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 1966: The Weary Web of Middle Age

Think of 1966.

The young creators of the comic book superheroes were by then middle-aged, paunchy, with their dreams of glory replaced by worries about the mortgage and dental bills. And one of them was the 52-year-old Jerry Siegel, the Cleveland-born co-creator of Superman.

He and Joe Shuster had sold away the rights to that feature for $130, By 1966, wearied by financial worries and failed lawsuits to regain the rights to his creation, Siegel was taking writing jobs where he could find them. One of those places was Archie Comics.

Artist John Cassone had created the Web in 1942 as a bespectacled criminology professor who prowled the darkened streets in a green and yellow costume, a jingoistic bruiser who tackled brutal, fanged, hatchet-hurling Axis menaces.

In his first recorded adventure in Zip Comics 27 (July 1942), the Web rescued his student Rose Wayne from the Black Dragon, a Japanese torturer. In defiance of comic book convention, Rose immediately recognized her masked professor John Raymond.

Two decades passed. MLJ Comics renamed itself in honor of its most popular character, and then developed an offshoot, Mighty Comics — an awkward attempt to surf the wave of superhero revivals popularized by DC and Marvel.

So in Fly Man 36 (March 1966), in a story written by the pseudonymous Siegel (“Jerry Ess”), Rose and John are revealed to be placidly married and the Web is long retired. The series turns on the fact that he wants to return to a life of adventure while his wife is determined that he stay put.

In his teens, Siegel had co-created the world’s most influential superhero, a multi-media superstar who proved to be a money machine for his publishers. In his 50s, eking out a living as a freelancer, buffeted by a string of defeats, the embittered Siegel was writing about a superhero long past his prime who daydreamed about recapturing past glories.

Somewhere beneath all that heavy-handed humor sits a sad irony. 

November 1965: When the Mighty Go Camping

In January 1966, the overnight success of the Batman TV program led to a miscalculation in the entertainment industry.

The archly comical ABC show created to be “camp,” a term defined by Merriam-Webster as “…something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate or out-of-date as to be considered amusing.”

The early TV stories, virtually lifted right from the comic books, didn’t sit so well on actual human beings in tights — even though it was fun to see Adam West address each crazy scheme involving puzzles, umbrellas, Rube Goldberg death traps and brightly colored knock-out gas as if it were the imminent detonation of a hydrogen bomb.

A 12-year-old then, I understood that the show was laughing at Batman, not with him. And I didn’t appreciate it one little bit when that same attitude backwashed into superhero comics — not just the Batman comics, but many other bandwagon riders.

Take the revived Archie Comics MLJ superheroes, for example. Subjected to the faux-Stan Lee writing of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the indifferent art of Paul Reinman, 1940s stalwarts like the Web, the Shield, the Fox, Steel Sterling and the Black Hood became goofballs as the Fly-Man title turned into Mighty Heroes in 1966-67.

Only the Web — now a henpecked, middle-aged superhero making a comeback attempt — had the seeds of a real story, touching on themes that would be developed in superhero stories 20 or more years later.

But finally, once all the publicity dust settles, things that are said to be “…so bad they’re good” are usually, after all, just bad.

The Batman show, and the comic book superheroes that copied it, all quickly fell victim to the problem that afflicts every camp melodrama.

You can’t generate concern about the fate of characters after you’ve encouraged the audience to laugh at them by making them appear ridiculous. The ticking time bomb can’t be suspenseful when we know it’s really a jack-in-the-box.

July 1965: Does Whatever a Fly-Man Can

The Fly, Archie Comics’ pioneer Silver Age superhero, was a wall-crawler with an alliterative name who was secretly a teenager.

“(B)etween 1961 and 1964, (The Adventures of the Fly and The Adventures of the Jaguar) were practically the only superhero comics NOT published by DC and Marvel,” recalled popular culture author Will Murray.

But while Tommy Troy’s alter ego was a modest success, Marvel Comics’ Peter Parker was a breakaway hit — and that gave Archie Comics ideas.

