Stan Lee's Guide to Creative Insults

Or, who says comics aren't educational?  Stan seemed to have an inexhaustible thesaurus of put-downs, aspersions and invectives:

I can tell you for a fact that was the first time I ever heard the word "dolt", and it was certainly a useful addition to a teenager's vocabulary.

Clod was not unknown to me, but prefaced with "worthless, insufferable" really makes it work as a taunt.

Okay, so maybe he overused "insufferable".  But did you know that an escutcheon is the shield on which a coat of arms is displayed?  It can also be the distribution of pubic hair (!) although I doubt that's what Stan meant in this case.

Doom, of course, was the Doctor of Disdain, the Sultan of Scorn, the Ottoman of Opprobrium.  But many other villains mastered the alliteration of aspersion as well:

However, that's not to say that the Marvel heroes were incapable of creative contumely:

I'm looking around for an example of my personal favorite insult; "costumed cretin" but not finding it quickly.  Anybody?  Anybody?  Bueller?

Update: Another classic, courtesy of Flodo:

Update II: Costumed cretin as mentioned by an anonymous commenter, from Avengers Annual #1:

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The Trouble With Robots

One of the central themes running through DC comics in the Silver Age was a reverence for science combined with skepticism for applied science (i.e., technology).  Few plot points illustrate this better than the continual problems that Superman (and Superboy) had with his robots.

They were originally created to help Superman out of jams, particularly in situations where both Superman and Clark Kent had to be somewhere at the same time.  However, they were unreliable at best, often shorting out due to electrical disturbances, or sunspots.  And at times they were unavailable for other reasons:

And on more than one occasion, they nearly revealed his secret identity:

At least twice, his robots went rogue.  Ajax, a robot who was transformed into an android by members of the Superman Revenge Squad in Superman #163, apparently went off the reservation and tried to kill Superman, although it turned out that he was just pretending to do so to fool the SRS squad.  And when Superman tried to create an android of his own in Superman #174, it turned out to be mistake-prone and attempted to take Superman's place by convincing Clark Kent that he had never really been super.

But nothing reveals Superman's trouble with robots more than the story in Action #299, surely one of the wackiest in the entire Silver Age.  He receives a robot named LL-35 from the planet Jax that is supposed to be much smarter than even Superman himself.  LL-35 makes a suggestion:

Here are the robots he builds according to the instructions:

Kryptonite vision, you say?  I can't imagine how that could possibly backfire on Superman.  Unless, that is, some aliens tampered with the robots' loyalty tapes:

Well, that's pretty unlucky.  And for the next several pages, the robots torment our hero, using Red Kryptonite to turn him into an elastic man, and later giving him three faces:

Superman doesn't even get out of this using his wits; instead he gets lucky.  See, this was all taking place on an alien planet, where every day, a fallout dust disintegrates metal:

Any other examples of Superman's robots causing headaches for him?

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S176. The Power House Gang

Here is the just completed Sunday Phantom story. Here is the original link from Emile who shared the story with us.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/yzd64c

Enjoy,

Venkit.

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Those Pagan Kryptonians!

A rather surprising response from Weisinger, who generally portrayed Krypton as far more advanced than Earth. Of course, you can see the problem; if he responds that they had some different kind of religion (or no religion at all), he's implying that's superior. So he almost had to come up with the answer that he did.

It does raise an interesting point, though. Surely Clark was brought up in whatever religion the Kents practiced, most likely some form of Protestantism. And yet his creators and longtime editor and publisher were all Jewish (which is probably why, after the Golden Age, there were almost no stories that mentioned Christmas or any other religious holiday).

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Letting the Hulk Out of the Bag

As I have discussed in the past, the secret identity thing could be considered a fate not quite as bad as death. That is, because even the dullest reader in the Silver Age pretty quickly realized that the main hero in a comic never died no matter how close he came (or somehow came back to life after a brief period of time), the secret identity reveal became something that could credibly happen and cost the hero quite a bit as he would either have to retire or create a new identity.

