Not Bad for a Couple of Bucks

October 1976: “The Following Information Is Classified…”

Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg inspired the 1973-78 TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, which in turn spawned the TV show The Bionic Woman.

Airing from 1976 to 1978 and starring the bright and talented Lindsay Wagner, the science fiction superhero series was popular enough to produce a Kenner doll (with its own Bionic Beauty Salon playset) a record, a metal lunchbox, two paperback novels, a Parker board game and a five-issue comic book series from Charlton (1976-77).

Unlike its abortive 2007 remake, the original series managed to be optimistic and humanistic (without being saccharine).

Watching the last episode, I was surprised to find that, unlike most American TV programs, the show did not simply break off, or run out of gas and splutter to a stop. It effectively concluded, and concluded well.

The dispirited Jamie Sommers, tired and somewhat sickened after three years of being a superspy “robot lady,” quits the secret Office of Scientific Intelligence, only to find that she can’t quit — she’s government property. They intend to jail her.

The Bionic Woman meets The Prisoner.

This cynical, realistic take on what the U.S. government would do is a little surprising in a 1970s adventure show. She has an ally in her dash for freedom from American law enforcement — her ex-boss Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson, who takes a break from exposition to enjoy a strong acting turn).

Jamie tells him, “I thought I was more than a pawn to you, or one of your little tools…”

“You’re hurting my arm,” Goldman replies.

Ever the compassionate heroine, Jamie takes time to help the alienated son of a blind man, and finds the solution to her own personal dilemma.

Wagner had specifically asked for a concluding episode, and the writer, Steven E. De Souza, worked all Wagner’s frustrations with doing a network series into Jamie’s emotions about her spy job.

The script, and Wagner’s Emmy-winning charm and acting ability, let the series finish with class.

September 1976: The Short Flight of the Human Rocket

What do you get when you cross Spider-Man with Green Lantern? Nova, the Human Rocket.

Introduced by writer Marv Wolfman and artist John Buscema in Nova 1 (Sept. 1976), the character was an attempt to recapture the teenage superhero lightning of Spider-Man in a bottle 14 years later. 

But instead of a bitterly alienated science nerd, Richard Rider was an ordinary high schooler, good-hearted but not overly bright. As with the Silver Age Green Lantern, his super powers are transferred from an endangered and dying alien champion. 

But the dying Green Lantern of Space Sector 2814, Abin Sur, had time to find the bravest man on Earth, Hal Jordan, and to use his power ring to check that he was also honest. The mortally wounded Centurion Nova-Prime Rhomann Dey just picked a kid at random.

And that angle gave the feature something of a Greatest American Hero vibe, with Rider learning to use his super powers on the job. And those were the satisfying if typical Standard Operating Procedure powers for a superhero — flight, super-speed, durability and super-strength.

His first run lasted only an unimpressive 25 issues. But I always thought Nova had potential, and at least his exit was as stylish as his entrance — for the final issue, his cover tag line was altered from “He’s here! The Human Rocket!” to “He’s gone! The Human Rocket!”

March 1976: The Sadness of Superman

A caped figure in red and blue leaping about the city skyline, Omega the Unknown seemed to be a visual wink at the early Superman and/or Captain Marvel. 

But there ended the resemblance, because Omega was not to be a wish fulfillment figure.  After all, in the 1976 series co-created by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney, he ended up being mistakenly shot dead by Las Vegas police.

“The 10-issue series follows the adventures of (two) protagonists, who interestingly don’t directly interact often but face thematically interlinked challenges,” noted comics historian Matthew Grossman.

James-Michael Starling’s world “…is a cockroach-infested, often cruel place and his repeated struggles with the uglier sides of high school suggest that to an emotional innocent, schoolyard bullying can be as harrowing as any battle with super-villainy. 

“The laconic, initially silent Omega struggles with the role of superhero he finds himself unwittingly cast in. It’s a task he barely understands and finds himself pretty lousy at, losing many battles and surviving most of the rest through sheer luck. And much to the consternation of a superhero-wise public, he’s willing to let villains walk away when they offer valid reasons for looting the public.

“Both characters seem to be representations of adolescence struggling in an adult world.”

Though commercially unsuccessful, Omega was arguably ahead of its time, anticipating the ambience of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 Watchmen.

“Gerber was Marvel Comics’ auteur of absurdity,” Grossman observed. “Superhero comics, with their repetitive plots and nonsensical underpinnings, lend themselves to the absurdist preoccupation with meaninglessness, and the disillusionment of the period, reflected in Bronze Age comics’ move away from optimistic themes, provided fertile ground for explorations of psychological malaise.”

Charles W. Fouquette said, “It seems like a nihilistic version of Superman in a post-Watergate/Viet Nam 1970s world. … Gerber always did push the boundaries on conventional comics and we have to give credit to Marvel for giving him leeway for some of his ideas.”

February 1975: Who Knows How to Break In to Comics?

 INT. 909 THIRD AVE., NEW YORK — Day

 New editor Denny O’Neil is shouting inside his DC Comics office.

A 1974 summer hire staffer runs in to check on O’Neil. He finds the writer-editor upset because DC had canceled and then un-canceled the Shadow title, leaving him with a comic book to publish immediately — but no script.

The young staffer realizes this is his chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing comics. Bluffing, he tells O’Neil he has a great idea for a story

What is it, O’Neil asks.

The staffer thinks fast. He and his wife had recently honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which daredevils once crossed on tightropes in the 1930s, the Shadow’s era. Could he use that?

“Uh … Picture a fight between the Shadow and a villain on that tightrope over Niagara Falls … at night … the roving searchlights catching a glimpse of him up in that sky!” the staffer improvised.

