What The #$%^--Hasbro And Bulletman?!?

I was reading some old comic books (big surprise)...and sometimes when you do that, you come across an old ad that you must have read 100,000 times as a kid. But the 35+ years of hindsight make you go, "What the #$%^?!?!"

This ad appeared in Marvels cover-dated August 1976...click to embiggen:

Yeah, for some reason Hasbro decided that G.I. Joe needed a bona fide superhero as part of the "Adventure Team," and they came up with...Bulletman??

Fawcett Comics' Bulletman?!?

Well, it's hard to say...he sure looks an awful lot like the Earth-S hero:


And here's a page from the 1976 Hasbro catalog..."Faster than the speed of light"??? Really?

I've done some moderate internet hunting, and I can't find anything one way or the other on whether this is just one of those coincidences, or if Hasbro "borrowed" an existing character to pal around with the Joes.

On the one hand, he's never given a civilian name anywhere that I can find. One the other hand, his costume, while similar to the Golden Age hero, is a bit different, including those metal arms. One the third hand, his powers are pretty similar, aren't they?

Hasbro had done "knock-offs" before. When they failed to acquire the rights to the Six Million Dollar Man, Hasbro quickly came up with "Mike Power, Atomic Man," a doll with mechanical "super-powered" arm, leg and eye, making him part of the Adventure Team. Just a coincidence, really.

DC had licensed the Fawcett characters in 1972, but Bulletman had already slipped into public domain by then, and DC hadn't actually used the character yet at the time of the introduction of G.I. Joe's Bulletman. So perhaps Hasbro felt justified in using the character, or at least a knock-off.

I'm not lawyer enough to know what was going on here, who was in the right, or what any implications might have been. But, in yet-another coincidence (or perhaps in a hastily-planned response), just a couple of months later Bulletman (and many of the other Fawcett heroes) are plastered on the cover of Justice League Of America #135:

By the time 1976 ended, Hasbro ended the G.I. Joe line for a few years.

So, honest coincidence? Sincere belief they had the rights to a public domain idea? Actionable knock-off? I've got no idea.

Oh, by the way, here's a British TV commercial for the Super Adventure Team...note how they never refer to "G.I. Joe"--in England the character was licenced as "Action Man," because England likes to be difficult...

Manic Monday--The Final Fate Of The Tandy Whiz Kids!!

It's no secret that I love the Tandy Whiz Kids, especially when they use Radio Shack computers to kick Superman's ass.

But that was 1980. It's now 1985, and Archie is the publisher these infomercial comics instead of DC. Which brings us to:

And yes, the title of the story actually is...

"The Computers That Said No To Drugs"? Well, that would explain...

OK, OK, sorry, cheap shot.

Anyway, back in 1980, the Whiz Kids got to use the awesome TRS-80, with it's 4K of memory (yes, 4K). Five years later, it's a whole different story:

But wait...there's more!!

And don't forget the porn!! Oh, wait, that'll come later.

And now, Radio Shack's inarguably correct view over what the future of education will be like once classrooms are chock full of (hopefully Tandy) computers:

Yeah, that so happened.

Anyway, this is a story about stopping drug smugglers, which, if you ask me, is a huge step down from Major Disaster...which is a pretty sad statement, if you think about it.

It's a tedious affair, so let's just look at what happens when industrious investigative reporter Judy Baker has infiltrated the bad guys' hideout, and has to--as quickly as possible--get that information to her paper:




Ah, all the joy of rotary dialing!!

Suffice it to say, Baker's 95 step set-up, when she could have just picked up the phone and called the police herself, gets her caught. Not to worry, though--the Whiz Kids have advanced information technology at their disposal!!

Long story short, drug smuggler Ali Gurka (yes, his real name) is thwarted in his scheme to use daisy wheel printer cartons stuffed with drugs, hidden with the rest of the boxes for the Traveling Science And Technology Exhibit, to move his product from city to city. Let's give him his Scooby Doo moment, shall we?