“(I)n 1965, Archie publisher (John) Goldwater thought he saw an opportunity,” noted Alan McKenzie. “He had been watching the rise and rise of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics and figured, ‘How hard can it be?’ He hired Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel to revamp all of his superhero properties into one line of comics, the Mighty Comics Group.”

The Fly’s teenage alter ego had been abandoned early on, without explanation, and he became an adult attorney, Thomas Troy. But now Archie Comics veered in the direction of Marvel’s most popular character, and changed the Fly’s name to something more suggestive of “Spider-Man” — “Fly Man.”

“Not exactly a title calculated to walk off the newsstands,” Murray observed drily.

Fly-Man’s already numerous super powers were expanded, and he gained the ability to shrink or grow to giant size.

“Starting with the Fly, Siegel morphed him into Fly-Man and pitched the writing style as a bad pastiche of Stan Lee,” McKenzie wrote. “To further beef up the appeal, Siegel included additional superheroes teamed up to help Fly-Man battle the Spider, including Golden Age MLJ characters the Comet and the Black Hood, as well as a revamped version of the Shield ... and of course Fly-Girl.”

“It’s difficult to say now, over 40 years later, whether Siegel was just doing a hack imitation, or was actually lampooning the Marvel approach to comics,” Murray said.

When the Batman TV show pitched camp in January 1966, kicking off the silly season, Fly-Man and friends fit right in.

January 1962: Everybody Wants to Be a Cat

Archie Comics’ Cat Girl may well have been a wink at DC’s Catwoman, the popular 1940s villainess who nevertheless hadn’t appeared in six years (since The Jungle Cat-Queen in Detective Comics 211, Sept. 1954).

No successful concept is ever abandoned in superhero comics. It’s always recycled — if not by the original publisher, then by another.

Introduced in The Adventures of the Fly 9 (Nov. 1960), Lydia Fellin was  “…the Sphinx, the original model for the countless ancient statues.”

The superhuman feline immortal clashed with the superhero when she freed big cats from their imprisonment in a zoo. She kept returning, eventually making a dozen appearances in Archie Comics.

Super-strong and armed with claws, Cat Girl was indestructible and could become invisible, fly, teleport, telepathically communicate with cats and gaze into the future.

After a couple of encounters with the Fly, she concentrated her attentions on the Jaguar, Archie Comics’ other superhero of the early 1960s, and promptly fell in love with him.

Seemingly inadvertently, the Jaguar turned out to be quite the lady-killer. Super women, alien women and ordinary women were forever becoming infatuated with him. The Adventures of the Jaguar threatened to become “Catfight Comics.”

Cat Girl rescued the Jaguar from aliens, wooed him with love potions and helped him out by breaking up a ring of cat burglars (who all wore cat masks, naturally).

Cat Girl also joined the all-female “Jaguar Rescue Team.” “In sponsoring this assemblage, the Jaguar may have created every superguy’s worst nightmare: a team made up entirely of ex-girlfriends,” Jon Morris quipped.

Cat Girl would eventually lose most of her supernatural powers through exposure to radiation, retaining only her telepathic control over cats.

In fact, one Cat Girl wasn’t enough for Archie Comics. They had to have two. 

The second was a sultry character in a black leotard meant to complement Archie’s movie monster parodies, and clearly a nod at the two RKO Cat People films made during the 1940s.

January 1962: Brainiac By Any Other Name

An alien invader who shrinks and collects your civilization? That would be Brainiac, right?

Well, no, it’s Grq, at least in the Archie Adventure universe of 1962.

When the Fly and Fly Girl ran into the planet-shrinker in The Test Tube Flies! (Adventures of the Fly 17, Jan. 1962), they were, ironically, reduced to the size of insects. But nevertheless, eventually they taught Grq just how formidable insects can be.

Robert Bernstein, a writer who worked for both DC and Archie, was well familiar with Superman’s exploits, and clearly used Otto Binder’s The Super-Duel in Space! (Action Comics 242, July 1958) as his inspiration. 

