Sugar & Spike.......Really!?!

Review by Darryl. 

Amongst a huge stack of digests (all Archie, sadly),  my trained eye spotted two (!) "The Best of DC"!  My heart skipped a beat in excitement. I had been to probably 30 thrift stores since my last find and I was starting to get a little discouraged.  Earlier in the day I had spoken to Dan and expressed the dry spell I was in.  He offered encouragement like, "The next BIG find is just around the corner, etc" and we reminisced about the huge number of digests DC had in fact published.  In almost a 'throwaway' comment Dan mentioned Sugar and Spike.  It was one of those throwaway comments like, "If we find any Sugar and Spike digests, we should throw them away, because that would be like the least appealing of all the DC Digests to find etc".  Well, if it ain't Sugar and Spike at the next store I visit, this time a used book shoppe.  My heart sunk just as it would've back in the early eighties had I saved my money, went to the corner store in hopes to find a Superman or Batman comic only to find the shelf bare, except for Sugar and Spike.

 I'm not even going to attempt to review the first "Bernie The Brain" story or the Halloween Special with that dastardly character "The Octopus", it's low rent humor, you either enjoy it or you don't.  I don't think telling our fine readers about the synopsis of these adventures will properly bridge the intellectual mastery that is the basis for many of these stories.  Sugar & Spike is to be read and enjoyed at the beach or in the car on the way to the beach.

The letters to the editor however proved too entertaining not to share.  Here's one that speaks volumes as to the state of the comic book industry in the early '80's.

Dear Editor,
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN,
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN,
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN.
     Well, you asked for it so here goes,
First, about the sixth annual YEAR'S BEST COMICS STORIES, this is the sixth
time in a row that Wonder Woman has not made it. Last year I was sure she'd get
in with the story from WW #310, but she didn't.  I wrote a very angry letter pointing out the injustice,
but I didn't send it because I knew "they'd" pay no mind.  Well now you've asked for input about the digests.  Thank you.  I will forgive the past injustices against Wonder Woman if you will please do a digest of Wonder Woman stories.
Since the digests were started, WW hs never gotten one to herself.  Superman, LSH, JSA and JLA have several.  Jonah Hex, Green Lantern, Flash and Batman have all had digests, but never Super-Heroine Number One.

Why has she been slighted so many times?  In fact, she has never had a special or annual.  Please, oh, please, will you do a Wonder Woman digest?  And could the stories be old ones?  However, don't print any of the stories that were use in the WW book by Tempo Books in 1978.  And please don't print any stories from the time WW had lost her memory and was with I Ching.  I haven't read any of those stories, they were a little before my time.  Stories from issues 209 to 222 would be nice and also stories from before WW lost her memory.  The stories should be ones that built up her legend, show her intelligence, wisdom, caring and sense of humor.
An absolute must is to use her original logo.  It looks bold, yet feminine.  It is a much better logo than the current one or the one before the current logo.  Editor, this Wonder Woman fan would greatly appreciate your efforts in making a WW digest that all may enjoy and that does her justice. Please will you grant me one wish?

Sincerely,
Elaine
Dade City, FL

P.S.
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN,
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN,
WONDER WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN.

Here is the response from the Editor,

Gee, Elaine, I'd love to grant your wish,...but before you start calling me names, let me point to a survey conducted by one of our rival companies.  They asked the usual questions about stories, favorite characters, etc, but a vital question was: Are you male or female?  Astonishingly, 95% of those asked checked off: Male.  Boys do not pick heroines as role models.  We're hoping more girls would begin reading comics in the future.  In the meanwhile, I have some good news.  WW Editor Al Gold informs me that he has chosen "Night of Many Wonders" (WW #323) as a candidate for the next YBCS.

LMAO!!!

