June 1977: The Long Reach of the Unseen Hand

The inventive British novelist H.G. Wells contributed several conventions that have become mainstays in superhero comics — among them time travel, interplanetary warfare and, oh joy of joys, invisibility.

The concept of human invisibility is a wish fulfillment fantasy that probably predates recorded history. We can trace it as far back as the Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic (which was undoubtedly the model for Tolkien’s One Ring). Plato used the magic ring as a metaphor to explore the question of whether an intelligent person would remain moral if he did not have to fear capture and punishment.

Wells’ answer was a firm “no.” In the novella, originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, Wells’ optical scientist Griffin decides to use his power of invisibility to become a national terrorist. Felled by an angry mob, the dying Griffin slowly turns visible again.

“By demonstrating the corrupting effects of the power of invisibility, The Invisible Man is a retelling of Plato’s myth of the ring of Gyges,” wrote Philip Ball in The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen. “It isn’t clear if this was Welles’ explicit aim, but that seems likely. He was deeply impressed by The Republic when it read it in his youth, not least for the alternative it offered to the stifling orthodoxy of Victorian society.”

In 1977, writer Doug Moench and artists Dino Castrillo and Rudy Messina adapted the story for Marvel Classics Comics. My late friend Roger Slifer was editor.

For an entertaining parlor game, ask your friends which super power they would prefer: invisibility or personal flight? The results will be telling, and generally spark an interesting discussion about expediency, ethics and life goals.

In the This American Life radio program, writer John Hodgman asked people that question. “He finds that how you answer tells a lot about what kind of person you are,” host Ira Glass noted. “And also, no matter which power people choose, they never use it to fight crime.”

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 Jaime 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.”

June 1975: In a Mirror Darkly

Battling bodies careering into and right through arcane architecture — this superhero feature was clearly something different.

“One of the aspects of early Dr. Strange that Marvel Studios’ eponymous movie got right were the eerie clashes between Strange and various astral plane assassins,” observed comics historian Mark Engblom.  “I felt like I was watching a (Steve) Ditko story come to life!”

In his first recorded exploit, Dr. Stephen Strange fought one of those conceptual, extradimensional entities who’d secretly harry our plane of existence throughout his career.

In his second adventure (Strange Tales 111, Aug. 1963, reprinted in Marvel Treasury Edition 6, June 1975), the Master of the Mystic Arts battled one of the mirror-image foes so common to superheroes — in this case, a treacherous, power-hungry sorcerer of equal ability who’d also been trained by the Ancient One. While Strange is pledged to use his power to protect people, his enemy intends to enslave them.

The villain introduced here had a name that fairly rumbled from the lips, “Baron Mordo” (with its suggestions of “morbid,” “morose” and “mordant”). JRR Tolkien also recognized the ominousness of the sound (“Mordor”), and so did Jim Shooter (“Mordru”). 

Comics historian Jeff Rovin wrote, “Among the countless dark powers (Baron Mordo) has at his command are astral projection … altering his physical appearance; mesmerizing others while he’s in corporeal or spiritual form; summoning up a paralytic vapor and creating another vapor which can remove an entire apartment building from this realm and drop it into limbo.

From his European castle, Mordo projects his astral form to Tibet, where he telepathically commands the Ancient One’s servant to poison his meal. Sensing the danger in his Greenwich Village sanctum, Dr. Strange sends his own spirit soaring to the scene, where he engages Mordo in battle while arguing their philosophical differences. Strange defeats Mordo with shrewdness.

“I really liked the balance between the surrealistic mystic environs and the noir-ish street scenes,” recalled comics historian Vincent Mariani.

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 was 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.

April 1972: Superman and Machine

America’s love of gadgetry would naturally culminate in the man who becomes a gadget.

In 1972, only a dozen years after the term “cyborg” was coined, Martin Caiden wrote a novel by that name that combined science fiction with secret agent shenanigans. 

