Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
Meanwhile -- over on the Marvel Comics side of the street -- an altogether different sort of examination, re: the travails of super-powered teen-dom, was taking place on a monthly basis.
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN established practically every cardinal "rule" we now think of as being part and parcel of Comics Done the Marvel Way. And while it's certainly true enough that -- these days -- "the Marvel Way" is scarcely the sort of compliment it used to be... one can scarcely blame Peter Parker (Spider-Man's non-spandexed persona) for that.
The nearly ritualistic beating of breast and making of moan which has come to caricaturize (rather than characterize) the Marvel heroes of today...? Done first (and better) in those first five, six years of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN.
Sub-plots, sub-sub-plots, and sub-sub-sub plots allowed to run so rampant, they very nearly become the literary equivalent of kudzu...? Been there; done that; bought the t-shirt. AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, again.
Nearly every element of comics storytelling held today(rightly or wrongly; often the latter, as it turns out) as being chiefly the province of those early Marvel comics -- and marvelous and fine those comics were, too; let us never forget that, please -- made its Stan Lee-approved debut in the pages of SPIDER-MAN.
For this young (at the time) reader, however -- the real allure(s) of early issues of SPIDER-MAN were: a.) glorious, evocative artwork by Steve Ditko (and, immediately after him, John Romita, Sr.); and: b.) a gallery of recurring nemeses as thrilling and chilling as those in any comics canon other than DC's Batman. If a hero (as I've heard it stated, on more than one occasion) is best measured by the mettle of his foemen... then Spider-Man deserved every inch of his reputation as Marvel's single greatest hero.
One of the most fascinating of these was one Wilson Fisk, esq. -- better known (in certain circles) as "the Kingpin."
Easily the most ruthless and machiavellian crime boss ever introduced in any mainstream comics title -- and yet, paradoxically, the Marvel villain most given to strict adherence to a personal "code of honor" as real and self-defining as that of any super-hero's -- the glacial, dignified Kingpin quickly became something of a "fan favorite" amongst the Marvel Comics partisans of the period. A gargantuan individual, was he... with similarly substantial appetites (both culinary and otherwise) which drove him on and relentlessly on, in much the same fashion that piranha are compelled to devour, even when their hunger is already sated.
.If, over the years, Spider-Man's authors have piled the "teen angst" chits so high at somepoints that the character bypassed the "Hamlet" guidepost and veered dangerously close into "Jesus Christ" territory -- none of his costumed super-peers trusted him; out of costume, he was a social pariah; newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson [see accompanying cover] kept trying to whip up anti-spider lynch mob sentiment; he had no money; and yaddayaddayadda, until one was finally driven to wonder if maybe he wasn't wearing that tres nifty costume in order to hide the tell-tale evidence of martyr's stigmata -- it was, nonetheless, a formula which worked and worked, with machine-like dependability, for a good many years before finally beginning to falter.
He was about as conceptually far removed, in fact, from a character by the name of Hal Jordan -- journeying back over towards DC Comics for a moment -- as it was possible to get.
Whereas a young Peter
Parker found himself abruptlybequeathed
with unasked-for powers and abilities which served only to complicate his life
further, over the years... test pilot Hal Jordan, by way of comparison, received
his own similar anointing almost as if it were a form of communion, if not divine
benediction outright. Selected out of the entirety of Earth's population
by a dying alien member of the interstellar "Green Lantern Corps" -- think of
them as a galactic version of the National Guard, if you like -- to receive
sole custodianship of a "power ring" capable of doing practically anything and
everything, he quickly became the comic book equivalent of Mallory's
Sir Lancelot; battling tirelessly on the side of the angels because he
was practically -- by nature and inclination -- one of them himself.
In simpler terms: whereas Marvel's Peter Parker was comicdom's most reluctant conscriptee... DC's Hal Jordan was an eager (and able) minute man.
The GREEN LANTERN series of the Silver Age -- as meticulously plotted by writer John Broome, and rendered by penciling legend Gil Kane -- is universally regarded as one of the artistic highwater marks of the medium. The stories -- at once both fanciful and yet suffused with the sort of verisimilitude which is the hallmark of the very best science fiction -- bear up as well under scrutiny, today, as any of 'em.
Many of said tales revolved around Hal Jordan's seemingly innate sense of honor and super-hero noblesse oblige: to his fellow man in general; and to the Green Lantern Corps (of which organization, by the way, he quickly became a shining exemplar). Playing him against such cracked mirror images as the super-powered foreign monarch calling himself "Sonarr," whose own actions were fueled by an overbearing and misplaced sense of nationalistic patriotism; and "Sinestro," a former member of the Corps turned interstellar rogue, Broome (among others) pounded away at the leitmotif until it became the series' own peculiar and particular version of "The Anvil Chorus."
Sadly, the tale of Hal Jordan is not one with the happy ending merited by so well-executed and iconic a hero. His comic taken over years later by hamfisted and wrongheaded "creators" of substantially lesser stripe than the aforementioned Broome and Kane, the character was grossly re-written -- against all previously published example, mind -- as a monomaniacal lout and madman-in-waiting, and transformed into one of the dullest and least convincing super-villains in recent memory. He was then summarily "replaced" (if the literary equivalent of a Twinkie, say, may be said to "replace" steak tartar) with a younger and (ostensibly) "hipper" Green Lantern, without one-tenth of Hal Jordan's well-fleshed-out characterization; the current GREEN LANTERN series is, sadly, all but unreadable as a result.
DC Comics In the 1970's: PAGE ONE
Golden Age DC Heroes In the Silver Age: PAGE ONE "MORE COMIC BOOKS," YOU SAY...?
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