#comics lit

Last time, we talked about one of the silliest issues in the entire print run of Batman comics. Now we’re doing the same thing, but (affectionate)! The Polka-Dot Man, known in this issue as “Mr. Polka-Dot” is one of those supervillains that you wonder how anybody could ever have taken seriously, but despite being outlandishly laughable for a hero as grim and self-serious as Batman, he’s nevertheless become a symbol of everything that was fun about the Silver Age of comics. The character has appeared less than 20 times in actual DC canon, but he’s made nigh-endless appearances in spin-offs, cartoons, and video games. He made a live-action appearance in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, and it was wildly regarded as a sign that Gunn understood what made the DC Universe unique as a creative endeavor.

Batman has a whole minor staple of villains that are impossible to be taken seriously. Calendar Man. Killer Moth. Kite Man. King Tut. Egghead. Condiment King. So many others and only one of them was deliberately created as a joke. More serious Batman stories will shy away from these characters, or reinvent them as far more legitimate foes, and occasionally they will lean in to their silly concepts to highlight the inherent absurdity of the DC Universe. I find that Polka-Dot Man is an interesting case story in how and why these silly creations work, and why they stick in the mind with a fond nostalgia instead of cringing embarrassment.

I think the first place to look is the character’s design. A man who bases his whole supervillain career on textile patterns is going to require those elements to be prominent in his design. The man isn’t called Tasteful Plaid man, or Captain Seersucker. So we have the requisite Polkaed Dots, plus the comic book shorthand of a mask and a pair of trunks. The underwear-on-the-outside look is just something that we all have to agree is a part of the whole visual language. It’s no less silly than a cape, and we wouldn’t take away Batman’s cape. Of note is that the dots on his costume are not in any kind of pattern, but cover his body in random colors and sizes like he went sprinting through a paintball tournament.

I think his face is really special. The Dick Sprang-style art tends towards blocky faces with wide mouths and big rows of pearly white teeth, and when they smile it makes them look almost deranged. This combined with his mask, which has goggles designed to look like two black polka-dots, but comes off looking more like the empty eyes of a skull. Looking into those inky voids, I begin to feel that he’s not just deranged, he is absolutely unhinged. Reading this, I’m more scared of him than I am of the Joker, which is still not a high bar to clear in this era.

Polka-Dot Man’s powers are just as unhinged as his appearance. Each of his polka-dots is a different gadget, and when he pulls them off his suit they can transform into anything that could be reasonably represented as a circle. He can make a buzzsaw, he can make a flying saucer, he can make a bubble, he can make the goddamn sun. This (opens thesaurus) preposterous man can replicate the powers of a green lantern and he uses it to fuel his obsession with objectively the worst fashion choice you can make.

The comic makes a smart move of having Polka-Dot Man’s goons ask how his dots work, but he never gives them a straight answer. The characters are there to guide the audience, and if they express confusion, then the reader knows that they should also be confused. If they express confusion that goes unanswered, the reader’s confusion only grows in response. This makes the Polka-Dot man feel even more like an enigma. This is emphasized because we never get a name or any kind of motivation for this costumed weirdo. He’s just a guy who loves crime, loves polka-dots, and loves doing crime with polka-dots, and everything else is just madness.

The most surprising thing about this comic is that Polka-Dot Man is shockingly competent. He does an unstoppable series of crimes at Gotham City’s many, many, many dot-related businesses, and Batman and Robin are constantly on the back foot. The Dynamic Duo is forced to split up and stake out two different places, which leads Robin to try to take out the whole gang on his own. He gets captured, and Polka-Dot Man uses him to lure Batman into some kind of polka-dot themed death trap or some shit. He forces Robin to write a letter, and mails it to him in an envelope which he deliberately smeared with a tiny smudge of mud that he knows Batman will find and identify, because of him being the World’s Greatest Detective and all.

In order to clue Batman in about the death trap, Robin has to create an even more subtle hint to tweak Batman’s detective senses. Because this whole dang thing is about dots, Robin uses some dots of his own. He pokes tiny holes in the paper to create a hidden message in braille. Batman and Robin of course know braille by heart, why wouldn’t they? This is a surprising degree of competency all around, I’m used to the solutions to these riddles being nonsense. It probably would have been more effective if we had got a better look at it, but there is enough to see that something is happening.

Through all this, Polka-Dot Man has been talking about his master plan that will finally get him respect in the underworld. Normally I wouldn’t spoil that because it’s not worth it, but you have to see this shit. His whole plan was that if he did enough dot crimes in just the right pattern, you could draw lines and connect them to make a stick figure. Not even like a good stick figure. This is what it’s all been about, folks. Polka-Dot Man is shockingly brilliant at pulling off an extraordinarily dumb plan.

When I started this project, I didn't want to become the Angry Video Game Nerd. I'm always saying how I didn't want to become the Angry Video Game Nerd. Other people are always saying how I'm always saying that I don't want to be the Angry Video Game Nerd. But that is not out of any disrespect for the AVGN. James Rolfe, as a filmmaker, is absolutely legit, and I have nothing but respect for his work. As a critic, I want to do different things, but philosophically, I find his wisdom undeniable. Sometimes, when you take yourself back to the past, you find the shitty comics that suck ass, and all you can do is button up your white dress shirt, straighten your wire-frame glasses, stare right down the barrel of your Panasonic AG-DVX100 Camcorder and ask "What were they thinking?"

