dictatorship of the plutotariat

I have no small amount of affection for the Captain Marvel Adventures comic series, especially the stories published between late 1945 and the title's demise in late 1953 (roughly issues #50-150). Over the course of those seven glorious years, the incomparable team of writer Otto Binder and artist C.C. Beck produced a stream of unselfconsciously whimsical and bizarre stories centering around one high concept after another.

Some of the challenges faced by Big Red Cheese included surrealism, (twice!), atomic killer robots, absent-mindedness, a corrupt dog catcher, an evil clematis plant possessed by a long-dead witch, an anti-talking tiger splinter group of the KKK, the ghost of an insane robot, and a variety of invaders from the past, present, and future...and let's not forget this little trip into nightmare land.

As an extended trip into handsomely illustrated kid-targeted comics of yore, those hundred issues of CMA make for an excellent diversion, despite the formulaic, drag-and-drop nature which underlies the off-the-wall story elements. As popcult artifacts of a bygone era, they provide a fascinating glimpse into that narrow window of time between the triumphant afterglow following the end of the World War II and the hardening of Cold War attitudes. The spirit of the era pervades many of the CMA stories from this period, reflecting contemporary hopes, as in a book-length story about the American Century, as well as its anxieties, two of which were given the bundle deal treatment in this gem from Captain Marvel Adventures #147 (August 1953):

Harvey Kurtzman's Frontline Combat, it ain't.

The story begins in the shell-pocked paradise between the Yalu River and Pusan, where a couple of weary American soldiers are taking a break while waiting for the Truman-MacArthur dick-waving contest to resolve itself. The poor dogfaces barely have the time to engage in a few lines of Hollywood-approved War Movie Dialogue^TM before the unthinkable happens:

It's true what they say; you never see the effect line with your name on it.
Back at radio station WHIZ, boy reporter Billy Batson gets word of the Reds diabolical super weapon and springs into action. With one mighty word, he transforms himself into Captain Marvel, "America's Mightiest American," and speeds of to the 38th Parallel, where the Army and Air Force are waging a losing battle against the flying saucers. Being the cowardly Bolshevik scum that they are, the saucer armada beats cheeks. Captain Marvel tries to capture one of the saucers, apparently by dry humping the vessel's tail fin...

Swamp gas? Hah! Unless you're talking about the stink rising from the fetid mire of Marxist dogma...
...but those fanatical Reds in their flying machines have protocols in place to deal with such a contingency...

Stinking commies, killing themselves just to deprive our side of the pleasure of killing them...
Seeking clues to the saucers' origin, the befuddled Marvel speeds off first to Manchuria, then Antarctica in search of their home base. Failing to turn up anything, he then hides in a cloud bank over the Korean peninsula in hopes of catching one of the saucers by surprise.

His plan succeeds in revealing the horrifying truth behind the saucer attacks -- the International Communist Conspiracy has gone interplanetary:

This panel was apparently ghostwritten by a young Norman Podhoretz.
After that saucer also self-destructs, Captain Marvel opts for a more stealthy approach, turning back into Billy Batson and stowing away inside a saucer's cargo hold. As per standard CMA story conventions, Billy is discovered, clubbed on the noggin, and bound and gagged (to prevent him from saying "Shazam," of course). He is then left to die of asphyxiation on the far edge of the Space Reds' Plutonian attack base.

Again, per standard conventions, Billy cheats death by bashing his fishbowl space helmet against a boulder, the jagged shards of glass not cutting his face into bloody ribbons, but instead conveniently severing the gag preventing him from transforming into Captain Marvel. (One of the problems in writing serial fiction for nigh-omnipotent characters is the inevitable overuse of the "one token weakness" as a means of establishing dramatic tension, leading to scenarios where even the lowliest purse snatcher or petty vandal in pre-Crisis Metropolis owned a hunk of Kryptonite.)

Having cheated death through an improbable plot device yet again, Captain Marvel drops a small mountain range on top of the enemy base, then races back to Korea, where he shows the Plutonian Reds how true-blooded Americans deal with those who would oppose them:

Oh, superior firepower and fanatical zeal, is there nothing you can't solve? Besides the War in Iraq, America's crumbling infrastructure, and a shaky domestic economy, I mean? (Also, which one of the gods and heroes who lend Captain Marvel their powers gave him the ability to fire a breech-loading heavy artillery piece as if it were a semi-automatic weapon?)

The enemy armada reduced to flaming wreckage, the Big Red Cheese sends a final warning back to the Plutonian War Commissariat, one which reflects the innocence and wholesomeness long associated with the Golden Age Captain Marvel stories...

Next issue: Hoppy the Marvel Bunny smashes the government of Guatemala and its leftist moleman allies on behalf of the CIA and the United Fruit Company!
Gang Green - Kill a Commie (from This Is Boston, Not LA, 1982)

Eddie Cletro & The Roundup Boys - Flying Saucer Boogie (from a 1952 single; collected on Flying Saucer Boogie, 2006)

The Fixx - Red Skies (from Shuttered Room, 1982)

Station WHIZ must be a FOX affiliate...

couldn’t understand a thing they said

The synergetic entertainment/marketing blockbuster that is the Transformers movie opens today. While I have no desire to submit myself to a widescreen assault of Michael Bay-isms and blatant product placements, the film’s premiere does present me with the opportunity to spotlight my affection for the gloriousness that is Cosmos.

I was twelve years old when the first generation of Transformers debuted in the States, which meant I was old enough to achieve escape velocity from the multimedia hard sell surrounding the toy line. Though I didn’t care about the ready-made Transformers mythos, which seemed rather puerile even from a kid’s eye level, I was fascinated by the sleek, angular designs of the toys themselves which dovetailed nicely with my growing appreciation of giant robo anime (where many of the early Transformers designs were “borrowed” from). I was especially fond of the Mini-Bot figures at the low end of the line’s price range, which combined affordability with an inspired sense of oddness, and none were as delightfully odd as Cosmos.

The extremely retro flying saucer vehicle mode…

…the awkward-looking (Maura says “absurd”) robot mode…

…and the garish red, green, and yellow color scheme that evokes both an Eastern Bloc design aesthetic and a commitment to pan-Africanism… What’s not to love? It’s as if some cheapjack Japanese toy from the early 1960’s managed to sneak its way into a hip, happening American franchise of the mid-1980’s, and I can totally get behind that concept (being somewhat unstuck in time myself).

When I went of a vintage robot toy buying spree in the late 1990’s, Cosmos was at the top of my wish list. (My original toy had gotten lost, along with most of my childhood junk, during the Great Upheaval of 1988.) The replacement version now occupies a place of honor on my computer desk, and it occasionally moonlights as a kicky chapeau for Oscar the Pughuahua.

Concept sketches for a deluxe edition update of Cosmos were displayed at Botcon (an event I envision resembling the circle of hell reserved for thirty-something victims of arrested childhood), but the newfangled designs lacked the simple appeal of the original’s and resembled a cross between a paramilitary Frisbee and a next-gen anti-personnel mine. (I still would have bought one, though.)

Billy Lee Riley and His Little Green Men – Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll (from Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley, 1999) - Take me to your juke joint, earthman. I feel the urge to wail on my space-sax. Update: Because I was behind in my blog reading, I didn't realize that AM, Then FM posted Sleepy LaBeef's excellent 1979 cover of this song on July 1st. Great minds think alike, yadda yadda and so forth.

Violent Femmes – Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah (Means I Love You) (from Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, 1995) - Jet Screamer! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!