Monday, November 18, 2024

1978 Lost DC Explosion Manhunter from Mars Strip

One of the things you continue to live for as a comics fan whose experience can be measured in words ending in "century" is something new under the sun... or at least something old that managed to escape your notice. This is especially after you've devoted better than a quarter-century (see!) to drilling down into a single character, particularly one as under-served as J'onn J'onzz.

It's no secret that the Manhunter from Mars was meant to receive a feature as part of the "DC Explosion" of titles in 1978, following on his four-part serial the previous year in Adventure Comics & World's Finest Comics by Denny O’Neil, Mike Nasser, and company. Somewhat less known was that the parallel association with the Sea King (same book, unrelated stories) was to continue into Aquaman. The original volume had been cancelled with #56 in 1971, but Aquaman was spun out of Adventure with its creative team of David Michelinie & Jim Aparo. The "Explosion" plan was to expand the page count of the solo title and bolster it with two additional features, The Vigilante and The Manhunter from Mars.

Cary Burkett, John Fuller, and Bruce Patterson were announced to scribe The Sleuth from Outer Space, but the finishes were ultimately by Bob Layton instead. Burkett co-created the Tom Tresser Nemesis, wrote a lot of Batman & Superman (solo, and in tandem, with each other and not,) and scripted a chunk of the '80s Mighty Crusaders revival. To my knowledge, Fuller was a little known late '70s inker with only a handful of assignments, most as part of the Continuity Studios "Crusty Bunkers" collective that worked with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. It's clear that Layton had a heavy hand over the art, as it looks entirely his, buoyed by some always welcome pasted tone work.

Mike Gold has described Aquaman as a "marginal title" which was cancelled with #63, rather than being expanded. The strip was supposed to move back to Adventure Comics #461-463, which is probably why it missed inclusion in "Cancelled Comic Cavalcade," but it never materialized. The talent was paid a kill fee, and the material never saw print. Pages went up on Heritage Auctions in 2021 though, which is where my buddy Illegal Machine stumbled upon them and forwarded to me. The pages are numbered 5 & 6, but the story is non-consecutive, so I have to assume that there are at least twelve pages of this story floating around out there somewhere. I mourn what could have been, as this looked pretty neat. I didn't know any of this when I had Layton draw the lost Bronze Age Martian Hunter Commander J'en, which gives that commission an extra zing!

Aborted Manhunter from Mars "Aquaman back-up"

Monday, November 11, 2024

Superman: Space Age (2022-2023)

Clark Kent's rocket from Krypton landed in Smallville, Kansas a bit later than in real life, offering a late teen debut of Superman in 1963 as part of an atomic age second act of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As with David Goyer's cinematic take, Pa Kent is averse to his son using his powers in any way, much less ever leaving home to do so, and warns him about unintended consequences with the story of his accidental wartime killing of a child. The flying farmboy in overalls nonetheless inserts himself into a moment of geopolitical panic that's ultimately responsible for the fiery death of the citizens of Coast City, California. Cue a rapper monotonously and repetitively intoning "this is the remix."

Clark Kent stumbled upon the Fortress of Solitude and begins training to become Superman, plagued by imposter syndrome over the recent circumstances, and his failure to live up to the hologram of Jor-El's minimum expectations of his child's development. The following year, Clark moved to Metropolis, where he took over Lois Lane's old "kooks" beat after she leveled-up to full reporter. It was here that he met Pariah ("this is the remix, uh-huh uh-huh") and was given a prediction of multiversal doom that will hang over the entire mini-series. Elsewhere, Bruce Wayne further develops a rejected pitch to the military into his Batman arsenal, jet fighter Hal Jordan downs Abin Sur's starcraft, and Lois Lane investigates the great events of the times, including the story highlight of spending time in jail with the Freedom Riders. Lex Luthor creates another missile crisis so that he can rule over the ashes, but is captured by Batman, and the actual nukes are redirected by the arrival of Superman. The characterizations mostly fit the Tom Mankiewicz mold, so you'd be forgiven for hearing the voices of Reeve, Kidder, Cooper, Beatty, and especially Gene Hackman while reading. The outliers are at Wayne Manor, as you'd more rightly hear Sam Hamm as read by Keaton and Gough, including the complete absence of a Robin. A month later, Wonder Woman is dropped into the U.N. to state the need for Amazonian intervention in any future crisis, and joins Green Lantern and the World's Finest at the new Hall of Justice. You can use whatever voice you want to while reading Princess Diana, because she's little more than an obligatory visual presence throughout this story.