The story is a brisk ten pages, and it wastes none of them, although I can't say that it makes good use of any of them either. Batman breaks into the hideout of some mobsters and their mad scientist, Garth. Garth zaps Batman with the Baby-Rayby, and Batman just stays in it for long enough for him to turn fully back into a child. Who is Garth? Why does he have a baby gun? How does it work? What made him turn to evil? These questions and more will go completely unanswered by the narrative, bravely telling a story in which we learn absolutely nothing about any of the characters involved.

I'm not normally one to pick on a fictional child, but Batman is a fictional adult in the body of a fictional toddler, so my consistence is fictionally clear. Bat-Baby looks grotesque. Not once in any of these comic panels does he look anything like a real human child. Mostly that's just due to the uncanny valley, but these first panels where he's wearing the floppy batsuit and we can see his massive chubby baby cheeks will never fail to induce a visceral reaction in me. He looks like somebody made a racist caricature of a cabbage patch doll.

This premise raises a lot of interesting questions about Batman as a person. Famously, Batman lost his parents at a young age, and has been in a state of arrested development ever since, so how does he react to suddenly being a child again? What negative effects does having a child's body have on Batman's ability to fight crime? The answers to these questions is "Shut up and stop asking questions." Batman has all of his maturity and intelligence as an adult, and is only moderately bothered by having to sit on phone books to reach the table. Furthermore, despite having the body of a toddler, Batman is every bit as strong as an adult man, but he is all too willing to put on short pants and little dress shoes to fight crime.

The art has absolutely not improved in these next few pages. Outside of his costume, Batman looks like he has a young man's head on a child's body, and his arms and legs are disturbingly muscular. When he's in his Bitty Baby Batsuit, Batman's still got those gross sausage limbs but he's also got those weird puffy cheeks and, for some reason, full, pouty lips. He looks like he's been Weinerized. Why does he... why is that a thing? Why is any of this happening? Why do I do this to myself? I just cannot fathom the artist looking at this at any stage of the production and deciding that it looked like it was good enough to print.

Anyway, gotta move on. Batman next has to deal with the arrival of Katy Kane, who in this issue has decided that she's in love with Bruce Wayne. Bruce could do the sensible thing and have Alfred say that he's out sick with Rubella or some other pre-vaccination disease, but instead they do this convoluted scheme where they invite Katy into Wayne Manor, and then let her see the shadow of Bruce kissing some other woman, trusting that she, like the emotionally fragile lady woman-girl that she is, will turn around and run away, crying big feminine tears. Later, Bruce will explain that he wasn't seeing another woman, he was just making out licky-style with his cousin, a normal thing everyone does.

This scene is absurd on its own, but it's really just the nadir of a phenomenon endemic to Silver Age comics. The protagonist seems to be able to predict the actions of other characters as if they had nigh-omniscient prescience. Here we see Batman knowing that Kathy Kane would turn and walk away instead of angrily confronting Bruce and his lover, or indeed paying attention enough to notice that these shadows aren't moving or even making any noise because they're just a cardboard cut-out. Batman may be the world's greatest detective, but this story is treating him like the Kwisatz Haderach.

If you're in any way invested in this story, and why the hell would you be, you probably can't wait to see how Bat-Baby gets himself back to normal. So the hell would I, because this story doesn't even show us. We see Bat-Baby go off-panel, Robin mops up the thugs by himself, and then Batman pops back up, fully adultified. We don't even get to see him as a muscle-bound adult wearing tiny little baby pants. This should be the climax of the story and they don't even whiff it, because they don't even take a swing. It just soars clean through the strike zone unchallenged like Casey at the Bat.

This story has a lot of baggage to unpack, so we're just going to get right into it. The Haunted Tank is a recurring military comics feature about a WWII tank haunted by the ghost of a Confederate general. The tank would go into battle flying the Confederate flag and blaring Dixie like this was a prequel to The Dukes of Hazzard. The tank commander was the direct descendant of the Confederate general haunting the tank, he's the only one who can see or hear the ghost, and he treats this racist poltergeist with an almost holy reverence. The series does very little to examine the lingering specter of the Confederacy in American history, and just pits the CSA against the Nazis in the most "Both Mangled And Killed" alternate history scenario that you or I have ever seen. All of this is still canon. Batman has teamed up with the ghost of a Confederate general. This ghost of an 1800s racist showed up on Cartoon Network. A dead slaveholder haunting a weapon of war met Scooby-Doo.

How the fuck did any of this...?

Sometimes, comics make me sad.

So, one thing we have to remember is that this comic came out in 1961. However racist America is at time of reading, it was way more racist in 1961. Unless things have gone horribly wrong in the time since I wrote this, for which I would like to say, sorry about that. I regret that I'm not in any way qualified to discuss the history of the Civil Rights movement, but suffice to say that America was heavily racially segregated, Jim Crow was the law of the land, and most states still had laws against interracial marriage.

