Worst Criminals of the Silver Age

It's an ill wind that blew this crook into the Marvel Universe:



Meet the Whirlwind, aka the Human Top. Clearly a charter member of the "my incredibly stupid-looking helmet gives me no peripheral vision" club, along with Magneto and others.

He's an exceedingly rare type of supervillain; one that had superpowers from childhood, as shown here:



Powers far beyond those of mortal men? Is Stan (or Roy Thomas) swiping a little of the Superman intro? Anyway, the Human Top faced Ant-Man during the latter's run in Tales to Astonish, then returned in Avengers #46. Of course, you may wonder, having been bested by a bug boy, how the newly-renamed Whirlwind thought he could tackle the entire team. Well, you guessed it:



This was a well that Marvel kept going back to: Hero defeats villain, then villain gets more powerful (and hero loses power or is sick/injured), so we have another matchup.

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#073.Indrajal Comics 29

May This Diwali be as bright as ever.

May this Diwali bring joy, health and wealth to you.

May the festival of lights brighten up you and your near and dear ones lives.

May this Diwali bring in you the most brightest and choicest happiness and love you have ever Wished for.

May this Diwali bring you the utmost in peace and prosperity.

May lights triumph over darkness.

May peace transcend the earth.

May the spirit of light illuminate the world.

May the light that we celebrate at Diwali show us the way and lead us together on the path of peace and social harmony.

"WISH YOU A VERY HAPPY DIWALI"

How I fallen in love with Indrajal Comics, I still remember as it happened only yesterday.

Mrutunjay (1978) was the first Indrajal Comics or Comic ever read. I was around 9 year old, we were waiting for train at Chhapra Railway station where I saw it at book stall. Ran back to elder cousin brother who is 3 years older than me, asked to add 40 paise (0.4 rupee), but he gave me rupee. We both enjoyed it whole journey, reading it again & again.

Phantom & Indrajal attracted me, although that days Indrajal was printed twice a month (I don’t understand initially), everyday goes to book stall. Meanwhile my father was transferred to Gumla*. Even knowing about the day of release of next issue, my feet automatically start moving towards book stall 2-3 days earlier. I always afraid to miss an issue or read it late (suffering from this sickness till now). One of my friend told about me to his elder brother, who was an advocate & had great collection of Indrajal Comics. Thanks to him in very short period, luckly read almost all early issues.

*Gumla district was formed on 18th May 1983 by carving out of certain areas of Ranchi district -that time Bihar state, now it is one of the twenty-two districts of Jharkhand state, India. Gumla is considered to be the birth place of Hindu God Hanuman and a temple few kilometers away from the city off the Gumla - Ghaghra road is dedicated to him and his mother. The district contains mountains named Risyamook mountains mentioned in the Ramayana.

This number is already avaliable online, but I can't stop myself to represent a new & better version today.

295-1978-Phantom-Mrutunjay

239-1975-Flash-The Solar Power Station

245-1976-Phantom-Ashaay Gajraj

Password: bookscomics.blogspot.com

Indrajal Comics contributors of this post:

* English - Anonymous
* Hindi - Ajay Misra

Some more coming Indrajals:

*Anonymous (first 4 - only English)
*Anurag (5 to 16 - Hindi & English)

May be there is crisis in world, but not for Indrajal fans. It was a year a flood, dryness, uncertain mood changes in world of Indrajal, but for fans it was most successful year. Many many thanks to all contributors, bloggers & visitors; without their love & efforts it was not possible. Hoping our e-treasure of Indrajal will continue to increase with geometric progression.

Once again WISH YOU A VERY HAPPY DIWALI.

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Friday Trivia Quiz #15: The Pets

1. Who was Ace the Bat-Hound's original master?

2. Superboy's dog, Krypto, joined an organization of super-powered dogs. What were the initials of the organization, and what did they stand for?

3. What gave Streaky, Supergirl's cat, its super-powers?

4. Supergirl also had a pet horse with super abilities named Comet. What famed sorceress gave him his powers?

5. What was the name of the Martian Manhunter's pet dog?

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Number 401


Tom Trojan


For Pappy's #400 a couple of days ago I showed you Sparky Watts #6, but originally I had another plan. I wanted to show you the whole of The Eye #1 from 1965, an amateur comic book entirely written and drawn by Biljo White, who was also called Captain Biljo.

I googled Biljo's particulars online, only to find out that Bill Schelly, who has documented the first wave of comics fandom of the early 1960s, now has the rights to The Eye, which were given to him by Biljo himself. You can order several books on early fandom from Schelly, including reprints of Biljo's Eye stories.

