FORTRESS OF BAILEYTUDE

Welcome to the fifth and final day of A Little Help From His Friends Week.  All week long I have been celebrating the supporting heroes from the Superman titles circa 1990-1992 and ranking them from one to five.  Today we have number one on the countdown with…

Jose Delgado first appeared in Adventures of Superman #428.  I don’t care what the Who’s Who entries say, you see Jerry White talking to Jose in that issue and he is mentioned by name.  So let’s get that straight right away because there are a handful of things that bug the crap out of me in terms of first appearance listings and Jose Delgado is one of them.

I wasn’t there for Jose’s first appearance nor was I there for the issue (Adventures of Superman #434) where he put on the Gangbuster outfit for the first time.  In the case of issue 428 I wasn’t buying the books at the time and in the case of issue 434 I wasn’t as anal-retentive as I would eventually become as a Superman reader and collector.  Oddly enough my first real exposure to Gangbuster was in Adventures of Superman #437, which is kind of odd considering that was the issue where Jose was crippled by Synapse.  From there I watched as Jose went through quite the journey including his life as a disabled man, the treachery he suffered at the hands of Lex Luthor, his return as a hero and the ups and downs his life went through over the course of the years.  It is because of those ups and downs that Jose became my favorite supporting hero in the Superman books and one of my favorite supporting characters in general.

Jose’s position as the top of the heap when it comes to supporting heroes goes beyond the reasons listed above.  The main reason I like the character is that no matter what he never gives up.  He almost did when he was crippled and you can hardly blame the guy.  Three seconds after he decides to enter the masked vigilante business he gets crippled by a super-villain.  Jose Delgado was a man of passion and that passion led him to adopt a second identity to protect the kids and people of Suicide Slum because no one else was going to do the job.  Suddenly and violently not only is that taken away form him but his ability to walk and Suicide Slum was far from handicap accessible.  This is why it is easy to see why he took Luthor’s offer.  Despite the fact that Luthor was ultimately responsible for him being in a wheelchair Jose wanted to walk so badly that he made a deal with the devil.  With the help of Dr. Emil Hamilton he was able to break free of Luthor’s control and after a somewhat disastrous fight with the robot called Turmoil Jose was back on his feet and back in action.

Over the next few years Jose tried to find his way in the world.  He briefly served as Cat Grant’s bodyguard but after Morgan Edge’s trial ended he was unemployed once again.  Jose’s luck seemed to change when he bought a winning lottery ticket but that luck turned bad in a hurry when a gust of wind blew it away and the ticket ended up in the hands of Bibbo.  He dated Cat Grant for a time but that fell apart soon after the death of Superman.  Jose’s misfortunes continued when his actions as Gangbuster messed up a police sting operation and he found himself on the outs with the police.

You know, after typing all of that I realized what a tragic character Jose is.  Nothing seems to work out for him.  He tries his best but life keeps kicking him in the teeth, but here’s the thing; that doesn’t stop him and again that is why I like the character so much.  Jose doesn’t give up.  He may get knocked down but he will always brush himself off and get back on his feet, both literally and figuratively.  I can’t speak much for what happened to the character during Trinity because I have yet to read the entirety of that series but in all of the experiences I’ve had with Jose he has always struck me as a man of honor and integrity.

He also has an awesome costume.  Just look at that thing.  Man is it cool and the best thing about it is that it looks like something Jose Delgado pieced together after a few trips to the supporting goods and Army/Navy stores.  While other artists have done the costume justice no one drew it better than Jose’s creator Jerry Ordway.

And that is it for A Little Help From His Friends Week.  I hope y’all enjoyed it and be on the look out for another theme week coming at you soon.