Like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man and many others, Colonel Steve Austin required a horrific tragedy to aesthetically balance his superhuman status. So Caiden gave us a detailed account of how the mangled form of the astronaut, torn apart in an air crash, became a literal superspy. Caiden followed up with three sequels: Operation Nuke (1973), High Crystal (1974) and Cyborg IV (1975).

In the novel, Col. Austin ends up with tireless legs, a poison dart gun/battering ram for an arm and a sightless camera for an eye. A swiftly produced TV movie starring Lee Majors upped the ante in the direction of Superman. 

And just as Superman was born from the social and economic anxieties of the Great Depression, the Six Million Dollar Man reflected a dominant force in postwar America: the technological focus of the military-industrial complex.

Humanoid robots, a rampaging Venus probe, an alien Bigfoot, another super-powered astronaut (played by William Shatner) and a Seven Million Dollar Man (played by Monte Markham) were among the menaces that threatened TV’s stalwart cyborg. 

“The Six Million Dollar Man truly found its identity when Austin faced off against super-powered fantasy figures,” wrote John Kenneth Muir in his Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television. “As a spy, Steve was just so-so, but as a superhero he kicked ass.”

In addition to Caiden’s novels, six paperback novelizations were published about the series, and Charlton Comics featured the character in both a nine-issue comic book series and a seven-issue black-and-white magazine. 

Like The Man from UNCLE a decade earlier, The Six Million Dollar Man inspired a distaff spin-off — The Bionic Woman (the producers thought it would be vulgar to stick a price tag on a woman). 

August 1971: Red Wolf in the Spotlight

“We must applaud Red Wolf for many reasons,” wrote Michael A. Sheyahshe in Native Americans in Comic Books. “The comic contains a character who is the first major Native superhero, one who is a complex character, more human than many other Indigenous characters, and one that even has his own sidekick.”

Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, Red Wolf was William Talltrees, a young man whose Cheyenne family was extorted and murdered by corrupt businessman Cornelius van Lunt. To avenge them, he adopted the legendary persona of Red Wolf, gaining vaguely defined powers from the Native American god Owayodata and a partner, an actual wolf named Lobo. 

“I liked the story,” recalled comics historian Paul Zuckerman of Red Wolf’s September 1970 debut in Avengers 80. “Although Native Americans had already long been treated with more respect in comics, this brought them front and center into the modern world, part of the trend of relevant comics that were popping up then and getting all of the attention from the media.

“They didn't really do much with the character and when Red Wolf got his own series, it wasn't him — it was his ancestor! But it was books like this that piqued my interest in comics again.”

Penned by Gardner Fox and drawn by Syd Shores, the Red Wolf feature that began in Marvel Spotlight 1 (Aug. 1971) was set in the Old West.

“The switch to a Wild West era character was something Stan imposed on us,” Roy Thomas recalled. “I would have preferred to keep the modern hero from the beginning.”

“Red Wolf marked the first time that an American Indian had assumed the role (of mysterious avenger), and it certainly should be remembered at least for breaking ground in a new direction,” Maurice Horn wrote in Comics of the American West.

In the movies at roughly the same time, actor and writer Tom Laughlin introduced his half-Indian ex-Green Beret avenger, Billy Jack.

October 1970: When Kirby Met Kent

In August 1970, at age 16, I was no longer reading many comics. But I knew I had to have a copy of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 133.

Jack Kirby, the Marvel visionary, coming to DC? I must say, the mind reeled.

So, like a lot of other readers, I picked up Jimmy Olsen 133, the first issue of that title I’d purchased in several years. It did seem odd that Kirby’s first new DC efforts were published in the moribund Jimmy Olsen title,

“Pete Costanza (Nemesis, Captain Tootsie) was the artist handling Jimmy's comic when Jack Kirby (Devil Dinosaur, Sky Masters) moved from Marvel to DC in 1970,” explained comics historian Don Markstein. “Since Costanza was planning to retire, Kirby could replace him without worrying about anybody getting thrown out of work. Thus, Jimmy was catapulted into Kirby’s Fourth World multi-title storyline, which also included The New Gods, The Forever People and Mister Miracle.”