The American South had an outsized grip on popular media at this time. Typically, in the South, Black characters would only be allowed to appear in movies or TV in stereotypical roles as criminals or servants. If they appeared in roles outside this remit, they would be edited out. If they couldn't be edited out, they simply would refuse to run it in their territory. The entertainment industry was happy to tailor their material to the southern standard if it meant not losing out on their ticket sales. This kind of thing by no means stopped in the 1960s, by the way. The Dukes of Hazzard aired from 1979-1985, the year I was born, and was one of the most popular shows in the country.

The story features an American M3 "Stuart" tank, named after confederate general James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart, famous loyal american patriot general good guy. This kind of thing was depressingly common in WWII. The Stuart was a light tank intended for reconnaissance and infantry support, and here it's going up against a German "Tiger" heavy tank, which was design to wreck absolute shit on anything short of a reinforced bunker. In reality, it was an overdesigned deathtrap, but still, a Stuart taking on a Tiger is something akin to an Imperial Guardsman trying to wrestle a Space Marine, if you'll excuse the unfuckability of that sentence.

With the crew knocked unconscious by the assault, we hear the after-action report of the tank commander, who is also named Jeb Stuart. In early stories, he was named Jeb Stuart Smith, but eventually he was renamed to just Jeb Stuart, and established as the grandson of the historical J.E.B. Stuart. Despite the incapacitated crew, the tank turret moves by itself and fires off a point-blank shot into the Tiger's undercarriage, blasting it to death with a decisive blow. The crew is glad to be alive, but absolutely baffled that they survived.

We get a potted history of Jeb Stuart's life, and we see that he is absolutely autistically hyperfixated on his confederate general ancestor. Like, even when he sees the tank's guns, he can only conceptualize them as cavalry weapons. He's also hearing ghostly laughter whenever he so much as mentions J.E.B. Stuart, and even imagines the ghost of this dead racist watching over him. This first story leaves the situation somewhat ambiguous, but later stories would establish that this ghost is absolutely real, and that tank is absolutely haunted.

The rest of the story doesn't really make use of the tank's haunted status. Instead, almost the entire second and third act are other tank units laughing at the M3 Stuart for being a little weenie baby tank for sick little three-legged puppies and not a big manly macho tank for real men with big giant 88 millimeter penises. And yeah, the Stuart Tank's penis was less than half that of all the other tanks, but the whole point of a combined arms doctrine is that different units are better at different... why am I even talking about this?

The historical J.E.B. Stuart was pretty much everything you think of when you picture a Confederate general. He was born on a plantation in Virginia. His family were southern Democrats who owned slaves. He was personal friends with Robert E. Lee. He fought in Bleeding Kansas. He opposed John Brown. He was an enthusiastic supporter of secession and expressed a desire to hang any Virginian who remained loyal to the Union. He was a scholar of the kind of brash, daring tactics that led the South to win dramatic battles but still lose the war.

One thing that's not obvious is that despite his impressive rank and even more impressive beard, General J.E.B. Stuart was actually a relatively young man. He became a General at 28 and got murked by a sharpshooter in a battle outside of Richmond at the age of 31. He was like his era's Charlie Kirk, if Kirk had the ability to grow facial hair. The comics would instead portray him as a crotchety old man, which is the least of what it does to his image. While I acknowledge that history is almost never black-and-white, I can safely say that Jebediah Ebediah Bebediah Stuart was a historical bastard, and didn't deserve a posthumous re-evaluation as a nazi-fighting tank ghost!

But while I've got you here, I want to look at another story from the same year, from Our Army at War #113. This story is the first appearance of Jackie Johnson, the only Black member of Sgt. Rock's Easy Company. In real life, the US Army was heavily segregated and African-American soldiers restricted to non-combat roles, but if that happened we wouldn't have a story. Jackie is introduced along with Harold "Wildman" Shapiro, and the story makes the bold move of just brushing past any white dude/black dude conflict and has them already be friends with a solid working relationship.

In fact, reading this story, Jackie's race is never directly commented on. He just is a Black man, and it's treated matter-of-factly, the same way it treats Wildman's giant red beard. He's a soldier first, and an equal to any of the other men in the squad, with his race just being an incidental part of his character. Throughout the story, he and Wildman are treated as equal partners, two halves of one whole, and the metaphor becomes clear in the climax, where Jackie is blinded and Wildman's hands are injured, meaning they have to rely on each other to stop a Nazi advance. They treat it like the most natural thing in the world.

Jackie Johnson is significant because he is quite possibly the first Black character in mainstream comics to not be depicted as an offensive stereotype. Black characters in the golden age were absurd racist caricatures like Ebony White, or Whitewash Jones, whom I will NOT be posting here, you're going to have to look for that on your own. Suffice to say they're about one step removed from the goddamn Golliwog. Jackie Johnson isn't a cornerstone of the Black experience, but it overshoots the bar by miles just for being less racist than H.P. Lovecraft's cat. You're gonna have to look that one up too.

As I keep trying to warn everyone, like Cassandra upon the shores of Ilium, stories have to be about something. This isn't a matter of plot, it's a matter of ideas. A story can be about literally nothing so long as it has an interesting idea about nothing. Ideas are conveyed through themes, which are illustrated through conflict, which is presented to the audience through the lens of the characters. Without characters, you have no ideas, and therefore, no story.