More to follow…

Welcome to the fourth day of A Little Help From His Friends Week.  All week long I am celebrating the supporting heroes from the Superman titles circa 1990-1992 and ranking them from one to five.  Today we have number two on the countdown with…

Back in 1988 I picked up Superman (vol 2)#16 off of the rack at the Super Fresh in Trexlertown, PA and eagerly read it once I got home.  It was the first Post-Crisis appearance of the Prankster and I enjoyed the story immensely but that wasn’t the only element that made that story memorable.  On the last page of that issue a research team in the arctic finds a blond woman wearing what appears to be a Supergirl costume buried in the ice.  For the next five months John Byrne and Jerry Ordway would have at least one page of either Superman (vol 2) and Adventures of Superman devoted to further the sub-plot of the mysterious Supergirl.  The sub-plot finally came to a head in the story arc known as The Supergirl Saga, which began in Superman (vol) 2 #21 continued into Adventures of Superman #444 and concluded in Superman (vol 2) #22.

Supergirl’s story was simple and yet a bit complicated.  Turns out she was from the same Pocket Universe that the Time Trapper created to fool the Legion of Super-Heroes into thinking there actually was a Superboy.  For those coming in late there was no Superboy in the Post-Crisis era but the Legion still formed with the Boy of Steel as their inspiration.   After Superboy sacrificed himself to save the Legion and his universe Lex Luthor came to Smallville and started poking around Superboy’s secret lab.  He found a viewer that allowed him to peer into another dimension where three Kryptonians convinced him to use a projector to free them.  Turns out this was General Zod, Zaora and Quex-Ul, three Kryptonian villains that were sent to the Phantom Zone.

In short order the Pocket Zoners (as Jeffrey and I took to calling them in the episode of From Crisis to Crisis that featured us talking about The Supergirl Saga) went about taking over the Earth with humanity offering little resistance against three maniacs with the powers of Superboy.  Lana Lang was one of the first ones killed in the Pocket Zoners’ attack but Lex Luthor “re-created” her in the form of a synthetic life form.  The Matrix, as she would eventually be called, had powers similar to those of Superboy, but they weren’t enough to defeat the Pocket Zoners so Luthor enacted a bold plan.  He sent “Lana” to the other universe to find Superman and bring him back to help.  There was a glitch though and somehow the ship was thrown into the “real” Earth’s past where it sat until the research team unearthed it or un-iced it would probably be a better way to describe it.  “Lana” had no memory of her mission until she finally encountered the Man of Steel and brought him to the Pocket Universe.

The final battle was a vicious one.  Matrix was seemingly killed and in the end the only survivors were Superman and the Pocket Zoners  After the battle Superman executed the villains and after burying them discovered Matrix’s true form and learned her origin from a dying Lex Luthor.  Superman took the humanoid form home and left her with his parents.  It was then that she officially took on the name Matrix and the Kents did their best to care for her.  When Superman went on a self-imposed exile he told Matrix to take care of his parents.  While he was away Matrix assumed Clark’s form and traveled to Metropolis where the staff of the Daily Planet thought she was an amnesiac Clark Kent.  After Superman’s return Matrix became unbalanced due to an encounter with the Kryptonian artifact known as the Eradicator and came to believe she was the real Clark Kent and Superman.  This led to a showdown between Superman and Matrix and in the end after seeing how much damage she was causing Matrix left the Earth on a self-imposed Exile, much like Superman did.

For a few years that was the end of Matrix’s story.  In 1992 she returned during Panic in the Sky and once more assumed the persona of Supergirl.  She entered into a relationship with Lex Luthor the Second and stayed with him for some time.  She became a hero in her own right especially after Superman died in the battle with Doomsday.  Soon after Superman’s return she learned how evil her boyfriend was and after Luthor left Metropolis in ruins she struck out on her own.  Eventually she would be united with an “Earth-Angel” and bonded with a young woman named Linda Danvers and Supergirl was effectively reborn.