A "Sensational" Find! Famous First Edition C-30: Sensation Comics #1(Reprint)

Reviewed by Dan

In reading the letters page of in his Sugar and Spike digests, Darryl shared with me an obnoxious letter from a fan that was printed in that digest imploring DC to offer more Wonder Woman reprints.  Well, if that fan is still around, we here at DC Digests and Tabloids aim to please!  Our first tabloid find was a copy of Famous First Edition C-30 (Sensation Comics #1).  While driving north to the lake, my daughter Ana and I decided to stop at the Hwy 400 flea market and look what we found - a low-grade copy of FFE C-30 for a mere four bucks!

 Now, before I proceed to review the Wonder Woman story, I want to make short digression about low-grade condition comics.  As you can see, this copy has a rolled spine, lots of soiling on the cover, and dog-eared corners.  But we here at DC Digests and Tabloids LOVE low-grade copies of our favourite comics! Now, you might ask "why?".  We believe the craze for mint condition books is over-rated.  We won't even address the absurdity of locking up a comic book in a hard plastic case with a professionally designated grade.  Comics are for reading.  Low-grade copies have been read, re-read, and loved by kids and adults alike.  We love a comic that has a reading history.  Someone sure has enjoyed this old tabloid. That makes us happy.  And let me tell you, we are enjoying it, too. So bring on the low-grade comics! They are also affordable.  Here at DC Digests and Tabloids, we have an informal policy not to pay much over ten bucks for anything we review here.  Let's just enjoy reading comics and not get all caught up in the politics and business of industry!  Here endeth the digression.
 

 One of the really great things about these Famous First Editions is that they are an exact reprint (except oversized) of the original comic.  There are all kinds of stories of unscrupulous dealers removing the outer covers and duping unsuspecting collectors or investors into thinking they were purchasing the originals.  Have any of these stories ever been verified, or are they only urban legends? 

The inside of the original cover presents this special message to young readers from managing editor of the All-American line, M.C. Gaines.  It features the usual publishing bravado about how hard they worked to get this new comic just right.  Yah, right.  When we get to the Mr. Terrific story (below) they could have offered the artist a few more months of anatomy lessons.

And just in case you are thinking of putting this comic down, don't think about it because the doubly-inspiring Gene Tunney gives it two thumbs up...

This little advertisement for All-Star #8 serves as a disclaimer that we are getting a story that starts "in medias res."  If you want Wonder Woman's origin, too bad, you're not going to read it here if you missed All-Star #8.  Suckers.

Here is a portion of the splash page. As a kid, I really disliked Harry Peters' Wonder Woman art, but as an adult I find it quite charming. His line had a swirl and a flair to it that really distinguished him from most other Golden Age DC artists.  His Wonder Woman is quite sexy and alluring and his thugs are stylish caricatures.  He was really quite skilled at contorting the human figure..

Our story begins with Princess Diana bringing the rescued Steve Trevor back to America from Paradise Island in her "transparent" (not yet to be called "invisible") plane.

Here we also see the origin of Steve calling Wonder Woman "Angel", a motif that lasted many years

Of course no man has ever called her beautiful before; she has spent her whole life amongst Amazons!  Sheesh.  She may be beautiful like an angel, but in these early stories, WW is none-to-bright!  This assertion is further proved by the fact that she has an inexplicable need to hide her invisible plane.  Go figure. 

She is smart enough, though, to figure out that she might not blend into the crowds in Washington, D.C., even draped in the American flag!  However, the problem that she will need to overcome is that American women apparently just have too much material in their dresses. 

Thankfully, though, the Church ladies league of decency and propriety is patrolling the streets to protect us against scantily clad women like our favourite Amazon princess!

But before the guardians of human decency can do anything, a robbery unfolds and Wonder Woman shows her stuff!

The thing that is always analyzed in these early Wonder Woman stories is the question of whether Wonder Woman is a sort of model empowered woman, or whether this is all just about male fantasies of submitting to a dominant woman.  The above panels reveal a bit of both, I think.  Consider especially the final panel in which WW stands triumphantly on the chest of her fallen foe, her shoulders thrust back and her chest thrust forward.

When the police try to detain WW for questioning, she runs away at super-speed.  A strange little fellow tries to follow her...

