fourth 007 thriller, published in 1956 and inspired by a Sunday Times article on diamond smuggling.

For this young American reader, the USA wasn’t as exotic a setting as a casino “near the mouth of the Somme” or Jamaica or even England, and loudly dressed American gangsters seemed laughable next to the elegant, imposing menace of Le Chiffre or Mr. Big or Sir Hugo Drax.

That said, it’s a perfectly serviceable Bond adventure, charged with Fleming’s early verve, a couple of chilling gay killers named Wint and Kidd and a likeable, tough, brassy heroine, Tiffany Case. A survivor of gang rape who works as a smuggler for the Spangled Mob, Tiffany becomes the second woman with whom Bond falls in love during the course of the novels. We learn only later that Tiffany, finding Bond too difficult to live with, returned to the U.S. with an American military officer, whom she probably married.

The novel includes a sybaritic setting, Las Vegas, that seems perfect for Bond from the moment when, with some amusement, he steps off an airliner to breathe pure oxygen from one of those American gizmos.

Never out of print, the novel got an early boost in November 1956 when the man from No. 10, Sir Anthony Eden, made a much-advertised visit to Fleming’s Goldeneye estate to recuperate following the Suez Crisis. It was adapted into a comic strip in 1959-60 and, in 1971, became the basis for Sean Connery’s last “official” film as 007. Jill St. John joined him, making an excellent Tiffany Case.

Here it is as a BBC radio drama starring Toby Stephens as 007. 

The First Time I Saw the Marvel Family

The first time I saw Captain Marvel, and the Marvel Family, I was kneeling on the floor of a second-hand shop in Effingham, IL, fairly desperate to urinate but too engrossed in a comic book to go do it.

I was perusing the penultimate issue of Fawcett’s Marvel Family, No. 88, but I didn’t know that. Circa 1963, Captain Marvel and his friends had been out of print for a decade, literally a lifetime to me.

The secondhand shop offered stacks and stacks of used “funny books” for a nickel each, and avidly combing through them all constituted an arduous endurance test of a 9-year-old’s bladder.

A man, a girl and a boy — all caped and dressed suspiciously like Superman — were walking through a door while deflecting various deadly threats with their invulnerable bodies. So they had Superman’s powers too!

Jokes of Jeopardy was the story’s title. “Geo Pardy?” What kind of a word was that?

The issue earned my nickel, and my speculations even after I’d read it. What had happened to these super people? Where had they gone?

I wouldn’t learn until years later that they’d been sent to their graves in part by a lawsuit on behalf of the very Superman they so resembled, and that they had for one brief shining moment in the 1940s they’d been the most popular superheroes of all. Their very popularity, I suppose, finally did them in, guaranteeing DC Comics’ enmity.

That may not have been the actual first time I’d seen Captain Marvel, although I didn’t realize it. Around then, in school, a classmate had brought in a copy of a magazine I’d never seen, Castle of Frankenstein. There, on the cover, was a black and white photograph of a caped flying man who was clearly not Superman. Utterly fascinated, I never got to look inside the issue to discover who he was. Decades later, when I finally got to see Republic Pictures’ The Adventures of Captain Marvel, I found that it lived up to its wonderful reputation among serial buffs. And yet it was somehow never quite as wonderful as all my pleasantly feverish speculations about this mystery man had been.

From the cover of the second issue of Larry Ivie's Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1962)

The First Time I Saw Captain Atom

Charlton Comics' Space Adventures 36, published in October 1960.  They used typewriters in place of letterers.

The first time I saw Captain Atom, I was at my grandparents’ home in bed with one of those diseases that 6 year-olds used to get, and my Aunt Shirley bought me a handful of comics to read, including Space Adventures 36, because the cover featured one of those costumed heroes she knew I loved.
Okay, the McCarthyesque Cold War plots were already hackneyed by 1960. Charlton Comics was clearly a step below DC, even to 6-year-old, except in one respect — that artist I couldn’t yet name but could always recognize. 
Those angular, rather contorted figures, that sparkling radioactive con trail left by the hero in flight, the bizarrely beautiful yellow lamé costume, the curving mask that seemed have been designed, as someone later said, using a protractor. And then there was that long-examined, curiously symbolic cover featuring a bisected someone who was half Air Force officer, half superhero. 
It was an artistic device created by Steve Ditko that he would use again on the second and much more famous superhero he would co-create, over at what would be called Marvel Comics.