Number 1617: Me love hate Bizarro!

“Tales of the Bizarro World” — featuring stories of the defective Superman clones and characters of the Superman universe — was a big favorite of mine when it appeared in Adventure Comics in 1961-62. The idea of an inverted world has passed from Superman comic books into pop culture, even showing up on an episode of Seinfeld.

This story, which originally appeared in Adventure #291, was reprinted with several others in Superman #202 (1968), an 80-Page Giant issue, which used as its theme the topsy-turvy Bizarro World stories. (It is also the only silver age comic book I bought in 2013, when I searched my collection and could not find it. Me hate it when that happens!) The Bizarro stories were also collected in a trade paperback a few years ago.

“The Bizarro Perfect Crimes” was written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by John Forte. At the time the series ended its 15 issue run I was extremely disappointed and stopped buying Adventure Comics, which means I missed out on the popular “Legion of Super Heroes” feature that took Bizarro’s spot. It went on to be a very collectible series. In that way it was a Bizarro thing for me to do.

This is the second of our three-part Spacey Stories theme week.

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Number 1484: Viking Prince by the crown prince of comic artists

The Viking Prince feature, which ran in The Brave and the Bold for the first two dozen issues in the mid-to-late fifties, is a collaboration between Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert. I believe the Viking Prince was a version of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, although the comic book character was original enough in his own right. Being written by Kanigher in the Comics Code era meant that the blood and thunder was not in violent battles between humans, but often with supernatural entities, like the living giant stone statue in “The Secret of Odin’s Cup!” Kubert’s art on the story is superb.

From The Brave and the Bold #20 (1958):

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Number 1570: Sea Devils — the devil’s in the details

Despite dropping almost all my DC Comics purchases in '61-'62 after Marvel introduced The Fantastic Four and the rest of their early hero lineup (a fickle fan, wasn’t I?), an exception was DC’s Sea Devils. I bought it because of Russ Heath’s artwork. It’s telling that I stopped buying the book after issue #10 when other artists took over. It wasn’t that they were bad artists, just that I was buying the book because of Heath.

Looking at #1 after 50+ years makes me wonder if I just looked at the artwork without reading the stories, because I don’t remember them. Like this first story from issue #1, about a movie with a robot Octopus Man who roams the ocean floor walking a huge octopus on a leash. Then a real Octopus Man shows up. Next to this The Fantastic Four seems almost non-fiction. But there is that Russ Heath artwork, and that makes up for the implausibilities and overall silliness of editor Robert Kanigher’s scripts.

From Sea Devils #1 (1961).

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Number 1524: Written in hot lead

When DC Comics picked up the license in 1947 for the radio program, Gang Busters, it entered the crime comics fray, presided over by Crime Does Not Pay and its myriad of imitators. DC had a ready-made audience for Gang Busters, which was a perennial popular show and identifiable by comic book readers. This story from issue #1 (1948) is more of the format of a traditional crime comic. Gang Busters later moved into the DC-style of the fifties, especially after the Comics Code was instituted. The title lasted at DC until late 1958.

The story, “Murder Was My Business,” with a traditional career-ending arrival by the killer at the electric chair, is signed by George Roussos.

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