Book Two leaps to 1972, and concerns itself with the impotence of colorful heroes maintaining the status quo in troubled times, within a story that is itself almost entirely bereft of non-whites, aside from stereotypical pimp and hos in the opening sequence. Maxwell Lord ("uh-huh uh-huh") takes over Wayne Enterprises, and runs it with such sociopathic criminality that Batman has to burn it all down in the end. Despite being the liberal voice of the Justice League of America for a generation, the appearance of Green Arrow, along with Aquaman, is purely token-- leaving the handwringing to the Dark Knight and Man of Steel. The Flash gets more attention, but in an already media-indebted work, painfully takes his cues from Ezra Miller's atypical ADHD neurotic. Clark Kent drops the ball on Watergate and is scooped by Lois Lane, who is constantly reinforced as his professional and moral superior. Kent does make a big show of finally acknowledging this, seemingly unlocking Lois' chastity as they finally embrace romantically, then marry, then procreate. It's a remarkably conservative trajectory, even for a Superman comic. The back third of this edition of an exceeding long trilogy of self-important 80-page tomes dispenses with the social concerns in favor of a lengthy Brainiac battle that sets the stakes of a final reckoning with the Crisis, along with the abrupt demise of Hal Jordan. Again though, nobody in this book really matters except Clark, Lois, and Bruce.

As with the Zack Snyder Murderverse, I'm more put out by the late inclusion of the Martian Manhunter than I would have been his total omission. It's explained by a contrivance of the story that no aliens are publicly known before the arrival of Brainiac, except Superman, and also readers saw Abin Sur and the Jor-El hologram, but whatever. He is joined by Green Lantern John Stewart, the Hawks, Black Canary (previously at Jordan's funeral,) Red Tornado, the Atom, and... Swamp Thing?!? Stewart gets the job of a Guardians of the Universe-informed exposition dump on the Anti-Monitor, and the insermountable Crisis coming in its wake. This is furthered by a multiverse of Brainiacs trying to recruit a multiverse of Superman...ses... after destroying their individual Earths for... natural resources, or something? It's a dumb play for such a bunch of... you know. In another straight lift from multimedia, Superman is girded into expanded action by the death of his terrestrial father by heart attack. Superman decides 19 years into the narrative to finally embrace hologram Jor-El and his inherited intellect to... take a few years off to master the human genome so that he can analyze every living being to create a pill that cures whatever ails them? It's ahh-- rather convenient-- and continues the telegraphing of the final resolution begun with one particular multiversal Superman at the top of Book Three.

In a nauseating turn that I'm thankful I read before the election, an Alan Dershowitz stand-in exonerates Lex Luthor for mass murder, allowing him to rebuild LexCorp, undermine Superman, and hire a rather Ledger Joker (complete with a Moore-biting origin story) to kill Batman... in an exhaustingly overlong tangent within an already tediously overwritten yet undercooked work that took me seeming ages to finish in one sitting... in a hospital waiting room, to boot. Trust that I was looking for a good distraction here. I had other books with me, but this thing ate up all the hours available for reading. Plus, the whole thing is just a set-up for a gag where Luthor claims victory just as the Crisis begins in earnest and he's forgotten entirely. Whomp-whomp. Here's hoping life imitates art. All I want for Christmas is a Big Mac-fueled coronary.

In a totally unobtrusive sequence where Allred definitely does not draw himself, friends, and family in as bystanders, most of the Earth perishes in lava as the planet breaks into pieces. For once, we don't actually see J'onn J'onzz die by fire, though he almost certainly burns. Just to twist the knife, Swamp Thing uses his stretching powers to save people in the final panel to bother with the props that were the JLA in this tale. Everyone dies, but Superman made a crystal that he stuffs through a hole in the multiverse made by the Brainiacs to land on an Earth where only a Superman survives. He uses it to repopulate everyone from the Space Age Earth as clones, including Lois and Jon Kent, who wonder why he made a golden statue in honor of himself. "That's not me, " the other Superman explains to extras from the forgotten 2005 Michael Bay thriller The Island. The End. So now you can't ask "Whatever Happened To...?" And I believe that I used every available Manhunter image in this blog post.