But then, DC Comics was perfectly capable of copying their own stories, as in The Alien Who Doomed Robin! (World’s Finest 110, June 1960). In that tale, written by Jerry Coleman, Superman, Batman and Robin fought to stop a green, tentacled alien from shrinking and stealing buildings to use as exhibits on an asteroid amusement park.

“The Fly stories largely consisted of our hero doing battle with various menaces: giant robots, alien invaders, prehistoric monsters and gangs of crooks were favorite opponents,” recalled comics historian Michael E. Grost. “In this way, his stories resembled those of the Green Lantern, who also spent much of his time fighting monstrous menaces from outer space and other dimensions.”

“The Fly was a superhero who had the powers of insects,” Grost noted. “He could fly, glow like a firefly, employ the immense strength of an ant, weave silk cocoons and bind his enemies, etc. He could also command hordes of insects to do his bidding.”

“John Rosenberger, most of whose comics work was in the romance genre, became the regular illustrator,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “He delivered dependable, routine work until 1964, when the title ended. Along the way, only one more notable thing happened — in the 14th issue, the Fly picked up a female counterpart, Fly Girl, who was in reality actress Kim Brand.”

September 1961: The Earlier Animal Man

A new superhero soaring through the air? A giant reptilian monster on a rampage? Red-skinned aliens invading Earth?

I’m in.

So I was happy to buy the first issue of The Adventures of the Jaguar (Sept. 1961), which appeared on the stands in June 1961 — a nice present for my 7^th birthday.

And yes, even at age I could recognize the character as being heavily derivative of Archie Comics’ other superhero, the Fly. But the Jaguar also shared the artist John Rosenberger with the Fly, and I enjoyed his clear, clean-lined work.

“It really does seem as though the character was created just to fill a space — he’s a simple knock-off of the Fly himself, but with the powers of all mammals rather than the more exotic and interesting ones of all insects,” observed comics historian Don Markstein. “He uses a magic belt instead of a magic ring, is a zoologist named Ralph Hardy instead of a lawyer named Thomas Troy, and unlike the Fly, has no female counterpart.”

Empowered by Incan magic and/or super-technology, Hardy flies with the aid of his “nucleon-energy belt” rockets and defeats an ancient serpent.

The Jaguar’s exploits, penned by Robert Bernstein, appeared for 15 issues in his own title and as back-page stories in Archie comedy titles like Laugh and Pep.

A little later, when the Archie superheroes formed the Mighty Crusaders, the Jaguar reappeared for a single issue as a member of a rival super-team, the Terrific Three. Mr. Justice and Steel Sterling were the other two.

We had several creature-totemic superheroes knocking about then, not just the Fly and the Jaguar but also Aquaman, Hawkman and Ant-Man. All of them had not just costumes and powers inspired by their biological namesakes, but also an intimate connection with the creatures themselves, whom they could communicate with and command.

In this, they resembled a certain ape man — the ubiquitous afternoon-movie hero Tarzan, who was forever summoning elephants to his aid.

July 1961: When Women Take Wing

Comic books, like television, are a generally conservative mass medium, reflecting social change only after it’s taken hold in the culture at large. And that makes it interesting to track the course of women’s rights in comics.

Mary Marvel, Bulletgirl, Miss America, Namora, Golden Girl, Doll Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Superwoman, Aquagirl, Miss Arrowette, Fly Girl, Hawkgirl, Power Girl, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman, even She-Hulk … the female knock-off of the dominant male superhero was a venerable tradition from the 1940s on, one that paradoxically paralleled American society’s growing recognition of female power even as it kind of condescended to the idea.

Take Fly Girl, for example.

Introduced in Adventures of the Fly 13 (July 1961) as a traditional damsel in distress, actress Kim Brand didn’t play that role for long. In Adventures of the Fly 14 (September 1961), she was granted a magic ring by extra-dimensional emissary Turan that enabled her to duplicate the powers of attorney Thomas Troy, the Fly. She co-starred with him thereafter while appearing in solo stories in the Archie comics Laugh and Pep.

