Introducing (One Version of) Dr. Megalo

A couple of weeks back, I linked to the Boston Comics Roundtable’s “Working Method” experiment, which this month is focused on a script I wrote called “Owl and Pussycat.” Different artists are sharing their character designs, layouts, and even finished pages.

As part of the exercise, I avoided specific details about the characters because I wanted to give the artists the widest latitude. And because the way I pictured those characters wasn’t original at all. When one of the artists, Mike Tomasulo, asked me what I had in mind for the villain Dr. Megalo, I had to admit I was imagining Sivana from the Captain Marvel comics.

But Mike’s question prompted me to push myself a little, and I gave him some more options for Dr. Megalo:

For instance, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in an ugly plaid blazer. An attractive blonde woman whose face has been scarred in a lab accident. A spoiled young prodigy in an oversized lab coat. A Silicon Valley billionaire who hasn't worn a tie since his bar mitzvah.

And the next day I had another idea: basing the design of Dr. Megalo on Edward Lear, author of “The Owl and the Pussycat.” At the Thursday B.C.R. meeting I sketched out that idea. Dan Mazur inked it (while fixing some proportions) with a brush. And finally I added type while trying out Manga Studio.

The Influence of Scalawagons

Scalawagons of Oz might well be John R. Neill’s most influential book. Not because it’s good. In fact, it’s the worst of the three or four Oz books Neill wrote. He was a talented illustrator, but had no apparent sense of narrative structure.

Among Neill’s other Oz books, The Wonder City of Oz was rewritten by a Reilly & Lee editor, and A Runaway in Oz was rewritten (with far more attention to the original story) by Eric Shanower.

Neill’s Lucky Bucky in Oz benefits from a conventional Oz-book narrative: An American child cast into fairyland by random disaster gathers companions and makes his adventurous way to the Emerald City. However, despite having such a simple plot laid out, Neill managed to make his timeline loop back on itself in an impossible way.

Even among that bunch, however, Scalawagons of Oz is the worst. Events happen randomly. Hardly any character is really likable. The storyline, such as it is, accumulates the tension of a sagging strand of chewing gum.

Furthermore, the book introduces mass-manufactured sentient automobiles into Oz, reason enough for some fans to reject the book. While L. Frank Baum established that Oz had electricity, and even some electrical communications systems (controlled by the elite), he made sure not to include modern transportation technology: no trains, steamboats, aeroplanes, or motorized runabouts. Having to travel by foot or Sawhorse guaranteed that people had adventures. Those cars called Scalawagons (Neill tried too hard on his puns) could have ruined life in Oz for readers. Therefore, none of Neill’s official successors as Oz authors, and few of his unofficial ones, have incorporated the Scalawagons into their stories.

So how is that book influential? Because, as David Maxine recently wrote at Hungry Tiger Talk, reading it pushed other authors into writing their own, better Oz books. The first was Rachel Cosgrove Payes, then a housewife biologist, who offered Reilly & Lee The Hidden Valley of Oz in 1951. About a decade later, she embarked on a long career writing other types of novels.

As the second example, David’s posting displays a copy of Scalawagons inscribed by three-time Newbery Honor winner Eloise Jarvis McGraw with these words:

This book…came into the possession of my daughter (and co-author) Lauren Lynn McGraw, who was reading it one day in 1962, looked up at me and said, ”We could write a better Oz book!” Whether we did or not is not for me to say, but we tried

The McGraws’ Merry Go Round in Oz (1963) was one of the best in the series, certainly by conventional measures of writing style.

Finally, a less worthy example of Scalawagons’ influence might be a curious story from Wow Comics, #48 (1946), which shows Mary Marvel fighting robots shaped like Oz characters. Alongside the easily recognized Scarecrow and Tin Woodman is a strange creature called the What-is-it. As David pointed out in reprinting this tale in Oz-Story, #2, that creature looks like the main villain in Scalawagons, published five years earlier and quite possibly still sitting unsold on a bookstore shelf.

Is That Crazy or What?

I was planning to return to the saga of the third Robin when Colleen Coover posted this sketch on her blog. It shows the original Boy Wonder and Mary Marvel, World’s Mightiest Maid.

My favorite detail is the font for the caption, evoking New Yorker cartoons. It fits with the two characters, both created in the 1940s, and their retrospective styling. (Dick has grown up in DC’s current continuity, but Mary grew evil.)