Ahem. Well, so much for that plan. But while The Eye #1 has two stories of Biljo's titular hero, it also features an older private eye story he did called "Blind Baby Blues," featuring Tom Trojan. :: OK, we're all grownups around here. (We are grownups, aren't we?) We all know Trojan is a brand of condom and a private investigator is also called a dick. So we've all got our yuk-yuks out of the title, haven't we? Good. ::

Biljo's career was as a firefighter, but comic books were a passion. He kept them in a block building called The White House Of Comics behind his house in Columbia, Missouri. Biljo's art was strictly old school. When I saw it originally in his fanzine, Komix Illustrated, I loved his cartoony style, which harkened back to another era. The Tom Trojan story appears to have been drawn in the early 1950s, complete with headlights and bondage. The Eye stories, even with their influences from Bob Kane's Batman, were drawn in the mid-'60s and appear more polished.

Biljo died in 2003 at age 73.

The postscript to all of this is that I sat down and listed the names of those guys that were important in those early days of comics fandom: Don Thompson, Ronn Foss, Richard "Grass" Green, Howard Keltner, Steve Gerber, Jerry Bails, Biljo White...sadly, all now gone.

Postscript to my postscript: A few hours after posting this I read of the death of yet another important early fan, Tom Fagan. I wrote about the visit my wife and I made to Tom's house in Vermont in 1970. Like Biljo, Tom was a great Batfan.

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When I'm the Evil Genius...

I will not suddenly see it all clearly:



For the rest of the Evil Genius series, click here.

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The Great Races

Get this letter and response from Superman #141 (November 1960):



It was indeed an excellent request, and yet despite Weisinger's promise, nothing came of the Superman-Flash race for almost seven years.

Finally, in Superman #199, the race came off. Supes and the Flash agree to a race for a UN benefit, with a "sweepstakes" (i.e., legalized wagers). One very interesting aspect to the race was that it emphasized the difference between Superman and Flash's powers, even though this was nominally a footrace. Superman was able to beat the Flash in some places, but when it comes to the sand dunes of the Sahara, the Scarlet Speedster has the advantage:



Making the race a little more interesting is that a US crime syndicate has bet on Supes, while a European cartel has bet on the Flash. This seems to be a swipe. Some may not be aware that there was another iconic series of races in American pop culture; in the early 1940s, Warner Brothers produced three separate cartoons featuring the Tortoise (Cecil B. Turtle) Against the Hare (Bugs Bunny), and oddly enough, the storyline for the second instalment, Tortoise Wins By a Hair, includes a subplot of gamblers sabotaging one of the racers:



And such was the case here:



Hilariously, though, the other syndicate has laid out the Flash as well, and substituted a ringer. Given the order for both of them to lose, the inevitable happens:



But in the meantime the two heroes have freed each other and they rocket towards the finish line, where they carefully break the tape together, in order to foil the gamblers (and presumably the sweepstakes ticket holders as well).

The rematch came in Flash #175. A pair of alien gamblers want the race rerun, and this time they add a little incentive: If the Flash loses, Central City will be wiped out, whereas if Supereman fails Metropolis will be leveled. Despite this, both heroes find themselves helping each other overcome obstacles. Predictably, perhaps, the outcome is inconclusive:



We learn that the two alien gamblers are actually the Reverse-Flash and Abracadabra, who have set this up in order to unleash some death traps at the Central City Comet, but they are eventually foiled.

The rubber match came (appropriately enough) in World's Finest #198-199. Superman is summoned to Oa by the Guardians, who advise him that a race of faster-than-light robots is moving through the galaxy and the only way to prevent them from destroying the time/space fabric is for Supes and the Flash to run in the opposite direction. This time the race will take place in outer space, so they give the Flash an amulet which protects him and also creates a track for him to run on.

The alien robots turn out to be a plot by the Phantom Zone criminals to escape from their prison. Superman and the Flash are wounded, with their legs useless, so they must crawl to a control room to turn off the robots:



And in the end, the story doesn't cop out:



It's hard to believe Weisinger would have allowed this during his reign as editor, but Julius Schwartz had taken over the reins of World's Finest effective with #198, and Schwartz was naturally a Flash partisan, having guided the Scarlet Speedster since his initial (Barry Allen) appearance in Showcase #4.

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Number 400


The incredible shrinking Sparky Watts


A worn copy of Sparky Watts #6 was the first issue I bought back in the late 1970s. I gave it to a friend when I upgraded to this copy, which I bought at the 1983 San Diego Comicon.

My first copy was well worn probably because the kid who had owned it originally had read and re-read it. There's something fascinating to kids about shrinking down and having the world around you become giant. This wasn't the only time creator/writer/artist Boody Rogers used the theme.

As we find out in this story, when the cosmic rays Sparky has been bombarded with wear off he gets small. Like the movie, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, a popular movie for Disney a couple of decades ago, Sparky finds a whole new world in his yard. He even finds out that as small as he is, there are people who are smaller. You've got to wonder if the guy who had the idea for Honey remembered this comic book from 1947. Who knows? He could've been the kid who wore out the copy I gave away in the mid-'80s!

Those were the days when you got a lot of value for a dime...even though this story is 26 pages long, there are two more Sparky Watts stories to round out the issue. I'll be posting them one of these days.

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