It’s kind of strange.  Even though I preferred the Linda Danvers Supergirl I have a soft spot for the Matrix incarnation.  For about four years she was the Girl of Steel and an important part of my favorite era of the Superman books.  She had a confusing back story and sometimes it seemed that the creators didn’t know what to do with her, but I was there for her first appearance and followed her all the way through the Peter David written Supergirl series.  It is kind of sad to consider that her best days were while she was involved with Lex Luthor even though he was, you know, a villain.  Her life was stable and she seemed to have a purpose.  It was after The Fall of Metropolis that she began to wander as a character, which led to the Peter David series.  As much as I like and appreciate that series I think that the Matrix Supergirl is under appreciated as a character.  She was a good effort on the part of DC to maintain the whole Superman is the Last Son of Krypton idea while still having a Supergirl running around.  I can see why some people may not like the character but I always will.

That’s it for today.  Come back tomorrow to see who occupies the number one spot on the list.

More to follow…

Welcome to day three of A Little Help From His Friends Week here at the Fortress.  All this week I am covering the supporting heroes of the Superman titles circa 1990-1992.  Today I present number three on the list and that is…

Number Three

The first thing I want to say about this image is how utterly awesome it is.  Karl Kesel is a fantastic inker and as Scott Gardner and I talked about on a recent Back to the Bins he is an excellent penciler as well.  This is such a fantastic image that shows the past and then present of the Newsboy Legion and the Guardian.

And this entry is about the Guardian, just so’s ya know, even though the image and the Who’s Who entry it comes from is about the Newsboy Legion.  Sure the Newsboys are an integral part of what I arrogantly refer to as the From Crisis to Crisis era.  Tommy, Big Words, Gabby, Scrapper and Flip were not only good for comic relief but were “living” examples of the slippery slope of genetic research.  Sometimes they would even do something big, like help Superboy escape from Cadmus.  Even though I like the characters and their place in the Superman comics I grew up reading this entry is really about Jim Harper, the Guardian.

I have never read any of the Guardian’s Golden-Age adventures and have only recently come into possession of his appearances in Superman Family, so I can’t really speak to those iterations of the character.  Heck, the only reason I know his origin outside of his original Who’s Who entry was Roger Stern’s novelization of the death and return of Superman titled, appropriately enough, The Death and Life of Superman.  In a few paragraphs Stern gave us everything we needed to know about the Guardian.  He was Jim Harper, beat cop in Suicide Slum in the late thirties and early forties.  One night after getting the snot kicked out of him by a group of bad guys Jim stumbled into a shop and donned a costume complete with a helmet to get his get back.  From then on Harper lived a dual identity; by day a patrolman on his beat and by night he was the Guardian, protector of Suicide Slum.

Sometime later Harper became of the actual guardian of the so-called Newsboy Legion, a group of four orphaned boys that banded together for their mutual survival.  The “Legion” were caught robbing a hardware store and were about to be sent to reform school when Harper stepped in and offered to take custody of them in a time where such a thing wouldn’t be considered creepy.  And so it went…the boys would get into a pinch and the Guardian would bail them out.  Eventually they grew up and got out of Suicide Slum, each becoming leading figures in their fields.  Somewhere along the way they formed the Cadmus Project, an organization dedicated to the exploration of the genetic causes and cures for aging and diseases.  To pay back all that Jim Harper had given them the boys cloned him and transferred his consciousness into the younger body.

From then on things got even stranger.  The alien Sleez tried to take over Cadmus but thanks to the Guardian, the clones of the Newsboy Legion and Superman that take over was averted.  The Guardian stayed on at Cadmus as Security Chief and every once in a while he would head into Metropolis and give Superman a hand either directly or just by looking out for the place when the Man of Steel was otherwise occupied.  This helping hand was never needed as much as when Superman died.  In the years to come Harper would continue to fight the good fight and became something of a mentor to Superboy when he returned to work with the Cadmus Project.

