The end is near.
By this I mean that I'm entering the home stretch of this year's six week long experiment in reprinting old diaries as I lurch grimly toward Kalamazoo. The paper is partially done, I'm tearing my hair out by chunks, and the Double Felinoid are avoiding me lest I spontaneously combust and deprive them of their major source of food, water, and heat source on cold nights. Exhaustion, comfort food, and staring dazedly out the window of my car as I drive to and from my day job are now the norm, and I'm hoping to God my paper is written in something that approaches English. That the said paper might, just might, make sense is not yet apparent.
The one exception to this dreary grind is my visit to the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex to see Avengers: Age of Ultron last night. This intimate film about a lonely robot that only wishes to execute its programming to protect the world by exterminating the human species, was the sort of warm, soothing, comfort flick that allowed me to relax and de-stress even better than a Calgon bubble bath, and -
Oh, for crying out loud, who am I fooling? Age of Ultron was EXPLOSIONS and ACTION and hilarious dialogue and great special effects and Chris Evans' GLORIOUS BUTTOCKS and Jeremy Renner's ARMS and Scarlett Johansson's EYES and Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo DOING SCIENCE and Chris Hemsworth's HAIR and EVIL KILLER ROBOTS TRYING TO KILL EVERYONE and the Avengers trying to pick up Thor's hammer and failing mightily and everything I could possibly want except a cameo by Captain Marvel and that's okay since her movie will be out in a couple of years and CAPTAIN AMERICA WEARING A VERY TIGHT T-SHIRT AS HE RIPS A LOG IN HALF LENGTHWISE, LENGTHWISE I TELL YOU!!!!!!!! and -
Ahem.
Yes, I'm a geek. Sue me.
There were some flaws - there was almost too much plot, a couple of twists came out of left field, and one or two sequences that made me blink at why they were included, particularly a gratuitous romance - but I liked what I saw enough that I will see this lovely art house flick at least once (or twice, or thrice, or whatever comes after that) more before it finally heads to DVD/Blu-Ray sometime before the 2016 Presidential primaries. For right now, though, I need to focus on my paper. At the same time I can't get comics off my mind, which is why the next two weeks of Research Rewinds will be devoted to funny books.
The first of these installments is a look at a creative team whose work cheered the home front during World War II, allowed millions of little boys to dream about fighting the Krauts, and led directly to me hyperventilating in the theater at the aforesaid scene of Captain America preparing for a second career as an axe-less lumberjack (and let me just say that if Chris Evans does not get the Oscar for Best Log Ripping Scene in Cinematic History, there is no justice). Silly names, child soldiers fighting for freedom instead of crazed warlords, wooden shoes, and tropes that show up again and again - come below the 0.5 Orange Kaiju for a little diary from last year as we all cry
FORWARD, BOY COMMANDOS!
I always wanted a posse.
I don't mean that I wanted to be part of a collection of grim, lean, hard-bitten cowboys ridin' the range lookin' for some damn varmint who'd robbed the bank/smashed up the saloon/robbed the train/abducted a pretty girl/stolen the cattle/run off with a soiled dove/etc. etc. etc. Nor did I want to be part of the right-wing militia movement that drew upon misunderstood American and British law to serve its own warrants/issue its own license plates/terrorize actual genuine law enforcement officers and judges/engage in behavior that led to them being besieged for several months by the FBI/CIA/SHIELD/NSA/Deuxieme Bureau/MI 5 6 7 cosmic lemniscate/etc. etc. etc. I didn't even want to be part of a murderous Jamaican drug gang/political party enforcement apparatus.
No, I wanted a posse. A group of buddies who'd stick by me through thick and thin, whether it meant driving our teachers nuts (especially Miss Galetovich, the fourth grade teacher with the towering black ringlets and the nasty disposition), hanging out after school, playing with our respective pets, climbing trees, or having the sort of exciting but not really dangerous ADVENTURES that end with everyone safe at home having a cup of hot chocolate and then going to bed. That kind of posse. You know. The happy kind.
Alas, this didn't happen when I was in young enough to appreciate such simple delights. Between frequent moves, a vocabulary that would have put the average college student to shame, a preference for show tunes and classics over rock, and a prickly streak that would have done a fretful porpentine proud, I simply never had enough friends at one time to have a posse.
