Review: 'The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom'

In his introduction to The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom, Mark Evanier rewrites a quote from playwright George S. Kaufman to declare, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”

Review: 'American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944'

The lingering aftermath of the Great Depression, a rise in organized crime, and especially, the country’s entry into World War II ensured that the early 1940s was a tumultuous time for the U.S. With such grim business rushing around them, many Americans found solace in escapist entertainment, and few entertainment mediums exploded as comics did between 1940 and 1944.

A timeline of this period is like a checklist of the most important developments in comics. These brief five years saw the debuts of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Archie and his gang, Captain America, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, Plastic Man, The Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, Pogo (before moving to newspapers), and many more of comics’ most celebrated characters. While we’d have to extend the timeline back just a year or two to include the medium’s two-most famous heroes, we would not have to in order to account for such foes and friends as Robin, The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Alfred the Butler, Lex Luthor, Perry White, Clay Face, Hugo Strange, Scarecrow, and Two Face. This period also saw the first significant rumblings of a major backlash against funny books with Wonder Woman as the most frequent whipping-girl. Was there ever a more crucial half-decade for comics?

Interestingly, TwoMorrows Publishings’ American Comic Book Chronicles series has been issuing volumes for six years but is only now getting around to this key period of 1940-1944. Because so much happened during these years, the storytelling seems to rush through the material faster than a speeding bullet, but Kurt F. Mitchell and Roy Thomas actually make the tale reasonably thorough, reasonably critical, and politically sharp. Along with the cavalcade of legendary characters, the writers make room to name-check such forgotten oddballs as Supermouse, Kangaroo Man, super-witch Spider Widow, and Snowbird, the Strangler’s coke-addicted lackey. Mitchell and Thomas refuse to succumb to the thoughtless jingoism that defined so many of the comics of the era they cover. Like all volumes in this series, American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is also a gorgeous, hardcover package, swelling with tons of full-color art beautifully and authentically reproduced.

Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes: Day 6

Does the mere idea of stepping into another mall, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionth time, or talking to your loved ones make you throw up? Then settle your bowlful of jelly into the La-Z-Boy® and deck your hall with today’s installment of Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes instead! Merry vegetating!

Series: Wonder Woman

Episode: “The Deadly Toys”, in which Diana Prince has an unusually disturbing holiday as the faces of man-droids keep melting. Most unsettling of all is when she comes face to face with Wonder Woman, increasing the possibility that she will be spending December 25 watching her own lovely face reduced to a pool of blecch. Turns out these uncanny-valley machines are the work of a toy maker with a weird concept of stocking stuffers. The guy’s animatronic mama dolls, chattering monkeys, and giant jack-in-the-boxes will also guarantee that visions of terror will be dancing in your head tonight. Christmas bonus: Frank “The Riddler” Gorshin plays the terrible toy maker!

Review: 'The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen'

What do you have to do to be worthy of the title “superhero”? Must you be capable of flying around in your underwear or blasting cobwebs out of your wrists? Do you need the wealth and training to thwart evildoers with your creepy cowl, pricey toys, and great, big muscles? Or maybe a woman who simply manages to run the everyday patriarchal gauntlet and come out the other end with her humor, wits, self-respect, and strength intact is a sort of superhero too.

Review: 'The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains'

When we last left the regrettable world of comics-chronicler Jon Morris, he was introducing us to a colorful cadre of super also-rans such as Bozo the Iron Man and Captain Tootsie. With his encyclopedic knowledge of characters most serious comics readers would rather forget and his bouncy wit, Morris turned The League of Regrettable Superheroes into one of the most fun reads of 2015. Two years later he is following up with a logical companion volume called The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains.

In some ways, this delightfully designed and written new book is more of the same despite its decidedly evil bent. There are many, many more asinine characters to make you giggle and cringe. 7ll’s enemy Brickbat is a schlub in a Batman cowl who hits people with poison bricks. A nemesis of The Black Hood, The Crow is an alcoholic opera singer who turns into a giant crow. The Dude gives corpses makeovers. Big Cheese of the Big Gang wields killer cheese. Egg Fu is a giant, offensive-ethnic-stereotype egg with a prehensile mustache who menaces Wonder Woman.

That’s where Regrettable Super Villains veers away from the wall-to-wall obscurities of Regrettable Superheroes. Some of these baddies actually faced off against genuinely legendary heroes, proving that even Wonder Woman, The Green Arrow, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Aquaman, Daredevil, Spiderman, and others of their A-list ilk were not immune to the taunts of D-list villains. One of these regrettable fellows— big-headed MONOK— even proved so popular that he got into it with virtually every top-line Marvel hero.

Some of these villains aren’t even all that regrettable. Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man is a rather ingenious creation who can simultaneously take on the characteristics of all three of his namesake organic matters, sprouting a dinosaur from half his face while ensnaring The Doom Patrol in hands made of crystal and tree. And I don’t need to explain to regular Psychobabble readers why I genuinely believe the natty simian Mod Gorilla Boss to be a villain right out of my own wildest dreams. Plus, any villain known to exclaim, “I am Bloor, dictator of Uranus” could hardly be labeled regrettable.

Review: 'The League of Regrettable Superheroes: Half-Baked Heroes from Comic Book History'

I like to believe there’s some bizarro world where grown men line up in front of cinemas to see the latest Dr. Hormone or Brother Power the Geek movie and plucky girls don red-cross-emblazoned masks every Halloween to impersonate Pat Parker, War Nurse, and the names of Superman and Wonder Woman elicit nothing more than a nonplussed shrug for all but the most hardcore comic book geeks. I suspect Jon Morris feels the same way. He has compiled a wittily written and lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of such D-list crime fighters from 1939 to 1997 called The League of Regrettable Superheroes.

Regrettable? Well, maybe Doctor Vampire, a confusingly named full-time vampire killer and part-time racist, was a bit regrettable. But what about Amazing Man, the near-naked marauder known to bite snakes to death and beat up “green Nazi gorillas”; Bozo the Iron Man, a super murder-bot who bashes sharks against walls; or Captain Tootsie, who teaches kids to operate assault rifles while buzzed on a diet of Tootsie Rolls ©? What’s regrettable about that lot? Or how about their super nemeses? What about Mr. Lucifer, a circus clown with delusions of demonic grandeur; Rossinoff, a donkey man his enemies call “Assinoff”; Dress Suit, an unoccupied yet deadly jacket and tie combo; and an undefined menace named Johnny Boom Boom? Those guys warrant a similar volume of their own!

I firmly believe that each and every one of these heroes and villains were worthy of careers as long and fruitful as those of Superman and Wonder Woman and the rest. Sadly, a lot of these failed superheroes were forced to put their capes in mothballs not because of their inherent jack-assedness but because their publishers simply went out of business. Perhaps if Harry “A” Chesler Publishing hadn’t gone belly up, The Black Dwarf would still be offering criminals “a bite of knuckle pie” today. In the bizarro world of my dreams, he is.

Review: 'DC Comics: A Visual History (Updated Edition)'

Last week I reviewed Matthew Manning’s Batman: A Visual History, which told the story of 75 years of dark knighting through perhaps every issue of DC Comics to feature The Dark Knight and his multitudinous co-stars. Manning patterned his book after another visual history he helped to write four years ago. DC Comics: A Visual History is at once more ambitious and less ambitious than its Batman-focused predecessor. It is more ambitious because it has to cover so many different titles, characters, and genres, and less because that plethora of themes means it can get away without being so exhaustive. Instead of the complete histories of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and the rest, we hit the major beats (no surprise that Batman and Superman still dominate).