"Space Age" was by Mark Russell & Michael Allred, credits I copied & pasted from Mike's Amazing World of Comics, who it pleased me to realize was still with us long enough to catalog the book. I haven't had much experience with the writer, but was bowled over by his Superman meets Jesus Christ series Second Coming, which left me on the lookout for more. The artist I've enjoyed since buying the original Tundra Madman #1 in 1992, although I've mostly admired from afar.

Superman was one of my first super-heroes, as would be common for children "From the Thirties to the Seventies." Among my earliest exposures was the Superman #1 Treasury Edition, reprinting the initial Siegel & Shuster stories, so my perspective on the character may be a bit different from most. I don't think the Superman comics of my childhood were very good, and while my key periods of faithful reading were 1987-88 & 1993, I don't hold that material particularly dear. As a fan and retailer, I kept up with the Triangle Number period through heavy skimming and odd reads until it ended, and have dipped in from time to time, but ultimately firmly rejected the Post-Crisis interpretation of the character that persists to this day. My taste in Superman is informed less by the comic stories that I've read and more by the idea of him-- heavily informed by the Donner films, the Animated Series, and references/second hand recollections. I like the Kryptonian Superman-- the one who is more Kal-El than Clark Kent-- as seen in the Golden and Silver Age comics. On pure concept, as metaphor, and at the peak of popular cultural relevance, give me the 1950s Weisinger Man of Tomorrow. I think the further he's drifted from that ideal, with an ever greater corruption by acolytes of Stan Lee's heroes with feet of clay, the less Superman has had to say in distinction from any other idiot that wears their underwear on the outside. It's right there in the "Man of Steel" moniker that the emphasis should be on the super, man!

Russell struck me as a big idea type, and Allred loves playing in a groovy oddball mid-century space, so I really thought that this mini-series would finally serve me the alien intellectual Superman that I've been longing for. There is a little bit of that, mostly toward the end, but it slipped my mind that one of Allred's biggest influences was the foundational Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko, and that Russell's overt humanism lent itself more to Denny O'Neil than Otto Binder. I was crushingly disappointed to realize that Space Age was pretty much the exact opposite of what I'd hoped for, and would trod well worn deconstructionist ground. Thanks to its setting and style, it strongly recalls Darwyn Cooke's The Final Frontier, but undermines its heroes and exposes the underbelly of the nation instead of celebrating the progress made in that era. I now understand that the relatively muted response to this piece is probably because it's so similar to and so pale against other efforts. It was sort of a Justice League story with no interest in the team, a Superman story that gave most of the victories to Lois Lane or Batman, aimed for profundity with bumper sticker platitudes, was a Bronze Age Marvel story with Silver Age DC characters, used the fall of Camelot as an arch and unnecessary allegory for modern sociopolitical concerns, and was a comic book largely dependent on characterization from outside media, reading like pro-fic pitched directly at Walter Hamada's Warner Brothers. But most importantly, as with Snyder, it fundamentally misunderstands the icons it toys with, and the nature of their metafiction. Laura Allred's colors are a beauty to behold on her husband's delightful pencils, but it's all in service to a story that I hold in contempt, and was such a chore to get through that I'll only ever take it off my bookshelf to look at, never again to be read. What I don't need in this moment is a downer yarn about the Superman that failed.

Monday, November 4, 2024

2022 Martian Manhunter art by Ryan Kelly

Had a last "October Surprise" kick in the teeth that meant reneging on that bonus post last week. It also ate up my weekend, so podcasting will be a whole other challenge. If things go the way I think they will on Tuesday night, I'll hopefully be of improved spirits, and am more likely to get that done this round. But if things go pear-shaped, I crawl into a bottle and Google "Canadian citizenship process" again.

