And you thought the re-launch of the
X-Men did it first?
Bang-Up Comics was "
All New And Different" 34 years before
X-Men #94!!
Aside from
Cosmo Mann and his Sun-Ray Gun,
and the debut of the famous Lady Fairplay, what did the comic have to offer us? Why not ask...
the comic itself?!?!!?
It's not often that the comic book
itself greets you. That's mighty friendly!
Of course, you might quibble with some of the specific claims he makes:
Looking at the known creators on this book--and this is in no way meant to trash them--few of them were, or would become, "world-famous artists and storytellers."
Sam Hill, Ed Moore, "Garrity," J. Olsen, Rick Yager, Van Sull, Frank Hamel, Charles Brooks, Jack Ryan...not a lot of Simon & Kirby or
Siegel and Shusters there.
Ken Ernst did go on to create
Mary Worth a year later, so there was some relative fame for him on the horizon...
And as to them all being
experts in the field, yeah, right. "
Taking their heroes only to places they themselves have been?" I'm calling a bit of BS on that. Oh, the art is certainly not bad, especially for the first issue of a pop-up
Golden Age anthology title. But, for example, no matter how well drawn his hippopotamus is, J. Olsen's
racist caricature of African tribes and their witch doctors either belies the fact that he'd ever been to "
the deepest jungle," or suggests how
irrelevant any alleged expertise is in making good comics. Just sayin'...
Sadly...
The verdict was that the fans
didn't want a visit from him, because after 3 quarterly (no, not "
every month"--comics have lied to you again, kids!) issues, Bang-Up Comics vanished into the Golden Age ether, as did the publisher,
Progressive Publications, which never published any other comic. Such is life...
Bang-Up Comics #1 was from
1941
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