Reading Room PLASTIC MAN "Dirty Devices of Dr Dome" Part 3 (Conclusion)

When Last We Left the Original Stretchable Sleuth...

It seems there's a lot of people who would wish harm upon happy-go-lucky Plastic Man!

Super villains like Dr Dome and Professor X!

The elitist (and extremely rich) Mrs DeLute and her butler Fawnish!

The arrogant (and inept) police Captain McSniffe!

And the conflicted daughter of Dr Dome, Lynx, who both loves our Stretchable Slacker and continually tries to kill him!

With this set-up in place, the title ran nine more issues.
Arnold Drake would remain as writer for the entire series.
Win Mortimer would take over interior art from 2-7, with Jack Sparling finishing the series from 7-10.
Carmine Infantino and Joe Orlando would contribute covers.
This being the 1960s, Plas would battle both mod-dressed characters and gorillas!
After an issue presenting three different origin tales, Plas' pliable pappy, the Golden Age (Quality Comics) Plastic Man appeared along with sidekick Woozy Winks!
There was a campy cross-over with Batman in Brave and Bold.
Then he disappeared for several years before being revived as an amnesiac involved in a romance with a villainess.
But that's a story for another time.
Speaking of stories, I believed this tale had never been reprinted, but it appeared in DC's Plastic Man 80-Page Giant (2004), which reprinted several of Plas' "famous firsts".
The rest of the 1960s series has not been reprinted, and we may present them here...

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Jack Cole and Plastic Man:

Forms Stretched to their Limits

by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd

Reading Room PLASTIC MAN "Dirty Devices of Dr Dome" Part 2

When Last We Left the Stretchable Slacker of the Sixties...

Professor X (not the bald, wheelchair-bound leader of the X-Men) is sent by Dr Dome to destroy Plas (and his best friend, the rather straight-laced Gordon [Gordy] Trueblood) before they can interfere with his newest plan to rule the world...

So, a super-hero sitcom!
Apparently inspired by the success of TV's Batman, writer Arnold Drake and artist Gil Kane went the "camp" route with a semi-serious/semi-humorous approach.
Looking back 50 years, I can see why they tried it, but I can also see why it failed as compared to Jack Cole's classic strip.
The big difference is that Cole's stories, though humorous, actually made sense!
This tale, though fun, doesn't hang together logically, ruining the counterpoint of the humor.
The story serves the jokes, not vice-versa!

Be here tomorrow for the...weird...finale!

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Jack Cole and Plastic Man:

Forms Stretched to their Limits

by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd

Reading Room PLASTIC MAN "Dirty Devices of Dr Dome" Part 1

Here's a bit of comic book history...

...which tells you it's a chapter in comic book history on its' own splash page!

In 1966, DC Comics decided to revive one of the many characters it had purchased from the now-defunct Quality Comics line.
Next to Blackhawk (which DC had kept going as an ongoing title from the demise of Quality onward), the most successful character had been Plastic Man, who headlined Police Comics as well as his own book for over 15 years!
The problem was that the character, under creator/writer/artist Jack Cole, was so unique, that finding someone to carry it onward in an equally-quirky manner was difficult.
DC gave it a shot anyway, with writer Arnold Drake and artist Gil Kane.
Ironically, both of them were also pioneers of the comics medium, being the writer of the first graphic novel (It Rhymes with Lust [1950]) and writer/artist of the second graphic novel (BlackMark [1971]), respectively!
Yet, on this project, they don't quite gel, though they both do their damnedest!

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Jack Cole and Plastic Man:

Forms Stretched to their Limits

by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd

Reading Room THE GREEN HORNET "Masquerade"

All good things must come to an end...

...but this party ain't over...yet!

Amazing how average people can create or acquire detailed Green Hornet costumes, eh?
Makes you wonder if (in the world of the TV series) some manufacturer actually produced them, making Halloween parties a hotbed for Hornet imitators!
For the only time, we see the Police Commissioner (who never appeared on the series).
In the radio show and 1940s comic, Police Commissioner James Higgins eventually learned The Green Hornet's identity and worked surreptitiously with him (maintaining the fiction that The Hornet was a criminal to the rest of city government).
But, since studio-mate Batman had a Police Commissioner as an ally, District Attorney Fank Scanlon was created for the series, and has become part of Green Hornet lore, showing up in the 2011 movie and associated comics!
This brings our re-presentation of the Gold Key series based on the TV Show to an end.
(There was one more tale of TV's Green Hornet published in the 1960s...a spoof called "The Mean Hornet" in Marvel's Not Brand Echh! #9 (1968), which you can read HERE!)
But, its not the end of The Green Hornet on Hero Histories!
Come November, we'll be re-presenting some of the never-reprinted tales of the 1980s-90s series from NOW Comics that tied all the incarnations of the Green Hornet into one big family, like Lee Falk's The Phantom!

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The Green Hornet

Collector's Edition 

by Ron Fortier and Jeff Butler

Reprinting the first 12 issues of the 1989-90 NOW Comics series that tied the versions of the characters from the radio show/movies, TV series, and a contemporary incarnation into one big ongoing family business!

Reading Room THE GREEN HORNET "Counterplot Affair" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

Attempting to protect the boy prince of the oil-rich Mid-Eastern country of Bahratta from foreign spies, The Green Hornet and Kato discover the lad's uncle is working with the spies to allow the kid to be kidnapped.
Kato shadows the young king-to-be, and during a kidnapping attempt loses the boy, who escapes from his would-be captors into the depths of the city's biggest park...

Just so you don't think writer Paul S Newman and artist Dan Speigel were pulling them out of nowhere, the Black Beauty was equipped with ice projectors, (along with brooms to sweep away tire tracks), but they were never used on the TV series.

The rear fog guns were used in a couple of TV eps, "Deadline for Death" and "Eat, Drink, and be Dead".

It's never shown or stated on TV that Britt is a skilled horseman, but with his family's proven expertise in such matters...
Considering Kato was rendered unconcious only twice in the entire twenty-six episode run of the TV show, getting KOed twice in three issues of the comic seems rather odd.
The other tale from the final issue of the Silver Age Green Hornet's Gold Key run will be presented tomorrow...

Please Support Hero Histories

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The Green Hornet

Collector's Edition 

by Ron Fortier and Jeff Butler

Reprinting the first 12 issues of the 1989-90 NOW Comics series that tied the versions of the characters from the radio show/movies, TV series, and a contemporary incarnation into one big ongoing family business!