The trend even continued outside comics, with Six Million Dollar Men spawning Bionic Women.

Those female copies sometimes served as guinea pigs, trial balloons for plot developments that would later be visited on the more established male hero. Supergirl was “killed” before Superman, and Batgirl was physically disabled before Batman.

The 1979 movie Alien featured a female lead besting a space predator after her male crewmates had failed. And Joss Whedon’s innovative 1997 TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer marked a shift in the culture, featuring a no-nonsense superheroine in the lead who had copied no one, and whose adventures balanced the traditionally male mission of monster hunting with traditional female concerns about high school relationships.

And the permanent cultural shift that has taken place is even more apparent now. Thor’s original love interest, Jane Foster, gained the powers, the hammer and the name of the thunder god.

August 1959: For Whom the Bell Strolls

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. 

August 1959: Archie Tries the Fly

Despite the immensely popular Adventures of Superman TV show, the 1950s remained kind of a desert for superheroes.

Like DC in its revivals of the Flash and Green Lantern, Archie Comics caught the first wave of the coming Silver Age with its Adventures of the Fly in August 1959.

Tommy Troy was a boy magically transformed into an adult superhero, a winning concept that was going begging since Fawcett Comics had stopped publishing Captain Marvel five years before. Oddly, that angle was dropped after a couple of issues, and Tommy was rushed through law school to become an adult attorney.

In the first issue I bought, Adventures of the Fly 8 (Sept. 1960), I was delighted to find two superheroes for the price of one (then a dime). The Fly teamed up with the Shield to fight the Monster Gang. Movie monsters too! How good could this get?

I remember being puzzled by the fact that the Shield seemed to come from nowhere, because he had no title of his own. In fact, he did — The Double Life of Private Strong, which lasted only two issues in 1959. Like The Adventures of the Fly, the title was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

The revamped Golden Age Shield now boasted flight, super-strength, invulnerability, super-vision and the ability to project lightning, and was the orphaned son of a scientist who’d given him his expanded-mind powers. Lancelot Strong had also been adopted and raised by a kindly farm couple.

Sound familiar? DC Comics thought so and threatened legal action, banishing the Shield to near-limbo. He did, however, show up for a couple of guest spots with the Fly.

That also happened with the Black Hood, another Golden Age superhero I’d never heard of, despite the fact that he’d once had his own comic book, radio series and pulp magazine.

June 1959: The Short and Double Life of Private Strong

Even given the quirky history of comic books, The Double Life of Private Strong was an odd title.

For one thing, what other superhero comic was named after the protagonist’s secret identity? For another, why would a title launched at the perfect time to become popular be killed off after a mere two issues?

Created for Archie Comics by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in June 1959, just ahead of the 1960s’ boom market for superheroes, the title took the route that had proven successful with DC’s the Flash (and would work well for Green Lantern the next month). In each case, a popular 1940s superhero was rebooted, updated and streamlined for the jet age.

Simon and Kirby’s most successful creation had been 1941’s Captain America, a Marvel character they essentially parodied for Prize Comics with 1954’s Fighting American. 

But the first flag-costumed patriotic superhero had been the Shield, published in January 1940 by MLJ, which would become Archie. Joe Higgins, an FBI agent who possessed superhuman strength and durability, fought criminals and spies as the Shield until 1948 (although his super powers had faded by then).

In retooling the Shield, Simon and Kirby amped-up the superman factor, granting him flight, super-strength, invulnerability, super-vision and the ability to project lightning. The orphaned son of a scientist who’d given him his expanded-mind powers, Lancelot Strong was adopted and raised by a kindly farm couple.

All that was a bit too similar to Superman for DC, which promptly threatened legal action and ended the title after its second issue. However, this Shield would reappear once or twice more — with his super powers muted — as a guest star in The Adventures of the Fly.

They made the Shield’s secret identity that of an Army private, perhaps because most young men were drafted in those days, and perhaps because their most successful character had also hidden his red, white and blue costume under the tan of an U.S. Army uniform.