Well, the title of this post sort of promised to reveal the final fate of the Whiz Kids. Well, just look at their home city, as revealed on this banner at the big end-of-issue celebration:

All right, all right, it says Coastal City, not Coast City.

Yes, yes, this series no longer takes place in the DC Universe (...or does it? Prove it isn't so!!)

So what? It's my punchline. And if I want to imagine Alec and Shanna tapping futilely at their Tandy computers, trying to stop Mongul before he atomizes their city, well, I'm kinda of sick that way.

Captain America Missed The 1980 USA-USSR Olympic Hockey Game?!?

I've made no secret of how much I'm bugged by "rolling timelimes," particularly when it comes to Captain America. So this week Marvel decided to throw a little bit of salt in my wounds (from Captain America: Hail Hydra #2):

That's Steve Rogers, shortly after his resurrection, meeting up with Trude Lohn, a WWII German resistance fighter Cap had worked with in the previous issue.

"You slept through the Cold War."

Sigh...so, Jack Kirby lied to us when he had Henry Kissinger giving Cap a secret mission to save the Bicentennial?? Double sigh.

Of course, the other problem with a rolling timeline is, once you start playing fast and loose with fictional history, maybe you start to lose your grip on ACTUAL timelines and history (assuming, of course, you ever had a grip on those to begin with).

"When the wall fell, greater evils rose."

Oh, yeah?

Baader-Meinhoff and the Red Army Faction were founded in 1971, and were most active before the wall fell.

The German People's Union was founded in 1971, and became an electoral political party in 1987...again, before the wall fell.

Of course, maybe their history was different in the Marvel Universe. Maybe there, those groups didn't rise up until after the wall fell, AND they looked to comic-book super-science for "weapons of conquest."

Or maybe scripter Jonathan Maberry just thought the Berlin Wall fell in 1971...

Spoiler Saturday--Don't Tell Notintheface!!

So this week saw the publication the overwhelmingly longish titled Doctor Strange: From The Marvel Vault #1.

It seems that Marvel will be, on an irregular basis, be publishing "lost" stories that never made it into print before, under the "From The Marvel Vault" logo.

This particular story comes from back in 1998, when Roger Stern was writing a new mag called Marvel Universe. It was meant to be an anthology series, "an ongoing monthly series that would explore the farthest corners of Marvel's vast realities" (Stern's own description, from the intro to this particular Doctor Strange story).

A fun idea, but the book only lasted 7 issues, because, as Stern notes, "the series didn't find its audience." Of course, that failure to find an audience may in part be because of some odd and not-likely-to-be-popular storyline choices: the first three issues were an Invaders arc. The next (and final) arc was a four-parter featuring Ulysses Bloodstone and Doctor Druid in the 1950s fighting Atlas-era monsters, Deviants, and some of the Mole Man's creatures. Talk about picking stories with limited appeal...(and come on Roger, after inflicting Doctor Druid on us in the Avengers, you bring him back for more??? What's the deal??)

Anyway, this particular story was to have been issue number 8 of Marvel Universe, a one-off telling the story of how a younger Doctor Strange came into possession of his Greenwich Village abode. (Now, see, if you had done more stories like this one early on, the series might have caught on. I'm just sayin'...)

So, it's a fun enough story, entertaining and well done. But then we meet the story's big bad:


Uh-oh. We'd better cover this up, quick. Because according to Bendis, who is (for some reason) the reigning authority on magicks at Marvel:

That's right, Avengers #504 (2004) rewrote decades of Marvel history, insisting that there was no such thing as chaos magic. Sorry, Mistress Tyanon, you just don't exist. Poof!!

Please don't tell notintheface about this post. It will just depress him further...

Friday Night Fights--Never Say Die Style!!

Hey, you know whom I haven't used yet this bout of Friday Night Fights??

Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung Fu, that's whom!!

Shadow-Slasher, a street-fighter from Hong Kong, has come to England. In order to get the respect he deserves as "the greatest fighter of all time", he feels he must kill Shang-Chi.

After a couple of testing skirmishes, Shadow-Slasher is ready for the main event:










Well, that's it, then...wait...what the???






OK, so that's the end of Shadow-Slasher. I'm sure even Spacebooger would...

Wait. WHAT?????????????????????





OK, finally...is he down??

Nah, he manages to skulk away, and come back on the last two pages for a final confrontation...but don't worry, Shang makes short work of him there.

After all that, Spacebooger demands to know--Why isn't Shang-Chi included in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3? Huh??????

Doug Moench, Mick Zeck and Gene Day bring the pain (again and again and again) in Master Of Kung Fu #98 (1981).

You know you love Shang-Chi, so go over to Spacebooger's crib, and vote for me as the best fight of the week...or Shadow-Slasher will keep coming back for more!!

Reminder: Awaiting The Mega-Rogue

"One thousand years in the future," while restoring the Flash Museum, they will uncover the evidence of Wally West's final fate:

By 2054, constant exposure to the Speed Force will have "evolved" Wally to look like this.

And he will meet his final fate at the hands of:

The Mega-Rogue!! Embittered scientist from Gorilla City who uses all the weapons of the long dead Rogues to hunt down and destroy The Flash! (Note, the story doesn't come out and say it's Grodd...but I'll wager it is...)

Two important lessons to be learned here. #1:

Thanks to those damn sliding time frames, a Wally West "in his seventies" by 2054 must have been born 1975-1984, give or take...which means that when he got his own title as Flash, in 1987, he was a kid, no more than 12 years old.

Which also means that, as groovy as the Bob Haney Teen Titans were, they never fought crime in the 60s or 70s.

I hate sliding time scales.

The second lesson?

Don't bury dead villains with their greatest weapons. Duh!!

(I will concede that Tom Peyer and Steve Lightle might have meant "looted the graves" metaphorically. In which case the lesson is "Don't keep dead villains' greatest weapons just laying around where a crazed super-gorilla can get his damn dirty ape paws on them.")

Anyway, Wally ends up "lashed to a boomerang of mirrors," and "launched to a place outside of time and space, never to return."

Hmm, maybe that would explain his complete absence from any DC comics the past couple of years...

From Flash 80-Page Giant #2 (1999).

The Easiest Question Of The Day

A new Marvel teaser promo has popped up, daring to ask the question...

Well, duh...that's pretty easy to answer:

"The Mystery Men are Marvel's admission that JMS screwed them pretty hard on The Twelve but they still want to use free Golden Age characters, so they're trying again, with hopefully more reliable results."

Also acceptable would be "The Mystery Men project would sure seem to imply that Tom Brevoort was...overly optimistic...when he tweeted that JMS would be finishing The Twelve any time soon."

Hey, Marvel, if you're really desperate for public domain intellectual properties to exploit, I've got a few for you...

For a more serious discussion of The Mystery Men, and who they might be, and who might be doing the book, check out this article...

Great Moments In Incorrect Predictions

It's 1998, and DC writer Mark Millar is sitting down with the Flash to discuss story ideas for an upcoming issue...

Wait, I guess we'd better remind the readers: in the DC Universe, the comic books about DC super-heroes are non-fiction; they recount actual adventures, not "made up" stories, as Millar reminds us...


So, as Millar tries to debrief Wally West (remember him?) about his recent adventures, the subject of how non-fiction comic books dealt with the private lives and secret identities of the heroes comes up:



Oh, if only that's what the Identity Crisis maxiseries had turned out to be about...

Mark Millar (and Ariel Olivetti) toss off a far better plot idea for Identity Crisis than Brad Meltzer could ever come up with in a hundred years Flash 80 Page Giant #1 (1998).