I came close in elementary school - someday I'll tell you about the Rain and Shine Club I had with Lily and Candy and Connie, my best friends on the block - but then Dad got a new job and we moved to Virginia. There I ran head on into the fact that I was so Northern I'm amazed my locker wasn't plastered with Confederate battle flags and miniature Kentucky colonels tricked to yell "Yankee, go home." Add in that we didn't even go to church on Sundays, and it's no wonder I didn't really accumulate a pack of besties, let alone have ADVENTURES.
It was very disheartening.
By the time I hit high school I'd basically given up. I was the class feminist, the class intellectual, and the class science fiction fan, and if this meant I had no dates, few friends, and nothing that remotely suggested a posse, big whoopee-ding-dongs. If that was how my life was destined to spin out, well, at least I'd read and understood Candide at the age of sixteen, which was more than the average graduate student could boast. I was fine, I really was, and if the part of me that longed for a sister was equally unhappy about my posse-less existence, that part would have to lump it. I wasn't going to give up my books, my politics, or my recording of Gustav Leonhardt playing Bach's Italian Concerto just to fulfill a childhood dream.
This somewhat pathetic state of affairs might have continued indefinitely if a miracle hadn't occurred when I was a few months short of eighteen:
I got into college.
Not only that, I got into a college with a million books, four separate libraries, and over 2,000 other equally bright, equally advanced, equally unusual girls. Here was the chance to make friends, friends who would like me even though I didn't care about boys, or makeup, or silly romantic movies, or any of other things that teenage girls were supposed to swoon over. I'd be among girls - women - who, even if they hadn't read what I'd read and could sing the entire Tom Lehrer songbook, would at least tolerate me when I did.
I could, at long, long last, finally have a posse. Even better, we might actually have the occasional ADVENTURE.
Faithful readers of these diaries know full well what happened next. I met girls (and a couple of boys) who not only didn't mind me caroling about the joys of poisoning pigeons in the park, but would actually join in. Shoshanna loved Star Trek every bit as much as I did, plus owned a fine collection of Remo Williams adventure novels. Susanna introduced me to the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes, and anyone who's read my sig line knows what happened next. Beata trusted me enough to take care of her during the Great Petrus Christus Incident of 1981, and Walter let me edit an early short story for a fanzine. We went to movies, we went to conventions, we slaughtered peeps, we laughed and cried and fought and teased, and by the time we graduated a few years later, we were all connected pretty much for life.
We even, though I didn't realize it until much, much later, had a few ADVENTURES.
The need for a band of friends, a group of people you can be yourself around and know that they won't run screaming into the night, is pretty much universal. This may be why it's such a common device in fiction; for every loner who drifts from town to town, exploit to exploit, there must be half a dozen who have a posse of friends/hangers on/allies/specialists who are there no matter the danger, toil, or tears. Whether Shakespeare's band of brothers, the St. Grottlesex Old Girls doing battle against oppressive factory owners in sweatshop-era New York, or a band of oddly assorted beings a-questing for the Dingus of Ultimate Destruction, posses having ADVENTURES are everywhere.
That includes, of course, that country we explore each week together, Badbookistan.
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Tonight I bring you three separate posses, all distinct, all entertaining, and all created by the same two men. Exciting, hyper-patriotic, and unintentionally hilarious, these three groups of daring, dashing youngsters were perfect for their time and audience. They also expressed the love of country that was so unabashed, and so heartfelt, and so common to Americans regardless of social class, political views, or ethnicity back in those days when it looked like democracy itself was on the line:
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby are legends. Born, respectively, as Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg around the time of the War to End All Wars, they created or co-created some of the best known and most influential characters in comic book history. Just look at this list of comics they worked on, either together or with other people:
Captain America
The Fantastic Four
The Hulk
Iron Man
Magneto
The X-Men
Black Panther
The Inhumans
Galactus and the Silver Surfer
The Eternals
Ant-Man
Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos
Wasp
Ronan the Accuser
Rawhide Kid
The Watcher
Blue Bolt
Prez
Sandman (Golden Age)
Vision (Golden Age)
Brother Power the Geek
The Fighting American
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.....
Add in their joint work on humor comics, romance comics, and kiddie books, Simon's solo work on Mad competitor Sick, and Kirby's role in shaping the "house look" of Marvel's characters between the early 1960's and the late 1990's, and it's safe to say that between them, Simon and Kirby were two of the most influential men in funny book history.
