Bobby Bell’s self-appointed mission was apparently wandering through deserted parks and dark alleys in hope that some muscular man would jump him.
Ahem.
Be that as it may, a surprising number of superheroes moonlighted as judo, jiu jitsu and karate instructors.
One-page features of “judo tricks” were not uncommon during the Silver Age. Harvey Comics’ stuntwoman turned movie star turned masked crime-fighter, the Black Cat, offered them. In Archie Comics’ Adventures of the Fly, the 1940s superhero the Black Hood was recruited for the task. A little later, in the mid-1960s, Charlton Comics’ "action hero” Judomaster joined the club.
But the oddest and most obscure of the lot was Bell, a teenage sidekick and/or mascot to a superhero who actually outlasted his hero.
In Adventures of The Fly 1 (Aug. 1959), the boy made his debut wearing a costume like the Shield’s (who’d premiered two months before in his own title as Lancelot Strong, a Silver Age revamp of MLJ’s Golden Age Shield Joe Higgins).
Apparently president of the Shield’s Young Americans’ Club, Bell's relationship to the Shield — whether sidekick or just fan — was never made clear because the Shield’s comic was killed after only two issues, the victim of a lawsuit threat. DC Comics claimed the hero was too much like Superman.
Even his name was ambiguous, shifting from Bill Bell to Bobby Bell or Bob Bell. Whatever. Bell stayed in the ring giving instructions in the martial arts through Adventures of the Fly 11 (July 1961).
This quirky how-to sideline of superhero comics eventually died out, and it’s easy to see why teaching children how to battle each other might raise some eyebrows.
Superheroes may not fear the criminal element, but they have a healthy respect for lawyers.
Bob Doncaster wrote: I have a self awarded black belt in comic book karate/judo lessons. Count Dante fears me.
ReplyDeleteRuss Maheras:
ReplyDeleteThose three martial arts were all the rage in popular culture during the 1960s. It started with the spy movies in the early 1960s, which of course spilled over to television, comics, etc.
By the late 1960s it seemed to fade a bit, but then Bruce Lee's films came along in the early 1970s, and the martial arts craze re-emerged. In 1973, I was 19, and several of my buddies and I started taking Tae Kwon Do classes. In my hometown of Chicago, dojos and other training schools were popping up everywhere.
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteInteresting article, Dan. Personally I preferred Black Cat’s Judo Tricks.
ReplyDeleteJohnny Williams:
Dan, so being a bookish nerdy skinny kid with big glasses was sometimes not a comfortable thing to be particularly when bullies often prowled the landscape like T-Rex’s on the hunt during the Cretaceous Period. Not having a dad at home, my parents had split up when I was a very young child, and no big brother to defend me or teach me how to fight (because there was just my younger sister and myself I ‘WAS’ the ‘big brother’) I became a frequent target of bullying. A little bit of that s_ _t went a long way. I Knew that I needed some self defense skills if I was going to survive my childhood with my self respect, pride, and physical safety intact. So I convinced (it didn’t take much as she was aware of my plight) my Mother to let me take Karate.
But ‘before’ I ever began formal training I was always seeking out tips, clues, demos, examples, any source of self defense, unarmed, hand-to-hand combat/fighting. That’s where comic books came in. Those ‘one page judo tricks’ features mentioned above were often just skipped past by most comic book readers but they garnered My undivided attention whenever I found them.
I remember Harvey’s Black Cat character having some particularly cool looking ones, and of Course Charlton’s Judo Master followed suite. As an interesting aside, because of my exposure to Golden Age comics and superheroes thanks to my Mom I became familiar with two characters, Crime Buster and (the GA) Daredevil. Both characters utilized and demonstrated ‘judo tricks and jiu-jitsu stunts’ in their respective titles. I do kind of remember Bobby Bell because I was a huge fan of the Lancelot Strong version of The Shield.
So, instead of just glossing over those features to stick with the stories I studied them intently! Luckily I had a best friend, Michael Cannon, another skinny, bespectacled nerdy Black kid on the South Side of Chicago, who had similar problems with bullying jerks and therefore was willing to ‘try out’ the techniques we were seeing on one another.
Our success was mixed.
Without the actual guidance of an instructor we found that we couldn’t always make the things work, but a few we could so we practiced the Heck out of those until we could do them smoothly and with some degree of confidence and authority. Our self esteem rose slightly and bully radar noticed so we became less attractive as targets somewhat.
Next, after gaining some confidence from our amateur martial arts self-training came investigating the Charles Atlas Muscle Building Course so prominently advertised in comic books of the time, but that’s another tale.