No pants necessary

Fleischer & Aparo

The Spectre wears a green Speedo over white tights. And he is scary as shit, man.

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Context Too!

The industry-history story of U.S. comics is about DC. There’s no history of Marvel, Dell, Fawcett, Archie, and Gold Key, or their related media without DC in place for the bigger context.

Super bad

Meet the Plutonian. Kiss your ass goodbye.

It took a lot of working out the context in my mind, but I’m finally ready to look at a very interesting species of comics villain.

Marvelous, meet miraculous

Superman, Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel, Marvelman. Marvelman, Captain Miracle. Marvelman, Marvelman reboot. Marvelman reboot, Miracleman. Paralleled by a completely different Captain Marvel too, oh wait, like four of them, plus Ms. Marvel, oh wait, three of them. What th’fuck?

I just want to talk to him

Today’s about two comics published simultaneously in the mid-late 1990s, both of which I bought start to finish and for which I own the full runs. Each concerns going to find God and have a little talk. With a bullet.

Ollie ollie oxen free

Politics and autobio sing a duet in this post! This title was central to my big dive back into comics, in the flush of First, Comico, Eclipse, and specifically Dark Horse, itself on the heels of the now long-forgotten “black and white boom.”

Plastic or fantastic

I’d like to learn more about the ~1980 transfer of personnel from Marvel to DC, many of them returning. The one thing I’m certain of is that the breakout hit which put DC back on the map, The New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, could only have been produced by people who’d thrown everything they had into mid-late 70s Marvel and formed very definite notions there.

Sheba knows her daddy

I can imagine the senior editor logic easily, upon seeing the mid-late 80s Suicide Squad pitch: “hey, the fans evidently want raw meat, Marvel’s massacring mutants, we have all these useless and unmarketable villains lying around, might as well blow’em up, one by one, or two by two if the plot needs it.” Oooh, awesome, here’s a fictional context for using them as cannon fodder so we can enter the “we’re gritty too” body count competition.

The not so secret cabal

Denny O’Neil, once upon a time

In the course of scribbling our vigilante posts and rejoinders therein, Steve and I realized something.

And the horse you rode in on

Ask any comics fan: over thataway is Marvel and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns], and over thisaway is DC and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns]. You choose your flag and you wave it. The rest are fringe. As my Brit Lit informed me, it’s “RCs to the right, Prods to the left, and fancy buggers in the middle.”

What was the question again?

This is the second in a series of dialogue-posts by me and Steve Long about vigilante characters in comics, mainly during but not completely restricted to the 1980s. More 80s TMI about me too!

Tom Artis

Note to readers: this post was supposed to be scheduled for August 30, but I accidentally posted it along with the August 27 post. The new/next post arrives on schedule September 3rd.

So I’ll tell you an anecdote from the late 80s. This was during the two years between college and grad school, when I was living in Chicago and working at the Field Museum, living in a studio in Hyde Park, and living life as a series of daily adventures.