Of course, the problem is that editors back then did not want to create new identities for their established heroes. Oh, they might tease us with it occasionally, and sometimes (e.g., with Superman) more than occasionally, but the story would end in one of a few ways: the discoverer would be conned into thinking that somehow he had gotten it wrong, would suffer amnesia, or would die by the end of the story. On exceedingly rare occasions, the discoverer would turn out to be trustworthy and keep the secret.

Even Marvel was not above using the secret identity revealed "teaser":

In that instance, Peter Parker had the flu and fought so terribly that everybody who watched the removal of his mask ended up believing that he had just pretended to be Spiderman. That's why Tales to Astonish #77 stands out as something new:

And it was no tease; inside, Rick Jones, convinced that Bruce Banner is dead, reveals his secret to Major Talbot:

And not only did Major Talbot not die, but Rick went on to tell Betty Ross, Banner's girlfriend:

You know the old joke? Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Well, with Rick and Talbot and Betty knowing about Bruce Banner being the Hulk, it isn't long before the word gets pretty widespread:

Even the President finds out:

And so the Hulk becomes the first superhero to have his "secret" identity widely revealed.

Note: The Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange never really had secret identities (although in the Strange Tales series it is strongly implied that nobody knows Johnny Storm is the Human Torch), and the Elongated Man decided to let everybody know his real identity of Ralph Dibny voluntarily.

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Hawk and the Dove #6

As the 1960s drew to a close, DC was under continuing financial pressure to raise prices due to inflation. As a result, many titles were discontinued in 1969: Angel and the Ape, Atom and Hawkman, Bat-Lash, Captain Action, Beware the Creeper, Metal Men, Secret Six, Spectre, Windy and Willy and the Hawk and the Dove. In fact this was the final issue for the title. Ditko and Skeates, the original creative team on the title were gone by this time; according to the GCD this issue was both scripted and drawn by Gil Kane, with inks by John Celardo. As the story begins, Hank and Don discover that their father being beaten by a hood, who apparently intended to kidnap him. Don stays with Dad while Hank impetuously chases the mugger, giving Kane the opportunity to do what he does best:

Smek? Unfortunately, the creep is tougher than he looks and he gets away. The next day, the boys arrive home from school to find that he's returned, and this time he managed to abduct Pops:

The lads try to track down the kidnapper in their own ways; Hank beats up hoods in an effort to find out who had it in for the judge, while Don does some detective work:

Both of them come to the conclusion that their dad has been kidnapped by the son of a man that the judge had sentenced to prison. Sure enough:

They don't really have much trouble kayoing the guy and rescuing their father, who of course kvetches about the danger they put him in:

The story ends on an ominous note:

As mentioned before, this was the final issue of the Hawk and the Dove. They made semi-regular appearances in Teen Titans for the next few years.

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Perry White, Businessman First, Responsible Journalist Second

I've been working my way through the complete Action Comics run of the Silver Age, and stumbled on this panel:

Gee, Perry, I don't know if this qualifies as a sure-fire gimmick, but I've often thought that maybe you should hire a third reporter and another photographer, and not always send Clark and me out to cover the same story....

In Action #331, Lois bribes a pressman to run off one copy of the Daily Planet with the headline story that Clark Kent is secretly Superman.  However, the joke is on her and Perry, as the pressman is suddenly taken ill and his assistants print the entire run of the paper with that news.  Fortunately, Clark has an idea:

Hey, if it makes the Planet a couple of bucks, who cares if we sacrifice our credibility?

What I find so amusing about this is that Perry could easily be considered a stand-in for Mort Weisinger.  Think about it; Weisinger was always using gimmicks to sell Superman comics, from Imaginary Stories to fake covers, to dream sequences, to Red Kryptonite stories.  And, I might add, he was very, very successful at this, which undeniably made his bosses at DC quite happy.

Any more examples out there of Perry looking for gimmicks to boost circulation?  I am sure there are plenty.

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