Monday, October 28, 2024

Justice Society of America #2 (September, 1992)

"As senior statesmen... or mystery men, we should have a role in society-- as mentors or advisors or helping hands in an emergency. I've worked with some of the Justice League and they're good... real good. I'm proud to say that maybe my experience made them even better... but they're not invincible-- no one is! And God knows there's plenty of trouble to go around in the modern world." -Carter Hall
I did that thing where I missed a week again. In my defense, I had a couple of doable posts in mind and had time set aside to get them done, but circumstances changed throughout the week. I kept having to push things back a day at a time, until Friday approached, and I figured, why bother? So to make it up, I intend to do a longer post on Wednesday. I have to say that 2024 has been full of exciting challenges, both good and bad. It's made me one poor correspondent, so if I owe you an email, I'm sorry and hope to catch up in November. I have to say that I'm in the safest, most comfortable place of my life. But also, time changes everything, I'm not one to just sit on a lilypad, and even if I could, a lot is simply outside my control. Thankful as I am, I was looking forward to enjoying Halloween this year, but there's been too many horrors this October to feel like seeking any more out. I'm sure we've all been extra tense this month, but whatever happens in November, I'm set on shoring things up on my end. 2024 has been defined by self-imposed degrees of drowning, and I need to find healthier ways to blog, podcast, and pursue other creative endeavors. Hopefully, that will include fewer skip weeks, but you've heard that before...

Monday, October 14, 2024

Jack Reed

"In my secret identity of John Jones, I'm an accomplished detective with the Middleton police force-- but Jack Reed set the standard there. He was as brave and skilled an officer as I've ever known. If only that had been enough to keep him safe. Jack made plenty of enemies. Vengeful mobsters murdered Jack and his wife. Their son Robby was barely two-- not old enough to realize what had happened-- only old enough to feel a great and inexplicable sense of loss. Not long after, Robby's maternal grandfather moved the boy to nearby Littleville. I can see now that I should have stayed in touch-- since i can't fathom what could have turned the boy into a-- super-hero?"
See Also: Silver Age: Dial H for Hero #1 (July, 2000)

Monday, October 7, 2024

2015-2017 Martian Manhunter Comrades Jam

Another funny one where all the individual parts have been posted online since 2019, but I waited a half decade to offer the combined piece as a whole. My explanation is that I intended this to be the "front cover" for the second volume of Who's Who in Martian Manhunter, with 2014-2016 JLI, Saturnians, & Other Friends Artist Jam on the back, but that's simply never going to happen. It's been eight years. I'm calling the time of death. Anyway, it's also amusing because this jam only took two years to complete, a short turnaround for such a long delay. It spanned an awful lot of conventions though, including a HeroesCon and a couple of Comicpaloozas, but the majority was done at just one of two years' worth of the now defunct Amazing Houston. Here's another cute thing: in the years between efforts, I had the same artist do two different Green Lanterns on as many jams without realizing it. On the plus side, the colors on the original FedEx Xerox were all washed out, but the direct scan from tonight improves on it. In the no laughing matter department, contributing artists Allen Bellman (a Golden Age great) and Adrian Nelson (one of my favorites and most oft-requested over the years) have passed away in the interim.

2015-2017 Martian Manhunter Comrades Jam

Monday, September 30, 2024

The Manhunter From Mars #106 (Nov.-Dec. 1969)

Following his clash with the Cosmic Criminals, J'onn J'onzz resumed his search for the Martian Ark. However, to his surprise, J'onzz's spaceship picked up a distress call from his family: mother, father, and brother, all once presumed lost. More puzzling, the signal came from Phobos, a moon of Mars the Manhunter had previously scanned for signs of life. However his family had come to be there, J'onn was set on reuniting with them.

Upon setting down on Phobos, J'onzz was greeted not by his loved ones, but the humanoid sentries of Duke Dorna. The Manhunter's Justice League of America compatriot Wonder Woman had once rescued her love Steve Trevor and Duke Dorna from a coup perpetrated by Ghurkos. Though Duke Dorna wasn't as clearly corrupt, the Plutonian legal system presumed guilt against any accused, and J'onn J'onzz was declared suspect in the immolation of Mars by The Blue Flame. Further, his fate would be determined through trial by combat, as was the Plutonian way, on penalty of death.