I remember being particularly interested in examining Kirby’s take on Superman. I wanted to see Kirby’s dynamism injected into my favorite character.

I also remember suspecting that Kirby’s Superman faces had been redrawn. No matter. This Superman hurtled along in reckless Kirby abandon, and that’s what I wanted to see. 

Even Superman’s heat vision looked more formidable when Kirby drew it. Kirby knew that superheroes were about power, and he took care to put that on the page.

I also noticed that Kirby’s characterization of Superman didn’t quite tally with DC’s established one. Superman did not generally moan about being lonely the way he did in the first issue of Forever People. Nor would DC’s established Man of Steel have considered leaving Earth to live with some tribe of super strangers. He was too dedicated to his mission for that.

But again, no matter. Here, Kirby was merely anticipating events. Superman’s sense of himself as an isolated outsider on Earth was a theme writers would return to repeatedly in later decades.

August 1970: An Echo of Tarzan’s Yell

You might argue that the first Marvel superhero predated even Superman.

Thanks to the spectacular and continuing success of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord of the Jungle in the pulp magazines, novels, movies and comic strips of the 1910s and 1920s, the jungles were soon crawling with ersatz Tarzans.

Readers had their choice of Bomba, Bantan, Jan, Jongor, Tam, Tharn, Kaspa, Ki-Gor, Kioga — and Ka-Zar.

Starting in 1936, “Ka-Zar by ‘Bob Byrd’ was also featured in a magazine bearing his name for several issues," noted Richard A. Lupoff in his excellent book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. “Ka-Zar, like the earlier Kaspa, was raised by lions; like the earlier Kioga, his real family name was Rand; like Tarzan, he fought with apes, befriended elephants and generally ruled a jungle domain.”

Because Ka-Zar (pronounced “KAY-sar”) was owned and published by Martin Goodman, young David Rand slipped neatly into Goodman’s seminal Marvel Comics 1 in 1939, right alongside the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner.

Then, like many another Golden Age Marvel character, Ka-Zar was revived in the 1960s — but not as David Rand. This time he was Kevin Plunder, a lost English lord discovered by the X-Men living with his sabertooth tiger Zabu in the Savage Land, a tropical wonderland hidden in Antarctica. (The X-Men 10, March 1965).

The jungle man knocked around the Marvel universe for five years before landing his own feature in Astonishing Tales, a duplex comic he shared with Dr. Doom.

Ka-Zar’s feature outlasted Doom’s, continuing through October 1973 before being replaced by It, the Living Colossus.

In whatever incarnation, Ka-Zar displays peak physical strength, speed and agility and an uncanny ability to communicate with animals.

“More than two-thirds of a century after his first appearance, Ka-Zar is probably the only one of those 1930s Tarzan knock-offs that is still appearing in new adventures,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “Pretty good for a guy who only managed three pulp magazines before sinking into oblivion.”

August 1970: From Siren to Superhero

Already spider-themed, Marvel Comics’ Black Widow naturally became the first of several female counterparts to Marvel’s most popular superhero, the first of several fully feminist Marvel superwomen and finally a Hollywood heroine.

In the first six years of her fictional career, she moved from minor villain to headlining hero. Over the same span, her dramatic journey paralleled the advancement in the status of women across the 20th century.

Created by Stan Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck in Tales of Suspense 52 (April 1964), Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanova was introduced as a Russian communist spy, a foe of the capitalist industrialist superhero Iron Man.

She wasn’t a costumed character but a beautiful “femme fatale,” an archetype created by male writers that represents a woman’s sexual attractiveness to men as a siren threat, a weapon.

Dashiell Hammett’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy, from the 1929 novel The Maltese Falcon, is a classic of the type, seducing several men to their doom. The femme fatale has often amounted to a nightmare view of female independence and confidence.

But Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century, was already a year old when the Black Widow debuted. So, by the end of the decade, the character was transformed from a slinky villain into a playgirl feminist superhero with her own feature in Amazing Adventures (Aug. 1970, drawn by John Buscema and written by Gary Friedrich).