Hmm... a business proposition?  She may be strong, but here is more evidence of her being just a bit naïve... "boy-oh-boy-oh-boy"  (I have a strict policy of never trusting anyone that looks remotely like Dr. Sivana)

WW quickly smartens up when she sees this shyster absconding with her hard-earned cash...

He should have known better!

So much for that business partnership!

Wonder Woman returns to the hospital to check up on Steve and see how he is recovering.  It appears Wonder Woman has since learned some business-sense from that Kale fellow as she buys the identity of a nurse named Diana Prince in order to gain access to her hapless lover.  (Has there ever been a WW story where the real Diana returns to re-claim her identity?)

Good Ole Steve might be a bit useless, but he sure has the spunk of Lois Lane.  He realizes that the evil bombers that he was originally tracking (back in All Star #8) are still on the loose, so he makes an escape from the hospital.

In her new secret identity of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman finds that Steve has sneaked away.  She returns to her makeshift hanger, and with her usual brilliance hopes no one has found her invisible plane.

A suggestive dressing shot...

Steve attempts some daring-do to disable the bomber...

But poor Steve, nothing ever really goes just right for him.

Good thing WW is close at hand to save his sorry ass...

Who wouldn't fall in love with a woman who could pull off this move?

Well, that's the second time this issue that she has saved Steve. But remember that Bomber that Steve has been chasing since All-Star #8?

One punch! What a woman!

They have to go and find the rest of the bad guys, but thankfully Wonder Woman can rely on a cheap plot device to find the hideout.

And she promptly teaches those baddies a lesson...

They do have some poison explosive gas, though, which serves to injure Steve again...  You might call it "an eternal moment of shattering ruin."

Giving Wonder Woman an opportunity to save him for a THIRD time this issue! I take it back... this guy is WORSE than Lois Lane!

It's back to the hospital for you, Steve!

It's a good thing Diana Prince is around to wait on his every need.... Oh right, she's too submissive for you, Steve ... You want Wonder Woman.  Too bad Diana is nothing like WW. This plot device was tired even back then!

Now what about the rest of Sensation #1?  Here's an ad for that elusive All-Star #8.

The Black Pirate was one of the better-drawn features.

As I mentioned above, the guy drawing Mr. Terrific desperately needed some remedial anatomy lessons... this is just plain awful.

I wonder why DC has never resurrected this guy?

Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys... I think this boring feature ran for an awfully long time in Sensation.

Wildcat by Bill Finger and Irwin Hasen was a long-time Sensation feature and this character still remains a DC favourite!

I wouldn't have minded finding these two comics on the stand!  Especially the first!

And another nice ad!  This time advertising the Superman movie serial and some of the regular DC titles.  Love those classic covers!

Well, that's all til next time. Hope you enjoyed this presentation of our first "sensational" tabloid find!

Best of DC (Blue Ribbon Digest) Vol. 3, No. 14 - Batman's Villains

Reviewed by Dan

This is one of the few remaining digests in my collection.   As you can see by the cover, it was read and re-read. Given the cover-date of July 1981, it would have been on the stands just before the summer.  This was the summer I turned eleven. The white cover is discoloured, not simply by age, but by dirty eleven-year-old, "summer" fingers.  I think I bought most of my digests at the Drug Store on the main street of Parry Sound when we were cottaging. I never really found too many of them in my local variety stores in Richmond Hill where we lived.  I don't know if they distributed them more widely in vacation areas... I have heard of distribution working in this way.  Digest were the perfect item to read on long car rides... small and portable, but many pages and lots of stories. This one took some damage from some serious summer reading!  I don't know what happened to all my old digests... perhaps I sold or traded them off.  Digests and tabloids were never easy to store because of their odd sizes; they couldn't be nicely kept in those long comic boxes like regular comics.  Anyway, this one remained in my collection probably because I was (well, still am) a great Batman fan, and this one featured the major villains of Batman's rogues gallery. 

As with so many of the digests in those days, the cover was by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano, and it is a pleaser with the baddies in their classic 70's iconic poses, some of them evoking the old Infantino iconic poses that appeared on the 8" Mego action figures boxes that we loved so much!