The accused was briefly jailed, sharing a cell with his old foe, B'rett, thanks to a safety feature in his Guard Belt that flew him to the moon when Mars perished in flames. Their reunion prompted a history lesson, recalling ancient myths of the Roman Gods having moved out into the solar system to claim worlds as their own, as was the case with Mars. Not content to reign over a planet that bore his name, Mars also sought to destroy any terrestrial gods, such as those worshiped by the green-skinned Desert Dwellers. The Albino Polar People embraced the gospel of Mars, which is why they assumed more humanoid appearances than the greens. Mars set the Martian tribes against one another, for sport and to assert dominance, aided by the lesser deities that served him. Lord Conquest oversaw a particularly ruthless band of Polars, who forced assimilation upon captive Desert Dwellers, from which B'rett's yellow-skinned race arose. Treated as lesser beings by the white-skinned Martians, the yellows came under the sway of Lord Conquest's rival, the Duke of Deception. The Duke so loved his people that he crafted a moon of their own to live upon, and led them to Deimos. Later, following a clash with Mars, Lord Conquest took his most fanatical followers to their own moon, Phobos, from whom the even more humanoid and Roman-influenced people of Duke Dorna were descended. Neither Green Martian nor Yellow Deimosian were welcome among the Phobosians, but only B'rett had the patronage of his personal deity in this foreign land. Not only had he declared that B'rett would survive his trial, but that he would also be free to leave for Earth aboard the soon-to-be deceased J'onzz's space ship. It was Duke Deception who had caused J'onzz to lose the trail of the Martian ark, and cast the illusion of J'onzz's family being stranded on Phobos.

All this caused the Sleuth from Outer Space to beg the question, what does God need with a starship? The Alien Atlas and the Xanthic Bandit competed in a series of Olympic-style challenges, as was the Phobosian way, each claiming an equal number of wins. Finally, the pair had to traverse perilous ground, and one wrong step meant a miles deep drop from atop a lunar plane where they had no special powers to save them. Through treachery, B'rett sent J'onzz falling to his apparent doom, while he succeeded with the aid of his still-active guard belt, giddily anticipating his rocket-powered exit from this satellite. However, Phobos could not sustain life without resources from lost Mars, so Duke Dorna and his favored would be taking the vessel for themselves, and allowing Brett to "live" for however long Phobos would keep him. Not only was B'rett enraged, but so was Duke Deception, himself trapped on Phobos by yet another rival, the Earl of Greed. Deception and B'rett joined forces against Dorna, but then the entire moon careened out of orbit.

The Martian Marvel had a history lesson of his own. Not only hadn't any of these false Roman deities of Earth "given" their followers moons, but there were never any Martian moons to begin with. 50,000 years earlier, the genius scientific survivalist Thas Bakkus had created the two miles-wide satellites during an earlier catastrophe on Mars when the rivers dried up and oxygen disappeared. While Thas Bakkus lay in suspended animation, Martian society evolved to adapt to the atmospheric changes, and in 1955 the Manhunter from Mars was teleported to Earth. Professor Erdel's experiments had also caused Thas Bakkus to awaken from his long slumber, and after studying Earth with his cosmic rays, attempted to conquer it as a replacement for his home world. Just after John Jones had captured “The Man of 1,000 Disguises”, Thas Bakkus caused all the humans on Earth to become his type of unevolved Martian, and obey his will. J'onzz was unaffected, but Thas Bakkus' having arrived near Earth aboard the Deimos satellite was causing gravitational calamity to the planet. While the Alien Atlas investigated Deimos and set it on a return course for Martian orbit, the human Jim Croft had thwarted Thas Bakkus himself. The Sleuth had recognized Thas Bakkus' handiwork on Phobos, and had programmed the satellite to carry its citizens to orbit a world that could sustain them. In the confusion, the Manhunter from Mars reclaimed his space ship, and made off, leaving B'rett and Duke Deception to drift through space, with only the guard belt between them...

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

2014-2023 Martian Manhunter Foes Convention Sketch Jam

As with the 2014 Martian Manhunter Villains Comicpalooza Jam, this was a set of pieces from a variety of artists mixing head shots with busts with figures in a way that kind of gets away from my preference of the subjects seeming to inhabit the same space, and which I sat on without posting for a decade. The big difference is that this one wasn't completed in 2014, but just last year, so I have a better excuse. Also, my scanner bed at home isn't quite 11x17", so to get more/all of the image up, I had to go digging for my FedEx Office printed copy. Given the chaotic nature of the piece, I think it comes together in the end, thanks especially to the artists who put in extra effort to provide bridging and filling elements. I'd love to say that this was the last jam in need of completion, but that would be a lie, so the saga continues until at least 2025. But I do have several more jams done to post over the next year, including one that I haven't even teased yet for the 70th anniversary...

