Why Your Parents And Grandparents Won't Have Any Estate To Leave To You!!

Did you ever look at those old Warren horror magazines?Where the last 25+ pages of each issue were solid advertising?

I mean, who could resist this? We weren't made of stone, you know!

And that was before The Empire Strikes Back!!

Close Encounters got some love, too...

And the non-neck-breaking version of Superman was there to suck away our money, too!

Is it any wonder nothing is left for your inheritances?!?

From Eerie #100 (1979)

Whither Muto?!?

You know who once looked like he was headed for the big time?

This guy:

Yup, that's Muto, big-brained menace.

You don't know Muto? Never heard of him? Here's a quick origin:

Now, if you still don't recognize him, that's probably because Muto is from one of those alternate futures:

Muto only cameoed in that issue, in a "photograph" shown to Superman XX, a.k.a. the Superman Of 2965.

But soon enough, he was the star villain of a two-part story in Action Comics!

A year later, he was back, and teamed up with the future Joker!

So--three cover spots within a year? Sharing covers with Brainiac and the Joker?!? That sure seemed like he was ready to become a big-time player at DC.

But it was not to be. Muto only made one more appearance, 5 years later:

Unfortunately, when you're a back-up story, and the lead story is a classic like "Must There be A Superman?," no one is going to remember you.

And that was it--DC cut bait on the whole "Superman XX' idea. Maybe because he shared the same date as the Legion Of Super-Heroes, and DC feared it would be too confusing to have two alternate futures of 2966 (or whatever)? Perhaps that's why, for this final appearance, they changed it to "The Superman Of 2466 (and they changed it to that date in subsequent reprints of the earlier stories...)?

Or maybe DC just decided that it was all a little silly, as they were draged kicking and screaming into the Bronze Age (although that didn't stop later stories like "Superman of 2020"!)

Muto did come back, briefly, during the "Dominus Effect" storyline in 1998:

Now he was Superman 2999...can we get our dates straight, people?!?!?!

I'm not saying Muto was the greatest character DC never uses, or anything like that. But it did seem like he was kind of being built up to bigger things, and then...not so much.

The alternate future shouldn't have been that big a problem, given that a time machine or the Time Trapper or a billion things could have brought him back to the 20th century, or shuttled him over to the Legion's reality.

But I guess that's the life of a comic book villain. 3 years of build-up...only to become a trivia question.

Anyway, Muto. Think about him, won't you?

Manic Monday Triple Overtime--Romance Heroines, Face The Camera!

If you've read enough Joe Simon and Jack Kirby romance comics--and by god, if you haven't, than get reading!!--you've no doubt noticed that they had an unusual introductory motif:

Not in every story. mind you. But in many, many of them...

In the splash panel, our heroine would describe her problem directly to the readers...

 

...ending in giving us the title of the story in big-assed font:

Let's look at some more...

(That's not as creepy as it seems...he was an adult trying to get some education to improve himself...)

No, your sacrifice was your fashion sense, apparently!


No, which of these was the worse problem...loving a woman-hater...

...or loving a mama's boy?

This one is like Kirby and Simon were spying on my love life:

Here's an interesting case...

While most romance stories have us assume that all problems are permanently solved with the last 4 panels of self-realization and revelation, in Toni Benson's case, Kirby and Simon decided that she and her beau weren't out of the woods yet, and published an actual sequel story!

This doesn't exactly fit the motif, but I couldn't resist...

From Young Romance: The Best Of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics (2012)

Manic Monday Bonus--Everyone In The 60s Wanted To Do This Story, Apparently!!

A few months ago, we discussed how remarkably similar the Star Trek episode Miri and a Supergirl story were to each other. They even came out on the same day!!

Well, the coincidences just won't stop. Just over a year later, in the very first appearance of Guy Gardner...

So, wait. Once again, a planet where a disease wiped out all the adults, leaving the children in charge, and they never aged??

Now, as I said, this was a year after the Trek and Supergirl stories, so there was certainly time for their "influence" to have been felt here. And as I noted last time, it's certainly possible that all 3 stories were just tapping into the "don't trust anyone over 30 because adults will destroy the world" and "if kids take over they'll ruin everything because the new generation sucks" zeitgeists that were floating around in the late 60s. Thank gosh that today we're past all that sort of generational blaming, eh?

Anyway, this planet's kids or substantially more destructive than the kids in Miri, because they've also got a healthy dollop of the episode A Taste Of Armageddon:

They don't realize that war and destruction are evil?!? Yup, this must be where DC got the idea that Superman had to snap Zod's neck in order to learn that murder is bad...

Anyway, Guy whips up some space armor to block the kids from mentally dominating him (because the story is borrowing from And The Children Shall Lead, too!), and puts an end to this war.

Mighty convenient.

Hmm, by the way, did you notice the way that robot emphasized that it was a yellow plague that killed all the adults? I wonder why...?

Oh. Man, they just took that yellow thing waaaaay too far, didn't they?

And so...

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention---this story never really happened!! Hal's just watching some magic Guardians machine that shows him what would have happened if Abin Sur's ring had called Guy Gardner instead of him!!

Oh, you goofy Elseworlds stories!! See, it can't be plagiarism if it's an imaginary story!!

From Green Lantern #59 (1968)

Manic Monday--Love, Wakanda Style!!

Tony Stark has flown to Wakanda for the dedication of a new Stark Industries facility there, and well...

...he's still Tony Stark, no matter the country.

Meanwhile, Rhodey, who's still just Tony's pilot at this point, is also having some luck with the Wakandan ladies:

He's just sitting there reading a Playboy, and he still attracts the ladies. How badass is that?!?

Meanwhile, Tony's charms are working, too...

But even though the other Wakandans aren't too happy about Tony makin' time with their ladies...

...they have nothing to worry about, because all is not as it seems:

See, Tony is really there to help T'Challa flush out revolutionaries trying to sabotage Wakanda's vibranium supplies. No time for love!!

Oh, and speaking of revolutionaries...

D'oh!! 

Love is never what it seems in Wakanda. And Rhodey will never be quite the ladies' man that Tony is.

BTW, this story featured the Mandarin using the reanimated corpse of Killmonger to try and destroy all of the metal in Africa, Asia and Europe, because COMICS. That had damned well better be the plot of Black Panther II...

From Iron Man Annual #5 (1982)