Like many characters from this era, though, the Guardian has been brought back but drastically changed from the version that I am familiar with.  It seems like James Robinson went back to those Superman Family issues for inspiration, but I’ll have a better handle on that when I read those stories.  The Guardian has had a better time of it than other characters, but it just isn’t the same.  I understand the reasons behind changing him but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Beyond Guardian’s background and personality I love the look of the character as well.  He is almost the Captain America of the DC Universe, which is apt considering the Guardian and Cap were both created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.  I like characters that carry shields, even trick out ones like the Guardian’s.

I think the main reason I feel such an attachment to the Guardian is that I was there on the ground floor when he was brought back into the DCU in Superman Annual (vol 2) #2.  There is something to be said for being there from the beginning and I got to see the Guardian evolve as a character.

I do have an all-time favorite Guardian moment.  It was in Adventures of Superman #498, which was the first issue after Superman (vol 2) #75.  The paramedics are trying to revive the Man of Steel and one of them says that they have done all they can and have if they hit Superman with anymore juice they’ll melt the paddles.  The Guardian grabs the medic and says, “Then melt the blasted paddles–but KEEP AT IT!”  I love that scene.  Love it to pieces.  It shows how much the Guardian cared about his friend and that he wasn’t about to give up on him.

So that’s it for today.  Tomorrow I will not only present number two on the list but also the latest episode of From Crisis to Crisis as well, so come on back for Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun Thursday.

More to follow…

So you are looking at the title to this post and quite possibly you are asking yourself is, “What is ACC?”

Well, ACC is the Atlanta Comic Convention, a great one day comic show that happens once every three months in, well, Atlanta.  I mean it’s right there in the name.  It’s run by Wes Tillander, who is a great guy and puts on a fantastic one day show that is 90% comics, which is fantastic.  Sure you have some off the beaten path dealers, like the person selling fans and parasols and such and you also have one or two DVD dealers, but other than that it is all comics, which is a rare thing to find these days considering even most supposed comic book conventions are, in reality, pop culture conventions.  It’s not that there is anything wrong with that sort of thing, but I’m a comics guy, so it is nice to be with my people and see all of the pretty books.

I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot of money this time out, so I wasn’t planning on getting much of anything.  I had a small list of comics I was on the look out for and would buy if the price was cheap enough.  In an odd bit of coincidence all of the items I bought were Superman related and one…one was such a freaking epic find that four days later I am STILL geeking out about it, but I will save that for last.

The first thing I found was a copy of Superman: Adventures of the Man of Steel.  This is a trade paperback of the first six issues of the Superman Adventures book that was published to go along with Superman: The Animated Series.

Bask in the glow of the Bruce Timm cover.

More under the cut.

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In an effort to read more comics for the pure enjoyment of reading comics and not as research or prep for one of the many podcasts I either host, co-host or appear on I dug out my runs of L.E.G.I.O.N. and what has become known as the Five Years Later Legion of Super-Heroes to go through.  I read the Legion of Super-Heroes series about 13 years ago but a lot of the details are now lost to my memory and after reading the L.E.G.I.O.N. ’90 Annual for From Crisis to Crisis this week I decided it was time to give that series a go.  The two books are connected, so it seemed like a good reading project to take on.

So I was reading these for pleasure rather than “work”, right?

Then how is it I find a few bits of business from the first few issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. to post about here?

It’s a conspiracy, I tells ya!  A conspiracy!

In any event, because L.E.G.I.O.N. first saw the light of comic book day in 1989 there were ads inside of it for the Superman: Exile arc that went through Superman and Adventures of Superman in late 1988/early 1989.  I was actually really excited to see these and scanned them into the old computer for your viewing pleasure.

First up is the first Exile ad that let the reading audience know that there were big doings over in the Superman titles.

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All things considered it’s been a pretty good decade to be a fan of Superman.

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Electro-Blue Superman.

Say the words and a certain contingent of Superman fans will either start laughing, cracking jokes or hit the ground and cover their head like a Vietnam Vet hearing a car backfire.