The caption also shows how a one-panel cartoon works differently from the comics form that rests on multiple images. The first line evokes moments in time slightly before this instant, while the rest invite us to imagine what will follow.

Bill Walko’s Hero Business webcomic also addressed the Robin mythos this week. (Hat tip to Titans Tower.)

Holy Moley! I Thought That Robber Looked Familiar!

Universal Hub informed me that today is the sixtieth anniversary of Boston’s Brinks Robbery. Back in 1950, that crime was the largest heist in US history. The gang got away with almost three million dollars.

But what, you might wonder, does that historic event have to do with the usual topics of Oz and Ends? (Not that that’s ever stopped me before.)

The FBI webpage on the Brinks Robbery states that all the robbers wore rubber Halloween masks, including the faces of Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr.

Now that was just wrong.

In addition, the Brinks Robbery—or, to be more exact, the hunt for its perpetrators—inspired a storyline or two in Will Eisner’s Spirit comic.

“Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be...”

In 1939, Roscoe K. Fawcett, a second-generation executive of the Fawcett Publishing Company, looked at the success of adventure comic books and decided it was time to get into the superhero business.

In a 1997 interview by P. C. Hamerlinck, reprinted in The Fawcett Companion, Fawcett recalled:

The surveys showed the greatest comic book readership was among 10 to 12 year old boys. I said, “Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10- to 12-year-old boy rather than a grown man.”

Historians are rightfully dubious about such recollections being complete and accurate since we all try to make sense of the past in our memories, sometimes in ways that serve our desires. Were there indeed market surveys at the time? Was Fawcett accurate in describing exactly how this new hero would appeal to boys?

One element of this quotation leads me to trust the general outlines of Fawcett's story: he acknowledged that he was trying to replicate the success of Superman, like everyone else in comics--though for legal reasons most couldn't acknowledge that fact.

Before the end of 1939, the Fawcett company created some "ashcan" issues of a new comic book, printed without color and hand-bound, to secure its copyrights and to show to potential advertisers. This proto-magazine was titled Flash Comics or Thrill Comics, depending on the copy. The lead hero was named Captain Thunder.

Captain Thunder wore a cape and tight coveralls, not unlike Superman. What set him apart was his alternate identity. Rather than being a mild-mannered reporter, idle playboy, or police detective, in his non-heroic life the superhero was a boy about twelve years old. His tale thus directly addressed the daydreams of the bulk of comic-book readers.

By the time Fawcett published the second issue of its magazine, competing trademarks had forced the company to change several names. The comic book was now called Whiz, though nonetheless labeled issue #2. And Captain Thunder had become Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel was a quick and lasting success, outselling all other superheroes in the mid-1940s and inspiring several spin-offs. The magazines was still doing relatively well over a decade later, when Fawcett decided to walk away from the declining comic-book business to settle a long lawsuit from DC over--what else?--having plagiarized Superman.

Back in late 1939, the executives at DC Comics probably saw the same market data that pushed Roscoe Fawcett into asking for a comic-book hero who was also a kid. Some folks at DC might even have gotten a peek at the "ashcan" story of Captain Thunder. In any event, that was the market environment in which Robin made his debut in the April 1940 issue of Detective Comics.

Judge Hand in the Land of Superheroes

I was intrigued by the opening of an essay by Peter Coogan in A Comics Studies Reader, just published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book says this article was excerpted from Coogan's book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, which is less widely available--perhaps because it comes from a publisher called Monkeybrain Books. (Just a hunch.)

The essay starts this way (at least as the Reader presents it):

In his 1952 ruling that Wonder Man copied and infringed upon Superman, Judge Learned Hand provided a succinct definition for the superhero. The characteristics of mission, powers, and identity are central to Hand's determination that Wonder Man copied Superman.

Legal scholars often call Hand the greatest American jurist never to serve on the Supreme Court. He was especially influential in defining the law of intellectual property, a topic that came up a lot in his New York circuit. The thought that Hand had a hand in providing a legal definition of a superhero--on the level of circuit-court precedent--was intriguing.

But the date nagged at me; the Wonder Man lawsuit, I recalled, occurred early in the history of superhero comics. And when I looked into this statement further, it turned out to be wrong in other ways. It mixes up two separate suits involving Superman, misstates Hand's role, and reads too much into the pertinent ruling.