Defecting to the U.S. and trading espionage for superheroics, Natasha had settled on a costume that consisted of a skintight black catsuit and wristband weapons that echoed Diana Rigg’s most popular outfit as Emma Peel in The Avengers (no, not those Avengers).

After her Amazing Adventures feature ended in 1971, the Black Widow started teaming up with Daredevil. In 1975, the characters attracted the interest of Angela Bowie, who planned to play Natasha in a TV project. She was the wife of David Bowie (Yes, that David Bowie).

June 1970: An Assembly of Archenemies

In 1970, Murphy Anderson provided us with a group portrait of the main enemies who had bedeviled the Man of Tomorrow over the three previous decades.

I never had much patience with those 1940s goofballs the Prankster, the Puzzler and the Toyman, three lame tricksters who shouldn’t have been a challenge to Batman, let alone Superman (in fact, Batman battled his own Puzzler).

But that other trickster, Mr. Mxyzptlk, was another matter. 

A being from a higher dimension than our own, the imp’s omnipotence overshadowed even Superman’s vast powers. Luckily, this ancestor of Star Trek’s Q really only wanted to play games.

Both Robert Mayer’s Superfolks and Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? deal with the chilling consequences of what would happen if Mxyzptlk decided to stop being mischievous and start being evil.

Naturally I’ve been impressed by Lex Luthor, who evolved from criminal scientist to criminal capitalist. The persistent arch-foes Luthor and Brainiac represent the yin and yang of Superman’s enemies, the human and the alien.

The power-draining Parasite is the newcomer here, having been created by writer Jim Shooter in 1966 (when he was 15).

Finally we have a sinister quartet from the spooky Phantom Zone: General Zod, Jax-Ur, Kru-El and Professor Vakox. This twilight dimensional prison was introduced in the comics in Adventure Comics 283 (April 1961), but had been prefigured in the 1950 movie serial Atom Man vs. Superman.

Jor-El’s discovery of the Phantom Zone has proven to be as enduring as the criminals who inhabit it.

The zone was a neat solution to the problem of how an advanced alien civilization might be able to sidestep capital punishment — even though banishment to an eternal incorporeal existence seems a fate almost worse than death, when you think about it.

The Phantom Zone even served to save the life of Superman’s “brother,” Mon-El, by removing him from exposure to lead, a substance fatal to him that’s prevalent on our planet. 

April 1970: The Amazon and the Clown

Wonder Woman and … Jerry Lewis? Talk about your odd couple.

But actually, the comedian had run into other superheroes in his DC Comics title The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, notably Superman, Batman and the Flash.

“Unfortunately, while this story (in issue 117) is explicitly touted as featuring the new Wonder Woman, it reads very much as though writer (Alan) Riefe and editor Murray Boltinoff weren’t all that familiar with what had been done to the character over the past year,” recalled Tom Brevoort. 

“In an attempt to spike interest in her series, Diana Prince had given up her Amazon power and taken to running a boutique while studying the martial arts under her sightless Asian instructor I-Ching. She would get involved in spy adventures very much inspired by Diana Rigg in the UK import television series The Avengers, and took to wearing white outfits. So most of the magic and the mythology had been stripped out of the series in an attempt to make it more relevant. But you wouldn’t know that from this Jerry Lewis tale.”

Mike Sterling noted, “Jerry’s run as a comic book character began in 1952 with The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. After the Martin/Lewis comedy act broke up, the title was continued as The Adventures of Jerry Lewis.”  

“What made Jerry Lewis stand out to me was his longevity,” wrote Sterling. “His comic book ran 124 issues before coming to an end in 1971. At DC, Green Lantern and Green Arrow were dealing with the impact of drug abuse, Batman was returning to the dark, gritty roots of his origin and a Jerry Lewis comic book was being published.” 

Comedian Bob Hope’s title had an equally impressive run of 109 issues. I once interviewed Hope prior to his show at the local university, and kicked myself later when I realized I’d forgotten to ask him about his lengthy career as a DC Comics character.

Still rankles me.