Frew #1557 - The Phantom Gladiator, Part 3

Here is long awaited last part. Enjoy!


Download


Written by Claes Reimerthi
Art by Kari Leppänen

Scanned & edited by Laki. All credits go to him.

More about →

Silver Age Trivia Video

Mark Waid versus some fans from a 2005 convention:



What strikes me is how many of these have been answered here.

Bob Hope's landlady?

Villain who escaped from Doiby Dickle's taxi?

Lois Lane's parents?

If in Battle I Fail? (Quizmaster misstates the title as If in Battle I Fall).

Little old gooey monster me wants Wonder Girl mine to be?  Can't find it now, but I know I highlighted this cover a long time ago.

There are six parts of the video quiz in total, you can see the rest of the show by clicking here.

Incidentally, at least one of the answers in one of the parts was completely wrong; when asked who the Green Lanterns were freeing in JLA #21, the quizmaster (Craig Shutt, thanks to commenter Jonathan L. Miller) said no, it was not the two Flashes, it was the two Atoms:

And the question about the villain the JSA helped the two Flashes to defeat which lead to the reforming of the Society is mistaken; in fact the two Flashes only freed the JSA members at the very end, when Vandal Savage had already been effectively beaten.

Still and all, a terrific bit of entertainment, and as I have made errors in my own quizzes, I'm in no position to criticize.

More about →

The Curious Case of the Time Trapper

Faithful readers of the Legion of Superheroes must have been confused at this sequence, which appeared in Adventure #317:

Why confused? Well, it turns out that this was the first mention of the Time Trapper in a Legion story. At the very end of that story (which mostly did not concern TT) came a semi-explanation:

In the next issue, we got our first glimpse of the villain:

Note in particular his physical appearance there. Over the next year or so, we'd see more futile efforts by the Legion to break through:

The Time Trapper turned out to be working behind the scenes in that story, trying to find out the secret of the Legion's super weapon, the concentrator:

But it turns out that he does not have the real secret of the concentrator and flees into the future again. Amazingly, the Time Trapper story would not be resolved until Adventure #338, almost two years after he was first mentioned:

In that story, the Time Trapper has recruited an evil female, Glorith of Baalour, to help him doom the Legion. We get a strong indication of the plot here:

However, when she tries the trick on several members of the Legion, they do not regress in age past babyhood:

Frustrated in his plot to turn the Legion into blobs of protoplasm, he joins Glorith, after first letting Superboy and Brainiac 5 through the Iron Curtain of Time. He leaves them trapped in the future and sets about training the baby Legionnaires to rob for him:

Then he brings them to a planet where elements in the atmosphere will resume their devolution. But this causes problems, too:

But one of the babies has spotted the Time Trapper's ring, which is responsible for keeping Superboy and Brainiac 5 in the future. He switches it off, allowing them to join the group. The Trapper makes a proposal:

Brainiac 5 agrees, but there is a trick:

End of story? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it quite literally is the end of the Time Trapper in the Silver Age; he did not appear again outside of a hallucination sequence in Adventure 363. Which, if you think about it, is very odd. Here's this villain whose confrontation with the Legion had been built up over the course of two years, and yet they dispose of him in a single 16-page story? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I began digging for clues and speculating a bit. The first clue is that initial mention of the Time Trapper in Adventure #317. It appears obvious that there was supposed to be a Time Trapper story which appeared before that, but which was bumped for some reason. And if we look at the cover to Adventure #317, we get a pretty good second clue:

Speculation: Perhaps the Time Trapper story which appeared in Adventure #338 was intended to appear just before #317, but editor Mort Weisinger belatedly realized that this would give him two consecutive stories featuring Legionnaires turning into babies? This fits, especially when you consider that Adventure #338 was written by Jerry Siegel, while #317 was written by Edmund Hamilton. Weisinger could have instructed Hamilton (or artist John Forte) to include a couple panels mentioning the Time Trapper.

There are certainly still some problems with this speculation. For example, the story does not end with the Time Trapper in the future, creating the Iron Curtain of Time. But this objection is easily overcome; Weisinger simply had the ending of the story rewritten because now it took place after the events in #317, instead of before. Note as well that the story in Adventure #338 did not explain what secret the Time Trapper was supposedly concealing from the Legion in the future.

So my best guess is that the Time Trapper story that was supposed to be published before Adventure #317 was in fact the story that ended up being published in Adventure #338, with some changes. Incidentally, the Time Trapper himself may have been based on the Time Master, a similar character that appeared in Wonder Woman #101:

More about →

Around the Horn

Check out Blogged and Boarded, a blog that is going through the complete Marvel 1960s catalog in order of publication.  Entertaining and informative.

