Our continuing review of peculiar superhero-types now takes us back several centuries to the era of tall ships and piracy on the high seas. Daring buccaneer “Black Douglas” is an expert swordsman, sailor and devoted Englishman pensively perambulating his poop…
I recently unearthed this image in some corner of the internet and fell in love with it. I have no idea where it’s from, where it was taken or who’s in it, but I still love everything about it. The…
In an unusual introduction to what will prove to be a very unusual “superhero,” we first meet the celebrated Dr Hormone in Dell’s Popular Comics #54 as an old man at death’s door. It’s unclear whether “Hormone” is a family…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Volume 2 of “The Steranko History of Comics,” a work that it’s fair to say blew my mind as a kid. I call it a “work” because I never know how to classify…
Returning to our retrospective on the kookiest superheroes of all time, I give you the short but spectacular career of Hip Knox, raised from birth to be a master of the art of hypnotism. Obviously he wasn’t raised to be…
When it comes to vigilante justice, why should millionaire playboys, off-duty cops and crackpot scientists have all the fun? In HIT Comics #1, beekeeper Richard Raleigh gets into the act with an M.O. that combines his skills as a brawler…
Things have been kind of slow around here, so I thought I’d start a series of posts on some of the weirder superhero comics I’ve come across. In recent years, many of these long-forgotten oddities have fallen into the public…
I’ve always been interested in the ways comic books imagined the future, especially when I was living in the “future” in question. As a kid, I read a reprint of an old Captain Marvel (“Shazam” variety) tale that featured a…
I didn’t grow up as a fan of Stan Lee. In fact, it’s fair to say that as a kid, I didn’t “get” Marvel at all. Weaned on Superman and Batman, I viewed superheroes as unflappable paragons of confidence, competence…
One of the key architects of the “Marvel Age of Comics,” Steve Ditko passed away last week at age 90. I was going to write that he “left us,” but for most of his career he wasn’t really among us,…
