October 1983: A Champion by Chance

A kind of latter-day Fly Girl, AC Comics’ heroine Nancy Arazello was appealing and unassuming, feeling her way toward independence both as a woman and as a superhero. 

She only became a superhero, in fact, because she’d accidentally interrupted her boyfriend when he was beseeching the dark insect god Zzara for power. 

“During the 1940s, student of the occult John Howard Gallagher performed a mystic ritual which gave him super powers,” noted Jeff Rovin in his Encyclopedia of Superheroes. “Engineer Kenneth Francis Burton Jr. spends years learning all he can about Gallagher, who had died in 1957 — and eventually learns the secret of the incantation. But while he was performing the ceremony at his factory, his fiancée Nancy walks in and receives the full force of the unleashed supernatural powers. Thereafter, simply by willing it, she becomes the Dragonfly, able to fly and possessing great strength and invulnerability.”

In fact, she could reach speeds of Mach 4 and move objects with telekinesis. She came with a built-in enemy, a boyfriend who seethed with envy over the powers he thought were rightfully his.

As T.M. Maple observed, “(Writer/artist) Rik Levins did seem to have a good time with the story, interjecting some of the more mundane, nevertheless interesting and amusing, problems that a superhero might run into.”

The character could be seen as a more mature homage to Fly Girl, with the 1950s’ male superhero who preceded her analogous to the Fly, and perhaps Charlton’s mystically powered Blue Beetle.

Nancy also had something in common with the Greatest American Hero as a goodhearted, accidentally super-powered person who was somewhat out of her depth.

Introduced in Americomics 4 (Oct. 1983), Dragonfly went on to star in eight issues of her own title.

I’ve always thought Dragonfly was among those well-done “might-have-beens,” a character who had some of the freshness Spider-Man originally possessed, and who deserved better than she got.

 

March 1982: Shout ‘Kimota!’ and Transform Comics

 

Before his own Watchmen, before Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, there was 1982’s Marvelman, Englishman Alan Moore’s milestone deconstruction of the American superhero.

If you need an example of why real art requires an outsider’s viewpoint, this is it. Moore took his loving familiarity with American comic book conventions — the superhuman powers, the magic words, the skintight costumes, the youthful sidekicks, the secret identities, the archenemies — and juxtaposed it all in his imagination with mundane British reality. The result was not the usual parody, but aesthetic insights that cut in more than one direction.

Using this American dreamscape to expose the American collective unconscious, Moore also explored a theme that paralleled Plato, who’d suggested that with great power comes catastrophe. 

And Moore did it with a character who had an impeccable, if convoluted, pedigree. Marvelman was the son of Captain Marvel, the grandson of Superman.

When the Superman-DC lawsuit finally put Captain Marvel out of business here in 1953, his British publisher L. Miller & Son saw no reason why such a great concept should die there. Writer-artist Mick Anglo replaced “Shazam!” with “Kimota!” and created Marvelman, clearly a pastiche Captain Marvel, in 1954. The feature and spinoffs ran until 1963. 

In 1982, Moore revamped the character for the British comic magazine Warrior (that version of Marvelman is now called “Miracleman” for corporate branding purposes).

The original character was juvenile even by 1950s standards, pretty thin stuff, but Moore’s reimagining was anything but.

Moore’s flair for dramatic surprises that amplify his themes is in evidence. When his wife expresses concern for his safety, Micky tells her not to worry — nothing can hurt him, he’s a superhero. Then, in an elevator, strangers hand him a baby, point out that he can’t transform without incinerating the child, and shoot him point blank. As Micky sinks into darkness, he is mocked by his own swaggering words…

The deconstruction of the superhero had begun. He’s never been the same since.