Steve Does Comics has done a couple of recent polls on the greatest enemies of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four.  The first place finishers are not surprising, but there is a good argument to be made for one of the runners-up in Spidey; "himself".

Jacque Nodell covers some fashion mistakes in romance comics so bad, it looks like they're Halloween costumes.

Mark Ginocchio reminisces on the desire, nay the lust, he felt for ASM #32.  As I mentioned in the commentsover there, a friend of mine traded me all his Spiderman back issues except for ASM #33, and so, irrationally, I decided that wasn't such a special issue.  I subsequently recovered my senses.

Was Batman in his late 40s in the 1960s?  Over at Nothing but Batman I cover Bob Haney's (and Neal Adams') Brave and Bold #84, which features Bruce Wayne parachuting into occupied France just before D-Day.

More about →

What's that the Challengers are Drinking?

From Challengers of the Unknown #58 (Oct-Nov 1967). I'm surprised that the Comics Code Authority let that one slip through.

More about →

Early Easter Egg

Just noticed this one in Sgt Fury #32 (July 1966):

Doc Daneeka was a character in Joseph Heller's famous novel, Catch-22.  In a memorable bit in that book, Doc Daneeka "dies" when the plane he is supposedly in crashes into a mountain.  Actually, Doc had simply signed his name in the log book for that flight to satisfy some regulation, but not gotten on the plane.  Regardless, the military (and many of the characters in the book) treat him as if he no longer existed.

More about →

Sgt Fury #31

Of all the series that Marvel published during the 1960s, Sgt Fury is probably the one that I have read the least. Well, except maybe for Patsy and Hedy. So when I found a small batch of issues on Ebay in reader grade, I snapped them up. This story starts out with the Howlers prepping for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Izzy earns a demerit for being too casual about his task:

The main plotline picks up when Captain Sawyer (aka Happy Sam) appears, just in time to head off to London for an important meeting. While there, the brass tells him the key date:

While there, Sawyer notes an aide who appears to be just a bit too interested:

There is something in the nature of fiction that tells us that these types of concerns are never "just your imagination". Although the aide does not hear the target dates for the invasion, he does find out that Sawyer has been informed. He quickly departs and radios the information to der Fatherland:

Now, in reality, the date of the invasion was not as important as the location. The Germans knew as well as the Allied generals that D-Day had several practical requirements: calm seas, high tides, and a full moon for illumination. The latter two virtually guaranteed the invasion would come on June 5 or June 6, or the invasion would have had to have been put off for a full month. As it happened, the weather was bad on the night of June 4, forcing the postponement of the mission to June 6, when the Allied meteorologist (correctly) projected better weather. On the other hand, the locations of the assaults were a closely-guarded secret and would have been worth quite a bit to the Germans. One of the logical spots was the Pas de Calais, the closest spot between England and France. As it happened, the Allies chose the Normandy beaches instead, but it was vital to keep this confidential so the Germans would be forced to defend both areas. The Germans kidnap Happy Sam (presumably named, like Happy Hogan, for his morose demeanor), but not without quite a fight:

The Germans attempt to torture the information out of Sawyer, but he refuses to divulge anything more than name, rank and serial number. So they try to trick the Allies into believing he has spilled the beans:

As you can see, the Howlers have picked up a British commando (apparently nicknamed Pinky, ouch), who talks straight out of central casting, with a lot of "cheerio" and "blighter" and "pip-pip, old bean" along with the obligatory brolly. No surprise, the Germans also toss around terms like "verdammt," "dummkopf" and "schweinhund". To be fair, Hollywood wasn't much more subtle in their stereotypes in WWII movies in the 1960s either. Anyway, the Howlers take the message to the brass, who apparently believe as Fury does, that Happy Sam would never tell. The general gives the commandos a chance to rescue their C.O., but warns them that the bombers will be shortly behind, as the information Sawyer has is too crucial to risk. Meanwhile:

But Fury and his men land virtually on top of Gestapo HQ and shortly:

The rest of the story virtually writes itself; they free Captain Sawyer, get away in a tank just before the bombers obliterate the Gestapo building, and are shortly headed for the English Channel. I enjoyed the plot, and I especially like the characterization for Happy Sam, who refuses to give up the date of the invasion. The tale was an early Roy Thomas outing, illustrated by Dick Ayers and J.Tartaglione.

More about →