Made Men - Return Of The Red Tornado!

The Red Tornado began life as a member of the Justice Society of America and was featured in Gardner Fox's final story featuring that epic team-up event in Justice League of America #64. Not  unlike the Vision over at Marvel who debuted a few months later, the Red Tornado was a secret weapon, a false hero implanted into the team for the dire purposes of an enemy. In the case of the Vision it was Ultron, and in the case of the Red Tornado it was T.O. Morrow.

Also like the Vision the Red Tornado is a Silver Age revision of a Golden Age hero, this time a heroine actually from the humorous pages of Scribbly named Ma Hunkel most of the time. But what makes the Red Tornado one of my favorite artificial heroes is his loser lifestyle.

Few heroes have had as much hard luck as the Red Tornado, luck so bad it sees him destroyed more than a few times. But always despite the best efforts of the wrtiers, it seems he resurrects and is ready for more some number of issues later. Watching the Red Tornado try to scratch out something akin to a normal life during his Bronze Age heyday was compelling. The Vision's romance with the Scarlet Witch sometimes became maudlin, but the Red Tornado's attempts to find love always had a charm which felt real.

When he learned he was really an old League villain called the Tornado Tyrant it made him even more like the Vision in many ways. About the only thing he couldn't fend off was bad fashion advice, as his elegant original togs were spruced up more than once by some really gaudy affair. 

What he has become today I cannot say, though a cinematic version of the hero did show up on television's Supergirl. 

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The Many Faces In Scorpio Rose!

Steve Englehart has been pretty frank about his comic book career in interviews and on his own website and such. In the collected Coyote the book is backed up by a few issues of a short-fused project by Englehart and Marshall Rogers called Scorpio Rose. It was meant to be a trilogy but only ever produced two comic books (both of which I remember buying at the time). They concerned themselves with a Romany mystic of a unusual lengthy life and of the demon who loved her at times. 

The saga was adapted and altered from scripts Englehar produced for DC for a projected Madame Xanadu series. The price for those scripts had been misrepresented to Englehart so he refused to turn them over and that was it for Madame Xanadu until some years later when we met her under the name of Scorpio Rose. 

The series went two issues then Rogers was unable to finish it. Instead of getting a new artist Englehart just left it unfinished but in this collection the layouts Rogers did for the final issue are printed with explanations as to how the story wrapped up. Frankly I found the stories very confusing even without an ending. It's not Englehart's greatest by any means, too much mysticism and Rogers art is  often hard to read. But the story is memorable for another reason which reaches back to Englehart's earliest days at Marvel and a character named Mantis.

Mantis of course was the Celestial Madonna (making a comeback perhaps when comics begin to publish again) and her saga unfolded over a very long time in the pages of The Avengers where she courted Swordsman and Vision and others while trying to understand her role in the universe. She gave birth to a child, also the child of an alien plant-person and supposedly this youngster was meant for great things indeed. Mantis disappeared when Englehart left the series. 

Englehart was attracted to DC by the call of better page rates and he took over the Justice League of America, bringing the same wonderful magic to those pages he brought to the Avengers. One issue introduced a green woman from the starts named Willow who was supposed to be Mantis, her story continuing with a new name and place. 

Then Englehart left DC and in the pages of Scorpio Rose from Eclipse Comics he gave us Lorelei, another green lady who was recognizably Willow and Mantis. She assists Scorpio Rose and we meet her child almost hidden in the shadows. 

Later Englehart brought Mantis back at Marvel, but I will always treasure the days when her story was bigger than any one company. For me it always will be.

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The Junk-Heap Heroes!

With all the vintage comics material in reprint form, you'd think there'd be nothing I yet needed. But that's not true. The Blackhawks were a venerable comic team which debuted in Quality's Military Comics in the heat of World War II. They were collected up by DC Comics (along with Plastic Man and the heroes of the future Freedom Fighters) when Quality dissolved. DC continued to publish them but sales diminish and so when the superhero craze of the 60's struck the idea developed to change the Blackhawks to meet the times. They became somewhat zany heroes with delightfully baffling names. There is a disdain for this era of the team which was a last ditch attempt to revive them before cancellation. They've since returned a few times, but never in their "Junk-Heap Heroes" identities. These comics drawn by stalwart DC artist Dick Dillin need collecting, if only to remind us all of what it was like in those days.

 To read the three-issue story in which the changes take place follow this link. 

Here are the rest if the covers in this unforgettable (some say "unforgivable") run.

Now don't you want to see what's under those covers. Admit it.

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Black Lightning Strikes Again!

Black Lightnng proved too good a character to let disappear when the original series passed away during the great comic book implosion. Jeff Pierce was a smart and adept black man who wanted to bring justice to Suicide Slum and those were stories needed telling. So what to do?

World's Finest, the longtime home of Superman and Batman tandem was a dollar comic for a time and had room to rent to aspiring heroes and heroines looking for a place to next. Hawkman and Hawkgirl too up residence as did Captain Marvel / Shazam. Green Arrow had been there in the pre-dollar days and that left room for one more and Black Lightning stepped in.

Written by Denny O'Neil and drawn by Dick Dillin, George Tuska, and Rich Buckler among others the stories sadly were not that strong. O'Neil didn't get Isabella's take on Black Lightning and instead of a good man pretending to be a brash superhero we get just the former, a hero full of platitudes all too eager to call attention to the color of his skin. 

The fight against the underworld continued but the private life of Jefferson Pierce was almost never dealt with aside from a few antique references to mimeographing some tests. (That was a blast from the past, I'll say that.)

Things were a little better when Black Lightning guest-starred alongside Superman. The threat is from the school Pierce works at and that helps, but the absolute oddness of the threat is not the kind of thing Black Lightning ought to battling. He doesn't do aliens. '

Which is pretty much what he told the Justice League of America when they checked him out for membership, In classic Silver Age style they tested  him under the guise of presumed villains but it felt weird and in the end he turned them down. 

One excellent thing about the two-parter, a favorite of mine from this era of the JLA, is that Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughling drew Black Lighting exceedingly well. His costume really had snap and I got a real sense of what should look like. It had seemed rather drab really from the get go, a side effect of Vince Colletta's inks (I generally like Colletta, but he doesn't hit the mark on his turn on Black Lightning). 

Then it was off to Detective Comics, also a dollar book as Black Lightning closed out his Bronze Age career. 

He looked quite sharp alongside Batman when Dick Giordano drew him as they worked in parallel mostly to stop a deadly gang of gas theives. 

But it was in the last two installments of his run that new writer J.M DeMatteis and artist Gerald Forton really hit the ball out of the park. Suddenly the personal life was back and the school was front and center and the whole thing felt exactly right. The tone of the character was the strongest it had been since Isabella's departure. 

And like that it was over. Black Lightning finished out his run and then went on to join Batman in the replacement comic for The Brave and the Bold -- The Outsiders. Drawn by Jim Aparo (as he was in his Who's Who entry he looked quite sharp. (See the cover at the very top of this post.)

It would be some time before he'd return again under the hand of his creator Tony Isabella. That's coming soon.  

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