They Might Be Giants! (1967-1969: The Wrap-Up!) ~~ A "Comical Wednesday" Post!

Here it is, fellow babies: The final installment in this lengthy "They Might Be Giants" series. (Okay, okay, which one of you just yelled "Yay?")

Oh, and by the way, are any of you familiar with the 1971 film and/or the alternative rock band which share that same name? I'm assuming you are.

In Fantasy Masterpieces #7 (cover-dated February, 1967), Marvel began reprinting one Golden Age story each of the original Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and Captain America per issue.

In late 1939 and in the early 1940s, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, was more of an anti-hero, fighting a one-man war against the "surface world." He fought the Human Torch a handful of times before finally deciding to help the "good guys" against the Nazis. One of those battles was reprinted in Marvel Super-Heroes #1, as shown in my last post. Fantasy Masterpieces #8 reprinted another Torch/Subby clash, a 22-page epic!

Also mentioned last time was Fantastic Four Annual #4, which featured the return (and death!) of the original Human Torch. There was even a brief re-cap of the Torch's origin, shown below, as drawn by the ever-popular Jack Kirby:

By mid-1967, however, Marvel decided to reprint the initial outing of the Human Torch, from late 1939's Marvel Comics #1. And here 'tis, as touted on the cover of Fantasy Masterpieces #9!

And if you'd like to compare the above Kirby page to a page from the premiere Human Torch story, written and drawn by Carl Burgos (1916-1984), here ya go! However, this is not a page from Fantasy Masterpieces #9, it's actually a scan of page one of Marvel Comics #1!

The last issue of Fantasy Masterpieces that made an impression on me was the tenth issue. By then, I was very familiar with the fact that DC Comics had teamed up several of its superheroes in the '40s to form the Justice Society of America, but in 1967, I learned that Timely Comics had tried combining a handful of its heroes into a super-team with the unfortunate name of the All-Winners Squad!

The main reason that this team -- which only appeared twice during the Golden Age -- was called the All-Winners Squad was apparently because the group appeared in an ongoing Timely title called All Winners Comics. The first All-Winners Squad story, written by famed comic author and Batman co-creator Bill Finger, featured Captain America, his sidekick Bucky, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, the Whizzer (a super-speedster like the Flash, who got his powers when his father injected him with mongoose blood), Miss America, and some kid in bathing trunks whom I assumed was a sidekick for the Sub-Mariner... at least, until I opened the comic.

The "kid in bathing trunks" was actually a younger version of the Human Torch, named Toro. Thus, obviously, Toro was the Torch's sidekick, regardless of the fact that he looked like a junior version of the Sub-Mariner on that damned cover! And why they named him Toro in the first place is beyond me, and why he wasn't in his flaming form on the cover of All Winners Squad #19 (reprinted on the cover of Fantasy Masterpieces #10) escapes me as well!

As it happened, the next issue of Fantasy Masterpieces reprinted Toro's first appearance... but I missed it. And with issue number twelve, Fantasy Masterpieces was renamed Marvel Super-Heroes, just like last year's 1966 one-shot. MSH became a title featuring a different "star" every month, and although it still contained reprints, too, the thrill was gone.

I was still reading and enjoying comics, but something was changing. I don't recall feeling the same level of excitement I'd felt during all of the last four or five years. Could it be that by 1967, I was already becoming jaded at the tender age of not-quite-eleven? (I didn't hit eleven until mid-November, y'see, so this 1956 birthday baby was actually ten years old throughout most of '67.)

Maybe it was the fact that so blasted many of the monthly Marvel titles -- and DC's, too, only not (yet) as much as Marvel's -- had storylines that continued endlessly. Or so it seemed to me, as a victim of the shitty spotty distribution of the newsstands, variety stores, and other odd vendors that carried comics in those days, long before the dawn of the comic shops we now take for granted.

Anyhoo, for whatever reason(s), the thrill of the "giants" was waning for me. 1968 only delivered two issues in DC's 80 Page Giant series that made a real impression on me.