The first suit was filed in 1939 by DC Comics soon after Fox Comics published the first Wonder Man story, commissioned from Will Eisner and his studio. DC claimed that the story infringed on its copyrights for the early Superman stories. Fox responded that both characters were based on older, more general heroic archetypes, so there was no copyright. Don Markstein's Toonopedia describes the proceedings this way: "Fox carefully instructed Eisner on how to testify. Instead, Eisner told the truth," which was that Fox had indeed asked him to come up with a hero as much like Superman as possible.

Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in favor of DC, and Fox appealed. In 1940, a panel of three judges upheld the decision. One of those circuit-court judges was Learned Hand. But the judge who wrote that 1940 decision was actually Learned's cousin, Augustus Noble Hand.

Learned Hand returned to the field of superhero law in 1952, at the end of a lawsuit between DC and Fawcett over whether a more successful comic-book hero, Captain Marvel, infringed on the Superman copyright. A lower court had ruled that the Big Cheese would have done so except that DC had made a legal blunder in not registering some Superman comic strips with the US Copyright Office. Hand reversed that decision to declare that Captain Marvel was a copyright infringement anyway.

So, to return to the quotation above, the Wonder Man suit was in 1939-40, not 1952, and Learned Hand didn't write the decision. Which brings me to the final point: that decision really didn't address what defines a superhero.

The judges were ruling on a narrow question: Was the Wonder Man story in Wonder Comics, #1, an infringement on DC's copyrights for Action Comics, #1-12, featuring the Man of Steel? They saw several points of similarity:

The attributes and antics of "Superman" and "Wonderman" are closely similar. Each at times conceals his strength beneath ordinary clothing but after removing his cloak stands revealed in full panoply in a skintight acrobatic costume. The only real difference between them is that "Superman" wears a blue uniform and "Wonderman" a red one.

Each is termed the champion of the oppressed. Each is shown running toward a full moon "off into the night", and each is shown crushing a gun in his powerful hands. "Superman" is pictured as stopping a bullet with his person and "Wonderman" as arresting and throwing back shells. Each is depicted as shot at by three men, yet as wholly impervious to the missiles that strike him.

"Superman" is shown as leaping over a twenty story building, and "Wonderman" as leaping from building to building. "Superman" and "Wonderman" are each endowed with sufficient strength to rip open a steel door. Each is described as being the strongest man in the world and each as battling against "evil and injustice."

If those traits actually defined a superhero, then comic-book heroes who don't run toward a full moon, who are shot at by more or less than three men, or who have powers other than being the strongest man in the world wouldn't qualify. And the ruling didn't touch on other qualities Coogan's essay says are distinctive ingredients of a superhero, such as a "codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, characters, powers, or origin."

So the essay opening that intrigued me instead reinforced my feeling that research in this field needs to be more rigorous and less wishful. Learned Hand's contribution to the definition of a superhero is as much a myth as Elvis Presley's imitation of Captain Marvel, Jr., or DC planning to cancel Batman in the early 1960s.

Captain Marvel Takes Off Again

Readers eagerly awaiting the next volume of Jeff Smith's Bone comics as reissued by Scholastic should check out the big comics project he turned to next after completing Bone in its original, black and white form.

It's Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, created for DC Comics. This volume retells the origin and an early adventure of Captain Marvel, as well as his sister Mary Marvel. It also picks up elements of a 1940s Captain Marvel story arc, a rare multi-volume story from American comic books' "Golden Age." However, readers don't have to know anything about Captain Marvel before picking up this book.

Like Bone, Smith's Shazam! is both layered and easy to follow, poking at deep ideas but fun for all ages. The art reflects his personal style, which is in between the very simple cartoons that C. C. Beck used for the original Captain Marvel stories and the "default style of the superhero mainstream." Though it changes some elements of the Big Red Cheese's mythology, such as making Tawny Tiger a shape-changing ifrit instead of a tiger in a business suit, Smith sticks to the simple values beneath any good Shazam story.

For readers wanting more after this, Judd Winick and Josh Middleton's take on the first meeting of Captain Marvel and Superman, Superman/Shazam!: First Thunder, has some of the same simplicity and a few very good moments, but less depth in the end.