2014-2023 Martian Manhunter Foes Convention Sketch Jam

Monday, September 23, 2024

2023 S'vor Fan Expo New Orleans convention sketch by Ian Chase Nichols


 One trick that's helping me as my aging mind fails is to take pictures with my phone of commissions at a given con, so that I can later recall more details of the when/where/who. I wanted to get commissions for celebrities appearing at that year's Texas Frightmare Weekend, plus this looked like a last convention run with one of my best friends before he was going to have to settle down. NOLA seemed like a reasonable drive from Houston, so we loaded up the car, rented a shotgun shack, and headed out for the weekend. You typically have to adjust your expectations for a show taking place right after the holidays, but there was top quality talent at there. I seriously considered laying down the $3K asking price for another Arthur Adams, and would have if they'd taken the cash at the show, but I hate dealing with online negotiations, indefinite waiting times, shipping concerns, et cetera... 

 I wasn't as familiar with Ian Chase Nichols, who's done work on IDW TMNT, Dynamite Red Sonja, and seems to pal around with The Tick's Ben Edlund. I liked what I saw at the show though, and was very happy with a Dawn of the Dead Charlie Peters piece he did for me. We had the time and money for another go (because Art didn't take it,) so he was kind enough to help finish another jam piece. He chose Jupiter's least favorite son, S'vor, an appropriate name for the porcine foe. I'd never gotten anything done with S'vor, and there was a decent anount of space yet, so Nichols did me a solid by filling it out. The Jovian looks to have gotten on Ozempic since we last saw him in the '60s, and he cuts a man figure. A love the energy radiating from our boy!

Ian Chase Nichols

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

The Conjurer convention head sketch inked by Kevin Conrad

This is another piece long lost in the shuffle. Although Antoine Mayes's pencil sketches for Porto augmented Herbie Rivera's original contribution with thoughts of his various assumed identities, I didn't love having a single character in a jam solely rendered in graphite. In truth, I have to fight myself not to get most pencil sketches inked, I love that solid comic book line so much. I enjoyed Kevin Conrad's inks on McFarlane Spawn comics, so he seemed like a good fit for the Image-style work of Shane Davis. That said, the when and where is fuzzy. It had to be after 2016, because I just employed ugly high contrast to use Davis' art for Who's Who in Martian Manhunter, and I got enough pictures at this same show to not recall having the inks done, so I lean toward HeroesCon 2017? All I know is that it took me way too long to finish this jam, but you should finally see everyone's combined efforts by month's end...

Monday, September 16, 2024

Mars & the Duke of Deception

In the Golden Age, the Roman God Mars ruled from the planet bearing his namesake, where he gathered the souls of dead men to serve as eternal slaves to his kingdom. Under Mars were three commanders, Lord Conquest, the Earl of Greed, and the Duke of Deception (along with General Destruction and Lya.) Mars and his lieutenants often deployed forces from the planet Mars against their sworn enemies, the Amazons, and their greatest champion, Wonder Woman. Initially, these "Martians" appeared to be Caucasian humans, perhaps related to those enslaved souls, but later, native Martians were clearly deployed. 

At one point, Duke Deception overthrew Mars to rule their planet, and later commanded a fiefdom over Yellow Martians, whose form he assumed to lead them in a combined invasion force alongside armies from Saturn and Jupiter. This was after Deception had gathered representatives from planets throughout the Solar System in a bid to join together to invade Earth, but they were put off when Princess Diana made an impressive demonstration of potential resistance in "The Olympics of Terror." Later still, after an unexplained separation from his prior army (which may have involved the machinations of Morpheus,) the Imperator of Illusions assumed a green-skinned form, and was surprised to make the acquaintance of actual Green Martians. For a sprawling arena of natives, the Master of Matter tasked Wonder Woman in the Martian Olympics of the Doomed, but the Amazing Amazon bested him in the crooked competition. In revenge, the Green Martians destroyed the Earth, but with the help of a Jovian, Princess Diana traveled back through to prevent the destruction before it began.