A lot of these B-list DC adventure comics feel like they're trying to reverse-engineer the process. They're starting from an idea and attempting to work that into a story without going through the all the work you need to create one. It's almost a cargo cult approach to storytelling. You understand the result but not the process, so you try to replicate the result to create the process. This is almost perfectly encapsulated with Cover Art Syndrome, where DC's editors will commission a cover for the issue and then has the writers and artists work backwards from that to create a story.

I don't mean to malign the creatives of DC comics. The writers and artists and editors who worked on all of these comics, even the stories I've shit-talked, are incredibly good at what they do, even to the point of being legends of their medium. But they're working from a terrible process and that makes it harder to make good stories. All stories have to start from a premise, but the cover of a comic book isn't a premise, it's promotional material. Being handed a cover and being told to make an issue that matches that art is like being given a movie trailer and being told to make a film around it. DC actually tried that, and it was called Suicide Squad. Full circle, baby! Who's the master?!?

This incarnation of the Suicide Squad doesn't have any memorable villains on it. Instead, there's Rick Flag, a tough guy, two nerds who are not important, and Karin Grace, who is The Girl. For this issue and this issue only, she also has psychic powers, capable of extrasensory perception and creating portals to other dimensions through her dinosaur paintings. I have to give credit to the art, those dinosaur paintings are sick as shit. And I have to give credit to the artist, Ross Andru, who was also the artist on Wonder Woman. The three dudes on the team are all interchangeable 50s men, but Karin is full of life and energy in every panel, especially when she freaks the fuck out over her psychic powers.

The first story in this issue is about Karin's mind powers teleporting the team to a parallel universe where dinosaurs evolved to human levels of intelligence and are planning to take over our world. You may remember this from the triumph of science fiction cinema, Super Mario Bros. (1993) The Suicsquaddies don't have any superpowers or even anything as dramatic as a gun, so they just wander around the alternate dimension getting into tepid setpieces and escaping by having Karin use her mind powers to basically wish them back home.

The second story in this issue lets me talk about the only real difference in characterization on this team. Karin Grace is The Girl, so all the boys want to give her big smooches, but she only wants to smooch the rock-hard chin of Rick Flag. That's all we get. All the other characters are defined by their skills, and in the heat of battle they all seem to be about as effective as any other. When I said that ideas have to come from characters, what I meant was that you need characters who are qualitatively different from each other. You can't tell a story where three out of four characters are essentially the same.

If you don't have characters that are significantly different, then you don't have a conflict. Often, this is achieved by making a large cast of characters who are significantly diverse. Characters of different genders, races, religious beliefs, body types, disabilities, sexualities, ect., a good writer can use that to inform the personalities and beliefs of each of their characters and create interesting characters who - and this is important - find conflict with each other. The secret sauce of any ensemble book isn't just that they have conflict with the monster of the week, it's that the protagonists have conflict amongst themselves.

An excellent example of this is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gene Roddenberry in his later years was trying to present an idealized world without interpersonal conflict, but the characters were so different and written with such force of personality that they managed to create natural humanistic conflict within the crew that didn't betray the utopian ideals of the premise. Even shows that are objectively terrible, like Captain Planet and the Planeteers can benefit from a diverse cast, even if the character dynamics on that series came down to four insufferable eco-crusaders dunking on the one american for over 100 episodes. The cast doesn't even need to be obviously diverse. Friends got ten seasons out of six terrible white people, because each of them was a different kind of terrible white people.

This initial Suicide Squad made a total of six appearances and then dropped off the face of the earth until the 1980s. It was brought back as part of a post-crisis crossover called Legends, where it became a group of b-list supervillains forced into a black ops unit by the government. That incarnation was wildly successful, because it incorporated pretty much all of the lessons about strong, character-focused writing that this incarnation neglected.

1961 also saw the debut of two features from Showcase in their own magazines: Rip Hunter: Time Master and Sea Devils. Both of them have the same format. A group of adventurers go on adventures in their respective science premises. None of them have any superpowers, or really, any interesting personalities, and neither of their books lasted very long. These are what many would call procedural stories. A procedural is the kind of story that's heavy on technical realism. Police procedurals are the most common expression of this genre, as seen in any of the 3.14 billion episodes of Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, FBI, Chicago P.D., 9-1-1, Criminal Minds, The Rookie, all of which ensure that police officers will be having their balls tongued by network television until the heat death of the universe.

Characterization tends not to be the focus in procedural stories, but there are exceptions. Monk was almost entirely about Adrian Monk, to the point where the actual mystery of the week could be a comedy side plot. Columbo told you so little about its title character that he doesn't even have a first name. The middle ground is something like The X-Files, where you have a serious character and a wacky character, and we get a balance between their personal lives and their interactions as as they solve the mystery of the week, which is the axis around which all the conflict in the episode revolves around.

Why am I talking about TV shows in this blog post about comics? Honestly, these things just enter my head in the middle of the day and if I don't get them out then my scalp starts to radiate the waste heat like a nuclear fuel rod. But what I'm trying to express is that these procedural stories aren't about working through the process, they're about the characters working through the process. You couldn't just replace Mulder and Scully with two faceless animatronics voiced by TikTok text-to-speech, but that's about the level of characterization we get from these stories.

