September 1967: That’s Nice, That’s Terrific

Superman editor Mort Weisinger often took his story cues from the popular culture fads of the day, shopping for ideas by scanning movie posters and other such signposts of the zeitgeist.

But in 1967, that could be a little like looking into a mirror. Batman was on TV and a Superman musical had just finished on Broadway. DC superhero cartoons abounded.

And then came the live-action superhero sitcoms Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific, both premiering on the evening of Jan. 9, 1967.

Whatever appeal the superhero comedy concept might have had in 1967, the shows stumbled right out of the starting gate because of their back-to-back network scheduling.

Mr. Terrific starred Stephen Strimpell as Stanley Beamish, a filling station operator whose singular biochemistry permitted him to pop a power pill and become a flying, super-strong superspy for a maximum of 100 minutes.

Captain Nice was police chemist Carter Nash (William Daniels), a mother-dominated fusspot who nevertheless appeared to be the only person with any sense of civic responsibility in Big Town, USA. When goggled and caped, Carter seemed self-conscious but game, smashing through walls, catching bullets, shrugging off artillery shells and zipping around the globe in under 60 minutes.

Both Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice were obviously Superman parodies. In Action Comics 354 (Sept. 1967), Weisinger did a tribute to both shows, splitting the difference by creating a character called Captain Incredible.

Captain Incredible turned out to be a super-robot created by a 27^th century scientist to assist Superman. However, the strain of time travel proved too much for the mechanical man, and he became a menace.

Actually, the shows were virtually off the air then, having been cancelled. They were just finishing their summer reruns by the time Action 354 appeared on the stands in July 1967.

“How ironic,” as the comic books used to say.

Looking back, Daniels put his show’s quick demise down to the audience’s disinclination to cheer for an “insecure Superman.”

The super-sitcom rivals: Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific

June 1967: The Fiery Frankenstein

I remember a puzzling reference to a 1940s Human Torch in a Mad Magazine parody about retired superheroes. He was said to have found a job lighting cigars for some millionaire.

Wait, you mean there was ANOTHER Human Torch before Johnny Storm?

Indeed, and thanks to Stan Lee’s reprinting of the earliest Marvel stories in 25-cent giants, we fans were able to satisfy our curiosity early on.

Both the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner debuted at the birth of Marvel Comics (Oct. 1939), which was both the title in which they initially appeared and eventually the brand name that would storm the world of popular culture. 

And both were monster men as much as supermen — the Torch a confused android who burned whatever he touched, and Prince Namor an angry loose cannon almost as likely to murder innocent people as to save them.

Comic book character concepts were less rigid in the experimental days of the 1930s. Initially amoral, unpredictable and just plain weird, both the Torch and the Sub-Mariner reflected Universal’s popular monster movies as well as the new hit character Superman.

The Torch’s origin, reprinted in Fantasy Masterpieces 9 (June 1967), was crudely drawn but had a fascination of its own. Carl Burgos gave us a willful child of a Torch, one who declares that the sound of fire alarms amuses him and that the blast of a fire hose tickles. 

Recruited by criminals for an extortion racket, the naïve Torch eventually catches on and burns some of them alive.

Children’s fascination with fire proved sufficient to sell 80,000 copies of Marvel Comics 1, prompting a second print run. Eventually 800,000 copies sold.

When Lee and Jack Kirby revamped the character concept for The Fantastic Four in 1961, the Human Torch became actually human. But the “monster hero” theme would be echoed in one of his teammates, the Thing, and then again in the second Lee/Kirby title of the Marvel Age, The Incredible Hulk.

May 1965: The Ian Fleming Affair

Gold Key offered kids helpful types on spying and sabotage.

In 1964, television audiences watched the stylish adventures of an Ian Fleming superspy named … Napoleon Solo.

At traffic lights, on his way to a producer’s office, actor Robert Vaughn had leafed through the script for a series called Solo. He realized immediately that it was “James Bond on television” and was sold.

With the film Dr. No and its sequel From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming’s hero had already become a successful franchise. And the biggest hits — Goldfinger and Thunderball — were yet to come.

In fact, the Solo producers had consulted with Fleming about their TV idea. With Bond movies in production, Fleming couldn’t participate much, but he did give them two character names — Napoleon Solo and April Dancer (eventually The Girl from UNCLE in a spinoff series).