They also created not one...not two...but three separate posses of heroic youngsters, two of whom actively fought the Axis while the third fought evil on the mean streets of Metropolis:
The Young Allies - the 1940's were the era of the kid sidekick, when it was considered perfectly acceptable for an adult man to recruit an adolescent boy/late teen to be his partner in crime fighting, ass kicking, and assorted mayhem. The most famous was of course Robin, Batman's best pal and Bruce Wayne's ward, but there were many others: Wonder Girl (actually a teenage version of Wonder Woman), Speedy (who was an archer, not super-fast), Kid Flash (who was super-fast, not an archer), Sandy the Golden Boy, and Toro (the Human Torch's ward, and oh dear googly-moogly how I would have loved to have seen the legal paperwork since the Torch was an android), to name just a few. Even older sidekicks, like Doiby Dickles (Green Lantern's sidekick, and no, I am not making this name up), had a distinctly adolescent feel to them no matter their alleged age.
And then there was Bucky Barnes, Captain America's "young ally."
In the original 1941 Timely Comics, Bucky was the annoying little "camp mascot" who walked in on Steve Rogers while he was changing out of his spangly costume into Army fatigues. This being a Golden Age comic, Steve immediately decides that the best way to preserve his secret identity is not to send the brat off to stay with relatives in Laboratory, Pennsylvania (a real place), but to give him a lame costume, teach him some boxing/gymnastic moves, and take him along on missions. This he proceeded to do for the rest of the war, and if there is a weirder recurring trope in the Golden Age than Steve's continuing threats to spank Bucky for disobeying orders, I really, really do not want to know it.
Fortunately Bucky was later retconned to be sixteen, not twelve, and a commando in his own right. He then became the Winter Soldier, but since that's a Comic Book So Good It's a Classic, that's a diary for someone else to write.
For reasons that probably made sense in 1941 but don't in 2014, Bucky was almost as popular as Captain America. Soon Simon and Kirby had decided that he deserved his own book, and had him leading a multiracial posse of twelvish kids named "Knuckles," "Tubby," "Whitewash," and "Jeff" (his real name). Originally called "The Sentinels of Liberty," these brave lads were quickly renamed "The Young Allies" and went after the Red Skull in their very first issue. Kirby and Simon were in the process of decamping to DC for more money (see below) by then, so most of their issues were written by a young Stan Lee and pencilled by a rotating cast of artists.
The Young Allies, who eventually included Toro (who also worked with Bucky, Cap, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch in the Invaders, and aren't you glad that Golden Age comics basically ignored little niceties like time, space, 1940's travel time, and logic?), lasted twenty issues. Along the way they fought the Axis all over the world, had ADVENTURES, and eventually beat up not just Hitler the way Cap did when he wasn't threatening to tan Bucky's rear oh god that sounds so filthy, but Mussolini AND Tojo.
Eventually the Young Allies were retconned to be, like Bucky, teenagers who were close to enlistment age but were deliberately depicted as children in wartime comics for propaganda purposes. Also like Bucky they're all still alive, although without the brainwashing, amputated limbs, and decades as a Soviet assassin. Whether they still have ADVENTURES is unknown, although if they've ended up in the same nursing home it's quite possible.
the Newsboy Legion - despite the runaway success of Captain America, which was selling over a million copies a month, Simon and Kirby were not happy at Timely Comics. They felt hampered by the editors, they felt stiffed by the money men, and they felt stifled by the overall atmosphere of the place. Add in that both men were convinced that when war came they would be drafted anyway and thus wished to make as much money as possible while they could, and it's little surprise that they left for rival publisher DC after less than a year.
DC was pleased to have them (and was willing to pay them $500 a month apiece, or about $200 more than they were getting from Timely), even if they weren't exactly sure how to use them at first. This changed by April of 1942, when Simon and Kirby introduced the Newsboy Legion.
The titular "legion" was a "kid gang" of newsies blessed with monikers like "Big Words" (for his vocabulary), "Gabby" (who never shut up), and "Scrapper" (the tough kid). Based in "Suicide Slum," an inner city neighborhood in New York (later retconned to be Metropolis), these boys, led by the imaginatively named "Tommy Tompkins" (his real name) got into scrapes, fought evil gang leaders and scientists, and (sometimes) sold newspapers. A recurring gag was that they were frequently assisted by non-powered superhero The Guardian (a civic minded policeman who used his fists and a shield to fight crime, and where oh where have we seen that in Simon and Kirby's work before, hm?), whom they suspected was their actual legal guardian, Jim Harper..and they were right, but this was never actually confirmed during the run of the comic.