The first story is a reprint from Batman #260 (Aug. 1971), and is written by Denny O'Neil, and illustrated by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano.  I think Novick is one of the great unsung Batman artists.  He was pretty much the steady Batman artist from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. His work held the fort on Batman in much the same way that Swan did on Superman during this era.  Novick is unsung, though, because the whole period was punctuated by great guest appearances by the likes of Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers (both of whose work we shall see in this digest).  Novick had a nice clean style, a good command of the figure, attractive layouts, and he drew the characters very well.  He cut his teeth in the Golden Age on MLJ's the Shield in Pep Comics, and to my mind is one of the classic DC house artists of this period.  His 1970s style is much in the vein of Dick Dillin and Jim Aparo. When you read a comic by any one of these three, you knew you were reading a DC comic.

 

Our story, "This One'll Kill you, Batman," begins at Arkham Asylum.  In the early 1970s Arkham Asylum/Hospital was beginning to be established as the place that Batman's criminally insane villains went when they were not on the streets.  If memory serves, certain villains, the ones that were not certifiably nuts, were still housed at Gotham Penitentiary.  Eventually, it became established that Arkham was a doctor that had founded the hospital, but here the name is derived from it being on the "edge of Arkham, New England."  I think that in current comic book continuity, Martha Wayne was originally an Arkham before she married Thomas. Bah.

 

The story begins with the Joker pulling off a prison break.

 

Batman attempts to put it down, but after having an urn of coffee spilled on him, a fellow named Marcus is about to stomp Batman to death when a green hand intervenes...

 

 

Here we get two villains for the price of one, but man did I ever hate it when they coloured Two-Face's hand green. Even as an eleven year old I knew that the acid only scarred the left side of his face, not his whole body, for goodness' sake!  Fire the colourist!

 

But why was Two-Face helping out Batman?  Read below...

 

 

The story is a pretty typical Joker tale of the early 70s. He is just starting to return to the homicidal version of 1940, but there is still a lot of his goofy 1950s/60s person showing through.  Even though he does a lot of bad stuff, this is still a comic you can let your kids read. 

 

I turns out Batman got a bit of a dose of the Joker's laughing drug, and being a bit worried he hurries off to see Dr. Hamish (who?).  He is one of the only two people in the world that is apparently qualified to prepare an antidote.  The other is Dr. Rockwell, who is in London.  Fortunately for Batman, Dr. Hamish lives in Gotham!  But unfortunately, just before he is able to help ole Bats, Hamish gets a delivery of flowers with some deadly gas, which kills him.  The Joker's calling card gives it all away.

 

Batman learns he has three days to live, but he is such a fine guy that he uses one of his remaining mornings to attend Dr. Hamish's funeral.  Now isn't that decent? That's just the kind of guy Batman was in the seventies.  The current prick-Batman wouldn't even think of doing this!  And Hamish must have been well-known in the superhero community because Oliver Queen, Hal Jordan, Clark Kent, Alfred, and Lois Lane are all in attendance!  Wow.  That's the kind of support group that a person needs at such times of tragedy!

 

 

The good news in all of this is that Alfred gets Batman to the Batplane, between intermittent fits of laughter, and Batman flies of to London to find Dr. Rockwell.  The Joker has beat him there and has put Dr. Rockwell in a guillotine. 

 

Batman saves the good doctor of course (because there are only a couple of pages left and Rockwell is the only guy with the antidote).  I include the next picture because I just love how goofy Batman looks when he laughs, and it is only one of the many "laughing Batman" panels in this story.

 

 

After Batman KO's the Joker, Dr. Rockwell administers the andidote. However, the laughing had become so frequent and debilitating, Dr. Rockwell wondered how Batman had managed block enough to beat the Joker. Batman reveals that he had guessed that horrifying things (like the sight of Rockwell in the guillotine) were what spurred on the laughter and activated the effects of the drug.  He therefore decided to focus on all the funniest scenes in his favourite Marx brothers movies.  Which just goes to show, there is no substitute for being well-versed in the classics!