I like the Hawks quite a bit. I like their big wings, I like their collection of medieval weaponry, I like how they look like something out of Flash Gordon or Conan instead of traditional superheroes. Whenever the Hawks appear in a DC movie or show, like Justice League, they've always been standouts. I even like how every incarnation of the Hawks adds something new to the mythos. However, the fact that there have been so many different incarnations of the Hawks makes trying to follow their characters an act of baffling incomprehensibility.

Hawkman, as a character, is such a mess that even the notoriously terrible DC Wiki has a comprehensive article showing all the ways Hawkman is confusing. It's got citations. Trying to follow the overall continuity of Hawkman is like trying to navigate an IKEA showroom while high on expired meatballs and being chased by a creature that is half man and half blahaj. Every new version of Hawkman has changed both too much and not enough that they're fundamentally incompatible but also completely inextricable.

Hawkman was introduced as a backup feature in Flash Comics #1. The character was introduced as Carter Hall, a wealthy archaeologist who collected a private armory of ancient and medieval weaponry. He receives an ancient glass dagger from Egypt, and when he touches it, he flashes back into his past life as Khufu, the whitest man in the Nile River Valley. Khufu tries and fails to rescue his lover, Shiera, from the clutches of the vicious Hath-Set, and both of them are sacrificed by the same dagger he now has in his room.

I'm not going to question the historical accuracy of, literally anything in this flashback. Even for 1940, it's clear that they did absolutely no research on anything related to Egypt. I think they might have actually done negative research and somehow writing this comic is what caused humanity to lose all knowledge of the Sea Peoples. The way everyone is dressed looks more like Barsoom than Earth, and in case I need to say it again, that half-naked torturer is the only character who looks African, with everyone else looking milky white or like they should be riding with Genghis Khan.

The one thing I will harp on is that this comic insists on referring to Anubis as a "Hawk-God." That's not just what Anubis is. You don't need to know anything about Egypt to know that. If you know the name "Anubis" then there is a 100% chance that you also know that Anubis has the head of a jackal. Ra has the head of a hawk, Horus has the head of a hawk, Anubis has the head of a jackal, this is like the most basic thing about ancient Egypt. This is a mistake on the level of Thor fighting frost giants with an enchanted screwdriver, or Christ strung up on a McDonalds sign.

Once his flashback is over, Carter Hall is caught in a supervillain attack, and soon after meets Shiera Saunders, a reincarnation of the woman from his past. She had also been having mysterious dreams of a past life in ancient Egypt, and they soon learn that Hath-Set, the priest who killed them, had been reincarnated as a man named Hastor. Shiera faints, as woman in the 40s are wont to do, and Carter Hall gets to hawkmanning. This doesn't seem to be a traditional superhero origin, as it's clear that Carter Hall has been operating as a superhero for some time. He's already got a full set of wings and a "dynamo-detector," and he's made a functional antigravity harness out of "ninth metal," later known as "Nth metal".

Carter Hall would eventually become the chairman of the Justice Society of America. In All-Star Comics #5, Shiera joined him in battle as Hawkgirl, and though she never officially joined the JSA, she was Hawkman's partner for the rest of the Golden Age. Eventually they married and had children, but that's a retcon for another day. I wouldn't normally go on this long about something from the Golden Age, but I think we can all agree, that was vital backstory.

In the Silver Age, Hawkman and Hawkgirl are basically the same, except they're ALIENS. In this comic and no others, they're from Polaris, but would later be established to be from the planet Thanagar. Their whole deal is barely changed from the Golden Age. Instead of Carter and Shiera Hall, they're now Katar and Shayera Hol. Instead of dressing like barbarian warriors because of a connection to Ancient Egypt, they explain their hawk costumes as just being what space cops wear on bird planet. Before the end of the first act, the police commissioner will have already set them up working in a museum with their Golden Age counterparts' names.

This is what I mean when I say that the reboot characters are way too different from their previous incarnations, but also having too much in common. They're basically carbon copies of their Golden Age selves, but with aliens instead of Egypt. Compare to how Flash, Green Lantern, and the Atom all created new characters complete with new appearances, backstories, and superpowers. You couldn't mistake Alan Scott for Hal Jordan, but this comic is inviting everyone to mistake Carter Hall for Katar Hol. I honestly could not tell you which incarnation of Hawkman is currently canon to the DC universe and I have all their wiki entries open right now.

Also, I have to comment on their looks here. They're basically wearing the same costumes as in the Golden Age, but with new helmets. Hawkman's helmet has a good beak, better than the Golden Age perpetually screaming mouth, but without the wings on the side it just looks naked. He looks like the saddest, wettest, sorriest kind of man: a bald man. Not that I would know what that's like. Hawkgirl, on the other hand, has an iconic helmet right from the word go. She's basically invented the Wolverine look 10 years ahead of time. I also love how she always looks completely unhinged, which is an S-tier character trait for any superheroine.

Mr. and Mrs. Hawk have come to Earth in pursuit of Byth Rok, a Thanagarian criminal with the ability to shapeshift. There's some back and forth where they try to track him down in his various forms, but I'm going to skip to the end when he turns into a big Ray Harryhausen dragon monster and wrecks up the New Jersey Turnpike. Also, despite Thanagarians being birdlike enough that they can talk to birds like Aquaman talks to fish, they don't actually have wings. Their wings are just part of an anti-gravity harness, like in the golden age. I always thought that was a mistake. T'were t'up t'me, I would make them much more freaky and birdlike. They would canonically lay eggs.