The first was 80 Page Giant #43, or Batman #198, if you prefer. The comic contained a handful of fair-to-middlin' Batman stories featuring the Joker, Catwoman, and the Penguin (among others), but the book cover-featured a reprint of a story from 1948's Batman #47, "The Origin of the Batman!"

This may be rather hard to believe in modern times, when it seems like someone's retelling "The Legend of the Batman and How He Came to Be" every half hour or so, but while Superman's Kryptonian roots were a constant story point throughout most of the earlier years of the Silver Age, Batman's origin wasn't referred to often at all. I'm not sure why.

The only reason I knew of Batman's beginnings was that in 1966, not long after ABC's Batman TV show hit the airwaves, Signet Books released a collection called -- take a deep breath, here -- Batman, The Best of the Original Batman--the Caped Crusader's greatest adventures. And by the way, all of the upper-case and lower-case letters in that lengthy title were chosen by Signet, not by me.

This book reprinted a bunch of Batman stories in black & white, mostly tales from the 1950s. And one of those stories was the two-page version of Batman's origin that was originally shown in 1940's Batman #1.

But the 1948 classic, "The Origin of the Batman," gave a slightly expanded version of how Bruce Wayne became Batman, and how years later, he actually caught up with the robber who killed his parents! Pretty cool stuff.

Only a couple of months later, 80 Page Giant #45 (or Action Comics #360) gave us a Supergirl-themed issue which had a cover made to look like a board game! Basically, the giant told how little old orphaned Supergirl finally was able to "prove" to her arrogant super-cousin that she didn't need further training, she no longer had to keep her very existence secret from the world, and that she, in her secret identity as "Linda Lee," no longer had to thwart the efforts of any couples who wanted to adopt her!

Yeah, that last one was a rather cruel stipulation of Superman's. Until he could declare her "good enough" to operate in the open as Supergirl, she couldn't even be trusted to live with adoptive parents. She was forced by "cousin Superman" to stay an orphan. What a mean thing to do to a teenage girl!

Most of Supergirl's solo adventures were drawn by the talented Jim Mooney (1919-2008). A self-portrait of Jim -- with Streaky the super-cat perched on his shoulder -- immediately follows this paragraph.

And speaking of Streaky, fellow babies, I should probably point out that during this series (and occasionally in other Comical Wednesday posts as well), I refer to characters such as Streaky, Comet the super-horse, Ace the Bat-Hound, Bat-Mite, Beppo the super-monkey and the like as being relics of the Silver Age that have never seen the light of day since. Well, here's a disclaimer: The existence of these characters has in relatively recent years been referenced here and there. Some new stories featuring these characters have been crafted, dealing with the characters' "reality" in different ways. But in terms of my childhood, these characters' "lives" ended for me years ago!

I threw that in here primarily because I couldn't think of a better place to put it. Heh.

1969 was worse. First of all, in the middle of the year, the price of the standard, thirty-two page comic book went from twelve cents all the way to fifteen cents! Three cents more! What, did these greedy buzzards think I was made of money?!?

The very last eighty-pager that gave me that old feeling was Batman #213. All sorts of origin stories. The origin of the Silver Age Clay-Face (using a name "borrowed" from a Golden Age Batman villain), the first appearance of Alfred the butler, an all-new retelling of Robin's full origin, and a 1951 story about a villain called the Red Hood, which -- SPOILER WARNING! -- actually ended up being the origin of the Joker!

Yep. One giant-sized comic of note that year. By the end of 1969, believe it or not, I'd turned my back on most of the comic books and characters that I'd once slavishly followed. But continued stories (and missed issues), plus that outrageous three-cent price hike, had soured me somewhat on the medium. For a relatively long while (i.e., two or three years, or even four), the only title I seemed to be buying on a regular basis was Marvel's Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos!

Maybe someday, folks, I'll tell you about when and why I got back into reading comics en masse again.

But if I do, it won't be for a lonnnng while now.

Thus, the mighty saga dramatically (and oh-so-pompously) entitled "They Might Be Giants!" ends, "not with a bang, but a whimper."*

Thanks for your time.

*With apologies to T.S. Eliot!