For those of you who have blocked it out of your minds or have only heard about it in hushed whispers I cast your memory back to 1997 when DC decided that the Man of Steel needed a change and the best way to change the character is to give him new powers and a new costume.  It looked a little like this.

Was it the best idea ever? Not really.  As a matter of face for a long time this was my gold standard of when the Superman books went off the rails.  Now I’m not so sure because there have been a couple of years after that where the books were a true chore to read and this era looks pretty good in comparison.

In any case I didn’t bring you here today to talk about the pros and cons of that storyline.  I am re-reading  itso I may do that at some point in the future but for right now I want to show off what four bucks can get you on eBay these days.

This is a packet that was sent to comic shops back in January 1997 to prep for the big change over.  No matter what anyone thinks of the actual story there is no denying that it was a big deal.  I will admit that the text on this packet, “Who says things never change?” is kind of amusing in retrospect but I can’t fault DC’s marketing department for doing their job.

So what came inside this packet?

I am a big fan of comic book promotional posters so these were a real treat.  While I thought the idea of changing Superman’s powers and costumes was wrong headed I did like the costume itself.  Twelve years later I look at these posters as a piece of Superman’s history so instead of being a reminder of a bad story they now serve as reminders of a particular era, so getting these posters makes me smile and yes at some point both of them are going up on the wall.  Don’t know when but they will be there.

These are neat.  They are rack cards for the five Superman titles that were coming out at the time.  A shop owner would put them on the rack behind the particular issues to draw attention to them.  I have no idea what I am going to do with these.  Hanging them on the wall springs to mind but I may just put them behind the several versions of the Superman Red and Superman Blue figures that I have.  In any case I think they’re cool.

So that’s what four bucks will get you on eBay.  In a few weeks I will be covering 1997 on my podcast, Views From The Longbox, so this storyline will be discussed.  I am hoping to have the issues re-read by that point so that I can have a firmer opinion of the Electro-Blue era beyond my memories of what happened at the time.  Maybe I’ll look more favorably on it.

Or maybe I’ll just shake my head and wonder what the hell those people were thinking.  Time will tell.

More to follow…

As many of you know I co-host a show called From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast with my buddy Jeffrey Taylor.  For the uninitiated FCTC covers, month by month, most of the Superman books published between lMan of Steel #1 in 1986 and Adventures of Superman #649 in 2006.  That’s a huge chunk of time and some people have expressed a desire to follow along with us.  I was wondering how feasible it would be for someone that doesn’t own  a complete run to find one or at the very least find most of them in trade.  I’m pretty sure if you had the time, money and energy you could do it, but it wouldn’t be easy.

And that got me to thinking.

Since February of 2004 (release date not cover date) every mainstream Superman book (Superman, Adventures of Superman and Action Comics along with Superman/Batman) has been released as a collected edition of some sort.  Usually in hardcover at first and then in softcover and in the case of Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee’s For Tomorrow even an Absolute Edition.  The Godfall arc, all of the Greg Rucka run on Adventures of Superman, the just mentioned For Tomorrow, all of Mark Verheiden’s run on Superman, Chuck Austen’s run on Action Comics, Gail Simone’s work on Action Comics, Sacrifice, the Infinite Crisis crossovers, Up, Up and Away, Last Son, Camelot Falls Parts 1 and 2, the rest of Kurt Busiek’s run, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Brainiac, The Coming of Atlas and right up to the current New Krypton stuff.  Five years worth of stories are pretty much all there give or take a once and done story here and there.  Someone getting into Superman today would have a very easy time getting caught up without having to track down the individual issues.

But what about that Crisis to Crisis era?

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I’m not even going to lie to you on this one.  My favorite Green Lantern is Kyle Rayner.

“Guy Talk”

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Today I continue looking at the stories reprinted in Secret Origins Featuring the JLA with the second story in that volume, which originally appeared in this comic.

“Gazing Back: The Secret Origin of Batman”

Batman easily has one of the best origins among the many comic book super-heroes that have been created over the past seventy years. Read more…