Insect Asides, Part Three ~~ A "Comical Wednesday" Post

My first issue of Insect Man's Weird Tales, #95, seemed to have been relatively well-received by its readers. I personally was very pleased with the artwork of Ken Carson, whom I soon got to meet. Don't forget, this was the first time I'd ever written a full comic script -- albeit for an eight-page amateur press book -- and I've always loved seeing how an artist interprets my script.

(I'd almost written a complete comic book script a few years earlier, when I first encountered my eventual writing partner, Skip Simpson. The full story of that stillborn project is here and here.)

In this, my first Insect Man script, I tried to begin plot threads of my own, make a few references to issues only half a dozen or so people would recall after ten to twenty years, and deal with recent plot elements that either had occurred or just been implied. And all of that in seven pages!

I began by having Rex (Insect Man) Mason approached by a thirtyish man who claimed to be IM's former kid sidekick, Greg (Kid Secret) Nile. Rex, a teetotaler, was evidently a regular patron of a local bar, although he only drank ginger ale.

I must admit that I cheated somewhat, by having Rex not recognize Greg at first. After all, a man of approximately twenty years old wouldn't really change very much in appearance after only ten or eleven years. But I didn't allow doubt to stay in Rex's mind for long. Once he was convinced as to who Greg was, I gave the two old friends a short sequence of playing catch-up.

When I was six, seven, eight... I "borrowed" character names/powers/origins from "real" comics to populate the comics that I "wrote." I had a character named Red Raven whose powers and origin were a complete steal from Superman, right down to his being born on the planet Krypton! Soon after, when I discovered the X-Men, I added a power beam exactly like Cyclops' to Red Raven's abilities!

Well, when Paul Howley was a boy, he sometimes did the same thing in his stories. I made a wisecrack about a couple of them, Giant Man and Plastic Man. Paul had also created a time-traveling hero, whom he had named the Green Hornet... another "borrowed" name. I wanted to use (or at least talk about) this particular character here and there, so I merely referred to him as "The Hornet," and had Greg Nile make a throwaway remark about "that wild green outfit" of the Hornet's.

I segued from long-worded reminiscences to the untold story of Insect Man's last mission for Counter-SKULL approximately ten years earlier. Writer/artist Larry Young, who wrote the first modern Insect Man story in Insect Man's Weird Tales #88, had never given any details, so it was up to me.

I even did some research at the library to see what I could learn about "Jüngstadt," like, for instance, where the hell was it? I assumed it was European. Maybe Germany? Austria? By the time I gave up, one or two hours later, I had found nothing. Discouraging.

Months later, I got to ask Larry Young where the city was. Turns out, "Jüngstadt" translates to "Young City!" The little smartass had made up a city and named it after himself.

I also had Rex throw in a brief comment about "my brand new Insect Man outfit, the one I wear today," just to satisfy why this costume was hanging in Rex's closet in 1985, although Paul Howley's comics of years before never showed this suit (since Larry Young didn't create it until years after Paul stopped his Insect Man series).

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff only I worry about. But you regular readers here knew that anyway, right?

And immediately after Greg made that little admission, three SKULL agents (two flunkies in uniform, plus their leader, dressed in street clothes) entered the bar and boldly approached Rex and Greg. Greg is the first to react, but he's laid low by a blow from behind.

This time, I was the smartass, not Larry Young. I wrote the ending caption that way because, let's face it, we all knew Rex would get out of this pickle. (As we all saw in the following issue, he ended up changing to an insect to avoid being shot. No surprise there.)

As I've already said, this was the first script I'd ever completed, and had had illustrated. I enjoyed having someone else interpret my words and bring them to life, but as much as I liked Ken Carson's artwork, I must admit that I never expected he would get a bit better with every issue, as he did!

By the way, Ken made a minor change to the insect emblem on Insect Man's uniform jacket. Take a close look at the bottom of that page above. Ken redesigned the "body" of the non-specified type of insect. The white area that he added effectively turned the bug's body into the letters "I" and "M." I thought it was a great touch. However, I'm pretty sure that nobody else ever drew it that way, probably because nobody else ever noticed what Ken had done.

It just so happened that the next issue, #96, was fated not to be drawn by Ken, but by Dan Courtney, who had drawn characters such as Psyclone and SilverLion in past issues of  Insect Man's Weird Tales. Also on hand to letter issue #96 was writer/artist Chris Coleman, who had written and drawn a three-part Insect Man story shortly before I started writing IM.

(And as far as creator credits for Psyclone and SilverLion, I'm not quite sure what Chris Coleman contributed to either feature. Was he the co-creator of either or both? Did he ink Dan Courtney's pencils on any of the stories? Was he "just" the writer? Unfortunately, I don't have access to that info.)

But I'm saving the rest of my reminiscences about #96 -- and #97 -- for next time. And next time gets weird, I promise!

Thanks for your time.

Insect Man, Insect Man's Weird Tales, and all related characters and titles are copyright © Paul B. Howley.