Good cover there, says O’Neil. Go on. Why are they fighting?

Still thinking on his feet, desperately, the staffer comes up with the idea of smugglers between the U.S. and Canada.

Smuggling what?

Drugs!

How?

In those barrels that people used to use to go over the falls!

O’Neil asks if he could have the script on his desk by 6 p.m. the next day, and the staffer says sure.

The Night of the Falling Death was published in The Shadow 9 (Feb.-March 1975), with interior art by Frank Robbins and a cover by Joe Kubert.

And the young summer hire who wrote it? He was Michael Uslan, who would go on to originate and serve as executive producer on the Batman movie franchise.

The anecdote appears in his memoir, The Boy Who Loved Batman.

May 1974: Legacy and the Living Weapon

Iron Fist, a superhero created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane for Marvel Premiere 15 (May 1974), was the result of pop cultural cross-pollination.

The Marvel Age of Comics was already more than a decade old, and to freshen it up the Bullpen tried superhero titles reflecting popular trends. 

Thanks to a relaxed Comics Code, more vivid horror stories could then be published, so Ghost Rider was born in Marvel Spotlight 5 (Aug. 1972).

Martial arts had been popularized by the David Carradine TV series Kung Fu in 1972 and the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon in 1973. Add the superhero trappings of a lost-child Tarzan origin, a secret identity, a colorful costume and the ability to focus chi into a punch of overwhelming power, and you have Iron Fist.

The character is presented in his Netflix series as a kind of billionaire super-Buddhist. And that may well ring a bell.

Comics readers might remark on the similarity of Danny Rand to Adrian Veidt, the superhero Ozymandias created by by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for their 1986 Watchmen graphic novel.

Well, yes, and there’s a reason for that.

Iron Fist was in part an homage to Amazing-Man, Bill Everett’s original variation on the Superman theme introduced in Amazing-Man Comics 5 (Sept. 1939). That Tibetan-trained super-being also inspired Pete Morisi to create Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt for Charlton Comics in 1966. And Moore and Gibbons used Thunderbolt as the template for Ozymandias.

The history of superhero comics is a wonderfully multi-faceted and multivariate thing.

September 1972: Gone, Gone, the Form of Banner…

They were men cursed to share their existence with a monster.

Jack Kirby’s Demon, a supernatural variation on the Hulk concept, should have had a longer run than a mere 16 issues, I always thought.  But somehow the execution never quite measured up to the elemental power inherent in the conception.

Reading this DC series, which began in 1972, I realized that many of Kirby’s characters could be seen to represent the awesome and dangerous power of the unconscious mind — among them the Demon, those transforming pre-hero Marvel monsters and the Hulk (who could originally only appear at night, when we sleep). Kirby’s two versions of the Sandman dealt directly with dreamscapes.

“Etrigan maintained a double identity,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “His Demon persona lay buried under that of Jason Blood, who appeared normal in every way except that he didn’t age. In fact, Blood himself didn’t know about his dual nature until, in The Demon 1 (Aug.-Sept. 1972), a spell brought out the Demon in him. Since then, he’s used his demonic powers in dozens of adventures, often serving a righteous cause (probably because of having been somewhat humanized during his centuries as Jason Blood), but seldom able to keep his evil nature completely in check. Between times, he sometimes reverts back to human form, and sometimes doesn’t.

“The Blood/Etrigan connection goes back to the time of King Arthur. To counter an all-out attack by Arthur's half-sister, the sorcerous Morgaine le Fay, Merlin the Magician conjured up Etrigan from the depths of Hell. But Camelot fell anyway; and to neutralize the menace he’d unleashed, Merlin transformed the Demon into a man.”

Etrigan’s transformational chant — Gone! Gone! The form of man. Rise, the Demon Etrigan!! — was as catchy a tune as Green Lantern’s oath.

This bounding, yellow-skinned super-antihero’s eye-catching design was an homage to comic strip artist Hal Foster. In the 1930s, Prince Valiant had disguised himself as just such a demon, using goose skin.

June 1972: The Man for the Moment

Superhero origin stories are necessarily fantastic, but at least one of them had an eerie parallel in real life.

Hero for Hire 1 — covered-dated June 1972, but on the newsstands in March — begins in the maximum security Seagate Prison, where the man who will be Luke Cage is caged. 

No cosmic rays or radioactive spiders for him. He gains his super powers of strength and durability through a prison experiment that’s a sinister, shadowy reflection of Captain America’s WWII origin. 

But Cage is no volunteer. He’s a victim.

And as Luke Cage’s first adventures were being published, the infamous Tuskegee experiments were coming to light in the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service studied the progression of untreated syphilis in African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free government health care. 

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study’s ruthless mistreatment of black men seriously and permanently damaged the black community’s trust in U.S. public health efforts. 

Ironically, the experiments became a front-page scandal in July 1972, just four months after the first issue of Hero for Hire appeared on newsstands.

“Probably no connection unless Archie (Goodwin), Stan (Lee) or I had seen earlier reports somewhere, since obviously Hero for Hire 1 was plotted out roughly half a year earlier,” noted Roy Thomas, the character’s co-creator.  

“We just followed human nature, which is suspect in the best of times, even irrespective of race.  The story was about powerful people experimenting on less powerful ones. Race wasn’t really a major factor in that part of the plot... Lucas just happened to be the unlucky recipient of the bad guys’ attentions because he was in jail.”

Nevertheless, the comic book they created ended up echoing the zeitgeist, for the very reason Thomas cited. The less powerful the race, the bigger the target on its members’ backs. 

Cruel scientific experimentation on black men turned out to be no comic book fantasy.