The Hawks attack Byth with the ancient weapons from the museum... because. Because they do. They just do. They give the excuse that they couldn't stop Byth with future space laser death weapons, so they may as well use ancient stabby bonk metal weapons, but that as an excuse is worse than nothing. Later comics would turn their weapons into advanced Nth metal weapons that can smash up shit to whatever degree the plot requires. And smash they do! The Hawks show some good detective work, but they also have staggeringly brutal tactics, defeating Byth's giant monster form with a two-pronged attack on both eyes at once.

Issue #34 is fine. It's adequate. Does the job. The first story has some Sorcerer's Apprentice-looking dork called Matter Master, and I can't tell if he's using magic or super science. The second story has the Hawks fighting magic yeti from space and the story is in no way as awesome as that sentence would indicate.

Issue #35 starts with a story about some sorcerer that's not worth repeating, but the second story introduces one of my favorite B-tier DC villains, the Shadow-Thief. Shadow-Thief is just some crook who lives in a trailer in the woods, but he fell ass-backwards into getting shadow powers from the shadow dimension. Using it could destroy the world... somehow... but he does not care, he's in this to get them fat stacks.

The Silver Age Atom is perhaps the archetypal shrinking hero, but not the first. The first shrinking hero that I'm aware of was Quality Comics' Doll Man, created in 1939, who was later purchased by DC comics so they get to claim him anyway. The golden age Atom was created in 1940, a full two years before Enrico Fermi created the first atomic reactor, and five years before they stuffed a big bomb full of atoms and lit the whole thing on fire.

The golden age Atom had barely any resemblance to his more famous descendant. Al Pratt was a 98-pound, 5'1" certified manlet, who always got picked on by the bigger kids and couldn't get a date. One day, a chance encounter with a down-on-his-luck boxing trainer leads to him getting the full Charles Atlas treatment. He was called "The Atom" because he was small but powerful, but he did not actually have any powers, at first. Once people realized how cool and not at all problematic atomic weapons could be, he began to exhibit genuine superhuman strength.

Most of the DC's golden age history is murky, crudely illustrated, and has been heavily retconned, so we won't go into the details because that won't matter in a couple decades! Al Pratt has nothing to do with the Silver Age Atom because they exist in completely different universes. One thing I do want to mention is that Al Pratt did make it into the dearly departed DCEU, played by Milwaukee's favorite adopted son, Henry Winkler, in a cameo he literally phoned in. And that's perfect.

The silver age Atom was created by writer Gardner Fox, whom I've mentioned about a dozen times already, and artist Gil Kane, whomst I don't recall if I mentioned or not, but he is also a comics legend, having also created the Silver Age Green Lantern with Fox. Among his other works, Gil Kane would help create the western concept of the Graphic Novel in his 1971 work Blackmark.

The idea for the new Atom's powers allegedly came from a fan suggestion. According to yet a third comics legend, Roy Thomas, he and physicist/fandom pioneer Jerry Bails came up with the idea of using atomic compression as a basis for a hero who could shrink down to nigh-atomic size, and submitted it to DC editorial. This is basically the same theory as outlined in the foundational academic text, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Our hero is Ray Palmer, who is already out here Szalinskimaxxing, attempting to compress matter down to a fraction of its normal size, but all his experiments come with a side effect of explosions. The key factor in his experiments is a lens crafted from a chunk of electron-degenerate matter from a white dwarf star that just happened to crash within driving distance. When he shines ultra-violet rays through the lens, he's capable of compressing the empty space within atoms and therefor shrink ordinary matter.

I am going to briefly put on a science hat, and say that this kind of electron-degenerate matter is compacted to an absurd degree, which makes it one of the heaviest theoretical substances in the universe. We see Ray struggling to lift it like it was a chunk of lead, but a chunk of a white dwarf is almost exactly one million times heavier, weighing in at ten thousand kilograms per cubic centimeter. But if we held this to scientific accuracy then not only would we not have a story, we wouldn't have a genre, so let's move past it.

After Ray implodes a typewriter, he's visited by his girlfriend, Jean Loring. Jean Loring... Jean has a long history of being hard done by the narrative. I think a fair amount of what she goes through and how she reacts to it makes sense as an illustration of how much it would suck to be the love interest of a superhero, but then she was the unfortunate victim of a brutal character assassination in 2004, and she has yet to recover from it.

Regardless! Jean Loring is introduced as a lawyer trying to prove herself, who rejects her boyfriend's marriage proposals as she wants to make good on her career before settling down to be a wife. Because this is a 1961 DC comic, getting married automatically means giving up every other aspect of herself to be a wife. But she treats the whole thing with good humor and is supportive of Ray's absolute mad science experiments. This is probably the best-case scenario for this genre of power couple in the 1960s.

Later that day, Ray is leading Jean and a group of kids in a geology club, because he's the kind of Gilligan's Island-ass scientist who can do experimental dwarf star shrink rays and geology field trips. When they're trapped by both a cave-in and a gas leak, Ray realizes realizes that the only way he can save everyone else is if he uses the shrink ray on himself. However, he's never been able to stop his experimental subjects from exploding. Even if he gets the kids out, it would be a death sentence for him.