One other Fleming-inspired idea was the name UNCLE. In his 9th Bond novel Thunderball, published in 1961, Fleming had winked at the mid-century bureaucratic passion for acronyms by calling Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s criminal syndicate SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Revenge, Terrorism and Extortion).  The TV show’s UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law Enforcement) established the practice as a fictional superspy cliché, and KAOS, SHIELD, THUNDER and others followed. 

The suave Solo and his stoic, taciturn partner Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) were usually pitted against Thrush, an organization described by Solo as believing “…the world should have a two-party system — the masters and the slaves.” 

America’s dark days cast their shadow even over The Man from UNCLE pilot, which suspended filming because of President Kennedy’s assassination.

The series started out well, but progressively lost focus, succumbing to “camp” claptrap. But it made its mark. 

Airing on NBC from 1964 to 1968, the series not only prompted a spinoff but numerous paperback novels, several movies, a latter-day pulp magazine and two Gold Key comic book titles. 

Solo and Kuryakin’s missions were called “affairs,” and my favorite of the paperback titles was, of course, The Unfair Fare Affair.

The Man from UNCLE's debt to the James Bond movies was always apparent.

September 1964: Mystery of the Missing Monster

The demise of the Hulk’s title with its 6^th issue (March 1963) gave Marvel room to create a new character.

“Marvel was limited by a distribution deal with Independent News Company, owned by rival DC Comics, to only eight titles a month,’ wrote Joseph J. Darowski in The Ages of the Incredible Hulk: Essays on the Green Goliath in Changing Times. “Even though the output was maximized by publishing 16 titles on a bimonthly basis, there was no space for titles of limited appeal.”

So the end of the Hulk’s title arguably made room for somebody else, probably the first appearance of Nick Fury. The first issue of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s application of their new Marvel approach to war comics, was cover-dated May 1963, two months after the Hulk’s run finished.

From March 1963 to October 1964, the Hulk was not really out of sight or mind, thanks to Lee’s skillful use of his tortured former protagonist as an antagonist against the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor and Giant-Man.

That move accomplished two purposes, keeping the Hulk alive in the minds of young readers, and carefully nurturing their growing sense of a vast, interconnected fictional universe, a Marvel universe. Lee used Prince Namor to serve the same function at the same time.

The Hulk returned in a new feature in Tales to Astonish 60. Drawn by Steve Ditko, the character was finally established in the form in which most people now know him — as a scientist turned into a monster by stress or anger — the fight-or-flight response.

Shared titles were necessary in Marvel’s expanding universe, and each of them had its own theme.

Tales of Suspense featured the out-and-out superheroes, Captain America and Iron Man. Strange Tales featured two characters on the fringes of the superhero world, Nick Fury and Dr. Strange. And once Giant-Man departed, Tales to Astonish featured the Hulk and the Sub-Mariner, two super-antiheroes.

September 1961: Those Thrilling, Time-Lost Titans

For the 10-and-under crowd, Showcase 34 contained not only the debut of a new superhero, but a thrilling surprise.

A text feature gave us our first glimpse of something we’d never heard of or suspected: a 1940s superhero team like the Justice League of America called the Justice Society of America.

The Spectre? Dr. Fate? Hourman? Sandman? Weirdly costumed alternate versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman? Just who were these tantalizing titans, anyway? Time would tell us…

The JSA’s founding members ranged from a crime-crushing ghost who was virtually omnipotent and a man who wielded a wish-fulfilling Aladdin’s ring to a stout, tough-talking matron whose mask was a pot with eye holes.

Also on the lower end of that power scale was a undersized college kid whose power was lifting weights — Al Pratt, the original Atom.

“Anyone who knows the Atom in his 1961 incarnation knows the two characters have nothing in common,” observed Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. “I have said that DC used the old name, but appropriated the powers of Doll Man. Doll Man had been moribund since 1953, and then the publisher, Quality Comics, was sold to DC in ‘56.”

The Atom’s Silver Age makeover was a more radical revamp than the Flash, Green Lantern or Hawkman’s had been. The 1940s’ origins of the latter characters had been soft-peddled in their titles, but with the Atom editor Julius Schwartz clearly decided that a fuller explanation was in order.

The three-page text feature included background on the original Atom and the JSA, as well as mini-autobiographies on writer Gardner Fox and artists Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson.

“When my long-time editor Julie Schwartz presented me with the task of creating an ‘Atom,’  I began dipping into a memory that stores the faces of almost every movie star and bit player since the 1920s, and I decided on Robert Taylor as a basis for Ray (The Atom) Palmer,” Kane explained.