 

I won't give a play-by-play of the next stories, but only show off a few panels of interest here and there.

 

The next story is the classic Two-Face revival story, "Half an Evil" from Batman #234.  If memory serves, Two-Face had not been seen since the 1950s.  Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams brought him back in the story reprinted here.  One of the things I love about this issue is how Neal Adams "swiped" several panels from Batman #81, "Two Face Strikes again."  That was the story in which Harvey Dent, having previously received plastic surgery and returning to the respectable life of an upstanding citizen, attempts to stop a crime and an explosion causes his plastic surgery to come undone.  Well, we all know what that means, and a flip of the coin confirms it, Harvey returns to his old ways...

 

Here is the Adams page from Batman #234, as reprinted in the digest...

 

 

And here is what he borrowed from Batman #81 (as found in my Batman from the Thirties to the Seventies book):

 

 

 

The GCD lists the artist as Dick Sprang... Imagine that, Adams aping a Bob Kane ghost.  Of course, it really was more of an homage.  Interestingly enough, I think these panels were swiped again in The Untold Legend of the Batman miniseries.  I`ll have to see if I still have my copies of that and check it out for sure.

 

Here is another classic Bat-pose re-imagined by Adams...

 

 

And I just have to include this humorous scene of Batman scaring Arthur Reeves. Reeves was a recurring Denny O'Neil early-seventies character.  I think he was a candidate for mayor or city councillor.  He filled the J. Jonah Jameson roll, i.e, "Batman is a menace that must be stopped."  Don't you just love the look on Jim Gordon's face?

 

 

Next up is a lovely little two-page spread featuring Batman`s Rogue`s Gallery, drawn by Denys Cowan.  Can you name them all?  Isn't interesting who is included!  Who'd have thought Captain Stingaree would have made it into the top 24!  Nice to see the recently resurrected Hugo Strange there!

 

 

 

And speaking of Hugo Strange... That's his body in the barrel being tossed into Gotham river by a couple of Rupert Thorne's thugs in the Penguin story 'Tec #473(below).  This is one of the classic stories from the Englehart/Rogers run on Detective.  It is nice to see this story included because is speaks to my earlier point about missing issues on the newsstand.  When that run was happening I was buying my comics at the local variety store. I had read part one of the Hugo Strange story, but missed part two, missed the Penguin story, then picked up part one of the Joker two-parter, but missed part-two.  These little digests were a great way of catching up! I just love how Rogers drew Batman's cape!

 

 

Another fun thing about this story was Bruce's evolving relationship with Silver St. Cloud.  Here she is recovering in the hospital after she was kidnapped by Hugo Strange and his monsters...
 

 

And here is Dick giving them some private time! 

 

And one more panel to demonstrate just how much fun Rogers was having drawing Batman's ears... even the panel border could not contain them! Darryl and I used to love going over Rogers' Batman work just to see how outrageously he was drawing the ears and cape! Now that was Batman, in our minds!

 

And I figured I should also at least show one shot of the Penguin, given it is Penguin story!

 

Darryl will be mad at me, as the Riddler is his favourite Bat-villain, but I am not going to include anything from the Ernie Chua-drawn reprint in this digest. Instead I will include the one-page origin story, drawn I think by Giordano.  There was one of these for each of the villains in this issue. 

The Catwoman story is another Irv Novick drawn story.  One of Catwoman's henchmen tries to get a little fresh, which was a bad idea.  He looks every part the sleezy seventies henchmen, does he not? Irv had several "stock henchmen" looks... I think this guy might have helped out the Joker a bit, too.

 

This is the only real Catwoman costume in my books... you can keep the leather and goggles.
 

Well, that's it for this installment.  This has been a recap of one from the collection.  We have be haunting the thrift shops for more digests and tabloids, and it has been more difficult than we thought, but the thrill of the hunt continues.  In our next installment, Darryl will present a surprising find that he picked up after going 0/7 in his thrift shop digest hunting.  See you next week!