Showing posts with label Gold Key Comics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gold Key Comics. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Holy Cowled Crusader! It's the THWOCK! ZAM! BOFF! Adventures of The Owl!

Tomorrow we conclude our look at comic book Owls with...
...the high-camp adventures of the only non-DC/Marvel/Archie Golden Age comic character to be revived in the Silver Age!*
In 1967, with the pop-culture success of Marvel Comics and the Batman tv series, superheroes were in vogue again!
Curiously, while Marvel and DC revived their Golden Age characters in reprints and new stories, and Archie did new tales about the classic characters, other publishers chose to do new characters instead...with one exception!
Gold Key now owned the 1940s Dell super-heroes, and though they did do a few new super-hero characters like Dr Solar, the only Golden Age character they revived was the one in their library most similar to Batman.
Guess who?
And because they felt it should be as much like the tv Batman as possible, Gold Key had writer Jerry Siegel (yes, the co-creator of Superman) and Lone Ranger artist Tom Gill camp it up beyond belief!
You'll see the results tomorrow and Friday.

*Doc Savage and G-8 were pulp heroes who had gained new popularity thru paperback reprints.
Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Mandrake, The Phantom, Brick Bradford, et al, were newspaper strips that published from the 1930s onward without a break.
The Green Hornet and The Shadow were originally radio shows.
And The Blue Beetle was a rather unique case, being a Golden Age hero at Fox who continued with new adventures at Charlton into the Silver Age before being rebooted in 1964 and then replaced in 1966 by a totally-new character when the reworked hero was killed off!

Friday, June 29, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Demon Dogfight"

...as a public demonstration of prowess goes awry due to evil intent!
Story by Dave Wood, art by Joe Certa.
This new story from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #22 (1968) backs up a reprinted U.N.C.L.E. tale, so most people (myself included) thought it was a reprint as well.
Good thing I took a look inside the book! ;-)
There's one more never-reprinted Jet Dream story to tell, but you won't find it here.
It will appear on our "sister" blog Heroines™ blog in daily installments on the week of August 13th, along with another long-unseen tale with an unusual history!

And, as of our next post, this blog's title is altering to Hero Histories™...although the feed and addy will remain the same.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Terror of Ting-a-Ling"

What happens when an innocent stumbles upon a heroine's secret hq?
Ask Johnny Kai, Ting-a-Ling's boyfriend, when he ends up in "No Man's Land"!
"Stray dog"?
Jet doesn't have a very high opinion of men in general, does she?
Story by Dave Wood, art by Joe Certa.
This new story from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #21 (1968) backs up a reprinted U.N.C.L.E. tale, so most people (myself included) thought it was a reprint as well.
Good thing I took a look inside the book! ;-)

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Menace of the Feathered Warriors"

The time had come for Jet Dream's final battle...
...and it's against her evil doppelganger...who's also her only recurring foe!
Well, so much for recurring foes...
Story by Dave Wood, art by Joe Certa.
We thought this story from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #20 (1968) was her final strip chronologically, but we've just found out that it's not the case!
While the final issues (#21 and #22) of the title reprint earlier U.N.C.L.E. tales, the Jet Dream stories in both issues are not reprints but new stories!
Those two tales will appear over the next couple of weeks.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Fall to Freedom"

The Stunt-Girl CounterSpies go back to their roots...
...unfortunately, for one of them, the roots include Nazis!
Remember, when this story from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #19 came out in 1968, it was only 23 years since the end of World War II, so those pesky Nazis were still pretty spry, especially in spy fiction!
For example: Baron Strucker was battling Nick Fury both in the 1960s in Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and in the 1940s in Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos!
Blackhawk, himself a WWII vet, was still fighting various hidden Nazi factions until his first series ended in 1968!
Nazis also popped up in the Matt Helm, Flint, and James Bond films, as well as the Man from U.N.C.L.E. tv series.

Story by Dave Wood, art by Joe Certa.

This is the penultimate Jet Dream short story.
Next week, we'll be presenting the final four-pager (which features the return of a past foe), then we're moving over to our sister blog, Heroines™, for the complete full-length one-shot tale that ended Jet's original run!

Monday, June 4, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Captive Jet"

What happens when you take "Jet Dream" out of...
...and the team has to rescue their erstwhile leader?
"Jet-A-Reeno"???
Well, it ain't no "Hawkaaa!", but it'll do.
It's good to know they can function without Jet's leadership when necessary.
Script for this tale from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #18 (1968) by Dick Wood, with vastly-improved art by Joe Certa.
(We can finally tell which StuntGirls are which!)

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Farmer Brown Fiasco"

It's difficult fitting a team into only four pages...
...so Jet Dream usually had solo action stories or a team-up with one of the Stunt-Girl Counterspies!
Unfortunately, because of the 4-page per story limitation, the individual Stunt-Girls never had any real characterization.
Add Joe Certa's passable art using the same facial features for all the female characters, and the only things differentiating the women were hair color and stereotyped accents.
Script for this tale from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #17 (1968) by Dick Wood, art by Joe Certa.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Day of Infamy"

Is one of the Stunt-Girl CounterSpies a traitor?
Jet Dream must discover the truth in only four pages before it tears the team apart...or worse!
Didn't Ting-a-Ling do something similar because her family was threatened several issues ago?
Script for this tale from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #16 (1968) by Dick Wood (who also wrote the earlier tale so he should have remembered), art by Joe Certa.
(To be fair, Ting wasn't a member of the StuntGirls at that point...nit-pick, nit-pick...)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Set-Up Sultan"

When your bodyguards are Jet Dream and her team...
...you would want bodies like those as close to you as possible! (Wink, wink, nudge nudge)
Script for this tale from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #15 (1967) by Dick Wood, art by Joe Certa.
Unfortunately, Certa has problems differentiating women, and uses hairstyles to tell them apart.
(I didn't know one of them was Pacific Islander Ting-A-Ling until Jet mentioned it on page 4!)

Monday, March 5, 2012

Reading Room: JET DREAM "Splash-Down to Death"

Usually we see Jet in action solo or with the entire team...
...but here we get to see her kicking evildoer butt with just one of the team at her side.
Script for this short, but effective, tale from Man from U.N.C.L.E. #14 (1967) by Dick Wood, with art by Joe Certa.
The one problem I had with the story is that Certa has difficulty visually-differentiating Jet and Ting, who look very similar (almost generic) in most panels!
Mike Sekowsky was able to make their faces different enough in Ting's intro tale (as seen HERE) to make it easy, even the group shots, to see who was who.