Eventually the Newsboys grew up and had sons who were remarkably like them, both in personality and in the ability to get into trouble. This shows that the propensity to have ADVENTURES is hereditary, at least in the comics, which is great for publishers who wish to have the said ADVENTURES take place in real time rather than the weird little bubble that allows a hero to age only ten years despite being bitten by a radioactive aardvark before John-John Kennedy finished teething.
The Boy Commandos - in addition to the Newsboys, Simon and Kirby created a second "kid gang" for DC. The Boy Commandos, who started out as "kid mascots" on military bases in Britain (and where oh where have we seen that in Simon and Kirby's work before, hm?), were a group of barely adolescent hooligans who followed their gallant adult leader, Captain "Rip" Carter, into battle against the evil forces they called "Ratzies."
Unlike the Newsboys or the Young Allies, who were all Americans, only "Brooklyn" (not his real name, which was never revealed) was from the land of the red, white, and blue. The other Commandos were allegedly French (Alfred Chavard, although he's called "Pierre" on the splash page of the very first issue), Dutch (Jan Haasan, who insisted on wearing bright yellow clogs into battle, which were ever so superior to actual combat boots), and English (Alfie Twidgett, and yes, that's his real name). Occasionally assisted by Brooklyn's cat, this quartet regularly went on highly secret missions in the ETO (and very occasionally in the Pacific and the Far East, never mind the travel time involved), always succeeded, and seemed remarkably unscathed by the mayhem they caused and saw.
One might think that the idea of a bunch of teenagers running around a battlefield would not precisely be the most realistic premise on which to base a comic. Add in the Commandos' peculiar fashion choices (including a bowler hat and a turtleneck for Brooklyn, which would show up again twenty years later when Kirby co-created Dum-Dum Dugan for Marvel), the insanity of a long-haired Dutch kid banging around the battlefields in yellow clogs, and the all but unintelligible dialect spouted by Brooklyn and Alfie, and the resulting books are some of the most unintentionally hilarious comics from the war.
None of this prevented the Boy Commandos from being a huge success. The book was soon selling nearly as many copies as Batman and Superman, more than justifying the vast sums DC had offered Simon and Kirby to lure them away from Timely. Unfortunately, popularity had its drawbacks; DC, convinced that Simon and Kirby would be drafted, ordered them to produce a year's worth of comics in advance so the series would not be interrupted if its creators went marching off to war. This wasn't necessarily a problem for Simon, who only had to write the scripts, but churning out that much art compelled Kirby to hire future comics legends Gil Kane, Curt Swan, and Carmine Infantino to help him with the inking and penciling.
As difficult as this was for everyone involved, the editors at DC were right. Kirby was drafted in 1943 and ended up in the infantry, where he nearly lost both legs to frostbite. Simon enlisted in the Coast Guard and spent the war years in Washington, DC, where he eventually created a recruitment comic called Adventure is My Career. Both men survived the war, both married and had families, and they continued to collaborate for many years to come.
The Boy Commandos also survived the war, although the non-American members were gradually replaced by Americans named "Tex" (probably not his real name) and Percy Clearweather (his real name, and if you think he's a nearsighted genius, give yourself a No-Prize and the a tip o' the butterfly hennin). Eventually it was revealed that Andre/Pierre grew up and became the head of French intelligence, Alfie grew up and became a successful businessman with the assistance of his daughter "Twiggie" (possibly someone else's real name), and Brooklyn (whose real name was Dan Turpin) became a police officer in Metropolis.
Whether they sometimes got together to reminisce about the good old days of shooting Ratzies and blowing stuff up with grenades is unknown, but it's hard to believe that they wouldn't. Even if they didn't actually get to beat up Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo like the Young Allies, the Commandos still had a hell of a war.
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Did you ever want a posse? Did you belong to a posse? Were you a Boy Commando? Did you collect scrap metal because the Young Allies told you to? Have you ever wanted to beat up Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo? Did you beat up one of the above? Now is the time to let us all know about your adventures, so spill.....
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