Completely unconcerned for his own safety, Ray enshrinkifies himself, and uses his newly found physics hack to climb up to a tiny hole in the cave wall and expand it to be a viable exit. Hoping that he can survive long enough to lead Jean and the others to the escape, he runs back through the shrink ray and returns to his normal size, unharmed and molecularly stable. Ray assumes that some mineral in the cave has nullified the explosion effect, and once Jean and the others are free, he goes back to his lab and tries to analyze the minerals. However, he finds himself unable to replicate the results. Through some mystery, the only thing he can safely shrink is himself.

The second story in the issue shows Ray properly becoming the Atom. A strange little man appears in a bank, zaps some money away, and vanishes. Alma Wilson, the bank teller, is accused of stealing the money and making up some insane story to cover it up. Alma badly needs a lawyer and calls her friend Jean Loring to defend her. There's a fun twist here in that the superhero of the piece doesn't have any sort of police hotline or super-senses to alert him to crime. He only learns about this stuff because his girlfriend is the lawyer who gets all the weird cases.

There's an interesting sort of Law & Order vibe in these stories. It's not just the Atom solving crimes and fighting villains with his special shrinking pants, he's also got to help Jean prove that her clients with absurdly weird alibis are actually innocent. Jean is also an absolutely fearless lawyer, taking on a case where her client's defense is "a tiny genie stole it." She's not even trying to plea it out, she is ready to go to trial with this nonsense.

Ray tries out his new super-powers, and we get a few explanations of what his whole deal is. His costume is actually made out of the dwarf star matter that lets him shrink, and he actually wears it all the time, over his normal clothes. When he's normal size, it's so thin as to be intangible, but when he shrinks, it neatly covers up his boxy 1960s suit with skintight spandex. This is a cool idea that makes less sense the more you think about it. Physics nonsense aside, it means that he can't be normal size and in costume, which means he has to attend Justice League meetings in a teeny little doll chair.

Ray also has the ability to selectively alter his mass while retaining his full strength, allowing him to jump around like a teeny little flea man but still punch like... well, like a research scientist, but that's still pretty good when you're more little than Stuart. It comes in handy when the same tiny little man from the bank robbery shows up in his lab. This guy presumably operates under the normal functions of the square-cube law, and is no match for a man with the weight limit turned off.

The tiny little man introduces himself as Kulan Dar, a tiny alien trapped on Earth. He needs a rare metal called europium to get home, but an earth criminal named Carl Ballard is enslaving him with his own dominator ray and forcing him to steal. This ties into the aforementioned dynamic, where both Alma and Kulan Dar are both innocent, and the real struggle of the issue is proving it. Most superhero comics of the silver age don't even go as far as presuming the innocence of the villain-of-the-month. We just see flat out that they're committing crimes and thus whatever the hero does to them is justified. It's a breath of fresh air to have a story with layers to it.

Ray has to do some detective work to find Big Mean Carl and get him to stop controlling his new tiny friend. Using the lost ancient technology known as a "phone book" he is able to immediately get this wanted criminal's address and telephone number. To actually get there, Ray comes up with a stunt so absurdly audacious that you would only ever see it in a superhero comic.

Ray dials up Carl's phone number, and as soon as the call connects he shrinks down small enough to ride the phone call through the lines and punch this man in the face courtesy of AT&T. This, as we all know, is not how ANYTHING works, but it's so awesome that neither you nor I even care. The actual explanation was so convoluted that they had to include an essay explaining it on a separate page. You can read it if you want to, but it will not explain anything to any degree of satisfaction. Regardless, it's become one of the Atom's signature moves, and he can even do it over cell phone transmissions but it makes him violently ill. The atom could punch you through your smartphone right now!

There's a fun battle where the Atom has to deal with a human-sized foe and a doll-sized foe, having to get the Dominator back from Carl while keeping Kulan Dar from being seriously hurt, and it's all very interesting, and the art really sells the scale of the fight. In the end, the Atom frees Kulan Dar, Kulan Dar shows up in the court to exonerate Alma, and the DA gets humiliated in front of the whole court, which is always fun.

This comic is exceptional. There's an art to producing a science-fiction story that feels real enough that you're willing to ignore all of the obvious impossibilities in the premise. Compare the science in Star Trek: The Next Generation to that in Star Trek: Voyager. Or just compare how the Atom considers things like the mass of an object affecting its weight to how the Flash will handwave away the side effects of moving so fast you can be in two places at once and still hold a conversation. Not to say that the Flash is bad, just that the extra effort at presenting the Atom's abilities more realistically helps draw the audience in to the story being told.

At the same time, the characterization and plotting enhance that feeling of reality. Ray Palmer doesn't feel like a superhero, he feels like a scientist who does superheroics on the side. It's not a burning call for truth and justice, it's a tool that helps him with his science. Jean Loring is the one devoted to justice, and Ray's primary motivation for putting on a suit and fighting crime is to help her. They don't feel like flat archetypes going through the motions of a superhero story, they feel like people who are living their lives, and they just happen to be in a superhero story, and that is a tremendously elevating quality.