Mars himself pitted against Wonder Woman the Crimson Centipede, a powerful green-skinned being, and a Martian creation bearing roughly sixteen arms and legs. Meanwhile, the Duke of Deception disfigured Wonder Girl, and tried to use her as bait for the Wonder Family to be cut down by a Martian fleet, but was thwarted. After a final invasion attempt on Paradise Island with Martian saucers disguised as an Amazonian Swan Fleet, the Duke of Deception was commanded by the Lasso of Truth to return to the Red Planet, from which the Martian incarnation of the Imperator of Illusions never returned. This final return took place before the seeming destruction of Mars in the inferno of The Blue Flame.

Friday, September 13, 2024

2024 Comic Art Live “Ziggy Manhunter” Mystery Sketch by Nir Levie

Click To Enlarge


For the mystery sketch May 2024, I chose Ziggy Stardust, what I received was this gorgeous amalgamation of Ziggy Stardust and Martian Manhunter. It’s crazy, unique and fun as hell! That’s what I love about the mystery sketches, you don’t really know what you are gonna get. Nir Levie put his own wild spin on it, and it works fantastically. David Bowie would have killed for abs like these.
Sorry I missed yesterday. I went to a concert with the Rolled Spine Podcasts crew, and also was inspired to put a little more work into something that I'd intended to hack out before the weekend.

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

1986 FPC DC Comics Calendar Poster

Fellow children of the '80s likely longed for this swell looking calendar, featured in ads across various DC titles. It looked like a normal calendar, with 12 rectangular images of swell characters by top talents, incorporating the monthly calendar. There was a couple of cheats, in that the George Pérez New Teen Titans image was "zoomed in," obscuring six other partially visible sections, and obliterating a second. Further, all of those other images were barely more than postage stamps, and all of them were in black and white. It was a tantalizing tease though, including a Joe Kubert Sgt. Rock & Easy Company, a Gil Kane Sword of the Atom (featuring Princess Laethwen,) Keith Giffen Christmas with Ambush Bug & Cheeks, plus a very licensing on-model Superman (Ross Andru?)

It was produced by FPC, or The Federal Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd., who distributed black & white DC Comics reprints in the Down Under. In fact, the ad running, in the original U.S. comics, added the unusual shipping penalty of $1.50 extra outside Australia-- which is, y'know, all of us buying the original North American editions. Like, almost everybody on Earth is somewhere besides Ozzieland, which has less than 27M population, only 0.33% of the global population. I live in the state of Texas, with nearly 31M, and that's only one (admittedly populous) of 50 United States, and these things went to Canada, too (40M.) At $6.50 in 1985 dollars, that's $19.00 today, including shipping, which actually isn't that bad when I consider it. But it's pretty hefty for something expected to be thrown out on a year, which might be why I've never seen one in the wild. But also, it's a one-sheet poster, not a flip calendar, with the Marshall Rogers Batman & Robin crowding into four of the other images (molesting a small portion of the previously unobscured Titans portion.) Other characters revealed in the final release are Blue Devil & Amethyst by Paris Cullins, and... wait... that's it? A twelve month calendar with only eight images, because several months do double duty, and one triple. What a rip-off.

The image that I haven't discussed yet is maybe my favorite, though not without serious competition. Green Lantern John Stewart, Firestorm, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and Martian Manhunter, drawn by Luke McDonnell and inked by Jerry Ordway! Wooo-we! That is quite the collection of choices cuts for ol' Frank-- enough for me to let my Texas (or at least my Slim Pikins) out just now. I really wish this art existed outside a sloppy, mangled sheet of paper. And it kind of does, as the original art is nominally available for trade or purchase. I'd miss that lovely Greg Theakston painted color, though I could overlook it wth those characters and that linework. But see, the seller doesn't actually post prices, and the listing is so old that for all I know it's part of the dead internet. I have enough trouble getting art and quotes from people face to face with me at conventions. I can't manifest the energy for "email me bro," so one of you can pursue it with my full blessing. I reserve the right to envy, however.

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

2016 Armek Commission by Rick Hoberg

I returned to comic conventions after something like a decade and started collecting commissions in 2010. I'd been daily blogging on J'Onn J'Onzz for going on three years at that point, and it seemed like a great way to visually realize the potential I saw in the non-franchise. I kept up that pace until a month after the seventh anniversary in 2014, the same year I began all those jams that took forever to finish (where applicable) and still await posting. Even though I'd pulled way back, I kept up with (on average) weekly posting for another couple years, but only bothered with seven total posts in 2017. My priorities shifted to podcasting sure, but also, I was just kind of sick of putting so much time and money into something that had made me that guy who shoehorned Martian Manhunter into conversations where he (or I) weren't wanted. I've kept my Alien Atlas art to a minimum in the COVID era, but old habits die hard, and I was still gathering a substantial body of material through at least 2017. So much of it, over such an expanse of time, that the process started to fall apart for me.