One of the reasons I started this insane project - blogging about comics, I mean, I was already reading thousands upon thousands of issues of old comics for my own insane reasons - is that the Silver Age Aquaman comics were actually really good, and I knew nobody would believe me unless I brought receipts. However, it does take a long time to get going, especially because the very first page of this issue completely broke my brain.

The issue starts with an exciting sea rescue where Aquaman and Aqualad use their amazing and abilities to control sea life to rescue a tanker ship containing, and I quote here, "a new rare poison." I read that sentence, and I just knew that I was going to have to spend the whole post talking about this scene. Aquaman fights an army of eel-men in this issue and we are not going to get to any of that!

So like, first off, what the fuck? What the fuck? What the actual fuck? What, pray tell, the fuck? Futuo hoc est? Why on Poseidon's blue testicle is there a cargo ship carrying industrial quantities of poison? They don't even say "herbicide" or "pesticide" or even like, toxic waste, or chemicals used in some industrial process that just happen to be toxic. They just say it's poison. It is a substance created for the purpose of killing. They also say it is new, and it is rare. So this is brand new poison, hot of the presses, and it's deadlier than uncommon poison, but not as good as legendary or mythic poison.

I gotta find the jokes where I can here, there's not gonna be a lot of comic pages in this one. I'm making this whole post out of the implications of two pages of comics.

Aquaman and Aqualad just happen to roll up to the scene, and once they find out what specifically is going on, their only reaction is "Oh gee jimminy jillickers, this ship full of poison could make the fish sick!" They call in a bunch of whales to put out the fire with their blowholes, which is not a thing that whales can do. I'm not going to look that up, but the writers of this comic didn't look it up either.

This bit with the poison isn't actually important to the plot of the issue either. The gun has been taken off of the mantelpiece and thrown into the trash thirty seconds after the curtains open on act 1. Aquaman and his finny friends bundle up all of this NEW RARE POISON, and helpfully bring it to port free of charge so that the flow of capitalism continues unbothered by any silly concerns like "What are you doing with all this poison?"

And that made me think about Namor.

I really didn't want to turn this blog into a comparison of DC and Marvel. Like, they exist, and they have different vibes, and that's fine. That's good, in fact. We don't have to constantly ask if Superman could beat Thor, or if Spider-Man is a better character than Batman. At time of writing, DC and Marvel just teamed up to publish a team up of Superman and Spider-Man, and their conclusion was that the two of them would be best friends, and that is objectively the correct answer. There is no pairing of heroes that would be better friends than the Man of Steel and the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. I am going to talk about Marvel comics, but I'm mostly going to let that be its own thing, and not compare the two unless I have something to say.

And I have something to say.

I've always been curious about why Aquaman and Namor have such different reputations. They both were created in the golden age, they both have similar power sets, they both are kings of their respective undersea kingdoms, they both have complicated interpersonal relationships, and the both dress like male strippers. Why is Namor seen as a badass but Aquaman seen as a joke?

Unfortunately, I have the worst kind of answer to this question: an obvious answer. Namor is treated as a badass because he's a badass. Aquaman is treated as a joke because he's a joke.

I showed my partner @toweringclam this page, and she had all the same questions that I did related to the larger problem of "what the fuck?" I said that Aquaman has zero questions about what the poison is for, why there's so much of it, and what these land mammals are doing shipping it in his ocean. She replied "Namor would make them eat it." Namor, the Sub-Mariner, would not put up with any kind of impertinence from dryworlders trying to pollute his beloved ocean with literal tons of poison. He's been like that since the 1940s. Even if he was being merciful, Namor would at the very least wreck the ship and dump the crew on a deserted island with their poison and see how they like it.

This is some absolute cop behavior from Aquaman. He sees a shipment full of poison in his ocean, and he's like "well you gentlemen have a permit for this, I wouldn't want to disrupt the supply chain!" I'm not saying Aquaman needs to kill these people, but he should, just like, ask even one (1) question about anything. A reasonable person would have questions here. Be concerned about this very concerning situation!

And that's not even the worst part. You see that title up there at the top of this post? That wasn't an exaggeration or a fun little quip there. I didn't do any research on if whales can fight fires, but I did research poisons.

Agent Orange was a chemical herbicide that was sprayed in massive quantities across South Vietnam by the United States during the Vietnam war. It was intended for use in destroying crops and thinning out the jungle, which allowed the US to get around chemical weapons restrictions. It's not a chemical weapon if it's just targeting plants. Millions of people were exposed, with up to four million people suffering from its effects ranging from birth defects and diabetes to heart disease and leukemia. I am by no means an expert on this topic, and I don't want to bring this post down any more than I already have, but I recommend the podcast Behind the Bastards, which did a two-part episode on Monsanto, one of the companies that produced Agent Orange, if you want to know more.

Why did I depress you all with that? Because this comic was published in 1961. JFK approved the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1961, and usage would begin in 1962. The creators of this comic would have no way of knowing this - and Agent Orange was widely believed to be harmless to humans at the time - but you and I have a superpower too, called hindsight. With the proper historical context, I think that we can - nay, should - assume that Aquaman just found a tanker full of Agent Orange and decided that his first priority was to get this shipment into the loving hands of Uncle Sam so he can spray it over Quang Tri. Jesus dear God in Heaven this was supposed to be a fun time.