For instance, I approached Rick Hoberg at a convention. I'm pretty sure that it was in Houston, but I don't think it was Comicpalooza. Both Space City Comic Con and Amazing were still operating in town in 2016, the date on the finished piece, but it was a take-home that ultimately got to me later. For all I know, we might have first talked about it the previous year. I'd been getting 1950s-1980s characters done in modern styles, so I thought it would be fun have a comparatively recent (1996?!?) character created in the post-Image school done by a more classical Bronze Age veteran. There was an added layer of irony, because Hoberg is likely best known for his work on DC's Golden Age heroes in All-Star Squadron, but I mostly associated him with the Ultraverse's Image-adjacent team book The Strangers. I dug his clean line, and I think I gave him a choice of characters (I usually do,) with him picking the Hyperclan's robot member, Armek.

It turned out great, and I think you can tell that he had fun working on something outside what was expected from him. This poor guy probably never wants to draw another archer or old-timey mystery man again. His Armek reminds me of Geoff Senior's Death's Head, with all the armor layers and battle damage. There's another blog I could have threatened. Anyway, the same year as the art arrived, I was working on the first volume of Who's Who in Martian Manhunter, making a bunch of mistakes with it while chasing a stupid self-imposed deadline. That project was a ton of work, but I had every intention of getting back to it, and "saved" Armek for the first page of Vol II. Eight years later, I wouldn't hold your breath over that happening. So here I am, poorly serving Hoberg's efforts by sitting on them and forgetting most of the finer points behind the piece's creation. John Cassaday, twenty years Hoberg's junior, died today, and I'm still playing around with time like it's infinite. Sorry, Rick. The piece came out awesome. Thank you!

Monday, September 9, 2024

The Fake Manhunter from Mars Comic Series & Other Entertaining Fabrications

As an advocate for the Alien Atlas, I sometimes like to just imagine a world where the character could have supported his own ongoing solo series for decades, rather than largely disappearing from comics in the late 1960s, and mostly subsisting since by joining team books for the rest of his career. I piece together preexisting art to create "covers" for nonexistent books that I then "summarize..."

  1. The All-Stars #120 (August-September, 1961)
  2. The Boy All-Stars #1 (April, 1963)
  3. John Jones: Manhunter From Mars #100 (Sept.-Oct. 1968)
  4. The Manhunter From Mars #105 (Sept.-Oct. 1969)
  5. The Manhunter From Mars #106 (Nov.-Dec. 1969)
  6. Manhunter from Mars #125 (February 1973)
  7. The Martian Manhunter #150 (Winter 1976)
  8. Manhunter from Mars #175 (February, 1979)
  9. Limited Collectors' Edition #C-61 ([March] 1979)
  10. Manhunter from Mars #199 (February 1981)
  11. Manhunter from Mars #200 (March 1981)
  12. Manhunter from Mars #201 (April 1981)
  13. Manhunter from Mars Annual #1 (1984) Part 1, Part 2
  14. Manhunter from Mars #250 (May 1985)
  15. Manhunter from Mars Annual #2 (1985)
  16. The Best of DC #74 (July, 1986)
  17. Manhunter from Mars #300 (July, 1989)
  18. The Manhunter from Mars Annual #7 (1990)
  19. Manhunter from Mars #350 (September, 1993)
  20. Manhunter from Mars Annual #12 (1995)
  21. The Manhunter from Mars Annual #14 (1997)
  22. Manhunter from Mars #400 (November, 1997)
  23. Surf and Turf #4 (9/08)
  24. 2012 Martian Manhunter Super Spectacular #2 Mock-Up
  25. 2012 New 52 Wave 3 Martian Manhunter #1!
  26. 2013 New 52 Villain’s Month: Malefic #1!

I've also goofed off in other ways, like constructing the The Manhunter from Mars Filmation-style limited animation intro/theme, or coming up with a solicitation catalog for the years 1999 and 2021 featuring more alternate universe Sleuth from Outer Space projects...